The passage: Who may dwell in God’s tabernacle, who may rest on his holy hill? The one who lives without corruption, does what is right, and speaks truth from the heart. Who does not deceive with his tongue, does no harm to his neighbor, and does not slander him. Who does not think highly of himself but is humble, and honors those who fear the Lord. Who keeps his word to his neighbor even to his own loss. Who does not lend money at interest, nor take a bribe against the innocent. Whoever does these things will never be shaken.
The Tabernacle that traveled with Israel through the wilderness witnessed that the Lord himself dwelt among them. When it was brought to Mount Zion with shouting and trumpet, it gained no new sacredness of its own — rather it gave sacredness to the place it rested on. God was felt to be there; the city stood because he was present in it.
If David or any Psalmist dared ask “who shall dwell in Thy Tabernacle, who shall rest on Thy holy hill?” you might expect the answer to be: the priests specially consecrated, clothed in garments of glory and beauty, marked “holiness to the Lord” — these alone may approach, as Moses ascended Sinai. Such an answer would not have been vulgar superstition; it would be nothing like a heathen climbing a hill to be nearer the sun. It would simply mean that some transcendent excellence, some spiritual absorption, was required to commune with the Everlasting God.
But the actual words of the Psalm are strangely different. The qualities demanded — not of a mere visitor to the Tabernacle but of one who dwells in it, not of one who ascends the hill but rests on it — are those of an ordinary citizen, without which no one could fulfill common duties in the world. They are mostly negative: not corrupt, not lying, not taking bribes against the innocent. One condition reads as if drawn straight from Israel’s civil code, local and temporary; all of them are of that same commonplace, mundane kind. None is the sort a person seeking a refined, sentimental morality would think to include.
Yet the more we read the Old Testament writers, the more we see they had an overwhelming sense of Divine Majesty, and counted nearness to it the highest privilege given to any creature. Think of Moses’s communion with the Lord God of Israel, of what sustained every prophet crushed by the sins of his land and himself, of the Psalmist’s habitual language in despair and in rapture. Always the same: to be without God is to be cast down, in deep waters, in mire with no footing; to see the light of his face outweighs treasures of corn and wine; in his presence is fullness of joy, and to wake in his likeness is to be satisfied. Whatever explains the seeming easiness of the Psalm’s terms, it cannot be that the blessing itself was thought small, or that anything else competed with it.
The key lies in a principle running through the whole Jewish polity and history: God is always spoken of as bringing his people into fellowship with himself. “He planted them,” says the Prophet, “wholly a right seed” — not meaning they were naturally right or pure, or less inclined to evil than others, or that the Covenant had changed their nature. The Prophet constantly makes them feel the opposite: they were naturally evil and as capable of indulging it, and did indulge it, as any people outside the Covenant. Exactly so far as they followed or trusted their own nature, they became the rebellious, stiff-necked people I spoke of last Sunday from Deuteronomy — because that was refusing God’s government, refusing the Covenant, which means a man is good only while he renounces any goodness of his own and refers it to God. So it was no contradiction to say of Covenant people, “they are wholly a right seed: whatever wrong springs up is their own doing, from choosing their own way, from wanting independence from their true Ruler.” The necessary consequence: certain evil habits and tendencies marked a refusal to remain in the state God had called them to. Such habits, being ones people naturally fall into unless they resist them, become the habits of society at large — caught by contagion, hardening quickly into the rules and maxims of the Jewish world as of any other. To resist them was to believe God’s Covenant, to believe he had set his throne on his Holy Hill of Zion, that from that throne came both law and the power to enforce it, and that he would put down in his chosen nation, and in each of its members, whatever opposed his will.
