For my thoughts [are] not your thoughts, neither [are] your ways my ways, saith the LORD.
8, 9. Jehovah’s thoughts transcend those of man as much as the heaven is higher than the earth. The point of the contrast is not the moral quality of the Divine thoughts as opposed to those of the “wicked”; the thoughts and ways of Jehovah are His purposes of redemption, which are too vast and sublime to be measured by the narrow conceptions of despairing minds (Isa 40:27 f.). Comp. Jer 29:11 (“I know the thoughts that I entertain towards you, thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give you a future and a hope”), Mic 4:12. The verses, therefore, furnish a motive not merely for repentance but also for eager and expectant hope.
Fuente: The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges
For my thoughts are not your thoughts – Interpreters have differed in regard to the connection of this verse with the preceding. It is evident, I think, that it is properly connected with the subject of pardon; and the sense must be, that the plans and purposes of God in regard to forgiveness are as far above those of people as the heavens are higher than the earth, Isa 55:9. But in what respects his plan of pardon differs from those of people, the prophet does not intimate, and can be understood only by the views which are presented in other parts of the Bible. The connection here would seem to demand some such view as the following:
1. People find it difficult to pardon at all. They harbor malice; they seek revenge; they are slow to forgive an injury. Not so with God. He harbors no malice; he has no desire of revenge; he has no reluctance to forgive.
2. It may refer to the number of offences. People, if they forgive once, are slow to forgive a second time, and still more reluctant to forgive a third time, and if the offence is often repeated they refuse to forgive altogether. Not so with God. No matter how often we have violated his law, yet be can multiply forgiveness in proportion to our faults.
3. The number of the offenders. People may pardon one or a few who injure them, but if the number is greatly increased, their compassions are closed, and they feel that the world is arrayed against them. Not so with God. No matter how numerous the offenders – though they embrace the inhabitants of the whole world – yet he can extend forgiveness to them all.
4. In regard to the aggravation of offences. People forgive a slight injury. However, if it is aggravated, they are slow to pardon. But not so with God. No matter bow aggravated the offence, he is ready to forgive. It may be added:
5. That his thoughts in regard to the mode of pardon are far above ours. The plan of forgiveness through a Redeemer – the scheme of pardon so fully illustrated in Isa 53:1-12, and on which the reasoning of the prophet here is based – is as far above any of the modes of pardon among people, as the heavens are above the earth. The scheme which contemplated the incarnation of the Son of God; which proffered forgiveness only through his substituted sufferings, and in virtue of his bitter death, was one which man could not have thought of, and which surpasses all the schemes and plans of people. In this respect, Gods ways are not, our ways, and his thoughts are not our thoughts.
But at the same time that this passage, refers primarily to the subject of pardon, and should be interpreted as having a main reference to that, it is also true of the ways of God in general. His ways are not our ways, and his thoughts are not ours in regard to his plans in the creation and government of the world. He has plans for accomplishing his purposes which are different from ours, and he secures our own welfare by schemes that cross our own. He disappoints our hopes; foils our expectations; crosses our designs; removes our property, or our friends; and thwarts our purposes in life. He leads us in a path which we bad not intended: and secures our ultimate happiness in modes which are contrary to all our designs and desires. It follows from this:
1. That we should form our plans with submission to the higher purposes of God.
2. We should resign ourselves to him when he chooses to thwart our plans, and to take away our comforts.
Fuente: Albert Barnes’ Notes on the Bible
Isa 55:8-9
For My thoughts are not your thoughts
Gods thoughts
The thought of God! Who can fathom it?
Astronomers tell us of stars in the sky at such infinite distances that their light, shooting through space at the inconceivable rate of 185,000 miles a second, would require 3,500 years to reach this earth. And vet Gods thought placed them thus far away in space, arranged the laws that govern them, not unlikely has set whirling around them planets like our own, peopled with sentiment and responsible beings like ourselves. To such distance reach the thoughts of God with the same clearness and wisdom as on this little globe. Shall not these thoughts, piercing the sublime avenues of infinite space, find a way whereby we may be saved? (Monday Club Sermons.)
The thoughts of God
We can form some conception of them through the works of His hand, whether in nature, providence, or redemption. The psalmist describes them as permanent in their endurance; as surpassing the reckoning of human arithmetic; and as being a fathomless deep. It is told of Kepler that, one night, after hours spent in observing the motions of the heavenly bodies, he exclaimed, I have been thinking over again the earliest thoughts of God. But there are earlier thoughts than those impresssd on nature. The love that led to the choice of man in Christ, and will culminate in the glory, is older far. (F. B. Meyer, B. A.)
God a thinker
I think, therefore I am, was the formula in which the great mind of Descartes found peace. We may reverently adapt it, and say, God thinks, therefore God is; and the proof that He thinks is the great universe around us bearing, everywhere the marks of a designing hand. The quality of any mind is determined by its product. The rare quality of the mind of Shakespeare found expression in Hamlet and Macbeth, that of Milton in Paradise Lost, and that of Tennyson in the Idylls of the King. Stephenson demonstrated the wonderful mechanical power of his brain in the production of the steam engine, and Edison has shown what he thinks by inventing the telephone and phonograph. You stand and gaze with reverential awe at St. Pauls, with its lofty dome, its magnificent portico, its beautiful windows. What is it? A church. Yes, a church in the heart of the busiest city in the world; a constant witness to the hurrying, bargain-making crowd, that man does not live by bread alone. It is a fine building–a veritable poem in stone–begrimed by the smutty fingers of oldFather Time, but strangely weird and solemn, as I have seen it bathed in the moonlight, with the mighty city sleeping around it, silent and still, or at least as still as London ever is. It is one of the peep-holes through which London gets a view of Heaven. But it is something more. It is the visualized thought of a great man; mute witness to the fact that mind is the great thing in the world. Sir Christopher Wren thought cathedrals, they were on his brain, he saw them before a single stone was laid, and then he selected one and put it on paper and said to the builder, Now go to work. Put this thought of mine in stone, and let it stand there in the midst of the city; so that all men may see the kind of thing my brain is capable of producing. So this world, so full of wondrous forms and lovely colours, is but the outward expression of the thought of God. (S. Herren.)
Man, like God, a thinker
1. The power of thought is one point in which man is made in the image of God. Other animated creatures which are put in subjection to the thinking, intelligent creature man, have no fellowship with God in thought; into His world of pure spirit they cannot enter. When men do not think, and especially when they do not think of the highest and most important matters, they degrade themselves from the true position and occupation of immortal minds.
2. In the text we have two persons thinking; and as the result–mans thoughts and Gods thoughts. Gods thinkings are declared by Himself to be exceedingly above mans, and yet if ever man is to dwell with God, he must think as God thinks. How can two walk together except they be agreed? What, then, can I do to rise to Him? Think as much as I please, thinking only sets me on my feet, and so far does me service, but it still leaves me on the earth, and God is yonder far above me, and my thoughts can no more attain unto Him than an infant can touch the stars with his finger. Still it is a comfort to me if I am sincerely thoughtful after God, that He is thinking about me, for if my thoughts cannot bear me up to Him, His thoughts can bring Him down to me, and when He has established a connection between the heaven which is above me and the earth which is beneath Himself, then I, laying hold on His thoughts, and believing what He has thought out for his, shall be drawn up to His elevation, and I shall come to think His thoughts, and so to be in communion with the Most High. (C. H. Spurgeon.)
God forgiving sin
At first, men have very low ideas of sin. But when the Holy Spirit begins to deal with them, sin grows to be an intolerable burden, a fearsome thing. While the thought of sin becomes clear, the thought of pardon is not, at first, so clear. Sin is great, and for that reason the sinner thinks it cannot be pardoned, as if he measured the Lord by his sin. In our text God in condescension helps the sinner to believe in pardon by elevating his idea of God. Because God is infinitely superior to man, He can abundantly pardon.
I. YOUR OWN THOUGHTS JUDGE PARDON TO BE IMPOSSIBLE.
1. To some it seems impossible that there can be forgiveness for them, because of some special, secret, gross, and grievous sin. Most persons, when they remember their past lives, seen certain spot blacker than the rest.
2. To others the difficulty of pardon seems to lie not so much in some special offence, as in the number of their sins, and the long continuance of them.
3. Others have been grievously oppressed with the idea that they could not be pardoned because of the wilfulness of what they have done. Certainly, this is a very grievous evil. Wilfulness is the very damnableness of sin.
4. Sir, says one, I sinned with a great falseness and treachery of heart; for I was baptized and joined a Church.
5. I hear one say, There is about my, sin this peculiar heinousness, that,, I have injured myself and others by my sin.
6. Perhaps one may even say, But, sir, my sin was of this kind, that I dishonoured God: I denied the Deity of Christ.
II. GODS THOUGHTS OF OTHER THINGS ARE FAR ABOVE YOURS. It is quite certain that the best thoughts–the most logical thoughts, the most original thoughts, the most correct thoughts you have ever had–are not worthy to be compared with Gods thoughts. Look in nature. The things you see in nature were, at first, thoughts in Gods mind, and He embodied them. Did you ever think such thoughts as God has thought in creation? Gods thoughts in providence–how wonderfully they are above ours I You read history, and everything seems to be a tangle. Yet, before you have read through the chapter, you see in it all a plan and a method. It has ever been so in your own mind as to the future. Read the prophecies, and see what is yet to be.
III. HIS THOUGHTS ABOUT PARDON ARE ABOVE YOURS.
1. Are you not slow to forgive? He delighteth in mercy.
2. You come to an end of your forgiveness before long. But God goes on to seventy times seventy times–on, and on, and on, and never comes to the end of pardoning mercy so long as a soul cries to Him for forgiveness.
3. Some things you find it hard to forgive. God does far more in the way of pardon than we ask or even think.
4. I am afraid I must say of some of you that you forgive, but you do not forget. God promises to forget our iniquities. I will cast all their sins behind My back. I will cast their iniquities into the depths of the sea. They shall not be remembered against them any more for ever.
5. We forgive, and yet feel some returns of anger. I have blotted out, says He, thy transgressions. Once blotted out, they arc done with for ever.
6. I do not slander you when I say that you are not very eager to pardon, and proposes to make peace with him.
7. Do you think that any of us would suffer much for the sake of being able to forgive another? Should there be a very serious difficulty in the way, so that you cannot rightly forgive without some atonement being made, would you make the atonement yourself?
IV. GODS THOUGHTS ARE ABOVE YOURS IN ALL THINGS WHICH CONCERN HIS GRACE. See the first verse as to the freeness of His grace. Your thought is that you can get nothing without paying for: Gods thoughts are, Come ye to the waters, and he that hath no money; come ye, buy, and eat; yea, come, buy wine and milk without money and without price. But you think that if God were to save you He would perform it in a second-rate style. Not He! He will have no niggard salvations. If He supplies His people, it shall be most richly and freely. Listen to this. Hearken diligently unto Me, and eat ye that which is good, and let your soul delight itself in fatness. It is not amp of the water, or a ernst of the bread, or a drop of the milk; but when Christ invites poor sinners to come, He invites them to a high festival. You that are the guiltiest may come to Christ, and be among the happiest and the best of His saints. Nobody would ever imagine that a sinner could ever enter into covenant with God–that God should strike hands with guilty men, and, pledge Himself to grace. Listen to this: Incline your ear, and come unto Me, etc. (Isa 55:3). I remember a man, shut up in prison, under a long sentence, and he was so violent that he was put into a solitary cell. The chaplain had done all he could as to bringing him to repentance; but one day he read to him this verse, I will make an everlasting covenant with you. The man said, I never heard of such a thing. Can God make a covenant with such a wretch as I am? Sir, said he, it will break my heart; and it did break his heart and he became a new man in Christ Jesus under the power of that amazing thought, that God would enter into covenant with such a wretch as he was. In Isa 55:5 Christ is said to call a people so ignorant that they did not know Him. This is to be His glory, that He is to call them by His grace. It is not one of your thoughts, but one of the thoughts of God, that He will glorify Christ in the saving of great sinners. Ah, well! says one, I will go home, and cry to God for mercy. That is your thought. Listen to Gods thought. Seek ye the Lord while He may be found, call ye upon Him while He is near. Ah! still you think, How can I be pardoned? Listen to this, Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts, etc. Read the rest of the chapter, and say to yourself, over each verse, This was not my thought; this, was not my way. End all your doubts with the last verse, instead of the thorn, etc. (C. H. Spurgeon.)
The Greatness of God
Until we believe in the greatness of God, not only in action, but in thought, we shall misunderstand our Bibles, the world in which we live, and ourselves. We use such words as omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence, infinite, but how little we grasp their meaning! They are but the poor, etymological husks in which we try to thrust that which no words can express. There are some things that you cannot describe,, you can only feel. Language is too poor, too clumsy a medium to express Gods best, or biggest things, much less to describe Him. It is like the colours with which the artist tries to reproduce the glory of a sunset. It is not a reproduction; at best, it is but a far-off resemblance. You look up on a cloudless day and there is not one speck, not one bit of white cloud against the vast expanse of undimmed azure, and yet feel, but cannot describe the infinity of space. Let that feeling of infiniteness rest upon you, soak into your mind, for it is good for man, the creature of a day, the heir of eternity, to linger amongst great expanses, and to learn that his geography is but a petty science, and his astronomy, with its measurements of millions of miles, does but nibble at the edge of the great universe of God. Thus you will preserve a reverent spirit, keep alive the faculties of wonder and admiration, and it is to be hoped be saved from the positive assertion of little narrow dogmas which have been adopted by certain sections of the Church, and declared with as much assurance, and fought for with as much bitterness as though an angel from heaven had proclaimed them every morning since the creation. (S. Horton.)
Gods thoughts higher than mans
Theology ought to be the science of God and Divine things. Often it is systematized misrepresentations of Divine things. It is not the revelation of Gods greatness, but of mans littleness; it starts with theories, instead of facts. Our text is Gods appeal against human misrepresentation. There is always a danger of putting our own limitations of thoughts and speech upon the Almighty, and of making our thinking and doing the measure of His. Have we not all met with the man who sees nothing in the Church but bricks and timber, in its devotions only so many needful exercises to be got through as speedily as possible, and in the great redemption plain nothing but convenient fire escape from the miseries of hell, and in God only a High Commissioner of Police? It is Vastly important that, as far as it is possible, we should get right ideas of God, for our whole character and conduct will he coloured by our thoughts of Him. And though it must ever be that our thoughts are as much beneath His thoughts as the earth is beneath the heavens, yet if He reveal Himself to us, as He is always willing to do to the humble soul, we shall at least be saved from rhea mental caricatures of Him that have darkened many a life, and been the fruitful soil in which unbelief has found its foothold.
1. The setting of the text takes us at once to the central doctrine of the Christian faith. The verse before it proclaims the pardon of God for the sinner, who, repenting of his sins, returns to the Lord. How can a sinless God forgive a sinful man, and yet maintain the majesty of His own law? And there rises before our eyes at once the form of a cross, and on it One, who, struggling in the death agony, exclaims, It is finished. All the wonder and mystery of the ages gathers round that cross. If you can explain that you can explain all. Was it possible for sin to take upon itself a deeper shade of guilt than the sin of the people of Judah in Isaiahs time? Crimson-hued and scarlet-dyed, what could even God do with such sinners as these? Sweep them away with the strength of His right arm. Yea, and all heaven and all earth would approve the justice of the sentence. But He can do something else. He can forgive them. At first we revolt at the very idea. Forgiveness for them! And then once more we hear the voice which says, My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways My ways. I will never forgive him is the language of the man who has been wronged. But God says, I will give My best and dearest if I may but win the wrong-doer to love that which is good. I will save him by showing him what love can do. Do you know it is the hardest thing in the world to persuade men to believe that God loves them with a love like that? There is a good deal of truth in the sarcasm of a scoffing French writer that man has made God in his own image.
2. Let us apply our text to the many problems that gather round our life, to those many difficulties behind which as yet we can see no meaning. Life for many is a prolonged agony. It is a burden, a pain, a puzzle to which we have not yet the key. Behind the pain, and the tears, and the smart, God is, and His plan for us is the best possible plan. He is but a poor shallow fool who says, I will accept nothing that I cannot understand. As a matter of fact he is always accepting what he does not understand. Does he understand sleep? Does he understand Why a seed grows? why a child thinks? why men die? And yet there are many men who reject the idea of a personal God because they cannot understand His works and ways. They declare life to be without purpose, and an aimless consciousness between two eternities. To all such our text is a rebuke. Faith is a bird of stronger wing than reason. Two texts are sufficient for me. Upon them I stake all for time and for eternity. God is very great. God is love. Socrates has put our belief once and for all into a convenient formula, What God is I know not; what He is not I know. God is not, cannot be cruel. God is not, cannot be pitiless. God is not, cannot be making useless experiments at our expense. Without that faith, how could we face the hopeless poverty, the misery of our slums? Oh! wearied heart, rest in the Lord, and wait patiently for Him. When faith falters, when the sun goes out in darkness, when the storm beats loud and fierce, when over a coffin-lid hope drops its head and weeps, wait for God. Give Him time to discover Himself. It is at the midnight hour that Christ walks on the tempest-lashed sea. Hush all your questionings and wait; simply wait. Is that easy? No; it is the hardest thing of all to do; but wait, only wait. What we cannot know–what it would not be wise for us to know now–we shall know hereafter. (C. H.Spurgeon.)
Gods thoughts and ways
I. SPECIFY SOME INSTANCES IN WHICH THIS DECLARATION IS STRIKINGLY ILLUSTRATED.
1. In His production of the most stupendous results from insignificant causes. Nature abounds with illustrations. Providence is still more abundant. Consequences the most stupendous, involving the destinies of individuals, of families, of empires, have arisen out of causes which we deem insignificant. But the most abundant proofs are derived from the history of the Gospel. Our Lord has suggested this view of the subject in His own illustrations–The kingdom of heaven is like to a grain of mustard-seed, and so on. And this is an illustration of the rise and progress of Messiahs Gospel. Who, and what was the Founder of the Gospel–as to His human appearance?
2. In the accomplishment of the most glorious designs by the weakest and most insignificant instruments. Who were the first propagators of the
Gospel? In what school were they educated? With what armour did they go forth to the war?
3. In the sovereign exercises of His grace, in connection with its freedom and fulness.
II. ASSIGN SOME REASONS FOR THIS.
1. His knowledge is more extensive than our information.
2. His judgment is more accurate than our decisions.
3. His purposes and plans are uninfluenced by our prejudices and passions.
4. It is His determination to humble pride, and His fixed resolution that no creature should glory in His presence.
III. LEARN LESSONS OF HUMILITY, GRATITUDE, AND CONFIDENCE. (T. Raffles, D. D.)
Gods thoughts
The word thought is used here objectively. It expresses a result and not a process.
I. ILLUSTRATION. Here we need only contrast the human with the Divine style of thinking. Observe some particulars:–
1. Creation. The visible creation that surrounds us on every side and spreads away into immensity beyond us, is only an embodied thought of the infinite, uncreated Intelligence. Tell me if it be at all like one of mans thoughts. Equip man with omnipotence, and set him to create a universe–and would it resemble the universe as it is? By no means!
(1) Mans universe would be absolutely consolidated. Into one immense continent would all these world-islands be cast, and all tribes and types of life inhabit it as a common dwelling! His agonizing regret this day is that he cannot fling the line of a mighty telegraph from star to star, and thus, even in face of the immutable ordinances of heaven, gather these isolated islands of life into one vast virtual consolidation!
(2) A universe projected by man would be motionless and steadfast. We build our homes, not on the waters, that they may be locomotive, but on the shore, that they may be fixed. But Gods universe is in everlasting motion. Or, descending from the survey of a universe of worlds to consider the economy of a single world, even with greater force shall we feel the same truth. Such a world as this no wise man would have created. He would have filled up the ocean with plough-ground, and sloped the mountains gently for vineyards, and covered with rich verdure the sands of the wilderness. And the waters would have brought forth after their kind only beautiful things, and every creature moving in the forests would have been musical and fair; and the sky would have been without cloud on its rich blue, and the year without winter or storm in its long summer of loveliness.
