XII. Deep Calleth unto Deep
Gerald Stanley Lee: While it is the power of the egoist that he reveals his life, he reveals no more than his life. David was not Solomon or Isaiah or Job, and he shared God's will more than his mind. The old boy-prayers - the outdoor ones - with the night wind in them, and the sleep of lambs, and the awe of the sky, and the nestling communion of a child, he never outgrew. Even through the sturdier ones, to be sung with the clash of shields and the voices of armies, there is something that steals from these - David is always a shepherd boy when he prays. With the child-beauty he stamps forever the relation of man to God. He stands forth in the wise, unhappy world with a philosophic innocence that has never belonged to so great a man before or since.
But he lived - this shepherd boy; a beautiful, revealing, singing thing - to live. He could not but spiritualize the law. Spiritualizing is experiencing, and thus came to pass that supreme crisis of the truth - the letter blossoming into the spirit - the law, objective in Moses, subjective in David - the mightier form of inspiration, the noble necessity of song, the heart of a shepherd, the expression of a world.
And indeed, whatever the self may be, self-revelation from the One in the heavens to the singers on the earth and the men who live the songs, is the creative principle of history. Genius is the conviction of ingenuousness. Prophecy the conviction that heaven listens and the earth waits - the helpless destiny of utterance. The world is not divided into singers and listeners. Because he could not keep still about himself, David became the opportunity of God. His prayers are not catalogues of desire, and there is more information than petition in this communion of the shepherd with The Shepherd.
In the jealous, watchful silence with which men often walk the revelations of the world and hide their hearts to listen, past a thousand beautiful doors are they doomed to go that would be opened if they opened theirs. Though the souls that go to and fro before Him can never hide a thought, He listens, not because He needs to listen, but because it is divine to hear His children speak; and when David tells his Maker the quaint human thoughts that fill our little living here, the prayer is not for the prayer.
It is not for God, but for the beautiful returns he sends to open places. When the heart has been emptied He comes. Only the singer listens. The self-expression of man is the self-revelation of God. The Incarnation - older than Jesus - is a habit from the beginning of the world. He has come to His sons not by hiding the human, but by calling the human forth and shining through it.
It is night. Following silence and shadow and sleep into the camp, David listens to the breathing of Saul - the breath of hate when it wakes, of murder and pursuit, a shout across the battle - as innocent now as the lambs asleep in his father's flocks. Destinies come and go across David's face - and psalms.
One blow for a hundred wars?
He hears the old brooks in the hills. "Thy gentleness hath made me great." (Psa. 18:35) Standing over Saul to long for him, David saw God in himself, and when the waking came, Saul knew at last that David must be king, because he had a king's heart.
The king in the gate, peering across the plain - Absalom fighting for the throne - the messengers running - a question - a complete theology. "Is the young man Absalom safe?" (2 Sam. 18:29)
Once he lay with his head on his arm - this shepherd boy, - and he watched the wandering flocks trooping above his sheep. "He would be a king; he would have princes for his sons."
He had not thought of this.
Through the heart-aches of a thousand years the Father-cry - the father-cry, "O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! Would God I had died for thee. O Absalom, my son, my son!" (2 Sam. 18:33)
The king's cry in the gate. The hailing of the Cross. The Fatherhood of God.
XIII. Who Giveth Songs in the Night
ONE would know that David must have lain awake with these songs of his. The beautiful broken sleep of a Hebrew king floats down its music, and for thousands of years we sing, because David shared the shadow of the sun with the shining ones, and in their wakefulness remembered not his rest.
O listening Night, when the children of mothers are born, and the children of the sky come forth, and the songs of the heart, and the Morning makes ready for joy.
O watching Night, when souls are unlocked with the dark and Silence sojourns with men, when the wind goes forth a muffled footstep of the day, and Sleep - from down his eternal ways - Sleep has come to us, and Dream - the walking of God through sleep!
O Eternal Night, O Infinite Face, bend low. The sun has wandered down the west. The tiny day has gone. Say thou again "Thou belongest unto Me! I am Death. I am Life. I am God. Thou belongest unto Me!"
O Infinite Face, with the shadow I know not of and the light I cannot know, with the shadow I know, I come, with the shadow of earth I come, with David's prayer I come. "Bow down Thine ear, O Lord, for I am poor and needy, yet Thou thinkest upon me. Make no tarrying, O my God." (Psa. 40:17)
No one would care what David did after reading these psalms.
