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44 
 
 LIBRARY OF THE THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY 
 PRINCETON. N. J. 
 
 PRESENTED BY 
 
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 Be 5 76 ee eon 
 
 Thomas, Moses Bross, 1845- 
 O25. 
 
 The biblical idea of God 
 
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 ON 
 
 
 
THE BROSS LIBRARY 
 
 VOLUME XII 
 
THE BROSS LIBRARY 
 
 THE BIBLE; ITS ORIGIN AND NATURE 
 Rev. Marcus Dods, D.D. 
 
 THE BIBLE OF NATURE. J. Arthur Thomson, M.A. 
 
 THE RELIGIONS OF MODERN SYRIA AND 
 PALESTINE. Frederick J. Bliss, Ph.D. 
 
 THE SOURCES OF RELIGIOUS INSIGHT 
 Josiah Royce 
 
 THE WILL TO FREEDOM, or the Gospel of 
 Wietsche and the Gospel of Christ 
 Rev. John Neville Figgis, D.D. 
 
 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS 
 H. W. Wright, Ph.D. 
 BIBLE AND SPADE 
 John P. Peters, Ph.D., Sc.D., D.D. 
 
 CHRISTIANITY AND PROBLEMS OF TO-DAY 
 By Various Authors 
 THE BIBLICAL IDEA OF GOD 
 
 M. Bross Thomas, A.M., D.D. 
 
 BROSS PRIZE VOLUMES 
 
 THE PROBLEM OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 
 James Orr, D.D. 
 
 THE MYTHICAL INTERPRETATION OF THE 
 GOSPELS. Rev. Thomas James Thorburn, D.D. 
 
 
 
THE BROSS LECTURES . . 1988 
 
 THE 
 BIBLICAL IDEA OF GOD 
 
 LECTURES DELIVERED BEFORE 
 LAKE FOREST COLLEGE 
 ON THE FOUNDATION OF THE LATE 
 WILLIAM BROSS 
 
 BY 
 REV. M. BROSS THOMAS, A.M., D.D. 
 
 PROFESSOR EMERITUS OF BIBLICAL LITHRATURE 
 OF LAKH FOREST COLLEGE 
 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS 
 IN Vas OTUs aecreneg ca Oran h va 
 
Coprrriaat, 1924, py 
 THE TRUSTEES OF LAKE FOREST UNIVERSITY 
 
 
 
 Printed in the United States of America 
 
 
 
FOREWORD 
 
 In writing these lectures I have had an audience in 
 mind rather than readers. This accounts for some- 
 what of repetition and also for a certain directness of 
 address. I have also had in view those whom Mr. 
 Lincoln called “the plain people,” that large number 
 of Christian men and women who are interested in 
 the great truths of the Bible but are not familiar with 
 the works of those scholars who deal largely and mi- 
 nutely with its history, structure, composition, author- 
 ship, and those details which are found in books of 
 Introduction. If the author can be of any help to 
 those who seek for guidance and confirmation of faith 
 in the midst of the controversies of the present day, 
 which too much tend to weaken, if not destroy, belief 
 in the Bible’s divine origin and in its teaching con- 
 cerning the nature, character, and eternal purpose of 
 the God of Revelation, he will consider his work not 
 to have been in vain. 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 in 2022 with funding from 
 Princeton Theological Seminary Library 
 
 https://archive.org/details/biblicalideaofgo00thom 
 
II. 
 
 eT; 
 
 IV. 
 
 we 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 THE BIBLICAL IDEA OF GOD, ConcrETE 
 IN PRESENTATION, PERSONAL, MONOTHEISTIC, 
 QprRITUAL. ORDER IN TIME OF THE BOOKs . 
 
 THE BIBLICAL IDEA OF GOD 1 Tue PRIMI- 
 TIVE AND ParriarcHAL Prriops, ss SET 
 TIGHTELIN (OINESISH AS ce declla eis ie coreiiouiber 3 
 
 THE BIBLICAL IDEA OF GOD 1n THE Mo- 
 satc PERIOD, oR AS Founp 1n Exopvus, Levit- 
 1cus, NUMBERS, AND DEUTERONOMY 
 
 THE BIBLICAL IDEA OF GOD DvuRING THE 
 PERIOD OF THE JUDGES, THE TIMES OF ELIJAH 
 AND ELISHA, AND IN THE WRITINGS OF THE 
 POOP RTS uae Aisin RiLamie ee Mis Ge Bag eta ete 
 
 THE BIBLICAL IDEA OF GOD 1. THE PsALMs, 
 Jos, AND ECCLESIASTES . .- +--+ e+e > 
 
 THE BIBLICAL IDEA OF GOD 1n THE TEACH- 
 ING oF CHRIST AND His APOSTLES ..... 
 
 PAGE 
 
 31 
 
 65 
 
 92 
 
 124 
 
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 St 
 
THE BIBLICAL IDEA OF GOD 
 
 I 
 THE BIBLICAL IDEA OF GOD 
 
 CONCRETE IN PRESENTATION, PERSONAL, MONOTHEISTIC, 
 SPIRITUAL. ORDER IN TIME OF THE BOOKS 
 
 Tur first sentence of Calvin’s “Institutes of the 
 Christian Religion” is as follows: “True and substan- 
 tial wisdom principally consists of two parts, the knowl- 
 edge of God and the knowledge of ourselves.” He 
 then proceeds to show the intimate relation and inter- 
 dependence of these two kinds of knowledge. Both are 
 necessary for man’s highest welfare. But since God is 
 the greatest object of knowledge, to know him is rela- 
 tively more important than to know ourselves. The 
 Greeks, by their adage, “ Know thyself,” seem to have 
 placed the greater emphasis upon the latter; but the 
 Bible places it upon the former. Our Lord, in his 
 prayer at the close of the last supper, said: “'This is life 
 eternal, that they should know Thee, the only true God 
 and Jesus Christ whom Thou didst send” (John 17: 3). 
 Paul, in his letter to the Ephesians, wrote that he did 
 not cease to pray, that “the God of our Lord Jesus 
 Christ, the Father of glory, may give unto you a spirit 
 of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of him” 
 (Eph. 1:17); and to the Philippians that their “love 
 
 1 
 
2 The Biblical Idea of God 
 
 may abound yet more and more in knowledge and all 
 discernment”? (Phil. 1:9), and also to the Colossians, 
 that they “may be filled with the knowledge of his 
 [that is, God’s] will in all spiritual wisdom and under- 
 standing . . . and increasing in the knowledge of God” 
 (Col. 1:9, 10). Indeed, it is not possible here and now 
 to quote the passages in which emphasis is placed upon 
 such knowledge. If you look up these words, knowl- 
 edge and to know, where God is the object, you may be 
 surprised to find how often they are used. They ap- 
 pear with striking frequency in the Old Testament, they 
 occur again and again in the New Testament, either 
 explicitly stated or implied. Hence it is not true, as is 
 sometimes said, that religion, at least the religion of 
 the Bible, consists merely or mainly of emotion. That 
 the emotional nature, in its deepest and noblest ele- 
 ments, is involved is true, but it is also true that it is 
 knowledge, the knowledge of God, that awakens and 
 determines the character of the emotions, and gives 
 and sustains their life and austere beauty. Agnosti- 
 cism, so prevalent in our day, the hopeless conclusion 
 of so many philosophic minds striving to solve the chal- 
 lenging mystery of the universe, asserts the unknow- 
 ableness of God. It neither affirms nor denies his exist- 
 ence. It simply says: “I do not, I cannot know.” It 
 is, as President Mark Hopkins used to say, “The know- 
 nothing philosophy.” But the Bible says that God is 
 and can be known, and that “he is a rewarder of them 
 that seek after him” (Heb. 11:6). It makes no elab- 
 orate argument to prove his existence. Its opening 
 
Human Ideas, Religious and Scientific 3 
 
 words imply that as the instinctive belief of man. For 
 man, as Aristotle defined him, is a “rational animal.” 
 Being rational, he is therefore essentially religious. To 
 worship is the universal and compelling impulse of his 
 nature; and worship implies the conviction of an object 
 worthy of that worship. 
 
 But believing in a being or beings greater than him- 
 self, to whom he has everywhere built altars and offered 
 prayers and sacrifices, man has yet clothed that being 
 or those beings with attributes suggested by his own 
 evil nature or with conceptions formed from the philo- 
 sophic contemplation of the world around him and his 
 own rational nature. The Iliad, which has been called 
 the Bible of the Greeks, ascribed to Zeus and the fam- 
 ily of the gods the vices of human society, so that 
 Plato would banish the Iliad from his ideal republic. 
 But Greek philosophy wrought out a conception of the 
 divine nature and character which, while less merely 
 human than that of the Iliad, was yet ineffective to 
 touch man’s heart and transform his life, and was the 
 object of contemplation and discussion only, and was 
 confined to the intellectual few. The common people 
 still worshipped their human gods. 
 
 Yet however inadequate or false such conceptions 
 are, man by his very nature seems compelled to form 
 them. Human thought in its ultimate aim is really a 
 quest after God. It seeks for a unity in the endless 
 variety of the world and for a fundamental truth which 
 shall explain all things. The speculative thought of the 
 physical scientists is not satisfied to rest with the many 
 
4 The Biblical Idea of God 
 
 and varied forces and forms with which they deal but 
 affirms an infinite and eternal energy of which all forces 
 and forms are but the ever-changing manifestation. 
 Ascribe personality and moral character to this infinite 
 and eternal energy and we may rightly name it God. 
 
 That God is is one question. What he is is another. 
 The Bible assumes the first and answers the second. 
 Its answer, moreover, claims to be a direct revelation 
 of God himself; a revelation not in the works of nature, 
 in the starlit heavens above, nor in the earth with its 
 manifold forms of life beneath, although the Bible 
 teaches that these declare him; nor in the mind and 
 conscience of man, intuitive of universal and necessary 
 truths, and imposing an imperative moral law; although 
 Paul at Athens built an argument on these; but in a 
 spoken and written word given to man and through 
 man, and because divinely given is therefore authori- 
 tative and complete. 
 
 This is the plain statement of the opening words of 
 the epistle to the Hebrews: “God having of old time 
 spoken unto the fathers in the prophets by divers por- 
 tions and in divers manners hath at the end of these 
 _ days spoken unto us in a Son.” And then the author 
 goes on to characterize the Son as having been “ap- 
 pointed heir of all things, through whom also he made 
 the worlds; who being the effulgence of his glory, and 
 the very image of his substance, and upholding all 
 things by the word of his [the Son’s] power, when he 
 [the Son] had made purification of sins, sat down on 
 the right hand of the Majesty on high; having become 
 
Teaching of Epistle to the Hebrews 5 
 
 by so much better than the angels, as he hath inherited 
 a more excellent name than they” (Heb. 1: 1-4). 
 
 In this introduction, remarkable both for the truths 
 it teaches and for their eloquent expression, the author 
 states in explicit terms one essential and fundamental 
 fact. It is that God has spoken. This underlies and 
 runs through the entire sentence, which consists also of 
 a series of striking contrasts. In the past God spoke 
 unto the fathers. In the present he has spoken unto 
 us. Then he spoke “by divers portions and in divers 
 manners.” Now he has spoken in a way that is full 
 and final and complete. Then he spoke in many men, 
 the prophets. Now he has spoken in one, a Son. 
 
 Thus the author (whoever he was, no one knows) 
 reduces the many books which compose the Bible to 
 an essential unity. To him both Old Testament and 
 New are the word of God. The many and varied 
 voices which sound through the long ages of Israel’s 
 past have one elemental tone essentially divine; and 
 this rises at last to full volume in the voice of Jesus 
 Christ, who is both human and divine. 
 
 This position taken at the outset by the author of 
 Hebrews is that of these lectures. It has been held 
 through long centuries and tested and confirmed by the 
 experiences of many generations of believing men. It 
 is the Bible’s estimate of itself. The prophets an- 
 nounced it. The Lord Jesus and his apostles affirmed 
 it. The Jewish and the Christian churches have al- 
 ways and everywhere accepted it, the one as regards 
 the Old Testament, the other as regards both. It is 
 
6 The Boblical Idea of God 
 
 the unshaken foundation of their religious faith. But 
 in these days, as also in earlier, it meets with limitation, 
 or with denial and rejection. The religion of the Bible, 
 many claim, is but one among the religions of the world, 
 a merely natural human product. It has no higher 
 source, no more divine authority. Its laws are merely 
 fixed human customs; its prophecy and poetry the ex- 
 pression of merely human experience, of human de- 
 sires and hopes and aspirations. Nay, more; it is said 
 to have been at last found out by scholars, whose re- 
 searches, it is claimed, have been made in a thorough- 
 going scientific spirit and with a rigorous scientific 
 method, that much of the history recorded in the 
 Scriptures, both old and new, is not a statement of 
 fact but is largely fiction, the work of authors who 
 either read their own present into the past, or filled the 
 dim and distant past with unreal persons and fancied 
 events. And the serious aspect of this denial and re- 
 jection is that it no longer stands without the church, 
 but has secured a place within. It is taught in school 
 and college and theological seminaries. It is suggested 
 or plainly stated in periodical and pulpit; and the books 
 that uphold it issue constantly from the press. 
 
 I do not question the sincerity of those who hold and 
 promulgate this view. I suggest no doubt of their 
 Christian character and life. It is not with men but 
 with opinions that we have to deal. And it is clear 
 that these two views concerning the religion of the 
 Bible are radically different and opposed. ‘There is no 
 neutral ground. If one is true the other is false. 
 
The Faith of the Church Vital 7 
 
 However, into this question I do not propose now 
 to enter. The books which seek to determine it are 
 “many and accessible. The literary and historical crit- 
 icism of the Bible now constitutes a library by itself. 
 The first book for which a prize was given on this 
 foundation, “The Problem of the Old Testament,” by 
 Professor Orr, as also the second book, “The Mythical 
 Interpretation of the Gospels,’ by Doctor Thomas 
 James Thorburn, are most important parts of this li- 
 brary and are conservative in their position. In sup- 
 port of this position archeology is bringing many as- 
 sured results obtained by recent investigation, and the 
 scholars who uphold it are neither few nor lacking in 
 learning and force of thought. 
 
 Aside, moreover, from all other considerations it 
 would be strange indeed if this age-long faith in the 
 Bible were proven false. For the issue is vital. On 
 that faith the Jewish and Christian churches were 
 founded and by it they have lived. Destroy that faith 
 and as distinctive organizations they will fall, if not at 
 once, yet ultimately into a ruin final and complete. 
 For if God has not spoken in prophet, in apostle, and 
 in a Son, then certainly the Christian church has no 
 distinctive message and no reason separately to exist. 
 If in any way it should continue, it will become merely 
 an ethical society without power to lift men to higher 
 altitudes of character and thus secure its aims. But 
 that God has spoken we may not doubt the church will 
 continue to believe, despite the assaults of men, how- 
 ever scholarly in attainments, however persistent in at- 
 
8 The Biblical Idea of God 
 
 tack. And it may be that a result of the investigation 
 we are to make, however imperfectly and inadequately 
 we may make it, will help to the confirmation of that 
 belief. For if the Biblical teaching concerning God is 
 found to be noble in its character, consistent and pro- 
 gressive in its unfolding, and meeting and satisfying 
 the conditions and deepest needs of the human heart, 
 then this is an argument for its truth which cannot be 
 ignored nor lightly set aside. 
 
 There are four general and essential points of view 
 which at the outset should be distinctly stated. The 
 first is that the Biblical idea of God is not abstract and 
 speculative, but purely and wholly concrete. By this 
 I mean that it is presented not merely as a subjective 
 conception, but in objective form and as corresponding 
 to an objective reality. In this respect it differs radi- 
 cally from the idea of philosophy. Philosophers deal 
 but little with the actual or concrete world. I do not 
 deny that they are searchers after truth, but theirs is a 
 quest ultimately for being, the most highly abstract of 
 all ideas. They deal with the purely rational concep- 
 tions of the mind, and in a highly rarefied atmosphere 
 build airy structures, whose materials, however logi- 
 cally related and finished in form, are not taken from 
 the actual, every-day experiences of human life. The 
 philosopher lives in his study among his books, or in 
 his classroom, far from the actual world where men 
 sin and suffer, toil and strive, hope and despair, aspire 
 and fail; where appetite and passion and frenzied action 
 constitute largely the experiences of mankind. His is 
 
Concrete in Presentation 9 
 
 the strictly intellectual world, the world of pure 
 thought, undisturbed by the ceaseless and agonizing 
 conflicts which go on just beyond the walls that shut 
 him in. 
 
 Thus philosophy dwells among abstractions and is, 
 as it has been defined since Socrates, a search after 
 truth which, like the radiant rainbow arch, is ever flee- 
 ing from its grasp.. The search is not without its com- 
 pensations. The philosopher has done important work 
 in the exploration of the abstract or ideal world. For 
 such a world exists, and the desire to explore it 1s ever 
 inciting the noblest minds, and the power to do so Is 
 among the greatest gifts of man. Philosophy, it has 
 been said, bakes no bread. It contributes nothing to 
 satisfy the lower needs of man; but it deepens and ex- 
 pands his reasoning powers and acquaints him with 
 realities of which the sordid soul engaged altogether in 
 ministering to animal wants does not dream. Yet, 
 though it may teach important truths, the forms in 
 which they are presented are beyond the reach of the 
 ordinary eye, and the language in which they are 
 uttered is strange to the ordinary ear. On the con- 
 trary, the Biblical idea of God, while containing all 
 the truth the philosopher has found, and indeed much 
 more, is expressed in forms and in a language with 
 which the ordinary man is familiarly acquainted. 
 “The heavens,” the psalmist says, “declare the glory 
 of God; and the firmament showeth his handiwork. 
 Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night 
 showeth knowledge” (Psalms 19:1, 2). The same 
 
10 The Biblical Idea of God 
 
 truth is stated in much the same way by the Apostle 
 Paul to the people and priests of Lystra, when they 
 would worship him and Barnabas, bidding them turn 
 from their idols “unto a living God, who made the 
 heaven and the earth and the sea, and all that in them 
 is... and who left not himself without witness, in that 
 he did good and gavé you from heaven rains and fruit- 
 ful seasons, filling your hearts with food and gladness” 
 (Acts 14:15, 17). 
 
 In historic events also is the Biblical idea of God dis- 
 closed—in the account of the creation and of the moral 
 fall of man, in the migrations of peoples, in the experi- 
 ences of persons, such as the call of Abraham, the mis- 
 sion and work of Moses, the deliverance from Egypt, 
 the giving of the law, the conquest of the promised 
 land, the reigns of judges and of kings, the sending 
 and work of the long line of prophetic men culminating 
 in the coming and teaching and character and death 
 and resurrection of the divine Son. All this is not a 
 series of abstract statements but of actual, historic, 
 concrete events and persons; and it is the only way in 
 which for mankind the true idea of God could be ade- 
 quately and effectively disclosed. 
 
 The second general point of view is that the Biblical 
 idea of God is purely personal. Made known in per- 
 sons and in the experiences of persons, it could not well 
 be other than personal. In this it again differs from 
 what much of philosophy has taught. 
 
 But, that we may have a clear conception of the term 
 we are using, let us ask what is meant by a person. 
 
Personal 11 
 
 It is a conception we all possess and act upon, but how 
 few ever stop precisely to define it. It is like vision. 
 We see and know that we see, but what it 1s to see—the 
 physical apparatus and the mental processes involved— 
 not many pause to consider. Yet the essential ele- 
 ments of personality are not far to seek nor difficult 
 to find. They are, as usually stated, self-consciousness 
 and self-determination. Every one is immediately con- 
 scious of thinking, of feeling, and of willing; and this 
 consciousness is individual and distinctive. Moreover, 
 it is an inward state of certainty. If man is not certain 
 of these realities he is certain of nothing. He is also 
 conscious, not merely that there are thoughts, emo- 
 tions, choices, but that they are his thoughts, his emo- 
 tions, fis choices, and not those of another. In this 
 way he affirms himself as a separate and distinct entity. 
 Hence in the unity of these three elemental modes of 
 personal being he stands face to face with himself and 
 has reached a sure basis and starting-point for all sub- 
 sequent conclusions. When Descartes said, “Cogito 
 ergo sum” (I think therefore I am), he stated a fact of 
 which there could be no possible doubt. In the proc- 
 ess of investigation he had put aside all other beliefs 
 as doubtful, but here at last he reached the bed-rock 
 of certainty. 
 
 But philosophers have raised the question, what is 
 the self ?—as if it were something different from these 
 elemental and essential modes of its expression, as if 
 the self were behind them and beyond conscious reach. 
 But thought, emotion, volition do not mask but mani- 
 
12 The Biblical Idea of God 
 
 fest the self. It is in the unity of these in conscious- 
 ness that the self is known. 
 
 The other attribute of personality, self-determina- 
 tion, is a centre of long and intense controversy. That 
 there are volitions or choices no one does or can deny. 
 But that they are free, that is, self-determined, is_ 
 denied. ‘The question is of profound interest to every 
 one. Not only is it debated in the schools but among 
 the unlearned as well. Milton, in “Paradise Lost,” 
 makes some of the fallen spirits sit apart and reason 
 high—— 
 
 “Of Providence, Foreknowledge, will and fate — 
 Fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute; 
 And found no end, in wandering mazes lost.” 
 
 (Book 2, lines 559-561.) 
 
 But no reasoning process can decide this question. 
 Its decision can be rendered only by the direct deliver- 
 ance of consciousness. The freedom of the will is an 
 ultimate fact. Consciousness testifies to every one 
 that his choices are determined by himself. It knows 
 nothing of a higher power determining them. Even 
 Herbert Spencer acknowledges that the consciousness 
 of freedom is, to use his language, “an inexpugnable 
 datum” of the human mind, that is, a state or affirma- 
 tion of consciousness of which man cannot rid himself, 
 although Spencer immediately proceeds to argue against 
 its validity. This the exigencies of his philosophical 
 system demanded. But the languages of the world 
 and the structures of all human society are the expres- 
 
Personal 13 
 
 sion of the universal and ultimate consciousness of the 
 freedom of the will. To deny this is to affirm that 
 man’s nature is at its heart a lie. 
 
 To these attributes of self-consciousness and self- 
 determination which are essential to personality there 
 needs to be added a moral element. Animals are not 
 persons, however self-conscious and_ self-determined 
 they may be. They are wnmoral. They give no evi- 
 dence of moral ideals or sense of moral obligation. 
 But man does, and without these he would not be a 
 person. That which presents these ideals is the con- 
 science, a term formed of two Latin words, con and 
 scio, which together mean, I know with. This is also 
 the meaning of the Greek term for conscience, 
 ouveldnows, a knowledge with. But what is it that 
 I know? Is it not myself? And with what do I 
 know myself? Is it not with, or in connection with, 
 a law? But whose law? Not my law, self-imposed, 
 for I find myself in conflict with it. Nor a law which 
 other men have laid upon me. Human customs may 
 indeed harden into law. But conscience, in its deep- 
 est and widest affirmations, deep as the inmost heart 
 of man, and wide as his social world, recognizes a law 
 whose source is beyond the self, and whose authority 
 is far more imperative than mankind’s collective 
 will. 
 
 Conscience, with its universal and ever-insistent 
 claims, is the bed-rock on which rest all true ideas of 
 both man and God. On it all false conceptions are 
 inevitably wrecked. It is, as we shall see, elemental in 
 
14 The Biblical Idea of God 
 
 the Biblical idea of the character of God, and pervades 
 the entire Scriptures, both old and new. 
 
 God, then, is personal in his nature, according to the 
 Bible, a being self-conscious, self-determined and moral, 
 not under law, as man is, nor superior to law, but 
 a law unto himself, the ultimate source of all law and 
 all authority, responsible unto none, but laying upon 
 every man the imperative obligation of obedience to 
 his supreme will. 
 
 Not thus, however, do the philosophers of this world 
 always teach. The religions of the world, even that 
 of the most degraded peoples, present a god or gods 
 personal in nature, and in some degree, however slight 
 and elusive, both spiritual and moral, with other attri- 
 butes essential to deity, which lift their conceptions 
 sometimes to a lofty plane. Thus the Indians of 
 Guiana speak of the “Ancient One, the Ancient One 
 in Sky-land, Our Maker, Our Father, Our Great 
 Father” (Lang, “The Making of Religion,” page 222). 
 But philosophy, brooding over the deep mysteries of 
 being, and using only the intellect for their solution, 
 has ever tended toward the impersonal in its concep- 
 tion of the ultimate and universal reality. This is the 
 teaching of Pantheism and Materialism, whose charac- 
 teristic note is ¢mpersonality. Man is the only personal 
 being, and as such is but a passing and momentary 
 wave upon the sea of infinite and universal existence. 
 He rises for one brief instant into distinct and con- 
 scious individuality and then sinks absolutely and for- 
 ever into unconsciousness and bare onenesswith the All. 
 
One God and One Only 15 
 
 Such a conclusion of the mere intellect may be logi- 
 cally deduced from the premises employed, but it is 
 against the deepest instincts, the strongest yearnings, 
 and the imperative affirmations of the human soul. 
 The philosophic minds of India, of Greece, and of some 
 in these modern days have taught it, but the religions 
 of all have rejected it; and religion, which is a univer- 
 sal fact, has as much right to be heard as has philosophy. 
 
 It is from his own conscious personality that man 
 rises to his belief in the personality of God. These two 
 beliefs stand or fall together. This is clearly evident 
 from the history of philosophic thought in India. 
 Resting on fundamental convictions of the human soul, 
 they stand when these convictions are clearly recog- 
 nized. They fall when these convictions are obscured 
 or dissolved by speculations which forsake the realm of 
 fact and wander in an unreal world of abstract dialec- 
 tics. 
 
 A third general point is the unity of God. The 
 Bible teaches that there is one God and only one. Its 
 religion is strictly monotheistic. In this respect it is 
 radically different from the religions of the world. 
 Polytheism, the worship of many gods, has apparently 
 within historic times, been universal outside the He- 
 brew race. Whether there was in the earliest day, 
 when man first began to worship, a simple undeveloped 
 monotheism, is a question upon which scholars are 
 divided in opinion. Indications furnished by investi- 
 gations of the historic and primitive periods show that 
 man has always and everywhere been a worshipper, 
 
16 The Biblical Idea of God 
 
 but whether of one or many gods the proofs thus ob- 
 tained are too slight and shadowy to lead to a positive 
 conclusion. Such investigations, however, take no 
 account of the Bible. Its descriptions of human origins 
 is ignored as merely mythical. Yet whether mythical 
 or not, whether in any and what sense true or not, I 
 do not here stop to consider. These questions, how- 
 ever important, are beside our quest. This, as I have 
 said, is simply to find out what the Bible teaches con- 
 cerning God; and there can be no doubt that from its 
 earliest chapters it is clearly and positively monotheis- 
 tic. It records, however, and condemns the prevalent 
 polytheism. All throughout Hebrew history, until 
 after the captivity, there is a conflict between those 
 who taught the sole deity of Jehovah and the common 
 people, who were continually falling away from that 
 belief. 'They were unable to resist the degrading influ- 
 ence of the nations, great and small, with which they 
 came in contact. These multiplied their deities, and 
 in Babylonia and Egypt worshipped them in magnifi- 
 cent temples and with elaborate and imposing forms. 
 In Canaan, as the sacred record tells us, the Israelites 
 again and again “forsook Jehovah, the God of their 
 fathers, who brought them out of the land of Egypt, 
 and followed other gods” (Judges 2:12). Even the 
 temple built for the sole worship of Jehovah was pol- 
 luted by the infamous and debasing rites of alien peo- 
 ples. To purify the Hebrew nation from idolatrous 
 polytheism and to establish finally and forever the be- 
 lief in one sole and supreme God was throughout long 
 
Spiritual he 
 
 centuries the work not only of divinely commissioned 
 prophets, but also of the bitter experiences which in- 
 evitably followed their apostasies, culminating at last 
 in the Babylonian captivity. 
 
 The fourth general point is that the Biblical idea of 
 God is spiritual. This is involved in the conception of 
 him as moral or personal. But it may be asked, what 
 is a spirit? Etymologically in both Greek and Latin, 
 it means breath or to breathe. But these are physical 
 terms used as figures of speech to express something 
 like and yet different, in regard to which the thought 
 of most men is far from being definite and clear. It is 
 of something invisible, intangible, widely diffused, a 
 sort of substance indescribable in positive terms. The 
 definitions are usually negative. In the early days of 
 my active ministry I remember seeking for a clear and 
 positive definition of what is meant by spirit. The 
 statement in theological and other books was that a 
 spirit is an 7mmaterial substance. But that tells me 
 what spirit is not. It does not tell me what spirit 2s. 
 All that is affirmed is that a spirit is not matter. This 
 doubtless comes from the common conviction that the 
 material world is the real world. But is it, to use a little 
 girl’s expression, the “really real” world? The ques- 
 tion has occasioned endless debate and over it great 
 systems: of philosophy are divided. No doubt the 
 world of matter has reality of a certain kind. We can 
 touch, handle, weigh, and measure it. It impresses 
 all the senses. It is the earliest reality with which 
 we are familiar, and from the beginning invites our 
 
18 The Biblical Idea of God 
 
 interest and awakens our energies. But later on in 
 life, when our reflective powers are developed, we be- 
 come acquainted with that other and higher world, 
 the inner one of mind or spirit. You cannot touch 
 or handle, weigh or measure that. It is known not 
 mediately through bodily impressions but immediately 
 in the consciousness of self. Here, then, if anywhere, 
 is, as has been already said, fundamental reality. For 
 to us the reality of what we call matter depends upon 
 the reality of mind. Mind or spirit is the primal fact. 
 It is not a function of the brain, a mysterious move- 
 ment of highly organized nerve-matter. It transcends 
 this and, as Divine Spirit, is the underlying cause of 
 all forms of physical organization, from the minutest 
 grain of dust to the vastest and remotest system which 
 moves and shines in splendor upon the confines of 
 the world. Indeed, all these, when analyzed in the 
 laboratory of thought, are found to be suffused with 
 mind. All law, all order are but the expression of 
 mind. In its ultimate form the universe, as the pro- 
 foundest philosophy has always taught, is a “spiritual 
 system.” If this be true, then he who formed it and 
 whose presence it reveals, must be spiritual in nature. 
 This throughout is the teaching of the Bible. All re- 
 ligions also have held, however dimly and imperfectly, 
 this view. The African savage worshipping his fetich, 
 worships not the low material object, but the supposed 
 indwelling spirit. And the Greeks, who built splendid 
 altars before the shrine of Zeus, and carved with high- 
 est art the marble images of their gods, bowed not to 
 
These Conceptions Most Effectively Presented 19 
 
 the outer and visible forms, however noble in design 
 and beautiful in execution, but to the personal, that is 
 the spiritual, beings whom they represented. 
 
 We have now stated certain general and essential 
 elements in the teaching of the Bible concerning God. 
 They are not all that we shall find, nor are they the 
 most important and distinctive. With the exception 
 of its strict and lofty monotheism, they do not, as we 
 have seen, belong exclusively to the Bible. But they 
 are throughout presented by it in a far more impressive 
 and effective way than in any philosophy or religion 
 that the world has known. In the Old Testament 
 period the religion had its outward expression. ‘There 
 was a temple and altars and sacrifices and an elaborate 
 ritual. But the emphasis was not even then on these. 
 In the most sacred place, the Holy of Holies, no image 
 of the unseen deity was found, as in other temples, 
 but rather a moral and religious law, expressing the 
 divine will and nature, and addressed to the heart and 
 conscience of mankind, lifting the adoring spirit above 
 the objects and splendors of the material world. 
 
 Let me remind you once more that at present I raise 
 no objection, nor attempt any answer concerning the 
 authorship of the various books of the Bible, nor when 
 they were written, nor whether any of them are essen- 
 tially historical, or altogether or in part fiction. Such 
 questions may be referred to as we proceed; but how- 
 ever it may have come to be, and however we may 
 regard it, the Bible is a fact, just as the works of Plato 
 are a fact, and as such we should investigate it, with- 
 
20 The Biblical Idea of God 
 
 out those presuppositions which antecedently determine 
 our conclusion. If the conclusion lies already in the 
 premises, investigation is useless and a waste of time. 
 But this plain and simple truth is not always recog- 
 nized. Thus the Bible clearly claims to be a self- 
 revelation of God. But by many at the outset, with- 
 out testing this claim by investigation, it is assumed 
 that the claim is false. Thus Kuenen, in his “Religion 
 of Israel,” in the first chapter, claims that this religion 
 is a purely natural, human product, one merely of the 
 religions of the world, “nothing less, but also nothing 
 more.” The Bible, however, as a fact, must declare 
 its own nature. By this I do not mean merely the 
 claims in words of its human authors, although these 
 should not be ignored, and in connection with other 
 things may be of weight and value. But just as some 
 noble cathedral, with lofty roof and pillared aisle, tells 
 its own story, that it was built by some devout and 
 greatly gifted mind for religious uses, so the Bible should 
 be allowed to tell its story by its structure, by its char- 
 acter, by its teaching concerning man and God, and 
 by its power to lift the soul of man to the highest 
 realms of righteousness, of joy, and of peace. 
 
 We find the books of the Bible arranged in a certain 
 order. This order is not always that of their composi- 
 tion. In the New Testament the greater number of 
 Paul’s epistles were written before the gospels were 
 composed. This is also true of some or most of the 
 books of the Old Testament. The grouping has been 
 determined by the nature of their contents. The his- 
 
Time Order of the Books 21 
 
 torical books precede the Psalms and the prophets; 
 and in these the order of composition has not been ob- 
 served. There are early and late Psalms. Isaiah, al- 
 though his prophecy is placed first in the series, was 
 preceded by Amos and Hosea. Jeremiah, who is placed 
 next to Isaiah, did not prophesy until the closing years 
 and downfall of the southern kingdom. All this is, of 
 course, familiar to scholars, but seems to be unknown 
 to the majority of Bible readers, or at least disregarded 
 in considering its teaching. 
 
 In a broad and general way, however, the time order 
 is observed in the arrangement of the books. The Old 
 Testament begins with the creation and ends with the 
 postexilic prophets; just as the New Testament begins 
 with the life of Christ and ends with the Apocalypse, 
 which, however you may interpret it, implies the found- 
 ing and spread of the church, and at the same time has 
 a forward look into the church’s future. 
 
