OLE GUY THAT IS REALLY STUPID

UNCONSCIOUS DECADENCE

"Gray hairs are here and there upon him, and he knoweth it not."—Hosea 7:9b

            Or, to read that in slightly different form, a more literal rendering of the Hebrew, and I think perhaps a more poetic: "Gray hairs are sprinkled upon him, and he knoweth it not."

            This is without question a terrible chapter. It is a prophetic diagnosis of the national condition. The dark and terribly sinister background of a degenerate and polluted people is of course obvious throughout the book. In this message, however, the prophet deals with it very clearly. He shows that the desire of God is to heal and to restore; but that this desire is constantly frustrated by the pollution of the nation, and its willful ignoring of God. In difficulty politically, and with regard to surrounding peoples, it is running to Assyria and to Egypt for help. I repeat, there is persistent ignoring of God, and all the while its strength is ebbing away. The nation is being destroyed.  Looks everywhere except with Him.

            The verse from which the text is taken repeats the same phrase twice over, "knoweth it not." The statement is first made, "Strangers have devoured his strength, and he knoweth it not"; and then is repeated pictorially, "Yea, gray hairs are sprinkled upon him, and he knoweth it not."            The tragedy of the situation is revealed in that twice-repeated word, "he knoweth it not . . . he knoweth it not." "Gray hairs are here and there upon him, and he knoweth it not." It is perhaps the most perilous condition possible.

            The first thing I would like to say in considering the figure employed is that the suggestion it makes is entirely contrary to Nature. Now I ask you, if any of you were unconscious when the gray hairs began to appear! I do not think anyone would claim such ignorance. It is never so in actual experi­ence. We discover the gray hairs, some of us sooner than others, but we discover them! So here is some­thing employed as a figure of speech which is contrary to Nature, and therefore is the more arresting. Men discover them, and they laugh at them, or they try to hide them, or if they are foolishly weak-minded, they pull them out, and if they are utterly stupid they dye them. I said men! The facts as stated may have wider application. I am content to refer to men only!

            "Gray hairs are here and there upon him, and he knoweth it not." It is not natural, it is not true. If it were ever true in the time of the prophet then mirrors were not plentiful. Mirrors are useful if only that they do help us to discover the gray hairs. And yet the prophet distinctly said of the nation: "Gray hairs are here and there upon him, and he knoweth it not." No mirrors in this house.

            And yet, this thing entirely unnatural in the physical, is constantly true in the moral and spiritual realms, and so the figure of the prophet is warranted and indeed most graphic. Signs of decadence, which. are obvious to others, are undiscovered by ourselves; and we go on, and on, and on, the victims of ebbing strength, spiritually and morally becoming degenerate, without knowing it! We are blind to the signs which are self-evident to onlookers. There is no condition more perilous to our highest well-being than this of unconscious decadence. The skillful physician knows how often the cessation of suffering means that mortification has set in, and that in the moral realm may be the meaning of ignorance of gray hairs. Numb to the facts!

            There is one text in the Bible that, as God is my witness, I never read without trembling. It is a text that tells the story of Samson: "He wist not that the Spirit of God had departed from him." A man who had known the power of the Holy Spirit resting upon him, working through him, was going on and on, and the Spirit had left him, and he did not know it. "Gray hairs are here and there upon him, and lie knoweth it not." The signs of moral and spiritual degeneracy are abounding, and they are seen by others, but not by ourselves. I repeat, there is no condition into which a man or a nation can pass more full of peril, more calamitous than that. Moral degeneracy and spiritual failure are cursing them, and all the while they are unconscious of it, going through the same motions, but without vital significance. It may be, to be particular and immediate, they are still going to church every Sunday, saying their prayers every night, making their contribution to the enterprises of God in the world with regularity, and yet all the while suffering from spiritual degeneracy and moral pollution.

            The change is apparent to others, the signs of weakness are obvious, but they do not know it. In considering this matter, let us follow three lines of questioning: What is the cause of this ignorance? What its course? And what its cure?

            First, then, what is the cause of such ignorance? I am not now talking about the disease. I am talking rather and only about the appalling condition of having the disease and not knowing it, of having moral and spiritual declension and being unconscious of it. Why is it that men are ever thus unconscious of that which is obvious to others?

            The first answer to this is that a man who is un­conscious of his own moral degeneracy and spiritual deflection is a man who has lost his vision of the normal. When I use the word "normal" I am using the word on its highest level. I am thinking for the moment not socially, or nationally, but individually. I am thinking of individual lives, according to the Divine standard and pattern, according to the standard, Here, moreover, I am not concerned with standards we have created for ourselves, but with the standards which lie potentially within our personalities, the standards—let it be said bluntly, the standards of God for us.

