The G. Campbell Morgan Archive

II. MAN IGNORANT OF GOD THROUGH SIN
HILE the attack of evil was directed finally towards the capture of human will, the method of approach was that of suggesting the possibility of a development of the intellect. By the assertion of the right to exercise the will outside all limitation, it was declared that man should know. In his attempt to grasp knowledge, man alienated himself from the light of fellowship with God, and thus his intelligence was darkened and dwarfed, rather than enlightened and enlarged. The result of this is so far reaching in the being of man, that it is important to devote a chapter to the discussion of the fact of man's ignorance of God, resulting from sin. In order to a proper understanding of this, there must be a correct conception of man's original capacity for the knowledge of God; and secondly, an understanding of the injury that happened to this capacity; in order that thirdly, there may be an explanation of the idolatry which resulted.
I. n dealing with man's capacity for God, the thought again gathers round the threefold fact of his personality, that as to spiritual essence, man has intelligence, emotion, and will, these being but a shadowing forth of the Divine personality. These three facts in man are interrelated, so that the appreciation of the intelligence will determine the action of the emotion, and finally also the attitude of the will. In the first Divine intention the intelligence of man is capacity for the knowledge of God. It would seem as though in the whole creation, man is the only being to whom God could perfectly reveal Himself, and this fact defines the dignity of human nature. In this connection a statement in the beginning of the Gospel of John has to be carefully noted. "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him; and without Him was not anything made that hath been made. In Him was life; and the life was the light of men." The declaration, "in Him was life," is a general and comprehensive one, declaring that all forms of life are related to the living Word. The announcement that "the life was the light of men," is a particular declaration revealing an essential truth concerning the nature of man. This cannot be said concerning the life of any plant, nor of animal life, until in the scale of being man is reached. In man life became consciousness of God, and capacity for the understanding of Him. This statement of John of course has far wider application. It certainly indicates the truth that perfect light concerning manhood has shined in the Word Incarnate, but as Jesus was the fulfillment of an original purpose, it becomes evident that according to that purpose, man is capable of intelligent appreciation of, and communion with, God. The whole process of creation was carried forward through the Word of the Eternal, and every form of life exists and subsists through the energy of that Word. In man however, life was first of such a nature as to comprehend the Creator. In the writings of the apostle Paul it is evident how he perpetually recognizes as one of the most glorious results of the redemption of man, the fact that there is restored to him the knowledge of God. Especially in the epistles of the imprisonment, when writing to the churches of his love, he thanks God for their faith, for their hope, for their love, but still is labouring for them in prayer; and the overmastering desire that he has for them is that they may come to the full knowledge of God. In the creation of man, God originated a being capable of knowing Him. For the comprehension of wisdom there must be intelligence, and in man God created an intellect equal to such wonderful knowledge.
o know God is to know love, and to know love is to love. Hence man is created with an emotional nature, ready to act in response to knowledge. The apostle of love declares, "we love, because He first loved us." Herein is a declaration of the origin of love in the consciousness of man. Man knowing God is conscious of His love, and that love of God is the generator of the love of man. The accurate knowledge of unclouded intelligence, inevitably issues in the perfect love of undegraded emotion. Such knowledge issuing in such love, creates the true governing principle for the action of the supreme fact of human life, that namely of the will.
he doctrine of the freedom of the will is itself only true within certain limitations. There is a sense in which in the very nature of will it cannot be free. Only in lack of reason, or madness, is there perfect freedom of the will. Man never wills save under the impulse of a conviction. Behind every decision of the will there must of necessity be a governing principle. Man constantly asserts, I will. He never does this, but that he might add to the statement something more. He might, that is to say, declare the reason why he wills, so that the full statement is always, I will because. That which follows the because, is the authority that commands the will. In unfallen man the authority behind will is the love of God, which is the outcome of a perfect knowledge of God. Thus the perfect activity of the will of man is always conditioned by submission to the will of God. Herein is a revelation of the meaning of much that Jesus said concerning His relation to His Father, and an explanation of all that He was in perfection of character, in wisdom of teaching, and in beauty of activity.
o this it may be objected that while this is true of human will, it cannot be said that the Divine will is under authority; and yet, that the very will of God is acting under an authority, is precisely the truth. The principle governing the movements of the will of God, is that of the perfect communion of Infinite Love and Infinite Light. In the very essential of His being, God is Love. It is equally true that He is Light, so that every action of the will is determined by Love, and by the unerring wisdom of Light. Thus let it be definitely stated that God is limited in every action of His will by unlimited Love and that unclouded Light, in which no darkness is. Thus unfallen man wills in response to love, which is the result of knowledge.