2. Providence. And whether we regard the entire economy of providence as a stupendous whole, or each successive development in its separation, the same truth will be manifest. Man certainly would have ordered the whole thing differently. Instead of those mysterious periods of slowly ascending, he would have rounded earth into beauty at first as a home for immortals, and breathed Divine life into man made in Gods image. Place at the head of human affairs an omnipotent philanthropist, and how soon would every dark thing be swept from a groaning creation. How the captive would leap from his chain, and the conqueror lay off his mail, and the cries of violence cease, and the rod of the oppressor be broken! How these dark places of cruelty would be irradiated with heavenly light, and Christianity, borne as on angel-wings, circle the round world!
II. APPLICATION.
1. Our first remark is addressed to this very class who reject the Bible because to their finitude it seems either unwise or incomprehensible. The poor erring creature of an hour, who cannot build a hovel that will not leak, nor weave a perfect garment to cover him, he–wonderful man that he is–would lift his thoughts into brotherhood with Gods thoughts, and adjust the complicate sublimities of revelation by the square and the line of his insignificant faculties! Why, the sceptic should begin further back and earlier with his scepticism, as his arguments lie as strongly against creation and providence.
2. Within our own time a new philosophy hath invaded the Church of Christ, with its watchwords spiritual insight, and the moral reason, and intuitional capacity, setting itself to overthrow the indispensable condition of all true piety–the entire, unquestioning, adoring submission alike of life, and conscience, and intellect unto God. And while the Church receives not this philosophy formally–for this were openly to deny the faith–yet, under its insidious and malign influence, there has come to pass a setting up within Zion of our own intellectual and moral judgments as critic and arbiter of the great doctrines of revelation. Doctrines that are profound or mysterious, if not openly rejected, are at least modified to square with our philosophy. And the positive declarations of God are lowered to the comprehension of our natural reason. We are as yet learners in Gods school-room, not advisers in His council-chamber! We shall understand things better by and by, when eternity flings its full light on the page of our scholarship! But until then humility is the apt temper of a learner. And faith, not comprehension, the great law of the scholarship! Till then ours must be the submission of an infantile mind to an infinite Intelligence–the trust of a short-sighted child in an all-seeing Father.
3. But the thought under consideration applies as well to the phenomena of Christianity as to its facts. Take, for example, its gradual increase and development. The characteristic of the age is impatience of anything but a demonstrative and headlong progress. Tell me where, either in creation or providence, God thus hurries to conclusions? So far from discouragements in this slow progress of Christianity, we have therein only fuller proof of its Divine orion, nobler prophecy of its ultimate consummation.
4. There is a still more consoling application of this truth to things unseen and eternal–immortality. The grand characteristic and charm of the eternal world is its utter unlikeness to the temporal and earthly. (C. Wadsworth.)
Gods ways and mans ways
There is nothing, perhaps, in which Gods thoughts and ways are more seen to be higher than mans than in the matter of salvation; and it is in renouncing his own ways, and yielding to Gods, that the main difficulty of salvation on mans part lies. Because there is nothing more simple than the plan of salvation–substitution.
I. Gods thoughts are not as our thoughts IN THE MATTER OF PARDON. This is proclaimed freely, without any condition on mans part in the way of satisfaction to Gods holy and broken law. Salvation is represented in Scripture as something which God Himself has achieved. God has delivered man from going down into the pit; He has found a ransom; and therefore, in every point of view, this salvation is perfect and complete. It is, further, proclaimed to sinners as a gift which they cannot earn or deserve, but which they are entreated to accent as a gift on account of what Christ has done (Rom 15:23). Men are called on to believe it instantly, to receive it and enjoy it at once, as the gift of Gods love in Christ Jesus. Now, to this the world objects, because such a plan of salvation knocks down mans pride, and leaves him in the position of a rebellious sinner dependent wholly on Gods grace and mercy. To escape, therefore, from such an ignominious admission, some go on to argue that by this view Gods law is dishonoured, sin is treated as if of no consequence, and the pardoned sinner is left without any obligation to obey God. But is this true?
II. Gods thoughts are not our thoughts, neither are our ways His ways, IN. THE. WAY IN WHICH PEACE AND JOY FOLLOW ON BELIEVING THE GOSPEL. This is proclaimed in Scripture as instant (Rom 5:1). But the world objects to this, and calls it presumption; and if they hear of a notorious sinner being converted, and entering into peace, they immediately set him down as a hypocrite. The question is not whether they are hypocrites, but whether a man who believes the Gospel, and is full of joy and peace in consequence, is a hypocrite. Whatever the world says on the subject, Scripture does not so represent him. We must take care and not conclude that where there is no peace there is no faith. This would be as wrong as to conclude that where there is not perfect health there is no life.
III. There is still another point in which Gods thoughts are not our thoughts, neither are our ways His ways, namely, HIS LONGSUFFERING. In preaching, I have no limit to make in the Gospel. If you say, This surely is abusing the goodness of God, I reply, Gods thoughts are not our thoughts, neither are our ways His ways. (J. W. Reeve, M. A.)
Gods thoughts
The very act of thinking implies imperfection. But it is a way of picturing the Divine nature by a comparison with man. Man thinks, reasons, and so arrives at certain results. These he calls thoughts or conclusions. It is not so with God. He has no need to arrive at conclusions by any mental process. He knows everything. It is difficult to find any English word wherewith to express the idea intended. The word feelings might partly do so–method of action as the result of feelings–dealings. It is really the whole of the Divine nature. My nature is not as your nature, nor My ways of action as your ways of action. The grand idea is a consciousness of the vast difference which exists between ourselves and God, and to certain practical inferences to be devolved therefrom. These are–
I. THAT WE ARE NOT TO JUDGE OF GOD BY OUR OWN FEELINGS. How can we for one moment put ourselves in the place of the great and mighty King of kings
1. Consider our ignorance compared with His perfect knowledge–our weakness corn pared with His almighty power–our short life compared with His eternity of existence, All these things point out the folly of setting ourselves to judge of the Divine acts or the Divine method of providence, by the methods which we would pursue. And yet people say, or think if they do not say, in so many words, that they could carry on the world far more wisely than God.
2. Consider our sin in comparison with Gods holiness. Sin prevents all feeling, all right, all truth. It has changed all mens views with respect to propriety or justice. And yet there are men who would dispute the justice of the Almightys dealings with men.
II. THAT WE ARE NOT TO JUDGE OF OUR OWN POSITION BY OUR OWN THOUGHTS. The ways of every man are right in his own eyes. We think we are acting for the best when we are acting for the worst. We think we arc serving God when we are bribing the devil. We think we are setting an example of all virtue to our neighbours, when all the while we are nought but hypocrites. We are not to judge of our position of holiness by our own thoughts. What a criteria of judgment are human thoughts! They go astray from the beginning, they are altogether depraved. How can we estimate our own advancement by them? Woe be to those who do, for they will only court destruction. Our thoughts are not Gods thoughts. Some are nearer the kingdom of heaven than they suppose, while others are further off.
III. THAT WE ARE NOT TO JUDGE OF ANY OF THE MYSTERIES OF THE FUTURE BY OUR OWN THOUGHTS. The world has a way of either perverting revelation, or inventing new theories from its own imagination. (Homilist.)
Disparity of thoughts, Divine and human
I. GOD AND MAN DIFFER IN THEIR THOUGHTS REGARDING LIFE–the meaning of our present existence, as we live in this world day by day. Mans general conception is that he has been sent into this world endowed with certain powers of body and mind that he may get on, and rise commercially, socially, and in those things which are hemmed in by things seen and temporal. As men are thus employed God looks down upon them with the tender eye of a mother and the pitying heart of a father, and says to His erring children, Why do ye spend your time and destroy your immortal powers in such a vain pursuit? You have mistaken the meaning of your present life, and the reason I sent you into the world. My thoughts concerning it are not your thoughts, and My ways are not your ways. Your life was given that you might grow in wisdom, experience, and Divine likeness in character, and the earth is a school in which you are to be trained, educated for highest worship and noblest service.
II. GOD AND MAN DIFFER IN THEIR THOUGHTS REGARDING DIFFICULTIES AND SORROWS. The human and natural way of looking at these things is to view them as unmitigated evils, and that either God knows and cares nothing about those who endure them, or that they are manifestations of His ill-will and judicial anger. These are not the thoughts of God. As seen in the light of heaven they are either the result of the violation of the law of love, of selfishness and sin, or are educative agencies to make the soul strong, tender, and true.
III. GOD AND MAN DIFFER IN THEIR THOUGHTS REGARDING THE TREATMENT OF ENEMIES. Hatred has been met by hatred; scorn has been answered by scorn; and for evil rendered evil has been repaid in full measure, pressed down and running over. Far otherwise has it been with God. Regarding treatment of enemies, God says, My thoughts, are not your thoughts, and My ways are not your ways. Ye would render evil for evil, hate for hate, blow for blow. I love Mine enemies, I seek to bless the greatest sinner, I cause My sun to shine on the unjust, and unthankful, and am ready to take all prodigals into My forgiving embrace. This has been Gods action from the first man till now.
IV. GOD AND MAN DIFFER IN THEIR THOUGHTS REGARDING DEATH. Mens thoughts on the matter are full of sadness, and they beget a melancholy most difficult to bear. But God understands life and He understands death, and if we are filled with His thoughts and walk in His ways, the supposed enemy that seems to be a fiend and the destroyer of our existence shall appear in the glorious position of being the condition of a higher, purer, fuller life, that shall never cease to be, and like the echoes of the soul shall grow for ever and for ever. (W. Adamson, D. D.)
The mystery and the glory of redemption
The whole Bible is but an expansion of one utterance of the Eternal, I am Jehovah. Hence the revelation must be incomplete, for a God who could fully reveal Himself to His creatures would be no God; and it must also be astonishing and amazing, for a professed record of any part of Gods thoughts and ways that did not land in mystery and tend to wonder, would be self-condemned, and proved to be neither true nor Divine.
I. Gods ways are not our ways, nor His thoughts our thoughts, in regard to THE NEED OF REDEMPTION. The lessons of Scripture, while leaving the entrance of evil in its awful mystery, assist our faith by showing that our misgivings in regard to God, which thence arise, are groundless, and also that, however strange, yet as a matter of fact, evil can be overruled for good.
II. Gods ways are not our ways, nor His thoughts our thoughts, in regard to THE PURPOSE OF REDEMPTION. Man, as we learn from Scripture–the only source whence we can expect to know it–is not the only being who has fallen; but man is the only being who is redeemed. There arc those who profess not to believe in Scripture, but who arraign this supposed procedure as unfair and unequal; and there are those also who accept Scripture, and yet reject its apparently clear testimony as to the exclusion of fallen angels from mercy. Both classes of objectors go upon the same principle that God cannot justly punish with a final sentence of rejection those who have sinned against Him, no matter how aggravated their offences may be; but that in some way having given them being, He is bound to make that being ultimately good and happy. But this runs counter to the whole Bible doctrine of grace; for on this footing, redemption is a clear debt; and whether it be fallen angel or fallen man God is not entitled to withhold it. Men may stand in their views either upon justice or upon grace; but they are not entitled to stand upon both.
III. Gods ways are not our ways, nor His thoughts our thoughts,, in regard to THE PLAN OF REDEMPTION. How utterly unlike to any means of mans devising are those which God has chosen for the recovery of His lost creatures to His favour and image! All the opposition to evangelical religion with which we are surrounded, and which incessantly repeats, Give us a Christianity that is rational! Give us a Christianity that we can believe! Give us a Christianity that meets, as everything else is doing, the advancement of the age!–what does it amount to but this, Give us a Christianity without God! Give us a Christianity without that element of grandeur, of mystery, of overwhelming superiority to mans thoughts and ways, which compels awe and humbles pride t We accept the demand, come from what quarter it may, as an, involuntary homage to the superhuman glory of the faith we stand by.
IV. Gods ways are not our ways, nor His thoughts our thoughts, in regard to THE PROGRESS OF REDEMPTION. Redemption has a history; and this of all others the most difficult to scan, not only as it lies in the Bible, but in uninspired records. It has been said, Interpret the Bible as any other book; but though there is a certain truth in this, if we take it roundly it ultimately means, Interpret God as you interpret man. You cannot even interpret Church history as you interpret any other history. It is in a sense which belongs to no other history, the story of a battle not yet fought out, of a campaign not yet ended; and there are combatants at work beyond the range of human observation, and a supreme celestial leader, whose point of survey none can share. I shall illustrate this union of mystery and greatness in regard to three features in the progress of redemption.
1. The rate of its progress.
2. The instruments of its progress.
3. The hindrances to its progress.
Man would have thought that hindrances would have speedily been removed, or that if they were suffered to remain or to return, they would have proved un-mingled evils to the Church. But God, on the other hand, we can now so far see, by giving the victory slowly, trains the faith and courage of successive generations, and by permitting old enemies to return, or new ones to spring up, shows the un-exhausted and inexhaustible energy of His Gospel, to face and put down every hostile power.
V. It is only necessary to add a few words in regard to THE LIMITS OF REDEMPTION. Here also Gods ways are not as our ways, nor His thoughts as our thoughts. And hence the real and painful difficulty, which has always been felt in regard to the Gospel, and perhaps never more openly expressed than in our own day. Why should not all men, as God wishes, be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth? Why should redemption, in the case of the human family, have any limits at all? Can we aspire to take in all Gods view of what a tremendous evil, like sin, and especially the rejection of the Son of God, may demand? (J. Cairns, D. D.)
Sovereign thoughts
I. THE THOUGHTS OF GOD ARE ETERNAL AND IMMUTABLE; THE THOUGHTS OF MEN ARE TEMPORAL AND CHANGEABLE. Reflections on things older and less, changeable than ourselves arc the best guides to the unknown height-s of the Fathers wisdom. They lead us some distance, but only to show us the way. These mountains were long seated on their rocky seats ore the plan of the pyramids of Egypt was conceived in the heart of man. These rivers had flown majestically in their channels for thousands of years before man made his aqueducts to entice them from their course. The revolving sun poured its ceaseless floods of light on the universe myriads of ages before the scientist made the first telescope. Astronomy tells us that the worlds which occupy distant locations in space have swept silently through their trackless regions for periods of indefinite duration. Geology unfolds the rocky leaves of the earths crust, and deciphers hieroglyphics which roll us backward beyond animal and vegetable life to primeval rocks whose age no historian can compute. Thus we are furnished with materials to write a grand history of by-gone generations, stretching into the past beyond our comprehension. This history is the A B C of the eternal. The fact that the thoughts of God are eternal, fixes His immutable counsel and purpose. The redemption of fallen man is a thought without beginning, and is not subject to any variation. This is the rock on which we build our Christian faith. Through the varying scenes of life there runs the one purpose of God in Christ Jesus to save our souls and reconstruct human society.
II. THE THOUGHTS OF GOD ARE PRIMARY CAUSES, WHILE OURS ARE MERE IMPRESSIONS.
1. The heavens and the earth are manifestations, not only of power and wisdom, but of mind.
2. No less evident is it that the revelation of Himself as the Saviour of man through human consciousness is the product of His thoughts.
(1) Gods thoughts in the Gospel are greater than mans thoughts. So great are some of them that they are above human comprehension (Rom 11:33).
(2) Gods thoughts are better than mans thoughts. The whole of the chapter is a declaration of sovereign mercy. The offender is called to repentance, and offered a free pardon. Human wisdom would ask, How can this be? How shall moral government stand without punitive justice. Can God be just if He justify the repentant sinner? There is but one answer: As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways, and My thoughts than your thoughts. Mercy is inexplicable except in its operations.
III. GODS METHODS ARE INSCRUTABLE, LIKE UNTO HIS THOUGHTS; BUT MENS WAYS ARE CROOKED AND PERVERSE. The Scriptural meaning of the word way is the character with which actions are stamped. Actions reveal the thoughts and motives of the actor. They are a reflex of himself. The ways of God are His thoughts in operation. Thy way is in the sea, and Thy path in the great waters, and Thy footsteps are not known. These words echo those of an older book, or, at least, they are the echo of the wisdom of the ancients–By His Spirit He hath garnished the heavens; His hand hath formed the crooked serpent. Lo, these are parts of His ways: but how little a portion is heard of Him? but the thunder of His power who can understand? Great and marvellous arc Thy works, Lord God Almighty; just and true are Thy ways, Thou King of saints. Fix your minds on the way of His goodness and mercy unto us. Think of the wonderful display of wisdom in the redemption of mankind. Jesus has appeared to remove our offences by the sacrifice of Himself. This great manifestation of eternal thought is the banquet at which the intelligences of heaven will sit, world without end.
IV. THE THOUGHTS AND WAYS OF GOD ARE BEFORE US FOR CORRECTION AND IMITATION.
V. THE THOUGHTS OF GOD ARE WITH US AS OUR INHERITANCE. He who has passed through the process of examining the casket to the possession of its contents, can say, How precious also are Thy thoughts, O God I how great is the sum of them. (T. Davies, M. A.)
The incomprehensibility of the mercy of God
Lo, these are parts of His ways, but how little a portion is heard of Him! This is one of the most sententious sayings of Job, and it expresseth, in a very emphatic manner, the works of God what this holy man said of the wonders of nature, we, with much more reason, say of the wonders of grace. Collect all that pagan philosophers have taught of the goodness of the Supreme Being. To the opinions of philosophers join the declarations of the prophets. Add the discoveries of the evangelists and apostles. To the whole join your own experience; your ideas to their ideas, your meditations to their meditations, and then believe that ye are only floating on the surface of the goodness of God, that His love hath dimensions, a breadth, and length, and depth, and height, which the human mind can never attain: and, upon the brink of this ocean, say, Lo, these are only parts of His ways, and how little a portion is heard of Him l Three things are necessary to explain the text.
I. THE MEANING MUST BE RESTRAINED. It is certain, that, in many respects, Gods ways are our ways, and His thoughts our thoughts. I mean, that there are many cases in which we may assure ourselves that God thinks so and so, and will observe such or such a conduct. To contrast the supreme grandeur of the Creator with the insignificance of the creature; to persuade mankind that the great Supreme is too lofty to concern Himself with us, that our conduct is entirely indifferent to Him; that it signifies nothing to Him whether we be just or unjust, humane or cruel, happy or miserable: to say in these senses, that Gods ways are not our ways, that His thoughts are not our thoughts, these are the arms that infidelity hath sometimes employed with success, and against the attacks of which we would guard you. For these reasons, the meaning of the text must be restrained, or it will totally subvert religion and morality. The exercise of my reasoning powers produceth in me some incontestable notions of God, and, from these notions immediately follow some sure consequences, which become the immovable basis of my faith in His Word, of my submission to His will, and of my confidence in His promises. These notions, and these consequences compose the body of natural religion. Let it be granted that God is, in many respects, quite incomprehensible, that we can obtain only a small degree of knowledge of this infinite Object, yet it will not follow that the notions which reason gives us of Him are less just, or, that the consequences, which immediately follow these notions, are less sure. If reason affords us some adequate notions of God, if some necessary consequences follow these notions, for a much stronger reason we may derive some adequate notions of God, and some sure consequences, from revelation.
II. THE OBJECT MUST BE DETERMINED. The prophets expressions would have been true, had they been applied to all the attributes of God; however, they are applied here only to one of them, that is, to His goodness. Wherein do the thoughts of God differ from ours Z In God there are treasures of mercy, the depth of which no finite mind ten fathom. In Him goodness is as inconceivable as all His other attributes. In God, a sinner, who seems to have carried his sin to its utmost extravagance, and to have exhausted all the treasures of Divine grace, shall still find, if he return unto the Lord, and cast himself at the foot of Him who abundantly pardoneth, a goodness, a compassion, a love that he could not have imagined to find.
III. THE PROOFS MUST BE PRODUCED.
(1) The means by which God conciliated His justice with HIS love.