 We shall conduct our investigation, therefore, in ac- 
 cordance with the order of persons and events as the 
 Bible itself presents or, rather, indicates them, for it is 
 from the Bible itself we learn that the order within the 
 main groups is not the order of time. Thus we will 
 study, in the first place, the Biblical idea of God as pre- 
 sented in the primitive and patriarchal periods. Gen- 
 esis, or the book of origins, gives us in the first eleven 
 chapters the account of the primitive period. Then 
 follow the times of the patriarchs, the call and wander- 
 ings of Abraham, the lives of Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph. 
 Then came about four hundred years of silence, broken 
 
22 The Biblical Idea of God 
 
 by the books of Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and 
 Deuteronomy, which contain an account of the bitter 
 Egyptian bondage, and of the birth and leadership and 
 legislation of Moses. 'To these we should add the book 
 of Joshua, which completes the account of the entire 
 period from the leaving Egypt to the conquest and set- 
 tlement of the promised land. Then we will consider 
 the conception of God found in the book of Judges, 
 which tells the story of the years between the death of 
 Joshua and the work of Samuel, the last of that nota- 
 ble series of divinely commissioned rulers of Israel, who 
 kept alive the national and patriotic spirit, and again 
 and again rescued the people from an oppression 
 brought upon them because they forsook the worship 
 of Jehovah and followed other gods. This period, 
 though much longer in time, is in some respects like 
 those few years which have been called the critical 
 period of American history. With a unity constituted 
 only by race, by language, and by religion, the people 
 come by their experiences to feel the need of a more 
 visible and tangible unity centring in the person of a 
 king. Hence their demand for a monarchy which, al- 
 though at first opposed, was yielded to by Samuel. 
 This change of government brings us to the times of 
 the psalmists and prophets, during which there was an 
 impressive and rich development of the idea of God, 
 nobly expressed in the personal experiences of Israel's 
 religious poets and in the messages of warning and 
 condemnation, and also of consolation and hope, of her 
 inspired seers. It was doubtless late in this period, 
 
Tume Order of the Books 23 
 
 perhaps some time after the downfall of the northern 
 kingdom, that the book of Job was written, the great- 
 est book in the literature of the Old Testament, and 
 some would claim in the literature of the world. Then 
 come the exilic and postexilic prophets, and after these 
 perhaps the book of Ecclesiastes, which records the ex- 
 periences of one who sought a satisfactory end in life 
 and found none except in the fear of God and the keep- 
 ing of his commandments, “for this is the whole duty 
 of man” (Eccles. 12:13). Then follows a period of 
 which no canonical book gives an account, but which 
 is made known to some extent by the Apocrypha. 
 
 We turn then to the New Testament, to the teaching 
 of our Lord and his apostles, in which the Scriptural 
 conception of God reaches its complete development 
 and expression. Beyond this nothing has been or can 
 be added. Whatever statements the church has made 
 have only been attempts to formulate and emphasize 
 the facts and truths of Scripture. If the great historic 
 creeds contain additions or modifications or merely 
 philosophic explanations of the Biblical facts and 
 truths, they are not to be accepted as authoritative, 
 constraining belief, but as merely human documents. 
 Neither pope nor cardinals, neither synods nor assem- 
 blies have the right to impose their thought and will. 
 upon the-faith of the Christian church. The Bible, 
 which is addressed to the common understanding and 
 is a self-interpretative book, is the sole and supreme 
 authority. If this were the accepted rule, the unhappy 
 divisions and antagonisms which characterize Chris- 
 
24 The Biblical Idea of God 
 
 tianity to-day would never have existed. The unity of 
 the church would have remained unbroken, centring in 
 a common faith in a common Lord. 
 
 We have thus before us a long course of historic de- 
 velopment, the germs of which lie in a far-distant past, 
 a course full of remarkable events and great personali- 
 ties, whose character and influence have determined 
 the direction which the progressive religious life of man 
 has taken. The central and determining idea of this 
 historic development has been the conception of God 
 revealed in the Bible. All religions, indeed, are con- 
 stituted, are differentiated and distinguished, by the 
 idea of the divine nature and character. So, also, are 
 all philosophies and theologies and creeds. From the 
 lowest fetichism up to the thought of Plato and the 
 teaching of our Lord this idea is central and elemental. 
 Always and everywhere man has been haunted and 
 constrained in action and belief by the thought of God. 
 He cannot escape it. His rational and moral nature 
 compels him to form some conception, however remote 
 from or near the essential truth. He has not reasoned 
 himself into it. It is, in its last analysis, an intuition, 
 an elemental consciousness of another self, standing 
 over against his own finite self, who is to be propitiated, 
 worshipped, obeyed. Therefore atheists are few, and 
 are the results of perverted reasoning, obscuring this 
 deeper conviction native to the soul. Wherever the 
 thought of God which is found in the Bible is made 
 clearly known, and in the concrete forms the Bible 
 uses, there the forces of unbelief give way. 
 
Modern Criticism 25 
 
 We live in times of minute and highly developed 
 scholarship. Nature, man, the Bible are subjected to 
 microscopic and extended investigation. There are in- 
 tense conflicts, as there ever have been, and many the- 
 ories once held as truths are being flung upon the 
 scrap-heap. As regards the Bible, the sphere and aims 
 of investigation are materially changed. Much of the 
 scholarship is critical, not constructive. It looks upon 
 the Bible largely, if not exclusively, as merely the lit- 
 erature of the Hebrew people. It is not so much the 
 contents as the form and structure, the sources and put- 
 ting together of the various books, that are being inves- 
 tigated. Once it was what the Bible taught concern- 
 ing God and man, their nature and relation to each 
 other, and the duty and destiny of man that was 
 sought for in its pages, and out of this teaching the 
 great ecumenical creeds were formed. But now the 
 questions are: Who wrote Genesis, and when and how 
 was it written? Who wrote Isaiah? How many 
 Isaiahs were there? How many strands have been 
 wrought into the Bible narratives, and what are their 
 distinctive characteristics, and from what part of the 
 Hebrew people did they come? How many redactors, 
 or editors, have there been, and how much did these 
 add or take away? How much is fact, and how much 
 is fiction, and how can fact and fiction be distinguished 
 and untwined from this many-colored and twisted and 
 even tangled thread of narrative? I do not deny that 
 such questions are interesting and indeed important, 
 in so far as they affect our belief in the truthfulness of 
 
26 The Biblical Idea of God 
 
 the records of the Bible and of its claim to be a revela- 
 tion of the living God. But relatively they are super- 
 ficial, in so far as they do not concern the solid and 
 essential contents of this great book. Let scholars de- 
 cide them as they may, I am confident that no de- 
 cision will or can destroy the faith of the, Christian 
 church in the essential truth of the Bible and in its 
 divine origin and inspiration. This faith has endured 
 the trying test of centuries and the assaults of much 
 scholarly unbelief; and, although not a few may fear 
 that at last modern scholarship has given it a mortal 
 blow, let us be assured that the scholars who defend it 
 are as numerous and as well equipped and thorough- 
 going as those who would destroy it. 
 
 Yet such devout and conservative scholars seem not 
 so well known to the general public as are those whose 
 work is destructive. For to destroy is ever more at- 
 tractive than to build up. War, with its wide-spread 
 desolations, its fearful passions, its awful waste of hu- 
 man life, its agonies and woe, awakens an intenser in- 
 terest than the silent forces of peace which create our 
 nobler civilizations and make nations really great. The 
 time will come, however, predicted long centuries ago 
 by Isaiah, Israel’s greatest prophet—nay, we can al- 
 ready see the faintly gleaming light of its gracious 
 dawn—when all constructive agencies will have a 
 deeper interest, a more effective power, and it is to the 
 Bible that we shall owe this profound change in the 
 minds of men. Especially shall we owe it to that 
 manifestation of the divine character which is found in 
 
Modern Criticism 27 
 
 the Bible alone and which reached its culmination in 
 Him at whose birth the angelic choirs sang: 
 
 “Glory to God in the highest, 
 And on earth peace among men 
 in whom he is well pleased.” 
 (Luke 2: 14.) 
 
 Hence, the present-day destructive criticism of the 
 Bible, although so prevalent, so subtle, so apparently 
 scientific in method, so microscopic in investigation, so 
 learned, so imposing in the authority of great names, 
 so attractive, so seemingly successful in securing its re- 
 sults, so often arrogant in its claims, is destined, in so 
 far as it rests on grounds subversive of Christian faith, 
 to pass into that oblivion where lie already so many 
 vaunted views, which were in conflict not merely with 
 the Bible, but with man’s essentially religious nature 
 and his deepest moral needs. 
 
 But not only are questions of authorship, and date, 
 and intermingled narrative of fact and fiction, and the 
 various sources from which these came those that to- 
 day Biblical criticism mainly considers, but there is a 
 distinctive spirit with which it carries on its investiga- 
 tions that we should not fail to notice. While not 
 true of all, it is true of far too many that the Bible is 
 approached and treated with that cold and merely in- 
 tellectual interest with which the physician dissects a 
 corpus vile. But when the knife has done its work and 
 instead of a symmetrical form there remain only sep- 
 arate masses of related fragments, these neither consti- 
 
28 The Biblical Idea of God 
 
 tute nor explain man. For man is “a living soul,” and 
 it is not in the laboratory, with its merely analytic 
 spirit and quest, that you shall find him, but rather in 
 the shop, in the mart, in the thronged street; out in 
 the broad fields beneath the bending skies; in national 
 organizations; in society and in the home; in his liter- 
 atures and arts; in all forms that express his thought 
 and aspiration, his faith and hope, his sorrow and his 
 joy, his religious beliefs and his moral codes. Here and 
 not elsewhere you shall find man, and here he can be 
 known only with that spirit which is not coldly critical 
 but warm with sympathy and love. These profound 
 emotions, out of which high aims are born and which 
 give nobility and color to human life, are the essential 
 conditions which enable us to understand and appre- 
 ciate the careers of such men as Abraham and David, 
 Moses and Isaiah, John and Paul. Physical science re- 
 quires the discerning and calculating intellect alone, 
 but the science of man, the science which would attain 
 to a knowledge of his moral and religious nature and of 
 the God whom the Bible reveals, while requiring no 
 less of intellectual power and apprehension, requires 
 much more the deeper perceptions of the heart if we 
 are to reach its essential principles and comprehend its 
 distinctive truths. These principles and truths are 
 neither found in such completeness nor expressed with 
 such transforming power in any other book, and they 
 have their centre and their personal expression in its 
 conception of the living God. In this lies its influence 
 in the lives of countless numbers of individual men and 
 
Expressed in a Gospel 29 
 
 in the changing character of the historic development 
 of the modern world. The moral maxims of Confu- 
 cius, the character and philosophic teaching of Gau- 
 tama Buddha, the claims and religion of Mohammed, 
 have indeed determined the character and controlled 
 the actions of unnumbered millions of our race, but no 
 other book, no other moral code, no other religion has 
 so appealed to and awakened what is noblest in man, 
 has so aroused his distinctive nature and lifted him to 
 such high planes of duty and devotion as has the Bible. 
 For in its essential nature it 1s not a philosophy nor a 
 law, but a gospel, a glad tidings concerning God, de- 
 claring his gracious attitude toward this lost and sin- 
 ning world and setting forth in historic terms what he 
 himself has done for its redemption. 
 
 Thus, when Paul in his epistle to the Romans defines 
 this gospel it is by the word power. The gospel is not 
 merely a moral message, a statement of the highest 
 standard of human duty, but, to use his own form of 
 words, it is “the power of God unto salvation to 
 every one that believeth” (Romans 1:16). According 
 to this statement, the source of this power is God, its 
 end is salvation, its condition is faith. The form which 
 this divine power takes is a word—the word of God, 
 that is, the Biblical idea of God expressed in spiritual, 
 concrete, personal terms, culminating in one supreme 
 personality, the Lord Jesus Christ, who according to 
 the Apostle John was the Eternal Word, both human 
 and divine, both living and life-giving, whose nature 
 and work the profoundest minds cannot exhaust, and 
 
30 The Biblical Idea of God 
 
 yet whose love and sympathy the simplest can under- 
 stand. 
 
 If our study shall lead to the clearer unfolding and 
 more comprehensive grasp of this historic Word, if it 
 shall bring to us a broader view of the divine charac- 
 ter, and a deeper faith in its self-revelation, it will not 
 be in vain. For what man most needs is to have a 
 clearer understanding and a more abiding conviction . 
 of the truth of the Biblical idea of God. 
 
II 
 THE BIBLICAL IDEA OF GOD 
 
 IN THE PRIMITIVE AND PATRIARCHAL PERIODS, AS 
 SET FORTH IN GENESIS 
 
 In the first lecture we have dealt with certain gen- 
 eral conceptions, viz., that the Biblical idea of God is 
 concrete in its presentation, personal, moral, spiritual, 
 monotheistic, which conceptions are to be considered 
 more at length and confirmed by the detailed investi- 
 gation which is to follow. We are now to study this 
 idea as it is presented in the book of Genesis. This 
 gives an account of the primitive and patriarchal peri- 
 ods ending with the descent of Jacob and his family 
 into Egypt and the death of Joseph. 
 
 The primitive period opens with the account of crea- 
 tion and ends with the genealogical record leading up 
 to the call of Abraham. This account of creation has 
 long been a subject of controversy. Certain natural 
 sciences have been arrayed against it. Astronomy, 
 geology, anthropology, ethnology, it is claimed, tell a 
 different story. Some of these conflicts have either 
 passed away, or only their lingering echoes are still 
 heard. At present the leading controversy seems to 
 be concerning the literary character and historical ori- 
 gin of this account. Who wrote it? When and where 
 and for what purpose was it written? Is it myth, or 
 
 legend, or a strictly accurate description of how the 
 31 
 
32 The Bablical Idea of God 
 
 heavens and earth, the animals and man came to be? 
 Did Moses write it, or is it an account by some late 
 writer living in Babylonia, and therefore determined 
 and colored by the religious conceptions of that coun- 
 try and age? Are there two accounts of creation, the 
 first ending with the third verse of the second chapter, 
 and indicated and distinguished by the names of God 
 used in each, as well as by other criteria; and do these 
 two accounts agree or disagree? These are the ques- 
 tions raised by the literary and historical criticism of 
 to-day. The opposing views may be characterized in 
 general as the radical and conservative. In their ex- 
 treme forms the one denies altogether any truth in the 
 creation story, the other accepts it in the most literal 
 sense. But such sharp antagonisms often lose sight 
 of important truths which may be discerned and held 
 without adopting either extreme. That the Bible ac- 
 count of the origin of the world contains such truths 
 cannot well be denied; and it is not with the source and 
 outward form of the narrative that we are here espe- 
 cially concerned, but with its essential contents. What 
 does it teach concerning God? That is the main and 
 most important question, a question too often disre- 
 garded in controversies concerning days, and the order 
 of succession of various existences, and the length of 
 time since man appeared upon the earth. As a witty 
 and eloquent minister of the gospel once put it: “The 
 garden of the Lord has often obscured the Lord of the 
 garden.” 
 
 We take the Bible as we find it, without prejudg- 
 
In the Primitive Period 33 
 
 ment, whether critical or traditional, and in reading 
 the account of creation inquire, first of all, what was 
 evidently the leading aim of its human author? Was 
 it scientific or religious? Was it to describe how the 
 world was made or was it to fix attention on the Maker? 
 In other words, was God the principal subject, or was 
 the description of the various and successive steps in 
 the creative process the principal subject? That it was 
 not the latter seems to be clearly evident from the brief 
 and comprehensive statements which make up the 
 account. 
 
 The natural sciences deal in precise and definite de- 
 tails. 'They seek each link in the chain of physical 
 causation. These causes are also effects of antecedent 
 causes, and their quest ends where that of religion be- 
 gins. For religion seeks and affirms the one infinite, 
 universal, and personal cause of all that has come to 
 be. It concerns itself with God and regards his works 
 not by themselves alone, to be explored and explained 
 by a strictly scientific method and principles, but as 
 disclosing him. Here psalmist and prophet are better 
 teachers than those who work in laboratories built for 
 physical research. 
 
 That the account of creation, while religious in char- 
 acter, is not opposed to the observations and just con- 
 clusions of the natural sciences, is held by scholars who 
 are familiar with both natural science and the Bible. 
 A purely scientific account anticipating by thousands 
 of years not only the facts disclosed by modern re- 
 search, but also the form and method in which these are 
 
34 The Biblical Idea of God 
 
 presented, would have been beyond the comprehension 
 of the men of the age in which the account was writ- 
 ten. As it is, however, it fits any age; the simplest 
 minds can grasp its essential truth, and men of great 
 scientific attainments have been impressed by its 
 beauty and power, as of a noble poem, whose theme is 
 the origin of the world. In its main outline it is in 
 agreement with the story science tells. There was 
 first a formless state of matter, “the earth was waste 
 and void’’—words which well express the condition of 
 fire-mist out of which the vast systems of sun and star 
 are said to have been evolved. Then in orderly suc- 
 cession came light, and the firmament, or expanse of 
 heaven, the separation of land and water, the appear- 
 ance of vegetation, of the sun and moon and stars, of 
 fish and fowl, and, last of all, of the higher animals and 
 man. Here, then, is a gradual and progressive devel- 
 opment from formless and inanimate matter up to 
 living and rational existence, the bright consummate 
 flower of all. 
 
 The only apparent conflict with the conclusions of 
 natural science is the appearance on the fourth day of 
 the sun and moon and stars, which such science teaches 
 preceded the existence of the earth and its inhabitants. 
 But, however we may attempt to resolve this conflict, 
 and such attempts are made, however conclusive or in- 
 conclusive they may be, the fact remains that in the 
 large outline there is agreement. But even if in cer- 
 tain portions of the two accounts, the Biblical and the 
 scientific, there is want of harmony, it is a grave mis- 
 
In the Primitive Period 35 
 
 take to rest on this the essential truth of the Biblical 
 account. For the essential truth concerns God, his na- 
 ture and character, and his relationship to the world. 
 To the natural sciences the main subject is the crea- 
 tion ; but to the religion of the Bible the main subject 
 is the Creator. The emphasis is upon who made the 
 world, not upon how it was made. This has been too 
 often disregarded by both friend and foe of the Bible. 
 But the word God stands out in the account as if it 
 were written in largest letters of living light. It occurs 
 no less than thirty-five times in the thirty-four verses 
 contained in the account, and each time it is the sub- 
 ject of a verb expressing some particular action. God 
 created, God said, God saw, God divided, God called, 
 God made, God set in the firmament, God blessed, 
 God finished his work and rested: these are the terms 
 used constantly throughout this brief account. They 
 fix attention on him more especially than on his work; 
 and the monotheism, which is clearly evident and 
 denied by none, is in striking and decisive contrast 
 with the prevailing polytheism of the ancient world. 
 It has been thought by some that the main purpose 
 of the author was to teach and emphasize the mono- 
 theistic view. In the opening words of his brief yet sub- 
 lime statement he says that in the beginning God al- 
 ready is, saying it by implication as if it were undoubted 
 truth, and that all other existences came into being 
 through his creative power. But in the Babylonian 
 mythology the gods are begotten of chaos and dark 
 night. They do not have eternal being. This mono- 
 
36 The Biblical Idea of God 
 
 theism, even if the account were written as late as the 
 Babylonian captivity, is most remarkable, however you 
 may account for it. That among the babel of many 
 voices uttering praises in many temples to many finite 
 gods there should be heard one clear voice affirming 
 the one infinite and ever-living God, would seem to be 
 alone rightly explained by the self-revelation of that 
 supreme God to which the Bible ascribes it. 
 
 Moreover, in considering the narrative of creation, it 
 should be noted that there is no attempt to describe 
 the method by which God works. Such words as cre- 
 ated, made, said are left unexplained. The process is 
 undefined. We are not told whether creation was in- 
 stantaneous or prolonged. There must have been an 
 instant when things began, but subsequent to that the 
 account describes six days of work, whether ordinary 
 days of twenty-four hours each is meant by the author, 
 or long periods of time, is a matter of conjecture; and 
 whether there is continuous genetic evolution or a 
 series of distinct creations is a question concerning 
 which even conservative scholars are not agreed. It is 
 a fact, however, that men have read into this account 
 their own meanings, and it is mainly over these that 
 controversies have arisen. Thus, as regards the crea- 
 tion of man it seems to have been assumed (and this 
 apparently has been held to be the orthodox interpre- 
 tation) that invisible hands fashioned an image from 
 the clay, and that invisible lips breathed into it the 
 breath of life. But this is to form a mental picture 
 which the account does not warrant, a picture taken 
 
In the Primitive Period 37 
 
 from the sculptor’s workshop. God’s method of work- 
 ing, it may rightly be assumed, is not man’s method. 
 If we wish to know what that method is, we should go 
 to God’s workshop, wherein he is still at work—in all 
 life and growth, in tree and flower, in beast and bird, 
 in ocean and stream, in sun and star. Hence, while 
 the Bible teaches that he is the originator and maker, 
 the student of nature, whether devout or undevout, 
 whether believer in the Bible or unbeliever, is yet by 
 sincere and patient investigation of the forms and forces 
 of the world, by discovery of past and present facts and 
 of the dominating and guiding laws which these facts 
 disclose, showing us how God has worked and still is 
 working in the creation and sustaining of the world 
 and man. Therefore the investigations of the student 
 of the Bible and of the student of nature should not 
 lead to conflicting results. They are on different 
 planes, and hence seek different ends and different an- 
 swers to their quest. The one teaches who originated 
 the world and man, with only large and comprehensive 
 outline of the method; the other endeavors to tell us 
 how with precise and minute statement of the various 
 steps in the age-long process. 
 
 Seeking thus to clear the field of all unnecessary con- 
 troversy and holding that truth in one sphere cannot 
 be in conflict with truth in another, let us inquire what 
 is the idea of God which evidently appears in the earli- 
 est chapters of Genesis. It is, as we have said, the 
 -monotheistic idea. The world and man owe their ori- 
 gin to one God and one only. This conception is fun- 
 
38 The Biblical Idea of God 
 
 damental in the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures and 
 among all the religions of the world is found in them 
 alone. Mohammedanism, it is true, is monotheistic, 
 but Mohammed, no doubt, derived his view from the 
 Hebrew and Christian faith, which in his time was 
 known in Arabia. Account for this pure monotheism 
 of the Bible how you.may, make it the result of a long 
 development from some lower and debased conception, 
 the earliest form of which is lost in the obscurity of pre- 
 historic time, or conceive of it as the primitive form of 
 religious belief, yet the fact remains that it is the dis- 
 tinctive teaching of the Bible and appears in its earli- 
 est records. 
 
 Thus the Bible begins where the speculations of 
 philosophy and science end. These cannot rest in the 
 multiplicity of things, but seek a common ground of 
 which all forms and forces are the manifold expression, 
 not a few conceiving of it as impersonal in its nature. 
 But the Biblical idea in its initial statement being 
 purely monotheistic is also purely personal. God is rep- 
 resented not merely as the sum of being nor as the in- 
 finite and universal energy, without self-consciousness, 
 and working from interior necessity, but as intelligent 
 and volitional. Creation is the exercise of his will and 
 is wrought according to a plan. Heaven and earth are 
 the eternal thought of God expressed in forms of space 
 and time and linked chain of cause and effect, and are 
 accomplishing his purpose. 
 
 This monotheistic and therefore personal idea of 
 God is also demanded by the profoundest thought and 
 
In the Primitive Period 39 
 
 insistent needs of the human soul. The greatest think- 
 ers and teachers, even those without the range of the 
 Bible’s influence, such as Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, 
 have nearly approached it, although not quite attain- 
 ing to the full and pure conception of the Bible. You 
 may call it anthropomorphic, if you will, that is, think- 
 ing of God after the form of the inner nature of man, 
 or, in other words, deriving the conception of the divine 
 nature from man’s consciousness of his own rational 
 nature; and because thus derived you may reject it. 
 But on this ground you could reject all kinds of knowl- 
 edge; for man constructs his idea of the material world 
 not merely from impressions made on the senses, but 
 from elemental and necessary forms of thought which 
 his own rational nature gives. As Browning finely 
 states in his “Paracelsus’’:. 
 
 “Truth is within ourselves; it takes no rise 
 From outward things, whatever you may believe: 
 There is an inmost centre in us all, 
 
 Where truth abides in fullness; and around, 
 Wall upon wall, the gross flesh hems it in, 
 This perfect clear perception—which is truth. 
 ... to know 
 
 Rather consists in opening out a way 
 Whence the imprisoned splendor may escape, 
 Than in effecting entrance for a light 
 Supposed to be without.” 
 
 (‘‘Paracelsus,” page 27.) 
 
 The conceptions of being, force, cause, time, space, 
 —as has been shown by the clearest thinkers, by those 
 
40 The Biblical Idea of God 
 
 who have most deeply explored and made known the 
 workings of the human mind—are not given to us 
 from without, but arise from within. Since outward 
 experience is not their source but only the occasion and 
 condition which draws them forth, it acts upon the 
 mind as the developing fluid acts upon the sensitive 
 photographic plate» The image is there, but this is 
 needed to bring it into view. Natural science were im- 
 possible, then, without those preconceptions, those nec- 
 essary and universal ideas, those primal truths, 
 
 “Which, be they what they may, 
 Are yet the fountain light of all our day 
 Are yet a master light of all our seeing,’ 
 
 which give form and coherence to what the eye per- 
 ceives, the ear hears, the touch discerns, of the mani- 
 fold objects of the outer world. Natural science, there- 
 fore, as science, that is, as ordered knowledge, is in this 
 sense anthropomorphic. Its world is constructed and 
 conceived in accordance with the thought forms which 
 the human mind itself supplies. But these give us, or 
 constitute, the ground on which rests our conviction 
 of its truths. Without these elemental and necessary 
 forms of thought our world would be one not of law, 
 but of confusion, and all ordered knowledge would be 
 impossible. 
 
 The doctrine of evolution shows that personality is 
 the highest form of being. The long, progressive proc- 
 ess of genetic development, from the primal fire-mist, 
 
In the Primitive Period 4] 
 
 as some teach, up to now, has issued in a rational moral 
 being, 
 “Man, the consummation of this scheme 
 Of being, the completion of this sphere 
 Of life.” 
 (‘‘Paracelsus,”’ page 145.) 
 
 Beyond him, so far as regards this earth, there is 
 no indication of a further advance. Any.finite being 
 of a different and higher kind it seems impossible to 
 conceive. Indeed, much of philosophical speculation 
 makes no attempt to conceive of a different and higher 
 form, but at this point reverses the evolutionary proc- 
 ess and turns back the line of descent toward the origi- 
 nal fire-mist whence it started, thus conceiving the 
 universe to be an immense self-moving clock which 
 throughout eternal hours winds itself up and then un- 
 winds itself, this upward and downward movement go- 
 ing on successively forever. 
 
 But leaving such subtle speculations to the philoso- 
 phers, the evident fact is that the Bible assumes per- 
 sonality to be the highest form of being, ascribing it to 
 God as well as man. It should be noted, however, that 
 while, in the account of creation, intelligence and crea- 
 tive power, working toward a preconceived end, are 
 ascribed to God, there is no direct ascription to him of 
 a moral nature except as it 1s implied in the statement 
 that man was made in the image of God; for this state- 
 ment cannot refer to anything but man’s spiritual na- 
 ture. For while the material world is one of law there 
 is in it no moral law. For moral law implies volition 
 
42 The Biblical Idea of God 
 
 and freedom. Unless man can determine himself and — 
 his actions with reference to ideal moral ends he is not 
 in the full sense a person; he is a thing, and the law of 
 things is the law of necessity. Here force, not will, 
 works unconscious of its ends, unless you conceive of 
 force as the unchanging expression of the Divine will. 
 The student of nature must begin with the moral 
 world, and from that go to the physical, or he will gain 
 no knowledge of the meaning of that imperative word 
 ought. He will only be impressed by a sense of must. 
 It is not strange, therefore, that so many of our nat- 
 uralists are necessitarians. Their thoughts are sub- 
 dued and colored by the material in which they work. 
 Personality, indeed, in its complete sense implies a 
 moral nature, but, as I have said, this does not imme- 
 diately appear in the account of creation. It is not 
 until the second chapter of Genesis, and throughout 
 those that follow, that the moral nature of God is dis- 
 tinctly expressed. In these man as a rational and 
 moral creature, the height and goal of the whole crea- 
 tion, becomes the leading subject. He is placed in the 
 edenic garden, to till its soil and enjoy its fruits, but he 
 is under a command. There is a prohibition. The 
 fruit of “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” 
 he is not to eat. Good and evil are to be understood 
 as moral good and evil, not physical. This prohibition 
 is sanctioned by a penalty, that of death. But tempta- 
 tion comes, disobedience follows, the awful sense of 
 sin and guilt is awakened, fear of the divine presence 
 ensues, and man hides himself in the depths of the 
 
In the Primitive Period 43 
 
 garden. But the divine voice is heard announcing the 
 infliction of the penalty; man has lost his childlike in- 
 nocence and dies morally; and the forces which result 
 in physical death begin their inevitable work. He is 
 cast out of the garden, where happiness and’ peace 
 dwelt, and becomes subject henceforth to toil, to suffer- 
 ing, to woe, and to the abiding sense of estrangement 
 between himself and God. Then there is the account 
 of the birth of children, of the beginning of envy, of 
 hatred, and of a brother’s murder, of the curse upon 
 the murderer, of his fear and flight into the desolate 
 land of wandering. 
 
 How vivid, how dramatic, how true is this account 
 to the working of the conscience oppressed by the ago- 
 nizing sense of sin! It is a tragedy which no dramatist 
 has ever equalled. All the essential elements of trans- 
 gression, of terror, and of woe are here. The stage is 
 the world with heaven and hell in the dark background 
 and the actors are mankind. Whether you interpret 
 it as literal history, or myth, or legend, or as a pictorial 
 presentation of man’s passing from a state of mere in- 
 nocence to one of moral apprehension, you must ac- 
 knowledge that it expresses in historic form the inner 
 state of the human soul when it is conscious of having 
 chosen moral evil instead of moral good. The facts of 
 life confirm it in every point, for every man in his in- 
 dividual experience passes from the edenic state of 
 childhood to the bitter consciousness of sin and guilt 
 and shame. 
 
 Throughout all this account of the command, of the 
 
44 The Brblical Idea of God 
 
 temptation and the fall, there appears in the clearest 
 light the moral element in the Biblical idea of a per- 
 sonal God. This should be distinctly noted, for this is 
 distinctively characteristic of the Bible. For it is not 
 the moral attributes of the divine nature that science 
 and philosophy dwell upon and illustrate, even when 
 there is belief in sucha God. Intelligence, power, omni- 
 presence, omniscience, infinite and eternal existence— 
 these mainly occupy the thoughts and awaken the awe 
 of those who seek to know God merely through nature 
 and man. But the Bible addresses itself directly to 
 man’s moral and religious nature by its presentation of 
 a moral God whose ever-insistent law is moral. Hence 
 it awakens a more abiding interest and a deeper awe 
 than philosophy and natural science ever can. Paul 
 states the character and aim of his ministry to be “not 
 walking in craftiness nor handling the word of God 
 deceitfully, but by the manifestation of the truth com- 
 mending ourselves to every man’s conscience in the 
 sight of God” (II Cor. 4:2). This is the profound 
 note, struck from the beginning, when man, not the 
 earth and its products, becomes the leading object of 
 interest in the sacred narrative. 
 
 But man is not left to the destructive agencies and 
 consequences which his transgression brought upon 
 him. Dark as was the future, a ray of light shone 
 upon it, a ray which was to broaden and brighten 
 throughout the centuries to come. If there is sin and 
 shame there is not the agony of despair. Righteous- 
 ness and its penalties exist, but athwart the lowering 
 
In the Primitive Period on S65 
 
 skies gleams the light of grace. The seed of the woman 
 is to bruise the serpent’s head (Gen. 3:15). This is 
 the prot-evangelium, the first prophetic note of the gos- 
 pel of redemption. It is faint, indeed, and enigmatical 
 in form, but to us its significance is clear. It indicates 
 that other attribute of the divine nature which no 
 other religion so confidently affirms, the attribute of 
 love, which is at last to lead erring man back to right- 
 eousness and peace. 
 
 The chapters which follow the account of the trans- 
 gression and expulsion from the garden are mainly con- 
 cerned with the growth of moral evil, which at last 
 reaches a condition described by that impressive state- 
 ment, a statement disclosing a profounder and more 
 exact psychology than that taught in the schools. 
 “And Jehovah saw that the wickedness of man was 
 great and that every imagination of the thoughts of his 
 heart was only evil continually” (Gen. 6:5). Here the 
 imagination, where thoughts take form and vivid pres- 
 entation, and the heart, the seat of emotion, the 
 sphere and source of all those forces which determine 
 and direct volition, are made the centre of man’s moral 
 life. This conception of man is held to throughout 
 the Bible. He is not merely a part of material nature 
 but a spiritual intelligence standing upon and above it. 
 Man’s sin and shame is that he has fallen below his real 
 self and plane of being, and fixes his desires upon things 
 that cannot satisfy, upon the creature rather than the 
 Creator. 
 
 Reaching thus a description of man’s moral state we 
 
 t 
 
46 Lhe Biblical Idea of God 
 
 have an account of the penalty it incurs, the almost 
 universal destruction of human life by the waters of 
 the flood. Whether this account is history or myth, is 
 fact or fiction, whether it is made up of two separate 
 and traditional accounts so clumsily pieced together 
 that the line of demarcation can easily be traced, or is 
 one consistent story, preserved by those who witnessed 
 and shared in the events, “the log-book of Noah,” as 
 an eminent naturalist and also student of the Bible has 
 called it—these, as I have said, are questions beside our 
 present purpose. There are not wanting many schol- 
 ars of high standing who see no reason for rejecting it 
 as a record of what once occurred, accounts of which 
 have come down in the traditions of other peoples be- 
 sides the Hebrews. But our purpose here is to point 
 out and emphasize the fact that the Biblical account of 
 the flood is written from a purely moral and religious 
 point of view. Other questions, whether relevant or 
 irrelevant, should not obscure this fact. We find the 
 same pure monotheism, the same personal conception, 
 the same essentially moral character of God and his in- 
 sistence on the supremacy of moral law, before which 
 physical law shrinks into comparative insignificance, 
 such as we have found in the accounts preceding it. 
 Righteousness is an elemental attribute of the divine 
 character, expressed in command and penalty, but no 
 less elemental is the attribute of grace. 
 
 Shining across the o’erarching heavens, upon which 
 the storm-clouds may still have lingered, was the bow 
 of promise. Noah and his family had often seen and 
 
In the Primitive Period 47 
 
 admired its beauty, for it is the effect of laws which 
 have existed from the earth’s beginning. But now it 
 received a new significance. It became the symbol 
 that never again should such destruction come upon 
 the earth. As Noah and his family, therefore, looked 
 upon it they could go forth with hope to the repeo- 
 pling and reconstruction of a perished world, sus- 
 tained by the faith that God is not only just but also 
 merciful. 
 
 Here, then, we have presented in these brief eleven 
 chapters of primitive history, in unmistakable terms, 
 in concrete historic form, in a record of persons and 
 events, two essential conceptions in the Biblical idea of 
 God. Just as often, in the opening notes of a sym- 
 phony there is given in briefest terms the musical 
 theme which the measures that follow elaborate in 
 various complicated forms, so here righteousness and 
 grace, justice and mercy sound clearly and harmoni- 
 ously forth, attributes of the divine character which 
 seem to some at times in conflict, as they consider 
 God’s government of the world, but which emerge at 
 last, when revelation is complete, in a final and abid- 
 ing harmony in the cross of Jesus Christ. 
 
 We pass on now to consider the patriarchal period, 
 which begins with the call of Abraham. Between this 
 and the primitive period there is an interval of we 
 know not how long a time, for the chronology is un- 
 certain. Formerly it was assumed that the genealogi- 
 cal records between Adam and Abraham gave immedi- 
 ately successive generations. Upon this assumption 
 
48 The Boblical Idea of God 
 
 Archbishop Usher’s chronology, placed in the margin 
 of King James’s version, was founded. But the method 
 of the Bible historians seems to be indicated by the 
 genealogy of our Lord given in the gospels, which, com- 
 pared with the Old Testament, omits a number of gen- 
 erations. Archeological discoveries in Egypt and 
 Babylonia, also, which disclose a highly developed civ- 
 ilization whose origin is lost in the mists of prehistoric 
 time, but which, in an advanced state, can apparently 
 be traced back to seven or eight thousand years B. C., 
 as well as the remains of man and his implements which 
 have been dug up in Europe and America, clearly in- 
 dicate that there was a much greater lapse of time than 
 was once supposed between the advent of man upon 
 the earth and the days of Abraham. Hence, the late 
 Revised Versions, both English and American, omit 
 the chronology of Usher. 
 
