That Clever God by Norman Grubb
by Norman Grubb

That Clever God
by Norman Grubb

We ask ourselves, How can a general fact become a personal experience? The answer is that simplest of ways by which alone all the generalities of life become personal experiences. It is the simple principle of supply and demand. The Bible calls it the way of faith. We might define it as freedom in action. God has so ordered the universe, all being forms of His self-manifestation, and our relation to it, that we are surrounded, almost overwhelmed, by all that is available to us-food, air, every convenience of life. We have a general recognition and acceptance of the fact that such things are beneficial for us and available to us. We call that believing in things.

But before anything, which is not mine already, can become mine in experience, it is obvious that I must come to want it, and then in my freedom appropriate it. My stomach needs food, it is available and I eat it. My lungs need air and I breathe it. My body needs a chair and I sit on it. But note that the effect of this response of my demand to the supply is that what I take takes me. I take the food and it takes me over for good or ill. I sit in the chair, and the chair holds me, not I it.

So faith, as freedom in action, is only faith when it produces the reflex action. The taker is taken, the grabber grabbed. Faith is not taking, but being taken, not grabbing but being grabbed. And the one and the same principle operates on all levels. There is no secular and spiritual with God. All is basically spiritual, for the one Spirit, that One Person, is manifesting Himself through all, and this is the principle of His self-manifestation.

But when it comes to our need of a right relationship to God, we meet a special problem. There is no automatic demand which will appropriate the supply. We humans by no means desire this revolutionary change. We are satisfied with ourselves, or make out to ourselves that we are; we find at least enough attraction in our normal selfinterested way of life to be repelled at the thought of any violent change. In fact, we are, as the Bible says, "deceived," "blinded," having been born in the delusion-the product of the Fall-that life is just we living it the way we think best. At most, a little religion, a few good works, satisfy any inner demand for some place in our lives for God and the service of others.

There has to come an awakening, a disillusionment, a sense of need and lack, to bring us to see that we are off the track. The first approach, therefore, that the God of our being has to make to us, to get us within hearing distance of Him, is exposure before remedy. It must be negative before positive: and this approach is what the Bible calls "law."

We have already mentioned that we use the word law to define the only way in which something can properly function. It is the law of its being. Thus we are continually busy seeking and discovering all the laws of our universe. If we attempt to make a thing work against the law of its being, we get trouble. This is true of all the laws of the body, of science, of mathematics, or the man-made laws of social or national life. But there is only one ultimate law, as the Bible has revealed it to us-that God is love. This is what God is. This is how God works. The universe is this law in operation. All is love and compounded of love. This is, therefore, the law of our being, for our being is in God. Anything which is not self-giving love, is broken law, and has its adverse consequences.

We humans instinctively know wrong from right, because, though Adam fell, he did not take the final, absolute step that Lucifer took. Lucifer from the centre of his being rejected God and made himself a god in reverse. To him good became evil, and evil good, self-giving bad, self-loving good. Lucifer became as fixed as a god of self-loving as God is fixed as the God of self-giving. There can be no change in either. There is no response in Lucifer to right ways, no discomfort that he is wrong; he is not savable.

But Adam’s sin was not a basic choice of evil for good, not a sin of spirit so much as of flesh. Eve was tricked, and Adam knowingly followed her to keep her, rather than blatantly defied God. When he took of the wrong tree, he chose the way of selfgratification but hoped, as it were, that God was not looking. He hoped for the best of both worlds. Impossible, but it left him with the vivid realization that he had done wrong. He hid himself from God.

Satan does not hide himself. He is in open defiance; he has proclaimed himself as a rival god with a rival kingdom. Adam and we of the human race do not call evil good. We still call good good and evil evil. So we are reachable and savable. Captives of Satan, bound to him, his property, sharing his destiny, but not yet fixed devils. We might be called children of the devil, but not yet sons of the devil. Satan has his being in God but, as a free spirit, has totally rejected even the recognition of that fact. We have our being in God, but, though we are joined to Satan, have not so cut ourselves off by the final choice of our wills and hearts, that we do not recognize or respond to the One in whom we live and have our being.

That is why we humans instinctively know wrong from right: we know that what proceeds from selfishness is wrong, whatever is self-giving is right. Paul truly said that we have the law written in our hearts, and John speaks of "the light that lighteth every man," and the conscience that bears witness to the truth.

But in our freedom, we easily rationalize, we stifle that inner voice and find ways around it. So God, through Moses, defined that law in written terms which we call the Ten Commandments. Jesus defined it in still more absolute and inclusive terms in the two commandments of absolute love towards God and our neighbor.

The normal operation of a law is a perfectly natural functioning of things according to its law-in ease, in spontaneity. So the law by which something works is not normally a burdensome thing or an imposition on it. It is only when it seeks to function against the law of its being, that this law is like an enemy to it. An automobile runs smoothly according to its mechanical laws: pull the wrong lever and it grinds to a halt by being made to oppose its own laws.

