p. 122I was not satisfied with the brief conversation we had last month.—Well, my friend, it is not often given to mortals to be satisfied with anything.
That may be true: but there are degrees in our dissatisfactions.—I don’t know that you had special cause for dissatisfaction.
Your explanations seemed to come too glibly. They struck me as being mechanical. You seemed to bring them out as the thing that was understood to be suitable rather than as what you felt to be true.—I regret if the great subject should have suffered from my manner. Human manner is liable to be the result of human infirmity: but wise men will reflect that the truth of a thing asserted is independent of the manner of its assertion.
That is of course true: but if I am to gather the truth of the thing asserted from the assertion of the assertor, I am naturally affected by his style of assertion.—Well, I hope there was nothing much amiss. The facts stated were complete in their p. 123 character, though they may have been somewhat scant in their amplification.
They did not meet my difficulties with the thoroughness of some of your explanations.—I think you will find they contained the elements of a solution.
My difficulty was the smallness and localness of the Biblically-recorded appearances of Deity when considered in the light of the vastness of the universe, and you put me off, if I might so say, with some Bible quotations about angels.—That is scarcely an accurate representation of the case. What I did was to give you a Bible clue to a Bible mystery. The mystery lies in the apparently limited actions on the part of the infinite and illimitable God who fills all space and time. The clue to the mystery lies in the mode of His action, revealed and illustrated in the ministration of angels.
Pardon me, but that does not appear to touch the difficulty. An angel is a created being. What an angel may do is the action of a created being. How can the action of a created being be an explanation to me of the procedure of an unlimited God, such as the Creator must necessarily be?—If that action is the procedure of the unlimited God, then certainly it is the very explanation you require. Angelic action is Divine action: “Are they not all ministering spirits, sent forth to minister?” This is Paul’s enquiry.
But what connection can there be between created action and uncreated action?—Just the connection the Creator may establish. If He has chosen to incorporate His own energy in the form of superior and immortal beings, whom He employs in the execution of His designs in detail, it seems to follow that the action of these superior beings would be His p. 124 action. This is, at all events, the Bible account of the matter, and we must not leave it out of account in judging of Bible descriptions of the works of God, The things before your mind in the way of difficulties are all works of God; God talking with Abraham, God coming down to deliver Israel, etc. Now if, upon investigation, it turns out that angels were the actual operators in these cases, why should there be any difficulty in the way of accepting their action as the Divine action?
Simply, as I have said, because of the difference between the created and the uncreated.—You are allowing metaphysical distinctions to interfere with the obvious relation of facts. Metaphysics yield no guidance in these things, nor indeed in anything truly. They are the futile efforts of the human intellect to conceive the operation of the abstract and eternal. What we have to do with is facts. The testified fact before us is that God employs angelic beings to carry on His work in the universe; and with this fact before us, there ought to be no difficulty in understanding why their work should be spoken of as His work, or why His work should therefore sometimes appear to have a pettiness (as you called it), not conceivably attaching to the ways of Him who fills heaven and earth. When God went up from Abraham (Gen. xvii. 22) we easily recognize that it was an angel who did so. Or when it is said that God appeared to Moses, we know that what is meant is that an angel appeared to him, as is testified (Exodus iii. 2; Acts vii. 38).
But why is it not plainly said that an angel appeared in all these cases? Why should it be said that God did thus and so?—Because of the relation of God to the matter. The angels were but agents p. 125 and servants. They did not act of their own motion. They acted in performance of a work of God. Had they only been spoken of in the narrative of their achievements, God would have been hidden from view, and the mistake would have been made of attributing to them the things done in their capacity as His ministers merely. Would the lord of an estate consent to his servants appearing in his transactions and doing his pleasure in their own name? It was needful that the name of God should be on the angels and their work, that the relation of that work to Him might be known. On the other hand, it was necessary that the fact of their instrumentality should be visible, otherwise the mistake would have been made of regarding them as the actual Deity whose servants only they are. It seems to me that the case could not reasonably be in any other form than just the form in which we find it: the angels as the actors, yet God as the mover by them.
Why was it not so with the prophets and apostles? They were sent to speak the word of God: yet we never find, so far as I am aware, that God is said to do the things that they did.—No. The cases are different. The angels possess the divine nature, and are in unity with God, which cannot be affirmed of prophets and apostles, who were but men, whose nature is of the dust (Ecc. iii. 20). God is Spirit: and it is testified of the angels that “He maketh His angels spirits” (Psa. civ. 4), while of man it is said that he is “of the earth, earthy” and a “natural body” (1 Cor. xv. 44-47). It is, however, also said by Paul that there is a spiritual body, and that to this body, approved men will attain when this mortal body is changed, and made incorruptible by transformation through the action of the Spirit, at which p. 126 crisis Jesus says they will be “equal unto the angels.” The angels are before us, therefore, as the sons of light and power, of whom it is not unnatural to speak as God when they come on the errands and do the works of God. The Divine power is manifest in the things they have done. They rained fire and brimstone on Sodom (Gen. xix. 22, 24); disabled Jacob with a touch (Gen. xxxii. 24; Hos. xii. 4); afflicted the Egyptians with plague and brought Israel out of Egypt (Exo. xv. 19); controlled the utterance and obstructed the way of the unrighteous prophet, Balaam (Num. xxii. 20, 22); consumed with fire the meal prepared by Gideon, and regulated the action of the dew on the fleece (Jud. vi. 21, 36-40); ascended in the flame of the sacrifice presented by Manoah (Jud. xiii. 3, 16-20); ravaged the coasts of Israel with pestilence in punishment of Israel’s sin (2 Sam. xxiv 16); decimated a whole Assyrian army in a night (2 Kings xix. 35); revealed the secrets of futurity to Daniel (Dan. ix. 21, 23); announced the birth of Christ beforehand, and celebrated its occurrence in celestial chorus on the plains of Bethlehem (Luke i. 26; ii. 10); liberated the apostles from prison (Acts v. 19; xii. 7, 11); besides shewing the course of history in advance to John in Patmos (Rev. i. 1).
You overwhelm me with texts. All these things may be true, but what can I do with them? What I wish to know is how they reconcile the pettiness of the Divine transactions with the greatness of a Being equal to the grasp and maintenance of an illimitable universe?—I should have thought the facts stated in the texts would have given you the clue. The newness of the idea to you may be the reason of your inability to see their bearing. I must not be discouraged; we may have better success next time.