We often have to remark it, but it never ceases to be remarkable and instructive, that, wherever we read in the Scriptures, God is before us, in some way or other. It is this that makes the Bible so necessary to us, because we do not see God anywhere else. We do not necessarily see Him in the works of Creation, except in so far as by a process of reasoning they tell us of His existence. We certainly do not see Him in the company of man, nor in the reading of ordinary books. In the Bible we cannot read without seeing Him, and in a shape never indistinct, with a light never dim. God is never absent from its pages. In Genesis He is the Maker of all things, and the Starter of His purpose with the earth through Abraham. In the subsequent books of Moses, He is the speaker of His will concerning Israel, and of His mind concerning many matters. In the historical books He deals with Israel; in the Psalms He is addressed and praised and implored hundreds of times, and hundreds of times in them speaks directly to us. In the prophets, He alone is the speaker. In the Evangelists we have Christ, who tells us that all He said and did was to be directly attributed to the Father, who spoke through Him. In the Acts of the Apostles it is a work of God is recorded, and in all the Epistles there is a continual beam of light from God.

Because of all this, we may become acquainted with God by reading the Bible, and, because of His absence from all the ways and thoughts and devices of men, we cannot know Him if we restrict ourselves to intercourse with man, and if we stand apart from the Bible we must be ignorant of God. We can only know Him by His communicated word. That communicated word is in various forms, and reveals various things, all of them converging on a centre of glory and comfort. Sometimes the revelation has a stern aspect, as when we are told of “the wrath of God revealed from heaven.” Yet even this has its comforting side. If God had no capacity for anger, how chaotically the universe would develop in the course of ages. The sparkling orbs of heaven would become so many hells, instead of abodes of light and joy, where the will of God is done. We see it partly illustrated in the as yet unfinished history of the earth. For the time, God is not speaking nor acting directly. Wickedness is apparently unnoticed by Him, and He shows no visible anger with those who set Him at nought. What is the consequence? That throughout the earth the wicked flourish like a green bay tree, and righteousness cowers helplessly in dark corners. If the will of God will yet be done on earth as it is in heaven, it is because of a day appointed for the wrath and the revelation of the righteous judgment of God, who will render indignation and wrath, tribulation and anguish to every soul of man that doeth evil. This terrible day of trouble will only be terrible in its bearing upon the enemies of God; to His friends even His anger is comforting, just as we feel a sense of comfort under the wing of a strong friend who can be tempestuous in our defence.

There is a present bearing of the matter of great importance for us to discern. God’s displeasure is great with all evil, but it is of a flexible and adjustable sort, and in a sense is in our hands to regulate. This is clearly before us in the chapters read. In the case of Jeremiah, the lesson is almost dramatic in its power. He was commanded to go to the potter’s house, no doubt a grimy place in Jerusalem, as all potters’ houses are. When he went there, the potter would not be aware of the reason of his coming; perhaps he knew him and would make him welcome, and Jeremiah would sit down and watch him as he went on with his work at the wheel. We all know, or may know, what a potter’s wheel is, for it is unchanged to the present day. The plastic clay is put upon a revolving circular body of small dimensions, and as the stuff is rapidly turned under the hand of the potter, he shapes it with his hand. In most cases the shaping is successfully performed in less than a minute, but it sometimes happens that the article is torn or ruptured in the process, in which case the potter takes the stuff off the wheel and crumples it up into something else.

At this point the word of God came to Jeremiah. If we had been there we should have seen nothing; possibly we might have heard, possibly not, for the ways of the Spirit are quiet or audible according to the purpose to be served. God spoke to Christ once in the hearing of the people; but sometimes He speaks in a way that is audible only to the person to whom the words are addressed, and by him they are very clearly heard, as was the case with Jeremiah. He was commanded to say to Israel,

Is that lesson confined to the house of Israel under the prophets? Has it no application to ourselves under the apostles? The chapter we have read from Romans is a complete answer. Our whole standing is made to depend upon our attitude towards God.

“Be not highminded, but fear.”

“Because of unbelief the natural branches were broken off, and thou standest by faith. If God spared not the natural branches, take heed lest He spare not thee.”

“Shall not uncircumcision, if it keep the righteousness of the law, be counted for circumcision? Circumcision verily profiteth if thou keep the law, but if thou be a breaker of the law, the circumcision is made uncircumcision.”

It would not be possible to affirm more distinctly or expressly the principle of the clay and the potter, as applicable to men under the Gospel. Perception has been somewhat obscured on this point by the fact that sinners are invited to believe and assume the name of Christ, as the condition of forgiveness, and thus attain peace with God and hope of eternal life without works. It has come to be supposed that faith without works continues to be the rule after adoption into the family of God. This is a great and fatal mistake. No one can read the apostles without seeing this. They are full of entreaty to believers to walk in obedience, lest they become cast away.

“Draw nigh to God, and He will draw nigh to you.”

This is the universal rule affirmed by James. The tendency of people in our age is to ignore it, and to think that God is independent of the action of His creatures for His action towards them. They prefer to regard God as a universal indiscriminate benefactor, and if they recognise the teaching of Christ in the sense before us, then they turn critical, and say it would have been better for God not to have given His creatures any trouble in the matter. This is very short-sighted, as well as a very presumptuous, attitude.

