Think Splendidly of God                                                       6/13/48

 

Scripture:  Psalm 50

 

Text:  Psalm 50: 21b;  “Thou thoughtest that I was altogether such an one as thyself.”

 

The writings of the prophets, and of some of the psalms, are an attempt to put into human words the intent of God.  Often the language used is as though God Himself were speaking.  And indeed many have so believed, through the centuries, that it is God who speaks through the medium of some prophet or “holy one” of His choosing.

 

Part of the 21st verse of the 50th psalm is such a phrase -- a protest to man on the part of God: “Thou thoughtest that I was altogether such an one as thyself.”  The wording is such as to suggest that God resents man reading into the divine character of the Eternal man’s own human conceptions, limitations, and prejudices.

 

Nothing could be more important than that we should have right views of God.   Individual people, and nations of individuals live by their vision of God.  Our theology determines our conduct.  If we worship, truly, the creator of the universe and of the moral order, we act in one way.  If we respect only the achievements of man and what we believe to be his potentialities, we act in another way.  If we decide that natural forces, hardly understood by man, push us around indiscriminately, making us the victims of pure chance, we act in yet a different way.

 

Our theology determines our conduct.

 

There is a superficial attitude which claims that it matters little what we believe, so long as we do what is right.  Such talk is nonsense.  For our conception of right depends on what we believe.  If we believe in the God of truth, love and mercy, we behave in one way.  If we really believe only in nature, “red in tooth and claw,” we act in quite another way.

 

Many of the basic values and principles upon which we generally act, or believe we should act,  in the United States, are rooted in the expressions of the Christian faith -- values and principles -- such as respect for plighted word, worth of human personality, sense of man’s basic equality in the sight of the Eternal, the rights of the weak, the responsibilities of the strong, justice to the minority, the proper worth of kindness and mercy.  These do not stand by themselves without rootage, but grow, like the branches of a tree, above and out of the roots of our belief.  Wherever these values and principles seem to be absent, there, you may be sure, is no belief in the God revealed by Christ.

 

The ideas and practices of subservience to the state, justice to only one class of people -- the proletariat, administered solely by the same class, the authority of the party -- these, and other characteristics which shape the life of people in Soviet Russia, spring directly from a belief in the supremacy of proletarian man in the party.

 

The character of whole nations is determined by the gods worshipped.  The gods of ancient Greece were ideals of physical beauty -- but not of moral perfection.  Therefore the ancient Greeks were known not so much for their righteous living as for their aesthetic tastes.  Their sculpture and their architecture have been unexcelled.  But their democracy, for instance, was democracy only for the small privileged class -- not for the mass of slaves and servants.

 

The gods of ancient Rome were a sort of super men -- Mars with his sword, Jove with his thunderbolt.  Worshipping such gods, Rome of course sought to rule the world.  There was close relationship between Japanese worship of the emperor and the fanatic type of Japanese patriotism.  Militarists knew this and deliberately promoted it through the requirements of Shinto.  Hitler knew he had to rid Germany of Hebrew and Christian doctrine, if he were to make the German people believe they were the master race, with the purest blood in the world, destined to rule all other people.  He needed a devilish creed for devilish purposes -- and so invented or compiled one.

 

The psalmist’s divine reproof of erring man -- “thou thoughtest that I was altogether such an one as thyself” is a correction entirely necessary to any hope that people will be able, or willing, to make, build, or preserve peace among themselves.  The belief that there is a God greater than any and all men, beyond mankind, by Whose will and law we are judged, by Whose ordained standards we must learn to live, is absolutely necessary for our peace.

 

Think splendidly of God!

 

Probably our commonest blunder is that we  have so often thought of God as a glorified earthly king - an extension or a multiple of man.

 

In the heyday of kings, the king was aloof from his people.  To approach the monarch -- even for those few who were privileged to do so, required elaborate preparation and meticulously accurate ceremony.  One had to be dressed properly, bow properly, be properly introduced.

 

Much of the ritual and  ceremony in religion reflects this attitude toward a king.  One historian has said that a careful study of the sacrificial rites and ceremonies used in religion would tell us all we need to know about the relation between our ancestors and their chiefs or kings.

 

Men have thought of God as they think of an earthly king and have felt that they must approach Him through priest and ceremony.  This I profoundly believe is an error.  But its correction does not imply a flippancy, or irreverence or inattention such as characterize some who feel “too modern” for king or deity.  In every expression of worship there should be reverence and the decorum of attention.  But the attitude of the sincere Christian worshipper follows the words of Jesus when he said, “When thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly.”  [Matthew 6: 6].

