Believing. Horton Davies
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evil in the world: no greed, no lust, and no war. Man would always live uprightly and honestly, serving his fellows and obeying his God. But what would be the value of such service, when the creature who gave it was not free to do otherwise? Men would be marionette dolls in the hand of Omnipotence. No, there would be no virtue in goodness if it were not the result of man’s own free choice. What light does this throw on the war?
I am often asked: “Why doesn’t God intervene and stop the war?” The answer is that having made man as he is, God will not mar his own creation, by taking away the power of choice. If man by his ignorance, folly and sin, turns this world into a hell then he cannot blame God for it; he has only himself to blame for it. God hides himself because of his respect for our freedom.
(3) God hides himself that our powers may develop and grow. If he hides himself when we suffer, it is only that through pain we may come to maturity; that patience and bravery may be born; that we may become strong.
A modern writer tells of a man whose wife was an invalid. For some time, he had been accustomed to carrying her about the house, but all his attentions only encouraged her to pander to her weakness. One day he discovered this. He realized that she must exert her own powers, that she would never be strong if she leaned on his support. It was difficult to refuse to carry her; it was still more difficult to stand aside and watch her painful, stumbling attempts to walk. But his restraint meant her development. So, also, God hides himself that we may develop our own powers.
II. Though God Is Hidden, He Is Not Absent
He has not flung the world into space and then left it to take its own course. He is quite near to us, because he has come to us, hidden, but hidden in the form of a man. That is what the Incarnation means that God came down in hidden form, in this carpenter of Nazareth, this man Jesus. If the infinite and holy God were to enter this realm of space and time, to draw near to his rebellious children, he must hide himself in the form of a man. The Christian Gospel is the Good News that this has happened. The hidden God has come near to us in his Son: that his Word is spoken to us in Jesus Christ. His is a truth that was born in the experience of those who trod the streets of Palestine with Jesus of Nazareth. It has been authenticated in the lives of men and women since.
Job’s question rings across the centuries: can man by searching find out God? The answer is: no, he cannot. God remains for ever hidden from the unaided human reason. But the only begotten Son has declared him. In Christ, God has entered into those very experiences in which we feel he is farthest away. He shared our sorrows and our pain; he shed tears at the news of his friend Lazarus’s death. He shared our agony, more than our agony, at the Cross. In death itself where God seems most hidden, at the darkest point of our existence, we see most brightly that God is there. We watch the net closing around him. We stand by the Cross; there evil triumphs, scatters his friends, wrecks his ministry, crushes his life. There the incarnate Son of God dies. Jesus drains the last bitter dregs of the cup of human experience. He too feels that the face of God is hidden. In despair he cries: “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?” So Jesus felt, yet men have realized that there, more than in all else he did, there was God.
That was how the centurion felt at the Cross. There was the confidence of Christ, commending his soul to his father, in that black hell of despair. His was no hardened or dangerous criminal. The hardened soldier looked, and as he looked, the truth dawned upon him. “Truly” he cried “this was the Son of God.”
Darkness will come, even to the Christian, days and nights when God seems far away. Nevertheless, as we stand beneath the Cross of Christ, we know that Faber’s words are true:
Thrice blest is he to whom is given
The instinct which can tell
That God is on the field when He
Is most invisible.
1943
the god of nature and the god of grace
Harvest Thanksgiving 1943
He left not Himself without witness in that he did good and gave you from heaven rains and fruitful seasons, filling your hearts with food and gladness.
—Acts 14:17 (St. Paul at Lystra)
Why is it that harvest festivals are so popular? I found myself asking this question after a year’s ministry among you. Christmas is popular, Easter is popular, Whitsuntide fairly popular. But the peak periods seem to be the Junior Church Anniversary and the harvest festival. Either is a red-letter-day in the Christian year, when we give God thanks for his revelation in the life, death or Resurrection of Jesus Christ. Why should we give thanks more readily at Harvest or at the Junior Church Anniversary?
We shall find the answer in the kind of festival we hold. The Junior Church Anniversary is the festival of the Child; the Harvest is the festival of the Earth. The first reason for their popularity is surely their very obviousness. The drab, grey world in which we live would be immeasurably colder without the warm gaiety of children and their irrepressible good spirits. The aging become Peter Pans in their company. And, whilst we are profoundly grateful for our salvation, we are more obviously grateful for our food. Salvation for most of us is a very abstract thing; food is a substantial need. As Dr. Johnson put it: “The state of the country never yet put any man off his victuals.” So we hold a Harvest festival to thank God for the obvious gift of sustenance.
Then a second reason is surely that the Harvest Festival has come to mean so much more to us in war-time. To use St. Paul’s phrase we are members one of another.
War-time, because it has made food scarce, has brought home to us its value. We cannot eat the simplest meal of bread and butter or usually margarine without reflecting on the risks that have been taken to bring the wheat across the seas. Our daily bread has come to as not only through the grace of God and the labor of the farmer, but through the gauntlet of submarines and four-engine bombers. Just as our Savior broke the bread of sacrifice at the Last Supper, we are eating the bread of sacrifice at every meal. Yes, and as we think of the hungry pinched faces of starving children in Europe, ransacking dust-bins for the veriest morsel of bread in Belgium or in Greece, we, like the Lord of Life, give thanks before we eat.
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