To resist those habits and tendencies was to deepen this faith day by day, to test its solidity, to learn more of the Being who kindled it. To resist them was to gain a fixed dwelling in God’s Tabernacle, a rest on his holy hill. Had the Psalmist spoken of heroic efforts winning entry to the Tabernacle or a seat on the hill, he would have contradicted the whole idea of heroism he and his fathers had learned. They were to seek no high place for themselves; simply to do as they were told, go where they were sent, and beat down whatever obstacle, material or spiritual, stood in their way, in God’s strength. They were to assume he was with them — to fail to assume it in any case was to abandon faith. No Jew could claim God’s presence because he was better or more believing than his brothers. The Lord was in the holy hill as Protector of the city, the bond of Jewish fellowship. Anyone wanting to be more than a citizen — seeking individual privilege instead of belonging to that fellowship — forfeited the Divine protection; he could not dwell in the Tabernacle or rest on Zion.
So the Jew’s highest spiritual aspirations were inseparable from his most ordinary civil life. The priests, with their anointing oil and glorious garments, did not sever outward from inner existence; they witnessed to their union. They entered the Holy Place with sacrifices for the common Israelite’s daily transgressions, testifying that this was where he belonged, that he had wandered from his true home through carelessness of God’s Law and his neighbor’s welfare, and that from that home flowed a continual power of reconciliation. The priest’s office suggested the highest dedication to God, not as a strange gift for a class of votaries who cast aside common life for it, but as a gift for human beings generally, without which no one could truly live as a man — realized most by those most watchful to keep their places simply and honestly, most aware of what drew them toward artificiality and baseness. Confidence that the living God had called a man to be his servant would keep him from lying to his neighbor in word and deed; every lie would weaken that confidence. The man determined to cast off lying, usury, and bribery must be lowly in his own eyes, aware of the temptations within and around him, and must honor those who, through fear of God, could overcome these enemies and find refuge in his righteousness.
We will use this Psalm on Ascension Day, and I am glad of that choice. It bears witness to what I argued last Sunday — that the life of the Nation and of the Church, of Old and New Testament, are closely bound together, and that we in England still have much to learn at the feet of ancient Israel. Let us apply the Psalm’s lessons to our own case.
I. The Lord on Zion’s holy hill was an object of distinct, definite contemplation. When we speak of the Father of Our Lord Jesus Christ, do we mean someone less distinct, less personal? Did Jesus, saying “he that hath seen me hath seen the Father,” mean our minds to drift into a haze the ancients were spared? Our reverence is not helped but destroyed by vagueness and unreality — and that vagueness breeds the darkest, most degrading superstitions. A Being of absolute righteousness, truth, and love, to whom our secret hearts are open, is an object of awe to child and sage, peasant and philosopher alike. A mere Presence or Spiritual Essence awakens no real awe in anyone — people may talk and write of it, but they do not bow before it. Yet the conscience’s deep witness that there is something more, something searching and judging them, drives people to imagine what that something is. They clothe their fears in shapes as various as those fears, shapes taking their moral character from their worshippers — and out of a Pantheism boasting of universality and freedom springs the most slavish, divisive idolatry.
If we truly believe Christ, the Son of Man, has ascended bodily to him with whom he dwelt before all worlds, we believe the King of Zion’s holy hill has revealed himself more distinctly and perfectly than before — that we are admitted to a far higher knowledge of him than the Jews had, that the communion the Psalmist spoke of as possible for himself is, in its highest sense, realized for us, and that God’s whole dispensation has aimed at removing what stood in its way. The Jew was still haunted by a sense of distance in space. Christ’s Ascension lifts that burden: he has led captivity captive, proving a power in himself to break the barrier separating earth from heaven. The freedom he claimed for the body he took implies a like freedom for the spirit that wears it — the power to break through the humiliations of sense it always felt unworthy of its birth yet could never shake off on its own.
- The Ascension of Christ, like the Tabernacle’s placing on the holy hill, claims equal privilege for us all. No Englishman may tell his brother, “the highest privileges of the New Covenant are not for you,” any more than an Israelite could say so of the Covenant with Abraham. David asserts the same doctrine as Moses; Paul agrees with both. Christ has claimed for us a place in his Father’s house as sons and daughters — his Father is our Father, and by that right we may ascend the holy hill. To say we ascend by virtue of our own feelings, sensations, or holiness is to set aside the Incarnation, Sacrifice, and Ascension of Christ.
