God deals very gently with conscious weakness. “Certainly I will be with thee.” Moses' estimate of himself is quite correct, and it is the condition of his obtaining God's help. If he had been self-confident, he would have had no longing for, and no promise of, God's presence.
1. God is no longer a voice that calls, a hand that points, an eye that guides. Or rather He is all this, but He is more, very much more. He is the living, burning Presence that destroys not but sustains. He is a consuming fire, but He does not consume. He knows the sorrows of His people because He shares them. In all their afflictions He is afflicted, and the angel of His Presence saves them. Now, we cannot say that, until Moses turned aside to see the burning bush, there was no knowledge of this wonderful immanence in history. No man can be brought into relation with the Living One without gaining some knowledge of His nearness. But it is one thing to have confidence that God will meet us in the way; it is another to awaken to the great conviction that He is the force at the back of our life. It is one thing to wrestle as with a man until the breaking of the day; it is another to stand upon holy ground and listen to the proclamation from out the fire of the ineffable Name. It is one thing to arise and follow God; it is another to find God even in present perplexities.
“To some,” says Patmore, “there is revealed a sacrament greater than that of the Real Presence, a sacrament of the Manifest Presence, which is, and is more than, the sum of all the sacraments.”1 [Note: E. Meynell, The Life of Francis Thompson (1913), 209.]
2. So God's promise, “I will be with thee,” is not to the man who enters church thoughtlessly and recklessly, but to the man who has an intelligent conception of what God expects and requires at his hands, and who feels in himself utterly insufficient for the step to be taken. It is better to be overwhelmed than over-confident, for only then will our weakness become strength, only then shall we abandon our righteousness and welcome the grace and power and spirit of Jesus Christ, which blot out, renew, vitalize, sustain, and transform, till the believer becomes “complete in him,” and knows all things are possible to him that believes in Jesus.
His prayers were, more than any other man's, marked by a sense of the majesty of the Holy Lord God, and a perception of the Divine glory, especially in the earlier part of his course. In his later years Christ was more the centre of all his thoughts, as seems to be often the case with eminent saints; Rutherford's wondrous letters have almost nothing of the Father or of the great God, except as seen in Jesus Christ. In the earlier period of Dr. Duncan's course, his view of the Divine glory was often the same as Isaiah's, “Woe is me, because I am a man of unclean lips, for mine eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts”; and as Job's, “I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear, but now mine eye seeth thee, wherefore I abhor myself.” Latterly this holy fear was modified, but it continued to the end; and the enviable epitaph found on some of our old gravestones might most fittingly have been written on his, “Deceased in the fear of God.”1 [Note: A. Moody Stuart, Recollections of John Duncan, 40.]
3. But the Christian life is not all; the Christian service is as sweeping in its demands. Our destiny is not only to be “conformed to the image of the Son of God,” but to carry forward the work given Him to do. It has fallen to the lot of His people to save the world; and Christians either shut their eyes to their mission, or, seeing it clearly, shrink from it. No wonder they do so. The very unwillingness of every sinner to be approached on the subject of his soul's salvation, his manifest disinclination to have a loving word said to him about his spiritual duties and privileges, the chilling reception that makes one unable to utter the message that the Spirit of God is moving him to speak, has made us say: “Who am I that I should try to win such souls to Christ? Let them alone.” But dare we, when God says, “I will be with thee”?
Let us catch the idea, and live and act by the truth that, like Moses, we are at best only “a poor thorn-bush in a dry and desert world,” but with God in us and God with us we are that bush on fire, and the fire in the bush is infinite strength dwelling in utter weakness. Omnipotence in impotence, then we may forget our past, defy our foes, go forward confidently to our duties, and rise to our privileges, because our extremity is His opportunity. Then we shall cease to make objections when God makes known His will concerning us; and some day we shall sing after we have seen our foes, like Pharaoh, sink as lead in the depths of the sea, and our enemies lie dead upon the shore-we shall sing praises unto our God for all His keeping and using, His sufficient grace and transforming fellowship, and shall rejoice in the blessed experience: “Thy right hand, O Lord, is glorious in power, thy right hand, O Lord, dasheth in pieces the enemy. Who is like unto thee, O Lord, among the gods? Who is like thee, glorious in holiness, fearful in praises, doing wonders?”
