The Good News of God - Charles Kingsley 3 стр.


But if any one shall say, that the souls of good men in heaven cannot help us who are here on earth, I answer, When did they ascend into heaven, to find out that?  If they had ever been there, friends, be sure they would have had better news to bring home than thisthat those whom we have honoured and loved on earth have lost the power which they used to have, of comforting us who are struggling here below.  That notion springs altogether out of a superstitious fancy that heaven is a great many millions of miles away from this earthwhich fancy, wherever men get it from, they certainly do not get it from the Bible.  Moreover it seems to me, that if the saints in heaven cannot help men, then they cannot be happy in heaven.  Cannot be happy?  Ay, must be miserable.  For what greater misery for really good men, than to see things going wrong, and not to be able to mend them; to see poor creatures suffering, and not to be able to comfort them?  No, my friends, we will believewhat every one who loves a beloved friend comes sooner or later to believethat those whom we have honoured and loved, though taken from our eyes, are near to our spirits; that they still fight for us, under the banner of their Master Christ, and still work for us, by virtue of his life of love, which they live in him and by him for ever.

Pray to them, indeed, we need not, as if they would help us out of any self-will of their own.  There, I think, the Roman Catholics are wrong.  They pray to the saints as if the saints had wills of their own, and fancies of their own, and were respecters of persons; and could have favourites, and grant private favours to those who especially admired and (I fear I must say it) flattered them.  But why should we do that?  That is to lower Gods saints in our own eyes.  For if we believe that they are made perfect, and like perfectly the everlasting life, then we must believe that there is no self-will in them: but that they do Gods will, and not their own, and go on Gods errands, and not their own; that he, and not their own liking, sends them whithersoever he wills; and that if we ask of himof God our Father himself, that is enough for us.

And what shall we ask?

AskFather, thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven.

For in asking that, we ask for the best of all things.  We ask for the happiness, the power, the glory of saints and angels.  We ask to be put into tune with Gods whole universe, from the meanest flower beneath our feet, to the most glorious spirit whom God ever created.  We ask for the one everlasting life which can never die, fail, change, or disappoint: yea, for the everlasting life which Christ the only begotten Son lives from eternity to eternity, for ever saying to his Father, Thy will be done.

Yeswhen we ask God to make us do his will, then indeed we ask for everlasting life.

Does that seem little?  Would you rather ask for all manner of pleasant things, if not in this life, at least in the life to come?

Oh, my friends, consider this.  We were not put into this world to get pleasant things; and we shall not be put into the next world, as it seems to me, to get pleasant things.  We were put into this world to do Gods will.  And we shall be put (I believe) into the next world for the very same purposeto do Gods will; and if we do that, we shall find pleasure enough in doing it.  I do not doubt that in the next world all manner of harmless pleasure will come to us likewise; because that will be, we hope, a perfect and a just world, not a piecemeal, confused, often unjust world, like this: but pleasant things will come to us in the next life, only in proportion as we shall be doing Gods will in the next life; and we shall be happy and blessed, only because we shall be living that eternal life of which I have been preaching to you all along, the life which Christ lives and has lived and will live for ever, saying to the Eternal FatherI come to do thy willnot my will but thine be done.

Oh! may God give to us all his Spirit; the Spirit by which Christ did his Fathers will, and lived his Fathers life in the soul and body of a mortal man, that we may live here a life of obedience and of good works, which is the only true and living life of faith; and that when we die it may be said of usBlessed are the dead who die in the Lord; for they rest from their labours, and their works do follow them.

They rest from their labours.  All their struggles, disappointments, failures, backslidings, which made them unhappy here, because they could not perfectly do the will of God, are past and over for ever.  But their works follow them.  The good which they did on earththat is not past and over.  It cannot die.  It lives and grows for ever, following on in their path long after they are dead, and bearing fruit unto everlasting life, not only in them, but in men whom they never saw, and in generations yet unborn.

SERMON IV

THE SONG OF THE THREE CHILDREN

Daniel iii. 16, 17, 18

O Nebuchadnezzar, we are not careful to answer thee in this matter.  If it be so, our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace; and He will deliver us out of thine hand, O king.  But if not, be it known unto thee, O king, that we will not serve thy gods, nor worship the golden image which thou hast set up.

We read this morning, instead of the Te Deum, the Song of the Three Children, beginning, Oh all ye works of the Lord, bless ye the Lord: praise him, and magnify him for ever.  It was proper to do so: because the Ananias, Azarias, and Misael mentioned in it, are the same as the Shadrach, Meshech, and Abednego, whose story we heard in the first lesson; and because some of the old Jews held that this noble hymn was composed by them, and sung by them in the burning fiery furnace, wherefore it has been called The Song of the Three Children; for child, in old English, meant a young man.

