What Does God Do

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By H. L. Willett Texts. — "Show us the Father, and it sufficeth us." — John 14:8. "My soul thirst eth for God, for the living God." — Psalm 42:2.

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WHAT DOES GOD DO? By H. L. Willett

Texts. — "Show us the Father, and it sufficeth us." — John 14:8. "My soul thirst eth for God, for the living God." — Psalm 42:2.

THE words of Philip to Jesus, "Lord, show us the Father," express the longing of the heart of man for God. "My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God, ' ' was the psalmist 's utterance of a sentiment common to the race. The conception of an infinite Life with, whom we have to do is fundamental in the experience of all but small fragments of mankind. All the literatures of religion give reverential regard to deity, and it is appropriate that the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, the supreme classics of the religious life, should open with the words, "In the beginning, God."

The idea of the Infinite is present in every language. All the nations have spoken of the Highest in some manner of speech which expressed the regard of the creature for the Creator. The ancient Hebrews gave him the names El Shaddai, the Protector; Elohim, Deity; and Jahveh, the Life-Giver. The Moslem names him Allah, the Hindo calls him Brahm, the
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Parsee speaks of him as Ahura Mazda, and the Indian reveres him as the Great Spirit. He has been called by all the hundred names written on the tomb of Akbar the Great, and for fear they might miss his title, some have anxiously carved upon altars reared to him the dedication, "To the Unknown God."

But though nearly all men have some conception of God, address him by some appellation, and assign to him a place in the universe, his position and importance in the worldorder have varied greatly with changing periods and different groups. Just as such enterprises as war, discovery, scientific research, philosophic discussion, commerce and industry have

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had varying assessments in different ages, so the idea and importance of deity have risen and fallen with the generations.

It cannot be questioned that belief in the Infinite and his activities in the world was formerly given a more commanding
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place than is today accorded. Once the idea of God, the supreme arbiter of the affairs of the world, was given first rank in the regard of the race. This belief took on all the forms of polytheism with which the religions records of mankind are informed. It ranged all the way from the crassest fetichism to the most exalted monotheism. But it was alike in all its expressions, the effort of the soul of man to find the source and fount of life, the ultimate Being with whom all have to do.

Former ages thought of God as the Creator. Either by the compelling word of his mouth, or by the direct activity of divine craftsmanship, he made the world and all the worlds. In obedience to his will, or by the touch of his hand, the heavens and the earth took form and stood in their appointed places.

He was the Ruler of nature. Man's place in the order of life was very small. It was God who was the worker. He brought day and night from their secret habitations and spread them over land and sea. He made the seasons to pass in the due order of their going. He set the bounds of the great waters and measured the heights of the mountains. He trenched out the channels of the rivers, and sent the brooks singing on their
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journey to the sea. He planted the forests, called the waving grain from the moist earth, and painted the flowers their thousand colors. He made light and created darkness. He brought forth heat and cold from his treasuries. All the events of nature were the direct activities of his hand. Man's work was as nothing compared with this marvel of the divine industry.

Nor was his task limited to the movements of nature that might be called habitual and regular. He was the source from which came the distresses that befell mankind. For some inscrutable reason he chose at times to bring upon the world such afflictions as left no doubt in the mind of primitive man that it was the Highest with whom the account must be ad-

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justed. Sometimes these visitations were believed to be due to human sin, and sometimes to the divine purpose to manifest his power. In either instance they were not to be questioned. The earthquake was his work. Volcanoes poured forth their molten depths at his command. The whirlwind ancl the tidal wave were the messengers of omnipotence. It was inconceivable to
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the early races that any ruin could be wrought or any plague endured save at the pleasure of Deity. ' ' Shall there be evil in the city and the Lord have not done it?" asked Amos, and with fine resignation Job exclaimed, "The Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away ; blessed be the name of the Lord. ' '

Plague and blight, draught and mildew, blasting and tempest were all the ministers of his will. The pestilence that walked in darkness and the destruction that wasted at noonday came in response to his call, and in the furtherance of his unchangeable purpose. Barrenness, sickness, failing vitality and death were all the slaves of his will.