Hamlet saw the king praying. If he had heard him, he would have forgiven him. Shakspere knew the manner of men too well to let the penitent words be known. It would make a god a God to listen one day to the world, and a man could hardly overhear the human heart for a thousand years without a divine love in him. It has been wondered that God could come down to the earth. He could not help coming. There was a cross because he had listened to David's prayers.
It is insolent to wonder that he loves us. Anyone would be a god who knew what a god knows. The one attribute of God is omniscience, and his virtues are the necessities of His knowledge. Rising into penitence, forgiveness, and peace, with no cross to make him bold, even David could chant in the night watches, "He delivered me because he delighted in me," (Psa. 18:19) and "I was shapen in iniquity and in sin did my mother conceive me." (Psa. 51:5) The transfiguration of Moses which the disciples thought they saw (Matt. 17:3) had happened a thousand years before. It was the Singer in the night.
The psalms are the real revelation of the Decalogue. What Moses stated, David sang. Commands had become prayers. It was the limitation of Moses that he sang but twice, that his song was separated from everything else. "I will sing unto the Lord, for He hath triumphed gloriously." (Exod. 15:1) The Ten Commandments were delivered to a silent people by a silent man. Miriam's song was not there. There were no responses. The voices of men sang not back to God at the foot of Sinai. Singing had been confined to the Red Sea, but the Red Sea song, broken loose in David, sweeps the worship of Israel in his "Praise ye the Lord" (Psa. 106:1) to the very foot of the Commandment mountain, and the laws of Moses are choruses at last, on the lips of the congregation.
The inside of the Ten Commandments came with one who saw them from the inside. David was the discoverer of the law's heart. His way of conceiving duty was praise. His method of doing it was communion. He has not a song that does not pray, or a prayer that does not sing. This was a new thing in the world. It was a poet's inevitable interpretation of command, gained as a poet must ever gain his interpretation, through life itself. He sang his experience of The Will. It was "Thy gentleness has made me great." (2 Sam. 22:36)
Jesus was the Redeemer of the Old Testament. He saved it for us. David was the redeemer of Moses. The nobler sense of relatedness, which is the essence of the poetic temperament, gave to the world in him two mighty moods that never had been blended before. Saul loved to listen because it was king's music. The same fingers that found the gentle reveries of the immortal harp held up the head of Goliath before the shouts of soldiers.
Before the darkness of a dream - beautiful dips of the harp which seem to glide down and down and down into the old, old melody that deep below life God keeps for the nearer ones - the melody that seems to sing about music that it came from - not yet for us. Achilles is Homer (The Iliad, ca. 900 B.C.).
Along the streets the women singing and dancing with tabrets, with joy and with instruments of music, Homer is his own Achilles.
An inspiration of paradox - a soul which is the most intimate revelation between the "I AM" and "He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father." (John 14:9) With "sons of Abraham," "sons of Isaac," "sons of Jacob," children of Israel, there is one name folded away with the pillar of cloud. There should never be the title "The son of Moses." Though with a David-place in his heart, it was not for his people to know. The name of God should be "The Son of David."
While it was somewhat [for David] to be Homer and Achilles, both at once, it was the greatness of the psalmist that he made men love him. He was the Old Testament atonement - this warrior minstrel - this king-poet, the singer of command, writing the Pentateuch over into hymns, saying his prayers with the Ten Commandments.
XIV. When the people Saw the Mountain Smoking They Stood Afar Off
THE second commandment was against idols, and the only alternative for the Hebrew was to make an idol of the thick darkness from which the commandment was issued. This is what he did. The smoke-god was the ghost of idol worship. The Voice was in the darkness, and it was carefully called the sign of God's presence, and not God himself. But when the average Hebrew looked up from his manna-gathering to the pillar in the sky, it was God. It was exactly God.
The cloud was the first clumsy and yet beautiful groping of the human heart toward infinity. It was a mystery idol, carved by the soft airs of heaven. There were no poor trivial human outlines. It was the idol of the Breath of God, half of heaven and half of the earth, floating over the lives of men like a thought. Always to be glorious because it first caught God away from the stone-loving, material ways of the human heart, a cloud is yet but a cloud, a poor tiny wraith of infinity, tucked over a little mountain way, down under the worlds, on a little earth. The worlds shone on unrecognized.
The essential thing about the pillar of fire was its nearness. It protected the Hebrews from the lonely stars, from the infinity of their God. Children crying in the dark, Jehovah kept a dim light burning over them to show that he was there. They did not know that the night was God.