That God’s way is the best becomes apparent upon the merest glance at the position, best, that is, as affecting the development and state of man. How incomplete human character, and, therefore human happiness depends upon knowledge, and its degree is in the ratio of the character of that knowledge, and also its adaptability to development, which means that things which please at one time do not please at another. Things please us when we are young, that have no power to please us when we are old; things that gratify an empty mind, afford but little gratification to a mind well stored. Look at the baby in its mother’s arms, it crows ecstatically at the jingling of crocks and spoons; look at that same baby when it is grown to be a man 60 years old, how differently it is affected by the same things. Now, there is a development beyond the stage of mortal life, for by-and-bye there comes resurrection, and the efficient faculties of immortality. In those days infinity is before us. What can please, then? While all things will more or less contribute pleasure, there is one object which is alone capable of affording satisfaction to the mind. We experience the truth of this even now, when we advance sufficiently in wisdom. God only can satisfy the highest reason. It is therefore kindness in God to require that we should seek Him, for He is the well of our joy, and the fountain of our salvation, and without Him we are withered branches in all respects, We learn at last to echo David’s expression,

The feeling grows so intense that we can join even in his apparently extravagant but only literally true statement of his experience;

But there is another side to the question, a side that few men are capable of realising. There is God’s side of the question. He has made man for His own pleasure chiefly from their independent and voluntary appreciation of Him. Is He to be cheated out of His pleasure? Men think of God as too high to be considered as capable of deriving pleasure from human submission; God is certainly too high for us to begin to conceive, but is it not for us to use this fact as a reason for denying what He has revealed. We can go further than that, and say that what He has revealed is inevitable from what we can see Him to be. God is the perfection of mentality; human mentality is but a faint resemblance to His, impressed on clay, as we might say. Now, we know from our human experience of mentality, that the capacity for pleasure is in the ratio of the development of mentality. Has a man a small and low mind? He has but poor capacity for mental enjoyment. Has a man a capacious and sensitive mentality? His pleasures are keen and ecstatic, and his pains the same. If this be true of mere brain substance on earth, it is not hard to realise that it should be true of spirit substance in heaven, does it not enable us to understand why God should be pleased with holiness in man, and pained at the opposite state? He has formed man for His own pleasure, and finds it in man’s love and praise and obedience; and He is displeased and pained when the creature He has formed for His praise, turns his back upon God who made him, and thinks only of his own pleasure in other things that God has made, in doing which man can rob God, although such a thing in the abstract looks impossible.

On both heads, therefore, the wisdom of God’s way in requiring man to seek after Him is supreme. If He did not make His knowledge and service imperative with man, men would become an abortion in creation. The longer we live, the more strongly do we see the reasonableness of all the things which God has commanded in the Scriptures of truth. The gospel is a summons to know Him, to give heed to Him, to obey Him, to love and honour Him. It is not merely the announcement of good things to come, it is not merely an offer of salvation in the sense of benefaction; it is not merely a promise that all our troubles will end, and that unspeakable good will come. It is all that, for “no good thing will God withhold from those who fear Him,” but primarily it is a command to repent and to submit to God, and to conform to His will, to become His servants, to glorify His name, to please Him by intelligent and fervent praise, “Blessed are they that do His commandments” in these things; that they may “have right to eat of the tree of life, and to enter in through the gates into the city.” This is almost the last utterance of inspiration upon the earth, it occurs in that last chapter of the Apocalypse. It is a principle almost entirely overlooked in almost all systems of religion, and in all the mental and moral habitudes of men. The world lives for itself; the children of God live for God, and this not as a fancy or a craze, but as the attitude of reason, which they are even prepared to carry the length of David’s speech,

This is the right attitude for created beings; there is the very highest and deepest philosophy in the apparently simple saying that-

“He that humbleth himself shall be exalted.”

This attitude of self-abnegation is the road to true blessedness; there is no blessedness in self-assertion or self-satisfaction. No experience at present accessible to human nature is blessedness.

We do not yet know what blessedness is, it is something only to be imagined, and scarcely that. There are more meanings than one in the saying that-

“Blessed” is a word almost peculiar to the Bible, like the word “glory.” There is an exhaustless world of beauty in it; it means more than happy, more than well off, more than honourable; it means something you cannot express by any other word; it is a word that was very frequently on Christ’s lips, and in connections where men would not have been likely to use it.

He does not mean that the blessedness consists in these evil experiences, but that these evil experiences are in the narrow way that leads to the blessedness to come after. This blessedness is expressed as “right to eat of the tree of life.”

It is impossible that we can feel the full depth of these words. We have not yet tasted truly what life is. We are in an evil state in which we are scarcely half alive. We are so weak and so afflicted that the mind fails to respond sometimes to the brightness and glory signified by the simple phrase “Life Eternal,” life as it is in God, life spontaneous, life strong, life perfect, life inextinguishable, life unimpaired by evil, and undimmed by weakness of any kind, like the Creator of the ends of the earth, who “fainteth not, neither is weary, and there is no searching of his understanding.” That is the life that is coming, and the life that God is both willing and anxious that we should enter. He has sent abroad the freest invitation it is possible to promulgate-

Jesus places the same healing comfort before us in saying,

Once more dear brethren and sisters, let us lift up the hands that hang down, and strengthen the feeble knees, and run with patience the race set before us.

Taken from: - “More Seasons of Comfort”

Pages 628-633

By Bro. Robert Roberts

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