S. THE PRIORITY OF GOD.

THE PRIORITY OF GOD.

We love Him because He first loved us. — 1 John 4:19.

John the Disciple had learned from Jesus, his Master, the truth of the priority of God, — the truth that before everything is God. Some truths, when we have learned them, are to us like precious jewels which we keep in caskets, hidden most of the time from sight, our great satisfaction regarding them being simply their possession, — simply that they are ours. Other truths, when we have learned them, are like new countries into which our lives have entered, and in which they thenceforth constantly live. There is a new sky over our head and a new earth under our feet. They fold themselves about us and touch every thought and action. Everything which we do or think or are is different because of them. Of this second sort is the truth of the priority of God. Unless God had been first we — our whole human race in general and each of us in particular — never would have been at all. We are what we are because He is what He is. Everything which we do God has first made it possible for us to do. Every act of ours, as soon as it is done, is grasped into a great world of activity which comes from Him; and there the influence and effect of our action is determined. Everything that we know, is true already before our knowledge of it. Our knowing it is only the opening of our intelligence to receive what is and always has been a part of His being who is the universal Truth. Every deed or temper or life is good or bad as it is in harmony or out of harmony with Him. Everywhere God is first; and man, coming afterward, enters into Him and finds in God the setting and the background of his life. There is no part of life which is not different if that is true. What John learned in mind and soul from Jesus was that that is true. I ask you this morning to dwell with me on the truth which He who is our Master teaches to us as He taught it to this great disciple long ago.

We may say a few words first upon the whole subject of the backgrounds of life in general. Man never is sent first into the world and bidden to evolve out of his own being the conditions in which he is to live. Always something is before him; always there is a landscape in which he finds his figure standing when he becomes conscious of himself. If we go back to the story of the Book of Genesis, behold, the earth is made before the human creature comes. The light and the firmament, and the sun and the moon, the grass and the ocean and the living creatures, — they are all here. The earth is this sumptuous palace of luxuries, this rich treasury of influences, before God says, "Let us make man."

Natural science has the same story to tell. It is into a furnished and a garnished earth that man steps forth. His earliest figure stands against the background of abundant pre-existent life. And coming down out of the antique stories into the picture which we see to-day, is there not something before man everywhere? Does not every part of him, each sense and faculty, find the provision for its exercise, the provocation and education of its use, in something which was before he came, against which each new-discovered power of his lays itself and knows itself and comes to its exquisite enjoyment and ripe growth? The food is before the hunger, and says, "I have waited for you to come." The river is before the thirst. Beauty was in the sky and on the hills before the eye was fashioned. Music was breathing on the winds before the ear was framed. Fragrance was in the violet and the forest before the nostrils came to catch its odor. The picture was before the imagination which discerned it; the sea before the ship that sailed it. Man finds the rocks waiting with their problems, frost and heat holding their inspiration and their comfort in expectation of his coming. And he never says, "Here I am," that the servants do not stand in ranks at the door of his great homestead to welcome the heir into his own, and to pledge him their obedient service. The material is background for the spiritual, — the earth, which is body, for man, who is soul. A child was born yesterday. How he lies to-day in his serene, superb unconsciousness! And all the forces and resources of the earth are gathered about his cradle offering themselves to him. Each of his new-born senses is besieged. Each eager voice cries out to him, "Here I am. I have waited for you. Here I am. "He takes what they all bring as if it were his right. Not merely on his senses, but even on his mind and most unconscious soul, the world into which he has come is pressing itself. Its conventionalities and creeds, its standards beaten out of the experience of uncounted generations, its traditions of hope and danger, its prejudices and limitations and precedents, all its discoveries and hopes and fears, — they are the scenery in which this new life stands, they are the mountains in whose shadow and the skies in whose light he is to unfold his long career. They are here before him, and he comes into them. You cannot separate him and them from each other. He and his world make one system, one rich, complex unit of life, as he lies this Sunday morning in his cradle, sleeping his unsuspecting sleep. Shall we talk about all this as if it were a bondage into which the new child is born? Shall we dream for him of a freedom which he might have had if nothing had been before him, if he had found nothing here when he came? Surely that is no true way to think about it. There are men who, if they cannot destroy the world of assured truths and accepted ways into which they have been born, would at least destroy the consciousness of it. They would ignore it. They would seem at least to be trying experiments as if nothing had yet been proved. They would live as if they were the first man, with no history to rest upon, — almost as if they could reverse the course of Genesis and make the round earth and the whole of Nature issue from and follow them instead of their issuing from and following it. We have all known men more or less of this sort; and, interesting as many of them have been, suggestive as their lives have often been, we have all felt, I am sure, the weakness that was in them. They have lacked coherence and unity with the great world. They have lacked humility. They have been self -asserting. The note which their life made has not blended with the music of the whole, but has been strange and violent. It has seemed as if a man of this kind thought that he must make the world before he could live in it, as if his knowing the truth was what made it true, and his doing of righteousness was what made it righteous.

