EMOTION DEBASED

EMOTION DEBASED

"We love, because He first loved us." (1 John 4:19)

To know God is to know love, and to know love is to love. Hence man is created with an emotional nature, ready to act in response to knowledge. The apostle of love declares, "We love, because He first loved us." (1 John 4:19). Herein is a declaration of the origin of love in the consciousness of man. Man knowing God is conscious of His love, and that love of God is the generator of the love of man. The accurate knowledge of unclouded intelligence, inevitably issues in the perfect love of un-degraded emotion. Such knowledge issuing in such love, creates the true governing principle for the action of the ultimate fact of human life, that namely of the WILL.

The doctrine of the freedom of the will is itself only true within certain limitations. There is a sense in which in the very nature of will it cannot be free. Only in lack of reason, or insanity, is there perfect freedom of the will. Man never wills except under the impulse of a conviction. Behind every decision of the will there must of necessity be a governing principle. Man constantly asserts, I will. He never does this, but that he might add to the statement something more. He might, that is to say, declare the reason why he wills, so that the full statement is always, I will, because ------. That which follows the statement because, is the authority that commands the will. In unfallen man the authority behind will is the love of God, which is the outcome of a perfect knowledge of God. Thus the perfect activity of the will of man is always conditioned by submission to the will of God. Herein is a revelation of the meaning of much that Jesus said concerning His relation to His Father, and an explanation of all that He was in perfection of character, in wisdom of teaching, and in beauty of activity.

To this it may be objected that while this is true of human will, it cannot be said that the Divine will is under authority; and yet, that the very will of God is acting under an authority, is precisely the truth. The principle governing the movements of the will of God is that of the perfect communion of Infinite Love and Infinite Light. In the very essential of His being, God is Love (1 John 4:8). It is equally true that He is Light, (1 John 1:5) so that every action of His will is determined by Love, and by the unerring wisdom of Light. Thus let it be definitely stated that God is limited in every action of His will by unlimited Love and that unclouded Light, in which no darkness is. Thus unfallen man wills in response to love, which is the result of knowledge.

In this consideration lies an explanation of the method of the enemy. When man, listening to his suggestion of evil, asserted his will, it was upon the basis of a doubt of the Divine Love, which he had allowed himself to entertain. By that act of self-separation from God, man lost the knowledge of God, which issues in love to God, and creates the true governing principle behind the action of will. Distance from God means the clouding of the intelligence, and therefore the debasement of the emotion, and therefore the degradation of the will. The fact that man's intelligence is clouded is by no means a popular doctrine, and yet human history, equally with inspired revelation, attests the truth of the declaration. Through all the ages, and through all the schools of human thought, man has been engaged in a fruitless search after a final knowledge. Too often man is utterly unconscious of what that knowledge is after which he seeks, and yet the restlessness of human intellect, and its passionate striving, indicate its incompleteness, and its deep consciousness of that incompleteness. Zophar the Naamathite, speaking to Job said, "Canst thou by searching find out God? Canst thou find out the Almighty unto perfection?" (Job 11:7)

This most remarkable question in the oldest book in the Divine Library, indicating the consciousness of incompleteness existing among the meditative men of a far gone age is revealing. Yet take that question and ask it in the midst of the vaunted culture of this century, and the implied answer of the age in which Zophar asked, is the actual answer of the present age. Man does not know, nor can he discover God by the unaided working of his intellect, and that because his intellect is clouded, having lost its action with the true light. The hardest thinking of the twentieth century was done in the latter half of the 19th, by men, who, in comparison with other men, were intellectual giants. Let it be granted, as it is almost certainly true, that they were honest in their searching, and the names of them will be sufficient guarantee, Darwin, Huxley, Tyndal, and Spencer. They observed, they collected, they compared, they labored to discover the deepest secrets, and yet what were the conclusions at which they arrived? They claimed to have found, and declared, a certain method discoverable through all natural phenomena, evolution at its finest. They were not able perfectly to explain the very method which they discovered, much less were they able to account for the method as to its origin. Hence, in the 20th century evolution came into popularity. Spencer speaks of being "in the presence of an infinite and eternal energy from which all things proceed." This was a modern day sun god approach to creation changing slime to living organisms. That in itself is a very remarkable discovery, and yet how vague, and inadequate for the satisfaction of the passion of the human intellect for definiteness and absolute truth.

What then have attempted to do is eliminate God from the Creation picture and therefore the human intellect in the most enlightened century of the human race, stops short exactly where man's clouded intellect stopped short in those dim and distant times of Zophar the Naamathite. Man watches still, and in his searching tracks the footprints of Deity, fail to see the Divine, and thereby utterly fail to find God. And yet for an intimate and immediate knowledge of God the intellect of man was created.