II.n this consideration lies an explanation of the method of the enemy. When man, listening to his suggestion of evil, asserted his will, it was upon the basis of a doubt of the Divine Love, which he had allowed himself to entertain. By that act of self separation from God, man lost the knowledge of God, which issues in love to God, and creates the true governing principle behind the action of will. Distance from God means the clouding of the intelligence, and therefore the debasement of the emotion, and therefore the degradation of the will. The fact that man's intelligence is clouded is by no means a popular doctrine, and yet human history, equally with inspired revelation, attest the truth of the declaration. Through all the ages, and through all the schools of human thought, man has been engaged in a fruitless search after a final knowledge. Too often man is utterly unconscious of what that knowledge is after which he seeks, and yet the restlessness of human intellect, and its passionate striving, indicate its incompleteness, and its deep consciousness of that incompleteness. Zophar the Naamathite, speaking to Job said,
"Canst them by searching find out God?
Canst thou find out the Almighty unto perfection?"
most remarkable question in perhaps the oldest book in the Divine Library, indicating the consciousness of incompleteness existing among the meditative men of a far gone age. Yet take that question and ask it in the midst of the vaunted culture of this century, and the implied answer of the age in which Zophar asked, is the actual answer of the present age. Man does not know, nor can he discover God by the unaided working of his intellect, and that because his intellect is clouded, having lost its action with the true light. The hardest thinking of the nineteenth century was done in its latter half, by men, who, in comparison with other men, were intellectual giants. Let it be granted, as it is almost certainly true, that they were honest in their searching, and the names of them will be sufficient guarantee, Darwin, Huxley, Tyndal, and Spencer. They observed, they collected, they compared, they laboured to discover the deepest secrets, and yet what were the conclusions at which they arrived? They claimed to have found, and declared, a certain method discoverable through all natural phenomena. They were not able perfectly to explain the very method which they discovered, much less were they able to account for the method as to its origin.
pencer speaks of being "in the presence of an infinite and eternal energy from which all things proceed." That in itself is a very remarkable discovery, and yet how vague, and inadequate for the satisfaction of the passion of the human intellect for definiteness and absolute truth.
hat then have these men found, if these things be true. They have found certain evidences of the working of God, have discovered it may be, certain attributes of Deity, but they have not by searching found out God. So that the most remarkable activity of the human intellect in the most enlightened century of the human race, stops short exactly where man's clouded intellect stopped short in those dim and distant times of Zophar the Naamathite. Man watches still, and in his searching tracks the footprints of Deity, sees something of the methods of the Divine, but utterly fails to find God. And yet for an intimate and immediate knowledge of God the intellect of man was created.
III.an is a ruined instrument. He nevertheless retains, though in impaired form, the natural elements which constitute the Divine image. There is therefore a constant demand in his nature for that for which he was created. Intelligence is still demanding light. Emotion continues to seek for objects upon which to fasten. Will requires a governing principle, in brief, man demands God. Having lost his knowledge of God, he proceeded to substitute in the place of the dethroned One, other deities. It is unthinkable and impossible that human nature should exist without a god in some form. The most blatant infidel, denying the existence of a Supreme Being, yet worships; and where there is no other object, then man enshrines his own intellect, bows down before that, declaring that he will receive and yield to the things he can comprehend, thus making his understanding the very deity that receives his worship. As a bird cannot fly except in air, and a fish cannot swim save in water, so man cannot exercise the necessary functions of his life save in relation to God.
hen man is thus driven to the dire necessity of creating his own deity, there is but one way in which he can do it. The only conception of God that man has, is gathered from an understanding of his own personality. This is true even in the case of the most devout believer. It is almost impossible to think of God save by projecting the lines of human personality into infinitude, and this is the true method. The last and highest fact of Divine creation is the spiritual in man, and that is in the image of God. Therefore it is possible to argue back from the final creative movement to the originating Creator. If man is the image of God, he is like God; and that is at once to say that God is like man. The intelligence of Deity is argued from the intelligence of man, so that man, projecting the lines of his own intelligence into immensity, thinks of God. This is true also with regard to emotion, and with regard to will.
his creation of a god upon the basis of man's knowledge of himself, lies at the back of the whole story of idolatry. From whence then has come all the ignorance and brutality, and vindictiveness of false gods? Evidently from the fact that the lines projected were in themselves imperfect.
roject the ruined man into immensity, and a ruined god is the result, only the ruin is worse than the ruined man. In the magnified man there is magnified evil and intensified failure. That is the history of all idolatry. Man having fallen, demanded a god, and having lost the knowledge of the true God, has projected into immensity the lines of his own personality, and thus has created as objects of worship, the awful monsters, the service of which, in process of time, has reacted in the still deeper degradation of the worshipper. All false deities are distortions of the one true God, and the distorted idea is the result of the ruin of the image of God in man.
eferring to the idolatry of Ephraim, the prophet Hosea, declared, "And now they sin more and more, and have made them molten images of their silver, even idols according to their own understanding, all of them the work of the craftsman." "Idols according to their own understanding" That understanding being darkened, the idol resulting was a libel upon God.