(2) His patience with those who abuse this means.
(3) His intimate union with those who fall in with the design of His patience.
Let us address the text to the gloomy mind of a melancholy person, who, having failed in the courage necessary to resist temptations, fails again in that which is necessary to bear the thought of having fallen into them. What madness possesseth thy melancholy mind? The Holy Spirit assures thee that though thy sins be as scarlet He will make them white as snow; that though they be red like crimson He will make them as wool; and dost thou think that thy sins are too aggravated to be pardoned in this manner? The Holy Spirit gives thee a long list of the most execrable names in nature; a list of idolaters, murderers, extortioners, adulterers, persecutors, highway robbers, and blasphemers, who obtained mercy when they sought it: and art thou obstinately bent on excluding thyself from the number of those sinners to whom mercy is promised; and because thou dost not believe it attainable, dost thou obstinately refuse to ask for it? The Holy Spirit hath lifted up a Cross, and on that Cross a Redeemer, who is able to save them to the uttermost that come unto God by Him; and who Himself saith to all sinners, Come unto Me, all ye that labour, and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. And dost thou flee from this Cross, and rather choose to sink under the weight of thy sins than to disburden them on a Redeemer who is willing to bear them? But, passing all these, let us return to the text. My thoughts are not your thoughts, etc. This is sufficient to refute the whole system of a despairing mind. (J. Saurin.)
Gods ways and mans
These words are grand poetry and noble theology, but they are meant practically and in fiery earnestness. The for at the beginning of each clause points us back to the previous statement, and both of the verses of our text are in different ways its foundation. So we have here two things to consider in reference to the relation between the Divine purposes and acts and mans purposes and acts.
I. THE ANTAGONISM, AND THE INDICTMENT AND EXHORTATION THAT ARE BASED UPON THAT.
1. Notice the remarkable order and alternation of pronouns in the first verse. My thoughts are not your thoughts, saith the Lord. The things that God thinks and purposes are not the things that man thinks and purposes, and therefore, because the thoughts are different, the outcomes of them in deeds are divergent. Gods ways are His acts, the manner and course of His working considered as a path on which He moves, and on which, in some sense, we can also journey. Our ways–our manner of life–are not parallel with His, as they should be. But that opposition is expressed with a remarkable variation. Observe the change of pronouns in the two clauses. First, My thoughts are not your thoughts–you have not taken My truth into your minds, nor My purposes into your wills; you do not think Gods thoughts. Therefore–your ways (instead of my, as we should have expected, to keep the regularity of the parallelism) are not My ways–I repudiate and abjure your conduct and condemn it utterly. Now, of course, in this charge of mans unlikeness to God there is no contradiction of, nor reference to, mans natural constitution, in which there are, at one and the same time, the likeness of the child with the parent and the unlikeness between the creature and the Creator. If our thoughts were not like Gods thoughts we should know nothing about Him. If our thoughts were not like Gods thoughts we should have no standard for life or thinking. Righteousness and beauty and truth and goodness are the same things in heaven and earth, and alike in God and man. We are made after His image, poor creatures though we be. But that very necessary and natural likeness between God and man makes more solemnly sinful the voluntary unlikeness which we have brought upon ourselves. Mark how wonderfully, in the simple language of my text, deep truths about this sin of ours is conveyed. Notice its growth and order. You begin with a heart and mind that does not take in Gods thoughts, truths, purposes, desires, and the alienated will and the darkened understanding and the conscience which has closed itself against His imperative voice all issue afterwards in conduct which He cannot accept as in any way corresponding with His. First, the thought unreceptive of Gods thought, and then the ways contrary to Gods ways.
2. Notice the profound truth here in regard to the essential and deepest evil of all our evil. Your thoughts; your ways. Self-dependence and self-confidence are the master-devils of humanity. And the root of all sin lies in these two strong, simple words, Your thoughts not Mine; your ways not Mine.
3. Notice, too, how there are suggested the misery and retribution of this unlikeness. If you will not make My thoughts your thoughts, I shall not take your ways as My ways; I will leave you to them. You will be filled with the fruit of your own devices. The question rises in many a heart, How am I to forsake these paths on which my feet have so long walked? And if I do, what about all the years behind me, full of wild wonderings and thoughts, in all of which God was not? The second verse of our text meets that despairing question.
II. THE ANALOGY BUT SUPERIORITY, AND THE EXHORTATION AND HOPE THAT ARE BUILT UPON THAT. This clause begins with Gods ways, from which alone men can reach the knowledge of His thoughts. The first follows the order of Gods knowledge of man; the second, that of mans knowledge of God.
1. Gods way of dealing with sin is lifted up above all human example. There is such a thing as pardoning mercy amongst men. It is a faint analogy of, as it is an offshoot from the Divine pardon, but all the forgivingness of the most placable and long-suffering and gladly pardoning of men is but as earth to heaven compared with the greatness of His.
2. Again, Gods way of dealing with sin surpasses all our thought. All religion has been pressed with this problem, how to harmonize the perfect rectitude of the Divine nature and the solemn claims of law with forgiveness. We have Jesus Christ. The mystery of forgiveness is solved, in so far as it is capable of solution, in Him and in Him alone.
3. We are taught here that Gods way of dealing with sin is the very highest point of His self-revelation. If we want to see up into the highest heavens of Gods character, we must go down into the depths of the consciousness of our own sin, and learn first how unlike our ways and thoughts are to God, ere we can understand how high above us, and yet beneficently arching over us, are His ways and thoughts to us. (A. Maclaren, D. D.)
Gods thoughts and ways far above ours
I. THERE IS REBUKE ADMINISTERED. The Lord says, Forsake your way, for it is not My way; leave your thoughts, for they are not My thoughts. The rebuke is enveloped in love, and made into a sugar-coated pill; the sweet promise of abundant pardon conceals the reproof. Let us take the rebuke, and notice–
1. The fault of mans thoughts. My thoughts are not your thoughts.
(1) As between each other, Gods thoughts are not mans, though they ought to be. Gods thoughts are love, pity, tenderness; ours are forgetfulness, ingratitude, and hard-heartedness.
(2) Your thoughts as to your conduct are not Gods thoughts. He considers that the creatures He has made should obey Him, but you judge that it matters not what a man does towards his Maker so long as he is just towards his fellow-men.
(3) Gods thoughts, again, as to the life which a man needs in order to salvation are very different from mans thoughts. In this chapter He says, Hear, and your soul shall live. He reckons, then, that man is dead till he has heard the word of God in his soul. Man reckons that he is alive enough.
(4) Gods thoughts are not our thoughts, again, in reference to the truth. Man thinks himself so wise and good that he does not like Gods thoughts concerning himself, his fall, his,guilt, and his danger.
(5) In the matter of salvation Gods thoughts are not mans thoughts, for God thinketh that man has so sinned that he must be condemned except a substitute be found. Man thinks not so. God sets before him pardon freely presented through the precious blood: man thinks to buy it by his devotions, or to win it by his merits.
2. The text advances to say that mans ways are not like Gods. Our ways are the outward actions which spring out of our thoughts. Gods ways are ways of holiness and purity. God hath never done anything unjust to His creatures or unrighteous to Himself. But our ways are not so; they are full of error, marred with evil, polluted with impurity. By nature we love that which we ought to hate. Two cannot walk together in heaven except they be of one mind; so that our ways and Gods ways must be made to be alike in character. Now, it is not possible for us to conceive of Gods making His thoughts to be like our thoughts. What then? We must rise to Him.
3. I ask you to consider the difficulty of this. As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways. How are we to be lifted up from earth to heaven? The word that answers the question is that matchless syllable, grace. God in Christ Jesus, by His almighty grace, must raise us up together with Christ.
II. WE HAVE REPENTANCE ENCOURAGED. Let him return unto the Lord, and He will have mercy upon him; and to our God, for He will abundantly pardon. For My thoughts are not your thoughts. It is clear that there is a connecting link between the abundance of pardon and the lofty character of God, and that men are encouraged to forsake their ways and thoughts by the hope of pardon derived from the greatness of the Divine thoughts and ways.
1. Do not stand back because you cannot understand God. It is not needful that you should comprehend His ways and thoughts.
2. Neither start back because you cannot find a parallel to the grace which God declares that He will display towards you.
3. According to our text, whatever your ways towards God shall be in the future, He will exceed them. And as to your thoughts–can you think of how He will receive you?
III. EXPECTATION EXCITED. This time the link is forward instead of backward. For as the rain cometh down, and the snow from heaven, and returneth not thither.! You are to expect that the Lords word will be unfailing to you.
2. Next that you are returning to a God whose ways are so much above your ways, and His thoughts so much above your thoughts, that your heart shall be filled with joy–ye shall go out with joy, and be led forth with peace. God will not merely break off your chains and say in cold accents, You are free; but He will release you amid the music of the spheres.
3. Next to this, all your surroundings shall minister to your gladness. The mountains and the hills shall break forth before you into singing etc. The mountain which you feared shall break forth into song, and the forest at which you trembled shall become an orchestra in which every tree shall clap its hands for joy.
4. And then, there shall happen to you wonderful transformations. Evil habits shall be withered and holy principles nourished.
5. This mercy is to endure for ever. (C. H. Spurgeon.)
Mans thoughts and Gods thoughts
I. Compare your thoughts of THE POSSIBILITY OF PARDON with Gods thoughts about it. You naturally form your ideas of Gods ways from what you conceive would be yours if you were in His position.
1. I take you on that ground, and we will suppose that some wicked person has very grossly injured you and that the question of your forgiving him is now mooted. We will suppose you to be of a generous, frank, forgiving disposition, and in a calm and judicious state of mind. You are ready to act most leniently, but still the case in hand is no trifle and requires consideration. After well pondering the matter, you feel bound to say, I could forgive this person, but his offence is of a peculiarly grievous kind. With the most sincere, desire to pass over it, I feel that I must not, but must let the law take its course. There have been many occasions when persons aggrieved have thus spoken, and when no reasonable person could have blamed them. Such, O awakened sinner, is your case as before the Lord, and if He should think of you as one man would think of another, you must own Him to be just. You have offended God in the very tenderest point; you have denied His right to you, though you are His creature. Though you have been a pensioner upon His bounty, you have constantly insisted upon it that you were your own master, and had a right to do just as you pleased. You have thus invaded crown rights of the King of kings, and committed treason against His sovereignty: worst of all, you have committed sin against His only begotten and most dear son, the Lord Jesus. If it were your case, you could not forgive; but be astonished as you hear that your thoughts are not Gods thoughts, and His ways of forgiveness are as high above your ways as the heavens are above the earth.
2. It is supposable that when you are weighing the case of an offender you decide upon it thus: I could forgive him, bad as the sin is, if I thought he had fallen into it from inadvertence or carelessness, or if I supposed that he was moved by some great hope of gain for himself, but the offence was intentional, malicious, and wanton, and therefore I cannot remit it. Naturally you transfer these thoughts of yours to the Lord of heaven, and you say, He will never pardon me, for I have trespassed wilfully. I have sinned without excuse. Such language as this befits a penitents tongue; men cannot forgive their fellows when they perceive wanton malice in their crimes, but God can forgive you.
3. You will in some cases also be obliged to say, I could very readily have overlooked this fault, but it has been repeated. Such to the full, is your case, O troubled sinner, with regard to God. Though you hardly dare to think of forgiveness, God can not only think of it, but bestow it.
4. I can conceive a person greatly injured saying, I would overlook all these injuries which have been hurled against me, but I cannot see any reason why I should have been the particular object of this mans spite; it has been quite undeserved on my part, and unprovoked. That would be a very excellent reason in a court of justice for insisting on the punishment of an offender. Listen to the voice of the good God whom you have injured Isa 1:2-3). What is the sequel to this very just but sad complaint?Isa 1:18).
5. Yes, says an offended person, I might overlook the fault if I thought the man were wholly humbled now; but you seethe asks me to pardon, but he has not a sufficient sense of his guilt. Troubled sinner, this is very much your case. You are somewhat broken down, but you must confess that your heart is hard still, compared with what it ought to be. But, God says, I will take away the heart of stone, and I will give them a heart of flesh.
6. Still, exclaims the aggrieved party, I think the man ought to make me some compensation. This principle is very properly recognized in courts of justice. Now, poor sinner, you feel that you cannot bring any compensation. But our loving God does not ask you for any compensation; He says, Only return unto Me. Sin is freely forgiven for Jesus sake.
7. Naturally, many a just-minded person would say, If I were most gracious, yet I could not find it in my heart freely to forgive when I see the consequences always-before my eyes. Suppose that somebody had wantonly injured your child; suppose he had broken one of your childs limbs, for instance; I think I hear you say, I could forgive him, but look at my poor limping child. But sinner! God sees before Him daily tokens of what you have done! You can never unwrith the past, nor restore the lost one. All that accursed past of sin must live on. If you light the fire, it will burn on to the lowest hell. God may forgive your incendiarism, but the fire itself still continues. With all the consequences of your sin before Him, He forgives you freely if you rest on Jesus.
8. Furthermore, I can conceive a case in which the offended party can fairly say, I do feel from my heart fully prepared to forget this offence against me, but it was public, and therefore highly, obnoxious, and injurious. Trembling sinner, you also may well think, Surely God wall never forgive me, for against Him only have I sinned, and done this evil in His sight. I sinned in the face of the sun. I sinned unblushingly, and gloried in my shame. Rejoice, poor mourner, that this is no reason why the Lord should not forgive you, for as high as the heavens arc above the earth so high are His thoughts above your thoughts.
9. I can imagine it possible that an offended one might add, by way of clenching all his arguments against pardon, My forgiveness he has already despised. I have put myself to great expense in order to subdue his hatred, and yet he has stood out against me. How can reason and justice expect me to do any more? I might, perhaps, answer, No; neither of them can well expect more of you; but what we cannot expect of you, the guilty sinner may yet expect of God.
II. Contrast your thoughts about THE PLAN OF PARDON with Gods thoughts. If you have advanced far enough to believe that God can pardon, and have to this extent laid hold upon Gods thoughts, it is well; but still another of your own thoughts drags you down, for you have a wrong idea of the way of pardon.
1. I will suppose that there are persons who ignorantly say, If it be true that the Lord will pardon sin, let Him do it outright; let Him just take the pen and mark through all my transgressions, and have done with them. He has but to say, I forgive thee, and there is an end of it. But Gods thoughts are not your thoughts in this case. You have evidently become so impure in heart as to look upon sin as a trifle; but the Judge of all the earth is of another mind. The great Rules cannot suffer sin to go unpunished.
2. Others have a notion that God may, perhaps, forgive them by putting them through a course of affliction. It is still a superstitious notion lingering in England, that poor persons are the special objects of Divine favour, and that hard work and poverty, and especially a long lingering sickness, are a means of putting away sin; for persons so afflicted have had so much misery in this life that they do not deserve to suffer more. But your thoughts on this matter are not Gods thoughts. You may be as poor as Lazarus, but never lie in Abrahams bosom; yon may endure as many sufferings here as fell to the lot of Job, and yet may go from Jobs dunghill to hell. Cast out any idea that these sufferings or privations of yours can make atonement for sin
3. A more current idea still is, that God will pur away the past and give men a new start, and that if they go on well for the future, then in their dying hour God will speak pardon. But there is nothing of that kind in the Word of God.
4. There is a very current supposition, however, that God pardons sin in this way: that He says, Well, now, I forgive you the past. My law was a little too severe for you, but I will try, you again under a more lenient rule. Do as well as you can, and I will save you. But God does nothing of the kind! The forgiveness which is given to a sinner reaches to the sins which are yet to be committed as well as to the sins which he has already done. Christ stood for you, and therefore God is severely just while He is bountifully merciful to you. In the next place, when God forgives you He does it unconditionally.
III. THE PRESENT POSSESSION OF THIS PARDON.
1. There is an idea in the mind of many that the plan of just trusting in Christ, and being pardoned on the spot, is too simple to be safe. It is a well-known fact that the simplest remedies are the most potent and safe; and, certainly, the simplest rules in mechanics are just those upon which the greatest engineers construct their most wonderful erections. Do not despise the Gospel because it is simple.
2. I think I hear you say, It is too good to be true. But it is just like our God.
3. I think I hear your heart say, It seems to me to be a plan too swift to be sure. This is no human nostrum, this is a Divine prescription.
4. Believe and live! Have done with thyself, and begin with Christ. (C. H.Spurgeon.)
Neither are your ways My ways, saith the Lord
The great contrast
Nature, Providence and Grace abound in eloquent illustrations of the text.
I. OBSERVE NATURE.
1. Gods works are characteristic. They manifest His character. Mans do not. We cannot tell infallibly what a fellow-creature is by remarking what he does. A garment is made for you. Are you able, as you look at it, to discover what the maker is? A carpenter constructs a box, table or chair; but nothing in its manufacture informs the spectator of the workmans holiness or sinfulness. It is even so with books. The productions of the pen sometimes oppose the deeds of the life. But Gods works show us Himself. The purity and power, the mercy and majesty of Jehovah, are all displayed in creation.
2. Gods works will bear the most minute examination. In yonder gallery of art is a painting. Stand from it at a certain distance and you are struck with its beauty. Look at it closely and it becomes a mere confusion of colours. But ascend a hill. Gaze at the landscape. Here it is a Divine picture. The fields are emerald with grass, golden and white with prolific wild-flowers. Beheld afar off, the scene is glorious. Come down the hill, however. Go into the meadow. Pluck one of the flowers, and gaze at it minutely; gather a blade of grass, and subject it to a most scrutinizing examination. It will bear it. It is as beautiful as ever. A piece of lace which looks delicate and fine to the naked eye becomes coarse and clumsy under a microscope. Not so the wing of a fly or a moth. Magnify the finest needle ever made, and it immediately looks rude and rough; but magnify the sting of a, bee a million of times, and its surface is still smooth and unvarying.
3. Gods works are inexhaustible in attractiveness. We never tire of nature. Human achievements are limited in the interest which they yield.
II. STUDY PROVIDENCE. How opposed to mens expectations have been many of Gods dealings. Placed in His position they would ]lave done the very opposite of what He was pleased to accomplish. E.g. Israel when brought out of Egypt; Joshua and Jericho; Gideon and the Midianites; Naaman and his leprosy. Man proposes, God disposes. We form our plans; He frequently leaves them where they are, and never allows them to crystallize into action. Brains are racked and hearts made anxious touching divers schemes and sundry intentions, when, lo! He who has the disposing of the lot quietly ignores them, and leads us into an altogether different path from that which we expected. I once visited the house of a friend. While waiting for admission my attention was arrested by a trivial but suggestive object. Beside the door an evergreen had been planted It was drooping and dying. Close to it, however, was a wild flower. Dropped by a passing bird, or cast there on the wings of the wind, some seed had taken root. It flourished and grew strong. Nor is it otherwise with human events. Schemes which we set, water, and watch, disappoint us and fail, while God gives to something very different vigour and life.
III. CONSIDER GRACE. In His spiritual dealings with us, Neither are your ways My ways, saith the Lord.
1. God loves all. We do not. Large-hearted philanthropists, whose affection takes in the whole race, are exceptional.
2. God makes allowance for our difficulties. Physical infirmities commonly awaken pity. We take them into account when we judge. Would that we carried out the same rule a little further! Not seldom when we Judge of our fellows morally and spiritually, we lose sight of the difficulties which they have to encounter. If we remembered their peculiar trials and temptations, we should speak a little less harshly of them. God makes full and large allowance for our difficulties. He sees and appreciates the obstacles with which we grapple. He remembereth that we are dust.
3. God helps us through our difficulties. Adversity is a severe ordeal. Tried thereby, many friendships are found wanting. Fair weather and smooth sailing on lifes sea will win fellow-voyagers, but clouds and breakers few will share with us. How different is it with God; I will never leave thee nor forsake thee–not even in trial. Nay, He is nearer to us then than ever. He not only makes allowance for our difficulties, but helps us through them. Two children were once overheard talking about the Good Shepherd. What does He do? said one. He feeds the sheep, and drives away the wild beasts, was the reply. But, rejoined the first, He does more for the sheep; He carries them up hill.