            If a man is unconscious of failure, it is because he has lost a sense of true standards; the reason is always that he has lost his vision of the true norm, even though he may still talk about the standard. When he speaks of the standard, what he means is not the standard. The trouble with men and women everywhere who have gray hairs upon them in the moral and spiritual realm, and do not know it, is that they have lost the true vision of the norm.

            The normal in man, what is it? First of all, his spiritual nature; second, the fact that holiness is forevermore the condition of beauty and health; and, therefore, that the mental and the physical in human personality are subservient to the spiritual, and only valuable as they are sacramental symbols of that spiritual essence. It will be admitted that men today are not so thinking of human life. And that is the trouble with man today, he is thinking about himself callously. Or to return to the statement already made, men have lost the vision of the normal.

            How do we think about human life? How is it to be interpreted? What is the standard? We lose the sense of the normal in human life when we forget that the utmost fact of personality is neither physical nor psychical, but pneumatic. I do not quite like using that word, because today we have lost its first value. We use it for tires! Pneumatic in the Scriptural sense means spiritual. Moral degeneracy, why? Because man is forgetting the majesty and the dignity of his personality, and that the standard of man's life is never accurate when the spiritual is either neglected or a contradicted quantity in his life. A man may be quite moral according to the standards of life today, and yet in the deepest sense be immoral. We say a man is a decent member of society? But what do we mean by society? Ordinary society, everyday society, intellectual society, aesthetic society, refined society? I am not denying that a man may be decent in those surroundings. But how does he feel when he gets into a prayer meeting? Oh, he says—"I don't go." We know that. But why doesn't he go? Because he feels he would be out of place there.

            Exactly, he has lost the sense of the fact that man at his highest is a man who communes with God; that the ultimate calling of human life is not the function­ing of the fussy days in which we are gathering ducats and dollars; that the ultimate meaning of human life is fulfilled when a man walks and talks with God. If he has lost that, then gray hairs are upon him, and he doesn't know it, because that is not his vision.

            This lost sense of the spiritual nature of man always issues in a lowered conviction concerning holiness, the forgetfulness of the fact that holiness is the condition of beauty; and that there is no beauty in the ultimate meaning of the great and gracious word, except the beauty of holiness, that which results from holiness. It may be objected that this is a very old-fashioned conception of life, indeed Victorian or puritanical. As a matter of fact it is much older than that. It is as old as man is, and older; it is as old as the founda­tion of the universe, as old as the philosophy that realizes that all things proceed from God as well as return to Him. It is lost irrevocably by men who have lost contact with God. When we have lost a sense of the spiritual, and the deep inner conviction that the secret of all beauty is holiness, and that the mental and the physical, sacred things, divinely created things, are, after all, in the last analysis, subservient to the spiritual, we have lost our sense of the normal in human life.

            The vision of the normal declares that the cardinal things of beauty and of splendor in human life are faith and hope and love. Faith, which is the substance of things hoped for, and the evidence of things not seen; faith, that faculty of the human soul that always soars from the rock of reason, but now spreads its pinions and reaches the Infinite, and has fellowship with it. Faith, which grasps the Eternal in its thinking, and then compels conduct to conform to the vision. Faith is never dead. It is always the principle of energy. Nothing was ever done, of human worth, but was done on the basis of faith. Every victory ever won individually or socially resulted from the activity of faith. Every deed is preceded by a dream. When we were young they told us, sometimes, sadly, cynically, we were building castles in the air. Of course we were. Normal human life always begins there. Have you a boy doing it at home? Don't you dare be fool enough to sneer at your boy for building his castle in the air. That is faith. No boy ever built a cottage on the ground but that it had been preceded by a castle in the air. That is faith. It was faith which spanned the rivers and tunneled the mountains; faith did the engineering feats that fill us with wonder as we travel, winding round and round the mountains, or boring through their strongholds. When faith only operates within the limits of the material, and does not go out into the realm where no bridges can be built and no tunnels made, there is an atrophy of personality. Then we have lost our vision of the normal. Where faith is eternally interpreting and making real the things not yet grasped and not yet reached, indefinitely building castles, not in the air, but in the vastness of eternity, and in the ages to come, then life is normal. No achievement within the physical is final or complete. No city of human construction is perfect. The ultimate city must come down out of heaven from God. For the building of that, faith is completely necessary.

            God grant that we may be enabled to see again the norm of human life, the real meaning of being, to catch again the consciousness of the norm in grandeur and splendor, with the spiritual central to every­thing; holiness the condition of beauty; mental and physical powers subject to spiritual aspirations and endeavors. That is faith grasping the infinite, hope aspiring toward realization, and love harmonizing with the pulsing heart of God. If we do not see that vision, then let us look in a mirror, and we shall see the gray hairs.

