Isaiah 30

Isaiah 30:21

THE DIVINE VOICE IN THE SOULIsa_30:21THE medium of truth is an important factor in the encouragement of our faith. It makes a difference, and a vast difference, who the man is that proposes to tell us what we shall believe. It ought not to be so, perhaps, among the Divine writers, since all authors of the Bible are inspired by the same Spirit; but even among them, we have our favorite teachers—those at whose feet we prefer to sit. One man enjoys Peter, another takes greater delight in John, while a third finds in James those characteristics that please him best and profit him most. It has been so since the beginning of Christianity, and doubtless dates far back of that to the times when men disputed the point of profit as between the works of Moses and Job and David. We remember that Paul found occasion to reprove the Corinthian Christians for this very thing.

Some of them thought what Paul said was to be received, and that only; others felt the same way toward Apollos, and still others claimed Cephas as their champion in doctrinal and spiritual affairs. Against that favoritism, Paul hurled his rebuke, charging their prejudices to carnality and saying to them, “Therefore let no mm glory in men.

For all things are yours; whether Paul, or Apollos, or Cephas, or the world, or life, or death, or things present, or things to come; all are yours; and ye are Christ’s; and Christ is God’s” (1 Corinthians 3:21-23).But Paul’s reproof did not cure the fault. Until this day we have our favorites among teachers of equal merit, and even allow our prejudice to invade the sacred realm and select thence some writer and say, “He is mine!” Many of us have felt so toward Isaiah, the Prophet! The fidelity of his character, the sincerity of his heart, the bravery of his spirit, the pathos and power in his eloquence, the evangelical in his preaching, the pungency of his reproofs, the prayerfulness of his soul, the soundness of his life, and the heroism of his death, have all combined to make his Book prominent in Sacred Writ, and to give an unusual weight to the words that escaped his lips or ran from the point of his quill. The text of today is no exception to this! Because Isaiah said, “Thine ears shall hear a word behind thee, saying, This is the way, walk ye in it” (Isaiah 30:21), we halt to hear, for after all we want men to tell about Divine voices, who, themselves, have heard and obeyed the same; and surely Isaiah spoke this text out of the fullness of a superior experience!But what are we to get from the text today?Shall we not learn first of all that God’s voice is heard in the enlightened conscience?For conscience, unenlightened by God’s Spirit, the most that can be claimed is that, like the other faculties of the soul, it was involved in “the fall” and so is only the wreck of what it might have been —the irresponsible, inane shadow of its original self. Its directions are no more to be relied upon than are those of the loaded needle after it has been detached from its pivotal point and left prostrate on some rough surface!

But in the new man, the Christ-born one, conscience regains its throne and its voice is to be hearkened to as the whisper of God.There have been many definitions of the Christian conscience, but among them what one surpasses that attributed to a little girl? It is related that a certain teacher of a Sunday School Class asked the children to tell her what conscience was.

Among the answers, one bright, sweet child gave this: “Conscience is Jesus whispering in the heart.” Aye, for a Christian it ought to be! It is a voice then to which the saved man must give ear; and as he values obedience to the Divine will, he must not be disobedient to it. There is not one conscience for business, another for society and yet a third for religion. It is the same God, whispering in the same voice, to the same heart, in them all. Every Christian man proves and experiences the truth of a part of this text at every turn; “Thine ears shall hear a word behind thee”. Your very shadow must fail to attend you before that voice ceases to be heard.It is the voice that breaks the silence of the soul.

The thunders of the sky leave it undisturbed; the rumbling of the street by day, or the passing of ponderous trains at night, may disturb the quiet of the body and break its rest, but the soul of man is deaf to such sounds, and lives in a realm where these can never come. But it has its own noises; it hears the voices that never float into audible speech.