But these grim visitations were not the only gifts of his hand. In that case he would have been a monster indeed. It was not in such aspects that the Hebrew was accustomed to think of his God. There were nations, to be sure, who looked upon the order of nature as the embodiment of cruel caprice and irresponsible menace. But to the men of nobler spirit, of whom there were many among the Hebrews, God was the great and friendly dispenser of the blessings of life. The Old Testament is full of this interpretation of the divine character. Good seasons, warmth of sun and refreshing showers, the early and the latter rain, the harvest waving in abundance, the cattle on a thousand hills,
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children, friendship, prosperity, beauty, refinements and courtesies, generous and noble impulse that made gracious the honored of their people, inventive skill and constructive genius were all his bestowments.

He it was who dowered Solomon with wisdom, Bezaliel with craftsmanship, Jonathan with prowess, and David with a contrite heart. He hardened the soul of Pharaoh, made the spirit of Jeremiah like a well of flame against the opposition of his people, and tried the heart of Ezekiel with an irreparable loss that he might be fitted for his task. The generosity of Abra-

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ham, the devotion of Ruth, the courage of Joshua, and the eloquence of Isaiah were all of his bestowing.

So early man thought of God. He was the Master in the house of the world, ordering all things according to his will, and making evil and good alike obedient to himself. He was the giver of truth and all its instruments. Religion was a gift of his to the human soul. No man by searching could find out
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God, but he could make himself known to those whom he chose, by signs and wonders, by ministries and rites. Through oracle and spiritual intuition he released such truth as was needful for the hour, and the generations accepted the messages of the Infinite as they came from the lips or were wrought by the hands of his messengers. Altar and sacrifice, sanctuary and priesthood, prophets and sages, law and testimony, Sabbathkeeping and pilgrimage, these and all other details of the religious life were prescribed for the instruction of his own people, ancT through them, of the world. Every act of ritual was ordained by him, and their neglect was the way to peril.

But above all, God was the divine Speaker to the men of the past. They conceived of him as uttering himself in many ways. Oracles and dreams, visions and apparitions were sent by him to make known his will. In one form or another God was believed to be evermore talking to mankind. Sometimes it was in conversations, as with Moses, and sometimes by dreams, as with Jacob; sometimes in visions as with Isaiah, and again in the sacred ecstasy, as with Elisha. And since men are ever voluble, and the teachers of religion come behind none others in the gift, it was not difficult to believe that God was speaking also, and that the messages of priests and prophets were the direct and verbal oracles of God. So the prophets and priests
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themselves believed, and so the people understood.

Today the feeling of the world is very different on all these themes. The small place man occupied in the affairs of the universe in earlier generations has grown vastly larger. Correspondingly the sphere of divine activity has been restricted till it nears the point of vanishing. The modern man knows that God is not the Creator of the world in any such naive and instantaneous fashion as it was once the custom to believe.

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The studies of the laboratory and the observatory have disclosed something of the immeasurable distance traversed in the long and ever-changing progress of the universe to its present state. Even yet the process seems far from complete. The world is but newborn in the family of the swinging planets. All things go on in accordance with seemingly fixed laws. Seedtime and harvest, heat and cold, summer and winter, and day and night do not cease. Is there a place for God in such a universe of law ? Or if men concede that this ceaseless process of creation is the work of God, what is his part in it? What
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does God do?

Nor is God conceived today as the Ruler of the world in any manner resembling the primitive tradition. All men have given up something of that, and some have given up all. He cannot longer be thought of as governing with a strong and arbitrary hand. The modern mind does not charge God with the responsibility for earthquake, drought and tidal wave. Science has been teaching the place and value of even the worst of these catastrophes in a universe that is obedient to uniform and unvarying law. There are still those about us who find comfort in the Hebrew view that such visitations are in accordance with the divine desire. They prefer to hold this idea rather than to confess that all the orderings of nature, good and evil, are not his own. But most sensitive minds shrink from placing upon God a responsibility that would rob him of every quality of sympathy for the suffering world. One feels the impropriety, not to say sacrilege, of implicating Providence in the deaths and disasters which seem to call for frequent public utterance. There is no more effective promoter of scepticism than the pious but unintelligent sentiment which counsels submission to the hand of God in the time of trouble. For even the least reverent of men are quite aware that God is not chargeable with the troubles that overtake humanity.
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If this be true, is he then the giver of the blessings for which we try to teach our spirits gratitude ? Why should one thank God for the gifts of life if he has ceased to be charged with its misfortunes? In what sense can it be said that its benefits are of his bestowal? In a word, what place is left for him in

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the modern world with its scientific view of nature and of life? What does God do?