Far be it from me to deny the exceptional value of such men; but their value is the value of protest and exception. There is always something gaunt and feverish and wild about their look. The normal, healthy human life lives in its environments and keeps its backgrounds. It is not their slave, but their child. They were before it; and its strength is to know that it comes into their richness. It recognizes their priority. It fastens itself into them, and realizes and fulfills its life by them, and makes in its due time along with them the background for the lives of the years to come.

Now all of this is not religious, save in the very largest sense; but all of this becomes distinctively religious the moment that all this background of life gathers itself into a unity of purpose and intention and becomes a Providence, or care of God. When once that truth has opened on us, then all the interest of life centres in and radiates from this, — that He, God, is before it all. All the welcome which Nature gave us on the bright morning when we came was His welcome. All the depth of Truth out of which our opinions have shaped themselves and from which our creeds draw their inspiration and dignity, was He, the everlasting truth. See what a change has come. It is as when up the morning sky, all coldly beautiful with ordered ranks of cloud on cloud, is poured the glow of sunrise, and every least cloud, still the same in place and shape, burns with the transfiguring splendor of the sun. So is it when the priority of existence is seen to rest in a Person, and the background of life is God. Then every new arrival instantly reports itself to Him, and is described in terms of its relationship to Him. Every activity of ours answers to some previous activity of His. Do we hope? It is because we have caught the sound of some promise of His. Do we fear? It is because we have had some glimpse of the dreadfulness of getting out of harmony with Him. Are we curious and inquiring? It is that we may learn some of His truth. Do we resist evil? We are fighting His enemies. Do we help need? We are relieving His children. Do we love Him? It is an answer of gratitude for His love to us. Do we live? It is a projection and extension of His being. Do we die? It is the going home of our immortal souls to Him.