ith regard to idolatry, it may broadly be stated that the Old Testament reveals three great ideas of God embodied within the false systems of religion, all of them based upon a truth, but in the distortion of truth resulting most disastrously. These three ideas may be indicated by the three words, Baal, Moloch, and Mammon. All false ideas of Deity gather around those words. Other gods are mentioned, but they are all subsidiary, and stand for some aspect or attitude of these essential misconceptions.
hese ideas moreover, have by no means ceased to be the gods which men worship. The form of the worship may have changed, and the garb of the idol may be different, but all else remains the same. Every human being who is not worshipping the One living God, is worshipping Baal, or Moloch, or Mammon, or all three.
he worship of Baal was essentially the deification of Nature, and in that deification there comes at last to be necessary the worship of the central and most marvellous fact in Nature. That fact is the reproductive faculty. All Nature worship which may seem to begin in the innocent and harmless adoration of the beauty and the order of Nature, issues at last in all uncleanness and lasciviousness, and the highest forms of worship come to be acts so foul as to be nameless.
he worship of Baal is the groping of the intelligence after God in Nature, and its search is futile; so that at last the darkened understanding touching the last mystery of power, without being able to discover the final truth, there results the degradation of the whole being.
he worship of Moloch expressed itself in all cruelty, its chief expression being the sacrifice of little children. This is the prostitution of the emotional nature. Hate always lives next door to love. Man magnifying his own emotional nature finds a god who will be appeased by acts of cruelty. As in the worship of Nature there is finally committed all manner of sins and sensualism through the debasement of the intelligence, so necessarily the degraded affectional nature will express itself in lack of love, and therefore in deeds of brutality towards the offspring of man.
he worship of Moloch has by no means ceased. As man to-day has deified, and worships in fearful form at the shrine of, the central mystery of life, he does so with callous heart and absolute indifference to the ruin wrought. Here are suggested lines of thought which must be followed without the expression of words to aid. Let it only be said that as love is the fairest word in all the vocabulary of human speech, the foulest is lust. Yet both these words are the result of the operation of one capacity. Its operation within the realm of a perfectly informed understanding is indicated by the word love. Its operation within the realm of a degraded intelligence is indicated by the word lust. Yet there remains the third of these�Mammon. Schleusner has asserted that Mammon was the name of a Syrian deity. Of this however there seems to be no positive proof. The word was one in common use in the East among the Phoenicians, the Syrians, and others, and it stood for wealth, and the power of wealth. Jesus made a most significant and remarkable use of the word. He said, "Ye cannot serve God and Mammon." In that statement there is evidence of His intimate understanding of fallen human nature, and of His far-seeing appreciation of all the facts resulting from sin. He did not say, Ye cannot serve God and the devil. If He had, for purposes of practical application His word would be almost pointless in this particular age. As it is, with every movement of material progressiveness, His word becomes still more searching, more arresting. The method of the evil one has ever been that of obscuring himself behind some other object of worship. In the dark ages men had a very weird and terrible consciousness of the personality of Satan, and the art of the time depicts him as a monster with hoofs and horns, and all ugliness of countenance. For the purposes of those dark ages, when men were superstitious, because ignorant, such method of appeal proved the subtlety of the foe. In the case of more cultured mental capacity, the foe always hides the ugliness of his being, and to-day as never before he asks for the submission of man to his sway, by presenting before the vision of man the fascinations of wealth, and the power which wealth commands. The worship of Mammon is the rendering to wealth for the sake of its power, of all that man ought to render to God. In the dethronement of God and the enthronement of man's personal desire as the governing principle behind the activity of his will, man has come to think of greatness as consisting in ability to govern and master other people. There is no way by which man may secure more power over other men than by the possession of wealth, and therefore man worships Mammon with all his soul, with all his mind, with all his heart, because Mammon represents unlimited power.
hus in the last analysis Mammon is the deification of human will. In projecting himself into immensity, man has magnified a will that insists upon the subservience of others, and so has come to worship a deity whose expression of godhead is mastery, and whose sceptre of power is the possession of wealth.
ay it not thus be said in brief, that the worship of Baal is the adoration of imperfect knowledge, resulting from the darkening of the intelligence; that the worship of Moloch is the adoration of prostituted emotion, resulting from the degradation of the affectional nature; that the worship of Mammon is the adoration of a degraded will, resulting from the loss of the true governing principle behind the will of man. All this in its thousand manifestations in the idolatries of the race, and in its continued manifestation in the godlessness of the vast multitudes of the most civilized people, has issued from the fact that man being distanced from God by sin, has become ignorant of God through sin.
hus all unconsciously out of a terrible ignorance, and, indeed, by that very ignorance, man calls for Christ; calls, that is, for the shining of the true Light, in which there shall be the restoration of the true and only God, by which knowledge there shall come a destruction of the false gods, the worship of which has resulted so terribly in the history of the race.