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Come, Holy Spirit. Eduard Thurneysen
Читать онлайн.Название Come, Holy Spirit
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isbn 9781498270717
Автор произведения Eduard Thurneysen
Жанр Религия: прочее
Издательство Ingram
In closing, a great requirement sums up everything: “Lift up your heads, O ye gates … ye ancient doors.” A great king desires to enter. Our distress is not that there is no help before our gates. The help is there, but the doors are too narrow, too low, too small for help to enter. Our ears are callous and deaf. God can continue to speak His word for a long time, but we do not hear it, we do not understand it as it ought to be understood and in such a way as to help us. “Lift the doors and open the gates”—this is the exhortation which must first of all be heard and obediently followed. Our small, selfish human thinking must be opened wide that it may become a vessel into which God will pour the great, the bright, the streaming content. It is a command to become humble, for only humility can open wide and high the door. Humility means: not I, not my understanding and knowing,—and this “not I,” this “not my” understanding and knowing is the lifted door through which God would enter into the least of these. To be humble means to wonder and to wait and to hope for that which is truly great, for that which God desires to do unto us; and wherever this wondering, waiting and hoping is to be found, that which is truly great is not distant.
But can one summon this, can one demand it? Is this “Lift up your heads O, ye gates, and be ye lift up ye everlasting doors!”—is this really a command? Is it not much rather a proclamation, a promise? Not that we have the capacity to open wide and high our gates, but because the King comes, because He is at our gates, and because, with His coming and existence, He would present humility to mankind; therefore, the call goes forth: “Lift up your heads O, ye gates!” The King is there, the One who makes us humble, because of whom we are humble at all times, who gives us pure hearts and clean hands. And this thy King comes to thee! Verily, more is expressed here than mere human command and human wisdom. Here Jesus Christ is speaking, the Son of the living God. Here alone one can withdraw the bolt and permit the blindness and foolishness and stubbornness of heart to be forgiven, and become joyful so that what this Psalm says is true, Yea and Amen, in Him. The earth is the Lord’s; man is God’s! Oh, that our eyes and ears might open soon!
Every man regards his ways as clean in his own eyes; but the Lord weigheth the spirits.—Proverbs 16:2.
“But” says the wisdom of the Bible. For one who has once heard and understood this wisdom nothing can surpass this panoramic, significant, heavily-contended, biblical “but.” We can never be done hearing and comprehending it. One can divide the readers of the Bible into those who note it and those who note nothing of it. Not all the learned belong to those who note it—nor all the unlearned. All of us belong at times to those who note, oftentimes to those who do not note. “But” means that there is still something that is overlooked and forgotten, still something to be taken into consideration, there is still another possibility at hand. “But” signifies that in all of our thinking and speaking and perceiving and doing we must turn a sharp corner. A ship is traveling at full speed with both happy and sad travellers, with hardworking stokers and sailors aboard, ploughing forward, straight ahead,—“but” the man at the helm swerves the rudder around as he avoids a disaster, because a sandbank lay in the direct path of voyage. One simply cannot always sail straight ahead. A group of hikers are travelling a dusty highway, fretting because of the heat, complaining because of the length of the hike,—“but” one suddenly bends down and in the dust of the highway finds a gold coin. Many times it pays not to fret and complain, but to keep your eyes open; something quite different might suddenly appear. But these are only illustrations and parables. That something different to which the “but” of the Bible points, is the totally different which is expectantly waiting upon us, which comes to meet us, which might instantly appear to us to tell us that it was always there and that it will always be there. It may be that when it meets us we shall be filled with fear, or with joy, but that is not the main issue. Happy is that servant whom the Lord, when he comes, finds awake—that is the main issue.
The “but” in the Bible is the great “but” which is the cause of all these many little and littler “buts” which are to be found in our lives and in the world. It is the reason of all reasons, the reason why we humans must so often turn the corner, the reason why again and again we must learn to see things in a different light, to think differently and to speak differently. It reminds us of the Greatest which is often overlooked and forgotten, but which is to be respected, but not only does it remind us of the Greatest, but rather of the One and Only. Because we overlook this One, we overlook so much. Yet if this One is respected, then everything is respected. The “but” of the Bible reminds us of the sense of God which is prior to, behind and above, yet always in, the sense and the non-sense of man. In every moment it is the altogether new, in every moment it is the totally different possibility: even God! Shall we grow hysterical in the face of it? Shall we rejoice about it? Both are possible, sometimes both at the same time. More important is the question as to whether we will heed it. The Bible can be eye and ear to us whereby we can see what really is contained within our own lives. God is! This is what the people of the Bible say. And they ask us: Who sees? Who hears? Who believes our report, and to whom is the arm of the Lord revealed? That is the Bible’s “but.”
The Lord weigheth the spirits, says our text. One could say that this is just what the Bible tries to say. For the Bible does not always say the same thing over and over again, but it does say this one thing again and again: But the Lord weigheth the spirits. This is the same thing the Bible says on other pages: But he who dwelleth in the heavens shall laugh, he shall have them in derision!… But my words shall never pass away … But he was wounded for our transgressions and because of our sins was he smitten … But Christ is raised from the dead and has become the first-fruits of them that slept … The “but” of the Bible proclaims to us the existence and the deeds of God. Who is God? He who always confronts us as Lord, incomparable, startling, unforeseen, He who possesses all and is all, over against whom we are nothing and possess nothing, and from whom our possessions and existences come as the shadow does from the light. What does God do? He weigheth the spirits. The spirits are the spirits of men. We, too, are on His scales, examined of Him, judged by Him, put to the test by Him to see how much we are worth in His estimation. That is our life-situation, as seen from the point of view of God’s existence and deeds.
The next thing of importance is that we are being weighed. We ourselves weigh and are weighed. We make judgments as to good and evil, truth and falsity; we discriminate between the worth and the unworthiness of our experiences in various situations and achievements which confront us, between the words and the deeds of mankind as well as our own. From day to day and year to year we go through our existence with a scale in our hand more or less observantly testing. But where did we get these scales? How do we know what we simply cannot know? That is the novelty: with our tiny scale in hand we are ourselves in the great scale. Not only do we discriminate but we are being discriminated. We not only judge, but are being judged. We not only apprehend, but are being apprehended. An eye that sees me, an ear that hears me, a master who is proving me, a judge who is judging me, a king who chooses me or does not choose me—that is the final, deepest truth of my life and it