Down to Earth But Heavenly Minded

Article 1

There is not one of us who knows his own frailty who would care to live a single day without God. We need Him every hour, even though we often forget Him. He has not made us to be independent of Him. We are not equal to the stress and strain of life apart from the succour that His mercy supplies. The breath of passing Time withers up the choicest flowers of this life, and his onward tread shakes and changes things that appear to be most permanent, and we feel more deeply than ever that we must have God as our refuge and resource.

He must be real to us, our knowledge of Him must be personal and practical. We must know Him, not as One who is coldly distant from us, indifferent to our struggles, but as One who stoops in His mercy to consider us, frail creatures of His hand, beset with many trials and perplexities, and who is able to hear and answer our prayers, and do for us more than all we can ask or think according to the mercy and love that are in Him. Only thus shall we be able to call Him our God, and move onward peacefully and with confidence to our destined end.

In a popular weekly review a well-known writer said: “I suggest that the most ambiguous word in the English language is the word God. It stands for many differing concepts of what the word taken as a symbol, or for that matter as a fact means. No doubt in many cases in interest of clearness it would be better if another word was used.” He then proceeded to give some concepts and definitions of God put forward by men famous in literary, scientific and religious circles. He is “the creative process, ” “the life force, ” “the universal mind, ” “the final principle, ” “the completed harmony, ” etc., etc. But such vague terms have no meaning for us, they cannot satisfy the longings of the heart or bring peace into a human soul that has faced its deeper problems, and a subtle devil is behind them, whose intention is to put the true God at a distance from men and rob them of Him as God, supreme and beneficent, who is interested in everyone of us, and who has been revealed in His Son Jesus Christ our Lord.

We turn from these meaningless conceptions of God to the fountain of life, the Word of the living God, and we learn from its pages that He is the God of patience, the God of comfort, the God of hope, and the God of peace. These four great titles occur in one chapter in the New Testament. There they shine and coruscate, precious gems in His eternal crown. And that chapter is at the end of the Epistle to the Romans, the foundation Epistle. In it God is revealed in His nature and fundamental character. It is the Epistle of the gospel of God. Having unfolded its great truths the Spirit of God brings us to this conclusion, God is the God of patience, of comfort, of hope, and of peace. These great things are absolutely essential to our well-being and their source is in God; they flow down from Him to us in living streams, nay, more than that, He comes to us as the One in whom they abide, to be with us Himself, for we read, “Now the God of peace be with you, Amen.” He is not distant from us, a vague and nebulous being, He is near us, He is with us, He is for us, in patience, comfort, hope and peace, and when we know this we can face the future with confidence, for “if God be for us, who can be against us?”

How blessedly these four things have blended in God’s ways with us, developing and completing our faith, and leading us on to full growth in the knowledge of Him.

Patience! We are amazed as we consider how He endured our rebellious ways in those days when we did not want Him, and since His grace broke down our stubborn will that same patience has continued, year by year, until this very day, undiminished in its endurance and tenderness. To this we can bear a grateful witness, as we exclaim, only the God of patience, infinite and divine patience, could suit such as we are, and this God is our God!

Comfort! Not soothing our sorrows only, consoling us as a mother consoles a distressed and tired child, there is all that in it but more. This comfort encourages the discouraged, it imparts strength to weak and hesitant steps, it cheers the drooping spirit, it makes us more than conquerors through Him that loves us, it is such comfort as David knew when he cried triumphantly “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for Thou are with me, Thy rod and Thy staff they comfort me.” And the God of comfort is our God!

Hope! We are in a groaning creation and we groan within ourselves, so chapter 8 of our Epistle tells us, and we know it well in our own experience. We are beset with infirmity; the enthusiasms of youth soon give way to the burdens of life and the weaknesses of old age, “Change and decay in all around we see.” We are permitted to groan, but not to grumble or grouse, but our God is the God of hope, and He has lit the lamp of hope within our hearts. We are looking on to the day, when our bodies of humiliation shall be changed into bodies of glory like to Christ’s own glorious body, according to the power by which He is able to subdue all things to Himself.

This hope is a living and sure hope, it will never fail us, we rely upon the sure word of our God, the God of hope, and lo, we are filled with all joy and peace in believing, and abound in hope by the power of the Holy Ghost (verse 13). Our joy is greater than our sorrow, our hope lifts us above all trying circumstances, our groanings are lost in our glad praise. We anticipate the coming glory. The God of hope is our God, and He is moving onward to the fulfilment of His purposes of love; nothing can thwart Him or postpone those purposes beyond His appointed time, but apart from us, whom He has chosen in Christ, they cannot be fulfilled; we are necessary to God’s great scheme of blessing. He has bound us up in the bundle of life with Christ and His glory, and ours is an inheritance incorruptible and undefiled, and that fadeth not away. As our faith lays its firm grip upon the Word of God and our hope stretches out to the glorious future, joy, peace and hope are ours. How surpassing all other knowledge is this knowledge of God as the God of hope, and He is our God.

