George MacDonald
‘More life!’ is the unconscious prayer of all creation, groaning and travailing for the redemption of its Lord, the Son who is not yet a son. Is not the dumb cry to be read in the faces of some of the animals, in the look of some of the flowers, and in many an aspect of what we call Nature?
All things are possible with God, but all things are not easy. It is easy for Him to be, for there He has to do with His own perfect will: it is not easy for Him to create — that is, after the grand fashion which alone will satisfy His glorious heart and will, the fashion in which He is now creating us. In the very nature of being — that is, God — it must be hard — and divine history shows how hard — to create that which shall be not himself, yet like himself. The problem is, so far to separate from himself that which must yet on Him be ever and always and utterly dependent, that it shall have the existence of an individual, and be able to turn and regard him — choose Him, and say, ‘I will arise and go to my Father,’ and so develop in itself the highest Divine of which it is capable — the will for the good against the evil — the will to be one with the life whence it has come, and in which it still is — the will to close the round of its procession in its return, so working the perfection of reunion — to shape in its own life the ring of eternity — to live immediately, consciously, and active — willingly from its source, from its own very life — to restore to the beginning the end that comes of that beginning — to be the thing the Maker thought of when He willed, ere He began to work its being…
A being that is one with the essential Life
When a man can and does entirely say, ‘Not my will, but thine be done’ — when he so wills the will of God as to do it, then is he one with God — one, as a true son with a true father. When a man wills that his being be conformed to the being of his origin, which is the life in his life, causing and bearing his life, therefore absolutely and only of its kind, one with it more and deeper than words or figures can say — to the life which is itself, only more of itself, and more than itself, causing itself — when the man thus accepts his own causing life, and sets himself to live the will of that causing life, humbly eager after the privileges of his origin, — thus receiving God, he becomes, in the act, a partaker of the divine nature, a true son of the living God, and an heir of all he possesses: by the obedience of a son, he receives into himself the very life of the Father.
Obedience is the joining of the links of the eternal round. Obedience is but the other side of the creative will. Will is God’s will, obedience is man’s will; the two make one. The root-Life, knowing well the thousand troubles it would bring upon Him, has created, and goes on creating other lives, that, though incapable of self-being, they may, by willed obedience, share in the bliss of His essential self-ordained being. If we do the will of God, eternal life is ours — no mere continuity of existence, for that in itself is worthless as hell, but a being that is one with the essential Life, and so within his reach to fill with the abundant and endless out-goings of His love. Our souls shall be vessels ever growing, and ever as they grow, filled with the more and more life proceeding from the Father and the Son, from God the ordaining, and God the obedient. What the delight of the being, what the abundance of the life He came that we might have, we can never know until we have it…!
Selah.
No comments:
Post a Comment