And yet the very fear of Jehovah had a certain familiarity in it, the sense of a right to constant attention, to striking miracles. There is an impression of a certain haughty intimacy, a divine neighborliness on the part of the One of Sinai that no amount of thunder and lightning and darkness and terror can quite remove from the early Hebrew thought. An air of close and mutual watchfulness - at once the source of the moral energy and the philosophical childishness of the Hebrew - runs through all the earlier chapters of the Bible, as if Jehovah were experimenting with the human nature he had made, and men were experimenting with him.
There is a freshness of atmosphere as if nothing had ever been done before, as if the responsibility of sinning the first fresh sins in all the world came then, with the glow and zest not left to us, in these later days, when the iron monotony of evil has pressed down its awful commonplace upon the human heart, and we sin too wisely to sin well - too thoughtfully, with a haunting of an inherited sadness and all the inconvenient convictions that reflect the experience of men.
Living when all the sins of which we can think have been used over and over again - when original sin is called original because it is not - we look back in the earlier Scriptures to a time when the originality of a sin was the most fascinating part of it.
The activity of Jehovah in the Pentateuch, the bustle of morality called forth by this creative period of immorality, is noticeably lessened when the sin of Israel has become a mere inheritance in the land of Canaan and the uniqueness of disobedience has lost its bloom. God and man are connected in every verse. Everything is either right or wrong. Every word moralizes. In Chronicles, and through the bad Kings, revelation grows aloof, and the emphasis of prophecy is changed to the story of events, as if Jehovah were letting men wander as they would - weary of history, waiting for something worthwhile, or a man to be born like David who would call out His waiting love and turn Him toward men again - for their beautiful dreams of what they would be if they could.
There was a time of divine retreat when the soul of the fathers worshiping their less familiar God drew closer to Him in the silence. He had been jealous before. Restive - He had seemed to change His mind, to lose His patience - a new God only beginning to learn how discouraging people were. Through all these cruder days the conception which emphasized His nearness belittled it, and He seems to have taken the opportunity - Infinite God - Incognito - to disguise Himself for the little awe of men in the tawdry passions that they had themselves, before they knew who He was.
The metaphor of a profound philosophy to us, Genesis was not a metaphor to the Hebrew, and this barbaric literalness of God's being almost in the next room was the token both of inspiration and limitation. The Hebrew revelation was inspired enough to begin at the beginning of the mind as well as the beginning of the world; and although it has been a supposed duty to maintain a special private psychology for the Bible - to believe that it could not have been inspired unless it commenced in the middle, or commenced at both ends, or did not commence at all, - the idea of truth looking down on itself as it winds high and higher through its pages, has gained momentum enough to make us distinctly worship God for what the children in the wilderness did not see.
They did not see infinity. The God of their duties was not the Infinite God. Though the Book of Job may have been a poem before the death of Moses, it was certainly not history until after David. Full of the trivial-terrible, Jehovah was a more earnest play-god in the groping childhood of the human spirit.
Before the telescope and the Sermon on the Mount, the compass and the thirteenth of Corinthians had wrought their vast and mutual prophecy; before Paul and Luther and Galileo and Columbus and - Jesus, had unfolded the works and the thoughts of God; under the serene satire of the heavens in the little land of Uz, "Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth," (Job 38:4) - Job became the discoverer of infinity.
by Gerald Stanley Lee (1862-1944), New York: The Century Co., 1896
Contents
Part 1
INTRODUCTION
I. THE PAGAN EMPHASIS
II. THE EMPHASIS OF LIFE
III. THE EMPHASIS OF THE IDEAL
IV. THE HAGAR NATION
Part 2
V. THOU SHALT NOT
VI. THOU SHALT NOT
VII. THOU SHALT NOT
Part 3
VIII. THUS SAITH THE LORD
IX. MILK AND HONEY
X. I AM THAT I AM
XI. THY GENTLENESS HAS MADE ME GREAT
Part 4
XII. DEEP CALLETH UNTO DEEP
XIII. WHO GIVETH SONGS IN THE NIGHT
XIV. WHEN THE PEOPLE SAW THE MOUNTAIN SMOKING THEY STOOD AFAR OFF
Part 5
XV. "WHERE WAST THOU WHEN I LAID THE FOUNDATIONS OF THE EARTH?"
XVI. CURSE GOD AND DIE
XVII. DOTH NOT WISDOM CRY AND UNDERSTANDING PUT FORTH HER VOICE?
XVIII. VANITY! VANITY! ALL IS VANITY
Part 6
XIX. THE SHADOW CHRIST
XX. THE SHADOW CHRIST
XXI. THE SHADOW CHRIST
XXII. THE SHADOW CHRIST
XXIII. THE SHADOW CHRIST
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