Chapter 6: The Soul's "Amen"
Chapter 6: The Soul's "Amen"
(JEREMIAH 11:5).
"Whatso it be, howso it be, Amen!
Blessed it is, believing, not to see.
Now God knows all that is, and we shall then,
Whatso it be.
God's will is best for man whose will is free,
God's will is better for us, yea, than ten
Desires whereof He holds and weighs the key."
CHRISTINA ROSSETTI.
THE WORDS OF the prophet in chapter 6:5 are full of deep significance to every holy soul summoned to stand between God and other men. It has also far-reaching meaning for all who are passing through the Divine discipline in this strange and difficult life. Jeremiah was conscious of the special current of Divine energy which was passing into and through his soul. The word had come to him "from the Lord," This is one of three forms of expression that he employs. Sometimes, "the word of the Lord that came to Jeremiah"; sometimes, "thus saith the Lord"; sometimes, as here, "the word that came to Jeremiah from the Lord." Probably he felt that word as a burning fire shut up in his bones, which he could not contain. He must needs give vent to it; but when it has passed his lips, and he has time carefully to consider it, he answers the Divine message by saying, "Amen, O Lord!"
There is something very sublime in this attitude. Jeremiah, as we have seen, was naturally gentle, yielding, end pitiful for the sins and sorrows of his people. Nothing was further from his heart than to "desire the evil day." Nothing would have given him greater pleasure than to have played the part of Isaiah in this decadent period of his people's history. But what was possible to the great evangelic prophet in the days of Hezekiah was impossible now. In Isaiah's case, the noblest traditions of the past, the patriotic pride of his people, and the promises of God, all pointed in the same direction. But for Jeremiah there was an inevitable divorce between the trend of popular feeling led by the false prophets, and his clear conviction of the word of God. It must indeed have been hard to prove that the prophets were wrong, and he was right; they simply reiterated what Isaiah had said a hundred times. Why was the policy of resistance to the invader wrong when Jeremiah spoke, whilst it had been right when Isaiah fired, with his own mighty faith, the entire people? In these earlier stages of his ministry especially, it must have been one long effort to stand by himself against the strong current of popular feeling and patriotism which coloured the visions of the false prophets. And yet, as he utters the terrible curses and threatenings of Divine justice, and predicts the inevitable fate of his people, he is so possessed with the sense of the Divine rectitude, so sure that God could not do differently, so convinced that, judged by the loftiest moral standards, the sins of Israel could not be otherwise dealt with—that his soul rises up, and though he must pronounce the doom of Israel, he is forced to answer and say, "Amen, O Lord!"
There is something like this in the history of the redeemed Church. When God has judged her that did corrupt the world with her fornication, and has avenged the blood of his servants at her hand, as the smoke of her destruction arises, the blessed spirits who had been learning the deepest lessons of Divine love at the very source and fount of love, are heard crying, "Amen. Hallelujah!"
In each of these cases it is extremely interesting to see how the sense of justly-deserved and righteously-incurred judgment corrects the verdict of mere compassionateness, and enables the most sensitive and gentle souls to acquiesce in what otherwise had been resisted to the uttermost.
Beside these two instances we may place a third, in which our Lord, in the same breath as He appealed to the weary and heavy-laden to come to Him, spoke of the mysteries which were hidden from the wise and prudent, but revealed to babes; and said, "Yea, Father; for so it was well-pleasing in Thy sight." "Yea" is close akin to "Amen." "How many soever be the promises of God, in Him is the Yea: wherefore also through Him is the Amen, unto the glory of God through us" (Matt. 11:26; 2 Cor. 1:20, R.V.).
This is also the utterance of the Holy Spirit. When the voice from heaven declares the blessedness of the dead that die in the Lord, "Yea, saith the Spirit." All through this dispensation the Holy Spirit is giving his affirmation to the utterances of the Church, and to the procedure of Divine providence. Too deep for human ears to detect, the Spirit utters his "Amen."
I. THE SOUL'S AFFIRMATION.—
(I) In Providence.—We often seem to be travelling through a difficult piece of mountainous country in company with a strong, wise, and gentle companion, who has undertaken to guide us to our destination. There are foaming torrents, black and hurrying, which we have to ford at the imminent risk of being carried off our feet; there are darksome woods and. forests, where suns have seldom penetrated, and where wild beasts have their lair; there are paths paved with flints so sharp, and slabs of rock so slippery, that progress seems impossible, except at too great a cost; there are long stretches of dreary desert, where the glare blinds, the sunbeams cut like swords, and the shadow of a tiny retem bush provides a grateful relief; there are steep hills, and paths so narrow that there is hardly room to pass along the ledge of rock, whilst the dark precipice waits to engulf. In earlier days the soul started back horror-stricken; in later ones we pleaded for an easier, pleasanter path, and envied the lot of others: but now our life has become one long and deep and constantly repeated "Amen" to the choice of Him who goes beside us, and in whose mind each step has been previously conceived.
