Dictator of the Human Spirit 7/20/41
Scripture: Leviticus 19: 1-14.
Have you ever tried to make a definition of what you mean when you say the word “God”? If you have, you know the difficulty inherent in the attempt to find words that will make clearer than ever before, what you mean when you use this greatest of all words. A few sessions of wrestling with your ideas about God will do more for your respect for the third commandment than repeating that commandment a couple of hundred times. If you have ever really thought about God you can not lightly take that name in vain.
Now I can not prove to you the existence of God. You can only do that for yourself. And the only way I can satisfy myself of God’s existence is through my own experience. Having begun, in an act of faith, by assuming that God is, I act as though he is here or there when I pray to Him, and when I think of Him. And the conviction grows upon me that I am known by Him; that there is answer to my prayer, an interchange of personality. And I am satisfied of Him who is my Father. He is an existence, a Being, of whom I feel sure in my own experience. And you may find him in your experience.
But, quite aside from proving for yourself the existence of God or knowing His presence, there is the mental activity of trying from time to time to express our ideas about God! For, very evidently, people have had differing concepts or ideas of God. And these ideas of God change even in the life of one individual. I think of God as being so complete, that He is unchanging--perfect. Jesus spoke of his Father as the only One fit to be called “Good” in the perfect sense.
But I know that my ideas about God have changed and advanced greatly from the time I was a child until now. And I expect to keep on growing “in the knowledge” of God.
I know, furthermore, that in the history of the human race there have been great variations in the idea of God. Some of the early Jews thought of God as walking in the cool of a garden; thought of God as jealous, envious, as full of wrath and vengeance as a bad-tempered human being when displeased. He was to be feared for His whims and his favor sought just as one might “cultivate” a fickle king. Then, again, we see the development of man’s idea that God is fair, that justice is His great attribute. He is to be feared only in the sense of respect and loyalty.
And then again, there comes at length the breath-taking idea that God is love, mercy, forgiveness, long-suffering.
There is inconceivable greatness and majesty; there is justice; but the highest description of God is that he is also, and above everything else, Love, and “Perfect Love casteth out fear.” The fear of a Christian is only great adoration, high honor, confident devotion, deep, soul-moved respect.
You see it is possible, and I trust profitable, to exercise our minds as to what we think about God. And it often serves to increase our reverence for the true God of our experience.
Two men were sitting in a planetarium. You know, of course, that a planetarium is a machine so wonderfully and finely designed that it can project an accurate replica of the stars, the moon, the comets and other heavenly bodies on a dome shaped roof. The skies of any season of the year can be studied in an evening this way. If you are ever in the city of New York, or Chicago, or any other city where there is a planetarium, I heartily recommend that you spend an evening there as I did in New York five years ago. One of the men about whom I started to tell you was a minister; the other a friend who, however, never entered the door of any church. As the latter man saw the unfolding of heavenly movements, speeded up so that an hours’ passing of time among the stars could be shown in only a few seconds, he said to the minister, “Dr. Bradley, there is no room in what we are seeing tonight for chance, is there?” “No room for chance.” “No room for accident here.” Had he not opened the door of his mind for a vivid idea of God as the great, purposeful, directing principle manifest in the operation of the universe?
Our experience is limited. We can not grasp the whole of God’s limitless resource. I have not had experience of the whole ocean, though I have had vivid experience with some of the bays along the shore that are a part of the sea! But though my experience is limited by the very fact that I am so small and so untraveled and so inadequate in years, my thoughts about the ocean are limited only by the ability of my mind. So it is with my ideas and your ideas of God.
Now just for mental exercise, suppose we think for a moment of God as dictator. This is a day of dictatorships. A human dictator demands and commands the entire loyalty of the people. The dictator tolerates no open betrayal or opposition. Here we pause for one particularly sobering thought. Dictators always arise because of human need. They are results of causes. Government in Russia became so corrupt that it was intolerable - even fell largely of its own decadent weight. And a communistic dictatorship resulted. A vicious and inhuman treaty was forced on conquered nations in 1918, which held their men and women in economic bondage and despair until they turned to dictatorship as a desperate hope. Proud people were so tired of being a despised and decadent nation in Italy that they responded to dictatorship. It is distressing that the condition of people has driven them thus to surrender their wills to men in exchange for hope. (Responsibility of all of us). It is an awful price to yield over your God-given will to a man as the payment for a little hope: most awful because it is just a man who leads these masses of people.
If there were a dictator of another kind, what would happen? Suppose we here today, and millions of others, should say, “Human need has driven us to a dictatorship; therefore we must find a dictator who commands our whole loyalty; the loyalty of our bodies, our minds, our souls!” There is such a dictator (if we may put to good use such a despised word) - God. And if God took possession of your life; if God could be dictator of all lives, what then?
Well, God is Love! Can you imagine a world dictated by love? That is the kind of world we would have if we accepted God as dictator and Jesus and his apostles of the ages as his cabinet!
But we must not push the analogy any further or the comparison will break down. For God will never force you into that relationship. God will never regiment you. He will never say to you, “Do as you are told or it’s the concentration camp; follow me or it’s torture and death.” God leaves it for you to decide whether you will submit to His way or not. You will not be forced into it. It is your problem. Do you choose it?
You may have your own way; you can bask in apparent security, you can live in sin and become degraded. You can even destroy yourself. God will not interfere nor prevent it, if that is what you will to do. For the highest concept of freedom was uttered by the Son of God when he said, “Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”
Benjamin Franklin took his son to see Voltaire who was sometimes called an atheist. Voltaire was very old. Franklin took his son into the presence of the great old man whose writings had done so much for the cause of freedom in France. And he said, “M. Voltaire, I would like to have you tell my son something that he could remember all his life.” Voltaire put his hand on the boy’s head and said this: “Son, remember two words always, God and Liberty.”
God and Liberty!
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Dates and places delivered.
Pilgrim Church, November 26, 1939, PM
Wisconsin Rapids, July 20, 1941
W.F.H.R., Wisconsin Rapids, October 7, 1941