1 D. Smith in Religion and the Modem World, p. 188. 2 7j^_ p jgg^
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postulate here and everywhere in our Lord's teaching is the kinship between God and man and the consequent reasonableness of interpreting the Divine by the human. As Browning has it :
Take all in a word: the truth in God's breast Lies trace for trace upon ours impressed : Though He is so bright and we so dim, We are made in His image to witness Him.
TL
The Unlikeness of God's Thoughts and Ways to Ours.
We have not gone far in our search for God before we feel the check-rein and are constrained to admit that, whilst there are points of contact between His being and ours, there are also points of enormous dissimilarity. We have worked from the scale of the dwarf, and the larger mensuration is beyond us. There is a basis for common fellowship in the elemental truths which arise from these methods of comparison : but we must not make God according to a petty, mundane ground-plan and transfer the limitations of human life and character to His incomparable person and government.
1. God's ways and thoughts are unlike ours in their sujoer- human perfection. The whole Bible is but an expansion of one sentence, one utterance of the Eternal, " I am Jehovah." Hence the revelation must be incomplete ; for who could fully reveal Himself to His creatures would be no God ; and it must also be astonishing and amazing ; for a professed record of any part of God's thoughts and ways that did not land in mystery and tend to wonder would be self -condemned, and proved to be neither true nor Divine. It is not only here and there that God's thoughts and ways are superhuman, but throughout, just as a circle is everywhere a circle, and nowhere a square, or capable of being reduced to the latter figure. How man can at all lay hold of God, or, with his finite and infinitely inferior mental faculties, frame any conception of Him, this is the wonder and has some- times been the stumbling-block of philosophy ; and it is only removed out of the way by devoutly and thankfully accepting the
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fact that we do know Him (though darkly), and are so far made in His image, that there may be and onght to be reverential contact and communion with Him.
God's method of teaching us would not be by a revelation if the finite could adjust itself at once to the infinite mind. In a revelation we have presented to us some of the unassimilated disparities between God's thoughts and ways and those of His creature man. Without realising it we verge upon the impiety of assuming that God has nothing to teach us, and that we may have something to teach Him. You do not hope to master Newton's Principia with as much ease as you grasp snippets of toothsome frivolities in the columns of the daily press. You ought not to think the Most High as easy to understand as a plain, plodding, transparent neighbour. Is it seemly to expect that the Mighty God will adopt our methods and put Himself into step for all time with the dwarfs of earth ? This gross, phenomenal self-complacency, this thrice-assured infallibility, proof against all doubt of itself, is an offence. God does some- times bow the heavens and strangely condescend to our infirmity, but it would be a poor kindness to us if He were to make those infirmities, rather than His own higher thoughts and surpassing ways, the limit of His self-revelations and the bounds of our destiny. We are not slowly evolving ourselves into the know- ledge of God, but God is meeting us with a vast body of truth concerning His being and His providential ways, the vaster part of which yet remains to be touched and assimilated.
IF Our nature may be like God's, but it is not the measure of God's. Even one human being is often a mystery to another. The words and actions of one who is far in advance of us in wisdom and goodness are often unintelligible to us. It is the penalty of greatness to lose the sympathy of meaner men. A great man is indeed the exponent of the truest spirit of humanity, but for that very reason he is often misunderstood by the men among whom he lives. His motives are purer, his aims nobler, his actions determined by wider principles, his whole career in life regulated by ideas more far-reaching and comprehensive than those of ordinary men. And so, just for this very reason that he is truer to the perfect ideal of humanity than they, it may be said that His thoughts are not as their thoughts, nor His ways as their ways. Much more, obviously, must this be said of Him whose image and goodness are infinite. Man is made in the image of God, but God
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is not the reflection of imperfect man. There is much in us and in all our thoughts and ways which we cannot transfer to Him, and if we attempt to do so, we only ascribe to the object of worship, as has often been done, our human weakness and errors, sometimes even our follies and crimes.^