 This lapse of time is variously estimated. Some 
 make it consist of hundreds of thousands of years. 
 But such estimates rest on few and uncertain data, 
 and seem to be largely the product of imagination. A 
 sane and careful observer, who was an eminent geolo- 
 gist, the late Professor Frederick Wright, in his book 
 “The Antiquity of Man,” after considering all avail- 
 able facts, comes to the conclusion that man appeared 
 upon the earth not more than about fifteen thousand 
 years ago. When we consider that the advocates of 
 a much longer time differ among themselves, in their 
 estimates, to the extent of even many hundreds of 
 thousands of years, we are less inclined to accept their 
 
In the Patriarchal Period 49 
 
 statements, resting as they appear so largely to do 
 upon unproved assumptions rather than on facts. 
 
 With Abraham begins a clearer and fuller disclosure 
 of the nature and character of God. Hitherto the man- 
 ifestations have been less defined and more infrequent. 
 The primitive period was the early dawn of God’s 
 self-revelation. A few stars shone here and there. A 
 few rays were brightening with promise on the east- 
 ern horizon. But now the light grows stronger and 
 gives greater assurance of the splendor of the coming 
 day. 
 
 Abraham is a believer in the one supreme God, El- 
 Elyon, “God most high, possessor of heaven and 
 earth,” to use his own expressive words. He has been 
 called the first great monotheist, standing large and 
 distinct against the background of ancient history. 
 But this is doubtful. The Biblical account does not 
 sustain it. Noah is represented as a worshipper of one 
 God. It is true, however, according to Joshua in his 
 final charge to the children of Israel (Joshua 24: 2), 
 that the ancestors of Abraham, including even Terah, 
 his father, were polytheists, serving other gods than 
 Jehovah. It is a fair conclusion, therefore, that Abra- 
 ham was brought up in this belief and worshipped his 
 father’s gods. We may picture him, then, in his early 
 life, offering his prayers and sacrifices at the altars and 
 contemplating with religious awe the temples of the 
 city sacred to the Moon-God, whose remains still lie 
 beside the Euphrates River. But when he left Ur of 
 the Chaldees on his long migrations he was seventy-five 
 
50 The Biblical Idea of God 
 
 years old and evidently was then a worshipper of Jeho- 
 vah. How or when the great change in his belief took 
 place we are not told. That there was an earlier mon- 
 otheism, taught in the religious schools of Babylonia, 
 from which the polytheism prevalent in the time of 
 Abraham was a falling away and degradation, is held 
 by some. If this be true, then there were not wanting 
 external influences in his time which may help to ac- 
 count for his monotheistic belief. But according to 
 the Bible history such influences alone were insufficient. 
 It distinctly teaches that the faith of Abraham was 
 the result of God’s self-revelation. He was the sub- 
 ject of an immediate divine call. This call involved 
 two essential elements; it was a command and also a 
 promise. The command was to leave his early home 
 and journey to a land to which he would be divinely 
 led. The promise was threefold, viz.: that he, although 
 at that time childless, should have descendants as in- 
 numerable as the sands of the sea and the stars of the 
 midnight sky; that they should possess the land to 
 which he was led; and, most significant of all, that in 
 him and his seed should all the families of the earth be 
 blessed. Just what form that blessing should take is 
 not stated. It is undefined. Its full and precise sig- 
 nificance was to be gradually revealed throughout suc- 
 ceeding centuries of historic events and by prophetic 
 messengers divinely sent. 
 
 In full or in part this promise is given to Abraham 
 seven times in the brief record of his life. Beginning 
 with his call it is repeated at every distinct epoch of his 
 
In the Patriarchal Period 5I 
 
 career: when he reached Canaan; after his separation 
 from Lot; after his defeat of the Eastern kings; when 
 the covenant of circumcision was established; just be- 
 fore the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah; and at 
 the offering of Isaac. To it also Abraham refers when 
 he sends his servant to obtain a wife for Isaac. All 
 this indicates how prominent the divine promise was 
 in the mind and life of the great patriarch. It explains 
 his career, it determines his character; it becomes the 
 supreme and guiding object of his faith. It is the 
 golden key which unlocks the mysteries of the historic 
 Revelation. Fling it away, or bury it beneath the re- 
 sults of a rationalistic and radical criticism, and you 
 cannot understand God’s dealings not only with the 
 Hebrew people but with the peoples of the world. Ex- 
 cept for the promise made to Abraham, Old Testament 
 and New would in essential meaning be unrelated 
 books. The Old closes with announcement of its ful- 
 filment in the sending of the personal Messiah (see 
 Mal. 3:1; 4:5). The New opens, after long years of 
 silence, with references to the promise of his coming 
 (see Luke 1:17, 55, 70, 73, 76). Mary, the mother of 
 our Lord, ends her song of praise with celebrating the 
 “mercy (as he spake unto our fathers) toward Abra- 
 ham and his seed for ever” and Zacharias, in his words 
 of blessing, announces the mission of his son, John the 
 Baptist, as the fulfilment of what the prophets of Israel 
 taught, and of the oath sworn to Abraham. Our Lord, 
 also, in his teaching links himself and his work again 
 and again with this prophetic past of promise, and the 
 
52 The Biblical Idea of God 
 
 Apostle Paul builds upon it his great argument for a 
 justifying faith. 
 
 Thus the entire Bible is but the announcement and 
 fulfilment of God’s purpose and promise of world re- 
 demption. By this the Biblical idea of his nature and 
 character is determined and expressed. Grace and 
 mercy, which is grace in exercise, are its essential ele- 
 ments. ‘T'o those who do not apprehend this the Bible 
 is a sealed and strange book. To them the persons 
 and events, which stand out so vividly and in such 
 lifelike form on its pages, will have no vital relation- 
 ship to one another. They will be like the planets of 
 the midnight sky, whose mysterious motions no astron- 
 omer completely understood, nor could understand, 
 until Copernicus pointed to the sun as the central and 
 controlling orb. Then every planet was seen to move 
 in its proper cycle, and the solar system was compre- 
 hended as a harmonious whole. So it is with the 
 promise of a moral redemption. It shines as central 
 and controlling in the Bible’s system of Revelation, 
 and discloses the essential significance of the Biblical 
 idea of God. 
 
 Let us pause now for a moment and try to realize 
 how wonderful is this experience which came to Abra- 
 ham, and how great is the conception of God which it 
 discloses. Once he seemed, and may still seem to 
 many, an almost solitary figure, wandering over plain 
 and mountain with flocks and herds, with no historic 
 background except what the Biblical record suggested 
 or supplied. But now, how marvellously the scene has 
 
In the Patriarchal Period 53 
 
 changed! The unromantic spade has dug up for us a 
 great historic past. The Bible canvas has been filled 
 in with persons and events, with nations and civiliza- 
 tions, with royal dynasties and the rise and fall of 
 empires, with racial movements, with codes of law and 
 religious systems, whose records were long buried be- 
 neath the mounds of Egypt, Assyria, and Babylonia. 
 The times of Abraham are now, it is claimed, as well 
 known as the times of Pericles in Greece. We not 
 only can trace his wandering steps upon the map, but 
 have become familiar with persons and events con- 
 temporary with and long preceding him. The location 
 of his native city, Ur, is now definitely determined; at 
 least, many archeologists so believe. He is thus no 
 longer an almost solitary figure, standing out against 
 an obscure Eastern sky and mingling with petty peo- 
 ples of whom little was known. But if his large his- 
 toric environment has become more clearly manifest 
 by means of explorations in far Eastern lands, still our 
 knowledge of his person and career, of his character 
 and religious faith, of his conception of the only true 
 God which lay at the basis of his belief, is altogether 
 dependent on the Bible; and while its record is com- 
 paratively brief, giving only a few leading events, a 
 few leading statements which show the nature of his 
 belief, yet they are of the highest significance, and jus- 
 tify the lofty place he holds in the sacred narrative, 
 both Old Testament and New. Yet the contrast be- 
 tween his external condition and this lofty place is 
 strange, it may be, to some, and difficult of realization. 
 
54 The Biblical Idea of God 
 
 Having no fixed abode, the leader of a tribe numbering 
 perhaps fifteen hundred or two thousand souls (which 
 may safely be inferred from the statement that there 
 were three hundred and eighteen trained fighting men, 
 “born in his household’’), represented as having rela- 
 tions with the small city kings of Palestine, among 
 them yet not of them, not, however, the only believer 
 in the Most High God, as the account of Melchizedek 
 shows, still his distinction is, and no distinction could 
 be greater, that he is the only one to whom and through 
 whom, in him and in his seed, was the promise of Re- 
 demption made—a promise at last, after long cen- 
 turies of waiting, and oftentimes obscured by doubt 
 and disbelief, to be declared to and to bless all the 
 nations, and so to overspread the earth. 
 
 Why, now, we may ask, was it to the leader of this 
 relatively small tribe, small when compared with the 
 vast empires which have lately risen from their age- 
 long graves, whose giant forms stalk before us in the 
 far-distant past, and the advancing steps of whose 
 armed hosts echo still as they march across continents, 
 undismayed by forests and rivers, by mountains and 
 plains, to subdue strange and alien peoples to their 
 thrones, whose pride was in slaughter and whose mis- 
 sion was to destroy—why was it to and through him 
 and not to and through them that this disclosure of the 
 character and purpose of the Most High God was given? 
 According to merely human standards they should have 
 _ been made the channels of this gracious revelation. 
 But the ways of God are not the ways of men. They 
 
In the Patriarchal Period 55 
 
 in their final overthrow declared only the divine jus- 
 tice. This is the message of Isaiah concerning the 
 Assyrian king, who “removed the bounds of the peo- 
 ples and robbed their treasures” and in his haughty 
 insolence boasted himself against the Lord Jehovah. 
 Not to such ruthless destroyers, great as is their place 
 and power in the estimation of the world, was the 
 promise of Redemption given, but to the man of high 
 religious faith, unmentioned by the national historians 
 of his day, but a heroic figure in the records of the 
 Bible, and known and honored where ancient con- 
 querors and kings have been forgotten. According to 
 every analogy of God’s working this is what we should 
 expect. In nature and in human history the begin- 
 nings of forms and of epoch-making movements are 
 generally obscure and oftentimes difficult to trace. 
 Rome, once the mighty mistress of the world, had its 
 origin in times as yet unknown to recorded history, 
 around which many myths and legends gathered, and 
 whose earliest remains archeologists are slowly seeking 
 to discover. So is it also with the origin of the Greeks. 
 American history, in its most important and determin- 
 ing elements, began with the faith and hopes of a few 
 pilgrims who landed in the winter storms on a stern 
 and ice-bound coast, to carve out of the wilderness a 
 state, now among the most powerful of the world. 
 Christianity had its distinctive origin in a little land 
 and obscure city, and in the person and work of one 
 who was outwardly only a Galilean peasant. 
 
 Not, therefore, through imperial persons and events, 
 
56 The Biblical Idea of God 
 
 but through Abraham, the sojourner in lands not his 
 own, the chieftain of a tribe of herdsmen relatively few, 
 were the promises made; and this fact, when rightly 
 considered, gives impressiveness and truth to what his 
 career tells us concerning essential contents in the Bib- 
 lical conception of God. As expressed by him it con- 
 nects itself with all that had been disclosed in the past 
 and looks forward to that larger disclosure that is to 
 follow. It is an essential and important part of the 
 progressive process of God’s self-revelation. The origi- 
 nal elements of power and wisdom, of justice and 
 mercy, are there. But there appears also that broader 
 and deeper conception of righteousness, a conception 
 we owe to the Bible alone, which teaches that right- 
 eousness is not merely retributive, but involves the 
 attribute of grace. “Shall not the judge of all the earth 
 do right?”? Abraham says in his plea for Sodom; that 
 is, shall he not refrain from destroying the righteous 
 and the wicked, shall not the presence of the one secure 
 mercy for the other? The immorality of those cities 
 of the plain was inexpressibly great. Vice in its vilest 
 forms was practised not by a few, nor in secret, but 
 openly and by “the men of the city—both young and 
 old, all the people from every quarter” as the story of 
 Lot distinctly states (Gen. 19: 4) and clearly shows to 
 those who read it with understanding. We need not 
 wonder, therefore, at the complete destruction with 
 which they were overwhelmed. But yet, while God 
 is revealed as severely just he is also willing to be gra- 
 cious. It is also revealed, as in the greater destruction 
 
In the Patriarchal Period 57 
 
 of the flood, that his moral laws are supreme, and that 
 they are not unrelated to but oftentimes control the 
 action of his natural laws. In his hands the forces 
 which they guide are used as whips to scourge the un- 
 speakable iniquities of man. 
 
 But not only in physical nature is God revealed as 
 supreme, but also in human history, disclosing thus, 
 when we consider the waywardness of man’s will, a 
 greater wisdom and a more commanding power. For 
 what else does the promised blessing, which is to take 
 centuries for its fulfilment, and is to come upon all na- 
 tions, imply? Here is revealed a divine plan, clearly 
 indicated from the beginning, involved in the prede- 
 termined destinies of a people, and which, despite the 
 vicissitudes, the conflicts, the rise and fall of peoples, 
 the apparently inextricable confusion of the forces 
 which contend with one another in man’s social life, is 
 to reach a consummation in the welfare of the world. 
 
 It is therefore no merely tribal God whom Abraham 
 worships, limited in place and power, whose sole work 
 was to care for the members of the tribe, regardless of 
 their character and life. Such a conception is ascribed 
 to him by some, but it rests upon a criticism which 
 denies historical authority to the Bible story and 
 makes it the idealized account of a later age. But if 
 we eliminate Abraham and the promise from the twenty 
 centuries of Revelation, if he is not an actual historic 
 character, and the recorded events of his life did not 
 actually occur, then the golden key which unlocks the 
 real inner meaning of these long-past centuries is for- 
 
58 The Biblical Idea of God 
 
 ever lost. Throughout them we shall search aimlessly 
 in a maze of unrelated facts and hear inarticulate 
 voices whose meaning we cannot comprehend. In 
 Abraham and his faith, however, we continue to be- 
 lieve, lie all the essential germs of the Biblical idea of 
 God. 
 
 We have dwelt thus-at length upon the life and be- 
 lief of Abraham, because he is the most commanding 
 personality in the patriarchal period, and as the first 
 father of the Hebrew people his faith determined its 
 distinctive career. He stands large and clear on the 
 sacred page, and to him prophets and apostles and 
 our Lord himself refer as the divinely chosen and 
 authoritative human source, in their germinal form, of 
 the truths they teach. 
 
 _We pass on now to consider briefly the remaining 
 persons whose lives make up the rest of the patriarchal 
 period and give to it religious meaning. Isaac, in 
 whom the threefold promise begins to find fulfilment, 
 is a less distinguished character than his father. He is 
 milder in disposition, more quiet and retired in life. 
 His wanderings are limited to southern Palestine. He 
 associates with its petty kings, and on a basis of equal- 
 ity; but the account of him is brief and without the 
 striking incidents in the life of Abraham. He inherits 
 his father’s wealth in flocks and herds, but of different 
 and greater importance is his spiritual inheritance of 
 the promised blessing. Twice it is renewed to him; 
 once when during a famine he is commanded nof to go 
 down to Egypt, and again after the strife of his herds- 
 
In the Patriarchal Period 59 
 
 men with those of Gerar and the digging of the wells. 
 He also refers to it when he sends Jacob to Paddan- 
 Aram. It is implied in pronouncing the stolen bless- 
 ing upon Jacob, and is evidently the essential element 
 in the birthright which Jacob purchased from his 
 brother. ‘Thus appears once more conspicuously in the 
 Biblical record those conceptions which bind the pa- 
 triarchal lives together and give them a common reli- 
 gious meaning. It is the God of his father, the God 
 of Righteousness and Grace whom Isaac worships, and 
 in whom he trusts. Living in a pagan land, where al- 
 tars were built and sacrifices offered to many gods, and 
 where religion was largely sensual and licentious, he is 
 still a monotheist, holding a pure though undeveloped 
 faith, whose essential elements he had inherited. 
 
 The story of Jacob is of great human interest. It is 
 an account of one who beginning on a low moral and 
 religious plane developed at last a character worthy of 
 respect and emulation. He stands out in clear con- 
 trast with his brother Esau, whose interests lie mainly, 
 if not altogether, in the material world, who is unable 
 to see the real significance of the birthright and in a 
 moment of physical exhaustion sells it for a mess of 
 pottage. That to Jacob it meant merely the head- 
 ship of the family and the inheritance of a double por- 
 tion of his father’s wealth is not to be inferred from the 
 Bible narrative. 'To him it would seem to have meant 
 mainly the divine blessing involved in the promise, as 
 the story of his later life apparently shows. That he 
 understood its full meaning is not to be maintained. 
 
60 The Biblical Idea of God 
 
 That could only be disclosed by its complete fulfilment. 
 But that the great promise influenced and determined 
 his religious life appears in the fact that it is directly 
 repeated to him at decisive epochs, once on his way to 
 Paddan-Aram in its complete threefold form in his 
 dream at Bethel; again in part, but evidently implying 
 the whole, when he is-told by God to return unto the 
 land of his fathers; again after his return and when he 
 had built an altar to Jehovah and had commanded the 
 putting away of foreign gods among his people; and 
 once again, in his old age at Beersheba on his journey 
 to Egypt to see Joseph, his long-lost son, so deeply 
 mourned. To the first of these he refers in his final 
 sickness. Frequently also he speaks of the God of his 
 fathers, which implies the revelation God had made 
 to them. | 
 
 All this clearly shows that through him is carried on 
 the knowledge of the one true God whose gracious pur- 
 pose includes not only the Hebrew people but also all 
 mankind. The stream of Revelation, however, runs 
 throughout the patriarchal period within fixed and nar- 
 row limits. There are other lines of descent from 
 Abraham, but it is not turned aside to them. It was 
 written: “In Isaac shall thy seed be called.”” But with 
 Jacob the promise widens beyond the limits of a fam- 
 ily. There is no selection of one of his many children. 
 All are included within the limits of the promise, and 
 are also the channels by whom it is to be conveyed to 
 the entire world. Individuals, nay generations, might 
 fail to apprehend and receive its blessings and turn to 
 
In the Patriarchal Period 61 
 
 the worship of other gods, but the people who have de- 
 scended from the patriarch Jacob stand out with strik- 
 ing distinctness among the peoples of the earth as the 
 possessors of a religion which presents the loftiest con- 
 ceptions of the nature and character of God. 
 
 It was evidently not the purpose of the writers of 
 Biblical history to trace in detail the lives of the fathers 
 of the Hebrew race. It is not biographies that they 
 have written. God, not man, was their supreme sub- 
 ject, or rather God speaking in and through man of 
 himself; and it is the progressive course of this revealed 
 word that is distinctly traced in the sacred books. 
 
 We, therefore, conclude this lecture with pointing 
 out how in the career of Joseph the essential elements 
 of the conception of God continue to appear. He is 
 still the God of promise, the God of righteousness and 
 grace. Joseph’s life is recorded more at length than 
 that of any other of the sons of Jacob. It has, as Pro- 
 fessor Moulton tells us, the character of epic story. 
 The favorite of his father, envied and hated by his 
 brothers, sold by them as a slave, this young Hebrew 
 prince, as he has been called, becomes the object of a 
 lawless passion by his master’s wife, resists her ad- 
 vances, is falsely accused and thrown into prison, and 
 is then made, under Pharaoh, the ruler of all Egypt. 
 His life, so filled with sudden and striking changes, 
 illustrates with impressive power that kind of charac- 
 ter which faith in the God of promise alone can form. 
 Tested by temptation to sensual sin, and also by the 
 subtler and more persistent temptations of undeserved 
 
62 The Biblical Idea of God 
 
 misfortunes and then of the sudden possession of auto- 
 cratic power, he yet never fails to fulfil the duties of 
 his station, whether as slave or prisoner, and so rises 
 to leadership in each position, revealing those traits 
 which fitted him at last to exercise the powers belong- 
 ing to imperial rule. Separated in youth from the re- 
 ligious influences of the home, surrounded henceforth 
 by the splendors and attractions of Egyptian worship, 
 with its innumerable gods, its elaborate ritual, its mag- 
 nificent temples, its dominant and haughty priesthood, 
 marrying the daughter of the priest of On, where the 
 great sun-god was adored, connected thus with the 
 most powerful sacerdotal family of his time—yet in the 
 midst of all these moulding influences which would 
 have drawn many away from the faith of their fathers, 
 he remains true to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and 
 Jacob. He regards him with reverential fear, as he 
 tells his brethren when testing their truth and before 
 he reveals himself to them (Gen. 42:18). He trusts 
 his providential care, saying, after making himself 
 known, that “God did send me before you to preserve 
 life’ (Gen. 45:5). In his message to his father he 
 tells him that “God hath made me lord of all Egypt” 
 (Gen. 45:9). To Joseph God is also the interpreter 
 of dreams, as he says to the butler and baker and 
 Pharaoh (Gen. 40:8; 41:16). God also determines 
 future events and controls the forces of nature, for in 
 making known the meaning of Pharaoh’s dream, he 
 tells the king that “the thing is established by God, 
 and God will shortly bring it to pass” (Gen. 41: 32). 
 
In the Patriarchal Period 63 
 
 To Joseph God is also the personal source and execu- 
 tor of moral law. “How, then,” said he to the wife 
 of Potiphar, the Egyptian captain of the guard, “can 
 I do this great wickedness and sin against God? ”’ (Gen. 
 39:9). 
 
 But while these conceptions of the divine nature and 
 character could be found in the religion and moral code 
 of Egypt; while, also, as some scholars claim, back of 
 all the prevalent and degraded polytheism there may 
 have been the lofty monotheistic belief with which 
 Joseph could deeply sympathize, yet there was not 
 found there the distinctive element of the religion of the 
 Hebrews. To no Egyptian priest or king had been given 
 the revelation of-the promise. But throughout his 
 life, as shepherd boy in Palestine, as slave and prisoner 
 and autocratic ruler in Egypt, this was the distinctive 
 faith of Joseph, the elemental force in developing his 
 character, which shielded him in temptation, sustained 
 him in the guidance of an empire, and also, greater 
 even and nobler than this exalted work, led him to be 
 gracious and forgiving to his brethren when their guilty 
 consciences made them fearful of retribution for their 
 crime. At the end of a long life Joseph said unto his 
 brethren: “I die; but God will surely visit you, and 
 bring you up out of this land unto the land which he 
 sware to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob—and ye 
 shall carry up my bones from hence” (Gen. 50: 24, 25). 
 Thus, in the eloquent words of the author of the epistle 
 to the Hebrews, after enumerating the religious heroes 
 of Israel’s past, “these all died in faith, not having 
 
64 The Biblical Idea of God 
 
 received the promises but having seen them and greeted 
 them from afar, and having confessed that they were 
 strangers and pilgrims on the earth” (Heb. 11: 13). 
 By their faith in the fulfilment of the divine promise 
 they were sustained, and in this faith lay the distinctive 
 and differentiating conception through the patriarchal 
 period of the Biblical idea of God. 
 
IT 
 THE BIBLICAL IDEA OF GOD 
 
 IN THE MOSAIC PERIOD, OR AS FOUND IN EXODUS, 
 LEVITICUS, NUMBERS, AND DEUTERONOMY 
 
 WE have traced the Biblical idea of God through the 
 primitive and patriarchal periods and are now to con- 
 sider the period between the exodus from Egypt and 
 the conquest and settlement of Palestine. From the 
 death of Joseph to the birth of Moses the time as gen- 
 erally computed is about four hundred years, although 
 some chronologists would reduce it to a little more 
 than half that number. However this may be, there 
 is, at any rate, a long period of silence concerning 
 which no historical details are given. The descendants 
 of Jacob are herdsmen, dwelling in the fertile land of 
 Goshen, in the northern part of Egypt and east of the 
 branches of the Nile. There are not wanting indica- 
 tions that to some extent they had felt the influence 
 of the high material civilization which the Egyptians 
 had developed. At first, as relatives of Joseph, and 
 also doubtless because they were an Asiatic people, 
 they were welcomed and kindly treated. For the Hyk- 
 sos, or shepherd kings, who were themselves Asiatics, 
 had conquered Egypt and were then rulers of the land. 
 How long their rule continued is a matter of dispute. 
 At some time, however, before the birth of Moses, it 
 
 had ended, and the native Egyptian kings had regained 
 65 
 
66 The Biblical Idea of God 
 
 their lost power. ‘This explains the statement at the 
 beginning of the book of Exodus that “a king arose 
 who knew not Joseph,” one of the many statements of 
 sacred history upon which late discoveries cast light 
 and to which confirmation is given. It was then that 
 the oppression of the Hebrews began. Because of the 
 fact that they were Asiatics, like the Hyksos kings, the 
 Egyptian Pharaoh feared that, dwelling as they did on 
 the northeastern border-land, should another invasion 
 occur they might join with their racial relatives and 
 help to reconquer the country. Hence they were sub- 
 jected to severe toil in building “store-cities, Pithom 
 and Raamses,”’ and the attempt was also made to re- 
 duce their numbers by putting to death, at birth, the 
 male children. ‘These store-cities have been discovered 
 and excavated by Naville the French archeologist and 
 their remains confirm the Bible history. 
 
 It is a familiar story how Moses escaped the fate 
 purposed by the Pharaoh. Evidently it was the result 
 not of a series of fortuitous circumstances and events, 
 but of a plan formed by his mother. This is indicated 
 by the placing of the little ark, in which the babe lay, 
 where the daughter of the king was wont doubtless to 
 come to bathe, by the expected appeal of helpless in- 
 fancy to a woman’s heart, and by stationing the sister 
 to watch and to suggest the child’s mother as the 
 nurse. Thus it came about that throughout his earliest 
 years—for how long it is not stated—Moses grew up 
 in a Hebrew home. During these years the deepest 
 and most lasting impressions are made on the mind 
 
In the Mosaic Period 67 
 
 and heart, especially those of the family religion. 
 That they were never effaced from the heart of Moses 
 is clearly shown by his subsequent career. 
 
 But they might have been effaced by the subtle and 
 continuous influences which surrounded him through- 
 out his later youth and manhood, for he became the 
 adopted son of the Egyptian princess, was instructed 
 in all Egyptian wisdom (Acts 7: 22), subjected to the 
 moulding force of the luxuries of the Egyptian court 
 and the splendors of the idolatrous worship of the 
 Egyptian religion, and he might perhaps have attained 
 to the rule of an Egyptian prince. Around this period 
 of his life many Jewish legends have gathered. But 
 rejecting these products of the fancy for the sober truth 
 of the Bible narrative, it is certain that he never forgot 
 he was the son of a Hebrew mother and one of the 
 heirs of the divinely given promise. He therefore never 
 lost his sympathy with his toiling and suffering breth- 
 ren, and when by an act expressive of this sympathy 
 he killed an Egyptian oppressor and was compelled to 
 flee from the vengeful wrath of the king he became, at 
 forty years of age, himself a shepherd in the mountains 
 of Midian, and for forty years more, during this quiet 
 life so conducive to meditation, brooded doubtless over 
 the knowledge and experience gained in Egypt, and 
 especially over the distinctive characteristics and truths 
 of the family religion, the gracious revelations made to 
 the ancient fathers of his race, and the predetermined 
 destiny of that race—that it should become a channel 
 of blessing to all the world. 
 
68 The Biblical Idea of God 
 
 That these were among the subjects of his thought 
 the whole character of the mighty work of his later life 
 would seem clearly to indicate. The simple and nar- 
 row interests of the ordinary shepherd occupation do 
 not suffice to breed great men who are to be leaders in 
 great events. There must be something more and 
 greater to awaken the deeper forces and nobler ambi- 
 tions of the human soul. Nature must indeed con- 
 tribute the inborn genius which the foremost leaders of 
 mankind reveal; but there must be added the forma- 
 tive influences of education and the quickening power 
 of great occasions which call that genius forth. God 
 uses men and means fitted for his ends. Thus Moses 
 was natively endowed with powers which few men have 
 possessed; and by his training as a Hebrew boy, when 
 he was taught the sacred traditions of his race, by his 
 associations with the wise rulers and learned priests of 
 Egypt, and by his secluded and meditative shepherd 
 life, when these moulding influences sank more deeply 
 into his spirit and fashioned it for future uses—by all 
 these he was being fitted for the great legislative work 
 he afterward accomplished of forming a people into a 
 nation by means of a great hope and an organized law. 
 
 Out of this condition in the solitude of the desert he 
 was suddenly called by the voice of God speaking from 
 the burning bush. Centuries had passed since that 
 voice had been heard on earth. The last time was 
 when God spoke to Jacob at Beersheba, as he was 
 going down to Egypt, and bade him fear not, and at 
 the same time renewed the promise. There is no ac- 
 
In the Mosaic Period 69 
 
 count of such a supernatural event in the life of Joseph, 
 although to him was given the spirit of divination and 
 the wisdom to guide the destinies of an empire. We 
 might have thought that such divine voices would be 
 frequent; and they would have been, if, as many 
 claim, all accounts of supernatural events are only the 
 work of man’s myth-making imagination. But the 
 Bible distributes such supernatural occurrences with no 
 lavish hand. There is a significant reserve in its ac- 
 counts. Only at times of supreme importance, when 
 epochal changes are taking place, does God miracu- 
 lously manifest himself; and herein lies no slight proof 
 that the Bible is a historical record not merely of the 
 ways of man but also of the ways of God. 
 
 When God spoke to Moses from the burning bush, 
 the first words identified him with the God of the past, 
 who had spoken to the patriarchs. “J am the God of 
 thy father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, 
 and the God of Jacob.” It was no new and strange 
 deity who made himself known and commanded obe- 
 dience. A celebrated German scholar has tried, in 
 direct contradiction to the Bible, to show that the God, 
 whose message Moses brought to his people, was a 
 Kenite god worshipped by his father-in-law Jethro. 
 But German scholars delight in fanciful and theoretic 
 reconstructions of Biblical history. All such attempts, 
 however, show only the ingenuity of the writer and 
 contribute nothing to our knowledge of the facts, ex- 
 cept, it may be, in stimulating a more thorough re- 
 search into the foundations of our faith. Unfortu- 
 
70 The Brblical Idea of God 
 
 nately, many, relying implicitly on the authority at- 
 tached to great names, are misled by such critical re- 
 constructions, and their belief in the historic truth of 
 the Bible is lessened if not destroyed. It is time that 
 we cease to sit with childlike, unquestioning reverence 
 at the feet of such teachers, who however wide and 
 minute their scholarship are not always clear and con- 
 sistent thinkers. The study and the classroom need 
 the education which the more vital and complex life 
 beyond their walls alone can give if we are to be saved 
 from conclusions contrary to the common sense of the 
 world. Had Moses brought to his people a Kenite 
 deity, hitherto unknown to them, his task of winning 
 their acceptance and following would have been far 
 greater than it was, if not impossible. There is no 
 stronger conservative force than the religious spirit. 
 Inherited religions are not lightly and easily changed. 
 It was only when Moses announced to the Hebrew peo- 
 ple a new revelation of the God of their fathers, and 
 when also this new revelation met the conditions of 
 their bondage, answered their groanings and _ their 
 prayers, and gave gracious announcement of relief 
 through the near fulfilment of the long-before-given 
 and long-deferred promise that he could secure a 
 hearing. When the silence of many centuries is broken 
 the same voice speaks and it speaks the same message 
 of a great hope. The essential elements are there, but 
 there is also an advance. For in the Bible God’s self- 
 revelation, as I have said, is progressive. In this re- 
 spect it is like the manifestation of himself in nature. 
 
In the Mosaic Period 71 
 
 Another step is taken in the fulfilment of the promise. 
 Great increase in the posterity has already taken place, 
 as was foretold. Now there is to be the first move- 
 ment toward the possession of the promised land. 
 The third and greatest element remains, but centuries 
 must pass before the fulness of time shall come when 
 it shall be fulfilled. 
 
 The progression in the self-revelation of the divine 
 nature and character does not, however, consist merely 
 in this partial fulfilment of the promise. Moses is con- 
 vinced that he hears the voice of the God of his fathers, 
 and hides his face lest he might see God and die. But 
 there was no visible form except the burning bush, 
 which was not consumed. Then when he has received 
 his commission to lead his people out of bondage, and 
 shrinks as every truly great man will shrink from the 
 greatness of the work, saying, “ Who am I that I should 
 go unto Pharaoh, and that I should bring forth the 
 children of Israel out of Egypt?” and is assured that 
 God will be with him, he seeks to know the divine name, 
 saying: “When I come unto the children of Israel, and 
 shall say unto them, the God of your fathers hath sent 
 me unto you; and they shall say unto me, What is his 
 name? what shall I say unto them? And God said 
 unto Moses, I am that I am. Thus shalt thou say 
 unto the children of Israel, J am hath sent me unto 
 you” (Ex. 3: 13, 14). 
 
 These words, I am that I am, are remarkable for their 
 brief simplicity and profound significance. They have 
 been translated in various ways. In the margin of the 
 
42 The Biblical Idea of God 
 
 American Standard Version, beside that of the text 
 which is here given, they are rendered: I am, because I 
 am, or I am who am, or I will be that I will be. This in- 
 dicates some uncertainty as to their precise meaning, 
 and scholars are divided in the support of each ren- 
 dering. But the revisers, both English and American, 
 have adopted the same translation, which gives it the 
 great weight of their authority. Yet much is to be said 
 in favor of the rendering: I will be that I will be. For 
 while the idea of being here expressed is an idea under- 
 lying all others, beyond which the human mind cannot 
 go, for even power, a fundamental conception, implies 
 some kind of existence which exercises it, and God is 
 here identified with being in its ultimate form, yet the 
 Hebrew mind, unlike the Greek, was not metaphysical 
 in its nature. It did not delight in curious inquiries 
 concerning ultimate reality, thus losing itself in the 
 formless mists of abstract truth. It dealt rather, as I 
 have said, with truth in its concrete and experiential 
 form; and it is through the Hebrew mind that God has 
 especially revealed himself. Moreover, the future ren- 
 dering is in harmony with God’s disclosure of himself 
 in the promise. Not mere being, therefore, a vague 
 conception taken by itself, but being made continu- 
 ously manifest in coming historic persons and events 
 is ascribed to God, and, while culminating in one su- 
 preme person and event, does not end even then, but 
 goes on with progressive power until the whole earth 
 shall be filled with the knowledge of the truth and grace 
 of the living God. There is thus, to use Bacon’s fine 
 
In the Mosaic Period 43 
 
 phrase, a “germinant and springing fulfilment” sug- 
 gested by the future form of the divine name. “ Yes- 
 terday, to-day, and forever” are found in it, but with 
 especial emphasis on forever. 
 
