Psalms 119:12. Blessed art thou, O Lord: teach me Thy statutes.
The blessedness of God, subjection to His statutes, and the relation between these topics – such are the threefold materials of thought furnished by this verse. Depending on the blessed God Himself to teach us, we take the three topics in order.
1. The Blessedness of God.
“Blessed art Thou, O Lord.” The blessedness of God is a great deep; it is a dazzling, bright abyss. We can look into it only as with shaded eyes; we can speak of it only as with a lisp tongue, like children. Yet if with childlike spirit we look and listen and meditate, our exercise may neither be unacceptable to the “blessed God” nor destitute of blessing to ourselves.
The blessedness of God! It is the result of His possession of all perfections, natural and moral. “God is light”; “God is love”. He is infinitely wise to devise the best conceptions, to entertain the infinitely true and good and grand ideals, and infinitely powerful to accomplish them. Thus His intelligent nature cannot but be characterised by that combination of inviolable repose and unhindered activity which constitutes a great element of our worthiest ideas of blessedness. His moral nature also in each of its glorious attributes – and in the union of their fulness and in the harmony alike of their indwelling in His being and of their outgoing into action – is at once suggestive of the highest conception we can form of blessedness.
To speak negatively is often, to our feeble intellects, the best means of grasping truth and guiding our own intelligence. Speaking negatively of God’s moral nature, it must be apparent that He is “the blessed God”. In Him is no darkness, no gloom, no shadow; no variableness or shadow of turning. In Him is no malevolence, no pleasure even in the death of the vilest of the wicked. In Him is no unrighteousness, no inequality. His nature and His ways are equal. Beautiful is that word equal as applied to God’s nature and ways, and blessed is what it implies. There is nothing unequal in Him; there is no excess, no defect, no incongruity, no conflicting element, no discord; no stain, no blemish, no shadow, no spot or wrinkle or any such thing. In all the boundless fulness of His being He is right, and only right – right, righteous, upright, even as one of His adoring servants has sung: “To show that the Lord is upright: He is my rock, and there is no unrighteousness in Him”
1Reprinted with editing from The Family Treasury for 1868, having been preached on June 14 that year. For an account of Martin’s life, see The Bulwark for October-December 2008 and January-March 2009.
(Ps 92:15). How then can we think of Him as other than the “blessed God”?
But the blessedness of God is intimately connected, not only with the absolute perfections of His being, but with His absolute natural supremacy and moral sovereignty. These may be distinguished. His natural supremacy is His necessary and absolute independence and superiority over all that exists; His moral sovereignty is His kingly rule over intelligent, responsible beings. And in each of these relations Scripture attributes to Him “blessedness”. In one passage He is designated God over all – that is, the Supreme Being – “blessed for ever” (Rom 9:5); and in another, “the blessed and only Potentate” (1 Tim 6:16) – the Sovereign, King of kings, and Lord of lords. As the Supreme Being He is blessed: “God over all”. As the sovereign God He is blessed: “the blessed and only Potentate”.
Nor is it difficult to see the grounds of these glorious assertions. He is in the fullest, the deepest sense, God over all, and therefore blessed. He is independent, absolutely so. He has relations to what is outside His own being, but He is independent of all that is outside His own being. All except Godhead exists by His will and at His pleasure: “Of Him, and through Him, and to Him are all things”. “For His pleasure they are, and were created.” His is the uncreated, self-existent, independent Being; infinite, eternal, unchangeable. Thus the heaven of heavens cannot contain Him, and He dwells in light that is inaccessible.
Language fails to tell, and thought fails to encompass the secret dwelling-place of the Most High, where the omnipotent and self-sufficient Godhead sits enthroned above all being beside, in His supreme and absolute independence, exalted above all circumstances, above all creatures, above all changes, above all influences. He is “God over all”, in blessedness which no events can invade, affect or control, which the will of no creature can cross, which no alien influence can overshadow or approach, which no voice of complaining or questioning can ever penetrate or ruffle, even though millions of apostate creations should unite to cry, “What doest Thou?”
For God is not only naturally and necessarily the Supreme Being, He is morally and judicially the absolute Sovereign of the universe, and herein also He is blessed. “Blessed art Thou, O Lord.” Thou art the Lord, the Master, the Ruler. God is Judge, Lawgiver, King. The Church welcomes and glorifies Him very specially in this relation, with emphatic, repeated, rejoicing recognitions: “The Lord is our Judge; the Lord is our Lawgiver; the Lord is our King; He will save us”. In this capacity in which we give Him threefold recognition as Judge, Lawgiver and King – Sovereign Lord Most High – He will save us.
And in this moral sovereignty God is blessed. For it is the outcome of His moral nature, which is blessed, and is therefore a high exercise, expression, enjoyment of conscious blessedness. For His kingly rule is at once the outgoing of His blessed nature and the fitting action of His blessed supremacy, when He deals with intelligent and moral beings. And if His nature and His supremacy are blessed, then blessed is He also in that sovereignty, which is the adequate expression alike of His nature with its perfections and of His supremacy with its rights and claims.
