Not simply to sympathise, but to save, to revive the heart of the contrite one, our Jesus comes. This is the great message of Christianity to the world. It is a message of hope to every heart.
To revive — then they are dead ! He whose spirit knows his own low estate, whose heart is crushed by the sense of his own sins, feels himself dead indeed, like unto them that are wounded, cut away from the hand of God. But behold, the hand of the Lord is not shortened. He hears the cry out of the lowest pit, in the place of darkness and in the deep: " Though I go down into the grave. Thou art there also." He dwells with him that is of a contrite and humble spirit, to revive the spirit of the humble, and to revive the heart of the contrite ones.
Thy home is with the humble, Lord,
The simplest are the best; Thy lodging is in child-like hearts; Thou makest there Thy rest.
Dear Comforter! Eternal Love!
If Thou wilt stay with me, Of lowly thoughts, and simple ways,
I'll build a house for Thee.
Who made this beating heart of mine
But Thou, my heavenly Guest ? Let no one have it then but Thee,
And let it be Thy rest.
Thy sweetness hath betrayed Thee, Lord I
Great Spirit, is it Thou ? Deeper and deeper in my heart
I feel Thee resting now.^
1 F. W. Faber,
426 THE GREAT TEXTS OF THE BIBLE
HI.
God's Double Dwelling-Place.
We know and believe separately the doctrines of the majesty and of the mercy of God ; but it probably seldom occurs to a Christian to think of one as a result of the other. We say that God forgives us our sins because Christ died for us ; or if we go further back, and give an account of the coming and redemption of Christ, we say that He came because of the love of God, both of the Father and of the Son, for the men whom He had made and who needed His help. It would not occur to us to say that God sent His Son into the world because He is almighty, and infinite, and all-glorious, or that Jesus came to save us because He is the eternal God. Yet this, or something very like it, is what Isaiah does say in the text. The verse gives a double description of God's nature and attributes, as containing majesty and mercy, so that He is equally at home in both.
It speaks of the dwelling of God with the humble, of the mercy of God to the contrite, not as fruits of the Incarna- tion or of the Sacrifice of Christ, but as results of the glory of the Eternal Father, the High and Lofty One that inhabiteth eternity. Of course one is as true as the other : it is through Jesus that we have access to the Father ; it is he who loves Jesus that His Father will love ; it is with Jesus that the Father will come unto him, and Both make their abode with him. But the special truth that seems to be set forth in these verses is, that the Incarnation and the Sacrifice of Christ, while they are to us the cause and the source of all blessing, of all pardon, of all grace, of all holiness, of all salvation, are them- selves not the cause but the effect of the mercy and the love of God the Fatlier ; as Jesus says Himself, " God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son."
The condescension of Almighty God found no difficulty at all in bridging the essential interval of nature between His own altitude and the low estate of His human creature, simply as a creature. Freely he spanned that interval to walk with man among the trees of his garden. The real difficulty has been purely a moral one, in the incompatibility and mutual repulsion
ISAIAH 427
of the pure from the impure. There is nothing save your sin that hinders God from dwelling with any one of you. And therefore it must be pressed upon you, that, if ever the absent God is to become a partner of your inner spiritual life, a friendly inmate of your heart, it must be through altered moral conditions on your part. Moral fellowship is practicable only on a ground of moral affinity ; it is like that dwells with like. Some rudi- mentary likeness to the Holy One there must be first in you, if in you the Holy One is to reside. And the beginning of all moral affinity of man with God lies in the moral state described as a contrite and humble spirit.
Immeasurably distant from each other these homes of God seem to be. The one is very spacious, the dwelling of cherubim and seraphim, and of a great multitude redeemed from among men ; the other is narrow and contracted, for it is no more than a single human heart. The one is marked by everlastingness ; the other is full of vicissitude, and such changes pass over it, of light and shadow, of repose and storm. The one is stainless, its bulwarks diamonds square, its gates right orient pearl ; but the other is broken before the consciousness of sin, and the righteous- ness of the Lord, and the retribution it deserves. And yet, and yet God resides not only in high heaven, but in the individual heart, the changeful life, the downcast soul.