1. We believe in God when we believe in a Divine purpose in the world. This is not always believed. In the ancient and the modern world men have believed this, and men have denied it. When we were children we were taught to believe it. The world proved the existence of the Creator, as a watch that of the watchmaker. The design could be read in all the details of the wondrous construction. Now, it is true that the modern scientist and the modern theologian are dissatisfied, and say that the argument in that form is not tenable. The theologian cannot do with a God clean outside his world in that way, and the scientist cannot find that everything fits quite so precisely; but the kernel of the old argument stands, namely, that there is a general order in things, that the whole is the unfolding of a purpose, that we must think of it all as designed, must posit a supreme intelligence and will in it, through it, behind it, above it. This to us today stands as an essential, fundamental truth.
Unless the universe in which I find myself is a divine cosmos, I cannot treat it, either in my thought or in my conduct, as absolutely trustworthy. I cannot trust in the practical permanence of natural law, upon which all science proceeds. The seeming cosmos, trusted in ordinary human life, may become finally chaotic instead of cosmic—if all must at last be resolved into. Unknowableness; and our intelligence and science may dissolve at last in irretrievable confusion. In continuing to live and act, and to interpret any portion of the universe, I must proceed upon the Final Venture—that nature in experience is really the language of God, and that Divine Order is supreme and universal. [Note: A. Campbell Fraser, Biographia Philosophica, 302.]
Lord, my weak thought in vain would climb,
To search the starry vault profound;
In vain would wing her flight sublime,
To find creation’s utmost bound.
But weaker yet that thought must prove
To search Thy great eternal plan,—
Thy sovereign counsels, born of love
Long ages ere the world began.
When my dim reason would demand
Why that, or this, Thou dost ordain,
By some vast deep I seem to stand,
Whose secrets I must ask in vain.
When doubts disturb my troubled breast,
And all is dark as night to me,
Here, as on solid rock, I rest,
That so it seemeth good to Thee.
Be this my joy, that evermore
Thou rulest all things at Thy will;
Thy sovereign wisdom I adore,
And calmly, sweetly, trust Thee still. [Note: Ray Palmer.]
2. This belief is not to be reached by reasoning. Somewhere, sooner or later, we are brought to a standstill and are bound to confess that, for the moment at any rate, reasoning can go no farther. Yet we must live and act, we must even try to present to ourselves intellectually the meaning of the world as a system of completely articulated thought. We are convinced that it is such a rational system, and where we cannot know we trust. Unless we are content to be simply sceptical (and an attitude of utter scepticism is sell-contradictory, and so impossible for men, either as practical or as speculative beings), we must, and habitually do, adopt, in the last resort, beliefs which reason can never completely justify. They do not contradict reason, but reason cannot explicate in its own terms all their content. Such is our attitude in the case of the argument from design, an argument which carries with it great weight, and which is strengthened when taken in connexion with other arguments for God’s existence. Behind the terms of logical inference in which the argument is cast lies the larger conviction, and this will always remain operative despite any explanations which science may give of adaptations in Nature. For we cannot observe adaptations without wondering at them, without seeing in them a significance, without regarding them as expressive of a purpose.
Doubt, yes, doubt he justified—doubt, so it were straightforward and honest. Forms and accessories—these he was willing to let go—though always with respect and care :for the weaker brothers and sisters to whom they stood for things of value; but Faith beyond those forms he clung to, faith fearless and triumphant, uprising out of temporary moods of despondency into ever securer conviction of righteous guidance throughout creation and far-seeing divine Purpose at the heart of things. [Note: Tennyson and His Friends, 282.]
Faith is not a crop which springs out of the world to reward a careless harvester; it is rather the work of a soul which, out of a world which would otherwise seem dead, extracts the answer of confidence in God. Did I speak of the world as if it were empty of meaning? It is alive with meaning, filled with a voice of God. But it is the voice rather of God’s question to us than of His answer. It challenges, it provokes the response of faith, and the dark places, the breaks—
What if the breaks themselves should prove at last
The most consummate of contrivances
To train a man’s eye, teach him what is faith?
And so we stumble at truth’s very test. [Note: P. N. Waggett.]
3. The Divine purpose is righteous and it is prophetic.
(1) It is a righteous purpose.—The God in whom we believe is a “righteous” God. And by “righteous” we mean a God who can be relied upon to hold to His intention. He will be sure to see His own purpose out. He will bring out judgment unto victory. He is a God who abides one and the same: with a permanent character, and an intelligible resolution. His personal identity secures our confidence in His enduring faithfulness. He has an end in view, and He means to get there. He will not be found wanting He is not a man that He should repent. He will never go back from His word. Facts anti circumstances will change, but through all He will press toward a fixed consummation. So He is revealed in history as “righteous.” “The Lord our God is a righteous God.”