 It should be noted, also, that this divine name, what- 
 ever rendering you may choose, is expressed in terms 
 of self-consciousness or personality. God says of him- 
 self, “I am,” or “I will be.” This is not a statement 
 of vague, indefinite, incomprehensible, impersonal be- 
 ing. Psychologists and philosophers may seek to de- 
 stroy confidence in the reality of the self by questions 
 of seeming wisdom which no one can adequately an- 
 swer. But, as was said in the first lecture, among all 
 certainties there is nothing more certain than the real- 
 ity of the self. It underlies and appears in all convic- 
 tions of the human mind. You must radically change 
 all languages, eliminating much, and reorganize all 
 human society, transforming its essential structure, if 
 you would conform these to the doctrine that the self 
 is an unreal conception of the mind. The religion and 
 philosophy of India have taught that the self is an illu- 
 sion, or at most a momentary bubble on the limitless 
 sea of impersonal being. But such religion and philos- 
 ophy degrades man and destroys the joy and freedom 
 of his life. Moreover, the very statement of doubt or 
 denial involves the affirmation of the self. If you say, 
 as I have sometimes heard students just entering on 
 the study of philosophy say, with all the confidence 
 of unlearned youth, “I do not know that I exist,” the 
 reply is, “ Who does not know?” and they inevitably 
 
74 Lhe Biblical Idea of God 
 
 answer “I do not know.” While, therefore, the terms 
 they use are in the form of a negation, their answer in- 
 volves an affirmation. In the very doubt there is as- 
 serted the existence of the personal self. This was long 
 ago effectively pointed out by St. Augustine. But 
 there seems to be nothing so impervious to truth as 
 the human mind. The same old errors find confident 
 and constant repetition, and systems of philosophy are 
 each generation built anew, as if they did not rest on 
 the shifting sands of mere opinion but on the solid 
 basis of the facts of consciousness. For the ultimate 
 deliverances of consciousness are the foundations of all 
 knowledge, and by them we judge all forms of truth 
 and error. They are clear and convincing to the human 
 mind, although they may not be made the subject of 
 direct and reflective investigation. It is only the mind 
 confused and lost in the mazes of philosophic systems 
 to whom they are obscured. When, therefore, Moses 
 made known to the Hebrew people this divine name, 
 expressive of a personal consciousness and of an abid- 
 ing selfhood, he was easily understood. They accepted 
 it at once as authorizing his leadership. It would be 
 clear also to Pharaoh. For the religious philosophy of 
 Egypt is said to have affirmed the existence of a univer- 
 sal and personal being the unseen reality back of and 
 beneath all visible and tangible phenomena. Pharaoh 
 indeed disclaims any knowledge of Jehovah, the God 
 of the Hebrews, but this may merely mean that he 
 knows no god of that name worshipped by the Egyp- 
 tians. 
 
In the Mosaic Period 75 
 
 Much has been made by some scholars of the state- 
 ment made to Moses, “I am Jehovah” (or Yaveh, as 
 it is often now more exactly written), “and I appeared 
 unto Abraham and unto Isaac, and unto Jacob as God © 
 Almighty, but by my name Jehovah I was not known 
 unto them” (Ex. 6:23). This, however, is to insist on 
 a rigid literalness of interpretation. The word Jeho- 
 vah, as Doctor Orr says in his “Problem of the Old 
 Testament,” is not to be taken as a mere vocable. 'To 
 the Hebrews, as to primitive peoples generally, the 
 value of a name lay not in its sound but in its meaning. 
 Jehovah, while used in earlier days among the Hebrews, 
 and not unknown among other peoples, as the tablets 
 of Babylonia have shown, in and from the time of °' 
 the exodus possessed a deeper significance, declared 
 and recognized through the ministry of Moses. There 
 was an advance in the knowledge of its meaning. Not 
 merely self-existence and power, but compassion and 
 the putting forth of power in the redemption of his 
 people was more fully indicated. “I know their sor- 
 rows,” God said to Moses, “and am come down to de- 
 liver them” (Ex. 3:7). 
 
 As has been said, the self-revelation of God is mainly 
 by events and the personal experiences of individuals. | 
 This is what makes the Bible a vital book and enables 
 it to appeal to all classes and conditions, to every age 
 and clime. Hence in the career of Moses God speaks 
 not alone out of the burning bush, but with increasing 
 intensity and effect by means of the ten plagues. It is 
 true that they add nothing essential to the idea of God | 
 
76 The Brblical Idea of God 
 
 disclosed in the creation. He who made the world 
 must also control the world. God, therefore, now 
 makes manifest his power and grace in so using the 
 forces of nature as to secure the welfare of his people, 
 accomplish the fulfilment of the promise, and make 
 himself known to the oppressor as well as to the op- 
 pressed. “The Egyptians,” said he to Moses, “shall 
 know that I am Jehovah when I stretch forth my hand 
 upon Egypt” (Ex. 7:5), and also to Israel: “Ye shall 
 know that I am Jehovah your God who bringeth you 
 out from under the burdens of the Egyptians” 
 (Ex 6 0). 
 
 The plagues in themselves were not new and strange 
 experiences. They are known in Egypt to-day, and 
 sometimes occur in their natural order within the limits 
 of a year. Their miraculous character consisted in 
 their greater intensity, in their subjection to the com- 
 mand of Moses, in the distinction made between the 
 dwellings of the Hebrews and the Egyptians, and in 
 the end for which they were used of rescuing the chil- 
 dren of Israel from bondage. Nature and the super- 
 natural are never opposed in the Bible. The one is 
 God’s ordinary way of working; the other is above the 
 ordinary to secure results beyond the scope of nature’s 
 mechanism. The supernatural is the world of will and 
 freedom; the natural is that of necessity and physical 
 causation. Thus considered as supernatural events, 
 the plagues reveal the moral nature of God. They 
 make known his power, justice, and grace, elemental 
 attributes of which the entire Bible is the supreme reve- 
 lation. 
 
In the Mosaic Period fue 
 
 It is not possible, nor necessary, within the scope of 
 these lectures, to trace the Hebrew history in detail. 
 The unfolding of the Biblical idea of God is mainly 
 found in the great epochs of that history. In the 
 Mosaic period, beginning with the rescue from Egypt, \ 
 it reaches its culmination in the giving of the law. ; 
 The story of this is of impressive dramatic power. The 
 scene, as was fitting, is set among lofty mountains ris- 
 ~ ing to a height of more than six thousand feet, in the 
 midst of which stands Sinai, sacred once, it is said, as 
 the site where Sin, the moon-god of Ur, was worshipped, 
 but having now a vastly greater sacredness, because 
 the God of Israel, out of lightnings and thunderings 
 and earthquakes and clouds darkly shrouding the 
 mountain’s summit, with awe-awakening voice, uttered 
 the ten words which to this day to Jew and Christian 
 are a supreme expression of his will. 
 
 It has been said, and to me it seems to have been 
 rightly said, that if nothing else proves the special in- 
 spiration of the great Hebrew lawgiver it is proved by 
 the Decalogue. For who among the lawgivers of the 
 world has given such a summary of religious truth and 
 moral duty? Not Solon, not Lycurgus, not the great 
 code of Hammurabi has stated the obligations which 
 belong to the relationships of man with man with such 
 brevity, simplicity, directness, and comprehensive 
 scope. It covers all essential relationships, conserves 
 all essential values, inculcates all essential principles of 
 action. Life, property, truth, the purity and integrity 
 of the family, which is the unit of society, are secured 
 if these commandments are obeyed. The first of the 
 
78 The Biblical Idea of God 
 
 second table, “Honor thy father and thy mother that 
 thy days may be long in the land which Jehovah thy 
 God giveth thee,” imposes a duty which is the origin 
 and type of all human obedience. Beginning with the 
 child, it insures that subordinate attitude toward all 
 rightful authority which is the strength and glory of 
 the man and constitutes the elemental force and safety 
 of the social fabric. For out of the insubordination of 
 childhood and youth spring the destruction of the state 
 and the reign of every ruthless passion. In the last 
 commandment, “Thou shalt not covet,” is indicated 
 the ultimate source of all the social evils which the 
 others seek to guard against. For if men do not covet 
 what is not their own there would be no murder, nor 
 adultery, nor theft, nor falsehood: Thus sin, in its 
 last analysis, is identified with selfishness, and its secret 
 source 1s found in the human heart. 
 
 But the deepest truth of the ten words is found in 
 their religious teaching, and in the vital connection be- 
 tween this and their moral precepts. The codes of 
 Confucius and Gautama Buddha, however ethically 
 noble and comprehensive they may be, are not rooted 
 in the religious consciousness and convictions of man- 
 kind. They are agnostic in character, neither affirming 
 nor denying God’s existence, but merely ignoring it. 
 The Mosaic code, however, begins with the affirmation, 
 “T am Jehovah thy God, who brought thee out of the 
 land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage,” thus set- 
 ting forth and confirming by a series of impressive his- 
 toric events his loving-kindness and tender mercy. 
 
/ 
 
 In the Mosaic Period 79 
 
 Then follows the first commandment. “Thou shalt 
 have no other gods before [or beside] me.” 
 
 It would seem that in these words monotheism is 
 clearly taught; and so the Jewish and Christian churches 
 have always believed. But by some modern scholars 
 it is claimed that nothing more is indicated than monol- 
 atry, that is, the worship of one god alone, although 
 the existence of other gods is admitted. Ethical mono- 
 theism, as it is called, is held to have been first taught 
 by the prophets of the eighth century—Amos, Hosea, 
 Isaiah, and Micah. But this contention rests on cer- 
 tain presumptions concerning the early religion of 
 Israel which we cannot consider now, but will refer to 
 when we discuss the teaching of these prophets. Here 
 it is only necessary to say that, accepting the Biblical 
 history on its face value, we have found monotheism in 
 the earlier portions of the history, a fact not denied by 
 those scholars who yet deny its historic value. It 
 would be strange, therefore, when at this time so great 
 a religious teacher has appeared and so much of an 
 advance in the unfolding of religious truth is being 
 made, that in the basic idea of all religion there should 
 be a falling away from the high position hitherto at- 
 tained and an approach to the degrading polytheism 
 of other peoples. With that in its extreme extent and 
 lowest forms Moses was acquainted. His life in Egypt 
 familiarized him with it. If, however, he was God’s 
 messenger to his people, as from this time onward the 
 entire Bible claims, he could have taught nothing else 
 than the existence of the one true God and of him 
 
80 The Brblical Idea of God 
 
 alone. The Mosaic code, then, is founded on a pure 
 and exalted monotheism, and its moral precepts are 
 presented as God’s commandments. Not, therefore, in 
 physical nature, impressive and manifold as are its 
 laws, but in the moral world the will of God finds its 
 supreme expression. It is in this that the legislation of 
 Moses exhibits its distinctive character and in this lies 
 one of the secrets of its power. It is an appeal not to 
 the intellect alone but to the conscience of mankind. 
 It is an appeal, also, sustained by an innate conscious- 
 _ ness of a universal power which makes for righteous- 
 ness and truth. 
 
 There is taught, also, in the Decalogue God’s invisi- 
 ble and intangible nature which no earthly form can 
 represent. Image-worship, so universal, so intimately 
 associated with the prevalent polytheism, was forbid- 
 den. The cherubim, whose wings overshadowed the 
 mercy-seat, did not body forth the unseen God, and 
 within the ark of the covenant, in the Holy of Holies, 
 as already noted, was found only the moral and reli- 
 gious law. 
 
 The sacredness of the divine name, which is expres- 
 sive of the divine nature, is also strictly enforced. 
 Guilt is attached to all vain uses of it. Thus reverence 
 for God was inculcated, and language, which so inti- 
 mately expresses character, was to be purified from all 
 profanity. 
 
 But while the introductory words teach God’s re- 
 demptive mercy, the second commandment teaches 
 also his even-handed and retributive justice, as well as 
 
In the Mosaic Pertod 81 
 
 his abiding grace. He will visit iniquity with certain 
 punishment; but at the same time sin is declared to be 
 self-destructive within the limits of the third and 
 fourth generations and loving-kindness is shown unto 
 thousands of generations of those who love God and 
 keep his commandments. Thus mercy is exalted be- 
 yond justice as the leading attribute revealed in the 
 divine administration of the world. No conflict be- 
 tween them is suggested, but “mercy seasons justice” 
 and secures what in all government is the noblest end 
 of law, not retribution but obedience. It is the end 
 which lawmakers have doubtless aimed at, but have 
 relied mainly, if not altogether, on force and penalty 
 to secure. But these alone have tended to brutalize 
 and harden the offender. Mercy, which does not con- 
 done nor minimize the evil, and does not arbitrarily 
 set aside its consequences, this alone can change the 
 spirit and purpose of him who does the evil, for it alone 
 touches and quickens the deepest emotions of the heart 
 and thus subdues the stubborn obduracy of the will. 
 Not the law but the gospel is that divine power which 
 wins the world to a new obedience; and this is prefig- 
 ured in the Old Testament even in the giving of the 
 law from the frowning heights of Sinai. The church 
 seems sometimes to have forgotten this and to have 
 relied too largely on the terrors of retribution. But 
 while law is to be set forth and enforced, and its results 
 are not to be ignored, yet, as Paul says, we are saved 
 by hope, and it is the goodness of God which leads us 
 to repentance. 
 
82 The Biblical Idea of God 
 
 Lastly, a day of rest was set apart, not merely for 
 freedom from toil, but for the better cultivation of the 
 higher nature, which the cares and labors of the week 
 too often tend to limit or prevent. The Sabbath is 
 one of the great religious institutions, established, as 
 our Lord tells us, for the race, to be observed and hal- 
 lowed, that the religion of the Bible may not perish 
 from the world. 
 
 Looking now at the Decalogue as a whole we shall 
 find that its great and distinctive character does not 
 lie merely in its moral precepts. Other moral codes, 
 even those of savages, state and enforce these. It lies 
 rather in what we may call its architectural plan. For 
 the genius of an architect is shown not so much by the 
 materials he uses as by the stately symmetry and 
 beauty of their arrangement and form. All parts are 
 combined into one splendid whole to express a single 
 great conception. Thus in the Decalogue the Hebrew 
 lawgiver has selected the rights and duties that are 
 fundamental and joined them in an essential relation- 
 ship with the profoundest religious truths. It would 
 clearly seem that this is a work beyond the power of 
 an uninspired human mind. Such certainly is the 
 claim of the Bible, and such we believe to have been 
 the truth. The ten words are spoken not by the voice 
 of Moses but by the voice of God. 
 
 We might have thought that such a law, so given, 
 especially in connection with events disclosing super- 
 natural power, would have made immediate and last- 
 ing impression on the minds of those to whom it was 
 
In the Mosaie Period 83 
 
 commanded. But, while Moses was in the mount, the 
 people, forgetful of the gracious way in which they had 
 been led, and saying “As for this Moses we know not 
 what is become of him,” turned aside to the worship 
 of the golden calf. Then the just anger of Jehovah 
 waxed hot against them, and punishment severe and 
 fearful fell at once upon them, for they suffered a great 
 slaughter. But this is not the most impressive part of 
 this event. It is after this scene of sin and retribution, 
 when Moses had returned to the mountain and hewn 
 out anew the two tables of the law, that Jehovah de- 
 scended in the cloud and proclaimed his character in 
 these wonderful and ever-memorable words: “Jehovah, 
 Jehovah, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, 
 and abundant in loving-kindness and truth, keeping 
 loving-kindness for thousands, forgiving iniquity and 
 transgression and sin, and that will by no means clear 
 the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the 
 children and upon the children’s children, upon the 
 third and upon the fourth generation” (Ex. 34: 6, 7). 
 Where in all religious literature of tribes or nations 
 will you find a statement such as this? Not infre- 
 quently the remark is heard that the God of the Old 
 Testament is harsh, capricious, merciless; that his rule 
 is merely retributive, and that only in the New Testa- 
 ment he appears as gracious and forgiving. But such 
 remarks rest on ignorance or a failure to comprehend 
 the fulness of God’s revelation of himself. Once more, 
 as we shall have occasion again and again to point out, 
 it must be said that, in dealing with this world so sin- 
 
84 The Biblical Idea of God 
 
 ful, so guilty, so sorrowing, his law is supremely re- 
 demptive in its end and nature. This the Apostle Paul 
 affirms, saying that it is God’s purpose “to sum up 
 all things in Christ” and that the working out of the 
 divine plan is “to the praise of the glory of his grace” 
 (Eph. 1:6, 10). But Paul only stated in more explicit 
 terms what was spoken to the Hebrew lawgiver more 
 than thirty centuries ago. Law is only a uniform mode 
 of working, and among rational beings involves ends to 
 be secured. It expresses God’s ways in both the ma- 
 terial and moral worlds. 
 
 If we have no belief in God and are without the 
 knowledge of his ways and ends, to us the worlds of 
 nature and of man are a chaos meaningless, inexpressi- 
 ble, awakening in thoughtful minds to whom the Bible 
 is a sealed book both horror and despair. Looking 
 upon the surging forces of evil and destruction which 
 evermore contend with and apparently overwhelm the 
 good, and which seem to make up this little world of 
 ours, they have used language like that of the guilt- 
 worn Macbeth: 
 
 “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player 
 That struts and frets his hour upon the stage 
 And then is heard no more: it is a tale 
 Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, 
 Signifying nothing. .. .” 
 
 But this extreme expression may not be alone the 
 utterance of a guilty soul, oppressed by a sense of sin 
 and appalled by the cloud of death which darkens 
 
In the Mosaic Period 85 
 
 around our earthly end. Profound and noble minds, 
 unillumed by the light of revealed truth, have felt 
 the mystery and apparent hopelessness of human life. 
 To the Greeks the joy and beauty of the golden age 
 lay in the past, in the early dawn of life’s brief day. 
 Their philosophers and poets saw no shining morn be- 
 yond the unfathomed darkness of its close. And, it is 
 true, there are expressions of doubt in the literature of 
 Israel occasioned by the religious experiences of indi- . 
 viduals in times of trouble. Such are found in the 
 Psalms and especially in the book of Job. But the 
 Hebrew mind, as expressed in its great teachers, looked 
 confidently to the future. There was to them a di- 
 vinely guided, progressive movement to issue in the 
 establishment of a kingdom of God, an abiding king- 
 dom of righteousness and truth. It is on this convic- 
 tion alone, in the midst of the stress and storm of the 
 conflict of evil forces, which the age-long history of man 
 reveals, that we can stand hopeful and serene. 
 
 It was this conviction that sustained the great He- 
 brew lawgiver as he led his people from Egyptian bond- 
 age. No one who would benefit mankind ever con- 
 tended with difficulties harder to overcome. They lay 
 not in external conditions, in the desert and the ene- 
 mies to be met, but rather in the character and spirit 
 of the people he would help. For they were “stifi- 
 necked and rebellious,’ ever fearful and complaining 
 when hindrances were to be overcome, unmindful of 
 Egyptian slavery and toil, longing for the flesh-pots 
 they had left, and without faith in the fulfilment of the 
 
86 The Biblical Idea of God 
 
 promise, a people lacking hope and the courage which 
 hope brings. But with a sublime patience, sustained 
 by a trust in God’s presence and help which never fal- 
 tered but once, Moses overcame these difficulties which 
 would have broken down a weaker and less noble spirit, 
 and at last with conquest and success behind him stood 
 upon Nebo’s Mount, overlooking the promised land 
 which he was to see but not to enter, and dying there 
 was buried in an unmarked grave, which no man has 
 ever seen, having finished the work to which he had 
 been called. 
 
 The book of Deuteronomy sums up and restates the 
 Mosaic legislation. Concerning this book to-day there 
 is an intense conflict of critical opinion. Radical schol- 
 ars ascribe it to the time of Josiah, about 621 B. C., 
 gotten up to bring about a religious reform, the work 
 of certain priests and prophets. Some allow that its 
 contents consist of a much earlier legislation but that 
 its form is new. In plain terms, then, the book as we 
 have it is a pious fraud. But, as opposed to this view, 
 it is only necessary here to point out that the book 
 itself in distinct and positive terms claims to give the 
 words of Moses, giving the time when and the place 
 where he, at the close of his life, in a series of eloquent 
 orations, recounted the events from Sinai to the plain 
 of Moab, and restated the law with the aim of secur- 
 ing obedience to its commandments. It is a continuous 
 appeal to conscience and will. There is in it an awe- 
 inspiring litany of curses and blessings. It adds noth- 
 ing essential to what had been already taught concern- 
 
In the Mosaic Period 87 
 
 ing the nature and character of God. But it states in 
 more explicit terms his unity and sole existence and 
 that he is the supreme object of love and worship. 
 “Hear, O Israel, Jehovah our God is one Jehovah, and 
 thou shalt love Jehovah thy God with all thy heart 
 and with all thy soul and with all thy might” (Deut. 
 6:4, 5). “Know, therefore, this day and lay it to thy 
 heart that Jehovah he is God in heaven above and 
 upon the earth beneath. There is none else” (Deut. 
 4:39). “Behold, unto Jehovah, thy God, belongeth 
 heaven and the heaven of heavens, the earth with all 
 that is therein” (Deut. 10:14). “For Jehovah your 
 God, he is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great 
 God, the mighty and the terrible, who regardeth not 
 persons nor taketh reward” (Deut. 10:17). Could 
 monotheism be more exactly and positively stated than 
 in these impressive words? 
 
 But this one God is a moral God, a truth which can- 
 not be too often nor too strongly stated. In the song 
 with which Deuteronomy ends and which gives the 
 last words of Moses and reveals him as a poet as well 
 as a legislator and orator, he says of God: 
 
 “His work is perfect. 
 For all his ways are justice. 
 A God of faithfulness and without iniquity, 
 ‘ . oP] 
 Just and right is he. (Deut. 32:3, 4.) 
 
 This righteousness and justice, here proclaimed in 
 words, is also shown in act. The inflicting of penalty 
 on his people, something which a merely tribal god is 
 
88 The Biblical Idea of God 
 
 not supposed to do, has all along declared it. But it is 
 with even more impressiveness declared in the destruc- 
 tion of the Canaanites. This is sometimes said to 
 have been the ruthless exercise of arbitrary power. 
 But to one who understands the licentious character 
 of their religion it will not seem so. Certainly the 
 Bible says that it was because the cup of their iniquity 
 was full. “For the wickedness of these nations Jeho- 
 vah thy God doth drive them out from before thee” 
 (Deut. 9:5), a statement more than once repeated. 
 Yet it was not because of the righteousness of Israel 
 that they had been chosen (Deut. 9:5, 6), but because 
 of the divine grace, a grace declared in the promise, 
 and not to be confined to Israel, but at last to be 
 shown to all the nations of the earth. Again and again 
 throughout this book, which, it has been said, possesses 
 an eloquence beyond that of the world’s most famous 
 orators, Moses refers to the promise made to Abraham. 
 It is the key-note of his legislation. It links past and 
 present and future in an underlying harmony which at 
 last will overcome earth’s discords and resolve them 
 into one with itself. 
 
 I have thus far made no mention of the law of cere- 
 monies. Large space is given to it in the Bible and the 
 directions are specific and minute. The tabernacle, 
 with its elaborate furniture, is twice described; and one 
 entire book, Leviticus, is given to the ritual of offer- 
 ings. There are also other ceremonial laws in Exodus 
 and Numbers. Is all this meaningless, an inheritance 
 from a largely ritualistic past, when forms and not 
 
In the Mosaic Period 89 
 
 moral duties mainly constituted the religion of the 
 people, or is it a much later addition, elaborated dur- 
 ing the captivity and brought back to Jerusalem at the 
 return? It is certainly given as the work of Moses, 
 and woven into the historic record of events so closely 
 that you cannot tear ceremony and event apart with- 
 out mutilating all. If, however, we accept the inter- 
 pretation given in the Epistle to the Hebrews, the law 
 of ceremonies had a profound and enduring significance. 
 It really, though in a veiled way, embodied the prom- 
 ise. For it was the type and symbol of a reality yet 
 to come, a shadow cast before of a person and event 
 which the centuries following were to reveal. In other 
 words, the temple prefigured the incarnate Christ (John 
 2:19-21), and the altar with its sacrificial offerings 
 shadowed forth the cross, and the sacrifice thereon of 
 the Son of God. I do not say that this was definite 
 and clear to even the most intelligent worshippers in 
 the centuries preceding the coming of our Lord, any 
 more than how the promised blessing was to be real- 
 ized was definite and clear to ancient believers, but 
 such is the teaching of Christ and his apostles and 
 those whom the apostles taught; and it illuminates what 
 otherwise to us would be useless acts and needless re- 
 quirements. They kept alive the sense of sin, the need 
 of its atonement, and of a priestly mediator between 
 God and man, and thus prepared the way for the gos- 
 pel. When that was announced in its fulness and 
 completion the types and symbols which prefigured it 
 must necessarily pass away. Only the moral law re- 
 
90 The Biblical Idea of God 
 
 mains, because its foundations lie in the essential na- 
 tures of God and man, and its fulfilment on the part of 
 man is the end which the gospel seeks. 
 
 Among all lawgivers who have formulated historic 
 codes by which nations have been organized, Moses 
 stands foremost and alone. ‘Tried by the decisive test 
 of time his code, although more than thirty centuries 
 have passed away since its enactment, still endures, 
 and in its distinctive features still marks and differen- 
 tiates a people. The nations made separate from all 
 others by the laws of Solon, or Lycurgus, or Ham- 
 murabi perished long ago beneath the conquering feet 
 of other nationalities which themselves have been de- 
 stroyed. Even Rome, which once seemed as enduring 
 as her seven hills, lives only in the broken fragments of 
 her fallen grandeur and in the legal forms and spirit 
 which have been adopted by the peoples who overcame 
 her. The maxims of Confucius, it is true, still charac- 
 terize the life of China, and millions still adhere to the 
 teaching of Buddha. The Koran, by its doctrines and 
 precepts, still distinguishes the followers of Moham- 
 med. But these have never yet felt the power of those 
 destructive forces which have made the Jew an out- 
 cast among the peoples of the earth. With no national 
 home, no king, no organized government, no temple 
 nor altars where his fathers worshipped, scattered 
 among all and persecuted by all, the Jew still retains 
 his peculiar character, and, so far as his conditions will 
 allow, still observes and is marked by the law of Moses. 
 He is destined, we believe, at last to give up that dis- 
 
In the Mosaic Period 91 
 
 tinctive character, yet will still abide by the moral 
 elements of the law, but with nobler and more efficient 
 motives through his acceptance of the fulfilment of the 
 promise in the redemptive work of our Lord and Saviour 
 Jesus Christ. Then the work of Moses for his people 
 and for the world will have been completed through 
 the full unfolding and acceptance, in a historic person 
 and event, of all the elements that are essential in the 
 contents of the Biblical idea of God. To that day, 
 from the heights of Sinai, across all the intervening 
 years, the great lawgiver looked forward with prophetic 
 eye and undoubting faith. That it may hasten must 
 be the prayer of every one who believes that the Bible 
 is the self-revelation of the living God and of his 
 eternal purpose and plan. 
 
IV 
 THE BIBLICAL IDEA OF GOD 
 
 DURING THE PERIOD OF THE JUDGES AND THE TIMES OF 
 ELIJAH AND ELISHA, AND IN THE WRITINGS OF 
 THE PROPHETS 
 
 THE Mosaic period may be extended throughout the 
 conquest and settlement of the promised land, during 
 which the influence of the great lawgiver was pre- 
 dominant. It was a period covering but a few years, 
 yet most important in determining the future religious 
 development of the people of Israel. They always 
 looked back to the teaching and work of Moses as giv- 
 ing them a true idea of Jehovah their God and also an 
 authoritative standard of obedience to him. However 
 much they wandered from the paths he had marked 
 out, and they often wandered far away, yet because of 
 the afflictions they suffered on account of disobedience, 
 they returned again and again to a new allegiance and 
 thus obtained the blessings it involved. 
 
 It is a remarkable fact that they never worshipped 
 Moses as a god. This is true also of their ancestors, 
 Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Other peoples regarded 
 the great men of their past as objects of worship and 
 built altars to them, but of this form of idolatry the 
 Hebrew people were never guilty. They did not even 
 regard their ancient heroes as demi-gods and no mythol- 
 
 ogy gathered around them. Their heroes were men 
 92 
 
In the Times of the Judges 93 
 
 who lived in historic conditions clearly set forth in the 
 Bible and sustained to-day, through archeology, by the 
 records of other people. The idea of God, given them 
 by Moses and the ancient fathers, was so exalted, so 
 unapproachable, that even when they turned away 
 from him and adopted alien gods there is no suggestion 
 in their history that with this foreign worship they 
 mingled the adoration of those through whom God’s 
 revelation of himself had been made known. There 
 was, and is, an essential incompatibility between the 
 worship of him and that of any man, however great. 
 
 We pass on now to a period covering many centuries. 
 Its history is written in the books of Judges, Samuel, 
 and Kings, to which may be added Chronicles and 
 Ezra and Nehemiah. We cannot consider in detail the 
 teaching of each or all of these books. We can only 
 turn to the great men of this long period and seek to 
 learn what they have taught us concerning the God of 
 Israel. It begins with the events following the death 
 of Joshua and ends with the return from the Babylo- 
 nian captivity. During this period there were devel- 
 oped two distinctive kinds of religious literature. The 
 one consists of the writings of the prophets, which will 
 be the main subject of the present lecture; the other, 
 to be considered in the next lecture, consists of the 
 writings of Israel’s religious poets and the sayings of 
 her wise men. 
 
 The times of the judges we pass over with brief con- 
 sideration. They may be called, as I have said, the 
 critical period of Hebrew history. It was a time of 
 
94 The Biblical Idea of God 
 
 testing. Was the religion of Moses too high in its 
 nature and demands for its acceptance on the part of 
 men, and was it finally to prevail, or perish utterly 
 from the earth? It seemed sometimes as though the 
 latter was to be its fate. Failing to destroy, as they 
 were commanded to do, the idolatrous and immoral 
 worship of the Canaanites, they were exposed to the 
 constant temptation to accept the gods and practise 
 the iniquities of the religion of the land, a temptation 
 to which again and again they yielded. The book of 
 Judges records a long series of apostasies, of penalties, 
 of repentances and cries for help, and of deliverances 
 by Jehovah. Certain recurring phrases may be said 
 to characterize it. These are: “The children of Israel 
 forgot Jehovah”; “forsook Jehovah the God of their 
 fathers”; “did that which was evil in the sight of Je- 
 hovah.” They evidently imply a definite and distinc- 
 tive conception of him and a positive standard of what 
 he requires. Where shall this conception and this 
 standard be found if not in the previous revelation to 
 the fathers and in the Sinaitic legislation? This reve- 
 lation gives continuity and consistency to the historic 
 record, and clearly indicates an essential antagonism 
 between the gods of Canaan and the God of Israel. 
 The difference is vastly more than that involved in the 
 substitution of one tribal god of limited power and 
 authority for another. The whole impression of the 
 history, when taken in its natural sense, is that the 
 God whom they forsook was the one, true, living, and 
 universal God, who had made himself known in the 
 
In the Times of the Judges 95 
 
 promise, in the deliverance from Egypt, in the voice 
 heard at Sinai, and in the victories which gave them 
 possession of the land. It was this invisible, all-pow- 
 erful and essentially moral God, whom no outward ob- 
 ject in earth or heaven could represent, whom no 
 merely formal modes of worship could satisfy, who de- 
 manded faith and sincere repentance and the allegiance 
 of the heart, and whose grace was shown in forgiveness 
 and restoration to his favor—it was such a one whom 
 they rejected. 
 
 The book of Judges, therefore, is not a history of 
 merely petty wars and obscure leaders, of a struggle 
 between the religions of unimportant tribes, but a reve- 
 lation, as it claims to be, of the eternal God whose 
 world-wide redemptive plan was being slowly wrought 
 out and disclosed in the experiences of persons and the 
 progress of events. The men who were leaders in this 
 movement, however limited their vision and whatever 
 their faults of character, were the instruments of Jeho- 
 vah, and were accomplishing a work larger and more 
 enduring than they themselves knew. In the great 
 war song of Deborah and Barak, celebrating the defeat 
 of Jabin and Sisera, is disclosed this consciousness of 
 a divine mission, and a recognition of the power and 
 goodness and righteousness of the God of Israel. It 
 was a song of praise to him who caused Sinai to trem- 
 ble at his presence, the stars of heaven to fight in their 
 behalf, the waters of Kishon to overwhelm their ene- 
 mies, and the righteous acts of whose rule in Israel the 
 people were to rehearse. They rejoiced over the down- 
 
96 The Biblical Idea of God 
 
 fall of their foes as enemies of Jehovah, for the song 
 ends with these words: “So let all thine enemies per- 
 ish, O Jehovah, but let them that love him be as the 
 sun when he goeth forth in his might” (Judges 5: 31). 
 It is this conviction, that they are fighting the battles 
 of Jehovah, which lifts them above the low level of 
 private revenge and a merely national hatred, and in- 
 vests their actions with the splendor of a patriotism as 
 broad as the earth and inclusive of mankind. I do not 
 say that of this they themselves were conscious. They 
 had the limitations of their day. But they were con- 
 scious that their cause was one of religious and moral 
 welfare for themselves and doubtless also for others. 
 In this consciousness lay the expanding germ, as we, 
 standing where we do and looking backward, can see, 
 of a development whose course and completion the 
 slow-moving centuries would alone disclose. Of that 
 development they were a part, and they helped to carry 
 it on through many conflicts by holding up, within 
 their narrow sphere and during their brief lives, the 
 torch of a divine revelation, in whose increasing light 
 is involved the welfare of the world. 
 
 The last of the judges was Samuel. He has also 
 been called the first of the prophets. This is not 
 strictly true, for Moses exercised the prophetic office 
 and Abraham was called a prophet. But what is a 
 prophet and how did this class of men arise who were 
 so influential in the national and religious life of Israel ? 
 Some scholars hold that in the earliest times the prophet 
 was like the whirling dervishes of to-day, a “mad fel- 
 
In the Prophets 97 
 
 low,” as the officers of Jehu called the messenger of 
 Elisha who came to anoint him king, one whose uncon- 
 trolled emotions overcame and swayed his judgment 
 and whose garb and actions awakened the awe of the 
 ignorant and the contempt of the wise. From such the 
 prophets of Israel and Judah are said to have been de- 
 veloped. But this view is held by those who deny 
 any supernatural source to Hebrew prophecy and is 
 not sustained by a study, without preconceptions, 
 of the words and works of the prophets themselves. 
 There is nothing saner than their teachings nor more 
 expressive of a lofty wisdom than what they sought to 
 accomplish. Milton in his oft-quoted lines speaks of 
 them: 
 
 “As men divinely taught, and better teaching 
 The solid rules of civil government, 
 In their majestic, unaffected style, 
 Than all the oratory of Greece and Rome.” 
 (‘Paradise Regained,” book 4, lines 357-360.) 
 
 Among those who accept the supernatural origin of 
 prophecy, the general conception seems to be that to 
 prophesy is merely to predict. But while prediction 
 was certainly a part of the prophet’s function it was 
 far from being the whole and not infrequently com- 
 prised but a small portion of it. The prophet, as has 
 been aptly said, was not so much a fore-teller as a 
 forth-teller. He was a teacher in whom, as the author 
 of Hebrews says, God spake unto the fathers. You 
 may deny the truth, even the possibility of the truth of 
 
98 The Brblical Idea of God 
 
 this claim, but you cannot deny that the prophets 
 themselves made it. “Hear, O heavens, and give ear, 
 O earth; for Jehovah hath spoken” are the opening 
 words of the prophecy of Isaiah. Amos the herdsman 
 said to the proud priest of Bethel: “Jehovah took me 
 from following the flock and Jehovah said unto me, Go 
 prophesy unto my people Israel” (Amos 7:15). Again 
 and again he repeats the phrase, “Thus saith Jehovah.” 
 In this Amos and Isaiah voice the insistent claims of all 
 the prophets from Samuel to Malachi. 
 
