To be near unto God - pagina 126

He

is a God who is our Heavenly Father, who speaks to us, who hears our prayers, in whose breast throbs a heart full of Divine compassion. He is a personal God, who companies with us as a friend, who turns in with us for the night, and who allows us to dwell in his holy tabernacle. The works of God are constantly described therefore as personal acts, in connection with which references abound to the face of God, to the mouth of the Lord, to the ear which he inclines toward us, to the footsteps of the Holy One, to the hand which is over us in blessing, and to the arm of strength with which the Lord breaks all forms of opposition. All this is in part personification, by which what is found in man is applied to God. But there is more to it than this. He that planted the ear, the Psalmist asks: Shall he not hear? He that formed the eye, shall he not see? (94:9). The eye and the ear, the hand and the arm are but bodily manifestations of our inward powers, which God has so made, because he created us after his image. When we say that

God

hears, sees, speaks, blesses

and

fights,

it

is

not said so, metaphorically, after the manner of men, but by it is asserted that all this is original in God and that it only appears in us after his image. When the Scripture speaks of an arm of the Lord, it means that there is not merely a vague outflowing of power from God, but that God governs his indwelling and outgoing power, that he directs it to definite ends, that he uses or leaves it unused according to his good pleasure,

and that when God employs his power to protect or to oppose us, it is equally much, and in a still

higher sense, a personal act, as 118

when we

lift

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