4. God is very forgiving. Man is not: he is slow to pardon (verse 7). (T. R.Stevenson.)
Gods long-suffering surpasses mans
An evangelist was conducting special services in a Yorkshire village and urged his Gospel-hardened audience to immediate decision. As he pictured the longsuffering of God his face beamed with holy excitement. Then, falling on his knees, he cried, Lord, Lord, how stubborn they are! If I had been Thee, Id a had em all in hell long since.
Fuente: Biblical Illustrator Edited by Joseph S. Exell
My disposition and carriage is vastly differing from yours. If any man provoke or injure you, especially if he do it greatly, and frequently, and maliciously, you are very slow and backward to forgive him; and if you do or seem to forgive, and promise to forget, and pass it by, yet you retain a secret grudge in your hearts, and upon the least occasion and slight offence you forget your promise, and you are soon weary with forgiving, and prone to revenge yourselves upon him: but it is not so with me; for I am slow to anger, and ready to forgive all true penitents, how many, and great, and numberless soever their sins be; and my promises of mercy and pardon shall be infallibly made good to them. And therefore you need not fear to come to me, or to find mercy and acceptance with me.
Fuente: English Annotations on the Holy Bible by Matthew Poole
8. Forreferring to Isa55:7. You need not doubt His willingness “abundantly topardon” (compare Isa 55:12);for, though “the wicked” man’s “ways,“and “the unrighteous man’s thoughts,” are soaggravated as to seem unpardonable, God’s “thoughts” and”ways” in pardoning are not regulated by the proportion ofthe former, as man’s would be towards his fellow man who offendedhim; compare the “for” (Psa 25:11;Rom 5:19).
Fuente: Jamieson, Fausset and Brown’s Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible
For my thoughts are not your thoughts,…. In some things there may be a likeness between the thoughts of God and the thoughts of men, as to the nature of them: thoughts are natural and essential to them both; they are within them, are internal acts, and unknown to others, till made known; but then the thoughts of men are finite and limited, whereas the thoughts of the Lord are infinite and boundless; men’s thoughts have a beginning, but the Lord’s have none; though not so much the nature as the quality of them is here intended: the thoughts of men are evil, even the imagination of their thoughts, yea, every imagination is, and that always and only so; but the thoughts of God are holy, as appears from his purposes and covenant, and all his acts of grace, in redemption, calling, and preparing his people for glory: the thoughts of men, as to the object of them, are vain, and nothing worth; their thoughts and sentiments of things are very different from the Lord’s, as about sin, concerning Christ, the truths of the Gospel, the people of God, religion, holiness, and a future state, and in reference to the business of salvation; they think they can save themselves; that their own works of righteousness are sufficient to justify them; their privileges and profession such, that they shall be saved; their wisdom, riches, and honour, a security to them from damnation: however, that their sincere obedience, with repentance for what is amiss, will entitle them to happiness: but the thoughts of God are the reverse of all this; particularly with respect to pardoning mercy their thoughts are different; carnal men think of mercy, but not of justice, and of having pardoning mercy in an absolute way, and not through Christ, and without conversion and repentance; and so this is a reason why men’s thoughts are to be forsaken, because so very unlike to the Lord’s. Or else these words are to be considered as an argument, proving that God does abundantly pardon all returning sinners; since he is not like men, backward to forgive, especially great and aggravated crimes, but is ready, free, and willing to forgive, even those of the most aggravated circumstances.
Neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord; the ways which God prescribes and directs men to walk in are different from theirs; his are holy, theirs unholy; his are plain, theirs crooked; his are ways of light, theirs ways of darkness; his are pleasant, theirs not so, at least in the issue; his lead to life, theirs to death; and therefore there is good reason why they should leave their evil ways, and walk in his. Moreover, the ways which he takes in the salvation of men are different from those which they, naturally pursue, and especially in the pardon of sin; he pardons freely, fully, without any reserve, or private grudge, forgetting as well as forgiving.
Fuente: John Gill’s Exposition of the Entire Bible
The appeal, to leave their own way and their own thoughts, and yield themselves to God the Redeemer, and to His word, is now urged on the ground of the heaven-wide difference between the ways and thoughts of this God and the despairing thoughts of men (Isa 40:27; Isa 49:24), and their aimless labyrinthine ways. “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith Jehovah: no, heaven is high above the earth; so high are my ways above your ways, and my thoughts above your thoughts.” The k ( imo ) introduces the undeniable statement of a fact patent to the senses, for the purpose of clearly setting forth, by way of comparison, the relation in which the ways and thoughts of God stand to those of man. There is no necessity to supply after , as Hitzig and Knobel do. It is simply omitted, as in Isa 62:5 and Jer 3:20, or like in Pro 26:11, etc. On what side the heaven-wide elevation is to be seen, is shown in what follows. They are not so fickle, so unreliable, or so powerless.
Fuente: Keil & Delitzsch Commentary on the Old Testament
8. For my thoughts are not your thoughts. This passage is expounded in various ways. Some think that it condemns universally the life of men, that they may not be satisfied with it or flatter their vices; for we cannot approach to God but by taking away a false conviction of our own righteousness. And indeed none call for physicians but those who are driven by the violence of disease to seek both health and remedies. Accordingly, this passage is compared by them to that saying of our Lord,
“
What ranks high among men is abomination in the sight of God.” (Luk 16:15)
But the Prophet’s meaning, I think, is different, and is more correctly explained, according to my judgment, by other commentators, who think that he draws a distinction between God’s disposition and man’s disposition. Men are wont to judge and measure God from themselves; for their hearts are moved by angry passions, and are very difficult to be appeased; and therefore they think that they cannot be reconciled to God, when they have once offended him. But the Lord shows that he is far from resembling men. As if he had said, “I am not a mortal man, that I should show myself to be harsh and irreconcilable to you. (87) My thoughts are very different from yours. If you are implacable, and can with difficulty be brought back to a state of friendship with those from whom you have received an injury, I am not like you, that I should treat you so cruelly.”
(87) “ Pour vous estre rude et ennemi a jamais.” “So as to be harsh and an enemy to you for ever.”
Fuente: Calvin’s Complete Commentary
GODS WAY OF PARDONING ABOVE MENS
Isa. 55:8-9 For my thoughts are not your thoughts, &c.
Suppose your sovereign taking a personal interest in you. But you have become a rebel. She has every justification in casting you off. Instead of this she makes an arrangement at great cost by which she is able to offer a free pardon. And this purely because of the benevolent interest she takes in you.
Think of the Divine greatness (2Ch. 6:18) and holiness. Contrast these with our littleness and sinfulness. Yet He offers pardon. He will have mercy. It is because His thoughts and ways are higher than ours. You cannot measure the distance between heaven and earth. You only think of it as immeasurable vastness. This is true in relation to every thought and every action about subjects on which we think or act. Especially so as regards forgiveness. Gods magnanimity is asserted here. It is illustrated
I. IN THE DISPOSITION TO FORGIVE.
How different from man! When injured he seeks revenge. Usually difficult to turn aside from this. Gods nature is to forgive (Exo. 34:5-7). This is one phase of His love.
II. IN THE TERMS OF FORGIVENESS.
The statement of this part of the case involves the fact that He not merely stands in the attitude of readiness to forgive, but also that He overcame the formidable difficulties in the way of forgiveness. And this at great cost and sacrifice. We hear much at present of the demands of mans moral nature. One demand of our moral nature is that the supreme ruler be just, as a primary condition of our confidence and respect. Here, then, was the problem that demanded solution. And Gods thoughts were equal to it. When in His love He desired to exercise mercy, He in His wisdom discovered a way by which mercy could be exercised while justice should be satisfied. By the sacrifice of His dear Son. A Divine victim for human sin. God vindicates His justice in the forgiveness of sin on the ground of the satisfaction He has made (Rom. 3:25-26). Hence the terms, so far as we are concerned, are perfectly free (Isa. 55:1). Salvation is not of works, but grace. You have simply to trust.
III. IN THE COMPLETENESS OF FORGIVENESS.
Remember the number and aggravation of your sins. Remember Gods hatred of sin. Yet He forgives fully. Casts them into the depths of the sea. Blots them out as a cloud. Will not remember them. Men remember offences against them, and make a difference. God forgets them.
IV. IN THE RANGE OF FORGIVENESS. The promises and invitations and overtures of the Gospel are made to all sinners everywhere. Whosoever will let him come. There is sufficient in Gods love, sufficient in Christs blood for all. If all mankind would come they would find the ample provision and the loving heart. Nor shall His mercy be provided in vain (Isa. 55:10-11, &c.)
So magnanimous is God. So much higher than ours are His thoughts and ways. They are the thoughts that are unfolded in the proclamation of mercy to sinners in the Gospel. It is gracious; necessary; all-sufficient.J. Rawlinson,
THE MYSTERY AND GLORY OF GODS WAYS IN REDEMPTION
The whole Bible is but the expansion of one sentence, one utterance of the Eternal, I am the Lord. Hence the revelation must be incomplete, for a god that could fully reveal himself to his creatures would be no god; and it must also be astonishing and amazing, for a professed record of any part of Gods thoughts and ways that did not land in mystery, and tend to wonder would be self-condemned, and proved to be neither true nor divine. It is not only here and there that Gods thoughts and ways are superhuman, but throughout; just as a circle is everywhere a circle, and nowhere a square or capable at any point of being reduced to the other figure. How man can at all lay hold of God, or frame any conception of Him with his finite and infinitely inferior mental faculties, this is the wonder and has sometimes been the stumbling-block of philosophy; and it is only removed out of the way by devoutly and thankfully accepting the fact that we do know Him (though darkly), and are so far made in His image that there may be and ought to be reverential contact and communion with Him. We must be constantly reminded that though brought near we are not brought up to Him, though companions we are not equals, and that while our line touches His, it cannot run parallel with it as it sweeps in its own awful circle from eternity to eternity. The lesson is one of humility but also of consolation; for the depths of Gods mind are depths of truth, of wisdom, and of love; and therefore we may be not only cast down, but lifted up as we study together in this lofty chapter the great words: For my thoughts, &c. In order to give unity to the subject I shall say nothing of the ways of God in creation and natural providence, but limit myself to redemption, showing how in various departments the ways of God are superhumanly mysterious and yet divinely glorious. Gods ways are not our ways, nor our thoughts His thoughts
I. In regard to the occasion of redemption.Take the entrance of sin into our world, and its continuance in it, which occasioned the need of redemptioncan anything be less like what man would have anticipated and conceived. [1704]
[1704] Had man been able to make a creature like himself, he would either have made him without any inward liability to fall, or any possible risk from without, and if be could not or would not exclude both, he would have made no creation at all. This is the way in which an earthly philanthropist would act in such a supposed case, and therefore in his hands sin could never enter at all, and hence the extreme difficulty, we may say impossibility, of accounting for the origin of evil on any theory framed in the present state by the human mind. I have read over many such theories and considered them; but to my mind this one verse is far more true and far more philosophical than all of them put together: My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord. We are sure on the one hand that there is a God, we are equally sure also that there is evil in His universe. Hence there must be something yet to be cleared up, something that without alienating from God His moral attributes, making Him either the author of sin, or the accomplice in it, for any fancied exaltation of His character would, if known, vindicate His ways and show them to be not only mysterious but right, as far above ours as the heavens are above the earth. Absolute faith might here come in and wait the disclosure of the mystery, why evil entered and wrought its ravages, and why it remains and works them still. But there are in the Gospel some further glimpses, not in the way of full explanation, but of indirect reference to this awful subject, whereby simple and naked faith in God may be assisted. These do not warrant us to say that evil entered in order that God might glorify Himself in overcoming it, or that the fall was a necessary stepping-stone to redemption; for language like this aspires to rise to a giddy height where the finite mind cannot support itself and where it mistakes its own reasonings or fancies for the thoughts of God. But the lessons of Scripture, while leaving the entrance of evil in its awful mystery, assist our faith by showing first that nothing derogatory to God could be implied in its introduction, and then that God dealing with it as a fact has overruled it for His own glory. The shadow which the entrance of evil casts on Gods redemption rolls away. It was not for want of power in God that sin entered, for in Christ He defeats it. It was not for want of righteousness, for redemption is one continued death-blow to its dominion. It was not for want of wisdom, for the wisdom that cures is higher than the wisdom that was required to prevent. It was not for want of love, for the love that provided the second Adam to humanity could not have been wanting in the trial of the first. There is thus a reply on Calvary to the vexing thoughts that cluster around Eden, and while the mystery remains it loses its terror. And further, the undoubted outburst of the glory of God on the darkened theatre of sin, though we dare not say that the theatre was darkened for the purpose, assists our faith in God. It has been conclusively shown that evil can be overruled for good, that attributes of God are brought out that might otherwise have slumbered, and emotions called forth in His creatures which without danger and deliverance would have been impossible. Where sin abounded grace has much more abounded. God has become more glorious in His dealings with sin for its expulsion; saved sinners more blessed, angels more instructed and confirmed. The thoughts of God all through have been unlike the thoughts of man, and yet there are gleams from a higher heaven sufficient to relieve the darkness and point to the day when it shall be dispelled; and thus is vindicated the assertion that in this matter His ways are as much above our ways as the heavens are above the earth.Cairns.
II. In regard to the purpose of redemption. Man is not the only being who has fallen, and yet man is the only being who is redeemed. When we inquire as to the reason of this arrangement we find none. It is one of the deep things which belong to God. It is an impressive display of sovereignty, where all that is left for us is to bow and to adore. We might have supposed that the higher race would have been selected, and that God would have glorified His mercy on the still more conspicuous theatre from which they had sought to cast themselves down. And altogether independently of the example of their rejection, we might have anticipated that mans ruin would have been final and hopeless. Man does not forgive where he has been insulted as God was in mans rebellion. Nations do not tolerate blows aimed at their independence and their very existence, and therefore mans revolt might have been expected to draw down swift and remediless destruction, for it was a blow aimed at Gods throne and being. That Gods thoughts should in such a crisis have been thoughts of peace is the wonder of unfallen beings and of those who are redeemed. They cannot rise in thought to that awful council wherein, though every foreseen trespass demanded vengeance, mercy yet rejoiced against judgment, without exclaiming, This is not the manner of man, O Lord God. O the depth of the riches, &c.
III. In regard to the plan of redemption. How utterly unlike to any means of mans devising are those which God has chosen for the recovery of His lost creation to His favour and image! That Gods Son should become incarnate, and die on the cross for the worlds redemption, and that Gods Spirit should descend into the guilty and polluted hearts of sinners, and work out there a blessed transformation, and that all this should be effected by the free and sovereign grace of God himself, and laid open to the very chief of sinners as the unconditional gift of Gods love, this, as universal experience attests, is something so far from having entered into the heart of man, that it needs incessant effort to keep it before him even when it has been revealed. [1707]
[1707] The world had four thousand years to learn the lesson. God had made the outline of it known to His Church from the beginning. He had raised up a special people to be the depository of the revelation; and He had taught them by priests and prophets, by types and signs without number, and yet when redemption came how few received it, how few understood it, so that when the Saviour was actually hanging on the cross and finishing the work given Him to do, it is questionable if so much as one, even of His disciples, comprehended the design or saw the glory of His sacrifice. Man sees so little of the evil of sin, that he cannot understand why an infinite satisfaction is needed. His own heart is so narrow that he cannot embrace the love of God in the gift of an infinite sacrifice. His own benevolence is so contracted that he distrusts the offer of an unlimited pardon, and his moral perceptions are so blunted that he is afronted rather than consoled by the promise of an Almighty Spirit to work out his deliverance from the bondage of evil. Hence when man is left to work his will upon the plan of redemption, he strikes out all its characteristic features, away goes the incarnation, and Christ is no more the co-equal Son of His Father, but the son of Joseph and Mary. Away goes the Atonement; and the cross is no longer the means of reconciling God and sinners, but the testimony to a God from the first reconciled. Away goes the offer of pardon through a Saviours blood; and back comes the voice of the law Do and live, and as there is now no call for a Divine Spirit to renew and sanctify, the last pillar of redemption falls amidst its other broken columns, and mans own effort and struggle return as the source of his repentance and reformation. What is Socinianism, what is Mohammedanism, what is Judaism, sinking from the level of Isaiah to the Talmud, but so many testimonies that Gods ways in redemption are too high for mans fallen reason, and that it is easier to bring down heaven to earth than to lift up earth to heaven? All the opposition to evangelical religion wherewith we are surrounded, and that incessantly repeats Give us a Christianity that is rational, give us a Christianity that meets the advancement of the age, what does it amount to but this: Give us a Christianity without God; give us a Christianity without that element of grandeur, of mystery, of overwhelming superiority to mans thoughts and ways which compels awe and humbles pride? We accept the demand, come from what quarter it may, as an involuntary homage to the super-human glory of the faith we stand by, as a tribute to the Christianity which still moves in her own orbit, and, though surrounded by cloud and darkness, refuses to leave her native heaven. Nor do we lose anything, but gain everything, by retaining the Gospel as its original elevation. Pointing to Him who is the Son of the Highest, we can say to the wandering children of men, Here is God Himself come to seek and to save you! Appealing to the matchless virtue of His sacrifice we can turn, not to the whole who need no physician, but to the sick and sore-wounded, and testify, He is able to save to the uttermost all that come unto God by Him. Taking our stand upon the completeness of His work and the freeness of His salvation, we can ply the most distrustful and desponding with the overtures of His love; Let the wicked forsake his way, &c. And when the pardoned sinner feels his utter weakness, blindness, worthlessness, and helplessness, then can we, standing by the fountain of spiritual influence which Christ has opened, invite all to be washed and sanctified as well as justified in the name of the Lord Jesus and by the Spirit of our God.Cairns.
The grandeur of these provisions comes home with a consoling and peace-giving as well as purifying power to the sin-burdened conscience and heart. They reveal the majesty and strength as well as the love of the Godhead, and are thus the support and stay of dying men. Never can we surrender this Godlike greatness of the Gospel, or suffer this high stronghold to be dismantled and destroyed. It were to surrender our own souls refuge, and that of all the guilty, and with a heaven above that stooped not to our rescue, and an earth at our foot that crumbled to our tread, to sink unpitied in the waste of sin and ruin.
IV. In regard to the progress of redemption. Redemption has a history, and this is, of all others, the most difficult to scan, not only as it lies in the Bible, but in uninspired records. It has been said, Interpret the Bible as any other book; but this ultimately means, Interpret God as you interpret man, and you cannot even interpret Church history as you do other history. It is, in a sense which belongs to no other history, the story of a battle not yet fought out, or of a campaign not yet ended; and there are combatants at work beyond the range of human observation, and a supreme celestial Leader whose point of survey none can share. It was to be expected, therefore, that the progress of redemption, as surveyed by human eyes, would present many anomalies and many difficulties, while at the same time, true to the analogy of the substance of redemption, there would be a lofty, all-pervading grandeur that spoke to the devout observer the presence and the hand of God. I will illustrate this union of mysteriousness and Divine greatness in regard to three features in the progress of redemption.
1. The rate of the progress of redemption. How much is there here, unlike the thoughts of man! But no one can deny that there is a Divine hand in the onward movements, and that it is all the more glorious for its incessant recovery from retardation and retrogression. When the whole is known it will be pre-eminently Godlike, and it will be seen that Gods law of progress, both as to time and space, was as far above mans law as the heavens above the earth.
2. The instruments of the progress of redemption. How unlike all that man would have conceived or devised! This applies even to the Old Testament dispensation, but far more to Christianity. Its leaders were the poor; its soldiers were slaves and women; its heroes were martyrs. How unlike the agents in any other revolution, and yet God chose the weak things to confound the mighty, &c. By similar instrumentalities has Christianity perpetually renewed its strength. What new development of glorious possibilities, undreamt of before, has the Gospel everywhere achieved and made tributary to its progress! Nothing so unlike to human predictions, nothing so far above human thought as the march of this Gospel.