 

Man has all too often read his own cruelties into his thoughts of God.  This was evidenced in a day when men found it easy to be cruel toward their fellows - when a hundred crimes, some mere trivialities, were punishable by death; when those imprisoned were put in for long terms under unbelievable conditions; when children were put in jail and given only bread and water.  People then read their own harshness into their thinking about God.  Some terrible doctrines of hell were believed and taught in those cruel days.

 

This quotation comes from a sermon of some 80 years ago:  “Hell is a dark and frightful sphere, cursed of God, with infernal vapors, oceans of fire and continents of burning rock.  No one has a friend and all are herded with the foulest demons and every stinking cave is inhabited with fiends, while God plies his burning whip over the ceaseless groans of the lost.”

 

Jonathan Edwards, the famous, and great, preacher of colonial days, said, “I doubt not that the floor of hell is covered with squirming infants who have never been baptized.”

 

Now you don’t find such ideas of hell elaborated in the Bible.  They are not in the world of God.  They are the ideas of cruel men, in a cruel time, attributed by them to God.  They savor more of Dante than of Scripture.  Surely God, when man though so cruelly of God and of fellow creature, must have been saying sorrowfully:  “Thou thoughtest that I was altogether such an one as thyself.”

 

Of course the same warning applies to those whose rose-tinted, and sentimental, feather-bedded, notions of easy harmony, are read into their notions of a God who has only spiritual cake for everyone.  For God is not like “such an one” either.

 

Man is guilty, too, of reading his natural prides and prejudices into his idea of God.  Each nation tends to think it is God’s favorite -- and somehow, therefore, superior to all others.

 

The enthusiasm of Americans, returning from abroad, verbally glad to get back to “God’s country” is understandable - but spiritually unreal.  For every country if God’s country; and every people is God’s people.  There is a vein of serious danger in that enthusiastic, sometimes flippant, sometimes almost fervent, expression.  The desperate desire of hundreds of thousands to get where Americans can live and be what Americans are privileged to be is just as much a concern of God as is the comfort and convenience and liberty of the United States’ citizen!

 

Stanley Jones lists some of the proud group claims of men in one of his books:  “The pious Jew thanks God every day that he was not born a Gentile.  The Greeks coined the word “barbarian” as a term of contempt for all who were non-Greeks.  The Romans despised every nation over which they ruled, while the shah of Persia still retains in his title the phrase, “The center of the universe.”  The Chinese call their country ‘The Middle Kingdom’ because they believe it is the center of the world, while the Japanese believe they have descended from heaven, and are a heavenly race.  The Japanese emperor calls himself ‘Manifest Deity.’  The United States is called “God’s own country.’  The Irish say, ‘Sinn Fein,’ which means ‘Ourselves alone.’  The Germans have call their land ‘The Fatherland, over all.’  Dr. Jones might have added that Mormons teach Hawaiian natives that they are one of the lost tribes of Israel; and that there is a popular religious movement in Canada that teaches that England is the true Israel, the chosen of God.

 

“Thou thoughtest that I was altogether such an one as thyself.”  God forgive us all that we try to use Him merely as a mirror for our own prejudices.  We ought rather to see Him as through a window, pouring into us truth and warmth and life from beyond ourselves.

 

There was One who came to make God fully and rightly known to us people; One who knew the Father as none other ever knew Him.  John has an illuminating verse in the first chapter of his gospel:  “No man hath seen God at any time.  The only begotten Son, he hath declared him.”  [John 1: 18].  The revised version of the Bible changes the word “declared” to “unveiled.”  “The only begotten Son hath unveiled him.”  I think I should prefer the word “revealed.”

 

Before Jesus came, God was only partially known; His presence dimly felt in storm, fire, disaster, destroying angel.  The dreams of Joseph, Moses’ burning bush, the vision of Isaiah -- these are partial revelations which left the hearts of men still wondering and hungry and oft confused.

 

When Jesus came, the Word became flesh.  Man saw what God was like.  The great word of Jesus was this: “He that hath seen me hath seen the Father.”  [John 14: 9].

 

If we still worship our own silly, inadequate, incomplete, stumbling selves projected to the proportions of a deity, it is because we have not yet seen Jesus.  If millions all over the earth think of Jesus only as an impractical visionary whom no one really obeys, it is because they have never yet seen Jesus -- in us or anywhere else.

 

Tell it to the sorrowful that Jesus revealed the God of compassion.  Tell it to the sinful that Jesus revealed the God of forgiveness for the repentant -- and also the God who will not change His ways for the stubbornness of the proud and unrepentant.  Tell it to children that Jesus proclaimed “Of such is the kingdom of heaven.”  [Mark 10: 14].  Tell it to the strong that the only true and lasting strength comes from the Omnipotent.

 

We will never hear any more splendid or welcome truth than this.  For Jesus thought splendidly of God.

 

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Delivered in Wisconsin Rapids, June 13, 1948