the world and they that dwell therein.” Here the two meet, the need and He who can satisfy the need; earth and heaven; man and God. Here God reaches forth His hand and says: “The earth in her need—that is mine!” And when God says that, can it mean anything else than: “I will help, I will redeem, I will have mercy, I, the Lord!” This is the help. To look for help means to look for it, to inquire whether this proffered help is authentic, whether it is true, whether it is spoken into the wind, or, whether it is in reality God’s word. Or do we need something other than the promise that “the earth is the Lord’s and they that dwell therein,” and that the will of God will be executed in spite of the unreasonableness of men? Would we not have all that we need to carry on, if we were really certain of this promise? Would we not be certain, that while men put through their own wills, while they seek their own glory, while they worship their own gods, that God is doing His work? And is the work of God anything else than that he puts forth His hand upon them and that with all the doing of their own wills they will not get away from His will, and in all their seeking for glory, His will finally will triumph?
And does the will and the glory of God mean anything else than that in the depth of their need men acknowledge Him as Lord, as He whom they should call upon to relieve their need? Does the will and the glory of God mean anything else than that men acknowledge how all need has in common the fact that men in their need have not called upon God as they should? So that eventually they may come out of the midst of their worship of false gods, to the place where they call upon Him and fear Him? God so works in the achievements of men against the achievements of men, whilst he awakens and illuminates until men’s eyes are opened and they see these achievements in their terrible reality and cry out: “God be merciful to me a sinner!”—until we acknowledge that our need is a judgment that has come upon us because we have forgotten God. Again and again men play with God until God reaches in with a powerful hand and reveals Himself as the Lord whose the earth is and all they that dwell therein. And when the lightning flash of this acknowledgment drives through the night of men’s lives and men understand their need and seek help, and when they again allow judgment and grace to be true, and also grant that the earth is the Lord’s—then the light of a new day streams across the earth. Then there breaks upon us what is termed a new day, for which we wait so longingly.
“The earth is the Lord’s and the fulness thereof, the world and they that dwell therein.” Yes, the right Word is spoken. But why does it enlighten us so faintly? Why does it not penetrate our ears and issue from our lips? Why do we not ascend, as it is said later in our Psalm, “into the hill of the Lord,” and stand, even amidst the need which surrounds us, in the holy place? Why is it not true and real to us and why do we not live by that Word: “the earth is the Lord’s.” Why, then, do we live on as though it is not true, if it is true? We know how the whole world waits to live by it. But we are ourselves “world.” We are never able to accomplish it in our own little lives, so as to allow salvation and truth to come to light. We live our days as though not a flicker of light would reveal itself. How poor our words are, how darkened are our spirits! How little we seem able to say to the great need and darkness of our times. We scold about the newspapers because they seem to thrash straw in their daily reports, but we ourselves know no better. Even our Christian words, our sermons and pious observations, are so helpless, faltering, lacking in light and spirit. They sound pious, but from them proceed the same far-distant hopelessness and perplexity, the same obstinate and despairing spirit which proceeds everywhere from books and men. The sad part of it all is that we speak and hear the word of God as a mere word of man, it no longer possesses its unique power and meaning.
Here undoubtedly lies the deepest reason of our need. The word of God is there, it is verified to us that God is Lord, and if we could accept it we would be helped. But we cannot. A bolt is fixed in place, it requires certain hands, different hands from our own, to open. “Clean hands” are required for it, say the words of our text. There is a darkness there which robs us of our vision. Even when we have the clearest, divine word of promise before us, it does not tell us anything. And we cannot get anything out of it. It requires men with other hearts than our own to see God’s light. He who has “a pure heart,” say the words of our Psalm, can “ascend into the hill of the Lord.” There is a power of temptation which frustrates us when we would and should believe. “Should God have said …?” and by it our faith is severed at its roots. It requires men in our places who have “not lifted up their souls to falsehood,” to break the bonds of this temptation, says the Bible.
“He who has clean hands”—this is the primary thing which is told us. Clean, guiltless hands open the bolt that closes the entrance to the redeeming and freeing things which God has to say to us. To understand what is meant we may imagine that all of us, without exception, are sitting, as it were, in a prison which we have erected around ourselves and keep on building through our foolish, frivolous, cruel and unclean living, thinking and doing. And when God lays His hand upon us, when He directs His words to us, it is that He wants to overlook all this; He wants to divorce us from it; He wants to forgive us. “The earth is the Lord’s and the fulness thereof.” He wants to tell us that all this imprisonment is invalid. It does not belong to you; that is not the real you. That is your imprisonment and God wants to look upon that as removed, as though it did not exist; He wants to look upon you without imprisonment. You are free before Him and through Him. But we must let that be done for us. We must learn to look upon our lives and ourselves that way, look upon them in the light of the judgment and grace of God. We must divorce ourselves from the old existence, we must become ashamed of our imprisonment. Something in us wants to be ashamed of itself. Something in us wants to believe that all this does not really belong to our real selves but that it is an imprisonment. This something we must give its right; it must be helped to break through. We must not be callous or hardened. For what separates us from God is not our sins, but our unwillingness to have our sins forgiven! We must really give God our hands when He walks toward us and desires to take them. The hands of men which are taken out of guilt and laid in the hands of God and which He takes are “clean hands,” for God forgives sin. Such hands unbolt the door which keeps us from redemption. But he who loves his sins more than God who wants to forgive them—with such a one God cannot speak.
This callousness of heart might happen in the finest and most spiritual manner. For instance, we might assent to all that God’s word says, but always apply it to others, to the unfaithful, the godless world. We conceive the strife for God and His things as a strife which we should direct against other folks—here the good, there the bad—and we are on the side of God as soldiers of the army of light. Then we shout “the earth is the Lord’s and the fulness thereof”; yes, and we shout it with a peculiar enthusiasm and zeal, but in the end we mean our own things, the things of our own religious party or movement. But in the same measure that we strive against other folks for our own things especially when it becomes important whether we shall keep the upper hand, in that same measure we thicken the walls of our prison and do not have anything more to do with God’s word, even if we are ever so familiar with it. God does not ask about the right of our life, He asks about the wrong of our life, for He does not want to help us into the saddle, but He wants to forgive us so that He alone might be right. Where is our unrighteousness, our sin, our weakness, and where are those sinful, wrong, and weak hands extended to God that He might take and make them into clean hands? This is the main thing, the only thing. As long as we have so many right deeds and habits to impose upon others, just so long are there no “clean hands,” and just so long will no active striving help us even if it is the noblest. We are still imprisoned, and God cannot do for us what He wants to do.
The words of our text tell us a second thing. We are perhaps ready to acknowledge and substantiate the truth that the earth is the Lord’s and the fulness thereof, but only as a truth at which we have arrived by the power of our own human insight, which we have validated by the power of our own experience. We add perhaps with a dash of pride, that it is a truth in line with all other truths, knowledge, experiences, and convictions which, in the course of life, we accumulate that the darkness of our existence may be a little clarified. But God is a jealous God, for He will be sole validator of what He says, and He will not be considered as a bit of human