3. The hindrances to the progress of redemption. Man would have thought that hindrances would be speedily removed, or, if suffered to remain or to return, would constitute unmingled evils to the Church. But God, on the other hand, we can see, by giving the victory slowly, trains the faith and courage of successive generations; and by permitting old enemies to return or new ones to spring up, shows the unexhausted and inexhaustible power of His Gospel to face and put down every hostile power. The variety and vicissitude of attack when it is once surmounted, surrounds the Gospel with richer trophies and places on its head more crowns. As it has been so it shall be. The onsets of unbelief that now disturb us shall be the consolation of our successors, and its scarce-remembered names and war-cries shall swell their song of peace.
V. In regard to the limits of redemption. Why should redemption have limits at all? Why should not all be saved as God wishes, and come to a knowledge of the truth? Thus man fondly argues, and by arguing like this not a few are in our day plausibly deceived, in forgetfulness of the warnings of conscience and the solemn voice of God, to the effect that he that believeth not shall not see life, but the wrath of God abideth on him. On this awful subject we cannot in this darkling state profess to justify the ways of God to man, for this He will do Himself in the day of the revelation of His righteous judgment. But it may be seen, even here, that whatever God appoints for the impenitent, cannot be inconsistent with His moral attributes. If the cross clears God from every aspersion in regard to the entrance of evil, not less does it do so in regard to the continuance of evil in His universe. What He has done in Christ is a sufficient proof that the fault is not His, and that man is the author of his own undoing.
Of this let us be sure, that though His ways are above us, they are so only as the heavens to supply a pathway for the sun and a fountain for the dew, and that shall break in blessings on our head.Professor John Cairns, D.D.
GODS WAYS ABOVE MENS
There is the strongest reason to believe that these memorable declarations refer to Gods pardoning mercy. His method of forgiveness is contrasted and exhibited as vastly superior to that of men. They find it difficult to pardon at all; they are slow to forgive an injury, &c. But God is not reluctant to forgive, &c. It may refer to the number and aggravation of offences, or to the number of offenders, &c. But while the passage refers primarily to pardon, and should be interpreted as having a main reference to it, it is also true of the ways of God in general.
I SOME ILLUSTRATIONS OF THE GLORIOUS TRUTH ASSERTED.
Anything in the shape of proof might be justly deemed superfluous, if not profane, inasmuch as it is affirmed by Him who cannot lie. The purposes, plans, and actions of God are exceedingly unlike ours; they are beyond measure more noble and excellent than ours can be. Any illustrations must be vastly beneath the greatness of our theme
1. In the fact that He produces the most important results from apparently insignificant causes.
2. As He accomplishes the most glorious designs by feeble instrumentality.
3. As He accomplishes the plan of salvation on a principle totally different from what we should have determined.
4. In the sovereignty with which He bestows mercy.
5. In the varied and mysterious dealings by which He trains up His people for glory.
II. THE PRINCIPLE ON WHICH THIS ARRANGEMENT IS FOUNDED AND JUSTIFIED.
1. The Divine knowledge is infinitely more extensive than ours.
2. The Divine purposes are inconceivably superior to ours.
3. It is His fixed, unalterable purpose to fulfil His plans in such a way as to hide pride from man.
III. PRACTICAL CONSIDERATIONS WHICH THIS VIEW OF THE DIVINE CONDUCT SUGGESTS.
1. It should awaken emotions of gratitude.
2. We should seek to have our will and our ways conformed to those of God. His will is the wisest, the kindest, and the best, and must be carried into effect: hence it is the highest wisdom of the creature to submit to His will and bow to His authority.
3. Learn to confide in His wisdom and love.
4. Anticipate the clearer light of heaven.George Smith, D.D.
I. OBVIOUS REASONS FOR THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN GOD AND OURSELVES.
Gods ways and thoughts must be far above ours
1. Because in situation and office He is exalted far above us. He is in heaven, we are upon earth. We occupy the footstool, He the throne. Consider the extent and duration of His kingdom. Must not the thoughts and ways of a powerful earthly monarch be far above those of one of his subjects who is employed in manufacturing pins, or cultivating a few acres of ground? Can such a subject be competent to judge of his sovereigns designs, or even to comprehend them? How far, then, must the thoughts and ways of the eternal King of kings exceed ours; and how little able are we to judge of them, further than the revelation which He has been pleased to give enables us!
2. Because He is infinitely superior to us in knowledge and wisdom. He must, therefore, be able to devise a thousand plans and expedients, and to bring good out of evil in numberless ways, of which we could never have conceived, and of which we are by no means competent to judge, even after they are revealed to us.
3. Because He is perfectly benevolent and holy. We love sin, and care for nothing but our own private interest, while His concern is for the interests of the universe. Hence His thoughts, affections, maxims, and pursuits must be entirely different from ours. Do not even the thoughts and ways of good men differ from those of the wicked? How infinitely, then, must a perfectly holy God differ from us!
II. SOME INSTANCES IN WHICH THIS DIFFERENCE MOST STRIKINGLY APPEARS.
1. In permitting the introduction and continuance of natural and moral evil.
2. In devising a way of salvation for sinners. [1710]
3. In Gods choice of means and instruments for propagating the religion of Christ. Not angels, but men; and those at the outset the humblest (1Co. 1:27; see p. 583).
4. In His choice of the best methods of dealing with His people, and carrying on the work of grace in their souls after it is begun.
[1710] We should have thought that, if God intended to save sinners, He would bring them to repentance and save them at once; or at least after suffering them to endure, for a season, the bitter consequences of their own folly and disobedience. We never should have thought of providing for them a redeemer; still leas should we have thought of proposing that Gods only Son, the Creator and Preserver of all things, should undertake this office; and, least of all, should we have expected that He would, for this purpose, think it necessary to become man. If we had been informed that this was necessary, and if it had been left to us to fix the time and manner of His appearing, we should have concluded that He ought to come soon after the fall; to be born of illustrious parents; to make his appearance on earth in all the splendour, pomp, and glory imaginable; to overcome all opposition by a display of irresistible power; to ride through the world in triumph, conquering and to conquer. Such were the expectations of the Jews; and such, most probably, would have been ours. But never should we have thought of His being born of a virgin in abject circumstances; born in a stable; cradled in a manger, living for many years as a humble artificer; wandering, despised and rejected of men, without a place to lay His head; and finally arraigned, condemned, and crucified as a vile criminal, that He might thus expiate our sins, and by His death give life to the world.Payson.
III. SOME PRACTICAL LESSONS.
If Gods ways and thoughts differ thus widely from ours, then,
(1), it is no reasonable objection against the truth of any doctrine, or the propriety of any dispensation, that it is above our comprehension and appears mysterious to us. On the contrary, we should have reason to doubt the truth of the Scriptures, and to suspect that they are not the Word of God, if they did not contain many things which appear mysterious, and which we cannot fully comprehend. In this case, they would want one great proof of having proceeded from Him whose thoughts and ways must be infinitely above ours (H. E. I., 587; see p. 581).
2. It must be abominable pride, impiety, folly, and presumption in us to censure them even in thought. For an illiterate peasant to censure the conduct of his prince, with the reasons of which he is utterly unacquainted; for a child three years old to condemn the proceedings of his parent, would be nothing to this (Pro. 13:13). [1713]
[1713] An ancient writer teller us of a man who, having a house for sale, carried a brick to market to exhibit as a specimen. You smile at his folly in supposing that any purchaser would or could judge of a whole house, which he never saw, by so small a part of it. But are we not guilty of much greater folly in attempting to form an opinion of Gods conduct from that little part of it which we are able to discover? In order to form a correct opinion of it, we ought to have a correct view of the whole; we ought to see the whole extent and duration of Gods kingdom; to be equal with Him in wisdom, knowledge, power, and goodness; in one word, we ought to be God ourselves, for none but God is capable of judging accurately the conduct of God. Hence, whenever we attempt to judge of it, we do, in effect, set up ourselves as gods, knowing good and evil.Payson.
3. From this subject we infer the reasonableness of the implicit faith in God which Christians exercise, believing what they cannot fully comprehend. For this they are ridiculed. But if Gods ways and thoughts are thus high above ours, ought we not implicitly to believe that all He says and does is perfectly right? Is it not reasonable for children thus to believe their parents? for a sick man to trust in a skilful physician? for a passenger unacquainted with navigation to trust to the master of the vessel? If so, then it certainly is much more reasonable for us to trust implicitly to an infinitely wise, good, and infallible Being; and when any of His words or works appear wrong, to ascribe it to our own ignorance, blindness, or prejudice, rather than to suppose that there is anything wrong in Him. Is it not more likely that we should be wrong or mistaken, than that God should be?Edward Payson, D.D.: Sermons, pp. 3755.
Fuente: The Preacher’s Complete Homiletical Commentary Edited by Joseph S. Exell
(8) My thoughts are not your thoughts . . .The assertion refers to both the promise and the warning. Men think that the gifts of God can be purchased with money (Act. 8:20). They think that the market in which they are sold is always open, and that they can have them when and how they please (Mat. 25:9-13).
Fuente: Ellicott’s Commentary for English Readers (Old and New Testaments)
The Certain Fulfilment of What Yahweh Has Purposed Through The Power Of His Word ( Isa 55:8-13 ).
Isaiah now concludes this section from Isa 40:1 onwards by a final statement of the triumph of God’s powerful word as it goes forward to do His will bringing new birth to creation and finally establishing victory to His people, bringing glory to His name.
Thus will His purposes triumph. Beginning with the call of Abraham (chapter 41) and advancing through to the victory of God’s Davidic King and Servant and the triumph of His people (Isa 52:13 to Isa 55:5), His word has been effective throughout.
Isa 55:8-9
‘For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
Nor are your ways my ways, says Yahweh.
For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
So are my ways higher than your ways,
And my thoughts than your thoughts.’
These words summarise all that has gone before. Strange as it may seem to man God is working through His Servant, from the first triumphal entry into the land by His servant Abraham (Isa 41:1-8), through His Servant faithful Israel (Isa 41:8 and often), right through to the Suffering and disfigured Servant (Isa 52:13 to Isa 53:12) Who is finally glorified and established as world ruler (Isa 55:4-5), and it is through that work that He will finally be exalted. For God does not work as man works. He does not think as man thinks. His ways are not man’s ways. They are above and beyond all that man can conceive.
Who would have thought that the coming into Canaan of a small tribal leader uniquely called by God; that the establishing in that land of a small, struggling nation as His witness, which sadly proved itself mainly unworthy but produced its spiritual heroes; and that the final coming of One Who would end His life in great suffering, followed by resurrection; all scarcely noticed while the tide of history flowed on, could have achieved the new birth of the world and the establishing of God’s final purposes? But it will. And that is Isaiah’s glorious message.
Such is beyond men’s thoughts. Such would not be man’s ways. But they are God’s thoughts and God’s ways. The same idea is to be found in the temptation of Jesus. Satan came with man’s thoughts and man’s ways, bribery, worldly power, religious manifestations, Jesus countered with God’s thoughts and God’s ways, obedience, submission, humility, response to His word. And it was Jesus Who finally triumphed.
Note carefully the connection with the following verses. The first part of what follows could be seen as describing man’s ways, although even there its source comes from God, from heaven, the second part reveals God’s ways without any intervention by man, although coming to man. But even in the first part man is seen as on the whole the recipient. All is provided by God, man simply uses it to produce food and enjoy it, which he can only do because of God’s provision of rain (firmly reflecting conditions in Palestine).
Isa 55:10-11
‘For as the rain comes down, and the snow from heaven,
And does not return there, but waters the earth,
And makes it bring to birth, and bud,
And gives seed to the sower and bread to the eater,
So will my word be that goes forth out of my mouth,
It will not return to me empty,
But it will accomplish that which I please,
And it will prosper in the thing to which I sent it.
The illustration brings out man’s dependence on God for everything. He is dependent on the God-given rain, he is dependent on the God-given earth, he is dependent on the God-given process, and then he uses and eats what is provided. His part is so small. He comes as it were at the very tail end, having a small part in the whole, and continually receives God’s blessings.
Then God declares that His powerful word works like the God-given rain and snow, and it is all under His control. Just as the rain goes forth and does not immediately return, so it is with His word. It continues its work day by day, season by season, it waters and feeds, it brings about new birth, it produces, first buds, and then full grain, which reproduce themselves both to provide further grain and to feed men’s bodies, and it will finally result in a forested, evergreen, thorn-free world that bears testimony to its Creator (Isa 55:13). (The trees are pictures of permanence). This is also what God’s word accomplishes. It too brings about His will and prospers in His purposes. And the Paradise that will result will be all His work
Here as elsewhere in the Scripture the word of God is seen as a powerful and living, almost personal, force that goes forth to accomplish what it wants to do. As in the account of creation, God speaks, and His purpose is fulfilled. This is the Creator again in action. That is one reason why Jesus was called ‘the Word’.
Note that the hiphil ‘bring to birth, cause to be born’ is rarely used elsewhere of anything but human birth. Behind this verse therefore lies the idea of the new birth that is so prominent in the New Testament (Joh 3:1-6; Jas 1:18), the result of God at work in the world.
So God’s world is an orderly world, superbly planned to provide for man’s continued existence and prosperity, and dependent on God’s gift of rain. And it should be noted that the illustration is one that would readily spring to the mind of someone writing in Palestine, where all depended on rain, but not so in Babylon where he would have spoken of irrigation channels and rivers, and snow would have been very unlikely.
But the word that goes out from God does not just produce a semi-automatic response like nature does in its response to rain, it is living and active, it does what He pleases, it accomplishes what He wills. It is positive and powerful and subject always to His purposes and His control. But it does bring men spiritually to birth and it does feed men’s lives. And it does bring about all His will. And nothing can thwart it. And its process has been especially described from chapter 41 to this present chapter. The Servant is uniquely God’s word going forth.
Isa 55:12
‘For you will go forth with joy,
And be led forth in peace,
The mountains and the hills will break forth before you into singing,
And all the trees of the field will clap their hands,
Instead of the thorn will come up the fir tree,
And instead of the briar will come up the myrtle tree,
And it will be to Yahweh for a name,
For an everlasting sign that will never be cut off.
And the result will be joy and peace and rejoicing. We note here that ideally man both goes forth and is led forth. On the one hand he is in control of his activity, he is free, but on the other he is subject to control, he is led. And the wise men, as these are, ensure that when they are led they are led by God. The verb ‘go forth’, as used also in Isa 55:11, is neutral. It simply means ‘go’. It has no necessary exilic connections. The going forth is of God’s people through all eternity just as that into which they go forth also symbolises the heavenly Paradise.
Here the thought is of godly men. As they ‘go forth’ they will be filled with joy, and they will be led forth in peace. These are the two great blessings of redeemed man. Joy is the expression of what he has received, peace is its core. It is to peace that we have been brought, peace with God, peace from God, the peace of God; reconciled to Him, at one with Him, inwardly enjoying what He is to us and what He has given us, and all through the work of the Servant (Isa 53:5; Isa 54:10). These blessings all come to us through His covenant of peace (Isa 54:10). Peace is an Isaianic key word and is central to the coming everlasting glory (Isa 9:6-7; Isa 26:3; Isa 26:12; Isa 27:5; Isa 32:17-18; Isa 45:7; Isa 48:18; Isa 48:22; Isa 52:7; Isa 53:5; Isa 54:10; Isa 54:13; Isa 57:2; Isa 57:19; Isa 57:21; Isa 59:8; Isa 66:12).
It is in this context that we are to work out our own salvation with greatest care, because it is God Who is at work in us to will and to do of His good pleasure (Php 2:12-13). And it will come to its glorious final fulfilment when we are presented before Him, holy, unblameable and unreproveable in His sight (Col 1:22).
And as they are led forth by God they will finally sing. Yes, even the mountains and hills will break out in singing, and the fields will accompany it with the clapping of hands. It will be like one great festival. And the curse of Eden will be reversed. The briars and the thorns will be replaced by glorious evergreen trees, and the whole transformation of creation will fully enhance God’s reputation, it will be to Him for a name, and it will be an everlasting sign, a symbol of His triumph similar to the monuments of the great kings, that in His case will not be cut off or toppled. Here is something that will last for ever bringing great glory to God. So is the work of the Servant fulfilled.
Note carefully the everlastingness of it all. Everlastingness is constantly in Isaiah’s mind and vocabulary. Not for him some temporary future state, but a state that lasts for all eternity.
Such promises as we find here, and in for example Isa 41:19; Isa 35:1-2, and such calling on creation to sing as we find in Isa 44:23; Isa 49:13; Isa 52:9, arise from the consciousness, which was common to both prophets and apostles, that those who truly know their God will joy with joy unspeakable and full of glory (1Pe 1:8), and that one day the whole creation will share in the liberty of the glory of the children of God (Rom 8:21). They describe both the continual blessing which the redeemed will experience as they enjoy eternal life in this life (Joh 5:24; Joh 10:10; 1Jn 5:13), and above all as they enjoy the wonderful perfection of eternity.
Final note on the Servant.
To us is the privilege of a full understanding of Who the Servant is and what His ministry and function would be. But the genius of Isaiah lies in the fact that his words could be an encouragement to his people even before the Servant came. They could still hear the call and encouragement of Yahweh to be His Servant in their time. They could still look forward with joy and hope towards the coming King. Through the centuries before Christ came his ideas were a continual encouragement to His people. They were the seed of Abraham His friend. But now for us who have seen the glorious fulfilment it is a joy beyond all measure. God having provided some better thing for us, that without us they could not have been made perfect (Heb 11:40). For we are the seed of His even Greater Friend. ‘I will no longer call you servants, I will call you friends’ (Joh 15:15). End of note.
Fuente: Commentary Series on the Bible by Peter Pett
Isa 55:8-11. For my thoughts are not your thoughts This whole period consists of two comparative sentences; the one of which sets forth the height and sublimity of the thoughts and ways of God, above the thoughts and ways of men; the other, the undoubted power of the word of God, sent forth by him to effect the salvation of mankind. The former is grounded upon the perfect knowledge of God; the other, upon his infinite power. This passage is well connected with the whole argument of this and the former section, as well as with what immediately precedes, respecting the calling of the Gentiles. Concerning the metaphor in the 10th verse, it should be observed, that the word of God, especially his prophetic word, is usually compared in Scripture to rain. See Deu 32:2. Job 29:22-23. When the inspired writers, therefore, intend to describe the certain completion of any prophesies, they represent it frequently under the image of rain, which impregnates and fertilizes the earth. Isaiah, having in the long prophesy from chap. 40: and especially in Isa 55:3-5, of this chapter, displayed the covenant of God with the Israelites, and the due performances of his mercy towards David, established by an oath, wherein he promised that there should never be wanting a king to sit on his throne, and that the person peculiarly designed for this high office, should be teacher and king of the Gentiles; in order to convince any one who should think this incredible, he bids them consider, that the ways of God are immensely higher than those of men; and that those things are easy to him, which are difficult to us. He adds, that the completion of the prophesies, however wonderful, would be inevitably certain; that the prophetic word of God was like unto snow or rain, which, as they do not return to heaven till they have answered the end in watering, impregnating, and fertilizing; in giving bread to the hungry, and seed to the sower; so likewise the prophetic word would accomplish its end, that is to say, its predictions. See Michaelis and Vitringa.
Fuente: Commentary on the Holy Bible by Thomas Coke
DISCOURSE: 985
GODS WAYS ABOVE OURS
Isa 55:8-9. My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord: for as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.
MEN are apt to judge of God by themselves, and to suppose him restricted by such laws as they deem proper for their own observance. The wicked almost reduce him to a level with themselves in a moral view [Note: Psa 50:21.]: and even the godly form very inadequate conceptions of his ways and works. Of this God himself apprises us in the words before us; which we shall elucidate by shewing how different his thoughts and ways are from what we should have expected with respect to,
I.