Be that as it may, it is a glorious hymn, worthy of the Church of God, worthy of those three young men, worthy of all the noble army of martyrs; and if the three young men did not actually use the very words of it, still it was what they believed; and, because they believed it, they had courage to tell Nebuchadnezzar that they were not careful to answer himhad no manner of doubt or anxiety whatsoever as to what they were to say, when he called on them to worship his gods.  For his gods, we know, were the sun, moon, and planets, and the angels who (as the Chaldeans believed) ruled over the heavenly bodies; and that image of gold is supposed, by some learned men, to have been probably a sign or picture of the wondrous power of life and growth which there is in all earthly thingsand that a sign of which I need not speak, or you hear.  So that the meaning of this Song of the Three Children is simply this:

You bid us worship the things about us, which we see with our bodily eyes.  We answer, that we know the one true God, who made all these things; and that, therefore, instead of worshipping them, we will bid them to worship him.

Now let us spend a few minutes in looking into this hymn, and seeing what it teaches us.

You see at once, that it says that the one God, and not many gods, made all things: much more, that things did not make themselves, or grow up of their own accord, by any virtue or life of their own.

But it says more.  It calls upon all things which God has made, to bless him, praise him, and magnify him for ever.  This is much more than merely saying, One God made the world.  For this is saying something about Gods character; declaring what this one God is like.

For when you bless a person(I do not mean when you pray God to bless himthat is a different thing)when you bless any one, I say, you bless him because he is blessed, and has done blessed things: because he has shown himself good, generous, merciful, useful.  You praise a person because he is praiseworthy, noble, and admirable.  You magnify a personthat is, speak of him to every one, and everywhere, in the highest termsbecause you think that every one ought to know how good and great he is.  And, therefore, when the hymn says, Bless God, praise him, and magnify him for ever, it does not merely confess Gods power.  No.  It confesses, too, Gods wisdom, goodness, beauty, love, and calls on all heaven and earth to admire him, the alone admirable, and adore him, the alone adorable.

Now let us spend a few minutes in looking into this hymn, and seeing what it teaches us.

You see at once, that it says that the one God, and not many gods, made all things: much more, that things did not make themselves, or grow up of their own accord, by any virtue or life of their own.

But it says more.  It calls upon all things which God has made, to bless him, praise him, and magnify him for ever.  This is much more than merely saying, One God made the world.  For this is saying something about Gods character; declaring what this one God is like.

For when you bless a person(I do not mean when you pray God to bless himthat is a different thing)when you bless any one, I say, you bless him because he is blessed, and has done blessed things: because he has shown himself good, generous, merciful, useful.  You praise a person because he is praiseworthy, noble, and admirable.  You magnify a personthat is, speak of him to every one, and everywhere, in the highest termsbecause you think that every one ought to know how good and great he is.  And, therefore, when the hymn says, Bless God, praise him, and magnify him for ever, it does not merely confess Gods power.  No.  It confesses, too, Gods wisdom, goodness, beauty, love, and calls on all heaven and earth to admire him, the alone admirable, and adore him, the alone adorable.

For this is really to believe in God.  Not merely to believe that there is a God, but to know what God is like, and to know that He is worthy to be believed in; worthy to be trusted, honoured, loved with heart and mind and soul, because we know that He is worthy of our love.

And this, we have a right to say, these three young men did, or whosoever wrote this hymn; and that as a reward for their faith in God, there was granted to them that deep insight into the meaning of the world about them, which shines out through every verse of this hymn.

Deep?  I tell you, my friends, that this hymn is so deep, that it is too deep for the shallow brains of which the world is full now-a-days, who fancy that they know all about heaven and earth, just because they happen to have been born now, and not two hundred years ago.  To such this old hymn means nothing; it is in their eyes merely an old-fashioned figure of speech to call on sun and stars, green herb and creeping thing, to praise and bless God.  Nevertheless, the old hymn stands in our prayer-books, as a precious heir-loom to our children; and long may it stand.  Though we may forget its meaning, yet perhaps our children after us will recollect it once more, and say with their hearts, what we now, I fear, only say with our lips and should not say at all, if it was not put into our months by the Prayer-book.

Do you not understand what I mean?  Then think of this:

If we were writing a hymn about God, should we dare to say to the things about usto the cattle feeding in the fieldsmuch less to the clouds over our heads, and to the wells of which we drink, Bless ye the Lord, praise him, and magnify him for ever?