But even more searching is the inquiry as to the place of God in the world of religion. It is the commonplace of informed reflection upon the best of the ancient faiths that their belief in the activity and speech of Deity was rather the expression of the ideals of their noblest spirits than the asserted divine revelation. There is not a faith of the Orient that does not believe itself the inspired message of deity to man. Were these ethnic faiths mistaken, or was it really true, as Paul affirmed, that God has never left himself without witness among any people? Were those innumerable offerings and ceremonies of
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the Hebrew codes really the expression of the will of God, or were they the devices of the priesthood ? And what bearing on the inquiry has the familiar fact that every one of them was taken in some manner, by inheritance or imitation, from older or neighboring peoples? What did God really do in those years when the law and the ritual and the religion of Israel were taking form ? We have left the place where we can longer affirm that this complex of ceremony, limited views of morality, and conflicting words regarding the deepest questions of religion, was the revelation of God to Israel. We know its value in the religious education of a race, but we cannot charge the God whom Jesus worshiped with its faults and limitations.

Has religion through all the centuries been more than the aspiration of the human soul after a nobler life? Is it anything more than social sentiment touched with something of the mystery of the unknown? Has not humanity devised the instruments and accessories of worship, even as it has coined its forms of language? And when one says that God has spoken in the past, has it not after all been the voice of humanity speaking constantly, and often thinking that God was uttering his will? Above all, if God has spoken in the past, why does he not speak today? Was there any reason why he should have held speech with man once, and then
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ceased to do so ? Or did he utter his complete mind, and then relapse into unbroken silence? No man is convinced by such arguments. What did God ever do that he is not doing today ?

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Here is the crux of the whole insistent demand for light. What does God do in the modern universe ? Is there any place for his activity longer? It is useless to deny that all men have given over something of the primitive conception of a ceaselessly active God, intent upon the mechanical tasks of the world. And it is equally true that some men have given over all that earlier generations held concerning the divine activity. In the world of the past there was little room for man. Today it would seem that there is little room for God. One is reminded of the idol-makers of Babylon described in the mordant phrases of the Isaiah of the Exile. They took a tree, and of part of it they made their beds and tables, stools and lampstands. Another part they took to kindle the fire on which they cooked their food. And of the rest of that same tree they made a god. How little must have been left to carve into Deity! Has not the modern world gradually
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stripped God of his place and function until it has left only enough material to make an inconsequential God, whom it is hardly worth while to worship?

One who looks at modern life with discerning eye finds few evidences, that the Infinite has place or value. Is there any need of him in the field of political activity? What statesmen of today shape their policies ' ' as in the great Taskmaster 's eye?" Is the business of the present generation conducted on the principle that there is a divine, if silent, partner in the concern? In the world of pleasure who takes time to think of the deeper sanctions and more serious purposes of life? Is the journalism of our age sensitive to the mighty pulses of the kingdom of God? Does industry stand for one moment in silence in the presence of the great Worker of the past? Even in the family group as it takes form in our time, is there any place for God?

It is still regarded as necessary that a moderate space should be kept for him in the churches, though it is often reduced to the measure of the Sundays. But even so, there must be many who wonder what he does with his time through the long week. Then there is a little place reserved for him in the volumes of religious literature; but few people trouble them13

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selves about such books today. The groups of men and women who devote themselves professionally to religious work are supposed to know about God, and to have time for converse with him. But the average person regards that kind of life as unearthly and remote from vital human interests. Meantime what does God do? Is it worth while to believe in a Being who occupies so inconspicuous a place in the regard of our generation?