 The scope of their teaching, therefore, is as wide as 
 Jehovah’s rule of the earth, and its truths are essen- 
 tially expressive of his character. As Plato said of the 
 philosopher, past and present and future lay open before 
 them, and their high mission was to announce Jehovah’s 
 nature, enforce his law, condemn the people’s sins and 
 recall them to obedience and worship. This was the 
 work of Samuel. It was a time of wide departure from 
 the high ideals of the Mosaic legislation. ‘The priests 
 were immoral, at least so were the sons of Eli, and per- 
 haps there were, as there certainly were later, prophets 
 who testified falsely. The lofty moral character of 
 Samuel’s teaching is shown in his rebuke of Saul: “Hath 
 Jehovah as great delight in burnt-offerings and sacri- 
 fices, as in obeying the voice of Jehovah? Behold, to 
 obey is better than sacrifice, and to hearken than the 
 fat of rams” (Sam. 15: 22). 
 
 It may be objected that this refers to Saul’s failure 
 to destroy the Amalekites, and that the command to 
 destroy them simply shows that the conception of the 
 
In the Prophets 99 
 
 divine character was but part of the barbarism of the 
 day. But we must remember that the will of God is 
 the supreme source of all authority, and also that a 
 radical distinction between the religion of Israel and 
 that of the inhabitants of Canaan was a moral distinc- 
 tion, and that it was because of their iniquities that 
 they were to be destroyed. It is true that the surgery 
 was severe, but where moral issues are involved severity 
 is both just and kind. 
 
 In studying the prophets it is necessary to consider 
 the times in which they lived. Without this their mes- 
 sage cannot altogether be understood. The ordinary 
 reader of the Bible, however, seems to pay little, if any, 
 attention to the historic conditions. But the great 
 teachers of Israel spoke directly to the men of their 
 own day. They were not “housed in a dream, at dis- 
 tance from their kind,” but were men of affairs, dealing 
 with actual and present realities. They were, indeed, 
 idealists; they saw visions and heard voices which it 
 were well if our leaders of thought and action to-day 
 could see and hear. But their visions and revelations, 
 however much beyond the ideals and practices of the 
 men of their own day, were never visionary and imprac- 
 tical. Of Isaiah it has been said that while his head 
 was in the clouds, his feet were upon the earth. It 
 would be better to say that his head was above the 
 clouds, for he had a nobler and broader outlook than 
 his fellow men, and the clouds did not prevent his 
 seeing what was taking place immediately about his 
 feet. The picture of a future world-wide peace, which 
 
100 The Boblical Idea of God 
 
 at the beginning of the second chapter he presents in 
 language of unsurpassed eloquence and power, which 
 was repeated by his younger contemporary Micah, and 
 which, in that time of universal war, must have seemed 
 to all, as it seems to many still, to be an iridescent 
 dream, is followed by a contrasting picture of the 
 actual idolatries and iniquities of his own day. And 
 the truth which lay in the background of these pic- 
 tures, and which gave reality to the ideal and made 
 the actual its essential contradiction, was the truth con- 
 cerning the nature and character of Jehovah. “The 
 mountain of Jehovah’s house,” he says, “shall be estab- 
 lished on the top of the mountains, and shall be exalted 
 above the hills, and all nations shall flow unto it ’”’—and 
 they shall say: “He will teach us of his ways, and we 
 will walk in his paths, for out of Zion shall go forth 
 the law and the word of Jehovah from Jerusalem.” 
 This promised day has not yet come. War with its 
 terrors and destructions and violations of the divine 
 will still exists. But in the multiplying voices raised 
 against it, in the growing hatred of its evils, in the 
 deepening horror of its desolations, in the widening 
 movement toward a league of nations, which shall seek 
 to fulfil the prophet’s vision, we can see the brighten- 
 ing heralds of its dawn and the assurance of its final 
 realization. 
 
 We are accustomed to divide the prophets into the 
 major and the minor. ‘This does not mean the greater 
 and the lesser. The division is not qualitative but 
 quantitative, determined by the length of their writ- 
 
In the Prophets 101 
 
 ings. It is the one found in our English Bibles. An- 
 other division is into the writing and non-writing 
 prophets. ‘The best division is based upon the succes- 
 sion of the times in which they prophesied. This, as 
 regards the most of them, is indicated by the historical 
 books and the general character of their prophecies, 
 and also more especially by the opening words of the 
 most of them. Although they appeared throughout 
 nearly the entire Hebrew history, their main work was 
 during the period of the kings. The most prominent 
 of those times were Elijah and Elisha, and of these two 
 Elijah is by far the more striking and impressive. He 
 appears upon the scene with dramatic suddenness. His 
 garb is distinctive of his person. His bearing is rugged, 
 stern, authoritative, and of imperious power. He is a 
 prophet of judgment rather than of tenderness and 
 grace. He represents Jehovah’s justice in the condem- 
 nation of religious apostasy and moral evil. Jezebel, 
 the wife of Ahab, Israel’s king, had brought in the 
 Phoenician idolatry and the iniquities of the licentious 
 worship of the Phcenician Baal, and had instituted a 
 thorough persecution of the worshippers and prophets 
 of Jehovah. Against this attempt to destroy Israel’s 
 religion drought and famine are announced by Elijah 
 as Jehovah’s weapons. He is forced to flee from the 
 wrath of the queen. At the brook Cherith the ravens 
 feed him, and later at Zarephath he is sustained by the 
 widow’s unwasting jar of meal and cruse of oil. When 
 at last he reappears there occurs that impressive scene 
 on Mount Carmel, told with dramatic power, when he 
 
102 The Biblical Idea of God 
 
 calls upon the people to decide between Baal and Jeho- 
 vah. The priests of Baal surround their altar and cut 
 themselves with knives and cry aloud upon their god. 
 Elijah with biting irony mocks their ineffectual prayers. 
 Then at his appeal the fire falls from heaven and con- 
 sumes the sacrifice, and the wood, and the stones of 
 the altar, and the water in the trench about the altar, 
 and the people exclaim: “Jehovah, he is God, Jehovah, 
 he is God.” 
 
 Then follows the prophet’s flight to Horeb, where 
 God appears not in the wind which rent the moun- 
 tains and the rocks, nor in the earthquake, nor in the 
 fire, but in the still small voice, or, as the Hebrew 1s 
 more literally and poetically rendered, a sound of gen- 
 tle stillness, and Elijah is bidden to return and complete 
 his work. Once again he appears before Ahab. It is 
 to denounce judgment upon the king and queen for 
 the murder of Naboth and the ruthless taking of his 
 vineyard. The prophet is not awed into silence by 
 royal power, but has the boldness of a divine messenger. 
 
 But Elijah, however stern and relentless he may ap- 
 pear, is not merely a prophet of retribution. Let us 
 not forget that to destroy evil is oftentimes the highest 
 kind of mercy. Such men, by overcoming the destruc- 
 tive forces of immorality and unbelief, prepare the way 
 for the noblest growths of righteousness and truth. 
 Love and justice are not contradictory and mutually 
 exclusive terms, for love without justice would be 
 moral weakness and would defeat its own ends. In 
 this history, therefore, of the severe prophet of wrath 
 
In the Prophets 103 
 
 it is not difficult to discern the nature and character of 
 the God of Israel. He is no merely benevolent deity 
 of national limitations and indifferent to the character 
 of his people. Nor is it because the Phoenician Baal 
 is only another god whom Israel has accepted in the 
 place of Jehovah that Elijah contends against him. 
 It is because Baal is an zmmoral god, whose worship 
 involves a vile licentiousness, and who cannot com- 
 mand the lightning and the storm, and because Jeho- 
 vah is God alone, whose hand wields nature’s forces 
 and whose law demands righteousness and love. Thus 
 Elijah carries on the Biblical idea revealed in the work 
 of Moses and declares it in word and act when it seems 
 about to perish from the earth. In lurid and severe 
 splendor it shines ott in contrast with and enhanced 
 by the religious and moral darkness of his day. Not 
 to see this is to be blinded by a theory which recon- 
 structs Hebrew history with violent assumptions and 
 an arbitrary hand. 
 
 Elisha, the servant and successor of Elijah, on whom 
 Elijah’s mantle and spirit rested, while different in per- 
 sonality, yet carries on the work of his master. He 
 completes it through Jehu, the ruthless soldier, who 
 with the sword exterminates the worshippers of Baal, 
 and by the death of Jezebel destroys the source of the 
 religious and moral infection which threatened the na- 
 tion’s life. The reform, however, was only partial. 
 The idolatrous calf-worship remained. Yet in these 
 terrible events of war and bloodshed, when thrones 
 were overturned and dynasties destroyed, Jehovah was 
 
104 The Biblical Idea of God 
 
 making himself known in the righteousness of his rule 
 among the nations and preparing the way for the 
 fuller revelation of his redemptive grace. That this 
 was not limited by national lines some events at least 
 suggest. It is the God of Israel who heals Naaman the 
 Syrian, a stranger and an enemy, and punishes Gehazi, 
 the avaricious and lying servant of the prophet, with 
 the leprosy from which Naaman was healed. 
 
 Much has been written against the severity of these 
 stern prophets of judgment. But to understand them 
 and justify their acts we must place ourselves back in 
 the times in which they lived. The ruthless deface- 
 ment which Cromwell’s soldiers wrought on the 
 churches and cathedrals of England seem to some 
 travellers of to-day the work of a spirit of barbarism, 
 regardless of noble art and beauty. So also Paul’s in- 
 dignation against the sculptured marbles which filled 
 the streets of Athens may seem uncalled for and the 
 expression of a narrow zeal. But in both cases it was 
 not a question of art and beauty, but of moral truth 
 and religious worship. In judging the men of the past 
 it is necessary, if we judge rightly, to understand their 
 conditions and the point of view from which they 
 acted. 
 
 The earliest of the writing prophets are Joel and 
 Obadiah according to some scholars, who place them 
 in the latter part of the ninth century B.C. Other 
 scholars claim that they are among the latest. The 
 decision is a difficult one because the proofs of date 
 both external and internal are so slight, If they were 
 
In the Prophets 105 
 
 the earliest, then Elijah had passed away, and Obadiah, 
 who is held to have preceded Joel, was contemporary 
 with Elisha during that prophet’s latter years. His 
 message is the briefest of all the prophecies, but it 
 makes the same high claims and teaches the same 
 great truths. It opens with the words, “Thus saith 
 the Lord Jehovah,” and thrice in the following verses 
 this statement is repeated. Jehovah’s rule is not lim- 
 ited in time or place, but is supreme in nature and 
 among the nations, and is moral in its character. 
 Edom, against whom the prophecy is spoken, God has 
 made small and despised among the nations, yet she is 
 proud of heart, and for this, though she dwells in the 
 clefts of the rocks and her habitation is high, she shall 
 be brought down to the ground and her wise men are 
 to be destroyed and her mighty men dismayed; for she 
 has done violence to her brother Jacob in the day of 
 his disaster and rejoiced over the children of Judah in 
 the day of their destruction. The universality of Jeho- 
 vah’s reign is also indicated by the prophet’s concep- 
 tion of the day of Jehovah, “which,” he said, “is near 
 upon all the nations.” Thus Obadiah strikes the con- 
 stant note of a righteous retribution, yet mingled with 
 it and modifying its sterner import, we hear also the 
 more inspiring note of a gracious redemption, for “in 
 Mount Zion there shall be those that escape, and it 
 shall be holy” (verse 17). ‘And saviors shall come up 
 on Mount Zion to judge the mount of Esau; and the 
 Kingdom shall be Jehovah’s” (verse 21). 
 
 In the opening part of Joel we have that vivid and 
 
106 The Biblical Idea of God 
 
 detailed picture of the destruction caused by locusts. 
 Like all prophets he sees in this the hand of Jehovah, 
 for the prophets looked through and beyond what we 
 with more limited vision call nature and think of sim- 
 ply as a system of fixed and independent physical 
 forces. The locusts, “before whom the land is as the 
 garden of Eden and behind whom it is a desolate wil- 
 derness” are Jehovah’s army, and they come as de- 
 struction from the Almighty, yet above the darkness 
 and desolation there shine the harbingers of a dawn 
 of restoration, for “even now, saith Jehovah, turn ye 
 unto me with all your heart and with fasting and with 
 weeping and with mourning; and rend your heart and 
 not your garments, and turn unto Jehovah your God; 
 for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and 
 
 abundant in lovingkindness, and repenteth him of the — 
 
 evil” (2:12, 13). In these words Joel repeats the 
 essential part of that wonderful declaration, which 
 more than five centuries before God made of himself to 
 Moses, when the great lawgiver came down out of the 
 clouds of Sinai to find the people worshipping the 
 golden calf. The prophet’s monotheism is also dis- 
 tinctly stated in the words: “I am Jehovah your God, 
 and there is none else” (2:27), and is shown in the 
 prediction that God will gather all nations and execute 
 judgment upon them (3:2). It is from Joel’s prophecy 
 that the Apostle Peter quotes, on the day of Pentecost, 
 to explain the gift of tongues, and the preaching of the 
 gospel in the languages of the nations. Far-seeing, 
 therefore, was the prophet to whom the centuries were 
 
In the Prophets 107 
 
 but moments in the continuous and growing revela- 
 tion of the God of Israel. 
 
 The earliest of the writing prophets of the eighth 
 century B.C. was Amos. He had not been born or 
 bred, as he tells us, to the prophetic office. He was a 
 herdsman and a dresser of sycamore-trees, a native of 
 Judah, but Jehovah took him from following the flock 
 and said unto him, “Go prophesy unto my people 
 Israel,” that is, unto the northern kingdom (7: 14, 15). 
 Obeying the divine command he goes to Bethel, a 
 principal centre of religious devotion, where one of the 
 golden calves was placed, under which form Jehovah 
 was idolatrously worshipped, and, standing beside the 
 altar, clothed, as we may believe, in his herdsman’s 
 garb, utters his prediction of woe and condemnation. 
 It stirs the anger of Amaziah, the priest of Bethel, as 
 the word of a prophet of Jehovah was wont to do of 
 those whose minds were not open to the message; for 
 the prophets were no respecters of place or persons, 
 and denounced priests and kings alike, if these upheld 
 false worships and were violators of the divine law. 
 
 Amos is one of the most eloquent of the Hebrew 
 prophets. Though of lowly station, his knowledge of 
 the conditions of his day both among his own and other 
 peoples is accurate and extensive. His language is 
 pure and noble. He knows the national history and 
 uses its great events to enforce his teaching. His con- 
 ception of Jehovah is the same as that of the inspired 
 teachers who had been before him, and is expressed in 
 terms of loftiest poetic beauty and power. There can- 
 
108 The Boblical Idea of God 
 
 not be the slightest doubt of his conviction that he is 
 Jehovah’s prophet. “Thus saith Jehovah” and its 
 equivalents occur more than forty times in his com- 
 paratively brief prophecy. Three striking passages set 
 forth his conception of the divine nature and character. 
 Calling upon Israel to seek their God and they shall 
 live, Amos tells them-that it is “He that formeth the 
 mountains, and createth the wind, and declareth unto 
 man what is his thought: that maketh the morning 
 darkness, and treadeth upon the high places of the 
 earth—Jehovah is his name” (4:13). And again: 
 “Seek him that maketh Pleiades and Orion, and turneth 
 the shadow of death into the morning, and maketh the 
 day dark with night; that calleth for the waters of the 
 sea, and poureth them out upon the face of the earth 
 (Jehovah is his name) and bringeth sudden destruction 
 upon the strong, so that destruction cometh upon the 
 fortress” (5:8, 9). And still again: “For behold the 
 Lord Jehovah of hosts—is he that toucheth the land 
 and it melteth—he that buildeth his chambers in the 
 heavens, and hath founded his vault upon the earth— 
 Jehovah is his name” (9: 5, 6). 
 
 Is there anywhere in all religious literature a concep- 
 tion of the divine nature more exalted and impressive? 
 Jehovah reigns in the natural and the moral worlds, 
 omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, and yet is not 
 too great, nay, because he is so great, regards the least 
 infraction of his law. Physical science, with its high 
 insistence on the universality and supremacy of law 
 goes not beyond the prophet, yet with its exaltation of 
 
In the Prophets 109 
 
 mere natural force falls far below him, for the prophet’s 
 conception is personal, and personality is the real and 
 final explanation of the world. Righteousness 1s its 
 supreme law, and righteousness is its end and consum- 
 mation. This is the message which the prophet had 
 learned as he guarded his herds beneath the stars of 
 the Judean skies, and this is the message which he 
 brings. 
 
 But the lofty monotheism of Amos, while also ethi- 
 cal, is not expressed in merely glittering moral generali- 
 ties. His code is concerned with the plainest and most 
 ordinary sins, and enforces the plainest, most ordinary 
 duties. He begins with a series of denunciations of the 
 peoples surrounding Israel, expressed in a constantly 
 recurring formula, which like a repeated phrase or 
 motif in music, gives increasing impressiveness to the 
 thought. But Israel and Judah have also sinned and 
 are included in the condemnation. Not because they 
 are Jehovah’s people can they escape, but just because 
 they are must punishment fall also upon them. “You 
 only,” Jehovah says, “have I known of all the families 
 of the earth; therefore I will visit upon you all your 
 iniquities” (3:2). “For you have rejected my law, 
 you have not kept my statutes, your lies [that is, your 
 false gods] have caused you to err, you have forgotten 
 my mercies, when I led you out of Egypt, and destroyed 
 before you the inhabitants of this land; and you have 
 said to my prophets, ‘prophesy not’” (chap. 2). “For 
 they hate him that reproveth in the gate, and abhor 
 him that speaketh uprightly” (5:10). This is not the 
 
110 The Biblical Idea of God 
 
 message of a partial god, who exists only to secure the 
 welfare of a special people, but of one whose authority 
 and power are universal, and to whom the earth be- 
 longs. 
 
 It is not, however, merely national sins that merit 
 the prophet’s stern reproof. In passages of vivid and 
 minute description he-condemns the luxuries and op- 
 pressions of the rich and powerful, they that “lie upon 
 beds of ivory, and stretch themselves upon their 
 couches, and eat the lambs out of the flock and the 
 calves out of the midst of the stall—that drink wine 
 in bowls and anoint themselves with the chief oils, but 
 they are not grieved for the affliction of Joseph” 
 (6:4-6). Those also are denounced that “would 
 swallow up the needy, and cause the poor of the land 
 to fail, saying, When will the new moon be gone, that 
 we may sell grain? and the sabbath, that we may set 
 forth wheat, making the ephah small and the shekel 
 great [that is, giving small measure for a great price], 
 and dealing falsely with balances of deceit; that we may 
 buy the poor for silver, and the needy for a pair of 
 shoes, and sell the refuse of the wheat?” (8: 4-6). This 
 sounds very much as if Amos were living in our day 
 and speaking to us of present evils. And this is, in- 
 deed, the peculiar greatness of these Old Testament 
 prophets that while they speak directly to the men of 
 their own time they are speaking also to the men of 
 all time. For, as the mouthpieces of Jehovah the eter- 
 nal God, they deal with necessary and eternal moral 
 truths, and regard human conduct solely in their blaz- 
 
In the Prophets 111 
 
 ing and burning light. The lapse of time makes no 
 change in the constitutive elements of moral law. 
 Thirty centuries have not modified the Decalogue in 
 the least degree, nor lowered the ethical standards of 
 the prophets. They are as enduring as are the physi- 
 cal laws, which govern the smallest atom and the larg- 
 est world, and the consequences of their violation are 
 as inevitable as are the consequences of the violation 
 of these. For, aside from human enactments, all law, 
 physical and moral, in the last analysis, is the expres- 
 sion of the abiding will of God. And that will plans 
 and purposes throughout the slow-evolving years the 
 establishment at last of the reign of righteousness and 
 truth. This was the vision of Amos. He saw clearly, 
 as all the prophets did, the moral and religious dark- 
 ness about him, but he saw also beyond earth’s shadow 
 the larger and enduring light, the light (to change 
 Wordsworth’s lines by one word): 
 
 “That never was on sea or land, 
 The consecration and the prophet’s dream.” 
 
 Therefore, in the conclusion of his prophecy of judg- 
 ment and woe, he reminds us of the enduring promise, 
 and presents a vivid picture of its fulfilment in the days 
 that are to come. The voice, therefore, which spoke 
 through Amos is the same divine voice which spoke 
 through Abraham and Moses and all the prophets 
 which preceded Amos, and will continue to speak until 
 prophecy, which is in part, shall be done away with and 
 
Liz The Biblical Idea of God 
 
 it rises to its highest and final utterance in the word 
 and work of the eternal Son. 
 
 The next in the chronological succession of the 
 prophets is Hosea, a younger contemporary of Amos. 
 He appears to have been a native of the northern 
 kingdom, and to have given his message there. The 
 first three chapters contain an account of his personal 
 experience with an unfaithful wife. Is this account to 
 be taken as literal or allegorical? The question has 
 divided scholars, some interpreting in one way, some 
 in the other. The decision, however, does not espe- 
 cially concern us, for it does not affect the prophet’s 
 teaching as to Jehovah. In either case his conception 
 of the divine nature and character remains the same, 
 although if arising out of actual experience its expres- 
 sion would have a force and poignancy not otherwise 
 to be attained. 
 
 Hosea is, as are all the others, a prophet of judgment, 
 but he is also pre-eminently the prophet of love. Clear 
 in his intellectual conception of Jehovah, he is at the 
 same time intensely emotional. He states unsparingly 
 the sins of the people and the inevitable results, but 
 there is a tone of profound sorrow; his heart is deeply 
 moved by the awful nature of their transgressions and 
 the consequences these involve. Israel is the faithless 
 wife of whom Jehovah is the husband. He has for- 
 given her apostasy, but she returns to it again. Jeho- 
 vah’s love, therefore, is redemptive in its nature. It 
 would restore and knit anew the broken relationship, 
 and do this by love’s essential power. Righteousness 
 
In the Prophets 113 
 
 and mercy, therefore, are fundamental notes in Hosea’s 
 conception of Jehovah. “TI will betroth thee unto me,” 
 Jehovah says to the apostate nation, “in righteousness 
 and in justice and in lovingkindness and in mercies”’ 
 (2:19). And again: “I will have mercy upon her that 
 had not obtained mercy; and I will say to them that 
 were not my people, Thou art my people; and they shall 
 say, Thou art my God” (2:23), and yet again: “I will 
 heal their backsliding, I will love them freely; for mine 
 anger is turned away from him” (14:4). 
 
 But this is no new revelation. Hosea, as was Amos, 
 is acquainted with the history of his people. He knows 
 the story of Jacob (12: 3, 4), the deliverance from Egypt 
 (11:1; 12:9; 13:4), the wandering in the wilderness 
 (13:5), the sin at Baal-peor (9:10). And he refers to 
 these events in that casual way that indicates them to 
 have been matters of common knowledge. He also 
 uses them with striking effect to enforce his moral and 
 religious lessons. 
 
 Hosea’s conception of the character of God is also 
 clearly indicated by his attitude toward a merely formal 
 worship, as if this could take the place of an upright life. 
 Not ritual, however elaborate and impressive, but 
 moral obedience is what Jehovah demands. “For I 
 desire goodness and not sacrifice, and the knowledge of 
 God more than burnt-offerings” (6:6). In this Hosea 
 announces a truth characteristic of all the prophets. 
 The fatally persistent feeling, not of the Hebrews alone 
 but of mankind, seems, however, to be that outward 
 observances can atone for inward sins. This is to de- 
 
114 The Biblical Idea of God 
 
 grade the spiritual nature of religion, to minister nar- 
 cotics to conscience, and to conceive of God as indif- 
 ferent to his supreme demands. 
 
 Among the prophets of the eighth century B. C. and, 
 indeed, among all prophets, Isaiah is the greatest, not, 
 however, in the character of his message, but in native 
 genius and poetic power. For though God spoke in 
 the prophets he did not suppress their distinctive per- 
 sonal qualities. The divine truth took upon itself the 
 varied forms and colors of human speech and human 
 individuality. Thus Amos in his illustrations gives 
 evidence of his herdsman’s life and rustic experiences, 
 and Isaiah shows familiarity with a royal court and 
 the literary culture of his day. 
 
 His prophecies have been subjected to the customary 
 critical analysis and have been divided into several 
 parts, ascribed to several assumed authors. Beginning 
 with the natural and clearly indicated leading division 
 into two parts, the first thirty-nine chapters were once 
 assigned to the historical Isaiah, and the rest to some 
 unknown author, variously designated, of the close of 
 the captivity and the restoration. But the determin- 
 ing of authorship has not stopped here. There are now 
 several more authors assumed to have written the first 
 part. The more moderate divisive critics allow only 
 one-third of the entire book, counting by chapters, to 
 have been written by the genuine Isaiah, while the 
 more radical, counting by verses, leave to him a trifle 
 more than one-fifth. There are still scholars, however, 
 of high standing who accept the whole book as having 
 
In the Prophets 115 
 
 been written by Isaiah, the son of Amoz, and we may 
 leave this conflict of opinion to be settled, as time will 
 doubtless settle it, to those whose greatest interest is 
 in such formal studies and turn to consider the more 
 important question as to what the book teaches con- 
 cerning God. 
 
 That the author, or authors, if such there were, was 
 a pronounced monotheist, no one doubts. The deities 
 of the world outside of Israel are held to be nonentities, 
 or no-beings; Israel’s God alone exists. In words of 
 biting irony Isaiah describes the idols as senseless and 
 devoid of power, formed of wood and silver and gold 
 (44:9-17). Man “heweth him down cedars, and 
 taketh the holm-tree and the oak,” with part he kindleth 
 a fire and warmeth himself, and baketh bread, and 
 with part he maketh a god. But Jehovah saith: “To 
 whom will ye liken me and make me equal” (46: 5)— 
 “the God that created the heavens, that formed the 
 earth, that established it and created it not a waste, 
 that formed it to be inhabited? Iam Jehovah and there 
 is none else” (45:18). And again, contrasting himself 
 with graven images, he saith: “Have ye not known, 
 have ye not heard, hath it not been told you from the 
 beginning, have ye not understood from the founda- 
 tions of the earth? It is he that sitteth above the cir- 
 cle of the earth, and the inhabitants thereof are as 
 grasshoppers; that stretcheth out the heavens as a cur- 
 tain, and spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in; that 
 bringeth princes to nothing; that maketh the judges of 
 the earth as vanity” (40: 21-23). In such passages of 
 
116 The Biblical Idea of God 
 
 unsurpassed eloquence, Isaiah declares the majestic 
 greatness and glory of Israel’s God, whose sole exist- 
 ence is the ultimate ground of the prophet’s faith. 
 
 But equally ultimate and elemental is his conception 
 of Jehovah’s character. He is the holy God. This 
 conviction is definitely expressed in the sixth chapter, 
 which gives an account of the prophet’s call. Isaiah is 
 worshipping in the temple and in a vision “saw the 
 Lord sitting upon a throne high and lifted up. Above 
 him stood the seraphim . . . and one cried unto another 
 and said, Holy, Holy, Holy is Jehovah of hosts, and 
 the fulness of the whole earth is his glory.” The vision 
 awakens in the prophet the sense of sin. “Woe is me, 
 for I am undone, because I am a man of unclean 
 lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean 
 lips.” But his lips are cleansed by a live coal from off 
 the altar, and his sin forgiven. Then his apparently 
 hopeless mission is given him to a people with ears that 
 will not hear, and eyes that will not see, and whose 
 heart will be hardened by the message which should 
 soften and save. 
 
 The prophecies, spoken throughout a ministry of 
 forty years, are arranged not in the time order of their 
 deliverance, but in groups determined by a common 
 theme. In the first chapter, which is evidently a gen- 
 eral introduction to the entire book, appear the leading 
 conceptions of the prophet. The breadth and sublimity 
 of his outlook are seen in those whom he calls upon to 
 listen. It is not merely Judah and Jerusalem, but the 
 vaster audience of earth and heaven. “Hear, O heav- 
 
In the Prophets 117 
 
 ens, and give ear, O earth, for Jehovah hath spoken.” 
 Then follows the denunciation of the sin of the people. 
 They are rebellious children, Jehovah has nourished 
 and brought them up, but they have forsaken him and 
 have despised the Holy One of Israel. It is the old 
 story, old as the nation’s life, and told again and again 
 throughout its historic career. Chosen of God for 
 knowledge and service, for righteousness and truth, 
 they have turned aside to falsehood and transgression, 
 and the irrevocable law of retribution has brought de- 
 struction and woe, and a foreign nation is desolating 
 their country, burning their cities, devouring their land. 
 Jerusalem is besieged and the people are appealing to 
 Jehovah for help. They are multiplying the sacrifices, 
 thronging the sacred courts of the temple, increasing 
 the prayers, but these accomplish nothing. Jehovah 
 delights not in burnt offerings or the blood of bullocks 
 or of lambs, oblations are vain, incense is an abomina- 
 tion. New moons and appointed feasts his soul hat- 
 eth, and he will not hear their prayers. It is the same 
 essential lesson that Amos and all the prophets taught. 
 Ritual will not take the place of righteousness. ‘The 
 hands lifted in supplication are full of blood. Jehovah 
 cannot accept iniquity and the solemn meeting. 
 “Wash you,” he says, “make you clean, put away the 
 evil of your doings from before mine eyes, cease to do 
 evil, learn to do well, seek justice, relieve the oppressed, 
 give judgment for the fatherless, plead for the widow.” 
 In all this the character of Jehovah is expressed with 
 stern decisiveness, clearness, and power, and shining 
 
118 The Biblical Idea of God 
 
 through the denunciation of sin Is also seen the element 
 of mercy as shown in his care for those who are help- 
 less against the oppressions of the powerful and rich. 
 The fifth chapter contains an appalling litany of 
 woes. ‘Woe to them that join house to house, that 
 lay field to field, till there be no room,” words which 
 are an evident indication that the evils attendant upon 
 trusts and combinations are not new in ourday. “Woe 
 unto them that rise up early in the morning that they 
 may follow strong drink, that tarry late into the night 
 until wine inflame them.” “Woe unto them that draw 
 iniquity with cords of falsehood, and sin as it were with 
 a cart-rope.” “Woe unto them that call evil good and 
 good evil, that put darkness for light and light for 
 darkness.” “Woe unto them that are wise in their 
 own eyes and prudent in their own sight.” “Woe 
 unto them that justify the wicked for a bribe and take 
 away the righteousness of the righteous from him.” 
 “Therefore Sheol hath enlarged its desire and opened 
 its mouth without measure, and their glory and their 
 multitude and their pomp, and he that rejoiceth among 
 them descend into it.” Could the moral character of 
 Jehovah be more impressively declared? When, in 
 their religions, other nations ignored the essential an- 
 tagonism between righteousness and unrighteousness, 
 between truth and falsehood, and ascribed to their 
 deities, as did the Greeks, the immoralities of man, the 
 prophets of the Old Testament lifted their conception 
 of Jehovah far above this low level of debasement, and 
 expressed it in terms which will forever awaken the 
 
In the Prophets 119 
 
 deepest elements in our moral consciousness, and 
 strengthen and sustain our noblest aspirations and 
 aims. No progressive development of our thought of 
 God will ever surpass their teaching or leave its essen- 
 tial contents among the outworn and rejected beliefs of 
 the world. 
 
 But we have not time, nor is it necessary, to quote 
 further passages which express Isaiah’s majestic con- 
 ception of Jehovah. He is, as he has been often called, 
 the evangelical prophet. He proclaims with a larger 
 vision and an increasing emphasis the distinctive Bibli- 
 cal idea of redemption. And this idea takes, in his 
 teaching, a more personal form. The promised bless- 
 ing is to be realized in a clearly defined personal Mes- 
 siah. Moses had spoken of a prophet like unto himself 
 whom God was to raise up (Deut. 18:15-18), but 
 Isaiah varies and enlarges this prediction. He beholds 
 a king who shall reign in righteousness (32:1); he 
 speaks of a shoot out of the stock of Jesse, upon whom 
 the spirit of Jehovah shall rest (11:1, 2); and in his 
 prophecy is that more marvellous prediction, which 
 Handel has combined with music of unsurpassed sub- 
 limity: “For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is 
 given, and the government shall be upon his shoulder, 
 and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, 
 Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace”’ 
 (9:6). 
 
 In the fifty-third chapter this personal Redeemer is 
 set forth as accomplishing his work through suffering. 
 He is the divine sacrifice for the world’s sin and so for 
 
120 The Biblical Idea of God 
 
 the world’s redemption. “He was wounded for our 
 transgressions . . . and by his stripes we are healed.” 
 Thus across the intervening space of seven centuries 
 Isaiah saw the cross and its dying victim lifted up upon 
 the mount of Calvary. This clear vision of a personal 
 Messiah, other and later prophets were to see. Micah, 
 the younger contemporary of Isaiah, uttered the pre- 
 diction which by the priests and scribes was quoted to 
 Herod: “But thou, Beth-lehem Ephrathah, . . . out of 
 thee shall one come forth unto me that is to be ruler 
 in Israel, whose goings forth are from old, from ever- 
 lasting 4{522)s 
 
 I have dwelt thus at length upon the prophets of the 
 eighth century B.C. because in them is disclosed in 
 greater fulness than at any time between them and the 
 earlier Mosaic age and the later Christian era the na- 
 ture and character of God. They repeat and enlarge 
 and enforce the ideas of that earlier age, and contain 
 all that is essential in the prophets who followed them. 
 Nahum, Zephaniah, and Habakkuk applied these con- 
 ceptions to the conditions and peoples of their day; 
 Jeremiah, whose work continued throughout the clos- 
 ing years of Judah’s national life, who while distinctly 
 foretelling the final fall, a fall determined by Judah’s 
 sins and Jehovah’s righteousness, yet foretold, also, 
 above and beyond the darkness and desolation of the 
 Babylonian captivity, the brightness of a better day, 
 when Jehovah would establish a new covenant, when 
 he would write his law upon the heart, when all should 
 know him from the least unto the greatest, and when 
 
In the Prophets 121 
 
 he would forgive iniquity and remember sin no more 
 (31.283), 
 
 This, also, is the burden of Ezekiel, the prophet of 
 the exile, who while still a prophet of judgment as the 
 others were, and thus in flaming language emphasizing 
 the righteousness of Jehovah and the supremacy of the 
 moral law, yet predicts, as they also did, the future 
 restoration. It is in his book that we find the ever- 
 memorable words: “As I live, saith the Lord Jehovah, 
 I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that 
 the wicked turn from his way and live” (83:11). Once 
 more let me point out that such a statement alone 
 makes impossible the opinion that the God of the Old 
 Testament is merely a capricious God of severity and 
 retribution. 
 