Peace! And while we wait the God of peace shall be with us all. Amen (verse 33). If we walk with Him, He walks with us. “How do you know there is a God?” was the question asked of an old saint. “I was talking with Him this morning” was the quiet and effective answer. What could disturb our peace of mind, if there was ever with us this consciousness of the company of the God of peace? The peace of God that passes all understanding would keep our hearts and minds by Christ Jesus, and we would live day by day as those who know in the experiences of life the God of patience and comfort, and hope, and peace, rejoicing in Him through our Lord Jesus Christ, who has reconciled us to Him.

Article 2

“The God of patience and consolation” (Romans 15:5).
“The God of hope” (Romans 15:13).
“The God of peace” (Romans 15:33).

The knowledge of God has enlightened our darkness, and we have it as our treasure in our earthen vessels (2 Corinthians 4); it is our glory (Romans 5); but not that only, it is of the greatest practical value to us in the trials of life. I turn to Romans 15 to see how it works out for us when we are faced with things that test us. The subject of this part of the Epistle is how we may help one another who are members of one body in Christ (chap. 12), and consequently in the closest possible relationship one with another. It is recognised that difficulties do arise among brethren; temperaments differ, spiritual attainments and knowledge are not the same, some are weak in the faith and of a legal mind, others are strong and in the liberty of grace, some are not very careful of their walk, and others would set up their own opinions and prejudices as the standard for their brethren and imagine that they were serving God. The devil is a watchful foe and is always ready to take advantage of these differences and sow discord among brethren, and nothing poisons Christian life like that, and brings such misery into it, and robs God of His joy in us. What is the safeguard against this evil? God is the God of patience and consolation, or as another translation puts it, the God of endurance and encouragement: that is the answer.

God has come to us as the fountain of these virtues. He has poured out His patience and consolation upon us, or if we have not yet experienced this which is the portion of all who believe, He is waiting upon us that we may. I question whether anything should impress us more than this twofold way in which we may know our God. We know in part our own waywardness and selfishness. He knows us through and through. Yet when we turn to Him in confession of our folly and sin, as we often must, how wonderfully we learn that He is the patient God and the God of consolation. He has never failed in these qualities, they are divine, and His ways with us in them often make us wonder.

We are His children — through grace, and it is His will that we should be like Him and bear this twofold character in our ways with all who are with us the object of His love and tender solicitude. Our knowledge of Him, (I speak of experimental knowledge), will strengthen us to bear the infirmities of the weak and not to please ourselves. The prayer of the Apostle was “the God of patience and consolation grant you to be like-minded one toward another according to Christ Jesus.” According to Christ Jesus! What a standard is this! Yet God will have no other, and He is able to make us like- minded one toward another, according to that standard. Christ Jesus is our pattern; we must consider Him. In Him we must see what God is to us, and in Him we must learn what we ought to be towards one another. So we read, “Let every one of us please his neighbour for His good to edification. For even Christ pleased not Himself.” Is there a more moving statement than that in the whole of Scripture? He was the only one who ever lived upon earth who had a right to please Himself, and if He had done so, everything that He did would have been perfect, but it was not on that principle that He ordered His life: “Lo, I come to do Thy will, O my God, ” He said, and wist ye not that I must be about My Father’s business, ” and “I do always the things that please Him.” To do the will of His Father in serving the needy sons of men was the motive and the joy of His life. He “came not to be ministered to but to minister, and to give His life a ransom for many.”

He showed what the patience and consolation of God were, and was reproached for it, as we learn from this quotation from Psalm 69, “The reproaches of them that reproached Thee have fallen upon Me.” That is the second half of a verse, the first half is “The zeal of Thy house has eaten Me up.” This is quoted and applied to the Lord in John 2, when with a whip of small cords, He drove from the Temple those who had turned it into a den of thieves. He did that alone, we could have no part in such divine and holy indignation, but in these reproaches we may share, and shall if we are like Him, and that which causes the reproaches is as necessary to the well-being of God’s house on earth now as was the zeal that cleansed the Temple then.

For what was He reproached? The continual taunt of the despicable religionists of His day was that He companied with sinners. “Why do ye eat and drink with publicans and sinners?” they ask in Luke 5. “A friend of publicans and sinners” they jeer in Luke 7. “This man receives sinners and eats with them, ” is their taunt in Luke 15, and in Luke 19 they murmur, “He’s gone to be guest with a man that is a sinner.” They could not endure the grace that refused to recognise class and sectarian distinctions, and that laboured for the good of the weakest and the worst. They reproached Him for His condescending mercy, it exasperated them: but it was God’s mercy. He was showing forth God’s nature and ways, and it was their hatred of God that fell upon Him. We must be like Him and not like them. He was the great burden-bearer, and if we are strong in the grace that is in Him we shall bear the infirmities of the weak and not please ourselves, we shall reach out to the ignorant, and to the babes in God’s family, and seek the edification of everyone of them and if reproached for it we shall have the compensation of the Lord’s approval, and the support of the God of patience and consolation.