The objects of his choice
[If we thought to take a person into the nearest relation to ourselves, we should be inclined to prefer one of high rank: if we undertook to instruct a person, we should select one who was intelligent and docile: or if we purposed to confer any favour, we should look out for an object that was worthy of it. But God acts in a very different manner. He takes the poor in preference to the rich [Note: Mat 11:5. Jam 2:5. Joh 7:48.] the ignorant before the wise [Note: Mat 11:25-26. 1Co 1:19-20.] and, in many instances, the vile before those, whose lives have been more moral [Note: Mat 21:31-32; Mat 19:20-22. contrasted with Luk 7:37; Luk 7:47 and 1Ti 1:13.] Not that God disregards morality, where it flows from proper principles, and has respect to his glory: but his grace is his own [Note: Mat 20:15.]; and he will impart it to whomsoever he will [Note: Rom 9:15-16.], without accounting himself responsible to any for the distribution of his favours [Note: Job 33:13. Rom 9:20.].
This exactly accords with the experience of the primitive saints [Note: See 2Sa 7:18-19. 1Co 1:26-29.], and with the Church of God in every age and place ]
II.
The extent of his love
[If it were told us that God would shew mercy to our fallen race, what should we have been led to expect at his hands? We should scarcely have raised our thoughts higher than an exemption from punishment. Indeed, this is the limit which unenlightened men universally assign to Gods mercy; He is merciful, therefore he will not punish. But who would have ever thought, that he should so love us, as to give his only dear Son to die for us? Who would have conceived, that he should moreover send his Holy Spirit to dwell in our hearts as our instructor, sanctifier, and comforter? Who would have imagined that he should give himself to us, with all that he is, and all that he has, as our present and everlasting portion? Is not all this as much above our thoughts as the heavens are above the earth?]
III.
The methods by which he accomplishes towards us the purposes of his grace
[Supposing us informed that God would take us to heaven, we should be ready to think, that certainly he would deliver us at once from temporal affliction, and more especially from spiritual conflicts. Would it ever enter our minds, that the objects of his eternal love should be left to endure the pressures of want, or the agonies of a cruel death? Could we once imagine, that they should be exposed, year after year, to the assaults of Satan: and be suffered, on many occasions, to wound their consciences, to defile their souls, and to grieve his good Spirit, by the commission of sin? Yet these are the ways in which he deals with them, and it is by these means that he fulfils in them the good pleasure of his goodness [Note: God does not approve of sin, or tempt to sin: but he makes use of the sins which men commit, to humble them in the dust, and to magnify his own superabounding mercy. Rom 5:20-21. Thus he permitted the fall of Peter, and overruled it for good, Luk 22:31-32.; but that permission neither excused, nor extenuated Peters guilt. The sin was the same, whether it were pardoned or punished: but the grace of Christ was eminently displayed in the pardon of it; and backsliders have over since derived much encouragement from thence (not to deny their Lord, but) to repent, and turn to God.]. Nor is this a mere arbitrary appointment: for, by these means, he discovers to us far more abundantly the riches of his grace, and affords us more ample grounds for praise and thanksgiving [Note: The deliverance vouchsafed to the Israelites was not a little enhanced by their oppression in Egypt, and their subsequent embarrassments.]. The way is circuitous indeed; but it is the right way to the promised land [Note: Psa 107:7.].]
Improvement
1.
How should we magnify and adore our God for the blessings of his grace!
[Well may every child of God exclaim with wonder, What manner of love is this wherewith thou hast loved me, that thou shouldest give thine only dear Son to redeem me by his blood, and thine eternal Spirit to sanctify me by his grace? In the review of his own life he may well add, Why me, Lord? why hast thou chosen me, and borne with me, and plucked me as a brand out of the burning? Why too hast thou used such methods for my recovery and salvation? Yes verily, in the review of all these mercies, he must of necessity exclaim, Bless the Lord, O my soul; and let all that is within me bless his holy name.]
2.
How submissive should we be under the darkest dispensations of his Providence!
[While we are saying, with Jacob, All these things are against me, perhaps the very dispensations, of which we so complain, are absolutely necessary to our eternal welfare [Note: Perhaps something which has met us unexpectedly has been, like Abigail, Gods messenger to keep us from some deadly sin. 1Sa 25:17-33.]. Let this thought silence every murmur, and encourage us to say, even in the most afflictive circumstances, Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him [Note: Job 13:15.].]
3.
How should we acknowledge God even in the most trivial occurrences!
[There is no occurrence really trivial, or unimportant: for there is such a concatenation of causes and effects fixed in the Divine purpose, that the most important events depend on circumstances, which seem to us altogether trifling and contingent [Note: Luk 19:3-4; Luk 19:9.]. Let the life of Joseph be surveyed, and we shall find that a thousand different things, apparently casual and independent, concurred to accomplish Gods promises towards him. Thus it is with respect to us; and it is our privilege to acknowledge God in all our ways, and to commit ourselves wholly to his guidance.]
4.
What a glorious place will heaven be!
[There the whole of the Divine dispensations towards us will be opened to our view. There Gods ways, which were in the great deep, and his footsteps, which were not known, nor perhaps capable of being comprehended by us in this world, will be clearly seen. O! what wonders of love and mercy shall we then behold! With what rapture shall we then exclaim, O the depths [Note: Rom 11:33.]! Let us then wait a few days; and the most painful events of this life shall be a source of everlasting joy.]
Fuente: Charles Simeon’s Horae Homileticae (Old and New Testaments)
Among a thousand testimonies in proof of this doctrine, as if to draw an everlasting line of distinction between the perfections of Jehovah and the character of all his creatures, this of grace and mercy in the thoughts and ways of God’s works! What an unmeasurable distance is this little globe from the unlimited heavens, and the unknown worlds with which we are surrounded! And yet these inconceivable disproportions are nothing, in point of opposition, to the pardoning grace of God in Christ, compared to the guilt of man. Reader! it is our contracted notion of things, which makes us limit the Holy One of Israel. If the loftiest mountain were cast into the sea, the top of it would be lost, and totally covered; and the Prophet says that such is the fulness of grace and mercy in Christ, when God casts all our sins into the depths of the sea of Christ’s blood; Mic 7:18-20 .
Fuente: Hawker’s Poor Man’s Commentary (Old and New Testaments)
Isa 55:8 For my thoughts [are] not your thoughts, neither [are] your ways my ways, saith the LORD.
Ver. 8. For my thoughts are not your thoughts, ] q.d., You may think it impossible, likely, that such great and grievous sinners as you have been should ever be received to mercy. But what talk you of your thoughts? Mine are infinitely above them, neither may you measure my mercies by your own models. Bring broken and bleeding hearts to my mercy seat, and I shall soon think all the meritorious sufferings of my Son, all the promises in my book, all the comforts of my Spirit, all the pleasures of my kingdom, but enough for you.
Fuente: John Trapp’s Complete Commentary (Old and New Testaments)
Isaiah
THE CALL TO THE THIRSTY
GOD’S WAYS AND MAN’S
Isa 55:8 – Isa 55:9
Scripture gives us no revelations concerning God merely in order that we may know about Him. These words are grand poetry and noble theology, but they are meant practically and in fiery earnestness. The ‘for’ at the beginning of each clause points us back to the previous statement, and both of the verses of our text are in different ways its foundation. And what has preceded is this: ‘Let the wicked forsake his way and the unrighteous man his thoughts, and let him return unto the Lord, for He will have mercy upon him, and to our God, for He will abundantly pardon.’ That is why the prophet dilates upon the difference between the ‘thoughts’ and the ‘ways’ of God and of men.
If we look at these two verses a little more closely we shall perceive that they by no means cover the same ground nor suggest the same idea as to the relationship between God’s ‘ways’ and ‘thoughts’ and ours. The former of them speaks of unlikeness and opposition, the latter of elevation and superiority; the former of them is the basis of an indictment and an exhortation, the latter is the basis of an encouragement and a promise. The former of them is the reason why ‘the wicked’ and ‘unrighteous man’ ought to and must ‘turn’ from ‘his ways’ and ‘thoughts,’ the latter of them is the reason why, ‘turning,’ he may be sure that the Lord ‘will abundantly pardon.’
And so we have here two things to consider in reference to the relation between the divine purposes and acts and man’s purposes and acts. First, the antagonism, and the indictment and exhortation that are based upon that; second, the analogy but superiority, and the exhortation and hope that are built upon that. Let me deal, then, with these separately.
I. We have here an unlikeness declared, and upon that is rested an appeal.
But that opposition is expressed with a remarkable variation. Observe the change of pronouns in the two clauses. First, ‘ My thoughts are not your thoughts’-you have not taken My truth into your minds, nor My purposes into your wills; you do riot think God’s thoughts. Therefore-’ your ways instead of ‘My,’ as we should have expected, to keep the regularity of the parallelism are not My ways’-I repudiate and abjure your conduct and condemn it utterly.
Now, of course, in this charge of man’s unlikeness to God, there is no contradiction of, nor reference to, man’s natural constitution, in which there are, at one and the same time, the likeness of the child with the parent and the unlikeness between the creature and the Creator. If our thoughts were not in a measure like God’s thoughts, we should know nothing about Him. If our thoughts were not like God’s thoughts, we should have no standard for life or thinking. Righteousness and beauty and truth and goodness are the same things in heaven and earth, and alike in God and man. We are made after His image, poor creatures though we be; and though there must ever be a gulf of unlikeness, which we cannot bridge, between the thoughts of Him whose knowledge has no growth nor uncertainty, whose wisdom is infinite and all whose nature is boundless light, and our knowledge, and must ever be a gulf between the workings and ways of Him who works without effort, and knows neither weariness nor limitation, and our work, so often foiled, so always toilsome, yet in all the unlikeness there is and no man can denude himself of it a likeness to the Father. For the image in which God made man at the beginning is not an image that it is in the power of men to cast away, and in the worst of his corruptions and the widest of his departures he still bears upon him the signs of likeness ‘to Him that created him.’ The coin is rusty, battered, defaced; but still legible are the head and the writing. ‘Whose image and superscription hath it?’ Render unto God the things that are declared to be God’s, because they bear His likeness and are stamped with His signature.
But that very necessary and natural likeness between God and man makes more solemnly sinful the voluntary unlikeness which we have brought upon ourselves. If there were no analogy, there could be no contrast. If God and man were utterly unlike, then there would be no evil in our unlikeness and no need for our repentance.
The true state for each of us is that we should, as the great astronomer said he had done in regard to his own science, ‘think God’s thoughts after Him,’ and have our minds filled with His truth and our wills all harmonised with His purposes, and that we should thus make our ways to run parallel with the ways of God. The blessedness, the peace, the true manhood of a man, are that his ways and thoughts should be like God’s. And so my text comes with its indictment-You who by nature were formed in His image, you to whom it is open to sympathise with His designs, to harmonise your wills with His will, and to bring all the dark and crooked ways in which you walk into full parallelism with His way-you have departed into darkness of unlikeness, and in thought and in ways are the opposites of God.
Mark how wonderfully, in the simple language of my text, deep truths about this sin of ours are conveyed. Notice its growth and order. It begins with a heart and mind that do not take in God’s thoughts, truths, purposes, desires, and then the alienated will and the darkened understanding and the conscience which has closed itself against His imperative voice issue afterwards in conduct which He cannot accept as in any way corresponding with His. First comes the thought unreceptive of God’s thought, and then follow ways contrary to God’s ways.
Notice the profound truth here in regard to the essential and deepest evil of all our evil. ‘ Your thoughts’; ‘ your ways,’-self-dependence and self-confidence are the master-evils of humanity. And every sin is at bottom the result of saying-’I will not conform myself to God, but I am going to please myself, and take my own way.’ My own way is never God’s way; my own way is always the devil’s way. And the root of all sin lies in these two strong, simple words, ‘ Your thoughts not Mine; your ways not Mine.’
Notice, too, how there are suggested the misery and retribution of this unlikeness. ‘If you will not make My thoughts your thoughts, I shall not take your ways as My ways. I will leave you to them.’ ‘You will be filled with the fruit of your own devices. I shall not incorporate your actions into My great scheme and purpose.’ Men
‘Would not know His ways,
And He has left them to their own.’
The unlikeness roots itself in thought, and blossoms in the poisonous flower of God-displeasing acts. It brings down upon our heads the solemn retribution of separation from Him, and being filled with the fruit of our own devices. Such is the indictment brought against every soul of man upon the earth, and there is built upon it the call to repentance and change,’ let the wicked forsake his way , and the unrighteous man his thoughts .’ The question rises in many a heart, ‘How am I to forsake these paths on which my feet have so longed walked?’ And if I do, what about all the years behind me, full of wild wanderings and thoughts in all of which God was not?
II. The second verse of our text meets that despairing question. It proclaims the elevation of God’s ways and thoughts above ours, and thereon bases the assurance of pardon.
It is a wonderful and beautiful turn which the prophet here gives to the thought of the transcendent elevation of God. The heavens are the very type of the unattainable; and to say that they are ‘higher than the earth’ seems, at first sight, to be but to say, ‘No man hath ascended into the heavens,’ and you sinful men must grovel here down upon your plain, whilst they are far above, out of your reach. But the heavens bend. They are an arch, and not a straight line. They touch the horizon; and there come from them the sweet influences of sunshine and of rain, of dew and of blessing, which bring fertility. So they are not only far and unattainable, but friendly and beneficent, and communicative of good. Like them, in true analogy but yet infinite superiority to the best and noblest in man, is the boundless mercy of our pardoning God:
‘The glorious sky, embracing all,
Is like its Maker’s love,
Wherewith encompassed, great and small
In peace and order move.’
God’s pardon is above all human example, even though, having once been received by us, it ought to become for us the pattern by which we shape and regulate our own lives. Nothing of which we have any experience in ourselves or in others is more than as a drop to the ocean compared with the absolute fulness and perfect freeness and unwearied frequency of His forgiveness. ‘He will abundantly pardon.’ He will multiply pardon. ‘With Him there is plenteous redemption.’ We think we have stretched the elasticity of long suffering and forgiveness further than we might have been reasonably expected to do if seven times we forgive the erring brother, but God’s measure of pardon is seventy times seven, two perfectnesses multiplied into themselves perfectly; for the measure of His forgiveness is boundless, and there is no searching of the depths of His pardoning mercy. You cannot weary Him out, you cannot exhaust it. It is full at the end as at the beginning; and after all its gifts still it remains true, ‘With Him is the multiplying of redemption.’
Again, God’s way of dealing with sin surpasses all our thought. All religion has been pressed with this problem, how to harmonise the perfect rectitude of the divine nature and the solemn claims of law with forgiveness. All religions have borne witness to the fact that men are dimly aware of the discord and dissonance between themselves and the divine thoughts and ways; and a thousand altars proclaim to us how they have felt that something must be done in order that forgiveness might be possible to an all-righteous and Sovereign Judge. The Jew knew that God was a pardoning God, but to him that fact stood as needing much explanation and much light to be thrown upon its relations with the solemn law under which he lived. We have Jesus Christ. The mystery of forgiveness is solved, in so far as it is capable of solution, in Him and in Him alone. His death somewhat explains how God is just and the Justifier of him that believeth. High above man’s thoughts this great central mystery of the Gospel rises, that with God there is forgiveness and with God there is perfect righteousness. The Cross as the basis of pardon is the central mystery of revelation; and it is not to be expected that our theories shall be able to sound the depths of that great act of the divine love. Perhaps our plummets do not go to the bottom of the bottomless after all; but is it needful that we should have gone to the rim of the heavens, and round about it on the outside, before we rejoice in the sunshine? Is it needful that we should have traversed the abysses of the heavens, and passed from star to star and told their numbers, before we can say that they are bright, or before we can walk in their light? We do not need to understand the ‘how’ in order to be sure of the fact that Christ’s death is our forgiveness. Do not be in such a hurry as some people are nowadays, to declare that the doctrine of the Cross is contrary to man’s conceptions. It surpasses them, and the very fact that it surpasses ought to stop us from pronouncing that it contradicts . ‘As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My thoughts higher than your thoughts.’
Lastly, we are taught here that God’s way of dealing with sin is the very highest point of His self-revelation. There are many glories of the divine nature set forth in all His ways, but the loftiest of them all is this, that He can neutralise and destroy the fact of man’s transgressing, wiping it out by pardon; and in the very act of pardon reconstituting in purity, and with a heart for all holiness, the sinful men whom He forgives. This is the shining apex of all that He has done, rising above creation and every other ‘way’ of His, as high as the loftiest heavens are above the earth.
Therefore, have a care of all forms of Christianity which do not put God’s pardoning mercy in the foreground. They are maimed, and in them mist and cloud have covered with a roof of doleful grey the low-lying earth, and separated it from the highest heavens. The true glory of the revelation of God gathers round that central Cross; and there, in that Man dying upon it in the dark-the sacrifice for a world’s sin-is the loftiest, most heavenly revelation of the all-revealing God. Strike out the Cross from Christianity, or weaken its aspect as a message of forgiveness and redemption, and you have quenched its brightest light, and dragged it down to be but a little higher, if any, than many another scheme of other moralists, philosophers, poets, and religious teachers. The distinctive glory of Christianity is this-it tells us how God sweeps away sin.
And so my last thought is that, if we desire to see up on the highest heavens of God’s character, we must go down into the depths of the consciousness of our own sin, and learn first, how unlike our ways and thoughts are to God, ere we can understand how high above us, and yet beneficently arching over us, are His ways and thoughts to us. We lie beneath the heavens like some foul bog full of black ooze, rotten earth and putrid water, where there is nothing green or fair. But the promise of the bending heavens, with their sweet influences, declares the possibility of reclaiming even that waste, and making it rejoice and blossom as the rose. Spread yourselves out, dear friends, in lowly submission and penitent acknowledgment beneath the all-vivifying mercy of that shining heaven of God’s pardon; and then the old promise will be fulfilled in you: ‘Truth shall spring out of the earth, and righteousness shall look down from heaven; yea, the Lord shall give that which is good, and our land’-barren and poisoned as it has been- responding to the skyey influences, ‘shall yield her increase.’
Fuente: Expositions Of Holy Scripture by Alexander MacLaren
My thoughts . . . your thoughts. Note the Introversion of the pronouns. The contrast thus emphasized is not merely holiness, but vastness.
Fuente: Companion Bible Notes, Appendices and Graphics
The Highest is the Most Forgiving
For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.Isa 55:8-9.
In this chapter we have a great evangelical discourse on the Return from Exile, which is very grandly conceived. Israel was not going back to be as before, but to become the mistress and mother of nations. Nations that knew not thee shall run unto thee because of the Lord thy God. And along with that enlarged political influence there was to be a new satisfaction of heart; in that deep hunger which cannot be appeased with bread, Gods gift would bring them rest. The promise was well-nigh inconceivable, and it was not made easier by the lowliness of the condition, for what was to ring in the full satisfaction was nothing higher or more revolutionary than obedience; all the needed changes in the mind of statesmen and in the mood of the exiled people were suspended on that. Hearken diligently unto me, saith God, and ye shall eat that which is good, hear and your soul shall live. Obedience, which, in the experience of every one has passed unrecognised a hundred times, was suddenly to work a transformation; and men, in listening, seemed to hear a fairy tale from worlds of other dimensions and powers than this, for things like that do not happen on the level of this arid and commonplace earth. To the exiles it sounded much as the preaching of the gospel sounds to some of ourselves, who do not doubt that satisfaction is a good thing, and whose heart runs out in desire for a little more worth the name; but in this sober world, where still the second best prevails, how can it be? In all our churches there are people who have settled it in their minds that, essentially, this promise is not true, but belongs to the delusive phraseology of religion where word and thing do not keep pace.
1. The glory of the preaching of a noble religion is that it bears our intellect, conscience, emotions, imagination out beyond this world, and enables us to realise another scheme of powers than our senses have discovered; and that is what the prophet here attempts. Where mans faith was hindered he thrusts in the bare assertion that Gods thoughts and ways are not like ours. If things are really of the size and force which commonly are attributed to them there would be no room for a gospel to work; but then the world is built in Gods way; it is a grander world than we yet have dreamed, with secrets of power yet unexplored. There are height and depth within it, and what we count impossible is possible with God.1 [Note: W. M. Macgregor, Jesus Christ the Son of God, p. 91.] My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are my ways your ways.
