In this chapter we have a great evangelical discourse on the
Eeturn from Exile, which is very grandly conceived. Israel was
not going back to be as before, but to become the mistress and
mother of nations. " Nations that knew not thee shall run unto
thee because of the Lord thy God." And along with that
enlarged political influence there was to be a new satisfaction
of heart ; in that deep hunger which cannot be appeased with
bread, God's gift would bring them rest. The promise was
well-nigh inconceivable, and it was not made easier by the
lowliness of the condition, for what was to "ring in the full
satisfaction" was nothing higher or more revolutionary than
obedience ; all the needed changes in the mind of statesmen and
in the mood of the exiled people were suspended on that.
"Hearken diligently unto me," saith God, "and ye shall eat
that which is good," " hear and your soul shall live." Obedience,
which, in the experience of every one has passed unrecognised
a hundred times, was suddenly to work a transformation ; and
men, in listening, seemed to hear a fairy tale from worlds of
other dimensions and powers than this, for things like that do
not happen on the level of this arid and commonplace earth.
To the exiles it sounded much as the preaching of the gospel
sounds to some of ourselves, who do not doubt that satisfaction is
a good thing, and whose heart runs out in desire for a little more
worth the name ; but in this sober world, where still the second
best prevails, how can it be ? In all our churches there are
people who have settled it in their minds that, essentially, this
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390 THE GREAT TEXTS OF THE BIBLE
promise is not true, but belongs to the delusive phraseology of religion where word and thing do not keep pace.
1. The glory of the preaching of a noble religion is that it " bears our intellect, conscience, emotions, imagination out beyond this world," and enables us to realise another scheme of powers than our senses have discovered ; and that is what the prophet here attempts. Where man's faith was hindered he thrusts in the bare assertion that God's thoughts and ways are not like ours. If things are really of the size and force which commonly are attributed to them there would be no room for a gospel to work ; but then the world is built in God's way ; it is a grander world than we yet have dreamed, with secrets of power yet un- explored. There are height and depth within it, and what we count impossible is possible with God.^ " My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are my ways your ways."
2. The consideration that God's nature is unlike to ours, that His thoughts are not as man's thoughts, His ways not as man's ways, is adduced, in the passage immediately before us, as a reason why a sinful being should have all the more hope for mercy at His hands. But there is a point of view from which we must hold the very opposite of this proposition to be the truth. Neither morality nor religion would be possible if, deeper than any dissimilarity, there were not a real and essential likeness between God's nature and ours. Morality is not obedi- ence to an arbitrary authority, but sympathy with the principle or spirit of God's law. Eeligion is the communion of the soul with God, but betwixt beings absolutely unlike there could be no communion. It is just because God's nature is essentially one with ours — His that of the Father of spirits, ours that of spirits made in His own image, after His own likeness ; it is because what we call thought, intelligence, mind, is in essence the same in God and in us — in Him the infinite thought or reason, in us that of beings to whom the inspiration of the Almighty hath given understanding ; it is, finally, because when I say, " God is Love," I can ascribe to Him as that which constitutes the deepest essence of His nature that same feeling which binds human hearts together, and, as by a hidden yet all-powerful solvent, melts their separateness into unity ; — in one word, it is because in the
^ W. M. Macgregor, Jeaus Christ the Son of God, p. 91.
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profoundest sense of the words, God's thoughts are as our thoughts, and God's ways as our ways, that we can understand the revela- tion He has given of His will, and enter into that spiritual fellowship with Him in which true religion consists.^
Let us accordingly consider (1) the Likeness of God's Ways to ours, and (2) their Unlikeness.
The Likeness of God's Thoughts and Ways to Ours.
1. If our thoughts were not in a measure like God's thoughts, we should know nothing about Him. If our thoughts were not like God's thoughts, we should have no standard for life or think- ing. Eighteousness and beauty and truth and goodness are the same things in heaven and earth, and alike in God and man. "We are made after His image, poor creatures though we be ; and though there must ever be a gulf of unlikeness, which we cannot bridge, between the thoughts of Him whose knowledge has no growth or uncertainty, whose wisdom is infinite and all whose nature is boundless light, and our knowledge, and must ever be a gulf between the workings and ways of Him who works with- out effort, and knows neither weariness nor limitation, and our work, so often foiled, so always toilsome, yet in all the unlikeness there is (and no man can denude himself of it) a likeness to the Father. For the image in which God made man at the beginning is not an image that it is in the power of man to cast away, and in the worst of his corruptions and the widest of his departures he still bears upon him the signs of likeness " to Him that created him." The coin is rusty, battered, defaced ; but still legible are the head and the writing. " Whose image and superscription hath it ? " Eender unto God the things that are declared to be God's, because they bear His likeness and are stamped with His signature.