Let us guard against mistake. It is not possible at first to say "Amen" in tones of triumph and ecstasy. Nay, the word is often choked with sobs that cannot be stifled, and soaked with tears that cannot be repressed. So it was with Abraham, when he tore himself from Ur of the Chaldees; when he waited weary years for his son; when he climbed with aching heart the steep of Moriah. And as these words are read by those who lie year after year on beds of constant pain; or by those who have lost the enjoyment of the presence of their twin-soul; or by those whose earthly life is tossed upon the sea of anxiety, over which billows of care and turmoil perpetually roll—it is not improbable that they will protest as to the possibility of saying "Amen" to God's providential dealings, or they will ask, Of what avail is it to utter with the lip a word against which the whole heart stands up in revolt? Is it not, it may be asked, an impiety, a hypocrisy, to say with the mouth a word that is so alien to the sentiments of the heart?
In reply, let all such remember that our blessed Lord in the garden was content to put his will upon the side of God. What though his body were covered with the dew of anguish, pressed out from it as the juice of the grape by the tread of the husbandman! He did not chide Himself. He knew it was enough if, in the lower parts of the earth to which his human nature had descended, He was able, unflinchingly to affirm, "I delight to do Thy will, O my God"; "not as I will, but as Thou wilt!"
Dare to say "Amen" to God's providential dealings. Say it, though heart and flesh fail; say it, amid a storm of tumultuous feeling, and a rain of tears; say it, though it shall seem to be the last word that shall be spoken because life is ebbing so fast: and you will find that if the will doth acquiesce, the heart comes ultimately to choose; and as days pass, some incident, some turn in the road, some concurrence of unforeseen circumstances, will suddenly flash the conviction on the mind and reason that God's way was right, the wisest, and the best. "What thou knowest not now, thou shalt know hereafter," is the perpetual assurance of the Guide: and this is realized not in the world of the hereafter only, but here and now, on the hither side of the Gate of Pearl.
(2) In Revelation there are mysteries which baffle the clearest thinkers, the most profound theologians, the Johns and Pauls of the Church; paths that lose themselves in mere tracks on the moor; snatches of music and colour which no mortal genius can work out; suggestions of movements in the spiritual world which defy the apprehension of the subtlest and greatest of the sons of men to follow. The man that tracks God's footsteps loses them in the depths; and the eye that pursues his workings is dazzled by a light above the brightness of the sun; and the argument breaks off with the cry, "Oh, the depth of the riches, both of the wisdom and knowledge of God How unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past finding out!" It must be so whilst God is God. We are partakers of his nature, as a child is of his father's: but the distance between our capacity of intelligence and the thoughts of God is not measured even by that between the dawn of a child's mind and the full splendour of his father's power; because this moves in the region of the finite, whilst that is a difference between the finite and the infinite. We cannot by searching find out God, or know the Almighty. There is no fathoming line long enough, no parallax fine enough, no standard of mensuration, though the universe itself be taken as our unit, by which to measure God. High as heaven, what canst thou do? Deep as hell, what canst thou know?
But, though we cannot comprehend, we may affirm the thoughts of God. That we cannot understand, is due to the immaturity of our faculties. We are in our nursery stage: our words are the babblings of infancy; our ideas the thoughts of a child. But we can accept, and admit, and acquiesce in, and affirm the things which eye could not see, nor the heart conceive, but which are revealed on the page of Scripture.
There is no doubt that the death of Jesus Christ has fully met the demands of Divine law; and though some phases of his atonement may at times perplex us, yet our soul confidently exclaims, "Amen, Lord!" We are ignorant why God chose us; how Christ could combine in Himself the nature of God and man; or in what manner the Holy Spirit regenerates the soul. "How can these things be?" is the question which often occurs to the devout student of revelation. But when He who has come straight from the realms of eternal day steadfastly affirms that which He knows, and bears witness to what He has seen, we receive his witness and say reverently, "Amen, Lord."
(3) In Judgment.—God's judgments on the wicked are a great deep. The problems that encircle the question of present or future punishment are amongst the deepest and most awful that the mind of man can approach. Like Moses, we fear and quake when we climb the storm-girt sides of Sinai, and hear the pealing, thunderous curse, to be followed by the lightning flash of fiery indignation devouring the adversary. We may well turn aside from such considerations, and ask if the time can ever come when we shall be able to consider with equanimity the awful suffering which they must incur who have rejected the love of God in Christ. Will heaven have any bliss to us, so long as there is a hell? Will there be any possibility of happiness whilst one sheep is lost, one link absent in the bridal necklet, one stone deficient from the regalia, one voice missing in the chorus? A partial answer at least is given to these inquiries when we hear from the lips of the most gentle of the prophets, anticipating the destruction of his people, for which his eye was to trickle down with tears, "Amen, Lord!"
At present we cannot expect to attain to much of this condition of mind and heart; because our views of the Divine rectitude are so imperfect, our estimate of sin is so slight, our knowledge of the conditions of the universe so inadequate. Did we know more of sin, of holiness, of the love of God, of the yearning pleadings of his Spirit with men, of the all-sufficiency of the measure He has taken for their arrest and salvation, of the barriers erected to stay the precipitate downward course of the wicked, we should probably understand better how Jeremiah was able to say, "Amen, Lord!"