Oh, the wonderful richness of life when it is all thus backed with the priority of God! It is the great illumination of all living. And the wonder of it is the way in which, in that illumination, the soul of man recognizes its right. This is what it was made for. Everything, until that light was poured into it, was half-born, cold, and incomplete, like the drawing without the color, like the morning sky before the sunrise. Take the single experience of joy. You have been very glad. Some particular delight or some great perpetual radiance of happiness has poured itself down upon your life. You have waked singing in the morning. You have fallen asleep with songs upon your lips at night. Men have beheld you in the street, and said, "How glad he is," and felt their own life brighter, their own burden lighter as they passed you by. Suppose that someday behind your happiness opens the depth of God. Suppose that it all turns to gratitude. It all is seen to come streaming out of the exhaustless fountain of His love. Tell me, is it the same? Is there no deeper color in its radiance, no deeper music in its song? Has it gained nothing of spirituality and peace? Has not the joy lifted its face skyward and been filled with a new light? Or if it has been not joy but deep distress, — pain of the poor racked body or of the perplexed and wounded — spirit, — it is still the same. You have gone up and down the earth in sadness, and behind that sadness too has opened God, — God not in anger and revenge, not hurling the arrows of your torment from his indignant wrath, not vexing and worrying you with peevish spite, but God full of pity, pitiful just in proportion to His holiness; God anxious to help, and watching that the worst tragedy of pain may not happen, that the pain may not come and go and leave no education and blessing. Let this open behind your pain, and is not pain transfigured? Not removed but transfigured, made something more than tolerable, pervaded with a low, strong light, and filled, as the joy was, with peace. The same is true of all experiences. The same is true of that sum of all experiences which we call life. A man’s world, stretching back and back, farther and farther, finds back of all, before all, God. The world becomes religious. Oh, those old words, that old phrase, "the religious world, "— what a poor, petty, vulgar thing it often has been made to mean!" The religious world," in the language of the newspapers, is almost sure to mean a little section of humanity claiming monopoly of divine influences and making the whole thought of man’s intercourse with God cheap and irreverent by vicious quarrels and mercenary selfishness. "The religious world" is the world of ecclesiastical machineries and conventions and arrangements. But look! See what the religious world really is in its idea, and shall be when it shall finally be realized. A world everywhere aware of and rejoicing in the priority of God, feeling all power flow out from Him, and sending all action back to report itself to Him for judgment, — a world where goodness means obedience to God, and sin means disloyalty to God, and progress means growth in the power to utter God, and knowledge means the understanding of God’s thought, and happiness means the peace of God’s approval. That is the religious world. That is the only world which is religious. It is the world of which Isaiah and Habakkuk dreamed, in which "the earth should be filled with the knowledge of the glory of God, as the waters cover the sea." And now we want to go on and see how all this truth comes to the full display of its richness in the Christian faith. The Christian faith is the sum and flower of the religious life of man. Whatever has struggled in all other religions comes to its free and full expression there. And so the truth of the priority of God is the first and fundamental truth of Christianity. Remember how it all begins. Jesus is sitting with Nicodemus, and telling him what He wants him to believe, What is it? Is it of a fermentation in humanity, — a loving impulse, a reaching up of man after a Deity whom he has discovered, to which at last God, out of His distant heaven, graciously responds? It distinctly is not that. "God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son." It is a movement from the side of God. Everything which Christianity conceives of man as doing, everything which Christianity bids man do, is in answer to some previous activity of God. God has given a law which you have broken. That is sin. God has offered a forgiveness and new life which you may, which you must, accept. That is salvation. Behold how all that we saw in the relation of man to Nature, all that was richly involved in the very fact of Religion, burns out in most complete expression in the Religion of Religions, in the Gospel of the Son of God, who becomes the Son of Man.

If I enter into the spirit of the narratives and see how Jesus approached the people whom He wished to save, I find the same thing everywhere. Did He meet them in the streets, did He step across the thresholds of their houses, and say to them, "You must love God," calling upon them for an adventurous excursion into an unknown land to which they could not tell whether they would find an open door or not? It was always a revelation. It was always, "God loves you." He went about saying that from house to house, from man to man. He said it to the Publican, the Magdalene, the Pharisee. He said it by His sermon, His miracle, and finally His cross. He built this background behind every life. He spread this great sky over every soul, and then He looked to see the great compulsion, " You must love God," "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God, " grasp every nature, not as a hard commandment, but as a warm necessity to which the nature yields as a cloud yields to the atmosphere and melts into the sky.

What will you do if you are sent to carry the Gospel to your friend, your child? Will you stand over him and say, "You must love God; you will suffer for it if you do not "? When was ever love begotten so? "Who is God?" "Why should I love Him?" "How can I love Him," answers back the poor, bewildered heart, and turns to the things of earth which with their earthly affections seem to love it, and satisfies itself in loving them. Or perhaps it grows defiant, and says, "I will not," flinging back your exhortation as the cold stone flings back the sunlight. But you say to your friend, your child, "God loves you," say it in every language of yours, in every vernacular of his, which you can command, and his love is taken by surprise, and he wakes to the knowledge that he does love God without a resolution that he will. So it is that children come to love their fathers and their mothers everywhere. There is no struggle after an uncertain thing. You do not urge them or exhort them. They are set into the lives which are before their lives, and the love of those lives flows into them and becomes their love. The real reason why men do not love God is that they do not really believe that God loves them. That does not take their blame away, but it does shift it and put it in the right place. They are to blame, grievously to blame, because they have made their lives so base and poor that they cannot believe that God loves them. There is where the attack must be made and the victory won. Fix their thoughts not on themselves but on God. Make them see that God is such that He must love His children, however base and poor they be, and then love becomes possible from them to Him, because it’s great cause, its depth of spiritual reason and reality, is there.