2. The consideration that Gods nature is unlike to ours, that His thoughts are not as mans thoughts, His ways not as mans ways, is adduced, in the passage immediately before us, as a reason why a sinful being should have all the more hope for mercy at His hands. But there is a point of view from which we must hold the very opposite of this proposition to be the truth. Neither morality nor religion would be possible if, deeper than any dissimilarity, there were not a real and essential likeness between Gods nature and ours. Morality is not obedience to an arbitrary authority, but sympathy with the principle or spirit of Gods law. Religion is the communion of the soul with God, but betwixt beings absolutely unlike there could be no communion. It is just because Gods nature is essentially one with oursHis that of the Father of spirits, ours that of spirits made in His own image, after His own likeness; it is because what we call thought, intelligence, mind, is in essence the same in God and in usin Him the infinite thought or reason, in us that of beings to whom the inspiration of the Almighty hath given understanding; it is, finally, because when I say, God is Love, I can ascribe to Him as that which constitutes the deepest essence of His nature that same feeling which binds human hearts together, and, as by a hidden yet all-powerful solvent, melts their separateness into unity;in one word, it is because in the profoundest sense of the words, Gods thoughts are as our thoughts, and Gods ways as our ways, that we can understand the revelation He has given of His will, and enter into that spiritual fellowship with Him in which true religion consists.1 [Note: John Caird.]
Let us accordingly consider (1) the Likeness of Gods Ways to ours, and (2) their Unlikeness.
I
The Likeness of Gods Thoughts and Ways to Ours
1. If our thoughts were not in a measure like Gods thoughts, we should know nothing about Him. If our thoughts were not like Gods thoughts, we should have no standard for life or thinking. Righteousness and beauty and truth and goodness are the same things in heaven and earth, and alike in God and man. We are made after His image, poor creatures though we be; and though there must ever be a gulf of unlikeness, which we cannot bridge, between the thoughts of Him whose knowledge has no growth or uncertainty, whose wisdom is infinite and all whose nature is boundless light, and our knowledge, and must ever be a gulf between the workings and ways of Him who works without effort, and knows neither weariness nor limitation, and our work, so often foiled, so always toilsome, yet in all the unlikeness there is (and no man can denude himself of it) a likeness to the Father. For the image in which God made man at the beginning is not an image that it is in the power of man to cast away, and in the worst of his corruptions and the widest of his departures he still bears upon him the signs of likeness to Him that created him. The coin is rusty, battered, defaced; but still legible are the head and the writing. Whose image and superscription hath it? Render unto God the things that are declared to be Gods, because they bear His likeness and are stamped with His signature.
The word thought would have no more meaning for me than the words red or green to a man born blind, if it were not that I have the key to it in the principle of thought or intelligence within me, and that when anything is asserted or denied of the thoughts of God, the proposition is intelligible only because it tacitly implies that thought in God is essentially the same with that which I call thought in me.1 [Note: John Caird.]
2. All knowledge of Divine things begins in a sense of our kinship with God. It is impossible to gain any strong, soul-dominating impression of the Eternal unless we recognise that in the stupendous presence which fills heaven and earth, there is a centre of personal consciousness, not unlike that upon which the sense of our identity rests. God thinks His counsels, chooses His lines of action, loves, and also welcomes the love which is offered to Him, according to the self-same scheme upon which human nature is constituted, and its functions proceed.
This opening up of the mind of God to the mind of man, with the very assurance that, worms of the dust though we be, we are reading the thoughts and exploring the ways of the Creator, is at once the starting-point and the goal of all human knowledge, in the treasure of history, the consecration of science and philosophy, the inspiration of religion natural and revealed, so that whoever cuts off this intercourse between God and man, through the manifestation of His very mind and heart to us, involves all things in darkness, and covers us with the shadow of death.
This is the method of the Old Testament, and Jesus also followed it. We see it in His parabolic teaching, which rests on the assumption that, as the Son of Sirach says, all things are double one against another, and the spiritual world the counterpart of the natural, as Mrs. Browning says,
Consummating its meaning, rounding all
To justice and perfection, line by line,
Form by form, nothing single nor alone,
The great below clenched by the great above.
And we see it also in the name which He gave to God. He called Him the heavenly Father, and I like to regard this as a reminiscence of His sweet and happy childhood in the house of the carpenter of Nazareth. The Evangelist describes Joseph as a righteous man, and the term means rather, in Biblical phraseology, a kindly man, as St. Chrysostom explains it, kind and sweetly reasonable ( ). Jesus remembered gratefully the fatherly goodness which had sheltered and sustained His helpless childhood, and, searching the whole domain of human experience, He could discover no fitter emblem of the infinite goodness of God.1 [Note: D. Smith in Religion and the Modern World, p. 188.]
3. With respect to the very matter of Divine forgiveness of which the text particularly treats, and which it seems to represent as altogether different from human forgiveness, the Bible is full of representations which seem to imply the very reverse. When it is declared that As a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth them that fear Him; when it is said, If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask Him; when we are told to pray, Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors; and when our Lord sets forth as the type of that love and tenderness which, in our furthest aberrations from goodness, God bears to us, the love which no ingratitude has been able to exhaust, no depth of infamy to render hopeless of its object, the mingled sorrow and pity and joy of an earthly father over his prodigal yet penitent childwhat have we in all this if not the assurance that we may know God by human analogies, that if we would learn what love and pity and forgiveness are in Gods heart, we have only to look into our own; so that, even as regards that very characteristic of the Divine nature of which the text treats, there is a sense in which we must not deny, but assert, that Gods thoughts are as our thoughts, and Gods ways as our ways.
I was told once of an old man in a Yorkshire village, whose son had been a sore grief to him. One day a neighbour inquired how the lad was doing. Oh, very bad! was the answer. Hes been drinking again, and behaving very rough. Dear, dear! said the neighbour. If he was my son, I would turn him out. Yes, returned the father, and so would I, if he was yours. But, you see, hes not yours; hes mine.2 [Note: Ibid. p. 189.]
Think of the parable of the Prodigal Son, or that great saying of His, that triumphant argument a fortiori: What man is there of you, who, if his son shall ask him for a loaf, will give him a stone; or if he shall ask for a fish, will give him a serpent? If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father which is in heaven give good things to them that ask Him? (Mat 7:9-11). The postulate here and everywhere in our Lords teaching is the kinship between God and man and the consequent reasonableness of interpreting the Divine by the human. As Browning has it:
Take all in a word: the truth in Gods breast
Lies trace for trace upon ours impressed:
Though He is so bright and we so dim,
We are made in His image to witness Him.
II
The Unlikeness of Gods Thoughts and Ways to Ours
We have not gone far in our search for God before we feel the check-rein and are constrained to admit that, whilst there are points of contact between His being and ours, there are also points of enormous dissimilarity. We have worked from the scale of the dwarf, and the larger mensuration is beyond us. There is a basis for common fellowship in the elemental truths which arise from these methods of comparison: but we must not make God according to a petty, mundane ground-plan and transfer the limitations of human life and character to His incomparable person and government.
1. Gods ways and thoughts are unlike ours in their superhuman perfection. The whole Bible is but an expansion of one sentence, one utterance of the Eternal, I am Jehovah. Hence the revelation must be incomplete; for who could fully reveal Himself to His creatures would be no God; and it must also be astonishing and amazing; for a professed record of any part of Gods thoughts and ways that did not land in mystery and tend to wonder would be self-condemned, and proved to be neither true nor Divine. It is not only here and there that Gods thoughts and ways are superhuman, but throughout, just as a circle is everywhere a circle, and nowhere a square, or capable of being reduced to the latter figure. How man can at all lay hold of God, or, with his infinite and infinitely inferior mental faculties, frame any conception of Him, this is the wonder and has sometimes been the stumbling-block of philosophy; and it is only removed out of the way by devoutly and thankfully accepting the fact that we do know Him (though darkly), and are so far made in His image, that there may be and ought to be reverential contact and communion with Him.
Gods method of teaching us would not be by a revelation if the finite could adjust itself at once to the infinite mind. In a revelation we have presented to us some of the unassimilated disparities between Gods thoughts and ways and those of His creature man. Without realising it we verge upon the impiety of assuming that God has nothing to teach us, and that we may have something to teach Him. You do not hope to master Newtons Principia with as much ease as you grasp snippets of toothsome frivolities in the columns of the daily press. You ought not to think the Most High as easy to understand as a plain, plodding, transparent neighbour. Is it seemly to expect that the Mighty God will adopt our methods and put Himself into step for all time with the dwarfs of earth? This gross, phenomenal self-complacency, this thrice-assured infallibility, proof against all doubt of itself, is an offence. God does sometimes bow the heavens and strangely condescend to our infirmity, but it would be a poor kindness to us if He were to make those infirmities, rather than His own higher thoughts and surpassing ways, the limit of His self-revelations and the bounds of our destiny. We are not slowly evolving ourselves into the knowledge of God, but God is meeting us with a vast body of truth concerning His being and His providential ways, the vaster part of which yet remains to be touched and assimilated.
Our nature may be like Gods, but it is not the measure of Gods. Even one human being is often a mystery to another. The words and actions of one who is far in advance of us in wisdom and goodness are often unintelligible to us. It is the penalty of greatness to lose the sympathy of meaner men. A great man is indeed the exponent of the truest spirit of humanity, but for that very reason he is often misunderstood by the men among whom he lives. His motives are purer, his aims nobler, his actions determined by wider principles, his whole career in life regulated by ideas more far-reaching and comprehensive than those of ordinary men. And so, just for this very reason that he is truer to the perfect ideal of humanity than they, it may be said that His thoughts are not as their thoughts, nor His ways as their ways. Much more, obviously, must this be said of Him whose image and goodness are infinite. Man is made in the image of God, but God is not the reflection of imperfect man. There is much in us and in all our thoughts and ways which we cannot transfer to Him, and if we attempt to do so, we only ascribe to the object of worship, as has often been done, our human weakness and errors, sometimes even our follies and crimes.1 [Note: John Caird.]
2. They are unlike in their comprehensiveness. It is a wonderful and beautiful turn which the prophet here gives to the thought of the transcendent elevation of God. The heavens are the very type of the unattainable; and to say that they are higher than the earth seems, at first sight, to be but to say, No man hath ascended into the heavens, and you sinful men must grovel here down upon your plain, whilst they are far above, out of your reach. But the heavens bend. They are an arch, and not a straight line. They touch the horizon; and there come down from them the sweet influences of sunshine and rain, of dew and of blessing, which bring fertility. So they are not only far and unattainable, but friendly and beneficent, and communicative of good. Like them, in true analogy but yet infinite superiority to the best and noblest in man, is the boundless mercy of our pardoning God:
The glorious sky, embracing all,
Is like its Makers love,
Wherewith encompassed, great and small
In peace and order move.
The lesson is one of humility, but also of consolation; for the depths of Gods mind are depths of truth, of wisdom, and of love; and therefore we may be not only cast down, but also lifted up as we study in this lofty chapter these great words: For My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways My ways, saith the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways, and My thoughts than your thoughts.2 [Note: J. Cairns.]
3. They are unlike in their moral and intellectual estimates. Can we estimate the moral difference between the human and the Divine? God spends the incomputable term of His eternal Being in ministries of unwearied grace,upholding the weak, doing good to all, setting forth in mighty deeds His truth and righteousness, so proving within Himself that it is more blessed to give than to receive; whilst we, though outwardly blameless, have spent much of our time in gathering for self-enrichment, taking toll of our neighbours, asserting our place in the world, bringing others into captivity to our will. And, compressed as we are into moral dwarfishness by the traditions of an imperfect society, we think a selfish scheme of life quite defensible. The Divine nature, like a fountain, is ever pouring itself forth in benediction, without taint of self or stain of darkness; whilst human nature is a turgid, devouring whirlpool, sucking down into its depths whatever may chance to drift within its range. When we think and act, we are weighted by the incubus of past aggressiveness and dishonour; but when God thinks and acts, His character of age-long goodness uplifts all His ideals beyond the uttermost heights.
How vast is the difference even among men in this respect. The ideas of James Chalmers, the apostle of New Guinea, and of the cannibals who clubbed and ate him, were not made of the same stuff. General Gordon and the Arab slave-raiders, whose power he set himself to break up, thought in divergent grooves and represented antagonistic schemes. The philanthropist who founds a Garden City and the pitiless Shylock who rackrents a slum have antithetic views of life because of the contrasted types of character which give impact to their notions. The passions cooped up in our close criminal communities do not produce rare art, seraphic music, supreme literature. The dreams flitting through Pentonville, Dartmoor, or Broadmoor brains, and the dreams cherished in a Peace Congress, would make books for different sections if written down and presented to a library.1 [Note: T. G. Selby, The Strenuous Gospel, p. 12.]
In the early years of the last century Walter Scott, poet and novelist, took a voyage round the north and west coasts of Scotland in company with Stevenson, the lighthouse constructor. Scott went for pleasure, and wherever they landed spent his time in visiting ruined castles, talking with the old gossips of the hamlets and picking up local traditions, which he afterwards wove into his fascinating stories. Stevenson was sent out by Trinity House to survey the coast, mark out dangerous reefs, and choose the best sites for lighthouses. Scott landed when the weather was fair and the sea smooth. His friend faced the gales in open boats, visited jagged rocks over which the surf boiled, and braved countless dangers, because he was commissioned to find out where warning beacons must be fixed and lighthouses placed, and how in the coming generations imperilled lives could be saved. When the storm outside shakes doors and windows we sit by the fireside deriving pleasure from the wizards books; but the seaman battling with the waves finds salvation through the thought and work of the romance writers comrade. The two men were the best of friends, and as they met day by day had many interests in common. But their thoughts ran in different directions because the one had no responsibilities and was catering for the tastes of his admiring readers, whilst the other bore upon his soul a great burden of human life. Their paths diverged, for their duties varied and their minds were acting in different grooves. God thinks with the burdens of a doomed race resting upon His soul of love, and acts to ransom them from the power of destruction. His thoughts and ways are beyond ours, even as the heavens are higher than the earth.1 [Note: T. G. Selby, The Strenuous Gospel, p. 15.]
4. More particularly Gods thoughts and ways are unlike ours in their estimate of sin.
1. God knows us more thoroughly than any human being can. The estimate which a human censor forms of us is not based on any immediate knowledge, but is an inference from our outward conduct and bearing. But this estimate may easily be an erroneous one, inasmuch as our actions may only partially betray us, may in many ways be an inadequate or deceptive expression of character. Would any of us like that a human eye should read our thoughts and feelings, draw back the curtain of reserve, of conventional propriety, of decorous looks and regulated speech, and see our undisguised selves for a single day? Would there be nothing to abate the observers good opinion of us, nothing revealed which neither our words nor deeds nor outward aspect betrays? We do not need to speak of concealed sins or crimes, the facts of which are unknown to the world, and which, if they were known would brand our name with dishonour and infamy; for in so far as these things are concealed, it is obviously nothing in the nature of human actions themselves but only in the accident of their being unobserved or undetected, that makes a man seem in the eyes of men better than he is, and gains him exemption from shame and censure. But what needs more reflection is that from the very nature of the thing there is much in a mans outward character and spirit that never comes above-board, or only partially and fitfully, and which cannot form an element in the judgment of those who measure us only by overt acts. There is an inner life which no mortal eye sees, a great hidden element of character seething beneath the surface, which only the occasional outflash or unexpected outbreak betrays. There are, for instance, lurking in many a mans nature evil tendencies which lack of opportunity has kept latent. The unregulated appetite, the secret lust, the cowardice, covetousness, or malignity, the frail virtue which, if but the hour of opportunity came, would present but a feeble front to temptation, may be there within the mans breast; but the conditions that would convert inclination into action have been lacking, and like the latent disease that has not become active, or the subterranean fire-damp which the flame has never reached, it lies harmless and hidden from observation.
If there be an inspection which is intercepted by no softening veil, before which all disguise and ambiguity are gone, which sees us through and through; if there be a moral estimate which takes into account all that men are and have been and donesecrets which perhaps have never been told, burdens of guilt that have been borne for years in silent anguish, smouldering tendencies to vice, unhallowed passions straining against the leash of self-control and social propriety, every rude, bad thought, every impure imagination, every meanness and weakness, every act of cowardly silence or sham disinterestednessif, I say, there be a moral Judge before the broad, unshaded, piercing light of whose inspection all that we are is thus laid bare; and if betwixt him and a fellow man a sin-stained soul had its choice who should be its judge, by whose decision its fate should be determined, might we not deem it impossible to hesitate for a moment? I can bear, might he not well say, mans inspection, but not Gods; before the tribunal of a mortal there is room for hope, but what hope or help can there be for a guilty soul at the bar of the Omniscient? Let me fall into the hands of man and not into the hands of God, for His thoughts are not as mans thoughts, nor His ways as mans ways.
And yet it is just because Gods thoughts and ways are not as mans, because His righteousness is infinitely exalted above mans that therefore the unrighteous may return unto the Lord with the assurance that He will have mercy upon him, and to our God with the confidence that He will abundantly pardon.1 [Note: John Caird.]
Undoubtedly a man naturally knows that sin is an evil, and without this knowledge, indeed, he would be incapable of committing sin, since in any action a man is guilty only of the evil which his conscience apprehends. But this natural perception of sin is more or less confused and indistinct. Our Saviour on the Cross prayed for His murderers in these words: Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do. He did not mean that they were ignorant that they were doing wrong, for then they could have needed no forgiveness, but that they did not realise the full atrocity of the deed. They were acting guiltily indeed, but inadvertently and blindly. And the same may be said of very many sinners. Sin is for the most part a leap in the dark. A man knows he is doing a dangerous thing, but he does not realise the full danger. He does not take in the full scope of his action, nor its complete consequences. St. Paul speaks of the deceitfulness of sin, and the expression describes very well the source of that disappointment and unhappiness which often overtakes the transgressor, when he finds himself involved in difficulties from which it is all but impossible to extricate himself, and sorrows which he never anticipated. It is the old story. Sin beginneth pleasantly, but in the end it will bite like a snake and will spread abroad poison like a serpent.
2. God is more angry than we are. In God there is an immitigable abhorrence and hatred of evil, to which, in our keenest moments of aggrieved sensibility, we only faintly approximate. The easy, good-natured divinity who makes everything comfortable is not the God of the Bible. There He has a frowning as well as a smiling face, an aspect, not of feeble benignity, but of terror and wrath and relentless hostility to evil and evil doers. If mercy mean foregoing just indignation and letting off from punishment, then there is no mercy in God. He is the most merciless, relentless, inexorable of all beings. If sin and misery were disconnected, if in all the universe one selfish soul could ever escape wretchedness and live on at peace, it would be a universe over which God had ceased to rule. Wherever a sinful soul exists in all time and space, there, sooner or later, in its loneliness and anguish, as of a worm that dieth not and a fire that is not quenched, there is the proof that the justice of God demands, and will not abate aught of its terrible satisfaction.
Frankly we have to recognise that there are two ways of it, two measurings of the value of things, two views of life; and, soon or late, we must make our choice of this or that. The common temptation is to shirk the choice. Within the Church of Jesus are multitudes of entirely worldly people, whose standard and aim are of this world. They live themselves, and they teach their children to live, under the domination of the ideas of society, and yet they never doubt that they are good Christians. If we believe Christ, that cannot be; the man who heard but did not do seemed to Him like a man building a house without a foundation, which topples about him. We learn in life that there is a religion which is not Christs religion. In our churches there is a veiled paganism, hard, scornful, unforgiving, fashion-ridden, and the mischief of it lies not in what these people do so much as in what they think; and in returning to God the first necessity is that they forsake their thoughts.