We should not dare; and for two reasons.

FirstThere is a notion abroad, borrowed from the old monks, that this earth is in some way bad, and cursed; that a curse is on it still for mans sake: but a notion which is contrary to plain fact; for if we till the ground, it does not bring forth thorns and thistles to us, as the Scripture says it was to do for Adam, but wholesome food, and rich returns for our labour: and which in the next place is flatly contrary to Scripture: for we read in Genesis viii. 21, how the Lord said, I will not again curse the ground any more for mans sake; and the Psalms always speak of this earth, and of all created things, as if there was no curse at all on them; saying that all things serve God, and continue as they were at the beginning, and that He has given them a law which cannot be broken; and in the face of those words, let who will talk of the earth being cursed, I will not; and you shall not, if I can help it.

Another reason why we dare not talk of this earth as this hymn does is, that we have got into the habit of saying, Cattle and creeping thingsthey are not rational beings.  How can they praise God?  Clouds and wellsthey are not even living things.  How can they praise God?  Why speak of them in a hymn; much less speak to them?

Yet this hymn does speak to them; and so do the Psalms and the Prophets again and again.  And so will men do hereafter, when the fashions and the fancies of these days are past, and men have their eyes opened once more to see the glory which is around them from their cradle to their grave, and hear once more The Word of the Lord walking among the trees of the garden.

But how can this be?  How can not only dumb things, but even dead things, praise God?

My friends, this is a great mystery, of which the wisest men as yet know but little, and confess freely how little they know.  But this at least we know already, and can say boldlyall things praise God, by fulfilling the law which our Lord himself declared, when he said Not every one who saith to me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven: but he that doeth the will of my Father who is in heaven.

By doing the will of the heavenly Father.  By obeying the laws which God has given them.  By taking the shape which he has appointed for them.  By being of the use for which he intended them.  By multiplying each after their kind, by laws and means a thousand times more strange than any signs and wonders of which man can fancy for himself; and by thus showing forth Gods boundless wisdom, goodness, love, and tender care of all which he has made.

Yes, my friends, in this sense (and this is the true sense) all things can serve and praise God, and all things do serve and praise Him.  Not a cloud which fleets across the sky, not a clod of earth which crumbles under the frost, not a blade of grass which breaks through the snow in spring, not a dead leaf which falls to the earth in autumn, but is doing Gods work, and showing forth Gods glory.  Not a tiny insect, too small to be seen by human eyes without the help of a microscope, but is as fearfully and wonderfully made as you and me, and has its proper food, habitation, work, appointed for it, and not in vain.  Nothing is idle, nothing is wasted, nothing goes wrong, in this wondrous world of God.  The very scum upon the standing pool, which seems mere dirt and dust, is all alive, peopled by millions of creatures, each full of beauty, full of use, obeying laws of God too deep for us to do aught but dimly guess at them; and as men see deeper and deeper into the mystery of Gods creation, they find in the commonest things about them wonder and glory, such as eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, nor hath it entered into the heart of man to conceive; and can only say with the Psalmist, Oh Lord, thy ways are infinite, thy thoughts are very deep; and confess that the grass beneath their feet, the clouds above their headsay, every worm beneath the sod and bird upon the bough, do, in very deed and truth, bless the Lord who made them, praise him, and magnify him for ever, not with words indeed, but with works; and say to man all day long, Go thou, and do likewise.

Yes, my friends, let us go and do likewise.  If we wish really to obey the lesson of the Hymn of the Three Children, let us do the will of God: and so worship him in spirit and in truth.  Do not fancy, as too many do, that thou canst praise God by singing hymns to him in church once a week, and disobeying him all the week long, crying to him Lord, Lord, and then living as if he were not thy Lord, but thou wast thine own Lord, and hadst a right to do thine own will, and not his.  If thou wilt really bless God, then try to live his blessed life of Goodness.  If thou wilt truly praise God, then behave as if God was praiseworthy, good, and right in what he bids thee do.  If thou wouldest really magnify God, and declare his greatness, then behave as if he were indeed the Great God, who ought to be obeyeday, who must be obeyed; for his commandment is life, and it alone, to thee, as well as to all which He has made.  Dost thou fancy as the heathen do, that God needs to be flattered with fine words? or that thou wilt be heard for thy much speaking, and thy vain repetitions?  He asks of thee works, as well as words; and more, He asks of thee works first, and words after.  And better it is to praise him truly by works without words, than falsely by words without works.

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