July 13th
…but Hezekiah had interceded for them, saying, “May the good LORD provide atonement on behalf of whoever sets his whole heart on seeking God, even though not according to the purification rules of the sanctuary.”
2 Chronicles 30:18-19 (HCSB)
Whatever belonging to the region of thought and feeling is uttered in words, is of necessity uttered imperfectly…
Our Lord had no design of constructing a system of truth in intellectual forms. The truth of the moment in its relation to him, The Truth, was what he spoke. He spoke out of a region of realities which he knew could only be suggested—not represented—in the forms of intellect and speech. With vivid flashes of life and truth his words invade our darkness, rousing us with sharp stings of light to will our awaking, to arise from the dead and cry for the light which he can give.
How, then, must the truth fare with those who build intellectual systems upon the words of our Lord, or of his disciples? A little child would better understand Plato than they St. Paul. The meaning in those great hearts who knew our Lord is too great to enter theirs. The sense they find in the words must be a sense small enough to pass through their narrow doors. And if mere words, without the interpreting sympathy, may mean, as they may, almost anything the receiver will or can attribute to them, how shall the man, bent at best on the salvation of his own soul, understand, for instance, the meaning of that apostle who was ready to encounter banishment itself from the presence of Christ, that the beloved brethren of his nation might enter in? To men who are not simple, simple words are the most inexplicable of riddles.
If we are bound to search after what our Lord means —and he speaks that we may understand— we are at least equally bound to refuse any interpretation which seems to us unlike him, unworthy of him. To accept that as the will of our Lord which to us is inconsistent with what we have learned to worship in him already, is to introduce discord into that harmony whose end is to unite our hearts, and make them whole.
Words for their full meaning depend upon their source, the person who speaks them. An utterance may even seem commonplace, till you are told that thus spoke one whom you know to be always thinking, always feeling, always acting. Recognizing the mind whence the words proceed, you know the scale by which they are to be understood. So the words of God cannot mean just the same as the words of man. “Can we not, then, understand them?” Yes, we can understand them—we can understand them more than the words of men. Whatever a good word means, as used by a good man, it means just infinitely more as used by God. And the feeling or thought expressed by that word takes higher and higher forms in us as we become capable of understanding him,—that is, as we become like him.
from George MacDonald’s Unspoken Sermons (Vol. 1, It Shall Not Be Forgiven)
Magnify by We Are Messengers
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