Cry for God’s Judgments

“Oh that Thou wouldest rend the heavens, that Thou wouldest come down, that the mountains might flow down at Thy presence, as when the melting fire burneth, the fire causeth the waters to boil, to make Thy name known to Thine adversaries, that the nations may tremble at Thy presence!”—Isaiah lxiv. 1, 2.

The passage: Isaiah cries out that God would tear open the heavens and come down, so that the mountains would melt at His presence as when fire burns and makes water boil. He asks this so that God’s name would be made known to His adversaries and the nations would tremble before Him.

This is nothing less than a prayer that God would show Himself as a Judge, and as a Destroyer. It is unlike the prayers we are naturally inclined to offer, and unlike the prayers many grave and religious counsellors would have us offer: “O God, remain far from us, hidden from us; teach us to escape Thy judgments! Let Saints, Angels, the Virgin-Mother, Thy Son, stand between us and Thy burning wrath!” These cries rise from the natural heart of man, and they seem justified by religion as well as reason. Is the preacher not sent to tell us how terrible God’s wrath is, and how fearful it is to fall into the hands of the living God? Is he not sent to tell us, in the words of this same prophet, of a Man “Who shall be a hiding-place from the wind and a covert from the tempest”?

If Isaiah contradicts himself, no comment of ours can make sense of him. But perhaps the passage about the Man who shelters us from the tempest illustrates the prayer in the text rather than contradicting it, and our fancy of a contradiction shows how our Theology differs from his. Isaiah longed for a Man who would deliver people from the oppression of the world’s tyrants, from the storms raised by the passions of peoples and rulers, and from the exhaustion that follows when their labours come to nothing. All this misery, he thought, springs from their pretending to be gods themselves, and from the disbelief they cherish and spread in a God altogether unlike them, whose ways and purposes are not theirs. He longed for the true Man to appear, who would fully show the ways and purposes of the true God, remove the thick veil that kept His light from His creatures, and make them know that He was present, ruling and judging them. To long for a Man who would be a covert from the storm was therefore the same thing as longing that God would rend the heavens and come down.

I have said that there is a natural heart in all of us, baptized or not, Christian, Jew, Turk or Pagan, which shrinks from this prayer and would rather utter any other. I have hinted also that there is a natural religion, natural in one sense and most artificial in another, which adapts itself to these inclinations and gives them a language. It is found in every country and attaches itself to every profession; it can turn almost any litany to its use, and it commends itself equally to the highest and the lowest. Priests organize it into a system of practices, doctors into a system of notions. Under all its forms it has one common mark: its aim is to keep God at a distance from men, and its art is to turn every person who performs its offices, every prayer and dogma, into a barrier against His appearing and His vengeance.

But widely spread as this religion is, and adaptable as it seems, it lacks the sign of Universality. It expresses the many different feelings of men in their different diseases. It does not express the one common feeling, the wish to be raised out of disease and made whole. It gives many shapes to the dread of God, the wish that there were no God, which dwells in every man. It has no language for the infinite craving after God that also dwells in every man, the longing to meet Him face to face and bear all His vengeance rather than be separated from Him. Many things in nature kindle that desire: sunrise and sunset, the still lake, children’s faces, the music of the human voice. In all of them there is a witness to something calmer, brighter, truer than himself, which he is meant to cry after and which alone will satisfy him. There is an equally strong witness that these things do not contain the treasure. And there is a more perplexing witness that it is nearer to him than to them, yet that he, and not they, would shut it out and gladly put it out. The deep and the sky answer his question with another: “Is it not in thee?” When he seeks, he first exclaims, “If it is, let it depart from me, for I am a sinner;” and then, “Let it come near to me, though I am a sinner, or I shall remain one for ever.” No wonder that every prayer which turns “Depart from me” into the dialect of a particular tribe is held with such tenacity, and keeps gathering new accretions from fresh experience of inward evil. Yet I say the universal prayer, the one that goes up from the whole heart of humanity and is heard through all the sounds most discordant with it, is Isaiah’s: that God would make Himself known, even in melting mountains and burning fire.

