But can we indeed believe? Is not everything only an artificial human comfort with which we deceive ourselves? What shall I say? The Christian Church must learn again to proclaim the word of God’s grace and to listen to it as to God’s word. Otherwise it cannot be believed. Without this we hang and hover half way between as those who are apparently dead: not really condemned and not really pardoned, not really abandoned to the wrath of God and not really happy in hope, all by halves, all weak, all only “as if,” all only figuratively and with reservation.
Perhaps this is the greatest calamity of our time, that such preaching and hearing of the word of grace, as the word of God, has been taken from us and has not yet been restored to us. And yet we hunger and thirst for reality, for the reality of revelation, without which faith, even though it removes mountains, has no reality to speak of; it is only our little faith. The prophet says: “Thus saith the Lord, thy Redeemer, the Merciful One.” This is reality. Christ in his witnesses is reality for which we hunger and thirst. We may doubt their witness and we do so continually; but we can also believe it, overcome our “no” through its “yes.” God be praised, “who according to his great mercy, begat us again to a living hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead!” He who will conquer us is the Spirit in whom we pray: “Our help and our beginning is in the name of the Lord who hath made heaven and earth.”
The sun shall be no more thy light by day; neither for brightness shall the moon give light unto thee: but Jehovah will be unto thee an everlasting light, and thy God thy glory. Thy sun shall no more go down, neither shall thy moon withdraw itself; for Jehovah will be thine everlasting light, and the days of thy mourning shall be ended.—Isaiah 60:19–20.
“The Lord will be thy everlasting light!” This is, like the content of the whole Bible, an announcement, a promise. Nothing more, but nothing less.
“Behold I stand at the door and knock!” A strong large hand reaches out after us. What does it want of us? What will become of us in its grip? That is none of our business. We need only know that we are in this hand. He, who knows this, understands the Bible, the heart of the Bible—Jesus Christ. One may live without knowing this, for Jesus Christ does not thrust himself upon anyone. We must again and again remind ourselves that we have forgotten this fact. We may call to Him: “Come, Lord Jesus, be our guest!” but He will not become once for all a member of any household. The announcement is and always will be a question addressed to each of us. For Jesus Christ is and always will be the living word of God; and his thoughts are not our thoughts and our ways are not his ways. We may or may not hear; Jesus Christ speaks to those who have ears to hear.
“The Lord will be thy everlasting light!” How shall we take this? The words of the text speak a twofold truth—twofold at least for our ears. First: All lights, the greatest and most brilliant, even the sun and the moon, must lose their splendor and radiance, for another incomparable light will take their place. “I am the Lord!” and: “Thou shalt have no other gods beside me.” But let it be remembered that the sun of this light will never set and the moon of this light will not lose its brightness. The days of thy sorrow will have an end. The great enemy, who seeks to rob us of all things, is also the great friend and helper who seeks to give us all things. O that in one word we might speak and hear this contradiction! Here it is actually spoken in a single sentence: “the extinction of all lights and the rising of the one true light, God’s taking and giving, judging and pardoning, casting into hell and exalting into heaven, killing and making alive, law and gospel.” Hear the one without the other and you hear only the word of man and not the word of God. Hear both in one and one in both and you hear God’s word, living, powerful, and sharper than a two-edged sword. But so far human lips have not spoken it and human ears have not heard it as one word. No sooner do we speak and hear it than it divides itself upon our lips and in our ears; it becomes an enigma and a question.
Why must this be? So that each moment God’s word may be for us God’s own word that must be revealed and believed. Precisely this is necessary, that only with human lips we pronounce and with human ears we hear the contradiction—God’s wrath and God’s mercy, God’s dominion and God’s help, God’s majesty and God’s love, God’s law and God’s gospel. This enigma in the external words of God must ever again overwhelm us and convince us, witness to us that God’s goodness and faithfulness are new every morning, lead us to repentance, raise us up, and so prepare us to let God actually speak and to listen to Him. Were we to ignore the external word with its contradiction and enigma and speak outright with our lips and hear with our ears what God himself says, we perchance would become too haughty. Then we might want again to be like God and for that God could not speak unto us in truth. God speaks to us only when he Himself can speak to us and when we must believe in Him. For this He uses the external word—its darkness and its contradiction.
Behold, by this we all live, that God speaks with us, even He Himself, and tells us that we are His and that His hand has reached out after us. In the end it matters little whether we hear this more from the one side or from the other, whether we hear the first part of the announcement that all lights which shine for us must become extinct so that the everlasting light may lighten us; or hear the second part, that this one light will take for us the place of all others and that then the days of sorrow will end; whether we know ourselves to be judged through God’s grace or pardoned by His judgment, whether our helper becomes our Lord or the Lord becomes our helper, whether our heart and conscience are wounded through God’s love or healed through God’s wrath. If we only will hear and heed the word of God: “I am that I am,” and the promise: “I will be your God, ye shall be my people.” God and the whole truth of God is in this promise; and, therefore, in it is all comfort, the highest hope, the final victory—even for us who are comfortless, hopeless, defeated. We live by that which Jesus speaks out of the heart of the Bible into the heart of our hearts: “You have not chosen me but I have chosen you.” When and how He speaks this—whether in anger or in goodness, whether to our terror or to our rapture, whether we receive it as judgment or as grace; for all that, wherever he speaks it, there is freedom, even though we are sinners and dying men—freedom to live as God’s children, always again another day, the next day; what more do we want?—to live, to bear, to endure, to work and not to despair, to make our lives a sacrifice. Here the great never-ending shadow of eternity has fallen upon us and humbled us; and here, just for this reason, we have the great uplifting outlook upon the new heaven and the new earth.
Thus we live by the word of God, just as it comes to us in the letter, a word dark and full of contradictions; as it is constantly revealed to us by God Himself and we are always able to believe it. If there is any one, who does not yet live by it, he awaits the time when he will live by it; and perhaps the difference between the two is not as great as we think. It is quite impossible that there is anyone who does not wait to live by it. For we, as sinful and mortal men, are inseparably bound up with that God who leads from life in death into life. Some one has said: “There is no heart or conscience that is not bent by God to find its master in Jesus of Nazareth.”
“The Lord will be thy everlasting light!” O, it is indeed true that we are in dreadful shallows and hear this promise only from afar. How have we come into this state? How is it possible that for so many days and hours we are comfortless, hopeless, defeated without being called to a consideration of the divine “nevertheless”? Why is it that our life in its farthest reaches is not under the healing shadow of eternity but in the shadow of a stupefying godlessness, though we are by no means atheists but so-called believing Christians? Where is the clear light of the eternal day of Jesus Christ, by which all our days will become radiant, at least in a small degree?
I shall mention first a minor matter as in part responsible. We allow ourselves, all too often and too easily, to be entangled in situations in which God cannot speak to us and reveal His word to us; and we cannot believe Him because, without