These acts were not done for the wise, good, elevated few, the favorites of Heaven. They are proclaimed in streets and highways as done for the outcasts who live there, because they were done for all human beings. We must receive them as common blessings, or not at all.
- Why then do we not receive them, freely given as they are? The fifteenth Psalm gives the reason again, and it applies to us in full strictness. This plain, homely explanation is the true one, the only true one — it is time ministers of God returned to such plain speech. We have talked as though people might be perfectly good in their dealings with neighbors and yet lack something needed to be servants of God — as if they must be something more than honest, true citizens to dwell on the holy hill. That is not what the Old Testament teaches. It says boldly: you are not honest and straightforward with your neighbors, therefore you do not believe God is honest and straightforward with you; you do not trust him, do not confess your sins, do not draw near his holy hill. Has the New Testament changed that lesson? It differs in this: it tells us more fully how to rise out of base, dishonest habits, how God has revealed his righteousness in Christ for the remission of sins. But he has revealed his righteousness — therefore no unrighteousness can have fellowship with him. He has revealed his truth — therefore no falsehood can have intercourse with him. Christ, the way and the truth and the life, ascended on high to open a way into the presence of the Eternal Living Truth, that we might share his nature.
Is that the goal we English Christians set for ourselves? If so, let us rejoice: Christ ascended that we might be delivered from our old evil life and possess righteousness in him. We may give up lying to one another, be freed from the worship of money and its power of self-multiplication — the spirit of usury that breeds immorality and dishonesty, that reduced the Jewish nation to degradation and will reduce any nation it possesses to the same. We may shake off the vanity that goes with it, become lowly in our own eyes, and honor honest, God-fearing men instead of fawning on the rich. But if this is not what we want — if we want a religion that makes us comfortable in the frauds of our trades and professions; if the shopkeeper denounces Popery loudly the better to adulterate his goods and use false weights without self-reproach; if lawyers and clergymen wear a respectable Christianity so as never to ask whether their words are honest before God or their acts fit for his scrutiny — then we must be told plainly: Sinai’s thunders were no more terrible than Zion where God dwells; the New Testament tolerates such practices no more than the Old, but less; God will be as swift a witness against our crimes as against Israel’s; Christ did not ascend to make fellowship with God easier for such people, but to testify that between us and a God of eternal justice and truth there can be no fellowship at all — not for want of some transcendent celestial quality, but because we possess the qualities that destroy nations.
I have now reached the point I was aiming at. When I spoke a fortnight ago of national righteousness and holiness, I expected two kinds of objection. One, from those who recognize only individual righteousness — I answered them last week. The other, from those who profess belief in a holy Catholic Church but cannot see what that has to do with a nation, treating nation and Church as barely compatible, even opposites. In the sense given to “Catholic Church” by that theory, they are indeed opposites: a nation is pledged to treat idolatry as its ruin, while a Church organized as an independent visible society with a visible head must by its nature encourage idolatry, and always has. Further, a nation is pledged to a wholesome, practical, manly morality, wholly opposed to the “touch not, taste not, handle not” morality such a Church must favor and has always favored — a morality quite compatible with gross departures from common truth and honesty. I urge those Protestant defenders of individual holiness I addressed last Sunday to consider whether their teaching hinders the great protest against idolatry inherent in a nation’s very existence, substituting for it a petty protest against some act of legislation they’ve privately judged idolatrous — whether they are replacing the Bible’s homely morality with capricious, artificial maxims — and whether they may thereby be preparing their own children for the very system they most dread.
But on the other hand, I maintain that a holy Catholic Church, in its truest and deepest sense, underlies the holy and righteous nation — that the two are not contraries but one the vestibule of the other, each supporting the other; that this Church is no imaginary or artificial society but a real one constituted in Christ our ascended Lord. So the ascension of Christ to the Father’s right hand, that he might fill all things, is the meeting point of these two divine principles, these two human societies — the consummation of all the old world’s hopes, and the beginning of all that is purest and holiest in the new.