There is nothing more false and immoral than the weak, sentimental tenderness with which crime and criminals are sometimes regarded. It is a spurious benignity that always recoils from severity, shrinks from the sight of pain, and would treat vice and crime as a thing to be wept over with effusive sensibility and not to be sternly condemned and punished. The hysteric cry for remission of a criminals sentence that occasionally bursts forth from foolish women and still more foolish men, has in it nothing of the spirit of true Christian charity.
Branger speaks of the God of good-natured folk, a God not unreasonably strict, who can, on occasion, be blind to human slips; and in Christian churches many prayers are addressed to that Dieu des bons gens. The trouble is that, when penalty begins to press, these people have no faith to help them. A God who does not make too much of little sins they can understand, but a God who forgives, when the sin is very great, passes all their comprehension; and when the evil days come they are left without a hope.1 [Note: W. M. Macgregor, Jesus Christ the Son of God, p. 93.]
5. But the purpose of the prophet in telling us that Gods thoughts and Gods ways are higher than ours is that He may give us to understand His readiness to forgive. We may turn the words about in many ways and put meanings into them, but what was first in the prophets intention was to assert that God forgives, as He does all else, on a large scale.
The for at the beginning of each clause points us back to the previous statement, and both of the verses of our text are in different ways its foundation. And what has preceded is this: Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts: and let him return unto the Lord, and he will have mercy upon him; and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon. That is why the prophet dilates upon the difference between the thoughts and the ways of God and men.
We may not say that God forgives just as man forgives, that mercy goes forth from Him towards the offender in the same measure and for the same reasons as mercy from man to his offending brother. It is possible for man to be cruel when God is kind, and to be weakly lenient where God is stern. There are occasions when the culprit might hope for escape were men alone his judge; there are occasions when, shrinking from the merciless censure of human judges, the sinful soul might well cry out, Let me now fall into the hand of the Lord; for very great are His mercies: but let me not fall into the hand of man.
(1) In the first place, it may be observed that, contrary to what might be supposed, it is not in point of fact, even amongst men, the best and purest who are found to be the severest censors and judges of others.
Thy mercy greater is than any sin,
Thy greatness none can comprehend:
Wherefore, O Lord, let me Thy mercy win,
Whose glorious name no time can ever end:
Wherefore I say all praise belongs to Thee,
Whom I beseech be merciful to me.1 [Note: William Byrd, Psalms, Sonnets, and Songs.]
And if, thus, human goodness is the more merciful in proportion as it approaches nearer to perfection, if amongst the highest, heavenliest spirituality is the most tolerant, the last to let go the fallen or to lose its faith in human goodness, and the possibility for the worst of better things,might we not conclude that when goodness becomes absolutely perfect, just then will mercy reach its climax and become absolutely unlimited?
2. Again, in proof of the assertion that Gods nature, in so far as it differs from mans, makes Him more and not less likely to forgive, consider that in God there is not, and cannot be, any personal irascibility or resentment; He can never regard a sinful soul with any feeling of vindictiveness, any desire to extract from His sufferings reparation for wrong. There are certain defective theological notions according to which the relations of sinful man to God have been represented as turning on the principle of what is called vindictive justice, and the so-called scheme of redemption as based on the necessity of extracting from suffering, reparation for wrong. Now, there may be a true notion which men try thus to express, but the form in which they express it is erroneous and unworthy. In God, and therefore in that moral order of the world which is the expression of His nature, there is no vindictiveness, no personal resentment; and it is the utter absence of this in His nature that makes Him infinitely more forgiving than men, even the best of men, are.
Conceive for a moment what a change would take place in our relations to those who offend or injure us, how far it would go to the removal of everything that hinders forgiveness, if we could eliminate from our feelings every vestige of what is due to personal irritation or resentment. Conceive a man looking on all insults, wrongs, offences, with absolute, passionless indifference as regards his own personality, and contemplating them only with the pain and grief due to their moral culpability. Suppose, further, that, with a mind thus no longer agitated by personal feeling, no longer biassed by wounded self-love, he could see in the wrong or injury an evil inflicted on the wrongers own nature far greater than any inflicted on himself, the exhibition of a morally diseased spiritual state so deplorable as to swallow up every other emotion than that of profoundest sorrow and pity for his wretchedness: and so, that instead of retaliating or inflicting fresh evil upon him, or never resting till the offence should be worked out in his misery, there should arise in the injured mans breast an intense longing to cure the diseased spirit, to save him from himself and win him back to goodnessconceive such a state of mind, and though, as we depict it, it seems to imply a magnanimity and self-forgetfulness almost impossible in a being of flesh and blood, yet is it an exact representation of the heart and life of Him who was God manifest in the flesh, and therefore of the relation of God to all sinful and guilty men.
For what is the life of Christ on earth but a long, silent, immovable patience; an absolute, life-long superiority to personal feeling; a sorely-tried yet unshaken calm and freedom of spirit amidst insults and wrongs. He could feel, He could grieve, He was not incapable of anger, but where in the record of His life shall we find Him betrayed into one whisper of resentful or vindictive feeling for the ills He suffered at the hands of men? He moved through life exposed to almost ceaseless hostility, subjected to almost every form of injury that human hatred and cruelty could inflctto scorn, contumely, misrepresentation of motives, treachery, ingratitude, desertion; He was subjected to foul personal indignities, disowned and deserted by the friends He most trusted, and, in His sore need, betrayed by one of them to His enemies. The tenderest, kindest, most loving Spirit that ever breathed, He lived rejected and despised of men, and He died amidst the cries and taunts of an infuriated mob. There were moments when His personal followers, amazed at His forbearance, would have unsheathed the sword in His defence, or called down heavens artillery on His persecutors. And yet never, from first to last, can we find in His history one slightest sign of personal irritation, one transient flash of exasperated sensibility, or cry for redress of His cruel wrongs. All other feeling in His breast was swallowed up in an infinite pity and sorrow for those at whose hands He suffered. He lived their unwearied benefactor, and He died invoking, amidst the paroxysms of His agony, heavens mercy on His murderers. And in all this He was to us the manifestation of that Being into whose nature personal irascibility can never enter, who has no personality apart from goodnessthe incarnate image of that God who is long-suffering and slow to wrath, abundant in goodness and mercy, and who, exalted in the infinitude of His goodness far above the agitation of mans resentful passions, declares that as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are His thoughts above our thoughts, and His ways above our ways, and that if the wicked will forsake his way and the unrighteous man his thoughts, and return unto the Lord, He will have mercy upon him, and will abundantly pardon him.1 [Note: John Caird.]
1. Now let us look at some of the ways in which we may see that Gods pardon outreaches the thoughts and the ways of men. And, first of all, let us consider the character of the sin which had to be forgiven. Man does not forgive where he has been insulted as God was in his rebellion. Nations do not tolerate blows aimed at their independence and their very existence; and therefore mans revolt might have been expected to draw down swift and remediless destruction. We justly exalt the Fatherhood of God; but this great and glorious truth must be harmonised with the rest of Gods character, and with the conditions of the moral universe over which He presides. Sin in its very essence is a wilful attempt to dethrone, degrade, and even destroy God; and even the relation of fatherhood, with its duties to other children, may warrant and even necessitate the penal separation of the child or children, who would conspire to act out in the family, what sin is in the universe. That Gods thoughts should have been thoughts of peace, in such a crisis to a sinning world, is the wonder of unfallen beings and of those who are recovered. They cannot go back to that counsel of peace, in which, though every foreseen trespass demanded the exercise of justice, mercy yet rejoiced against judgment, without exclaiming: This is not the manner of man, O Lord God. O the depth of the riches, both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past finding out!
Wilt thou forgive that sin where I begun,
Which was my sin, though it were done before?
Wilt thou forgive that sin, through which I run
And do run still, though still I do deplore?
When thou hast done, thou hast not done;
For I have more.
Wilt thou forgive that sin which I have won
Others to sin, and made my sins their door?
Wilt thou forgive that sin which I did shun
A year or two, but wallowed in, a score?
When thou hast done, thou hast not done;
For I have more.1 [Note: John Donne.]
2. The conditions imposed.The sole and simple condition is repentancethat is to say, repentance which is renunciation. Is there anything in God which, if I now repent and turn with my whole heart to Him, bars the way to forgiveness, makes Him insist first on the satisfaction to His offended law which misery and suffering bring? Be my past life what it maywasted, mis-spent, stained with the indelible traces of selfish and evil deedsif now I break away from the past, hate it, renounce it, and in sincerest sorrow and penitence turn to offer up my soul, my life, my whole being to God, will He say: No, till vengeance for the past have its due, till the demand of my law for penal suffering be satisfied, mercy is impossible, I cannot forgive?
Is not such a thought a travesty of the nature of God, a misconception of what He, the All-good, All-loving, must regard as the sacrifice for sin that is best and truest? For what must be that sacrifice or satisfaction that is dearest to Righteousness or to the Infinite Righteous One? The misery of lost souls, the pain, the sorrow and dismay of their moral desolation, that knows no mitigation, and the smoke of a torment that rises up for ever? Oh no, offer that to Molech, but not to the God whom Christ has revealed. But the tear of penitence, the prayer of faith, the sighs of a contrite spirit, the love and hope that will not let go its hold on God, the confiding trust that from the depths of despair sends forth the cry, Father, I have sinned against heaven and before thee; the yearning after a purer, better life, that finds utterance in the prayer, Create in me a clean heart, O God; and renew a right spirit within me. Cast me not away from thy presence, and take not thy Holy Spirit from meyes, I make answer, that is the sacrifice dearest to Him who despiseth not the sighing of a broken and contrite spirit, who hath said, Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest, and whose gospel, proclaimed by the lips and sealed by the sacrifice and death of His dear Son, is but a glorious renewal of the ancient promise, Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts: and let him return unto the Lord, and he will have mercy upon him; and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon.
He discoursed with me very fervently and with great openness of heart, concerning his manner of going to God, whereof some part is related already. He told me, that all consists in one hearty renunciation of everything which we are sensible does not lead us to God, in order that we may accustom ourselves to a continual conversation with Him, without mystery and in simplicity.1 [Note: Brother Lawrence, The Practice of the Presence of God, p. 19.]
3. The measure of the forgiveness.Nothing of which we have any experience in ourselves or in others is more than as a drop to the ocean compared with the absolute fulness and perfect freeness and unwearied frequency of His forgiveness. He will abundantly pardon. He will multiply pardon. With him there is plenteous redemption. We think we have stretched the elasticity of long-suffering and forgiveness further than we might have been reasonably expected to do if seven times we forgive the erring brother, but Gods measure of pardon is seventy times seven, two perfectnesses multiplied into themselves perfectly; for the measure of His forgiveness is boundless, and there is no searching of the depths of His pardoning mercy. You cannot weary Him out; you cannot exhaust it. It is full at the end as at the beginning; and after all its gifts still it remains true, With him is the multiplying of redemption.
The fault of all our human theories about forgiveness is that, in the process of explaining, we seem to narrow it; and thus we turn back to words which are better than human, as they come from Christ Himself, when He speaks of the father, who saw his son a great way off, and ran and fell on his neck. In that there is a grand theological artlessness; it seems to say that God forgives, not because a man is sorry, or because some condition or other is satisfied, but at the bottom of all, because, in His heart, He wants His son back again. And in three successive parables Jesus declared that God knows the human joy of finding things. He will abundantly pardon.
We scarcely know what forgiveness is on earth. Even after a reconciliation relations remain clouded. Men may not quarrel, but something of the grudge remains; and if they forgive it is for once or twice, for few have patience to go with Peter to the seventh time, and then the heart, with all its gathered rancour, gets its way. Forgiveness is a hard thing, hard to bestow and hard to receive, as most of us have found; and so long as we think of God in the light of that human experience, it must be with reluctance. But His ways are not as ours; when He pardons He pardons out and out, and He does not remember our sins.1 [Note: W. M. Macgregor, Jesus Christ the Son of God, p. 95.]
We have just as much right to draw Gods natural attributes to the scale of the monad as to draw His moral attributes to the scale of a man. If God forgives at all, He will do it with God like freedom and grandeur. If He permits us to crawl across His threshold, He will not merely tolerate our return, but welcome us with music and priceless gifts. Alas! alas! we put into the matchless mind which delights in mercy poor Simon Peters thought of a forgiveness stretched and strained to seven times, whilst all the time His mercy outsoars and outspeeds ours, as the path of a sun outsoars the track of a glow-worm in the ditch. His thoughts are not bound by our petty precedents of limitation.
When Dr. Moffat began his labours in Africa, one of his earliest converts was a chief called Africaner. This Africaner was the terror of the colony. He had the ferocity of a desperado, and wherever his name was pronounced, it carried dismay. When Africaner was brought to the knowledge of the truth, it seemed such a great thing that it was described by those who knew him, as the eighth wonder of the world. But God is doing such work every day. Christ is charged to save to the uttermost. He does not improve, but renew. The stupendous thing is giving life to the dead.2 [Note: A. Philip, The Fathers Hand, p. 182.]
4. The method of it.How utterly unlike to any means of mans devising are those which God has chosen for the recovery of His lost creatures to His favour and His image! That Gods Son should become incarnate and die on the cross for the worlds redemption; that Gods Spirit should descend into the guilty and polluted hearts of sinners, and work out there a blessed transformation; and that all this should be effected by the free and sovereign grace of God Himself, and laid open to the very chief of sinners, as the unconditional gift of His love, this, as universal experience attests, is something so far from having entered into the heart of man, that it needs incessant effort to keep it before him, even after it has been once revealed.
The world had four thousand years to learn the lesson. God had made the outline of it known to His Church from the beginning. He had raised up a special people to be the depositaries of the revelation; and He had taught them by priests and prophets, by types and signs without number. And yet when redemption came, how few received it, how few understood it; so that when the Saviour was actually hanging on the Cross, and finishing the work given Him to do, it is questionable, if so much as one, even of His own disciples, comprehended the design, or saw the glory of His sacrifice.
We cannot believe God gave His only begotten Son for the spiritual healing and salvation of His enemies, since such an act would be impossible to us. No hero of whom we have read or heard is equal to a like sacrifice. It defies probabilities. Is not this a sign that the Gospel, and the message within it, was thought out in a mind transcending ours, and the way of the Cross was a way suggested by no analogies of history.
All religion has been pressed with this problem, how to harmonise the perfect rectitude of the Divine nature and the solemn claims of law with forgiveness. All religions have borne witness to the fact that men are dimly aware of the discord and dissonance between themselves and the Divine thoughts and ways; and a thousand altars proclaim to us how they have felt that something must be done in order that forgiveness might be possible to an all righteous and Sovereign Judge. The Jew knew that God was a pardoning God, but to him that fact stood as needing much explanation and much light to be thrown upon its relations with the solemn law under which he lived. We have Jesus Christ. The mystery of forgiveness is solved, in so far as it is capable of solution, in Him and in Him alone. His death somewhat explains how God is just and the justifier of him that believeth. High above mens thoughts this great central mystery of the Gospel rises, that with God there is forgiveness and with God there is perfect righteousness.
When my thoughts about life are put away that I may get Gods thoughts, Christ becomes the gift of Gods heart to me, a Deliverer in whom the power of my new life consists, an Enlightener from whom I learn to think of God and man. If any man be in Christ, says Paul, he is a new creature: old things have passed away, behold they have become new. His former judgments, his estimate of great and small are changed; he finds himself in a new washen earth. It is no power of earth that can work a change like that, but the redeeming will of God, who is able also to subdue all things unto Himself.1 [Note: W. M. Macgregor, Jesus Christ the Son of God, p. 100.]
Enough, my muse, of earthly things,
And inspirations but of wind;
Take up thy lute, and to it bind
Loud and everlasting strings,
And on them play, and to them sing,
The happy mournful stories,
The lamentable glories
Of the great crucified King!
Mountainous heap of wonders! which dost rise
Till earth thou joinest with the skies!
Too large at bottom, and at top too high,
To be half seen by mortal eye;
How shall I grasp this boundless thing?
What shall I play? What shall I sing?
Ill sing the mighty riddle of mysterious love,
Which neither wretched man below, nor blessed spirits above,
With all their comments can explain,
How all the whole worlds life to die did not disdain!2 [Note: Abraham Cowley.]
The Highest is the Most Forgiving
Literature
Baker (F. A.), Sermons, 329.
Cairns (J.), Christ the Morning Star, 140.
Candlish (J.), The Gospel of Forgiveness, 264.
Craufurd (A. H.), Enigmas of the Spiritual Life, 232.
Davies (T.), Sermons, ii. 106.
Edmunds (L.), Sunday by Sunday, 63.
Hall (E. H.), Discourses, 1.
Henson (H. H.), Westminster Sermons, 269.
Keble (J.), Sermons for the Christian Year, ChristmasEpiphany 27.
Macgregor (W. M.), Jesus Christ the Son of God, 90.
Maclaren (A.), Expositions, Isaiah xlix.lxvi. 152.
Philip (A.), The Fathers Hand, 179.
Sandford (C. W.), Counsels to English Churchmen Abroad, 1.
Selby (T. G.), The Strenuous Gospel, 1.
Smellie (A.), In the Secret Place, 212.
Spurgeon (C. H.), Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, xii. No. 676; xxiii. No. 1387; xxxvi. No. 2181.
Talbot (E. S.), Sermons at Southwark, 71.
Wilmot Buxton (H. J.), Mission Sermons for a Year, 99.
Wilson (J. M.), Clifton College Sermons, i. 234.
Wilson (J. M.), Rochdale Sermons, 271.
Religion and the Modern World, 188.
Christian World Pulpit, ix. 13 (Beecher); xxv. 106 (Beecher); xli. 33 (Bradley); lviii. 279 (Horton); lxxiii. 65 (Henson).
Clergymans Magazine, xii. 23 (Straton).
Contemporary Pulpit, 2nd Ser., i. 45 (Candlish).
Expository Times, iii. 298.
Fuente: The Great Texts of the Bible
2Sa 7:19, Psa 25:10, Psa 40:5, Psa 92:5, Pro 21:8, Pro 25:3, Jer 3:1, Eze 18:29, Dan 4:37, Hos 14:9
Reciprocal: Gen 18:30 – General 1Sa 16:7 – seeth not 2Ki 5:11 – Behold 1Ch 17:4 – tell Psa 33:11 – thoughts Psa 139:17 – precious Pro 8:12 – I wisdom Pro 15:29 – he heareth Pro 17:15 – that justifieth Pro 21:18 – wicked Ecc 7:24 – General Isa 30:18 – therefore Isa 40:28 – no searching Jer 29:11 – I know Hos 11:9 – for Mic 4:12 – they know Mat 7:11 – how Luk 4:25 – many Luk 19:25 – Lord Joh 11:6 – he abode Rom 5:15 – But not
Fuente: The Treasury of Scripture Knowledge
Isa 55:8. For my thoughts are not your thoughts, &c. My disposition and way differ vastly from yours. If any man injure you, especially if he do it greatly and frequently, you are slow and backward to forgive him. But I am ready to forgive all true penitents, how many, and great, and numberless soever their sins be; and my promises of mercy and pardon shall be infallibly made good to them: and therefore you need not fear to come to me, or question but you shall find mercy and acceptance with me.
Fuente: Joseph Bensons Commentary on the Old and New Testaments
55:8 For my {l} thoughts [are] not your thoughts, neither [are] your ways my ways, saith the LORD.
(l) Although you are not soon reconciled one to another and judge me by yourselves, yet I am easy to be reconciled, yea, I offer my mercies to you.
Fuente: Geneva Bible Notes
Sinners need to forsake their ways and thoughts (actions and attitudes, Isa 55:7) because they are not God’s ways and thoughts. God’s way is forgiveness and His thoughts are compassionate (Isa 55:7), as far different from those of sinners as the heavens are higher than the earth. Sinners must make a break with their thoughts and ways to have fellowship with a holy God. The Servant’s work makes relationship with a holy God possible, but our work, having appropriated the Servant’s work by faith, makes intimate fellowship with a holy God possible.