It follows that men cannot trample under foot the Divine laws of justice and humanity and yet presume upon the Divine favour. If that were possible, it would mean an utter degradation of the nature of God. No amount of patriotism, no amount of self-sacrifice, will justify in God’s sight a nation which is daily transgressing His commandments. Only in so far as we feel that we are ready to surrender our will to His can we hope to make good our assurance that He is going before us. Humble obedience, cheerful submission, singleness Of purpose, and honesty of heart—these are among the qualities which God requires from those who count upon His protection.
(2) It is a prophetic purpose.—That is to say, the purpose of the “righteous” God develops. It starts from a small beginning, but it looks to the whole wide world. It begins in one selected man; but it proposes to embrace all nations in the counsel, though they be as the stars for multitude. It moves forward, as times and seasons permit. It expands in scope as new possibilities open out. It gathers volume, force, significance: it draws everything on towards a great justifying conclusion—a day of complete manifestation, when the full plan will be disclosed, and God’s faithfulness to it verified. God, as history reveals Him, is a God whose manifestation of Himself is progressive: it develops: it grows. This is the key of prophecy.
The prophet is the man who most intimately corresponds with the counsel that is being unrolled: and the prophet interprets what he can detect of the counsel in present working by ever seeing it in the light of what it works for in the end. He is the man who catches sight, in the confused turmoil of actual experience, of symptoms and signals of a purpose that struggles and strains towards a fuller achievement, towards a consummating close. He lifts the stupid, cruel facts of the passing day into the light of the Day of the Lord, in which all days end. And the temper which desperately clings to this far purpose, and relies on the end which shall come in God’s good time, and never despairs of the purpose that is even now at work towards the end, and which, through the delays that sicken the heart, and the defects that spoil the joy, and the black nights that hide the light of the Divine desire, still grimly and desperately asserts the certainty, of God’s faithful achievement, is called “faith.”
One adequate support
For the calamities of mortal life
Exists—one only; an assured belief
That the procession of our fate, howe’er
Sad or disturbed, is ordered by a Being
Of infinite benevolence and power;
Whose everlasting purposes embrace
All accidents, converting them to good. [Note: Wordsworth, “The Excursion,” bk. iv.]
4. But this purpose of God in history is a purpose to be achieved through man’s co-operation. Man is the subject, the material, the instrument of the purpose. God has a counsel into which He admits men; and that counsel is a counsel on man’s own behalf. It is a purpose by which man, in and through the facts of a progressive history, shall himself become what God designs him to be, and has qualified him to become. God’s mind is to issue in and through man: and man comes to his full self in corresponding to that Divine mind. This is possible only if God and man are capable of working together with one mind and one will. And the bond between them, therefore, without which intelligent and willing co-operation is impossible, is a moral one.
Christ, come in the flesh, lived a life of faith or trust in His Father. As the Head and Representative of men He trusted in the Father’s purpose of deliverance for the race, and in this trust He yielded Himself up to the power of that purpose, so that it was accomplished in Him. And He did this that all men might apprehend the trustworthiness of the Father and the power of a real trust in Him, and might thus be strengthened and encouraged to partake in His trust, that so they might also partake in its results.
The righteousness of God towards man consists in this loving purpose, and the righteousness of man towards God consists in his faith in that purpose, a trust which makes man a fellow-worker with God in carrying it out. The eternal Son came into our world to reveal the Fatherhood of God; none but a Son could have made such a revelation, and none but those who are created in the Son’s nature could be capable of comprehending or receiving it. He came to draw and guide the hearts of the children to their Father by revealing the fatherliness of the Father’s heart, and He did this by His own unfaltering trust even whilst standing in their place, accepting and enduring that penalty which they had incurred.
(1) The call to this work is a call to the mind of the man, that he should understand what he is about—that he should enter into the mind of God for him. The purpose is an intelligible purpose, and he is to be a rational agent. So the call is personal. Each man, with his own special power of intelligence, is to make the plan his own, and to offer to it his own reasonable contribution. Each, then, is called by name, like Abraham, Each finds himself alone: mind to co-operate with mind and will with will. Alone, separate, individually—so he finds himself under the stars, with God, in the eye of the everlasting heaven.
(2) Yet he who is called is not called for his own sake. He is called to co-operate, in his representative character, as an embodiment of entire humanity. His value, in his separate individuality, accrues to him solely by virtue of his being a typical expression of that for which he stands. And the purpose in which he is to co-operate, and the end for which he serves, is absolutely universal. So it was with Abraham. In him, in his solitary person, alone under the stars, all the sum of nations over the whole earth was to be blessed. So it is now; as each one of us is smitten by the call. The faith which gives itself to the high duty of co-operation takes in the whole destiny of man. “I believe” means “I, in my own individual and personal freedom, give myself to the work of co-operating with God in the Divine purpose which reaches from end to end of the story of man on earth. By faith, I make a covenant with God: I bind myself to the service of this great hope. By faith, I dedicate myself to this end; and have no other significance or value. My righteousness lies in my steady adherence to this purpose. All sin lies in the disloyalty which betrays it. Goodness is wisdom—the wisdom that sees, understands, adheres to, and never fails to correspond with, the work of God.”