And the more pure and simple we perceive this sovereignty is – more absolute, independent, uncontrolled – the more we see it to be the pure and simple expression of His sheer and absolute will, so much the more will we see that it is blessed, and be disposed to acquiesce and rejoice in it. For if His will cannot contradict His nature, which is light and love, beneficence and righteousness, and if it vindicates to moral beings His supremacy and independence, why should it not be sheer and absolute – the mere good pleasure of His will? Shall we plead for it to be brought down beneath His natural supremacy as He is God over all, blessed for ever? Shall we plead for it to be taken outside the boundless glory of His blessed nature as light and love – the only wise, the only good; in whom there is nothing tortuous, perplexed, unequal, unrighteous?
Would we not thereby impair His blessedness as our Sovereign? Indeed would we not destroy our own perceptions of His blessedness. And would we rather serve a Sovereign whose blessedness we could not recognise than one whom we must perceive to be the blessed and only Potentate, the King of kings and Lord of lords, absolute and uncontrolled? No, it concerns me much, if I am to be His subject and His servant, to see His sovereignty ruled by nothing but His nature – His will controlled by nothing but His perfections, His reign worthy of His absolute supremacy and impaired by no influences that must be infinitely inferior. Let Him do what seems good in His sight alone. Let me rejoice that He takes counsel with none – whose counsel would be infinitely beneath His own, incongruous with it, degrading to it. “Even so, Father; for so it seemed good in Thy sight.” Thy sovereign rule is as blessed as Thy nature is blessed. Thou art the blessed and only Potentate. “Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven.”
But further: the blessedness of God subsists in fellowship – fellowship worthy of His eternal being and Godhead, worthy of His glorious nature and its infinite perfections, worthy of His absolute supremacy and uncreated independence, fellowship in the everlasting relations of the ever-blessed Three in One. As far as I see, after much and frequent thought, the doctrine of the Trinity enters indispensably into the blessedness God. For it provides the element of fellowship – fellowship fully worthy of God’s nature and alone adequate to God’s infinite capabilities of fellowship. Without fellowship, I confess I cannot conceive of blessedness either in the creature or the Creator.
I cannot conceive of a Unitarian’s God as a blessed being. A unipersonal Deity inhabiting a past eternity, absolutely without relations, without converse, without all love or aught to love; in solitariness, solitude, silence seems to me to add only the element of infinity to the idea of all that is blank and cold and terribly repulsive. Such a past eternity inhabited absolutely by only one unrelated Person, contemplating naught and in naught conversing, alike unloving and unloved, seems to add the character of boundlessness, of illimitable magnitude, to that of the very grave itself. It is the most unchristian idea even of the grave: “the cold grave to which we haste, where everlasting silence reigns”.
I cannot imagine a unipersonal deity blessed in contemplating himself – contemplating his own nature in his own only person, however full of all possible perfections that nature may be. I doubt whether it is even possible to imagine him as self-conscious at all, or capable of saying from eternity, “I am”. And I do not wonder at the particular heathen doctrine which represents a unipersonal deity Brahm as asleep from all eternity until he wakens up in the act of creating. As far as I can see, the profoundest modern doctrine of what is called the absolute Being fails because it proudly refuses to borrow light from revelation and to draw on the glorious revealed truth that Godhead subsists as Three in One.
I do not say that reason may discover that truth; but I do say that, if this truth is suggested from any quarter, reason can justify it more fully than has been, as far as I can see, generally admitted. For how an absolutely and eternally unrelated unity should ever begin to enter on relations, I utterly fail to understand. How such a God, subsisting in one eternal Person alone, should ever begin to create, I cannot possibly imagine; more especially how He ever could call persons – personal beings, intelligent, moral persons – into being.
A personal God, self-conscious, can utter from all eternity the great word, “I am”. A dependent intelligent being created by Him, conscious of his own being, gives forth a created reflection of that utterance; and being in the image of God, self-conscious though dependent, expresses the essential dignity of highest created being by also saying, “I am”. It is a result of the uncreated “I am”. That any creature in the universe can say, “I am”, demonstrates that there must be One who from all eternity could say, “I am” – in His case, “I am that I am”, Jehovah. But then, besides the great word, “I am”, there is another which seems to me as great – indeed, it would appear, the necessary reciprocal and complement – “Thou art.”
A created intelligence can say, “I am”, but that is not the first time that great word has been uttered; Jehovah was from everlasting the eternal utterance of it, “I am”; “I am that I am”. A created intelligence looking to his Creator can, in the instant following first consciousness, exclaim, “Thou art”; and his Creator looking to His intelligent creature can say, “Thou art”. Is this the first time that this great word has been uttered or utterable? Is it right that the great word, “Thou art”, expressing relation, expressing recognition, expressing fellowship, should begin to be uttered in time and should have no place in eternity – should have no eternal root to grow upon, no eternal fountain to flow from, no eternal rock to lean and rest upon? I cannot think so.