One turns from this negative, but too largely actual, state of the case to contemplate the real and assured place of God in the universe. Perhaps the denial or neglect of the Divine is due in no small degree to the confident assumptions of earlier ages regarding him. Men grow sceptical where there is such insistent affirmation. The twentieth century is becoming very weary of the dogmatism of the fourth. The scholastic circles of a former time were able to define and describe and vindicate the Deity to the last degree of accuracy. They talked of him with the assured and patronizing air which no modern scientist
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would assume in the discussion of a rock or a beetle. From such presumptuous claims to knowledge the present age has swung far in its protest against infallibility. It has discovered that there were few funds in the bank of knowledge to meet the drafts so lightly drawn by the men of the past.

And yet no inquiring spirit can be satisfied with negatives and denials. The rich experience of the ages has proved the reality of God, even as the prophets and Jesus affirmed. His place in the universe can never be that small and remote circle to which too many in the subjective world of their own souls have reduced him. To the eager and searching spirit he is real and present. And this after all is the supreme concern of mankind. A universe without him is as the blackness of darkness. It is easy to think that one is an unbeliever in Deity, merely because he has ceased to have faith in the sort of God someone else has described. But to settle oneself calmly to the thought of a godless world is a more serious proceeding. People imagine themselves the victims of many sorts of misfortune, and there are distresses that are very real. It is not difficult to make a catalogue of trouble, calamity, suffering and

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disappointment. But the only anguish that has no cure is the sense of loss that comes from a denial that there is a God. This is the bitter pain that never ceases. There are sufferings that come from hunger, from poverty, from bereavement. But the soul of suffering is the thought that perhaps there is no great Companion. The sorrow of a life orphaned of the Father is the supreme tragedy.

In no such forlorn universe does the man of insight live. He is aware that he cannot boast of large knowledge of Deity, as earlier and bolder generations did. But somewhat he knows; and that somewhat is sufficient to serve him in the adventure of life. He is more modest in his affirmations than some who have gone before him, but this modesty is the proper reticence of partial and unfolding knowledge. He cannot gain his own consent to attempt the definition of the Infinite in lengthened categories, but he is confident that he can make the language of Frederic Myers his own:

"Whoso hath felt the spirit of the Highest Cannot confound nor doubt him nor deny : Yea with one voice, O world, though thou deniest,
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Stand thou on that side, for on this am I. "

He is the Creator and Ruler of the universe. If science has discredited the older beliefs as to the direct and mechanical manner in which the divine activity is manifested in material nature, not less has it vindicated the right of the devout soul to perceive in all the processes of physical life the unvarying guidance of the laws which are only God's ways of working. If the universe is vastly older and larger than the writers of the Bible understood, it is by so much the greater theater for the divine industry. The Psalmist thought with reverence of a God who set his glory upon the heavens, as a painter puts his own conceptions upon the canvas. But science has revealed vast extensions of the canvas of creative effort, and by so much has lifted to higher levels the conception of the Creator. And furthermore, it is apparent that this vast labor goes onward ceaselessly through the ages. Never has the divine energy been unemployed in the vast enterprises of the changing

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worlds. To the Jews who worried themselves about the break17

ing of the Sabbath rest, Jesus said ''My father has always worked, and I work." And that unceasing movement of the physical organism toward some as-yet-unknown goal, that evolution of forms which is yet to traverse unbelievable diameters of space and time is all a part of the Father's work. As yet the universe is very young. The earth, with its millions of years gone by, is yet in its morning-time. And humanity, the latest arriving of its forms of life, is only in its infancy as yet. The writer of Genesis declared that God made man in his own image. Even more truly may it be said that God is making man in his image as rapidly as we give him the right of way. Never has there been a moment since the dim, far-off, mysterious beginnings in which God was not at work, realizing himself in the plastic materials of nature and humanity.