There is a striking thought in Ezekiel 14:22, 23, in which God says that when we see the way and the doings of sinners in the light that shall be flung upon their entire life-course from the great white throne, we shall be comforted concerning the evil that He shall have brought upon them. And the prophet goes on to show that God will make us know that He has not done in vain anything that He shall have done. That era has not yet broken; but it is a wonderful conception of the comfort and resignation which the added light of eternity shall bring into hearts perplexed and anxious as they consider the fate of the ungodly. Abraham shall be comforted over the destruction of the cities of the plain; Jeremiah shall be comforted as he reviews the fate of Jerusalem; and Paul shall be comforted as he considers the long alienation of the seed of Abraham from their land, and their exile with wandering foot and terror-stricken heart in all the countries of the world. And we shall he comforted as we behold the destruction of the wicked.
II. THE GROUND OF THE SOUL'S PEACE.— "Yea, Father!" It may seem at first sight as though it were impossible that the heart of man could ever be induced to acquiesce in the terrible and difficult matters touched upon in the previous paragraphs. As long as mothers love the sucking child, and have compassion on their sons; as long as soul is wedded to soul by the strongest and most tenacious bonds of human love; as long as we can suffer, yearn, fear, hope, pity; whilst memory keeps the records of the past, and love reigns, and the mind holds her seat—it might seem the impossible dream of the imagination that what appears incompatible with the tender human feeling can be consistent with the love of God. "Surely," you cry, "there are things to which I never can assent; decisions I can never reaffirm: sentences I can never countersign; possibilities to which I can never say, 'Amen, Lord!'"
But does not this protest of the soul arise from the fact that you judged such things from the standpoint of pure emotion, or human reasoning, or perverted principles of human action; and that you need to stand in the sanctuary of God, which is the focus and metropolis to which the loftiest intelligences converge, in order to come in contact with the lofty morality and legislation of eternity? And do we not wrongly think that our love is more tender, our sympathy more delicate, our compassions deeper, than those of the Father?
When tried and perplexed with the troubles of life, turn from these, which will make the brain dizzy and the heart sick, and consider the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, from whom every ray of love in the universe has emanated; and remember that nothing can be permitted or devised by Him which is not consistent with the gentlest and truest dealings that an earthly father could mete out to the child of his right hand, his Benjamin, the darling of his old age. So shall you be able to say, "Amen, Lord!"
When face to face with the mysteries of the Atonement, of substitution and sacrifice, of predestination and election, of the unequal distribution of Gospel light, be sure to turn to God as the Father of Light, in whom is no darkness, no shadow of unkindness, no note inconsistent with the music of perfect benevolence. He is your Father, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father from whom every home life receives its tenderest touches. Dare to trust Him; and in the strength of that trust to say, "Amen, Lord!"
When peering over the strong barrier of redemption that intervenes between you and the dark fate of the ungodly, when thoughts will force themselves upon the spirit, as the cry of the insurgent mob might penetrate the sacred seclusion of a temple—look away from this and gaze into the face of the Father, which is turned in the same direction, and dare to believe that nothing can happen in heaven or earth or hell which is out of harmony with the love that has inspired parents towards their children; that breathed the love into Mary's heart as she clasped her babe to her bosom; or that yielded the Only-begotten to the horror of the cross for man's redemption: so there shall be a new tone in the voice of the soul that says, "Amen, Lord!"
In other words, we must not look into the dark and perplexing questions that seethe and boil like wreaths of vapour around us. We must look up to the blue sky of undimmed sunshine, our Father's heart. He must be love, beyond our tenderest, deepest, richest, conceptions of what love is. In his dealings with us, with all men, and especially with the lost ones, love is the very essence and law of his nature. Somehow, we repeat it, everything must be consistent with this all-persuasive nature and temper of the Divine Being; and in proportion as you dare to believe in the Father, you will be able to say "Yes," which is a true rendering of the Greek word in our version translated " Even so" (Matt. 11:26).
III. THE TRIUMPH OF THE AFFIRMING SOUL.—"Amen, Hallelujah!" Jesus as He rested in his Father was able to say, not only, "Even so, Father"; but, "I thank Thee, Father ": and so there shall come a day when the four-and-twenty elders, representing the redeemed Church, shall see the judgment of the great opponent of the Lamb's bride, and say, "Amen, Hallelujah!"
Mark the addition of "Hallelujah" to the "Amen." Here the Amen, and not often the Hallelujah; there the two—the assent and the consent; the acquiescence and the acclaim; the submission to the will of God, and the triumphant outburst of praise and adoration. Let us anticipate that age when we shall know as we are known, and when we shall be perfectly satisfied, perfectly jubilant, perfectly blessed; when every shadow of misunderstanding and misapprehension shall be dispelled, and we shall join in the hymn of the redeemed Church: "Great and marvellous are Thy works, O Lord God, the Almighty; righteous and true are Thy ways, Thou King of the Ages" (Rev. 15:3, R.V.).