Sometimes far out at sea the sailor sees the sky grow tremulous and troubled. The cloud seems to be all unable to contain itself; it’s under surface wavers and stretches downward toward the ocean. It is as if it yearned and thirsted for the .valued water. A great grasping hand is reached downward and feels after the waves. And then the sailor looks beneath, and lo, the surface of the waves is troubled too; and out from the water comes first a mere tremble and confusion, and then by and by a column of water builds itself, growing steadier and steadier, until at last it grasps the hand out of the cloud, and one strong pillar reaches from the sea into the heavens, from the heavens to the sea, and the heavens and the sea are one. So you must make man know that God loves him, and then look to see man love God.

How shall you make man know that God loves him? In every way, — there is no speech nor language in which that voice may not be heard, — but most of all by loving the man with a great love yourself, by a lofty and generous affection of which he shall know that, coming through you, it comes from beyond you, and say, " It is my Father that my brother utters, " and so be led up to the Father’s heart. We talk about men’s reaching through Nature up to Nature’s God. It is nothing to the way in which they may reach through manhood up to manhood’s God, and learn the divine love by the human. God make us all such revelations of His love to some of His children!

We may think again not of the way in which we shall get our friends and brethren to love God, but of the way in which we shall get ourselves to love Him. Oh, the old struggles! How many of us have said, " I will love God; I ought to, and I will," and so have wrestled and struggled to do what they could not do, — what in their hearts they knew no real reason for doing, — and have miserably failed, and now are satisfying themselves with loveless obedience, or else have left God altogether and tell their hearts that they must forego all such beautiful, hopeless ambitions. Ah, my friend, what you need is to get away round upon the other side of the whole matter. It is not whether you love God but whether God loves you. If He does, and if you can know that He does, then give yourself up totally and unquestioningly to the assurance of that love. Rejoice in it by day and night. Go singing for the joy of it about your work and your play. Let no man, however wise, persuade you that you have not a right to the satisfaction of that love. You have. It does not wait for your summons. Of course it does not wait for your response. How could the offer say, "I will not give myself to you till you accept me first?" But as you go singing for joy that God loves you, behold the response is born before you know it, and you are loving God as countless souls have always loved Him, in Saint John’s old way, " because He first loved you. "

Sometimes it seems good to sweep aside all the complications of spiritual experience and bring it all to absolute simplicity. Here is God, and here is a child of God. The Father loves the child, not because the child is this or that, or anything but just His child. He says to you, "Go save my child for me." And you say, "How, my Father?" And He says, "By Me." And you say, "Yes, I see," and go and take the Father’s love and press it on that child of His, just as you find him. You do not ask him how he feels about it, any more than you ask the wood how it feels about the fire which you bring to it. You know that the fire and the wood belong together. You are sure that if the fire gets at the wood, the wood will burn, and by and by, look! The wood is burning. The wood turns to fire because the fire gave itself to the wood. The wood loves the fire because the fire first loved it.

It is the way in which one man gives himself to another man; and shall God be more cautious and prudent in His gift? If you want your fellow-man to trust you, you must trust him first. With frank, free cordialness you give yourself to him and he responds. All stingy caution and reserve defeats itself. The same trust, only infinitely greater, is in the Cross of Christ. It does not always at once succeed. As in the Parable, God says, "They will reverence my Son," and this man or that gives Him not reverence but scorn; but nevertheless it is that trust of God in man that saves the world. God trusts Himself to man, and countless souls in answer trust themselves to God.

