^ Not the slavish fear which brings the spirit into bondage, but rather that modest, humble, sensitive spirit which yields to God as the quivering grass of the meadow yields to every breeze that sweeps over its waving wealth of stems ; so the soul, in deep contrition before God, trembles lest it should be found doing its own will instead of the will of Him who has come to dwell in it. It is a holy fear lest we should mistake our will for His.
That I no more from Thee may part,
No more Thy goodness grieve; The filial awe, the fleshy heart,
The tender conscience give.^
III.
The Twofold Agency Engaged in the Wobk. " God worketh in you."
1. This virtually is what St. Paul says here : Work out your own salvation, for now the great impossibility has become possible ;
^ A. H. Strong, Miscellanies, ii. 185. " E. W. Moore, The Promised Hest, 191.
PHILIPPIANS 11. 12, 13 305
God is working in you ; this is no hopeless task to which I am calling you, no fruitless beating of the air, no idle effort of the leopard to change his spots or the Ethiopian to wash himself white. The Lord is working in you, and He is mighty to save. Whatever impulse you feel, whatever goodwill to this work, look upon it as a token of His presence and of His readiness to help you in it ; that is God working in you both to will it and to do it, for He has no feeling but one of goodwill to you.
^ I cannot for a moment believe that Paul called the Philippians to work because it was first of all necessary that God should work in them. But the import, the beauty, the comfort and the encouragement of this word will appear at a glance when you see that what the Apostle really says is, Work out your own salvation, for God is working in you both to will it, and to do it in His good will to you. That is the only meaning which the original can really bear. And when it is thus read the argument at once becomes clear, and the perplexity gives place to a feeling of relief and good hope. That God must needs work in us is, of course, taken for granted ; but we are encouraged by the assurance that that is exactly what He is already doing.^
^ Eeligion has been defined by an eminent scholar as " the recognition of the Infinite and Eternal with a view to the regulation of life"; and Jesus, the Divine Author of the only true and perfect form of religion, teaches us to recognize the Infinite and Eternal as a power which is equally active in the measureless abyss of the starry heavens and in the mysterious depths of the human souL God is present and active every- where. In Him all things subsist ; in Him we live, move, and have our being; men and things are alike a revelation of His glory.*
^ God cannot have intended any other end for man than the perfection fitted for a self-conscious being. But such perfection is realized in God Himself, and anything less than God must be condemned as imperfect in comparison with that ultimate standard. Consequently, to become even as God is must be the final destiny of man, and the goal towards which both the individual and the race are tending. Thus, Paracelsus declares that
in completed man begins anew A tendency to God.
^ Walter C. Smith.
2 D. E. Irons, A Faithful Ministry, 192. EPH.-COL. — 20
3o6 WORK OUT YOUR OWN SALVATION
Rabbi Ben Ezra speaks of man as " a God though in the germ " ; while the Pope, looking forward to his final state, sees him
Creative and self-sacrificing too,
And thus eventually God-like (ay
" I have said ye are Gods " ; shall it be said for nought ?).
In Fifine the doctrine that the spirit shall return unto God that gave it, the finite being merged once more in the infinite spirit to which it is akin and from which it sprang, is put forward in more philosophical language :
The individual soul works through the shows of sense, (Which, ever proving false, still promise to be true) Up to an outer soul as individual too ; And, through the fleeting, lives to die into the fixed, And reach at length "God, man, or both together mixed."
The narrow limits of the individual self will at last be left behind, and the process of our life will culminate in the identi- fication of thought, feeling, volition, action, of our very soul and being, with the thought and life of Him, of whom all other life is only the partial and imperfect manifestation.^
2. Two powers are at work, and the error lies in separating them. The two parts of the text, if taken separately, may lead to error. " Work." " God works." The truth lies in the synthesis of the two : Work, for God works. The fact that God works in us ought to be the incentive to our own activity. All life is supported by reciprocation — action and reaction. There must be activity in that which lives before the environment can act upon it.