And see the result of this, instead of discord among brethren, which is one of the seven abominations to God, we read, “Ye may with one mind and one mouth glorify God, even the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.” We must be like-minded to do this, but is it not a state of things most earnestly to be desired? and not desired only but sought after in self-sacrificing whole-hearted energy? It is the patience and encouragement of God, even the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, that can make this holy happy unity a fact, and produce this praise which is the answer in us to what we have learnt Him to be to us. It is this that the devil would spoil, but God is greater than the devil and we may ever count upon His patience and His encouragement.

But mark well what follows, “Wherefore receive ye one another, as Christ also received us to the glory of God.” If our praise springs upward to God our love must flow out to all whom He loves, and it will and does if we receive one another as Christ also received us to the glory of God. Our reception of one another glorifies God equally with our united praise; indeed, how can we praise Him with one mind and one mouth if we do not receive one another? And again Christ is the pattern; if He has received me to the glory of God, I must also receive those whom He has received. There is not room here for partiality; sectarianism, “the natural weed of the human heart” is outside of this; cliques and parties, the dead sea fruit of the carnal mind, are utterly condemned by it, but there is plenty of room for the operation of the patience and consolation of God. These divine qualities can bring about what it is impossible for our fallen, selfish nature to secure.

“Now the GOD OF HOPE fill you with all joy and peace in believing, that ye may abound in hope, through the power of the Holy Ghost” (verse 13). If there are difficulties in the Christian circle, that can always be met and overcome by the patience and comfort of God, what of our life in the world? One of our poets has written:

“This world is a wilderness wide.”

and if it is this to us what shall our lot be in it? Well, God is the God of hope. He has set before us a great destiny. He will not allow either the power of the foe or our weak faith to thwart His purpose for us, and He has told us what this purpose is in chapter 8 of this Epistle. We are to be “conformed to the image of His dear Son, that He might be the First-born among many brethren”; we are heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ Jesus, waiting to be glorified together with Him. We were saved in the hope of this and God would have us filled with all joy and peace in believing this. No matter how great and many are the difficulties, we may abound in hope, for the Holy Ghost has come to us and indwells us as the earnest of that great inheritance, the pledge to us that we shall most certainly enter into it. The pressure upon us may be great, our circumstances very testing, but this only makes the hope more real, and above all these is the love that rests upon us from above which draws us onward to Him whose love it is. So we sing:

“‘Tis the treasure we’ve found in His love
That has made us now pilgrims below.
And ’tis there, when we reach Him above
As we’re known all ills fullness we’ll know.
Till then ’tis the path He has trod.
Our delight and our comfort shall be;
We’re content with His staff and His rod,
Till with Him all His glory we’ll see.”

We are more than conquerors through Him that loves us, when we abound in hope, through the power of the Holy Ghost.

“Now the GOD OF PEACE be with you all. Amen. And the God of peace shall bruise Satan under your feet shortly. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you. Amen” (chapters 15:33; 16:20).

“He has said I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee, ” and it is the God of peace who has said it, and this is the portion of all who love God and are the called according to His purpose. What blessed company — the God of peace! Life has its downs and ups, its nights and its days, its sorrows and joy, but who would be afraid if the God of peace is with him? “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil; for Thou art with me, Thy rod and Thy staff they comfort me.” Only let the heart be set upon Christ, let there be joyful obedience to His word and through every phase of life and in all its vicissitudes the God of peace will be with us, keeping the heart and mind in confidence and peace.

“And the GOD OF PEACE shall bruise Satan under your feet shortly” (chapter 16:20).

Then we look forward to God’s triumph and ours over Satan himself, he is to be bruised beneath our feet shortly; we are to share in the triumph of the woman’s Seed (Genesis 3), and it is the God of peace that will bring us into this. Satan is the adversary; his name means that. Every bit of trouble that ever came on the church of God was engineered by him; all the persecutions that the saints of God have ever suffered lies at his door; but he has a more subtle way of working. He is not Satan only, but that old serpent, who “by good words and fair speeches deceive the hearts of the simple.” Verse 18 describes his way of working well. “I fear” wrote the apostle to the Corinthian church, “lest by any means, as the serpent beguiled Eve through his subtlety, so your minds should be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ” (2 Corinthians 11). So here these Roman Christians are warned against those who would bring in divisions and offences contrary to the doctrine they had learned; such were the ministers of Satan and not the servants of our Lord Jesus Christ, and to be avoided. They abound today, men who preach another gospel, who despise the gospel of God, who tread under foot the Son of God, and count the blood of the covenant an unholy thing, and have done despite to the Spirit of grace. It is Satan’s work, and those who would be faithful to the Lord must suffer because of it, but the end is near. God’s triumph will soon be complete and we shall share it. Then strife and conflict will give place to peace, for the God of peace will establish and display His righteousness in the heavens and the earth, and the effect of righteousness shall be quietness and peace. Meanwhile we joy in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, for He is THE GOD OF PATIENCE AND CONSOLATION, THE GOD OF HOPE AND THE GOD OF PEACE.