Satan speaks to it and gets attention; and God addresses it and is heard; and while it listens, the voice defines the right and the wrong, encourages to the one, and warns against the other. Men say of this, “It is the voice of conscience and we ought to treasure its teaching.” All men hear it! Even the worst of men may not hope to wholly escape its reproving word.A speaker in the Moody School one summer, a Baptist preacher of fame in England, his home, said something like this: “Upon the coasts of France, the sailor says, there is a buried city, and on quiet nights as they are rocked upon the deep, they can hear the tones of the buried bells coming up from the steeples far down in the ocean depths, with muffled sound. So in the hearts of men of the world who have lived lives of self-indulgence and evil, there are muffled tones from the depths of their nature, ringing in the steeples of the soul, telling them what is right and what is wrong. That is conscience!” That also is the voice of God breaking upon the silence of the soul!It is the one voice that is so subjective and spiritual that it cart say the word that renders the soul ecstatic in its joy, or drives it to desperation in its sorrow, and yet the individual’s closest neighbor hears not a sound.Gotthold, the great naturalist, was also much of a philosopher, and standing one day before that species of poplar whose leaves are peculiarly sensitive to every breeze, he heard a rustle in the foliage. He cast about to see the wind’s effect on other trees, but the breath was so slight that not a one of them seemed sensible to it.

Then Gotthold said, “This tree is an emblem of a man with a wounded and uneasy conscience, which takes alarm at the most trifling cause, and sets his whole person to trembling.” He might also have said, “This tree is like conscience because it is sensitive to whisper of winds that others about fail to feel.”That power of this silent voice accounts for many actions of men that seem strange to conscienceless souls. The State Treasurer of Ohio received an anonymous letter from some man in Cincinnati.

Upon opening one, he read this note, “The enclosed $1,000 belongs to the State of Ohio. Call it conscience money.”Some man had been disobedient to a silent voice as long as possible. No one else heard the word behind him that tracked him wherever he went; that accused him of theft a thousand times a day; that started him from his sleep at night by crying into the ears of his soul, “Thief! Thief! Thief!” His closest neighbor knew not the fact, nor did conscience publish it so far from home. His own wife, if he had one, might have seen her golden wedding anniversary with him, and shared in all his secrets save this one, for conscience would drive him distracted and yet never speak loud enough for the wife of his bosom to hear. I think it was Rev. F.

B. Meyer who said, “Every man carries the judgment seat within him, and day after day stands before it; and the Son of Man, to whom all judgment is committed sits on the throne of this inner court, and he not only tells us that this or the other is right or wrong, but he goes further and pronounces sentence in our favor by a kiss of infinite delight, or judgment against us by his frown of infinite sorrow.” We may enjoy the one, or we must endure the other, according as we heed or despise the silent voice within the soul. Happy is the man who can say before God of his treatment of this voice, what Paul said of the voice he heard on the way to Damascus, and the sights and sounds attending it, “Whereupon, O king Agrippa, I was not disobedient unto the Heavenly vision” (Acts 26:19).The voice of an enlightened conscience is distinct or muffled and uncertain, according as we are obedient or disobedient to its counsel. People often complain that conscience does not speak in audible voice, and her counsel is not to be relied upon because often of uncertain sound. Only when we wrong her by refusing or failing to execute her behests, does she speak in timid tones, or cease to speak altogether. In a sermon which Dr.

Alexander MacLaren preached on “Pilate’s Effort to Wash His Hands of Christ’s Blood”, that wise preacher said sagely enough, “There is nothing that so effectually silences the remonstrances of the inward voice as the habit of neglecting it. If you persistently pick the buds off a plant and do not let it either flower or fruit, you will kill it, and if you nip the shoots of conscience by neglecting its warnings, then the plant will, if it does not die, at least retreat into its root and lie there dormant ‘till—’till it is transplanted by death, and a new climate draws it out into activity.” It is a fearful thing then to be disobedient to this heavenly voice.