 It has been said that the prophets of Israel and Judah 
 are a terra incognita, an unknown land, a statement far 
 too true of even many believers in the Bible. They 
 are read with reference merely to the narrow experi- 
 ences of individuals and not with reference to the larger 
 interests of mankind. But among the wise men of the 
 past there are no greater teachers. They state with 
 unequalled clearness and force those elemental truths 
 which should determine the thought and guide the 
 action of both individuals and nations. Especially do 
 they teach with an eloquence and power, which the 
 religious literature of no other ancient people has ap- 
 proached, that deepest and most universal of all truths, 
 the nature and character of God. It has become a 
 disputed question in these latter days whether this 
 
122 The Biblical Idea of God 
 
 truth, namely, that there is but one God, and that 
 his supreme law is moral, originated with the prophets 
 of the eighth century B.C. and arose from their own 
 reflection. Speculation cannot settle it, nor arbitrary 
 affirmation offer a solution. But the answer of the 
 Bible is positive and clear. Unless we radically change 
 the history so as to make it quite different from what 
 the Bible gives, ethical monotheism had its beginnings 
 in a far-distant past. It was no new belief when Amos 
 prophesied beside the altar at Bethel, and Isaiah con- 
 demned the plans and purposes of Judea’s priests and 
 king. Their insistent claim, as we have seen, is that 
 they are the mouthpieces of Jehovah. It is no less their 
 insistent claim that they are voices in a continuous 
 revelation. They constantly appeal to a divinely 
 guided historic past, in the events of which Jehovah 
 has disclosed himself. There is not the slightest shred 
 of evidence that they are conscious of a new truth con- 
 cerning him. There is no proof that they know that 
 they are lifting the conception of a merely tribal God 
 into the conception of one who is limitless in power, 
 unapproachable in holiness, merciful and gracious in 
 plan and purpose. They look upon themselves not as 
 innovators but as reformers. Their mission is to recall 
 the people to the worship and service of the God of 
 the fathers, the God of the promise, who had revealed 
 himself to Abraham (Isaiah 29 : 22) (Micah 7: 20), who 
 had delivered them from Egypt (Micah 6:4) (Amos 
 2:10), who had declared his law at Sinai, who had 
 sent his servants, the prophets, daily rising up and 
 
In the Prophets 123 
 
 sending them (Amos 2:11; also Jer. 7:25). The con- 
 tention, therefore, that ethical monotheism, as it is 
 called, began with them, has no basis in fact and is 
 quite contrary to the evident consciousness of the 
 prophets themselves. 
 
 It were well if the Christian church, and especially 
 its ministry, should, with a more thorough study and 
 deeper reverence, turn back to these great prophetic 
 teachers of the past. They are the ones to whom our 
 Lord so frequently refers as heralds of himself, and on 
 them and the fulfilment of their predictions the apos- 
 tles built their message of salvation. In times when 
 men were wandering in the darkness of religious apos- 
 tasy and moral degradation, they saw far off the light, 
 “the light of the knowledge cf the glory of God in 
 the face of Jesus Christ.” To attain the height and 
 breadth of their vision, to be quickened by their faith 
 and spirit, is to possess a power which shall make the 
 pulpit once more a place where men shall speak with 
 authority, and whose words shall have power to re- 
 create the world. 
 
V 
 THE BIBLICAL IDEA OF GOD 
 
 IN THE PSALMS, JOB, AND ECCLESIASTES 
 
 THE Jews divided the Old Testament into the law, 
 the prophets, and the hagiographa, or sacred writings. 
 This division is found in the New Testament (Luke 
 24:44). The last portion was sometimes called the 
 Psalms, because they are the principal part of it. The 
 law comprised the Pentateuch or first five books, called 
 the books of Moses, because their authorship was 
 ascribed to him. The prophets included not only those 
 whom we especially designate as such, but also Joshua, 
 Judges, Samuel, and Kings. We now speak of these 
 as historical books, but the Jews called them the for- 
 mer prophets, doubtless because they were written by 
 prophetic men and from a prophetic point of view; 
 that is, tracing in the recorded events the unfolding 
 process of a divine revelation. 
 
 The sacred writings comprised the Psalms, Job, 
 Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, Ruth, Lam- 
 entations, Esther, Daniel, Chronicles, Ezra, and Nehe- 
 miah, a varied group, part historical and part poetic, 
 and were the last received into the sacred canon. 
 
 It is not necessary, nor is it possible in these lectures, 
 to treat of all these writings, nor to arrange them all 
 in chronological order. Some cannot with any assur- 
 
 ance be located in time; and concerning the dates of 
 124 
 
In the Psalms 125 
 
 most, if not of all, there is much disputing among 
 scholars. The most radical view is that they belong, 
 mainly at least, to the period during and following the 
 exile, while conservative scholars, although not accept- 
 ing in every case the traditional authorship, as stated 
 in the titles of the Psalms, yet are unwilling to reject 
 altogether a tradition that has come down from a re- 
 mote past and against which no external, or manu- 
 script, authority has thus far been adduced. That 
 there are Psalms, such as the 102d and 137th, which 
 belong to the time of the exile is clearly evident from 
 their contents, but that there are none in which David 
 poured out his heart in prayer and praise is difficult to 
 believe. To ascribe all these religious lyrics to the 
 times during or after the exile seems to me very much 
 like ascribing the Elizabethan drama to the more arti- 
 ficial times of Queen Anne. 
 
 However, as I have already said, into these critical 
 discussions we do not specifically enter. Our interest 
 is in the more essential and important question as to 
 what these great religious poems teach concerning God, 
 not as to when and by whom they were written. 
 Questions of chronology are sometimes of decisive im- 
 portance; for instance, questions regarding the records 
 of historic persons and events. But in our present 
 quest their importance is not so great. In general, we 
 may consider the Biblical conception of God without 
 particular consideration of the age and authorship of 
 the books in which it is expressed. Its development 
 may on the whole be traced without having regard to 
 
126 The Biblical Idea of God 
 
 the distinctly successive stages of every part of that 
 development. Thus, the Psalms of David preceded 
 the writings of the prophets, but we shall find in them 
 the same essential religious ideas which we have found 
 in the prophets, as also in the earlier periods we have 
 considered. ‘They are, however, presented, more per- 
 sonally, more vividly, and with greater variety of form 
 and emphasis. They are not theological treatises pre- 
 senting truth or speculation in philosophic statement, 
 but intensely vital expressions of personal experience. 
 Indeed, the Bible is not a system of theology, neither 
 as a whole nor in any of its parts, although it has been 
 treated as if it were. Had it been it would never have 
 captured and held the interest of men. Its human au- 
 thors, especially the authors of the Psalms, were not 
 cloistered souls, dwelling apart from human relation- 
 ships and sympathies, but men of God and of this 
 actual world, who felt God’s presence and power, and 
 were familiar with his ways not only in the sanctuary 
 but among the nations and in the homes and marts of 
 men. It is this characteristic which gives to the 
 Psalms, as to all the books of the Bible, a lasting inter- 
 est and makes them appeal not merely to the question- 
 ing intellect but also to the yearning heart of universal 
 man. 
 
 The main if not the exclusive theme of the Psalms is 
 the character and ways of God. They are lyric songs 
 of devotion, the answer, as has been said, of the human 
 heart to the revelation which God has made of himself 
 toman. ‘There is nothing just like them, nor equal to 
 
In the Psalms Tey 
 
 them, in all religious literature. There are, indeed, 
 Babylonian and Egyptian psalms which occasionally 
 contain noble thoughts and lofty aspirations. But 
 these are like grains of wheat in masses of chaff and 
 refuse. They are debased by the polytheism and low 
 conceptions of their authors, and are mingled with 
 magical incantations and an agonizing sense of merely 
 ritualistic transgressions. But the Hebrew Psalms rest 
 on the abiding conviction of the real existence of the 
 one living and true God, the God of the promise, and 
 they voice the deepest emotions of moral penitence 
 and joy, of moral worship and adoration, of moral faith 
 and hope, of moral assurance and aspiration. The 
 hymns, therefore, sung in Babylonian and Egyptian 
 temples cannot be compared in thought and feeling, in 
 majestic greatness and impassioned fervor, with the 
 hymns sung in the temple at Jerusalem. No other re- 
 ligious poetry ever has been or could be made the de- 
 votional expression of a divine worship in which all 
 races, all classes, all conditions can unite. The reason 
 for this lies in the conceptions, or rather the convic- 
 tions, which these psalmists held concerning God. No 
 other beliefs could have awakened, nor can awaken, 
 within the human heart such profound and melodious 
 response. Destroy these beliefs and the answering 
 strings of praise are forever broken. Philosophic agnos- 
 ticism has never written a song of adoring wonder to 
 the dark void which to it obscures the glory and the 
 grace of Israel’s God. Impersonal and resistless force, 
 however vast in extent and power, may awaken awe, 
 
128 The Biblical Idea of God 
 
 but it is awe without trust and love, a terror and not 
 a joy. But it is to the one living and personal God 
 that the Hebrew psalmists utter their songs of praise. 
 He is the sole and supreme object of worship whose 
 attributes are not mere subjective conceptions of the 
 human mind but objective realities, beyond and be- 
 hind, and yet madé manifest in, the forces and forms 
 of earth and heaven, in historic events and in the actual 
 experiences of living men. 
 
 Thus the psalmists ascribe personality to God and 
 their conception is intensely spiritual. No outward 
 and visible form can body him forth. Idolatry is ab- 
 horrent to them. The second commandment, that 
 against graven images, had completely dominated 
 their thought of the divine nature. In the 115th 
 Psalm, in terms of irony which remind us of Isaiah, 
 there is a description of the idols of the nations. 
 
 “They are silver and gold, the work of men’s hands. 
 They have mouths, but they speak not; 
 Hyes have they, but they see not; 
 They have ears, but they hear not; 
 Noses have they, but they smell not; 
 They have hands, but they handle not; 
 Feet have they, but they walk not; 
 Neither speak they through their throat. 
 They that make them shall be like unto them, 
 Yea, every one that trusteth in them.” 
 
 But the God of Israel is not like these, a senseless 
 image. 
 
In the Psalms 129 
 
 ‘He that planted the ear, shall he not hear? 
 He that formed the eye, shall he not see?” (Psalm 94: 9). 
 
 “‘His footsteps are on the deep” (Psalm 77:19). 
 
 “His voice is upon the waters, and in the thunder, a voice 
 of power and full of majesty, breaking the cedars of 
 Lebanon, cleaving the flames of fire, and causing the 
 wilderness to shake” (Psalm 29). 
 
 “The heavens declare the glory of God, 
 And the firmament showeth his handiwork, 
 Day unto day uttereth speech, 
 And night unto night showeth knowledge” (Psalm 19:1, 2). 
 
 Yet this vast expanse, radiant with sun and star, 
 this constant interchange of light and darkness, are 
 silent, inarticulate expressions of Jehovah’s greatness. 
 As the Revised Version more accurately translates it: 
 
 ‘There is no speech nor language, 
 Their voice is not heard.” 
 
 Thus the Hebrew poet celebrated not merely the 
 impressive sounds but the more impressive silences of 
 nature. It was with the inward eye and ear that he 
 regarded it. To him nature was in a certain real sense 
 but another name for God, but not in the sense of 
 pantheism. God is immanent in nature and yet tran- 
 scendent. Instead of losing God in nature and re- 
 garding it as the ultimate reality, nature to the psalm- 
 ists is not a cause or complexity of causes, but an effect, 
 or series of effects, the marvellous and intelligible ex- 
 pression of the creative action of a divine intelligence 
 
130 The Biblical Idea of God 
 
 and will. Among all the manifold forms and forces of 
 the world there is a central personal power. Nature 
 finds its unity in the living God. Thus with an unfal- 
 tering faith the Hebrew religious poets affirm that in- 
 terpretation of the material world which the broadest 
 scientific observation and the profoundest philosophic 
 thought of to-day confirm. 
 
 This fundamental conception is eloquently expressed 
 in the 104th Psalm. The unknown author (for the 
 Psalm is anonymous) presents no elaborate argument 
 for God’s existence, which only the learned few could 
 grasp and understand, but appeals directly to the re- 
 ligious consciousness, and in vivid poetic terms enu- 
 merates those visible and tangible objects that are 
 familiar to all, and yet so familiar that to the ordinary 
 mind and to the mind entangled in false preconcep- 
 tions and fallacious reasonings their deeper meaning is 
 often obscured, but to the psalmist are evidences of 
 Jehovah’s presence, and awaken in him emotions of 
 awe and trust and worship. The light is Jehovah’s 
 garment, clouds his chariot, winds his messengers, 
 flames of fire his ministers. He laid the foundations of 
 the earth that it should not be moved forever, he cov- 
 ered it with the deep as with a vesture. At his com- 
 mand the mountains rose, the valleys sank down. He 
 set a bound for the waters and they turn not again to 
 cover the earth. He sendeth forth springs into the 
 valleys where the wild asses quench their thirst. By 
 them the birds of the heavens have their habitations. 
 He causeth grass to grow for the cattle and herb for 
 
In the Psalms 131 
 
 the service of man. He hath planted the cedars of 
 Lebanon. He openeth his hand and satisfieth with 
 good every living thing. Thus contemplating the earth 
 and its inhabitants the psalmist exclaims: 
 
 “O Jehovah, how manifold are thy works! 
 In wisdom hast thou made them all. The earth is full of 
 thy riches.” 
 
 There are also other psalms in which this devout 
 vision of God in nature is eloquently expressed, such 
 as the 8th and 18th, the 33d, the 65th, and still others 
 in brief passages too numerous to mention. In these 
 lyric songs of praise, to use once more the language 
 of an eminent minister of the gospel, the Lord of the 
 garden is not hidden by the garden of the Lord. If 
 those students of nature, whose work is to trace the 
 relationship and order of what are called secondary 
 causes, could stand with these Hebrew poets on their 
 lofty height of vision and see with inward and unsealed 
 eye the primal cause revealed in the ever-changing 
 panorama of earth and sky, there would be less atheism 
 and agnosticism taught in our schools and colleges to- 
 day, and more of those deeper truths which are the 
 formative and sustaining forces in developing moral 
 character and ennobling human life. 
 
 But not in nature only do the Hebrew psalmists see 
 the work of the God they worship. The history of 
 man in all its involved and oftentimes perplexing 
 movements is to them the unfolding by him of an eter- 
 nal plan. They are sometimes troubled by its slow 
 
132 The Biblical Idea of God 
 
 development, they cannot always understand the im- 
 mediate trend of its events; God at times seems to hide 
 himself and is apparently indifferent to the turmoil 
 and evil of the world. Thus in the 10th Psalm the 
 author cries out in his distress: 
 
 “Why standest thou afar off, O Jehovah? 
 Why hidest thou thyself in times of trouble?” 
 
 ‘Wherefore doth the wicked contemn God, 
 And say in his heart, Thou wilt not require it?” 
 
 All his thoughts are, There is no God.” 
 
 We, also, who live in times of larger light and fuller 
 revelation, find, like the psalmist, our belief in God’s 
 guidance of the world to be sometimes shaken. The 
 late war which involved so many nations in its agonies 
 and horror led not a few to question that guidance. 
 But wars which desolate wide realms and destroy an- 
 cient civilizations are no new and strange experience. 
 Again and again the earth has been drenched with the 
 blood of untold millions. Again and again the ery of 
 humanity has gone up to heaven: How long, O Lord, 
 how long? | 
 
 But this questioning doubt of the psalmist is a mo- 
 mentary mood. It disappears before the deeper and 
 more abiding conviction that “Jehovah reigneth, there- 
 fore let the world rejoice.’ The divine hand deter- 
 mines the direction of events and assures their trium- 
 phant issue. The psalmists, therefore, while intensely 
 national, do not limit God’s interest and control to their 
 
 ————— 
 
In the Psalms 133 
 
 own people. The historical psalms, such as the 105th 
 and 106th, speak of the covenant with Abraham and 
 recount the glories of the Mosaic age; and this patriotic 
 feeling was natural and right, for to the chosen people 
 the promises had been made. Yet, just as to Abraham 
 even, Jehovah was “judge of all the earth,” so also to 
 the psalmists he is “King over all the earth” (47: 2), 
 “whose throne is established of old” (93:2), and this 
 universal rule of Jehovah is not merely righteous and 
 retributive, but gracious and redemptive, which clearly 
 shows that the full significance of the promise to the 
 great patriarch had not been obscured by the interven- 
 ing years, but remained as a far-flashing beacon-light 
 to guide and sustain the faith and hope of Israel’s in- 
 spired teachers. The days will come, it is said, when 
 “the princes of the peoples are gathered together to 
 be the people of the God of Abraham” (47:9), when 
 “all Kings shall fall down before him, all nations shall 
 serve him” (72: 11),“ when the peoples are gathered to- 
 gether and the Kingdoms to serve Jehovah” (102: 22). 
 Such expressions are not frequent, but they are not the 
 less significant of an enduring conviction that human 
 history is the realization of a divine purpose of redemp- 
 tion formed in the counsels of eternity, and compre- 
 hending every age and all mankind. 
 
 We have already found this sublime conviction in 
 the prophets, lighting up the darker clouds of condem- 
 nation with which their writings abound, in the predic- 
 tions of the Messiah and of a final universal peace such 
 as Micah and Isaiah foretold; and it will broaden and 
 
134 The Biblical Idea of God 
 
 brighten with the years that are to come, until it 
 reaches its fulfilment in the advent of the Christ. 
 
 The essential character of this divine purpose and 
 plan is also shown in the book of Psalms. It is alto- 
 gether moral, and is to work out the moral regenera- 
 tion of the human race. Its morality, moreover, as in 
 the Decalogue, is rooted in religion, and the religion 
 is that in which Jehovah is the one object of worship. 
 
 This recognition and assertion of a moral order, 
 established and sustained by Jehovah, vaster than the 
 physical order and inclusive of it, is found with especial 
 emphasis in the book of Psalms. Open the book any- 
 where and you will find it affirmed or implied. The 
 first Psalm begins with the words: 
 
 “Blessed is the man who walketh not in the counsel of the 
 wicked, 
 Nor standeth in the way of sinners, 
 Nor sitteth in the seat of scoffers, 
 But his delight is in the law of Jehovah, 
 And in his law doth he meditate day and night.” 
 
 And the Psalm closes with the words: : 
 
 “For Jehovah knoweth the way of the righteous, 
 But the way of the wicked shall perish.” 
 
 The 37th Psalm is addressed to those who fail to see 
 this righteous rule and are troubled because evil is so 
 prevalent and apparently predominant. 
 
 “Fret not thyself because of evil doers, 
 Neither be thou envious against them that work unright- 
 eousness, 
 
In the Psalms 135 
 
 For they shall soon be cut down like the grass, 
 And wither as the green herb.’ 
 
 “For Jehovah loveth justice, 
 And forsaketh not his saints, 
 They are preserved forever, 
 But the seed of the wicked shall be cut off.” 
 
 “Clouds and darkness are round about him,” but 
 “righteousness and justice are the foundations of his 
 throne” (97: 2). 
 
 This even-handed moral order, whose source and sus- 
 taining power, according to the Bible, are in God alone, 
 some to-day would dissociate altogether from belief in 
 him. They would base moral obedience on the vague 
 conceptions of philosophy, or on physical science, or on 
 the recognition of the working in human history of an 
 invariable though impersonal law, or on the mere sense 
 of obligation which conscience gives. But such sources, 
 which to some extent are effective, furnish no sufficient 
 motive power against the evil appetites and passions 
 of mankind; nor can they lift men to the serene heights 
 of that nobler morality whose inmost nature is unsel- 
 fishness, and whose law is the golden rule. This is al- 
 ways and everywhere the experience of the world. 
 Among the lowest tribes of savages obedience to their 
 limited and imperfect moral laws is secured by the 
 sanctions of their religions, however inadequate their 
 religious conceptions and worship may be; and it is a 
 matter of simple observation that wherever the God of 
 the Bible is known and sincerely believed in, there so- 
 
136 The Biblical Idea of God 
 
 cial evils are overcome and righteousness and truth 
 prevail. 
 
 But it is not merely the strict and impartial justice 
 of Jehovah that psalmists teach. Were this the sole 
 idea of a moral God, we might well exclaim with the 
 author of the 130th Psalm: 
 
 “Tf thou, Jehovah, shouldst mark iniquities, 
 O Lord, who could stand ?”? 
 
 But he adds immediately: 
 
 ‘There is forgiveness with thee that thou mayest be feared.” 
 
 Shakespeare, who evidently knew his Bible, has felt 
 the force and beauty of this great truth, and restated 
 it in his own inimitable way. To Shylock Portia says 
 that mercy 
 
 “Ts an attribute to God himself. 
 And earthly power doth then show likest God’s 
 When mercy seasons justice. Therefore, Jew, 
 Though justice be thy plea, consider this, 
 That, in the course of justice, none of us 
 Should see salvation; we do pray for mercy; 
 And that same prayer doth teach us all to render 
 The deeds of mercy.” 
 
 It is not in its records of war and conquest that the 
 deepest convictions of a people are expressed, but in 
 its literature, its poetry, especially in its songs of de- 
 votion. Let all the creeds that were ever formed, all 
 the doctrinal treatises that were ever written, all the 
 sermons that were ever preached perish utterly, yet if 
 the hymns sung in the Christian church remain you 
 
In the Psalms 137 
 
 shall find enshrined in them the essential truths of our 
 faith. In rhythmic form they voice our religious con- 
 victions and sustain our religious life. In the Psalms, 
 therefore, we shall find the best and highest expression 
 in the Old Testament of Israel’s thought of God. The 
 Hebrew word which in the old version is sometimes 
 translated mercy and sometimes loving-kindness is in 
 the new American Revision always, with but three ex- 
 ceptions, translated loving-kindness, and is found one 
 hundred and thirteen times in the Psalms, as also fre- 
 quently elsewhere. In the 51st Psalm, which is said 
 to be David’s penitential hymn and plea for forgiveness 
 after his great sin, it is to the loving-kindness and ten- 
 der mercies of God that he appeals, and the 32d Psalm 
 begins with the words: 
 
 “Blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven, 
 Whose sin is covered. 
 Blessed is the man unto whom Jehovah imputeth not 
 iniquity, 
 And in whose spirit there is no guile.” 
 
 The 103d Psalm is a song of joy and blessing to the 
 God 
 
 “Who forgiveth all thine iniquities; 
 Who healeth all thy diseases; 
 Who redeemeth thy life from destruction, 
 Who crowneth thee with lovingkindness and tender mer- 
 cies.’ 
 
 “Jehovah is merciful and gracious, 
 Slow to anger and abundant in lovingkindness.” 
 
 “For as the heavens are high above the earth, 
 So great is his lovingkindness toward them that fear him.” 
 
138 The Biblical Idea of God 
 
 Can any one read such words and still say that 
 Israel’s God was cruel and capricious? Cruelty and 
 caprice take no account of moral character or moral 
 needs, nor of moral ends in the government of the 
 world. They express a passion which seeks only to 
 gratify itself. But grace, while clearly recognizing the 
 fact and guilt of sin, and never disregarding the claims 
 of justice, yet seeks to reclaim the transgressor and 
 restore to him the righteousness he has lost. This 
 essential harmony of these contrasted but not conflict- 
 ing attributes of God is affirmed in the 85th Psalm: 
 
 “Mercy and truth are met together. 
 Righteousness and peace have kissed each other.” 
 
 But it is the attitude of loving-kindness which touches 
 most deeply the hearts of these Hebrew poets, and 
 awakens in them the thanksgiving uttered in their 
 songs of praise. Hence again and again we find such 
 statements as: 
 
 “The earth, O Jehovah, is full of thy lovingkindness” 
 (119 : 64). . 
 
 “Oh praise Jehovah all ye nations; 
 Laud him all ye peoples. 
 For his lovingkindness is great toward us; 
 And the truth of Jehovah endureth forever” (117). 
 
 Again: 
 
 “All the paths of Jehovah are lovingkindness and truth 
 Unto such as keep his covenant and testimonies” (25: 10). 
 
In the Psalms 139 
 The 118th Psalm opens with the words: 
 
 “Oh give thanks unto Jehovah, for he is good, 
 For his lovingkindness endureth forever.” 
 
 This last line is four times repeated in the first four 
 verses, and the Psalm closes with the verse with which 
 it began. 
 
 The 107th Psalm recounts the troubles through which 
 men pass, troubles arising from adversaries, from exile, 
 from hunger and thirst, from bonds and afflictions, from 
 nearness to the gates of death, from storms upon the 
 sea, from the evils of wickedness and oppression, yet 
 they are called upon to 
 
 “Give thanks unto Jehovah, for he is good, 
 For his lovingkindness endureth forever.” 
 
 “He delivered them out of their distresses, 
 He led them also by a straight way.” 
 
 Psalm 136, which recounts the signal events of the 
 deliverance from Egypt, consists of twenty-six verses, 
 each verse referring to a special event, and ending with 
 the phrase, 
 
 “For his lovingkindness endureth forever,”’ 
 
 like a continuously recurring musical refrain, which 
 only escapes monotony because of the greatness of its 
 thought and its fitness to meet the moral needs of men. 
 
 Thus the Psalms abundantly express the two funda- 
 mental elements of justice and mercy in the Biblical 
 
140 The Biblical Idea of God 
 
 idea of God. They express also other elements which, 
 combined with these, make up the complete conception 
 of his nature. Limitless power is ascribed to him. 
 This is involved in the conception of him as the creator 
 of earth and heaven, and as controlling all events. It 
 is also definitely stated in such passages as: 
 
 “God hath spoken once. 
 Twice have I heard this, 
 That power belongeth unto God” (62:11). 
 
 ‘Be thou exalted, O Jehovah, in thy strength, 
 So will we sing and praise thy power” (21: 18). 
 
 ‘““Who by thy strength setteth fast the mountains, 
 Being girded about with might”’ (65: 6). 
 
 “He ruleth by his might forever” (66: 7). 
 
 The 139th Psalm celebrates the omnipresence and 
 omniscience of God, not as an abstract metaphysical 
 truth, but as a personal and vital experience, and in 
 terms which touch the heart and awaken awe, and 
 auicken the love of righteousness and truth. 
 
 “OQ Jehovah, thou hast searched me and known me. 
 Thou knowest my downsitting and my uprising: 
 Thou understandest my thought afar off. 
 
 Thou searchest out my path and my lying down, 
 And art acquainted with all my ways. 
 
 For there is not a word in my tongue, 
 
 But lo, O Jehovah, thou knowest it altogether. 
 Thou hast beset me behind and before 
 
 And laid thy hand upon me. 
 
 Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, 
 
 It is high, I cannot attain unto it. 
 
 Whither shall I go from thy spirit? 
 
In the Psalms 141 
 
 Or whither shall I flee from thy presence? 
 
 If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: 
 
 If I make my bed in Sheol, behold, thou art there. 
 If I take the wings of the morning, 
 
 And dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, 
 
 Even there shall thy hand lead me, 
 
 And thy right hand shall hold me. 
 
 If I say, Surely the darkness shall cover me, 
 
 Then the night shall be light about me, 
 
 Even the darkness hideth not from thee, 
 
 But the night shineth as the day; 
 
 The darkness and the light are both alike to thee.” 
 
 But time fails us to set forth adequately the fulness 
 and richness of these Hebrew songs of devotion, and the 
 many and varied forms of personal experience in which 
 they express their conception of the nature and charac- 
 ter of God. Doubtless to the most of us the one whose 
 beauty and power awakens the deepest feelings, and 
 quickens the tenderest memories, is that one which in 
 earliest childhood we learned from our mother’s lips. 
 It is the 23d Psalm, and is ascribed to David. The 
 imagery is evidently suggested by the remembrance of 
 his early life when he cared for his father’s flocks on 
 the Judean hills, and when day and night, “with all 
 their changeful pageantry,” led to meditation on that 
 personal Power whose presence is everywhere, and 
 whose care is round about us all. 
 
 “Jehovah is my shepherd, I shall not want. 
 He maketh me to lie down in green pastures; 
 He leadeth me beside the still waters. 
 He restoreth my soul; 
 He guideth me in paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.” 
 
142 The Biblical Idea of God 
 And the Psalm closes with the words: 
 
 ‘Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of 
 my life, 
 And I shall dwell in the house of Jehovah forever.” 
 
 No words could more tenderly express trust in God’s 
 goodness, and they voice the feelings of the human 
 heart to-day as fully as when they were uttered by the 
 royal psalmist nearly thirty centuries ago. 
 
 But if these songs of praise teach in such rich and 
 varied forms and with such entire trust the mercy 
 and loving-kindness of Jehovah, what shall we say of 
 the so-called imprecatory Psalms? These are often re- 
 ferred to as indicating a spirit of vengeance in the heart 
 of the author, and implying the conception of a merci- 
 less God. We may frankly confess that they are quite 
 unlike the prayer of our Lord when the Roman soldiers 
 were nailing him to the cross: “Father forgive them, 
 for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34). But 
 even that prayer implies the recognition of a crime and 
 the desert of retribution. Moreover, no one has ever 
 condemned sin with more intense terms and with clearer 
 conception of its awful nature. Again and again, in 
 the 23d chapter of Matthew, he says: “Woe unto you 
 scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites,” and ends this series 
 of terrible denunciations with the words: “Ye serpents, 
 ye offspring of vipers, how shall ye escape the damna- 
 tion of hell?” Nothing could be severer than this, and 
 nothing is more frequently overlooked in setting forth 
 the teaching of the Lord Jesus. 
 
In the Psalms 143 
 
 But, as regards these Psalms of imprecation (the 35th, 
 69th, 94th, 109th, and others), these things should be 
 said: First, the self-revelation of God recorded in the 
 sacred history has been progressive, a fact sometimes 
 forgotten by both friends and foes of the Bible. The 
 authors of the Psalms lived at a time in which, while 
 more advanced than that of the patriarchal and Mo- 
 saic periods, the full and final disclosure of the attri- 
 butes of God in their just balance and proportion had 
 not yet been made. If, as I have said, we would judge 
 men fairly it must be with reference to the knowledge 
 and conditions of their day. 
 
 In the second place, the imprecatory Psalms are not 
 personal in the sense that they express the vengeful 
 feelings of the authors’ arising because of wrongs done 
 to themselves. It is against the enemies of Jehovah 
 that they utter these severe denunciations. It is for 
 the cause of God that they are passionately pleading, 
 which is the cause of righteousness. It is upon the 
 “workers of iniquity” that they call for retributory 
 punishment, upon those who “slay the widow and the 
 sojourner and murder the fatherless,”’ and who say, in 
 their extreme scepticism: “ Jehovah will not see, neither 
 will the God of Jacob consider”’ (94: 4, 6, 7). 
 
 In the third place, the main impression of the Psalms 
 as a whole gives to us the conception of God’s mercy 
 and loving-kindness. These attributes are mentioned 
 and implied far more frequently than the attribute of 
 justice which inflicts the penalties due to sin, and they 
 awaken constantly the most exalted expressions of 
 
144 The Brblical Idea of God 
 
 gratitude and praise. The fundamental note of the 
 entire body of this religious poetry is given by them, 
 and should to some extent modify the harsher tone of 
 the imprecatory Psalms. 
 
 In the fourth place, let us remember that justice is 
 not mere benevolence nor mercy a weak and sentimen- 
 tal emotion which disregards the guilt of sin. Too 
 often, in these later days especially, is this lessened 
 sense of righteousness shown in seeking relief and par- 
 don for those who have violated the most sacred moral 
 obligations, the most imperative moral laws that se- 
 cure the safety of society, and who show no penitence 
 or quickened sense of the evil they have done. Not 
 only individuals but also nations, as we see to-day, are 
 the objects of this maudlin pity, which would do away 
 with the sanctions of righteousness and destroy the 
 structural basis on which a moral civilization can alone 
 securely rest. 
 
 Lastly, in estimating the character of the impreca- 
 tory Psalms we must not forget the essential difference 
 between the Occidental and the Oriental mind. The 
 Bible is the book of an Oriental people, whose emotions 
 are intense and easily aroused, and are expressed in 
 terms of extreme vividness and power; and poetry is 
 the language of feeling and imagination, and in Eastern 
 lands rises to a passionate strain, which to the colder 
 Occidental mind may seem far beyond the limits of 
 sobriety and truth. This creates one of the difficulties 
 we constantly encounter in interpreting the Bible. 
 East and West, though both have the common aittri- 
 
In Job 145 
 
 butes of humanity, cannot always find a common point 
 of view in their outlook upon man and God. Kipling 
 has voiced this in the lines: 
 
 “Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain 
 shall meet, 
 Till earth and sky stand presently at God’s great Judgement 
 seat.” 
 
 Hence, in the study of Oriental literature, especially 
 that of the Bible, we should neither ignore nor lessen, 
 nor, on the other hand, overestimate this racial differ- 
 ence. 
 
 I have spoken of the fact that the psalmists reveal 
 sometimes a deep perplexity and distress when they 
 contemplate broadly God’s government of the world. 
 Moral evil seems not only prevalent but all-controlling. 
 The righteous are afflicted and the wicked triumphant. 
 God hides himself in impenetrable mystery, and there 
 are those who with insolent scepticism deny his pres- 
 ence and power. 
 
 This question is the subject of the book of Job. No 
 greater book in Hebrew literature, nor in the literatures 
 of other peoples, has ever been written. It belongs 
 not to one age, but to all ages, not to one people, but 
 to all peoples. Professor Moulton, in his introduction 
 to this book in the “ Modern Reader’s Bible,” says that 
 doubtless a consensus of literary opinion would pro- 
 nounce it the greatest book in the world. Its author is 
 unknown. The date is a matter of conjecture. In 
 form it is dramatic. The action is not scenic or exter- 
 
146 The Brblical Idea of God 
 
 nal, but wholly within the minds and hearts of Job and 
 his friends. The attempt has been made to place it 
 upon the stage, but it does not easily lend itself to such 
 presentation. It is a book for the closet and for quiet 
 contemplative reading. The thought and emotion ex- 
 pressed in the dialogue are what attract and hold 
 attention, and the thought is altogether concerning 
 God and the emotions are such as this thought awakens. 
 
 In seeking the idea of God set forth in the book of 
 Job we must consider it as a whole. Its dramatic char- 
 acter demands this. Perhaps no book in the Bible has 
 suffered more through neglect of a general considera- 
 tion of the author’s purpose. Many a sermon has been 
 built on texts taken at random without regard to the 
 generic thought. The intention of the author, in part 
 at least, was to present and reject a prevalent concep- 
 tion of God, and to substitute another more in accor- 
 dance with the facts of life. The friends of Job hold the 
 prevailing view, viz., that those only suffer who sin, a 
 view which the disciples of our Lord evidently held and 
 which led them to say, “Who sinned, this man or his 
 parents, that he should be born blind?”’—a view also 
 which is held still by not a few to-day, and Job, in his 
 character and experiences and passionate affirmations 
 of integrity and outcries against his misfortunes, is 
 used to destroy it. But the purpose is not merely de- 
 structive. There is a positive conception of God pre- 
 sented. We are not left in final and utter darkness as 
 to his nature and character and our right relations to 
 him. 
 