He is the Euler of the worlds. By unfailing laws which operate to the ends of righteousness he is governing the nations, and making even the wrath of man to praise him. The blessings and penalties of life are, in a truer sense than the Hebrews ever understood, the results of his unfailing government. The universe is keyed only to beneficent ends. The rejection of the divine program, as made increasingly clear by centuries of teaching and experiment, is the open way to disaster. Conformity to the purpose of God, as it is interpreted
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by the spiritual leaders of the race, and especially by Jesus, is the secret of success. Men throw themselves against the onward-moving enterprises of God at their peril. Not less surely, by co-operation with the divine purpose does man master the secret of power. The world gives up its reserves of wealth in material and immaterial forms to those who pay the price of research after its mysteries. Power comes through knowledge. The diseases that swept away multitudes of victims in earlier ages are now held at bay or are vanishing. The disasters, fire, flood, earthquake and storm, are now brought under some measure of control by skill and foresight. These are human achievements, but not human alone. Nature waits to reveal her secrets to the sons of God, and every discovery of the laboratory or the study is a further co-operation with the self-revealing purpose

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of God. And if the physical universe is yielding up its intimacies, not less does man by the blessing of the Father learn to master wider areas of the moral life. Some lessons are learned and forever learned in the school of experience, which is the school of God. Some of these lessons are terribly costly, but
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once learned they are not easily forgotten, and "through the measure of the years we sweep into the broader day."

In a very real sense God is the giver of religion. If we have learned that the sacred books of all the ages, those of the Hebrew and the Christian classics not less than others, were written not by heaven-controlled men but, as they themselves affirm, by "holy men of old who were moved, urged on, impelled, by the Spirit of God, ' ' we are the more free to discover in them the passionate search of the soul after God, and the unfailing answer to that search. If the laws and rites of an earlier age were not in very fact prescribed by divine enactment, but were developed out of the inheritance of the past, the customs of contemporary peoples and the exigencies of prophetic and priestly leadership, we are the more sensitive to the wisdom by which they were adapted to the adolescent needs of a race. And if the doctrines formulated in the name of Christianity seem often to miss by wide spaces the thought of Jesus and his first interpreters, we may perceive that they have not been without value at certain periods in the history of the church, and at base express some truth that has been worthful in the development of character. In all this the hand of God may be seen. If he has been less particular about ordinances and organizations than his people have sometimes supposed, it
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is that there are more important things in his program. If he has been less voluble than the prattling generations have tried to represent him, it is rather that he might utter himself where alone he can be understood, — in human life. The Word must become flesh before it can become intelligible.

God is the Friend, the Companion of the soul. Jesus delighted to call him Father. And in so doing he took all that the ages had said of him and raised it to the highest power. And our generation is learning afresh the fact that these terms denote personality, in spite of all the difficulties that seem to

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hedge that term about. Does it seem a limitation of Deity to call it personal? It may be that our definitions are too small. We do not yet know much even of human personality. We have to walk softly where former centuries hurried on with confidence. Much has to be left unsaid. But of one thing we may be sure : Jesus knew more of God than any other who has passed this way. And to him he was Father, personal and precious. In the deep joy of personal communion with the
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Father he passed his days. And his experience is classic for the race. More than personal God may be, and the centuries must give larger knowledge and new vocabularies for its expression. But less than personal he cannot be to any who are minded to give to Jesus the final word.

God is the beloved of the soul. The prophets so rejoiced in him, the saints have so found him, and the holy church throughout all the world bears witness to the fact, That timeless and blessed relation of sonship which Jesus first experienced has become the haunting dream of the noblest spirits of the ages. And not in vain has been the quest. Into that intimacy there is open way for any who are smitten by the great desire. The discovery of the secret is hidden only from those who will not see.

God is eternal, and in his life the meaning of eternity becomes clear. The soul pants for him as the hart for the waterbrooks. The eager spirit pursues hard after him, for he is the sum and the totality of life. Whatever good is done in all the world, and by any hand, is of his doing. Whatever knowledge is gained in any corner of the universe is of his bestowing. And whatever holiness in character is won, it is a gift from him. In him we are complete, and in the completion of our
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lives in power and purity he finds his own eternal joy. In such a universe, moving on to gracious ends in righteousness, and luminous to the eye of faith with the presence of the divine, there is no longer room for the doubting question, "What does God do?"

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