Is it right, is it fitting, is it conceivable, that God and His first intelligent creature should be on equal terms, in that each of them should, for the first time begin, in recognising each other, to say, “Thou art”, to each other? They are not on equal terms in saying, “I am”. God has from everlasting been the “I am”; “I am that I am”. There was no beginning of circumstances to enable Him to say, “I am.” Shall there be a beginning of circumstances to enable Him to say, “Thou art”? Is it right and fitting that this self-existent God, who has no beginning of being, should have a beginning of fellowship, the very crown jewel and diadem of being, that He should begin in time, and only on the frail platform of created things, to say, “Thou art”? No. “To which of the angels said He at any time, Thou art My Son; this day have I begotten Thee?”
But to His eternal Son He has eternally – in the unbeginning, unending now, the day that has no morning and no evening – been saying, “Thou art”. All along the eternal line of His having said, “I am”, to His own Son, He has been saying, “Thou art My Son; this day have I begotten Thee”. Not reflecting merely on self, the Father has seen – and He has been the blessed God in seeing – the brightness of His glory and the express image of His person in His Son. In no self-seclusion, selfhood, or exclusiveness, but in fellowship, the Father has seen in the Son also and has admired – and has been blessed in admiring – Godhead’s sovereignty; and unto the Son He saith, “Thy throne, O God, is for ever and ever; a sceptre of righteousness is the sceptre of Thy kingdom”.
I cannot imagine a unipersonal God as a creator at all. I cannot imagine God beginning to say, “Thou art”, to a creature if He had not been eternally saying, “Thou art”, to One altogether worthy to say, “I am”, in all the same exhaustless fulness of meaning in which Jehovah says, “I am that I am”. Without an eternal “Thou art”, we search in vain for a beginning of creation – we meet with nothing but an eternal gulf between a unipersonal deity and a created being. Reason fails to find a possibility of a beginning till it is said of a second Person in the Godhead that “He is the beginning of the creation of God”; The eternal Son”; the indispensable divine Mediator of creation – afterwards the divine Mediator of redemption.
I repeat, I cannot possibly imagine a unipersonal eternal God, having in his own being no relations, no fellowship, no “Thou art”; no one therefore to whom to say even, “I am”; and therefore no voice, no word – no word at all. I cannot imagine a beginning to creation from such a God. But there has been a “beginning”, for there has been a “word” – an eternal Word. And I adore the wisdom that links that Word and that beginning thus: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God” – there was fellowship. “And the Word was God”; it was fellowship adequate for Godhead – fellowship of God with God – yes, fully adequate, for the “same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by Him, and without Him was not anything made that was made. In Him was life, and the life was the light of men.”
Tell me not of a dark, blank, cold, and cheerless past eternity, with one only, eternal, self-inclusive, self-contemplating person dwelling in it, however much you may accumulate into your description of his being all possible perfections. The more you tell me that he is self-subsisting, self-sufficient, self-complete and absolutely independent, so much the more do you remove him far away from every idea of blessedness that reason, as it seems to me, can frame or can accept. It is a dark abyss of solitude and silence, from which I shrink back in terror and from which I cannot possibly believe that any bright and blessed creation could ever spring – that any bright beginning or blessed work could ever emanate. I demand some inward, living, bright and blessed relation in the eternal God Himself before I can imagine Him beginning to give birth to blessed and bright created things.
An absolute unity, such as reason tells that Godhead must necessarily be, combined with relation, such as reason and heart alike demand, may be an insoluble problem in which I can but doubtfully and darkly grope my way. But my reason is more than satisfied and my heart is more than joyful when, from what were otherwise the dark and blank abyss of unipersonal solitude and silence, I hear an eternal Person – an eternal Word – saying: “The Lord possessed Me in the beginning of His way, before His work of old. I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the earth was. When there were no depths, I was brought forth; when there were no fountains abounding with water. When He prepared the heavens, I was there; when He set a compass on the face of the earth, then I was by Him as one brought up with Him, and I was daily His delight.” Blessed art Thou therein, O God! “I was daily His delight, rejoicing always before Him” (Prov 8:22-32).
O Thou everlasting Son of God, Thou art the depth of all true philosophy, the solution of the profoundest problems, the satisfaction of our reason, the joy of our heart, the Saviour of Thy people. Thou art alike the light of men and the explanation of the Godhead’s blessedness. Thou fillest Thy Father’s boundless bosom with boundless, uncreated bliss. Blessed art Thou, O Thou Father of an Infinite Majesty, and Thou, O Word of God, His true and honourable Son, also the Holy Ghost. For the Father and the Son are blessed, not only in each other, but in the fellowship of the Spirit as I cannot now stay to show.
Observe, however, that the fellowship of two, each of whom can say, “Thou art,” seems incomplete and still only a kind of mutually-reflected self-hood till, going beyond themselves, they can add that other great word, “He is”. But in Trinity there is provision for this; and the Father and the Son having fellowship in the Spirit and concerning Him; the Father and the Spirit concerning the Son; the Son and the Spirit concerning the Father; blessedness in Godhead is in all relations complete – complete in every kind and in every degree, complete in every kind beyond degree. “Blessed art Thou, O Lord.”