In Job 147 
 
 _ The story in its main outlines is familiar. In the 
 prologue Job is represented as a man of great wealth, 
 of high position, and of exalted piety. It is upon the 
 last that the emphasis is placed. In the opening words, 
 descriptive of Job and his conditions, it is affirmed by 
 the author. It is twice declared by God in speaking of 
 Job to Satan. Job’s wife, who in some respects was 
 doubtless the best human authority as to the character 
 of Job, asserts it. But Satan, or the adversary, as the 
 word is more accurately translated, who may be called 
 the district attorney of the universe, whose function is 
 to spy out and bring transgressors to trial, suggests a 
 doubt. Does Job fear God for naught? Is his piety 
 disinterested? “Thou hast blessed the work of his 
 hands, and his substance is increased in the land. But 
 put forth thy hand now, and touch all that he hath, 
 and he will renounce thee to thy face.” Then, with the 
 divine permission, the test is made. By four immedi- 
 ately successive strokes, flocks and herds and servants 
 and children are destroyed. But Job’s piety with- 
 stands the test. With sublime submission he exclaims: 
 “Jehovah gave and Jehovah hath taken away; blessed 
 be the name of Jehovah.” 
 
 Then follows a severer and final test. Job is himself 
 stricken. Black leprosy, of all diseases the worst, 
 and by man incurable, falls upon him. The piety of 
 his wife fails. She bids him renounce God and die. 
 But Job replies: “What? Shall we receive good at the 
 hand of God, and shall we not receive evil? In all this 
 did not Job sin with his lips.” 
 
148 The Biblical Idea of God 
 
 Then Job’s three friends came “to bemoan him and 
 to comfort him” as he sits among the ashes on the 
 refuse-heap without the city. Many days and nights 
 have passed since affliction fell upon him, days which 
 he pathetically describes as “swifter than the weaver’s 
 shuttle, and spent without hope” and nights which are 
 “full of tossings to and fro unto the dawning of the 
 day.” 
 
 Beside him for seven such days and nights his friends 
 sit in silent sympathy, “for they saw that his grief was 
 very great.” Then, at last, his long pent-up emotions 
 break the silence and burst forth in that awful impre- 
 cation in which he curses the day of his birth and the 
 night of his conception, and passionately longs for 
 death to relieve his misery. The friends are astonished 
 and perplexed. They had evidently expected peni- 
 tence and a reawakening of faith, instead of this bitter 
 arraignment of the providence of God. They had 
 come with a theory—a theory which like not a little of 
 our scientific philosophy and theology is a false infer- 
 ence based on actual facts. Job is an extreme sufferer, 
 therefore he must have been a great sinner. Only in 
 this way can they explain his afflictions. It is their 
 view, the then orthodox view, of the divine government 
 of the world; and throughout the entire drama, with 
 cold and pitiless insistence, they argue for it as the 
 truth. The law is even-handed and exact. Only the 
 good prosper; only the evil are afflicted. 
 
 Job, doubtless, once believed this. But now experience 
 has shattered his belief. He is conscious of his integ- 
 
In Job 149 
 
 rity. He will not deny this inward witness. His cause 
 is righteous (6: 29). It is his consolation that he “has 
 not denied the words of the Holy One” (6:10). And 
 yet he is overwhelmed with the extremity of suffering. 
 God treats him as if he were a sinner; and mankind, 
 sustained and justified, apparently, by this treatment, 
 have turned against him. He has become “a byword 
 of the people,” children mock his misfortunes, and his 
 nearest friends pursue him pitilessly not only with 
 veiled implications but at last with open assertions that 
 his iniquities have been great (22:5). 
 
 But just this is the cause of Job’s profound and hope- 
 less perplexity. As to Hamlet, so to him the world 
 seems out of joint; and he is led boldly to question the 
 righteousness of the divine government. Why should 
 he, a God-fearing man, suffer? Why should he have 
 fallen from the height of prosperity and regard to the 
 depths of want and woe? 
 
 But it is not himself alone that Job considers. Dur- 
 ing these weeks of unrelieved agony his thoughts have 
 been quickened, and his observation of the life of man 
 has taken a broader scope and his discernment has be- 
 come more keen and accurate. He looks out with 
 clearer eye upon the world, and he replies to his friends: 
 
 ‘“‘Mark me and be astonished, 
 And lay your hand upon your mouth. 
 Even when I remember I am troubled, 
 And horror taketh hold on my flesh. 
 Wherefore do the wicked live, 
 Become old, yea, wax mighty in power?” (21: 5-7). 
 
150 The Biblical Idea of God 
 
 Nay, he goes beyond this questioning attitude and 
 openly ascribes the cause to God: 
 
 “The tents of robbers prosper, 
 And they that provoke God are secure, 
 Into whose hand God bringeth abundantly.” (12:6). 
 
 “The earth is given into the hand of the wicked.” 
 
 God “covereth the faces of the judges thereof: 
 If it be not he, who then is it?” (9: 24). 
 
 There is no moral discrimination: 
 
 “Tt is all one; therefore I say, 
 He destroyeth the perfect and the wicked” (9: 22). 
 
 This is indeed extreme statement and seemed the 
 most daring impiety to Job’s friends, as to many of us 
 it still may seem. But it is wrung from Job by the loss 
 and agonies he personally suffers and by the wider out- 
 look on the life of man. Yet as the debate continues 
 he rises in some degree from this depth of moral doubt 
 into which his experience has plunged him, although at 
 times this mood returns. He does not, however, de- 
 scend still further, as atheists do, who, denying God’s 
 personal existence, and in sullen submission to the 
 evils of life, conceive of the power that controls the 
 world as irresistible, unconscious force. Job was too 
 essentially a monotheist to hold that conception. But 
 believing in the living God with a conviction which 
 nothing could destroy, he yet failed to find a rule of 
 righteousness, and his spirit struggles with this impene- 
 trable mystery through the long cycles of the debate. 
 
In Job 151 
 
 In many brilliant passages he describes the limitless, 
 resistless power of this wnmoral God. 
 
 “Who,” he cries out, “hath hardened himself against him 
 and prospered ? 
 
 Him that removeth the mountains and they know it not, | 
 
 When he overturneth them in his anger, 
 
 That shaketh the earth out of its place, 
 
 And the pillars thereof tremble: 
 
 That commandeth the sun, and it riseth not, 
 
 And sealeth up the stars; 
 
 That alone stretcheth out the heavens, 
 
 And treadeth upon the waves of the sea; 
 
 That maketh the Bear, Orion and the Pleiades, 
 
 And the chambers of the south, 
 
 That doeth great things past finding out, 
 
 Yea, marvelous things without number. 
 
 Lo, he goeth by me, and I see him not; 
 
 He passeth on also, but I perceive him not. 
 
 Behold, he seizeth the prey, who can hinder him? 
 
 Who shall say unto him, what doest thou?” 
 
 Thus Job, in agony of mind and body, is tossed about 
 on this wide, wild sea of doubt and despair until the 
 whirlwind and the storm break upon them, and out of 
 these the divine voice speaks. Then at last Job attains 
 quietness of spirit and peace. But it is not the peace 
 which comes through understanding. The mystery is 
 not resolved. It would have been easy but insufficient 
 to have stated the solution of the prologue—that Job’s 
 sufferings were the test of his piety. The question had 
 become far broader. It now involved God’s entire rule 
 in the moral world, and for this a merely intellectual 
 answer were not enough. The answer must meet and 
 
152 The Biblical Idea of God 
 
 still the far profounder emotions of the heart. This 
 can only be done, as the Bible everywhere does it, by 
 awakening trust—trust in the ever-present, ever-liv- 
 ing God. In other words, the true solution for Job 
 and also for us, of the moral mysteries of the world, is 
 one of faith. We cannot comprehend God. “Clouds 
 and darkness,” as the psalmist said, “are round about 
 his throne.” Yet, there zs the throne. It is revealed, as 
 the divine voice declares, in laying the foundations of 
 the earth; in setting bars and doors to the sea, and in 
 saying to it: “Hitherto shalt thou come but no further, 
 and here shall thy proud waves be stayed’’; in estab- 
 lishing the ordinances of the heavens, binding and loos- 
 ing the constellations; in a word, in the supreme con- 
 trol of all those mighty forces which are at work in the 
 inanimate and animate worlds of nature, by which 
 wisdom and power are revealed. 
 
 All this, of course, though in terms less eloquent, had 
 been said by Job and by his friends. But there is a 
 difference. It is now God himself who speaks. He 
 does not argue. He does not explain. That would 
 have been too human, too undivine. There is the over- 
 whelming vision of a supreme personality, and it com- 
 pels Job to exclaim: 
 
 “T had heard of thee by the hearing of the ear, 
 Now mine eye seeth thee.” 
 
 We all understand this difference. The written 
 word, the word read, is ineffectual compared with the 
 spoken word. ‘There are impressions mysteriously con- 
 
In Job 153 
 
 veyed by this which suggest elements of character that 
 nothing else can give. The voice out of the storm gave 
 these impressions, and was prophetic of that living, 
 personal voice which was heard in Galilee and Judea 
 centuries later, which the Apostle John characterizes 
 as the Word—the Word which “became flesh, and dwelt 
 among us (and we beheld his glory, glory as of the 
 only begotten from the Father) full of grace and truth” 
 (John 1:14). Job had cried out for this face-to-face 
 meeting with God (23:3; 18:3). It is the universal cry 
 of the human heart, and men have sought in many im- 
 perfect ways to answer this elemental cry. Longing for 
 a visible, tangible God, they have resorted to idolatry. 
 But images of gold and silver and stone graven into 
 human form by art and device of man have been in- 
 sufficient. Nor have trees, nor mountains, nor the 
 varied forms of animal life, nor stars and suns, nor the 
 o’erarching heaven itself, all of which men have wor- 
 shipped, been adequate to meet this longing. But 
 when God himself comes and speaks, even in darkness 
 and storm, as he did to Job, we are like children, who 
 in the terror of the night hear the voice of the father 
 and put forth our hand to feel the reassuring grasp 
 which dispels all fear and guides our steps to safety and 
 to light. 
 
 The book of Job, therefore, presents to us the con- 
 ception of a God who does not merely hide himself, but 
 who, while his ways are past finding out,and who dwells 
 in the depths of an infinite mystery which no finite 
 mind can fathom, speaks directly to man, and reveals 
 
154 The Biblical Idea of God 
 
 himself as the enduring ground of an unfaltering faith. 
 In this faith we can rest secure, even though evils 
 throng about us and it seems at times as though truth 
 were “forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on the 
 throne,” yet God stands “within the shadow, keeping 
 watch above his own.” 
 
 The book of Job also presents a God who, though he 
 may permit men of the truest piety to be tested by 
 the severest sufferings and troubled by almost the ex- 
 tremity of doubt as to the righteousness of his rule, will 
 at last resolve these doubts and restore them to prosper- 
 ity and peace. For the book ends, as all ideal construc- 
 tions should end, with Job rescued from his afflictions 
 and surrounded by blessings greater than he had lost. 
 
 The book also teaches that God regards with greater 
 favor sincere and honest doubt than those glib and 
 theoretic arguments in his behalf which are regardless 
 of the salient facts of life. This was the attitude of 
 Job’s friends; or, as he puts it in a question to them: 
 “Will ye speak unrighteously for God?” (13:7). 
 They uttered many fine truths; but these did not fit the 
 case of Job, and were false to those larger facts of ex- 
 perience which he saw and declared. Hence, in the 
 end Job is commended and his friends condemned 
 (42:7). This may seem strange to those who fail to 
 grasp the full and tragic significance of this great book; 
 who, to use the words of Job, would “show partiality 
 to” God, that is, would make religious belief a thing 
 of partisanship and not a matter of essential fact and 
 truth. Against this attitude the book of Job is a per- 
 
In Ecclesiastes 155 
 
 petual rebuke. To his friends he was a heretic, per- 
 sistent in his obduracy; but he was one of those heretics 
 who break the chains of proscription and the hardened 
 crust of a merely traditional conservatism, and who 
 lead thought into a broader field and a larger freedom. 
 Such were Luther and Paul and our Lord himself. 
 There remains to be considered one book more of 
 this group of sacred writings. We pass over the rest 
 because they are not essential to our purpose. It is 
 Ecclesiastes. To many it is a strange book, and its 
 right to a place in the sacred canon has been questioned. 
 Its authorship, and composition, and the time when it 
 was written, are subjects of critical controversy. These 
 questions, however, we leave to others. Our interest 
 is in what the book teaches concerning God. It is evi- 
 dently a record of the author’s experience. He begins 
 with pronouncing all things “vanity and a striving 
 after wind.” ‘This phrase comes again and again, a 
 constant and sad refrain. There is a monotonous and 
 wearisome sameness in life. At times the author seems 
 to be a sceptic, an agnostic, a pessimist, an epicurean. 
 He has tested all that men strive for and they bring no 
 satisfaction. Hope is elusive, a lasting good is beyond 
 our grasp, and death is the end for both man and 
 beast. And is this not true if such things as the author 
 mentions, knowledge and wealth and power and plea- 
 sure, are made the chief aims of life? He has stated 
 what every thoughtful mind at last perceives when 
 these are made the leading objects of endeavor. There 
 must be something more and nobler than these if man 
 
156 The Biblical Idea of God 
 
 is to realize the end for which he was created. The 
 author’s scepticism does not reach to the denial of God’s 
 existence. This conviction is too deeply seated to be 
 denied or even doubted among all the other doubts 
 that trouble him. God is, and he has “set eternity” 
 in man’s heart. There are ideas in the human mind 
 which reach beyond the narrow scope of the merely 
 finite. God also “hath made everything beautiful in 
 its time” (3:11). There is, moreover, a moral order. 
 “To the man that pleaseth him God giveth wisdom 
 and knowledge and joy, but to the sinner he giveth 
 travail” (2:26). “God will judge the righteous and 
 the wicked” (8:17). “It shall be well with them that 
 fear God, but it shall not be well with the wicked” 
 (8:12, 13). Yet it must be acknowledged that these 
 convictions do not always at once completely relieve 
 the oppression of spirit under which the author suf- 
 fered. They gleam like lights here and there in the 
 darkness, now and then obscured by the clouds of 
 doubt, but at last shine with a strong and steady radi- 
 ance; for he sums up finally the matter in the words: 
 “Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is 
 the whole duty of man” (12:13). 
 
 The book is helpful as a frank account of an inward 
 conflict between truth and error, between the thought 
 of God and the seemingly opposed thought of the in- 
 explicable mysteries of his providence. Many a pro- 
 found mind has passed through this conflict; nay, we 
 may say that all, or nearly all, who have looked out 
 thoughtfully on the facts of life have had, to some ex- 
 
-In Ecclesiastes 157 
 
 tent, this disquieting experience. Some, how many we 
 know not, have passed through it safely and attained 
 a stronger faith, a more radiant hope. Others, whose 
 numbers, too, we know not, have lost all faith and 
 hope, and have been plunged into the depths of a cyni- 
 cal agnosticism, or atheism, and despair. But even 
 from these depths not a few have been restored, and in 
 the frank records of the experience of travail of such 
 souls we often learn the power of that revealed thought 
 of God which is found in the Bible and in the Bible 
 alone. No other religious literature has declared with 
 such fulness, such clearness and force, as we have 
 found in the Hebrew prophets and in the Psalms, that 
 mercy and loving-kindness whose supreme aim is the 
 moral redemption of mankind. It cannot be too often 
 repeated that the Bible is not a book of ethics merely. 
 It is a history, a history of God’s gracious dealings with 
 a people, with all peoples, and of the inward experi- 
 ences and outward life of those who have known and 
 felt the transforming power in human character of these 
 gracious dealings. When this is clearly recognized 
 there will be fewer fruitless controversies concerning its 
 contents and transmission, and a unity of conviction as 
 to its essential nature will prevail, brought about by 
 the unifying power of its central yet all-pervading 
 thought of the character and purpose of the living 
 God. 
 
VI 
 THE BIBLICAL IDEA OF GOD 
 IN THE TEACHING OF CHRIST AND HIS APOSTLES 
 
 BroLocists in ‘their study of life deal mainly with 
 the earliest and simplest forms. So in our study of the 
 Biblical idea of God we have begun with primitive con- 
 ceptions and have dwelt more at length on their devel- 
 opment throughout the Old Testament than will be 
 necessary in considering the teaching of Christ and his 
 apostles, to which we now have come. We shall find 
 nothing essentially new in what they present. To 
 them the Old Testament was the word of God. It had 
 moulded their minds and determined their convictions 
 and characters. They appealed to it as inspired and 
 authoritative. They claim that they are fulfilling its 
 predictions and declaring and enforcing its distinctive 
 truths and duties. 
 
 But their teaching was not mere lifeless repetition. 
 In this it was in decided contrast to that of the scribes 
 and Pharisees. Truth to and in them was a vital 
 power, not a dead formula. It grew, therefore, into 
 new and higher and more impressive forms. There was 
 increased emphasis upon certain elements which are 
 found in the earlier revelation but which received 
 through them a larger and clearer statement and ef- 
 fected a stronger and deeper conviction. As they 
 
 conceived it, God’s self-revelation was essentially the 
 158 
 
In the Teaching of Christ and His Apostles 159 
 
 same in content throughout the preceding ages, but in 
 them it reached its culmination. In the claim of 
 Christ, as well as in that of his apostles, he himself is 
 the last and highest expression of the nature and char- 
 acter of God, both in his person and work. Beyond 
 him progress is to be found only in the widening accep- 
 tance of his mission and person and the increasing in- 
 fluence of his character and work. 
 
 It is the fashion in these days of not a few, even 
 within the limits of the Christian church, to regard 
 our Lord as merely a teacher, and especially as a 
 teacher of ethics. His moral code is acknowledged to 
 be the loftiest the world has ever known. His miracles 
 are doubted or denied, and what he taught concerning 
 the exalted nature of his person is rejected and regarded 
 as the later conceptions of his apostles and by them 
 ascribed to him. 
 
 Certainly the Lord Jesus was a teacher of moral duty. 
 The Sermon on the Mount is unsurpassed as a state- 
 ment of that. Moreover, as was recognized by those 
 who heard him, he taught with authority and not as 
 the scribes, whose teaching was legalistic and without 
 the force of a living conviction. His method was never 
 tentative. He did not speculate. He seldom argued. 
 There was no slowly developing process of logical 
 reasoning, such as we find in Socrates. He never con- 
 fused and troubled his disciples with the dialectic of 
 the Greek schools. He spoke from an inward and 
 vital conviction of truth directly to the heart of man, 
 and the heart responded with an instinctive appre- 
 
160 The Biblical Idea of God 
 
 ciation and acceptance more controlling than that 
 arising from a merely intellectual perception. 
 
 Moreover, unlike the philosophers and theologians, 
 he was not systematic in the form and presentation of 
 truth. There is no fixed order of arrangement. The 
 Sermon on the Mount and some of the discourses in 
 the Gospel of John are the nearest approach to this. 
 He seized upon occasions as they came, and under the 
 most ordinary circumstances and to the humblest per- 
 sons taught the profoundest truths. His illustrations 
 were taken from familiar scenes, and he made use of 
 stories formed from the common experiences of life, 
 whose force and beauty all could understand and whose 
 inner meaning the earnest seeker after truth could 
 clearly apprehend. Hence the common people heard 
 him gladly, and men of profound minds also, like John 
 and Paul, became his devoted disciples. 
 
 Duty, then, clothed in simplest and most attractive 
 forms was a large part of our Lord’s teaching, but it 
 was only a part. For, however clearly and attractively 
 presented, to be effective duty must be grounded on 
 religious truth. Our actions are determined by our 
 beliefs, especially by our beliefs concerning God. Fun- 
 damental, therefore, in our Lord’s teaching is his con- 
 ception of God’s nature and character. This underlies 
 and determines and gives effectiveness to his entire 
 ethical code. Likeness to God is its supreme aim and 
 the highest duty of man. “Ye, therefore,” said he to 
 his disciples, “shall be perfect, as your Heavenly Fa- 
 ther is perfect”’ (Matt. 5: 48). 
 
In the Teaching of Christ and His Apostles 161 
 
 It is true that to the Greeks Plato had taught the 
 supreme duty of likeness to God. But in order to be 
 like God we must know God, not indeed exhaustively, 
 yet really, though it be in an incomplete degree. 
 Of such knowledge Plato confesses ignorance. “How,” 
 says he in the “Timeus,” “can we find out the father 
 and maker of all this universe? Or, when we have found 
 him how shall we be able to speak of him to all men?”’ 
 And despairing thus of man’s attainment by himself 
 of such knowledge he affirms the need of some one who 
 shall reveal God to us in the fulness and majesty of his 
 person. Thus in a limited sense, and unconsciously, 
 Plato may be said to have been a prophet of the com- 
 ing of our Lord. 
 
 It is to be noted that Plato uses the terms “father 
 and maker,” but at the same time acknowledges that 
 their real and full significance is beyond the reach of 
 the unaided mind. It is not strange that he should 
 use them, especially the word father, as expressing a 
 relationship between man and God, for it is an almost 
 if not universal word used in the religions of the world. 
 Jupiter means heaven father, and the savages of 
 Guiana, as already stated, adore the “Ancient One in 
 Skyland, our Maker, our Father, our Great Father” 
 (“Making of Religion,” Lang, page 222). But this 
 word of relationship may have a purely natural sense. 
 In certain primitive religions the god worshipped is 
 looked upon as the physical ancestor of the tribe. 
 It may mean the national deity. It may also mean 
 the creator of mankind. 
 
162 The Biblical Idea of God 
 
 But what did Christ mean when he taught his dis- 
 ciples to say “Our Father’’? The answer can only be 
 found in the way he uses the term and in the concep- 
 tions he constantly associated with it. It is the word 
 most frequently used by him to express his idea of God. 
 
 In the early years of my active ministry I was 
 preaching a series ef sermons on the catechism, a duty 
 I am constrained to believe much neglected in the pres- 
 ent time. When I came to the exposition of the Lord’s 
 prayer beginning with “Our Father,” I consulted the 
 system of theology of a great teacher who is said to 
 have influenced the beliefs of more Presbyterian minis- 
 ters than any other teacher of his day. Much to my 
 surprise I found no treatment of, nor even reference to, 
 God as a Father, nor was it mentioned in a voluminous 
 index to the several volumes which contained the sys- 
 tem. ‘The word was found in many passages of Scrip- 
 ture quoted, but these were used for other ends than to 
 set forth and emphasize the Fatherhood of God. Ido 
 not doubt that this great teacher believed in God’s 
 Fatherhood, but he made it no part of his system. I 
 confess that the investigation changed in no slight de- 
 gree my regard for the works of systematic theologians 
 and turned me more entirely to the theology set forth 
 in less scholastic and more vital forms in the sacred 
 Scriptures. It is not to be denied that in many ways 
 system is of great importance. But it may mar and 
 injure the forms and relationships of truth. We not 
 infrequently “murder to dissect.” There seems to me 
 to be nothing more injurious to our conceptions of the 
 
In the Teaching of Christ and His Apostles 163 
 
 relative values and importance of certain truths than 
 those books which break up the natural order of the 
 Scriptures and rearrange words and texts under certain 
 formule which gratify only the logical understanding. 
 Not in this way did the prophets, nor did Christ and 
 his apostles, teach. Had they given us a system of 
 theology instead of the truth as they have presented it, 
 we may safely say that they would have had no wider 
 and deeper influence over the lives and characters of 
 men than have the dialogues of Plato and the treatises 
 of Aristotle. Systems are determined by some central 
 and dominating idea, and even if composed of truths, 
 yet the truths are shaped and fitted in subordination 
 to this idea, just as rocks from a quarry are shaped and 
 fitted to conform to the architectural conception of the 
 builder. This is the work of what Kant calls the 
 Architectonic Reason, and to the reflective mind may 
 be useful; but great care must be taken to secure the 
 right idea that is to be central and controlling. In the 
 ancient astronomy the Ptolemaic system was deter- 
 mined by the idea of the earth as central, and this led 
 to many errors in tracing the relationships and move- 
 ments of the planets; but when Copernicus conceived 
 of the sun as central the system was radically changed, 
 and the real order and motions of the earth and stars 
 were at last understood. 
 
 If, therefore, we are to seek to systematize Christ’s 
 teaching, although he himself never presented it in 
 systematic form, we must find its centre in God, and 
 in that dominating truth concerning God to which all 
 
164 The Biblical Idea of God 
 
 other truths taught by him are related and subordi- 
 nate. ‘To me it seems clearly evident that this is found 
 in the word Father. We may, indeed, ourselves draw 
 from this word, as has been done, certain conclusions 
 which are not found in his thought of God. We may 
 infer from it a merely beneficent being, who is some- 
 what indifferent to moral standards, lessens in some 
 degree moral obligations, ignores the strict requirement 
 of moral penalties, and makes happiness rather than 
 righteousness the supreme end. But in doing this we 
 would fail to grasp Christ’s full conception of God’s 
 character and purpose. We would disregard certain 
 truths, which although to us they may seem out of 
 harmony with the idea of Fatherhood yet evidently did 
 not seem so to him. Such, for instance, is his concep- 
 tion of God as just in a retributive sense, and not merely 
 beneficent, a conception to be considered later. 
 
 If we consult a concordance we shall find that our 
 Lord uses the word God one hundred and seventy-two 
 times. But the mere use of this word conveys no dis- 
 tinctive conception beyond the meaning ordinarily ex- 
 pressed by it. Of course, the way in which he uses it, 
 the terms he associates with it, will convey distinct im- 
 pressions loftier than those which the common mind 
 generally receives. But whenever used by him we may, 
 perhaps, substitute for God the word Father, without 
 changing the significance attached to it. 
 
 In the first three gospels Father is found forty-three 
 times, and in John one hundred and ten times in ac- 
 counts of our Lord’s teaching not reported by the 
 
In the Teaching of Christ and His Apostles 165 
 
 synoptics. It must have been used many more times 
 by him, for it is recorded again and again that he 
 taught the people without any statement of what he 
 said. But enough of his teaching has been reported 
 to convey to us its substance and distinctive char- 
 acter. 
 
 What, then, did Christ mean by the word Father? 
 And what kind of a relationship did it express and how 
 widely extended? Sometimes to his disciples he says 
 “Your Father,” and in the prayer he taught them they 
 are to say “Our Father.”’ Sometimes it is “Heavenly 
 Father,” sometimes “The Father,’ and sometimes 
 simply Father. Very often it is “My Father.” In 
 John, Father is almost the exclusive word, and with 
 the pronoun my, occurs thirty-three times. In the 
 first three gospels it is thus used as frequently as the 
 Father or your Father. But our Lord never says “our 
 Father,” including his disciples with himself, a distinc- 
 tion of supreme significance which was evidently recog- 
 nized and carefully reported by them. It cannot be 
 doubted, therefore, that he was conscious of a special 
 relationship to God the Father not shared with him 
 by men, and not constituted by moral character, as 
 some claim, however perfect that may be. This con- 
 sciousness appeared early in his life. In his twelfth 
 year, when his parents sought him in Jerusalem, he 
 said to them: “How is it that ye sought me? Know 
 ye not that I must be in my Father’s house?” (Luke 
 2:49). 
 
 But it is not with our Lord’s person and his peculiar 
 
166 The Biblical Idea of God 
 
 relationship to the Father that we are just now con- 
 cerned, but with the person of the Father himself. 
 
 Fundamental in his teaching is his conception of 
 God as spirit. To the Samaritan woman whom he 
 met at Jacob’s well, and who raised the question whether 
 God was rightly worshipped on Mt. Gerizem or in 
 Jerusalem, he said: “God is spirit and they that wor- 
 ship him must worship in spirit and truth” (John 4: 24). 
 He does not define the term spirit, but assumes that its 
 meaning is sufficiently clear. The Samaritans accepted 
 the Old Testament, and that, as we have seen, taught 
 the spiritual nature of God. Although to them wor- 
 ship might be limited to time and place, yet God was 
 not so limited. He transcends all existences and pos- 
 sesses all the essential spiritual attributes of knowledge, 
 affection, and volition, and is the source of truth and 
 wisdom and righteousness and grace. 
 
 Spirit, as we have seen, is not a negative term, al- 
 though by many it is usually so defined. It is not 
 merely wmmaterial being. It has a positive content, 
 as was stated in the first lecture. It is within himself, 
 in the elemental and necessary deliverances of con- 
 sciousness, that man must find the essential nature and 
 real significance of spirit. Not in the forms of earth 
 and sky, not in tree or mountain, not in beast or bird, 
 not in sun or star, not even in the human form itself, 
 noble and beautiful as that is, all of which have been 
 made objects of worship, but in the mind and its essen- 
 tial powers, of whose nature the lowest savage is dimly 
 conscious, are we to find the kind of being possessed by 
 
In the Teaching of Christ and His Apostles 167 
 
 spirit. For, made in the divine image, man reflects as 
 in a mirror the divine attributes, though in man they 
 are limited by finiteness, and, as created, have a begin- 
 ning in time. 
 
 It should be noted that in his conversation with this 
 woman of Samaria our Lord speaks of God not only as 
 spirit, but also as the Father. Did he include the 
 Samaritans, so intensely hated by the Jews, among the 
 children of God? ‘That he did would clearly seem to 
 be sustained by the parable of the good Samaritan. 
 If, then, these half-pagan, half-Jewish people, why not 
 all mankind? Is God the Father of only a portion of 
 our race? Is his redemptive plan and purpose so lim- 
 ited that not all have the privilege, nay, even the right, 
 a right given and confirmed by himself, to use the 
 opening words, “Our Father,” of the prayer Christ 
 taught? It is an old question much debated. But 
 when we remember the words “God so loved the world,” 
 not a part of it, not the best and noblest of it, but all 
 of it, this sinful world, “that he gave his only begotten 
 Son, that whosoever believeth on him should not per- 
 ish, but have eternal life” (John 3:16), and when we 
 read in the first epistle of the beloved disciple that 
 Jesus Christ “is the propitiation for our sin; and not for 
 ours only, but also for the whole world” (I John 2: 2), 
 we must believe, despite all that theological subtlety 
 can do to wrest these words from their natural mean- 
 ing and narrow their scope and purpose, that the Fa- 
 therhood of God is as wide as the creation of beings 
 like himself, and also rests on the fact not merely that 
 
168 The Biblical Idea of God 
 
 he is their creator, but that he has redeemed them by 
 the most costly of sacrifices, and would have all men 
 accept this redemption which he has made and offers. 
 
 But since God is spirit, and is also, as the author of 
 Hebrews says, “the Father of spirits” (Heb. 12:9), he 
 is therefore personal. So Christ constantly conceives 
 of him. There is no vague, pantheistic idea in his 
 teaching. As we have seen, the Hebrew thought of 
 God was intensely personal. To the prophets he was 
 a supreme moral and beneficent Will, revealing himself 
 in both command and promise. This conception of the 
 divine nature and character the Lord Jesus expresses 
 everywhere, and in all his teaching, by the well-side, on 
 the mountain, along the seashore, and in the synagogue 
 and the temple. To him the Father was constantly a 
 conscious presence and a gracious power. He brings 
 men face to face with the living God. The impersonal 
 God of Greek and Oriental sages and of some modern 
 philosophers, the God of mere being, undefined and all- 
 pervasive, regardless of moral distinctions and of man’s 
 moral welfare, and neither a hearer nor answerer of 
 prayer, may awaken awe and fear, but cannot inspire 
 trust nor create affection. Man stands speechless be- 
 fore such a conception. Its only effect is the stoicism 
 of despair. 
 
 But while the idea of God as spirit and therefore, as 
 in the highest sense, a person is both explicit and im- 
 plicit in all our Lord’s teaching, and the word Father 
 is the distinctive and explanatory word which he uses 
 to express his idea, there are certain conceptions con- 
 
In the Teaching of Christ and His Apostles 169 
 
 veyed or suggested by it which he does not fail to set 
 forth, and which, like overtones in music, give fulness 
 and richness to the fundamental idea. For the term 
 Father is a comprehensive term and includes specific 
 characteristics and relationships, which only other 
 words can distinctly state. 
 
 Thus Christ teaches that God is the creator, that the 
 world is not self-evolved but owes its existence to his 
 intelligence and power. In predicting the destruction 
 of Jerusalem, he said: “Those days shall be tribulation 
 such as there hath not been the like from the begin- 
 ning of the creation which God created until now” 
 (Mark 13:19). The Father’s care also is over all his 
 works. “Behold the birds of the heaven, that they 
 sow not, neither do they reap nor gather into barns; 
 and your heavenly Father feedeth them” (Matt. 6: 26). 
 His providence, also, is not merely general but special. 
 “Are not two sparrows sold for a penny; and not one 
 of them shall fall on the ground without your Father” 
 (Matt. 10:29). When the seventy returned from their 
 mission, in his prayer he addressed God as “Father, 
 lord of heaven and earth” (Luke 10:21). To the law- 
 yer who asked what is the great commandment, he re- 
 plied that God is the supreme object of affection: 
 “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart 
 and with all thy soul and with all thy mind” (Matt. 
 22:37). To the tempter he affirms him to be the sole 
 object of worship. “Thou shalt worship the Lord thy 
 God and him only shalt thou serve” (Matt. 4:10). 
 God, also, is seen in the forces and forms of nature. 
 
170 The Biblical Idea of God 
 
 His hand clothes the grass of the field and fashions the 
 growth and beauty of the lily (Matt. 6: 26-30). To 
 the young man who sought to know what he must do 
 to inherit eternal life Christ taught that God alone is 
 good (Matt. 19:17). This goodness is not confined to 
 the righteous only, “for he maketh his sun to rise on 
 ‘the evil and the good, and sendeth rain on the just 
 and the unjust” (Matt. 5:45). To the astonished dis- 
 ciples, doubting the possibility of man’s salvation, he 
 affirmed that “with God all things are possible” 
 (Matt. 19: 26). 
 
 But Christ also taught that justice, the justice that 
 inflicts penalty for sin, is a divine attribute. This 
 clearly appears in the series of woes pronounced against 
 the scribes and Pharisees and lawyers (Matt. 23: 13- 
 36; Luke 11: 42-52). It appears also in the parables 
 of Dives and Lazarus (Luke 16: 19-31), of the rich fool 
 (Luke 12 : 16-21), of the unmerciful servant (Matt. 18: 
 23-35), of the wicked husbandman (Matt. 21: 33-44). 
 In our Lord’s teaching, therefore, sin and suffering are 
 linked together as cause and effect, a relationship estab- 
 lished and enforced by the justice of God. If the prodi- 
 gal son leaves his home, wanders into a far country and 
 consumes his inheritance in riotous living, he cannot 
 escape the bitter consequences of his acts. Retribu- 
 tion in the moral world is as inevitable as any result of 
 the violation of a law of nature. 
 
 It is well for us to remember, especially in these days, 
 that this truth is as elemental as any other, in Christ’s 
 idea of God. He never obscured to himself and others 
 
In the Teaching of Christ and His Apostles 171 
 
 the stern facts of life, but faced them resolutely and 
 interpreted them as revelations of God’s character in 
 his government of the world. In his conception there 
 is a wrath of God against unbelief, and “all ungodli- 
 ness and unrighteousness of man” (John 3: 36; Ro- 
 mans 1:18). 
 
