“Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him for righteousness.” In those words is shown the only basis for men’s relationship to God. Yet even those who accept them as inspired and recognize their force may not always see their true meaning.
There is such a thing as belief in God. A man may look at the wonders of nature and see in them the evidence of design. He may examine the witness of prophecy, and find that it can only be accounted for by a purposive control of history. On these grounds he may say, “I believe in God”: he has come to the conclusion that the existence of God is the only rational hypothesis to explain the facts. That is good so far as it goes, and may be a stepping stone to something more, but Abraham’s faith was not of that kind: he did not believe in God, he believed God.
To believe God one must know Him. But what is it to know God? A man may say of an acquaintance, “I know Jones; I met him in London a month ago”. On a higher level of knowledge he may say, “I know Brown; he is a true man”. After years of intimate friendship he might reach a still higher stage and say, “I know him, and have proved him; if I was in trouble he would not let me down. What he says he will do, he will do”. The last example is an illustration in measure of Abraham’s belief in God, except that whereas the warmest friendship between men may fail, friendship with God will never fail from His side.
From the day that God had said, “Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred . . into a land that I will show thee . . . and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed”, Abraham had known God. He went from Ur of the Chaldees to Haran, and from Haran to Canaan, and there he received a renewal of the promise and the making of a covenant. He believed in hope when hope seemed dead, until he received the confirmation of the promise in the birth of Isaac. At last came the supreme test of faith when he was commanded to offer the son in whom all his God-given hope rested; and he laid Isaac bound on the altar of stones, “accounting that God was able to raise him up, even from the dead; from whence also he received him in a figure”. In all this Abraham believed God as a man may believe his friend. He did not reason out the existence of God as an hypothesis; he knew Him as a Person.
How are men to know God when He does not speak with an audible voice? They can know Him through the silent voice of His word. He spoke in promises to men of old, and the words are on record; He spoke by His spirit through the prophets, and their words were written; He spoke at last in His Son, who bore the impress of His character and was the shining forth of His glory who was His word become flesh; that word is known through the Gospels and the Epistles and the Apocalypse. The written word remains today, living and powerful; the embodied Word, though unheard and unseen, is active at the Father’s right hand.
If men are to know God they must know Him through His revelation of Himself. He has chosen to make known His character and His purpose through promises made to men, through words given to men, through the Word made flesh. If, then, men are to know God they must know His promises; but they must be His promises and not something else which men chose to make them; they must know God’s word, but it must be His word, and not their own desires, or dreams; they must know God’s Son, but he must be the real Christ and not another. If they rest their faith in false promises and a corrupted word they will not only be deceived as to their own hope and destiny; worse still, the God they come to know will not be God as He has revealed Himself but a God of their own making. The god they set up in their hearts will be an idol and a delusion.
If men believe that the aim of man should be to attain a lofty ethic of his own design rather than receiving Christ, who was delivered for our offences and raised for our justification”, then they are believing in a false god. If men believe that all are by many roads coming to the same end, when God has said, “Strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life”, then they are setting up a false god. If God declares that eternal life is His gift through Jesus Christ our Lord, and men prefer to believe in an immortal soul which aspires to the divine, then they are not merely deluding themselves as to their own nature —they are making their own god. If God has promised faithful men and women that they shall reign on the earth as kings and priests, and men choose to think that their souls will return at death to the heaven whence they came, then they are looking not only to a legendary future but to a mythical god.
Less than fifty years ago there was built in the Hague a Palace of Peace. It was so enriched with the treasures of all the nations in priceless works of art that to the visitor it gives the impression not so much of a palace as a temple. But a temple of what? Not of God, even though it is dominated by the figure of the “Christ of the Andes”. It is a temple of humanism ———- of man’s belief in himself and his own ideals, of man’s aspiration after a peace which he cannot attain on his own terms. To stand amid that polished marble and stained glass, the tapestries, the statuary and the paintings, and look back over the years since the Palace was built is to be filled with bitter irony and great sadness. Has any half century in the history of man been so crowded with war, revolution, despotism, cruelty and death as this? Has any period been so filled with training for war and the feverish invention of every device for torture and destruction? The years that began with hopes of sweetness and light as man marched on in advancing civilization have led to the hydrogen bomb and the intercontinental missile.
The god of the Temple of Peace is a false god and has failed his devotees.
Long ago it had been announced that glory to God in the highest must precede peace on earth; and when men “go up to the mountain of the Lord, and the house of the God of Jacob”, it will not be to Holland they will turn their eyes hut to Zion, for there He has declared His rest shall be, and from there peace shall flow like a river. The history of our generation has shown the disastrous consequences of substituting for Him a god of men’s own invention.
If it is calamitous on the world scale it is no less so for the individual. Men arc sinners, and God “reckons righteousness” to them on the ground of faith in Him. Only of men who know and believe Him can it be said, “Blessed are they whose iniquities are forgiven, and whose sins are covered. Blessed is the man to whom the Lord will not impute sin”. Faith is made the ground of forgiveness because it creates a bond between men and God, and provides a basis on which they may be reformed and a motive power to bring the change about. By “waxing strong in faith” Abraham “gave glory to God” in the one way which is possible to men; he was fully persuaded that what God has promised He is able to perform, and he lived in the light of that faith.
Salvation comes not by believing about God, but by believing God and no one else. The only way in which we can believe God is to take Him at His word: and for that purpose we must first find what the word is, and gain assurance that it is His word. Belief does not so much matter because it is desirable to know the facts, to be philosophically correct or theologically sound: it matters because if a man is to live he must know and believe God. He may believe in a God evolved in his own mind; he can only believe God by knowing God as He has revealed Himself. That is something a man can only do through God’s words and acts; but they must be God’s words, and no one else’s.
The Origin of the Organic World – Part One