Where did the Prophet learn that prayer? How could he speak for Egyptians, Phœnicians and Assyrians, who despised his tribe and worship, or for Greeks, Romans and Goths, not yet known in the world? Had he not been taught to see his nation as dwelling alone, fenced off by ordinances and prohibitions from other nations’ habits and prayers? Yes, and even so, he was disciplined to understand that man does not need protection against God, but needs God to protect him against himself and to raise him from the slavery he invents for himself. So he was prepared to read every event that befell Israel or her enemies as a sign that God was coming out of His place to judge both, the chosen race no less severely than those who trampled on it, by the same law of righteousness and to establish righteousness and truth on earth by purging out whatever loves and makes a lie. So he learned that the misery of the heathen was that they suspected their gods, supposed their authority merged in that of their ministers, and fancied the worshipper could flatter and pervert them with offerings. So he saw how hateful to God are even the services He has appointed, when they are not offered to Him as a righteous Being and acknowledge no purpose to make men righteous. So he knew that the melting fire is not only the minister of men’s purposes, though they are meant to compel all Nature’s subtlest agencies into their service, but also God’s minister, executing His justice on wrong-doers and purifying the earth. So he learned to rejoice even as he trembled at convulsions in the world or in society, which bade his people cease from men whose breath is in their nostrils and hide in the clefts of the rocks from the fear of the Lord. So he understood that by such signs God was avenging the poor and helpless, shaking kings on their thrones and surprising hypocrites. So he perceived that falling into the hands of the living God is indeed fearful if we separate our cause from that of those made in His image and seek advantage for ourselves; but that the only hope for us and all human beings is that the Living God should make the nations tremble at His presence, and prove Himself, not some dead God, far less the Spirit of Pride, Oppression and Injustice, to be Lord of the nations. So, finally, Isaiah became the Evangelical prophet, the witness that unto us a Child is born and a Son is given, who can be a covert from the tempest because He is both Son of Man and Son of God, and because God appearing in Him does rend the heavens and come down.

Isaiah joined to that prophecy of a Son to be born other words that often sound strange beside it: “Every battle of the warrior is with confused noise and garments rolled in blood. But this shall be with burning and fuel of fire.” How does this accord with our notions of Him who is called in the same passage the Prince of Peace, who, we affirm, was revealed in David’s city, meek and sitting on an ass, with none of the warrior’s trophies? Does Isaiah not link His appearing with a battle far more tremendous and destructive than ordinary battles? Did Jesus of Nazareth not fulfil the idea these words set forth? Or is He hereafter to be other than He was when the children poured out their hosannas, the daughters of Jerusalem followed Him to the Cross, and the Apostles preached Him to Jews and Greeks?

Brethren, I hold that the Prophet’s words were fulfilled strictly and literally when Jesus came in great humility, died, rose and ascended, and when the Apostles bade Jews, Greeks and Latins receive Him as king. I hold that they have been fulfilling themselves ever since, and are now. When Jesus came among Scribes and Pharisees, Publicans and Sinners, claimed to be the Son of Man, sympathizing with men, healing their diseases, vindicating the day of rest for them and preaching the Kingdom of God, and when He took to Himself the power of a Son of God, bidding devils depart and forgiving sins, He did not at once stir up the customary battle of the warrior with its noise and blood. Nothing seemed to threaten one. But a battle was raging in men’s hearts, like a fire seizing every inflammable thing and turning it into its own nature. “Is this our King, the true King of men, or, as the Scribes and Pharisees tell us, a liar and blasphemer? Does He show us the nature of the God who made us, or, as they say, of the Devil who is destroying us?” Was a battle with that issue described by the Prophet in exaggerated phrases? Must it not be the battle of all battles, the central battle of the Universe, and the final one? Did it not grow mightier still when the word went out that Death, the Grave, Hell, all that had terrified mankind, the powers of the invisible world that held the visible in dread, had been met and conquered for men by their Champion and Lord, because He came to do His Father’s Will? What a subversion of all the religious maxims that supported the world’s governments! What a contradiction of the policy to which Israel and every other nation was pledged!