 But while Fatherhood does not exclude justice, jus- 
 tice does not exclude mercy. Justice is the dark back- 
 ground against which mercy shines with a greater splen- 
 dor. For were there no righteous condemnation there 
 would be no occasion for the exercise of Grace. For 
 Grace, as it has been well defined, is “favor toward the 
 ill-deserving.”’ And the supreme end of justice in God 
 is not retribution but restoration. This was the teach- 
 ing of Ezekiel. “I have no pleasure in the death of 
 him that dieth, saith the Lord Jehovah, wherefore turn 
 yourselves and live” (Ezek. 18:32). Micah also said: 
 “He delighteth in lovingkindness” (7:18). This was 
 also taught by the Apostle Peter, who wrote that God 
 did not wish “that any should perish, but that all 
 should come to repentance”’ (II Peter 3:9). Itisclearly 
 involved in what our Lord states concerning the end of 
 his mission. To Nicodemus he said: “For God sent 
 not his Son into the world to judge (that is, to con- 
 demn) the world, but that the world should be saved 
 through him” (John 3:17). To those who murmured 
 because he went in to lodge with Zaccheus, whom they 
 held to be a sinner, he said: “The Son of man came to 
 seek and to save that which was lost”? (Luke 19:10). 
 And still again to the people he cried: “I came not to 
 
172 The Biblical Idea of God 
 
 judge the world, but to save the world” (John 12: 47). 
 Such sayings also are not to be understood as express- 
 ing merely the purpose of Christ himself, but primarily, 
 as he said, the purpose of the Father who sent him. 
 Mercy, then, we may rightly say, is, according to 
 Christ, the predominant attribute of God and is best 
 expressed by the name Father. It is the main element 
 in God’s perfection, for in the Sermon on the Mount, 
 at the close of the paragraph in which Christ says, 
 “Love your enemies and pray for them that persecute 
 you, that ye may be sons of your Father who is in 
 heaven,” he also says, and it is clear that the conclu- 
 sion is closely connected with what precedes, “Ye 
 therefore shall be perfect as your Heavenly Father is 
 perfect” (Matt. 5:44-48). To be merciful constitutes 
 the perfection of the divine character as it does that of 
 men. ‘This is also the teaching of the Apostle John, 
 when he writes: “If we confess our sins He is faithful 
 and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us 
 from all unrighteousness” (I John 1:9). To forgive 
 and cleanse is elemental in the divine righteousness, 
 and its essential aim. Paul, also, teaches the same 
 truth when he writes of God as being “just and the jus- 
 tifier of him that hath faith in Jesus” (Romans 3: 26). 
 But this great truth in Christ’s thought of God is 
 found expressed with the greatest clearness and beauty 
 in the three parables of the lost coin, the lost sheep, 
 and the lost boy. With the exception of one, the lost 
 sheep, given by Matthew (18: 12-14), we owe these to 
 Luke, the Greek companion of Paul. The occasion for 
 
In the Teaching of Christ and His Apostles 173 
 
 them was when “the publicans and sinners were draw- 
 ing near unto him to hear him” and both the Pharisees 
 and the scribes murmured, saying: “This man receiveth 
 sinners and eateth with them” (Luke 15:1, 2). But 
 why did they murmur? It was because of thezr thought 
 of God. To them his law was merely one of retribu- 
 tion, an even-handed justice which gives to each his 
 exact due. According to their standard they them- 
 selves were righteous and would alone receive reward. 
 All others merited perdition, for God hates not merely 
 sin but sinners (John 9:31). 
 
 Against this false conception of the character of God 
 these parables were spoken. Men are indeed lost in 
 sin. Christ clearly teaches that. But they have not 
 lost their essential nature. They are still moral crea- 
 tures, whose deepest need is the restoration of the char- 
 acter they have lost; and the marvellous fact is that 
 God is seeking to accomplish this, just as the woman 
 seeks the lost coin, the shepherd the lost sheep, and the 
 father welcomes with joy the repentant and returning 
 prodigal. It is this joy which stands out prominent 
 and radiant in these parables, emphasized in each, joy 
 in heaven, joy in the presence of the angels of God, 
 that is, in the heart of God himself, and which pervades 
 the whole household, with the exception of the elder 
 brother. Moreover, it is said in the first two parables 
 that they seek wntil they find; a statement we should 
 not overlook, although by some slight emphasis seems 
 to be laid upon it. It is an everlasting mercy that our 
 Lord here plainly teaches, a truth long before taught 
 
174 The Biblical Idea of God 
 
 by a psalmist, although Christ states here no limita- 
 tions of time or character. It is simply the lost one 
 who is sought. Through all time God our Father has 
 been seeking and still seeks to save. 
 
 This, as was once pointed out by President Julius 
 Seeley of Amherst College, in a series of lectures to the 
 Brahmins and Buddhists of India, is the distinctive 
 character of the religion of the Bible and differentiates 
 it from all the other religions of the world. They pre- 
 sent man as seeking after God, but the Bible presents 
 God as seeking after man. This distinction by itself 
 should cause a thoughtful mind to pause before reject- 
 ing the Bible as God’s revelation of himself. It is a 
 truth, however, which men find hard to believe. A 
 justice which condemns is easy to understand. A 
 righteousness which includes mercy as an essential ele- 
 ment seems to involve a contradiction in itself. For 
 an awakened conscience knows only the guilt of sin 
 and its worthiness of punishment; and unenlightened 
 reason finds no escape from that. Fear fills the appre- 
 hensive soul, and darkness unrelieved by hope veils 
 alike its present and its future. The relentless furies 
 of the Greek mythology express this universal convic- 
 tion of men to whom the revealed light of the gospel 
 has not come. Without this conviction there would be 
 no tragedies in this our world. It is the inevitable 
 feeling of guilt, with its attendant terrors, that consti- 
 tutes the essence of tragedy. The Greek dramatists 
 present it in scenes of awful sublimity and power. In 
 his greatest tragedies Shakespeare shows his clear and 
 
In the Teaching of Christ and His Apostles 175 
 
 profound knowledge of its effective work within the 
 human soul. 
 
 “Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood clean from 
 my hand?” 
 
 cries out Macbeth after Duncan’s murder; and Lady 
 Macbeth in that terrible sleep-walking scene, says: 
 
 All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand. 
 Here is the smell of the blood still. 
 
 This is the expression of a conscience, agonized by 
 the sense of guilt; and aside from revelation man knows 
 of no “sweet oblivious antidote” that shall “cleanse 
 the stuff’d bosom of that perilous stuff which weighs 
 upon the heart.” 
 
 But to accomplish this, to persuade conscience- 
 stricken men that there is a grace of God toward even 
 the vilest violators of his law, and that righteousness 
 and grace are not distinct and conflicting attributes, 
 but God’s righteousness is of that nobler kind within 
 which grace is included and which makes righteous—to 
 persuade men of this was the aim, and has been the 
 effect of the ministry of Jesus Christ, and the accep- 
 tance of this divinely given truth has ever been the 
 initial step of that spiritual work within the soul which 
 cleanses and restores. 
 
 Among the many incidents of our Lord’s life which 
 show this there is one in which it appears with pathetic 
 power and beauty. A proud, self-righteous Pharisee 
 
176 The Biblical Idea of God 
 
 had invited him to dinner. He was received without 
 those ordinary forms of courtesy shown to a guest. 
 But a woman who was a sinner came behind him as he 
 reclined at meat, and bathed his feet with her tears, 
 and kissed them and anointed them with precious 
 ointment. The hard Pharisee, untouched by the 
 scene, in his thought condemned the woman, because 
 she was a sinner—a harlot, doubtless—and condemned 
 our Lord also because he did not shrink from her touch 
 as from pollution. But Jesus said to her: “Thy faith 
 hath saved thee; go in peace”’ (Luke 7: 36-50). Think 
 you that the attitude and word of the Lord Jesus was 
 without transforming power? Think you that hence- 
 forth this woman’s life was not consecrated to all that 
 is noblest and best? The Pharisee would have turned 
 her back to her vile life on the street, but the Lord 
 Jesus turned her feet into the paths of righteousness 
 and peace. 
 
 For it is the power of love, love toward the erring 
 and the fallen, love whose attitude is grace and whose 
 effect is righteousness, love which in securing such re- 
 sult sacrifices self—this is the only power which can 
 redeem the world; and this is that divine love which 
 has been revealed by and in Jesus Christ. John, the 
 beloved disciple, who, despite the teaching of some 
 modern scholars, we must believe best understood and 
 reported his Master’s thought, tells us that love is 
 God’s essential nature; “God,” he wrote, “is love” 
 (I John 4:8). Of no other attribute is such a state- 
 ment made in the sacred Scriptures. It is never said 
 
In the Teaching of Christ and His Apostles 177 
 
 that God is justice. It is, indeed, written that “God 
 is spirit” and that “God is light.” But spirit and light 
 are not distinct attributes but general characteristics 
 of the divine nature. Since, therefore, God zs love, not 
 to love would be for God to deny himself; and the most 
 wonderful aspect of his love is that it persists, although 
 its object is no longer worthy of it. Of such love Paul 
 wrote that “it suffereth long and is kind” (I Cor. 13: 4). 
 Hosea, the prophet, knew and expressed its enduring 
 quality and power in the yearning tenderness with 
 which he pursued and sought to restore an erring wife. 
 And yet the astonishing fact is that men fail to recog- 
 nize and believe in this divine love. Not merely those 
 who violate every moral law, but those also who, up- 
 right in character and life, are made blind to its beauty 
 and insensitive to its power through unbelief. Chris- 
 tianity has no harder task than to convince such per- 
 sons of its truth. To the chief priests and the elders, 
 proud of their righteousness, Christ said: “The publi- 
 cans and the harlots go into the Kingdom of God before 
 you” (Matt. 21:31). 
 
 At the root of not a little of the present-day rejection 
 of the gospel is the philosophic conception of an emo- 
 tionless God. For philosophy, as the expression of 
 pure intellect, places little if any stress on feeling. It 
 regards this as a mist obscuring the clear perceptions 
 of the mind, and this is true if feeling is excessive and 
 uncontrolled. But that God is impassive, without emo- 
 tion, is not the teaching of the Bible. Love and hate, 
 joy and grief, are ascribed to him. This may be dis- 
 
178 The Boblical Idea of God 
 
 missed as a merely anthropomorphic conception, but, 
 if it be not true, then we cannot call him Father, and 
 there can be no revelation of himself which shall touch 
 the human heart and awaken those profound motive 
 forces which determine and give richness and beauty to 
 character and life. As a Father he grieves because of 
 our transgressions, and rejoices over our return. The 
 cold formalist and legalist and the moralist, whose obe- 
 dience is to a merely abstract law, cannot understand 
 this; but every one who has felt the awful agonies and 
 degradation of sin can understand it; and when men 
 really believe the message of Christ concerning a God 
 who loves, then their delivery from all the evils that 
 oppress them has drawn near. 
 
 Love, then, being the central and dominating element 
 in the nature of God, in what way and form, we ask, is 
 this love expressed? What is its highest manifesta- 
 tion? Isitnotinthecross? This is the answer which 
 our Lord and his apostles give. “Greater love,” said 
 he to his disciples, “hath no man than this, that a man 
 lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13). “God 
 so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son,” 
 are his words to Nicodemus (John 3:16). To the Ro- 
 mans Paul wrote: “God commendeth [or showeth or 
 proveth, as it may be rendered] his own love toward 
 us, in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for 
 us” (Romans 5:8). To the Ephesians, also, he wrote 
 that “God, being rich in mercy, for his great love where- 
 with he loved us, even when we were dead through 
 our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ” 
 
In the Teaching of Christ and His Apostles 179 
 
 (Eph. 2:4, 5; see also II Thess. 2:16; Gal. 2: 20). 
 And John, who in his three brief epistles uses the word 
 forty-six times, wrote: “Herein is love, not that we 
 loved God but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be 
 the propitiation for our sins” (I John 4:10). 
 
 But there is no need to multiply proofs. It is not 
 merely in special texts but in the total impression which 
 the gospel makes that this greatest of all truths is de- 
 clared. The logic of a system of theology that is based 
 upon a conception of God’s nature which makes unre- 
 lenting justice the central and all-dominating attribute 
 and mercy merely the option of his will may blind one 
 to this teaching of the Bible, and such a system may be 
 taught in the cloistered classroom of the school, but in 
 the world without, where men sin and suffer and need 
 to be quickened to faith and hope and love, it is only 
 the Biblical truth that can accomplish this. For love 
 alone awakens love. No other power in earth or heaven 
 can effect this spiritual transformation. Human life 
 unilluminated by divine revelation plainly proves this. 
 Faith and love are the only forces that unite the family 
 and society with bonds that bring no bitterness, and 
 create only peace and joy. 
 
 Once more, then, we say that love is the essential 
 element in the nature of God, and its supreme expres- 
 sion is the cross. It is, as it has been called, “the 
 greatest thing in the world,” the last and noblest word 
 which God has spoken of himself. Beyond it there is 
 no loftier, no completer revelation. It is the sum of 
 all divine attributes, the final and most effective of all 
 
180 The Biblical Idea of God 
 
 divine activities. It is not expressed by word only 
 but by historic act. It is not an abstract formula, 
 which the intellect alone can grasp, but a concrete 
 event occurring in the fulness of time, toward which 
 the whole past led and from which the whole future 
 springs. Here on Calvary all essential questions find 
 an answer. Here all antagonisms cease. Here all dis- 
 sonances disappear. Here all difficulties are solved. 
 Here justice and mercy, righteousness and grace, meet 
 and mingle in enduring harmony to express a love that 
 is divine. Love, therefore, is not a distinct attribute, 
 but rather an attitude of God in which all attributes 
 have been transfigured and into which they have been 
 transformed. 
 
 But a severely analytic theology has not been satis- 
 fied to rest here in contemplation of this sublime fact. 
 It has entered into the profound mystery of the divine 
 nature and has sought to show the order and relation- 
 ship of the various divine attributes which find expres- 
 sion in the cross of Christ. Bitter and intense contro- 
 versies have arisen, in which love, the supreme expres- 
 sion of the cross, has been forgotten and obscured. The 
 theologians of an older school look upon the cross as 
 revealing a divine insistence upon penalty which would 
 not abate the least and the utmost of its claims. Retri- 
 bution to them is a divine necessity, and justice finds 
 its satisfaction in the sufferings of Christ. An eminent 
 teacher of this school has written: “God must be just 
 and may be merciful.”” That he must be just is not to 
 be denied; and that the death of Christ was strictly 
 
In the Teaching of Christ and His Apostles 181 
 
 propitiatory is clearly taught in the Scriptures. The 
 Old Testament sacrificial system symbolized this, and 
 he himself said that he gave his life “a ransom for 
 many” (Mark 10: 45), and that his blood was “poured 
 out for many unto remission of sins” (Matt. 26: 28). 
 Both Paul and John call Christ a propitiatory offering 
 for sin. But that satisfaction is found merely or 
 mainly in the sufferings of the cross is simply inferen- 
 tial, and the Scriptural conception of the character and 
 nature of God does not lead to this conclusion. If love 
 is the very essence of God, as John wrote, then mercy, 
 which is the expression of love, is no more merely op- 
 tional than justice is, but is an equally inner and even 
 deeper necessity of the divine nature. As the prophet 
 Micah wrote: “Who is a God like unto thee who par- 
 doneth iniquity, and passeth over the transgression of 
 the remnant of his heritage? He retaineth not his 
 anger forever, because he delighteth in lovingkindness” 
 (Micah 7:18). If God found satisfaction in the cross, 
 was it not rather in the supreme obedience of Christ, 
 an obedience which finds its perfect expression in the 
 sacrifice of self for the welfare of others? Paul sug- 
 gests this in the words, he became “obedient even unto 
 death, yea, the death of the cross” (Phil. 2:8). 
 What God desires and seeks in man is righteousness, in 
 its highest and purest form, the righteousness which 
 comes from faith and is identical with love, and this 
 righteousness he found in the Son of man, the universal 
 Man, who alone realized in his life and death what 
 man ought to be, and in whom all men are summed up 
 
182 The Biblical Idea of God 
 
 who trust in him (Eph. 1:10), and in finding this God 
 finds his deepest satisfaction. Not suffering, then, as 
 meeting merely the claims of retributive justice, but 
 suffering endured for man’s salvation, and as expressive 
 of a love that shrank from nothing to accomplish this 
 great end, this is the meaning of the cross (see John 
 3:16, 17). And it is this that makes the gospel that 
 proclaims the cross a word of power, of consolation, 
 and of hope and joy. ‘Take the cross, as the expression 
 and proof of a divine love, out of the Christian message, 
 as is so often done, and that message has lost its ele- 
 mental force. Not in science, not in philosophy, but 
 only in the historic Christ, who lived and died and rose 
 again, lie the sources of that redemption which shall 
 rescue man from the evils that now oppress him and 
 restore him to righteousness, and to that love of moral 
 truth and beauty and goodness which is righteousness 
 in its noblest form. 
 
 Is it strange, then, that the Christian church, through 
 all the centuries and in all the parts into which it has 
 been broken, has clung to the cross as the symbol of its 
 salvation? Is it strange that in the hymns which voice 
 its strongest faith and quicken and express its deepest 
 emotions, it should sing the grace and glory of the 
 cross? Is it strange that our Lord, in the last hours 
 of his earthly life, should institute an ordinance which 
 should forever, until his return, keep the cross in our 
 remembrance? Is it strange that we should hold it to 
 be the central object in the history of the world, and 
 its victim the central person? 'To it men have looked 
 
In the Teaching of Christ and His Apostles 183 
 
 and still will look with eyes in whose depths shine faith 
 and hope until there is the fulfilment of our Lord’s 
 words: “And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will 
 draw all men unto myself” (John 12:32). For the 
 cross expresses love in its highest and noblest form and 
 in its most effective power. 
 
 One more essential truth in the self-revelation of God 
 remains. ‘There is one God and only one, according to 
 the Bible. But he has manifested himself in a three- 
 fold way as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The nature 
 of this triune manifestation awakened and occupied the 
 earliest thought of the church, and the Greek fathers 
 formulated it in a creed which has never been surpassed. 
 The New Testament explicitly teaches the essential 
 deity of the Son and of the Spirit; and this was the be- 
 lief of the church from its beginning. Christ claimed 
 essential oneness with the Father. To the reviling 
 Jews he said, “I and the Father are one”’ (John 10: 30), 
 one not merely in ethical character, but one in power 
 and being; for this is what the Jews understood him to 
 mean, as is clearly indicated by their reply: “Thou 
 being a man makest thyself God” (John 10:33). 
 Hence they accused him of blasphemy. This under- 
 standing Jesus did not deny. He also claimed the 
 essential attribute of eternity. To the Jews again he 
 said: “Before Abraham was [or came to be] I am” 
 (John 8:58). In his prayer after the supper he also 
 said: “And now, Father, glorify thou me with thine own 
 self with the glory which I had with thee before the 
 world was” (John 17:5). This is also the teaching of 
 
184 The Biblical Idea of God 
 
 John in the prologue to his gospel. “In the beginning 
 was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the 
 Word was God” (John 1:1). That he means the per- 
 sonal Word, that is, the eternal Son, is shown by the 
 later statement: “And the Word became flesh and 
 dwelt among us (and we beheld his glory as of the only 
 begotten from the Father), full of grace and truth” 
 (John 1:14). It was distinctly taught by Paul in his 
 letter to the Philippians, where he wrote of Christ 
 Jesus as one, “who existing in the form of God, counted 
 not the being on an equality with God a thing to be 
 grasped”’ (Phil. 2:6); that is, he needed not to seize 
 upon “equality with God,” for it was what he already 
 from the beginning had. In the beginning of the epis- 
 tle to the Hebrews the Son of God is described, in terms 
 of profound significance, as “being the effulgence [or 
 shining forth] of his [God’s] glory, and the very image 
 of his [God’s] substance” (Heb. 1:3). But these pas- 
 sages are only a part of the abundant proof that might 
 be cited. Beyond them we cannot here and now go. 
 
 The essential deity and distinct personality of the 
 Spirit is not stated in the Scriptures with such definite- 
 ness and precision as is that of the Son, but is involved 
 or implied in passages too many at present to enu- 
 merate. The formula for baptism, given by our Lord 
 himself, “baptizing them into the name of the Father 
 and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (Matt. 28: 19), 
 clearly teaches the Spirit’s distinct personality and 
 power; and this has always been the belief of the 
 cburch. 
 
Renew and Conclusion 185 
 
 The Scriptures, however, do not formulate what is 
 called the doctrine of the Trinity, but give only the 
 essential data which the church has combined and 
 stated in the Nicean Creed. 
 
 We have thus, in this comparatively brief and imper- 
 fect way, tried to trace the essential contents and grad- 
 ual development of the Biblical idea of God. It is not 
 an idea which, as some affirm, is merely an ideal, exist- 
 ing only in the human mind, the result of a slowly un- 
 folding process of thought brooding upon the nature of 
 things and upon man’s own nature and experience 
 amid the changes and forces and laws of this visible 
 and tangible world, an idea, or ideal, to which there 
 corresponds no objective being. If it were merely that 
 it would still be the most marvellous work which the 
 unaided reason of man has ever accomplished. Noth- 
 ing which his philosophy, dreaming of things unseen, 
 has produced; nothing which his religions, aspiring after 
 a god unknown, have conceived, can compare with it. 
 You have only to read the history of human thought 
 without the Bible to assure yourselves of that. And if 
 it be true that man is unable to pass beyond the limits 
 of his own conceptions, then his philosophy, with its 
 necessary and universal convictions concerning the na- 
 ture and forms of metaphysical being, is but illusion, 
 and his religions, based upon an inescapable belief in 
 the existence of a person or persons beyond and above 
 him, visible only to the inward eye, are but misleading 
 mockeries. In vain has he built his altars; in vain has 
 he poured upon them the blood of countless victims; in 
 
186 The Biblical Idea of God 
 
 vain has he offered prayers pleading for help, which, 
 sounding out through an echoless abyss, have no an- 
 swer; in vain has he clung to a faith that God 2s, and to 
 a hope that some time and somehow the answer will be 
 given, and that God will reveal himself not only as the 
 judge condemning sin but as the Father, loving, mer- 
 ciful, forgiving, and restoring man to an abiding fellow- 
 ship with himself. The very nature and contents of 
 the Biblical idea impress upon us the truth of its objec- 
 tive reality. Man is not mocked by hunger, for there 
 is food; nor by thirst, for there is drink; nor by the 
 yearning after truth, for he finds it in the inner and the 
 outer worlds. So the deep, instinctive hunger and 
 thirst of the soul for the living God, the inborn and 
 deathless desire to know him, and the abiding convic- 
 tion that he is, all imply the reality of God. If not, 
 then the reason and heart of man are sources of error 
 only, and the age-long cry for a truth which neither 
 nature nor man can give shall issue in an endless de- 
 spair. 
 
 As we look back now over the slow religious develop- 
 ment which the Bible records, which began with certain 
 essential conceptions, limited in expression, but which 
 grew throughout the centuries of revelation until they 
 attained the fulness and power of the teaching of our 
 Lord and his apostles, we find in this development an 
 argument for the truth of the Bible’s claim concerning 
 itself; that its historical accounts are a truthful state- 
 ment of how and when and through whom the Biblical 
 thought of God has been revealed. But we live in an 
 
Renew and Conclusion 187 
 
 age of doubt and of denial. It is not an age of creative 
 thought but of critical investigation. More than ever 
 before the sacred Scriptures are subjected to micro- 
 scopic criticism. Not the great outstanding features 
 but the manifold minutiz are treated with a detail al- 
 most exhaustive, and the main facts and truths are 
 oftentimes obscured and lost to view. Hence this 
 criticism has been called, and rightly called, destruc- 
 tive. I do not deny that critical study is important 
 and even necessary. ‘There is a criticism that is con- 
 servative and constructive. But much of the Biblical 
 criticism of to-day rests on unproved assumptions, and 
 these assumptions include often a frank denial of the 
 possibility of a supernatural revelation. 
 
 Moreover, there is slight regard for the past, as if its 
 records were mainly traditional and nearly always 
 wrong. Such criticism finds the Biblical account of 
 creation, of the temptation and fall, of the flood and 
 destruction of life, to be merely mythological, or fanci- 
 ful creations of the mind. ‘To it the patriarchs are 
 eponymous, or, at the most, legendary characters. The 
 exodus from Egypt, with its attendant plagues, never 
 occurred; or, if it did, it was in a way different from 
 that given in the record. The Mosaic legislation, ex- 
 cept to a very limited extent, was not the work of the 
 great lawgiver but the product of centuries of gradual 
 evolution, and was not completed until the return from 
 the captivity. It is true that the Bible presents this 
 legislation as so closely and vitally interwoven with 
 historic persons and events that they cannot be torn 
 
188 The Brblical Idea of God 
 
 asunder without mutilation of both. But this does not 
 disturb the critical mind intent only on the theoretical 
 reconstruction of the past. This reconstruction is 
 based on a law of evolution, whose dates and working 
 are at best but a matter of conjecture. That there is 
 such a law we do not deny. It is to this, as disclosed 
 in the history and-thought of the Hebrew people, that 
 we appeal. But our conclusions will depend upon the 
 period within which we trace its working and the dates 
 we assign to its principal epochs. An important as- 
 sumption of the radical or destructive criticism is, as 
 we have stated in a former lecture, that ethical mono- 
 theism began with the prophets of the eighth century 
 B.C. Against this assumption the prophets them- 
 selves are witnesses. ‘They are conscious of no new 
 teaching. They are reformers, not innovators. Their 
 God is the God of the fathers, the God of the promise, 
 the God of creation and redemption. And this redemp- 
 tion is essentially moral. It is first dimly intimated 
 after the temptation and fall. The seed of the woman 
 shall bruise the serpent’s head. It is bodied forth in 
 the history of the flood and the rescue of Noah’s fam- 
 ily. It has further and clearer disclosure in the call of 
 Abraham, in the legislation of Moses, in the rescue 
 work of the judges; and when the prophets throughout 
 the period of the kings uttered their burning messages 
 of retribution and of hope, this distinctively moral and 
 redemptive idea of God was widened and deepened, 
 and became more individual in its application to the 
 hearts and lives of men. In the New Testament times 
 
Review and Conclusion 189 
 
 all that was prophetic before reached historic fulfil- 
 ment in the person and work of Jesus Christ, beyond 
 which lies only the world’s acceptance of him as Sa- 
 viour and Lord. The one fundamental and unfolding 
 element which underlies and determines this entire his- 
 toric process is, I repeat, the divinely given promise of 
 redemption. It is the golden key of the sacred Scrip- 
 tures. It is the sole adequate explanation of all the 
 persons and events which they record. Without it 
 there is no law, no order, no beginning, no end. Con- 
 fusion unrelieved rests on past and present and future 
 alike. 
 
 The question now arises, How can we account for the 
 continuity throughout successive ages of this unfolding 
 idea of a moral and redemptive God if the books which 
 contain it are made up of shreds and patches? For 
 such they are if much of modern criticism is accepted. 
 The polychrome, or many-colored edition of some of 
 the Biblical books, notably that of Judges, in clear and 
 definite detail shows this. Each assumed source has a 
 distinctive color, and each assumed editor, or redactor, 
 is in like manner indicated. This extends even to sin- 
 gle connective words. But among so many different 
 revisers, belonging to widely different periods, how is 
 it that there has resulted such unity of thought and 
 continuity of development? There must have been 
 one presiding mind determining it all, and that mind, 
 as the author of Hebrews tells us, must have been the 
 mind of God. ‘This is required to explain the essential 
 harmony of the many books which really make up the 
 
190 The Biblical Idea of God 
 
 Bible. Much more is it required if these books are 
 themselves compilations of unknown authors, a bewil- 
 dering combination of bits and portions, chosen here 
 and there, to compose, as I have said, a patchwork of 
 myth and legend, and occasionally, it may be, an ac- 
 count to be regarded as historical. 
 
 There are books- which are evidently compilations. 
 Such is the book of Proverbs. But critical analysis and 
 division has been carried to an extreme, the result of 
 which is not infrequently a reckless disregard of the 
 saving quality, common sense, and the destruction of 
 faith in the Bible as the revelation of the will of God. 
 The only rational position, it seems to me, is to accept 
 it on its face value for what it claims to be. The only 
 rational explanation of its manifold phenomena is that 
 which is given by itself, that God speaks in and through 
 its words, its persons, its events, and that it contains 
 in clear and full expression the true conception of his 
 nature, his character, and his eternal purpose concern- 
 ing man. It is this thought of God that is the very 
 core of the gospel, and in it lies the power by which the 
 gospel has won its victories in the past. And if the 
 Christian church is to withstand the persistent assaults 
 of a critical scepticism and a philosophic unbelief, if it 
 is to continue to minister to the deepest moral needs 
 of man, to solve the perplexities of his inquiring mind, 
 and satisfy the insistent yearning of his heart, if it is 
 to continue inwardly to grow and outwardly to extend 
 its conquests throughout the world, to overcome error 
 and vice and wretchedness and woe, if it is to perfect 
 
Renew and Conclusion 191 
 
 in the individual the noblest forms of moral and spir- 
 itual character, and among nations to destroy war and 
 bring the peace which Isaiah prophesied and of which 
 the herald angels sang; if, in a word, it is to accomplish, 
 whether soon or late, the great mission God has given 
 it, then, by its teaching in the school, its preaching in 
 the pulpit, and its life in society and the home, it must 
 continue to proclaim what God is, his Fatherhood, his 
 righteousness, his grace, his love, and these as declared 
 in the life that culminated in the sacrifice and resurrec- 
 tion of his Son, Jesus Christ, for there is nothing else 
 that the world so much needs to know as this Biblical 
 idea of God. 
 

 
THE BROSS LECTURES 
 
 Tue Bross LecTuRES are an outgrowth of a fund 
 established in 1879 by the late William Bross, lieuten- 
 ant-governor of Illinois from 1866 to 1870. Desiring 
 some memorial of his son, Nathaniel Bross, who died 
 in 1856, Mr. Bross entered into an agreement with the 
 “Trustees of Lake Forest University,” whereby there 
 was finally transferred to them the sum of forty thou- 
 sand dollars, the income of which was to accumulate in 
 perpetuity for successive periods of ten years, the ac- 
 cumulations of one decade to be spent in the following 
 decade, for the purpose of stimulating the best books 
 or treatises “on the connection, relation, and mutual 
 bearing of any practical science, the history of our 
 race, or the facts in any department of knowledge, with 
 and upon the Christian Religion.” The object of the 
 donor was to “call out the best efforts of the highest 
 talent and the ripest scholarship of the world to illus- 
 trate from science, or from any department of knowl- 
 edge, and to demonstrate the divine origin and the 
 authority of the Christian Scriptures; and further, to 
 show how both science and revelation coincide and 
 prove the existence, the providence, or any or all of 
 the attributes of the only living and true God, ‘infi- 
 nite, eternal, and unchangeable in His being, wisdom, 
 
 power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth.’” 
 193 
 
194 The Bross Lectures 
 
 The gift contemplated in the original agreement of 
 1879 was finally consummated in 1890. The first dec- 
 ade of the accumulation of interest having closed in 
 1900, the trustees of the Bross Fund began at this 
 time to carry out the provisions of the deed of gift. 
 It was determined to give the general title of “The 
 Bross Library” to-the series of the books purchased 
 and published with the proceeds of the Bross Fund. In 
 accordance with the express wish of the donor, that the 
 “Evidences of Christianity” of his “very dear friend 
 and teacher, Mark Hopkins, D.D.,” be purchased and 
 “ever numbered and known as No. 1 of the series,”’ 
 the trustees secured the copyright of this work, which 
 has been republished in a presentation edition as Vol- 
 ume I of the Bross Library. 
 
 The trust agreement prescribed two methods by 
 which the production of books and treatises of the 
 nature contemplated by the donor was to be stimu- 
 lated: 
 
 1. The trustees were empowered to offer one or more 
 prizes during each decade, the competition for which 
 was to be thrown open to “the scientific men, the 
 Christian philosophers and historians of all nations.” 
 In accordance with this provision, a prize of $6,000 
 was offered in 1902 for the best book fulfilling the con- 
 ditions of the deed of the gift, the competing manu- 
 scripts to be presented on or before June 1, 1905. The 
 prize was awarded to the Reverend James Orr, D.D., 
 professor of apologetics and systematic theology in the 
 
The Bross Lectures 195 
 
 United Free Church College, Glasgow, for his treatise 
 on “The Problem of the Old Testament,” which was 
 published in 1906 as Volume ITI of the Bross Library. 
 The second decennial prize of $6,000 was awarded in 
 1915 to the Reverend Thomas James Thorburn, D.D., 
 LL.D., Hastings, England, for his book entitled, “'The 
 Mythical Interpretation of the Gospels,” which has 
 been published as Volume VII of the Bross Library. 
 The announcement of the conditions may be obtained 
 from the president of Lake Forest College. 
 
 _ 2. The trustees were also empowered to “select and 
 designate any particular scientific man or Christian 
 philosopher and the subject on which he shall write,” 
 and to “agree with him as to the sum he shall receive 
 for the book or treatise to be written.” Under this 
 provision the trustees have, from time to time, invited 
 eminent scholars to deliver courses of lectures before 
 Lake Forest College, such courses to be subsequently 
 published as volumes in the Bross Library. The first 
 course of lectures, on “Obligatory Morality,” was de- 
 livered in May, 1903, by the Reverend Francis Landey 
 Patton, D.D., LL.D., President of Princeton Theolog- 
 ical Seminary. The second course of lectures, on “The 
 Bible: Its Origin and Nature,’ was delivered in May, 
 1904, by the Reverend Marcus Dods, D.D., Professor 
 of Exegetical Theology in New College, Edinburgh. 
 These lectures were published in 1905 as Volume II 
 of the Bross Library. The third course of lectures, on 
 “The Bible of Nature,’ was delivered in September 
 and October, 1907, by Mr. J. Arthur Thomson, M.A., 
 
196 The Bross Lectures 
 
 Regius Professor of Natural History in the University 
 of Aberdeen. These lectures were published in 1908 
 as Volume IV of the Bross Library. The fourth 
 course of lectures, on “The Religions of Modern 
 Syria and Palestine,” was delivered in November and 
 December, 1908, by Frederick Jones Bliss, Ph.D., of 
 Beirut, Syria. These lectures are published as Vol- 
 ume V of the Bross Library. The fifth course of 
 lectures, on “The Sources of Religious Insight,” was 
 delivered November 13 to 19, 1911, by Professor 
 Josiah Royce, Ph.D., of Harvard University. These 
 lectures are embodied in the sixth volume. Volume 
 VII, “The Mythical Interpretation of the Gospels,” 
 by the Reverend Thomas James Thorburn, D.D., was 
 published in 1915.. The seventh course of lectures, on 
 “The Will to Freedom,” was delivered in May, 1915, 
 by the Reverend John Neville Figgis, D.D., LL.D., of 
 the House of the Resurrection, Mirfield, England, and 
 published as Volume VIII of the series. In 1916 Pro- 
 fessor Henry Wilkes Wright, of Lake Forest College, 
 delivered the next course of lectures on “Faith Justi- 
 fied by Progress.” These lectures are embodied in 
 Volume IX. In 1921, the Reverend John P. Peters, 
 Ph.D., of Sewanee, Tennessee, delivered a course of 
 lectures on “Spade and Bible.’ These lectures are 
 embodied in Volume X. In November, 1921, the lec- 
 tures on “Christianity and Problems of Today,” 
 which constitute Volume XI of the Bross Lectures, 
 were delivered upon the occasion of the inauguration 
 of the President. The present volume is Volume XII, 
 
The Bross Lectures 197 
 
 entitled, “The Biblical Idea of God,’ by M. Bross 
 Thomas, D.D., Professor Emeritus of Biblical Litera- 
 ture of Lake Forest College. 
 
 Hersert McComs Moore, 
 President of Lake Forest University. 
 
 Lake Forest, Illinois. 
 
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