It means a coming experience when the soul shall sit either in an eternal silence, or else hear only its own lonely wail, or the taunts and jeers of friends. On the other hand, if we obey it, the voice grows in distinctness of utterance, and in readiness of counsel, and the soul is furnished a chart and compass that will point out the way in the darkest night, and render piloting safe in the fiercest storm that sweeps the sea of life. Let us not be disobedient to the word within us!This voice, though silent, is yet supreme. The supreme forces of the material universe are silent. It is only the small machinery in material things that thunders and attracts attention to itself. At North Easton, Mass., once we saw a boy drawing a small wagon on the sidewalk and racing with a passing train of many coaches.

The little wagon rattled so loud that the sound of rumbling car wheels and the puffing of the engine were drowned in the greater noise of the plaything. And yet the train was too small to be wholly silent.

It takes a world to roll through space and start never a sound. The Psalmist wrote, you remember, “The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth His handywork. Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge. There is no speech nor language, and their voice is not heard” (Psalms 19:1-3). Those are the supreme forces, which move and reign in silence.It is so in the spiritual world—the unuttered word is the one that directs the soul into right paths and warns it against the wrong ones. It is the word of conscience, which no mortal ear hears, from which the soul’s ear receives this sentence distinctly, “This is the way, walk ye in it” (Isaiah 30:21).

That voice comes to you in the hour when you need it most; in the hour when two or three paths lead off before you and you stand before the forks not knowing which one to take. Then, set your judgment aside; then ignore your preference as far as possible; then shut your ears against volunteers of cheap counsel and listen to the voice within, the voice that no other can hear, the voice that has been to you as the voice of God, and follow it, for its word is supreme.Have you ever been on a strange road in a dark night, and as you went along, came suddenly to a fork in the road and saw two or more highways leading off in as many directions?

If so, you were calm, or disturbed, according as your horse was familiar with the course you wished to take, or was untravelled in it. If he was familiar, you loosed the rein and confided in him. You may have thought him wrong as he turned calmly to the left; you may have been disposed to draw on the other rein just a little, but his persistency toward the left decided you, and you yielded the point of your judgment to his more sure instinct and he brought you to your destination all right. He is woefully ignorant of the precision of instinct in the beast, who, under such circumstances, thinks his judgment superior, and gives to it the supremacy. What instinct is in the lower animals, enlightened conscience is in man—it is God’s silent whisper in both; and that whisper is supreme, as both he that obeys and he that disregards it must learn. Theodore Parker was in many respects a wonderful man.

He was spiritual and surpassingly eloquent, and though at times he wandered so far from the truth as revealed in God’s Word, yet at other times he set forth with singular effect the truth he had discovered from life, or experienced in his own soul. He tells the story of an incident that came into his earliest years in illustration of the distinctness of the voice of conscience in one of tenderest summers.

He was but four years old when he started alone, from the field where his father was laboring, to the house. His path led by a shallow pond, and in passing he saw a lily in full bloom and went to the water’s edge to get it. Once there he saw a spotted turtle sleeping in the sun. He had never killed anything, but he had seen other boys and he was seized with a desire to imitate them in that. He raised a small club and was in the act of bringing it down on the tiny head when he heard within him a voice clear and loud saying, “It is wrong!” He dropped his stick, hastened to his mother and asked her what it was within that had spoken the words, “It is wrong!” She took him into her arms, wiped a tear from her eye, and said, “Some people call it conscience, but I prefer to call it the voice of God. If you listen to it and obey it, then it will speak clearer and clearer and always guide you aright.

My child, your life depends on your heeding that little voice.” Parker said of it long afterward, “No event of my youth made such a lasting impression!”But this word is not only supreme in that its directions are most distinct and wise, but also in that its counsel is a command of authority, “This is the way, walk ye in it” (Isaiah 30:21). There is no appeal from that speech.

It admits of no choice on our part; it is final, and to disobey is little less than destruction. Some men seem disturbed by the want of latitude in this. They complain of conscience that its mandates abridge their liberties, and resist the silent whisper of God as an encroachment on their personal rights. Alas, that man will persist in setting such store by himself, and in claiming so much as his right, and in supposing his judgment to be supreme. The average boast of liberty, the average cry for greater latitude in behavior than conscience approves or God’s Word allows, is a carnal boast and a carnal cry! It is the voice of the flesh quarreling against the leadings of the Spirit; it is the desire of wicked license, using and abusing the term liberty.

