3. What Hushai Knew: The World around Him
What Hushai Knew: The World around Him
Hushai hung some pictures in the gallery of Absalom’s mind, pictures taken from the world that both of them knew personally. It was a world in which she-bears protected their cubs and roaring lions fought courageously, a world in which nobody could number the sand grains on the seashore or hear the dew fall on the grass. Hushai didn’t invent a new world (fantasy); he simply used the world that he and Absalom already knew (imagination); and that’s how Hushai won the battle. John Calvin called creation “the book of the unlearned.”[1] The person unable to read a printed book can learn much from studying the heavens and the earth and how God works in His creation. In his Institutes, Calvin calls God’s creation “a dazzling theater,” “a most glorious theater,” and “this magnificent theater of heaven and earth.”[2] Along with David, Calvin believed that the heaven and earth declare the glory of God.
God has so arranged things that there is a connection between the facts of the natural world and the truths of the spiritual world. Ralph Waldo Emerson rejected Calvinism, but he would have agreed with Calvin’s view of nature as the “theater of God.” Emerson wrote in his seminal book Nature, “The world is emblematic. Parts of speech are metaphors because the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind.”[3] In his “Divinity School Address,” given at Harvard in 1838, Emerson boldly announced: “I once heard a preacher who sorely tempted me to say I would go to church no more. . . . A snow storm was falling around us. The snow storm was real, the preacher merely spectral, and the eye felt the sad contrast in looking at him, and then out of the window behind him into the beautiful metaphor of the snow.”[4]
In a profound sermon based on Deuteronomy 29:29, Campbell Morgan says this about the relationship of the natural world to God’s truth and His nature:
Have you ever noticed that in our Lord’s teaching He made use of figures and symbols, but never hinted that the figure was the fact? He always gives us to understand that, after all, the things seen are only symbols of something else. Let me give you an illustration. He says, “I am the true Vine.” Now, we make a mistake if we say that Jesus borrowed the figure of the vine to teach us what He is. The deeper truth is this. God planted the vine in the world and let it grow through the centuries on the pattern of the infinite Christ.[5]
In the Incarnation, God announced that matter is not evil and that He would use material things as vehicles for revealing Himself and His truth. Christians take a sacramental view of nature, not a Gnostic view. The Gnostic philosophy is that matter is evil; and the closer you get to the spiritual, the farther you move from the material. The Christian philosophy, however, is that matter is not evil but a gift from God for our benefit and our learning; and the closer you get to God, the more you see His hand in the world around you. The Gnostic sees only tree branches waving in the wind, but the Christian sees “the trees of the field clapping their hands” (see Isa. 55:12).
Unfortunately, the Gnostic view of nature has crept into our thinking. We no longer sincerely sing “This Is My Father’s World” because the world is wicked and under the condemnation of God, and we must be separated from it. We think that the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins is a bit odd when he shouts, “The world is charged with the grandeur of God!” or when he chuckles and writes, “Glory be to God for dappled things!”
On Sunday morning, July 25, 1858, Charles Haddon Spurgeon read an unusual text to his London congregation: “I have multiplied visions, and used similitudes” (Hosea 12:10, KJV). He then preached what I think is one of his most creative sermons, pointing out that “God is every day preaching to us by similitudes. The things which we see about us are God’s thoughts and God’s words to us; and if we were but wise there is not a step that we take, which we should not find to be full of mighty instruction.”[6] He then expounded this truth by applying it to four areas of life: God speaks to us every day, in every season of the year, in every place and in every calling. Interestingly, Spurgeon’s friend and fellow Londoner Joseph Parker said to his City Temple congregation some years later, “The whole year, from spring to winter, is a long parable, a curious symbol, a marvelous revelation of divine purpose; he that hath eyes to see, let him see; he that hath ears to hear, let him hear.”[7]
Every Bible reader knows that Jesus used images from the visible world to teach truths about the invisible world. As a master teacher, He followed the principle of starting with the known and moving to the unknown, but His use of natural images meant more than that. Our Lord not only saw God’s truth revealed all around Him, but He touched the common things of life and sanctified them: bread and wine, water, seeds, yeast, vines, birth, lamps, dogs, sparrows, cups, coins, even crosses. Our Lord had a sacramental view of nature and could joyfully have sung, “This Is My Father’s World.” The world in which Jesus lived was “charged with the grandeur of God.”
In our noble attempt to be biblical preachers, we have so emphasized the analytical that we’ve forgotten the poetic. We see the trees waving their branches, but we hold the branches still, examine them scientifically, leaf and twig, and all the while fail to hear the trees clapping their hands at the glory of God. To preach biblically means much more than to preach the truth of the Bible accurately. It also means to present that truth the way the biblical writers and speakers presented it, and that means addressing the imagination. Both the world around us and the Word of God before us are “charged with the grandeur of God,” but too often we fail to bring them together and take them into the pulpit. Like Ahithophel, we put our dry facts into the conduit and then wonder why nothing happens when we preach.
Imagination and Spiritual Vision
In one of his finest essays, “The Value of Sanctified Imagination,” A.W. Tozer wrote:
The value of the cleansed imagination in the sphere of religion lies in its power to perceive in natural things shadows of things spiritual. It enables the reverent man to “See the world in a grain of sand. . . . And eternity in an hour.”
