W HEN the Psalmist asked of God, “What is man, that Thou art mindful of him? and the son of man that Thou visitest him?” it was an excla knew and marveled that man was in God’s mind. For that is what the word mindful means, to be fixed in the mind. The whole Bible teaches this, that man is fixed in God’s mind, that God finds it forever impossible to forget him. The only eccentricity of the great God is His strange weakness for the human race. Among the things which may be known in the universe, the irrational persistence of God’s love for men is surely one of the hardest to understand. It can be justified before human reason only by supposing that in some mysterious way man became lodged in God’s heart, woven into the emotional life of the Creator so completely and so inextricably that for God there is no deliverance. Forever and forever man is in His heart, and the pains and agonies through which He has passed in effecting redemption are but normal consequences of this solemn entwinement of the heart of God with the soul of man. It is a moving and an awesome sight to behold God caught in the sweet, painful meshes of His ancient love, wrestling on toward the time when a ransomed race can stand before Him unabashed by any remaining traces of sin. Hurt, wounded by man’s ingratitude, pressed under the woe of his treachery and sin, but held by a love that will not let Him go, a love reasonless and vast, deeper than hell and older than the world: that is God as the Bible presents Him. God has said, “Yet will I not forget thee,” and this is not beyond our power to understand. No one can forget love. As long as love remains it will be remembered. We forget only when love is no more. God’s unremitting love which has been ever of old is sufficient guarantee that we can never be forgotten, that He will never lose us amid the vasty spaces nor overlook us among the com plexities of His million worlds. Love, faithful love, will recall us to His mind. And if we cannot forget love, neither can we forget pain. The pain in God’s heart will not permit Him to forget the unhappy race of men. No one forgets pain. God is not at peace while man is in his sin. “All day long,” said God to Israel, "I have stretched forth my hands unto a disobedient and gainsaying people.” What is this but the picture of a father, beside himself with grief, pleading with a loved but wayward son? This pain in God’s heart allows Him no ease, but moves Him constantly to restless labor and eager toil. Out of His pain flow His mercy and all the acts of grace with which He has surrounded the feet of His people. It is impossible to conceive of any external force which could compel God to do what He did, and is con stantly doing, for our salvation. The compulsion comes DECEMBER, 1946
from within the deeps of His own nature. Man in God’s mind is the pain in God’s heart. .The consequences we have seen at Bethlehem, at Calvary and the empty tomb. “Thou art mindful of him ... Thou visitest him.” These bear to each other a cause-and-effect relationship. The one is father to the other. Because man was in God’s mind, God visited him. Only this will account for the man Christ Jesus. Remember, I do not say explain Him, but account for Him. There is no explaining Him, as there is no explaining life or love or God Himself. He escapes through our theological nets and rises above our doctrinal formulas. But He can be accounted for. The pain in God’s heart accounts for Him. Love required that He seek and save that which was lost, and He obeyed the resistless compulsion by "visiting” us in the likeness of human flesh. A brief visit it was when seen against the background of the ages, a short thirty-three years, yet in that time He managed to do three mighty works of love, the works of a God indeed: Incarnation, Atonement, Resurrection, these three, the glory and hope of mankind, if unbeliev ing men could only know it. This is the true meaning of Christmas, God obeying the pain in His mind and the love in His heart. When this beautiful and solemn truth is known, how empty seem the tawdry celebrations and the tinseled excesses commonly associated with the Christmas season. Civi lized man, with his genius for extravagance and bad taste, has made of that holy visit of God a cheap and vulgar carnival, and the merchants of the earth have been quick to turn the whole gaudy business into hard cash. Yet the very sin that thus perverts a holy act is one of the causes of God’s pain, of His coming to the earth to dwell in mortal flesh. Our sin, gross and shock ing as it must be to a holy being, did not repulse Him; rather it drew Him to us as the burning fever in the veins of a child but draws the mother nearer in tenderest solicitude. Man in God’s mind, I say, accounts for the Babe of Bethlehem, the Lamb of Calvary and all the deeds of love and grace that came between. He carried a wounded heart within Him before ever they pierced Him with a spear. He groaned for our sins long before they nailed Him on the tree. He walked among us a God in pain, a Man possessed, and His love and His pain determined His attitude toward the whole race of men. The cross was always before Him. Whichever road He took, the cross was at the end of it. There was no escape from that pain, but a greater pain drove Him toward it. There will come a day when the work of love will be done. Till that day arrives He must toil on. The same love that motivated His earthly life is in His heart still to keep Him at work till the last straying sheep has been brought in. If we cannot understand it, we can yet be rich in the knowledge that it is true. 9
mation of wonder, not a request for information. He
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