There is such a thing as abusing the liberty that we have, under God, until He is provoked by our license to restrict us more and more, and render our paths straighter and narrower. The child who does not obey the mother who tells him to play inside the yard, soon finds himself locked into the narrow confines of a single room.

If he can’t enjoy the liberty of the lawn without availing himself of the license of the streets, he must be content behind bolted doors. It is so when we are disobedient to God’s voice within the soul. Russell Conwell tells how it happened on a steamer by which he returned from England, that only a few cabin passengers were aboard, and the captain, a kind-hearted man, allowed them great liberties. When it was fair weather he let them manage the wheel. When a storm arose and fears were entertained lest the vessel should go down, there were passengers who thought they knew better how to manage a boat than the pilot or captain. Some of them so persistently interfered with the captain’s orders that he had to put their leader in irons for mutiny on the high seas.

So there are men who think they know more about managing the craft of immortality than God knows—men who mutiny against His great pilot conscience and so persistently refuse obedience to his directions that it is necessary to restrict them in their liberties. As Conwell said, “God has to put some men in irons before they will learn obedience.” But whether in joy or sorrow, in peace or pain, one lesson we must learn or lose life, and that is to obey the voice that comes to us in every perplexity, saying to us when about to turn to the right or to the left, “This is the way, walk ye in it” (Isaiah 30:21).But the last and sweetest fact of this supremacy is that he who obeys this voice will never blunder.

The great sorrows of this life are not those that befall us in consequence of no fault of our own. We can bear all such and be brave! Job can live after his oxen and asses and sheep and camels and servants and children are all swept away with one destructive storm; after that his flesh and bones are cursed with boils; after that his wife has grown dyspeptic and faithless; after that his miserable comforters have regaled him for days with their pessimistic sophistries, because in it all, Job was conscious of his own integrity. He had not been disobedient to the word behind him! Elijah found himself visited of angels in the solitude of a wilderness whither he had gone to escape Jezebel, and comforted with the sweetest message, when he thought himself alone in faithfulness to God. Daniel was not disturbed at the sight of a lion’s den, as Joseph had not been at that of a prison, nor the three Hebrew children at that of Heated furnaces; for all carried in their bosoms a consciousness of obedience to the silent voice and feared no blunder.

But how different with those who have despised the word within! The downiest bed could not induce slumber to come to the perjured soul of Saul; the most bewitching strains from David’s harp failed to soothe his excited nerves, because in his bosom was the voice of a wronged conscience, the silent protest of an insulted God.

Darius passed a similar night after Daniel had been wronged, and Judas Iscariot found life a burden too heavy to bear after that he had disobeyed the voice and betrayed his Lord. Better follow that path to which “The Word” directs, saying, “This is the way, walk ye in it” (Isaiah 30:21), for though it seem rugged at times, though it leads through the valleys of humiliation and over the hill of difficulty, though it has stones that cut the feet, and chained lions that frighten the heart, it goes straight upward and onward toward the wicket gate of the celestial city, and he who keeps to that path will have no steps to retrace, no pitfalls to encounter, no castles of doubt to endure, make no blunders that superinduce despair. It may be the straightest and narrowest path that leads through this world of ours, but, taken all in all, it is infinitely the best one that man can tread. The old Appian way was a magnificent road. It is said to have been 24 feet wide, 350 miles long, and built of stone, smooth as a floor. But men travelled it most because it was the Emperor’s highway and led to the eternal city of the seven hills. This path of the text is more rugged and narrow, but the King of Kings walks there, and those who take it forget all trials in the sight of His gracious face; at its end are thrones and crowns, and the eternal city, the soul’s everlasting habitation—and God reigns!