So we humans are challenged and opposed by what should be the natural law of our being in God, the life of self-giving love, because we have ground to a halt by the turn of the wrong lever and are seeking to make life work on the unlawful principle of self-loving love. What should be normal, spontaneous, automatic, confronts us in our hearts and by written commandments as a threatening demand: "Do this and you live. Don’t do it and you die."

Law, then, is not God’s frown on us; it is the first form of His love. The Bible calls law elementary religion. It is the delicate way in which God reaches us on the only level upon which we could be reached, for love always adapts itself to situations. Being self-satisfied and self-reliant, we would see no point in being told that we need God. Very well then, God meets us where we are in our self-centeredness. "You know what you ought to be. You say you can be it. Well, be it. Here is the law. Keep it." How clever and adaptable love is. You aren’t conditioned yet for true religion; well, then have a religion on your own level-the law.

We must have the wrong way exposed to us which in our blindness we try to make out is the right, before we are conditioned to desire or find the right.

The Answer Begun
The effect of this inner and outer law on us is two-fold. On our response hangs our eternal destiny. We can either respond by hyprocisy or honesty. As a fact, we all start by being hypocrites. That is, we pretend to ourselves and others that we keep the law reasonably well, enough to salve our consciences: we have enough religion or a philosophy of some kind to cover our tracks, for a self must always have a foothold for its selfhood-a righteousness (rightness) of some sort. What we really do is to try to keep the eleventh commandment, to hide the truth from ourselves as from others- "Thou shalt not be found out!"

Honesty is when by some means or other (God has a thousand original ways), we are brought up sharp enough in our lives, suddenly or gradually, to be faced with the plain recognition that we are not what we should be. We are law breakers. The moment of truth is when in our freedom we admit that fact. That is honesty, and that is also a total self-humiliation. The supposed foundations to our selfhood have given way. That is why there is a cost in it. The false front of our self-justifying religion or philosophy collapses.

But this admission of merely being a law-breaker in the sense of not living up to the standards of God’s law is not sufficient by itself. The point is that it is the law of God, and, therefore, the law on which our being is founded, so that we are at variance with the Source, the Originator, the Upholder of our being. Therefore, we are at variance with life itself. We are wrong, we are lost, we are in the dimension of what Jesus called "outer darkness."

Now when that is an admitted reality to me, I am conditioned for the truth. I have a need and I must have it met. I can no longer consciously continue at variance with the God of my being and under His justifiable condemnation, with its necessary ultimate ending in "everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord". What then shall I do to make amends? But that is exactly what I cannot do as a self-confessed law-breaker with the usual consequences of law breaking.

This is the moment, the first moment when He who is love, the ground of my being, can get over to me what love is and what He is, and what I am to be. Jesus Christ, God in the flesh, is the answer. What He did for me and as me was what I could not do for myself. This is the eternal love. Now in my total need I am conditioned simply to see with thankfulness that what I could not do to remove guilt, condemnation, ever-lasting separation, He did for me; and they are no more. Seeing is recognizing and receiving and release.

In my freedom of choice, which hardly was conscious choice, when my need was so desperate and the supply so complete, I suddenly realize that God is now my God and Father, and Jesus Christ my Savior and Lord; and not only have I a conscious peace and release, but I have a love for Him. What I probably do not realize is that this is the beginning of my living the eternal quality of life for which I was originally created. The restoration to God of His stolen property has taken place. A revolutionary change has taken place. For the first time in my human history, I love someone else more than myself. A new love, greater than my love for myself, has taken possession of me: love for God and Jesus.

I do not yet realize that this is not my human affections. I probably think this is my love for Him, but what has really happened is that in receiving Christ I have received into myself the One who is love, and what I regard as my love for Him is really the first expression of God’s self-giving love in me, loving another more than myself, "The love of God (not love for God) shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit." This new love, greater than love for myself, has taken possession of me, causing me to start being an other-lover: for I very soon find that if I have love for Jesus, I also have love for all men, for He and His world are identified. I find in myself, not only the love for Him, but also the desire that my friends, my neighbors, and all men should share the secret of life that I have found and that they equally need, and that I should take my share in the ministry to mankind in all ways available to me.

This is eternal life which is eternal self-giving love begun in me. I have "come home," and begun to be the light and the love I was destined to be. What we call Christianity, therefore, is not belief in a doctrine, not membership in a church, not allegiance to a Bible or a Jesus of history, but a new love; for again we say, we live where we love, and this new love is for the first time in my human history the love of someone more than myself: and this is and means a new quality of life of which the potential and implications are way out of sight beyond space and time, just as an Amazon river starts by a trickle at its source, or a prairie fire begins with a spark.

-The Spontaneous You