Sometimes the great world and the human life which it contains grow wonderfully simple. Its mixed confusion disappears. It’s one or two great certainties stand out to view. It all seems for one bright moment to come just to this, — if there is a God, everything is right, if ’ there is no God, everything is wrong. And there is a God. There is a God. Therefore all is right at the bottom and in the end. Into the world all full of God comes man, and God is there before him. He finds God there. God takes him as he comes. Sometimes he talks as if he made God, and could make God over again to be what he would. But God made him. And it is to the God who made him that he comes. "Of Him and through Him and to Him are all things." All is well! And now I wonder whether in some of your minds there does not come a question regarding all this that I have said. "After all," you may ask yourself, "what does it matter? If the end is gained, if God and man come together, what matter is it from which side the first impulse came, — whether God went out to seek man, or man with daring spiritual impulse rose up and went and clamored at the gates of God? "But must it not make a difference? Is there a situation or a fact or a condition anywhere which is absolute and identical, and does not vary with the character of him who occupies it? And one of the strongest elements in making the character of him who occupies a situation is the way by which he came there. It is not enough that a man stands upon the mountain-top. I must know the path by which he climbed. It is not enough that a man walks in the dark valley. I must know what brought him there. The man is more than the situation. The situation means little without the soul of the man giving it its meaning. When then I see man reconciled to God and walking with his Lord in the white garment of a new life, it makes vast difference what is the spirit of that reconciled, regenerated man. If it is the first fact of his new existence — that which he never loses for a moment — that the impulse of it came from God; that God sought him; that before he ever thought of the higher life, its halls were made ready for him, and its Lord came forth into the wilderness to find him and to bring him in, — then the strength of a profound humility is always with him. The paralysis of pride does not creep over him. Into his feebleness, through the openness of his humility, there is always pouring the power of God. It is not so much he that stands upon the mountain or walks in the valley, but the God who brought him there stands or walks there in him; and it is God’s work that is being done, God’s life that is being lived. He is full of the humility which exalts and strengthens.

Besides this, the appeal of the new life to the soul which lives it is largely bound up with the truth of the priority of God. To know that long before I cared for Him, He cared for me; that while I wandered up and down in carelessness, perhaps while I was plunging deep in flagrant sin, God’s eye was never off me for a moment, He was always watching for the instant when His hand might touch me and His voice might speak to me, — there is nothing which can appeal to a man like that. The man is stone whom that does not appeal to. When, touched by the knowledge of that untiring love, a man gives himself at last to God, every act of loving service which he does afterwards is fired and colored by the power of gratitude, surprised gratitude, out of which it springs. How shall he overtake this love which has so much the start of him? This is what makes his service eager and enthusiastic. It is a "reasonable service," justified by the sublime reason of the soul which loves its God because He first loved it.

Again this truth, that God is first, gives me the right to keep a strong and lively hope for all my fellow-men. It gives me also the chance to believe that I can help them. It is all hopeless if I have to stir them from, their lethargy and force them over distant hill and dale to find a distant God who will not care about them till He sees them coming. But, behold, God is here. He is infinitely nearer to them than I can come. Perhaps they are loving and serving Him already in ways which are so thoroughly their own ways that I cannot recognize them. I have only to tell them over and over again how near He is; I have only to beg them to open their eyes and see!

Sometimes in our faithlessness it seems to us as if we had to do very much more than that. It seems as if we had to go and find God, and bid Him love this child of His, It seems as if we had to remake God’s child into such a being as God could love! We almost act as if we must introduce God and this man to one another! Ah, let the veil drop from your eyes! See how it really is! God loved this man before you dreamed of loving him. God loves him deeper than you imagine. What can you do, what need you do, but hold your life in such a way, and make it such a life, that besides the direct radiance of God’s love, which is pouring on him all the time, some indirect testimony may be borne by you, that so this brother man may a little more speedily and clearly see the love of God. Have I talked to-day too generally of the priority of God? Then make it absolutely special and concrete. There is some duty which God has made ready for you to do to-morrow; nay, to-day! He has built it like a house for you to occupy. You have not to build it. He has built it, and He will lead you up to its door and set you with your feet upon its threshold. Will you go in and occupy it? Will you do the duty which He has made ready? Perhaps it is the great comprehensive duty of the consecration of yourself to Him. Perhaps it is some special task. Whatever it is, may He who anticipated your love by His own in giving you the task, now help you to fulfill His love with yours by doing it. Amen.