Soon the question was debated not only in secret hearts but in the Temple, where the Jews always gathered, and in the market-place, the exercise-ground of Greek philosophy as well as Greek trade: was Cæsar, or this crucified Man of whom the tent-maker spoke, really King of kings and Lord of lords? What could come of such a debate but what did come? First the chosen people confessed they had no king but Cæsar, having given up any other dream; then they provoked Cæsar, the God-General to whom they had surrendered the faith and hopes of past ages, to show he was stronger than the wretched anarchs fighting for the holy city, and he was commissioned to destroy it. Next, when that old foe was swept away, Cæsar found a new one, not shut within walls or tied to local customs, but speaking its treason to every tribe he ruled: that One who had sacrificed Himself and lived for ever, not a commander of legions who bade men sacrifice to his image, was Ruler in the armies of Heaven and would prove mightiest on earth. Supposing such a doctrine was not mere madness, did not die of itself and was not crushed at once by imperial power, could it be anything less than the beginning of a battle with burning and fuel of fire? Was it not sure in time to cause some of those more material battles, with confused noise and garments dyed in blood?

And if that battle ended, as we know it did, if a Christendom rose out of the Roman empire and the empire itself bowed to the Cross, did that cry fall silent to which we suppose Christ’s appearing was the answer, the cry that the true God would “rend the heavens, and come down, that the mountains might flow down at His presence; that as when the melting fire burneth, the fire causeth the waters to boil, He would make His name known to His adversaries, that the nations might tremble at His presence”? It could not be silent unless the rulers of the earth, civil and ecclesiastical, confessed in word and deed the righteous, self-sacrificing King to be their King and the King of men, who came to establish His righteous, heavenly order in the world. Loud must the cry be that rises from the lonely bed of misery and the dens where prisoners lie for speaking right words and refusing to serve treacherous men. It must grow louder, swelled by the cries of all ages and echoed by new saints beneath the altar, if rulers civil and ecclesiastical think that a Cæsar, not a crucified Man, holds the real and highest royalty, and lead men to think that Christ came to enslave the world rather than redeem it, to hide us from God rather than bring us near. Hidden from Him, living in dark unbelief about His character and purposes, men are left to the mercy of those He has entrusted with powers to wield in His name, and those powers are sure to be used for the curse and not the blessing of His creatures.

Brethren, we need to dwell on these thoughts far more earnestly than we have. Battles with confused noise and garments rolled in blood may end for a while. Let us not think the battle with burning and fuel of fire, the battle of principles, has ended or can end; we are more than ever in the midst of it. Let us not try to sever the principles that affect the polities of the earth from those that concern the Kingdom of Heaven, for they are inseparable. The Kingdom of Heaven is the Kingdom of Righteousness. All unrighteous government, all that sets itself against the order and freedom of man, is hostile to Christ’s government and is rebellion against Him, in whatever name and by whatever instruments it is administered. Let us go back to this old and undoubted maxim, which we are strangely forgetting amid notions of religious interests and civil interests, religious duties and common duties. Remember that what the Jews took for religious interests and duties set themselves to war with Christ, blaspheme Him and crucify Him when He came in the flesh. Remember that the religious interests and duties of the Roman world sent the witnesses for Christ to the wild beasts, and that they have been the plea for every crime of the last eighteen hundred years. God has permitted us in this land to witness that civil tyranny and ecclesiastical tyranny are equally detestable to Him; that each is always strengthening and abetting the other; that both dread the appearing of Him who is the true Judge of men because He is the sufferer for them and with them. Let us never abandon that testimony, and let us ask that whatever hinders us from bearing it faithfully be taken out of our hearts. In us, as in others, there is a notion, always working, sometimes put into words and taking the shape of Christian orthodoxy, that we want a deliverer not from Atheism but from God: a Mediator to stop Him carrying out His cruel designs against us, not one to reveal His love and purge our own cruelty so that we may share it. In us there is a feeling that the Judge and the Saviour are different beings, or one being with different purposes, and not that He who hung upon the Cross will show, in the day that winds up this age as He did in the day that wound up the former, that His is the power meant to draw all things to itself, and that all power unlike His must divide and destroy. Let us think well, for we, like the other nations, may have to decide what we reverence and worship most in our hearts: the Spirit of Him who took the form of a servant and became lowest of all that He might exalt all, or the spirit that exalts itself to crush humanity. Let us solemnly resolve that nothing shall tempt us to abandon our hope for the freedom and blessedness of all nations. Let us place our hopes not in the promises of princes or the schemes of plotters, but in the oath of God that He will set Truth upon the earth. Then the cry, “Oh that Thou wouldest rend the heavens and come down,” will be answered to us no less than to our forefathers. Now, as of old, the bitterest disappointments prepare the surest hope; when darkness is thickest the Light will come forth, to shine over all and never be put out.