The weakness of the Pharisee in days of old was his lack of imagination, or what amounted to the same thing, his refusal to let it enter the field of religion. He saw the text with its carefully guarded theological definition and he saw nothing beyond. “A primrose by the river’s brim/A yellow primrose was to him/And it was nothing more.”
When Christ came with His blazing spiritual penetration and His fine moral sensitivity, He appeared to the Pharisee to be a devotee of another kind of religion, which indeed He was if the world had only understood. He could see the soul of the text while the Pharisee could see only the body, and he could always prove Christ wrong by an appeal to the letter of the law or to an interpretation hallowed by tradition.
I long to see the imagination released from its prison and given to its proper place among the sons of the new creation. What I am trying to describe here is the sacred gift of seeing, the ability to peer beyond the veil and gaze with astonished wonder upon the beauties and mysteries of things holy and eternal.[8]
As Halford Luccock reminded us in chapter 2, the purpose of preaching “is not to make people see reasons, but visions.”[9]
In his essay, Dr. Tozer quoted from two poets who were trail-blazers in breaking the shackles of tradition and using words to unveil pictures. The first quotation is from the opening four lines of “Auguries of Innocence” by William Blake (1757–1827), and the complete opening stanza reads like this:
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.
The poem goes on for 128 more lines to survey the “inner meaning” of animals, birds, plants, people, and various miscellaneous things that we all take for granted. Like Emerson, Blake had little to do with organized religion; and, also like Emerson, Blake opposed the “system makers” whose definitions and formulas analyzed everything to death and turned God’s beautiful world into a laboratory.
In a letter written in 1803, Blake said, “May God us keep from single vision and Newton’s sleep.” The “single vision” was the scientific approach to life as personified by Isaac Newton, the great mathematician and physicist whose formulas explained everything in the universe. But Newton put people to sleep with a false confidence—because of Newton’s formulas, men and women were convinced that they understood the world and could manipulate it as they pleased. If Blake were living today, he would rejoice to learn that Newton’s formulas are no longer the last word in physics.[10]
Tozer’s second quotation comes from the poem “Peter Bell” by William Wordsworth (1770-1850). You may recall from your days in English Literature 101 that Wordsworth and his friend Coleridge were part of what the textbooks call “the romantic era” in literature. Of course, the word “romantic” has nothing to do with Hollywood movies, daytime TV serials, or garish paperback novels. The writing in the “romantic era” was a right-brain reaction against “the enlightenment” with its left-brain emphasis on science, logic, authority, and formulas. The romantic writers claimed that truth was something to experience as well as to explain, and in this they antedated the existentialists. The romantic writers felt that to explain nature but not experience it was to rob it of its power and beauty. They agreed with Blake that there’s more to the world than Newtonian mechanics and the logic of Kant and Locke.
Along with “Peter Bell,” many of Wordsworth’s poems were a call to a sensuous (not sensual) experience of nature, something that just can’t be found in books. “The Tables Turned” is one of my favorites.
Up! up! my Friend, and quit your books;
Or surely you’ll grow double:
Up! up! my Friend, and clear your looks;
Why all this toil and trouble?
The sun, above the mountain’s head,
A freshening lustre mellow
Through all the long green fields has spread,
His first sweet evening yellow.
Books! ’tis a dull and endless strife:
Come, hear the woodland linnet,
How sweet his music! on my life,
There’s more of wisdom in it.
And hark! how blythe the throstle sings!
He, too, is no mean preacher:
Come forth into the light of things,
Let Nature be your teacher.
She has a world of ready wealth,
Our minds and hearts to bless—
Spontaneous wisdom breathed by health,
Truth breathed by cheerfulness.
One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can.
Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;
Our meddling intellect
Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:—
We murder to dissect.
“We murder to dissect.” What a line—and what an indictment! I must confess that I’ve been guilty many times of treating the Bible the way Wordsworth’s bookish student treated nature. Instead of allowing the living words of Scripture to express themselves in their own natural way, I’ve taken them apart and organized them so severely that my “meddling intellect” has mangled the text and robbed it of its beauty and its power.
This isn’t a plea for the abandonment of an intelligent and reverent critical study of the Scriptures, using all the helps we can get. I’ll have more to say about this later, but I want to assure any troubled seminary professors reading this book that I do not in any way advocate eliminating biblical languages, exegesis, hermeneutics, or homiletics from the curriculum. I’m only asking that we include something that’s been left out for too long: the proper use of a sanctified imagination in the study and preaching of the Word of God. It’s important to know the Book and books, but it’s also important to know the book of nature and the book of human nature if we hope to penetrate the picture gallery of the human mind with the truth of God’s Word.
Hushai knew people and the world around him. But he also knew words, those mysterious sounds and symbols that convey meanings and powerfully influence what people think and do. We now turn our attention to words.
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the word was God.”
“[The Bible’s] most customary way of expressing God’s truth is not the sermon or theological outhne but the story, the poem, the vision, and the letter, all of them literary forms and products of the imagination.”
“Words are the physicians of a mind diseased.”