2. God is more angry than we are. In God there is an immitigable abhorrence and hatred of evil, to which, in our keenest moments of aggrieved sensibility, we only faintly approxi- mate. The easy, good-natured divinity who makes everything comfortable is not the God of the Bible. There He has a frown- ing as well as a smiling face, an aspect, not of feeble benignity, but of terror and wrath and relentless hostility to evil and evil doers. If mercy mean foregoing just indignation and letting off from punishment, then there is no mercy in God. He is the most merciless, relentless, inexorable of all beings. If sin and misery were disconnected, if in all the universe one selfish soul could ever escape wretchedness and live on at peace, it would be a universe over which God had ceased to rule. Wherever a
^ John Caird.
ISAIAH 401
sinful soul exists in all time and space, there, sooner or later, in its loneliness and anguish, as of a worm that dieth not • and a fire that is not quenched, there is the proof that the justice of God demands, and will not abate aught of its terrible satisfaction.
Frankly we have to recognise that there are two ways of it, two measurings of the value of things, two views of life ; and, soon or late, we must make our choice of this or that. The common temptation is to shirk the choice. Within the Church of Jesus are multitudes of entirely worldly people, whose standard and aim are of this world. They live themselves, and they teach their children to live, under the domination of the ideas of society, and yet they never doubt that they are good Christians. If we believe Christ, that cannot be ; the man who heard but did not do seemed to Him like a man building a house without a foundation, which topples about him. We learn in life that there is a religion which is not Christ's religion. In our churches there is a veiled paganism, hard, scornful, unforgiving, fashion-ridden, and the mischief of it lies not in what these people do so much as in what they think ; and in returning to God the first necessity is that they forsake their thoughts.
There is nothing more false and immoral than the weak, sentimental tenderness with which crime and criminals are some- times regarded. It is a spurious benignity that always recoils from severity, shrinks from the sight of pain, and would treat vice and crime as a thing to be wept over with effusive sensibility and not to be sternly condemned and punished. The hysteric cry for remission of a criminal's sentence that occasionally bursts forth from foolish women and still more foolish men, has in it nothing of the spirit of true Christian charity.
If Beranger speaks of " the God of good-natured folk," a God not unreasonably strict, who can, on occasion, be blind to human slips ; and in Christian churches many prayers are addressed to that " Dieu des bons gens." The trouble is that, when penalty begins to press, these people have no faith to help them. A God who does not make too much of little sins they can understand, but a God who forgives, when the sin is very great, passes all their comprehension ; and when the evil days come they are left without a hope.^
1 W. M. Macgregor, Je^us Christ the Son of God, p. 93. 26
402 THE GREAT TEXTS OF THE BIBLE
5. But the purpose of the prophet in telling us that God's thoughts and God's ways are higher than ours is that He may give us to understand His readiness to forgive. We may turn the words about in many ways and put meanings into them, but what was first in the prophet's intention was to assert that God forgives, as He does all else, on a large scale.
The " for " at the beginning of each clause points us back to the previous statement, and both of the verses of our text are in different ways its foundation. And what has preceded is this : " Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts : and let him return unto the Lord, and he will have mercy upon him ; and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon." That is why the prophet dilates upon the difference between the " thoughts " and the " ways " of God and men.
"We may not say that God forgives just as man forgives, that mercy goes forth from Him towards the offender in the same measure and for the same reasons as mercy from man to his offending brother. It is possible for man to be cruel when God is kind, and to be weakly lenient where God is stern. There are occasions when the culprit might hope for escape were men alone his judge ; there are occasions when, shrinking from the merciless censure of human judges, the sinful soul might well cry out, " Let me now fall into the hand of the Lord ; for very great are His mercies : but let me not fall into the hand of man."
(1) In the first place, it may be observed that, contrary to what might be supposed, it is not in point of fact, even amongst men, the best and purest who are found to be the severest censors and judges of others.