            This loss of the vision of the normal issues in the setting up of false standards of life. Denying the spiritual there follows the pinnacle of the mental, and the deification of the physical. When these things are so, personality is degenerate; it is working its own destruction.

            Of course the trouble too often is that men are satisfied with comparing themselves with the average man, a terrible thing to do. The average man is the man who does not know, does not see that the Spirit of God has departed. Too many today are like the group in Ephesus who said—as the King James Version renders it—"We have not so much as heard whether there be any Holy Ghost." Real spiritual depth to their lives.

            Of this condition of unconscious decadence we have another prophetic illustration in Malachi. Seven times over across the page of Malachi it is recorded that the people replied to the prophetic messages by asking the same question, "Wherein?" Here we have the same people later on saying, "Wherein." The prophet said, You have robbed God; and they replied in effect: We do not see we have robbed Him; wherein have we done so? He charged them with blasphemy. They said, Wherein have we blasphemed? That is what the world is saying today to the preacher: What is all this about? Wherein have we failed? What is the matter with us? Why do you preach to us? Why do you do it? Wherein are we wrong? I will tell you what is the matter. Gray hairs are here and there upon men, and they do not know it. Spiritual declension, moral deterioration, lowering of the standards, a loosening of the high standards of beauty and holiness; and men do not see it, do not know it, because they have lost the vision of the true standard, and therefore they have set up false standards. A debased standard issues in a degenerate personality; but men are unconscious of the destructive process.

            Now a second line of consideration is involved, that of the curse of this ignorance. Signs of decadence witness to debility and disease; and they are really beneficent warnings if we did but see them. To return to the realm of Nature. Gray hairs are a beneficent warning. They are at least to remind us that we are to limit our output of energy. Every indication of degeneracy is a warning. It might be possible for a man to grow old without any sign to warn him as to how he should conduct his affairs. That would but hasten the end of everything. The signs are beneficent warnings, but when they are undiscovered, the warning is not known, but the disease is still there, and its operation is progressive, and its ultimate is death.

            Are we conscious that between the today of our experience and the yesterday of it, five, ten years ago, there is a lowering of our moral standards? If we are not, our neighbors are, and our mothers are, our wives are, and our husbands are, and our children are! It is indeed a tragedy if we are blind to it when it is there. The warning is unheeded because the sign is not discovered; but the trouble is there, and the process is going on. Ephraim, not knowing that gray hairs were here and there upon him nationally, was degenerate, and the degeneracy was progressive, and the ultimate must be destruction.

            Gray hair is not a tragedy; but failure to see it is. An unconsciousness which produces carelessness is in itself a catastrophe. Spiritual and moral failure is a tragedy, accentuated a thousand-fold by ignorance of it. Thus we come to our final question. Is there any cure for this ignorance? The answer is involved in the previous considerations. The cure for ignorance is found in the contemplation of the normal. And this is now made possible to us in a Person. How much time do we give to see Jesus clearly for our­selves? I know, and I am not unconscious of the value of it so far as it goes, that we have a general familiarity with Him, that we even give our assent to the great doctrines of the Church concerning Him. But how much time do we give to personally consider Him? There is no correction more quick, and sharp, and powerful to my own spiritual and moral carelessness and blindness than determined consideration of the Normal and the Standard of my human nature, as it is given to me in the Person of Christ. We are headed for His kingdom, not ours. Consideration of Him means the restoration of the vision of the Normal. If we will honestly give ourselves to the business of considering Him, such consideration will bring quick and sharp revelation of the sprinkling of the gray hairs, of the sense of failure in ourselves. It always has been so, and always will be so to the end of the journey. To see the failure is at least to be a long way towards recovery. To know that the Spirit of God has left me at least gives me the opportunity for investigating the reason for His departure, and seeking again to find Him.

            Of course contemplation of the normal must be followed by severe and honest self-examination by that Norm. How often do we examine ourselves? How often do we take time to see how far are we from these standards? Wherein are we coming short? Do not expect any one else to do this for you. They cannot. You could neither for me, nor I for you. We cannot examine each other in the last analysis. But if we will ourselves bring our lives to the test of the revelation that God has given us in the Man of Galilee, and that not merely with regard to the outward conditions of life, but to the inward thinking of life, not merely with regard to the things that are overt and open before the eyes of others, but with regard to those inner and spiritual centers of life, it will be a severe and healthful discipline for us spiritually.

            But again, the vision of the normal and of the actual, by the way of severe self-examination, will reveal the gray hairs, but it will not remove them. If they are there, even though I see the Normal, the sight of the Normal will not remove them. If they are there, even though I am brought to a consciousness of failure, that consciousness is not enough to overtake it and correct it.

            Then what shall we do? We must turn to God. To return to those half humorous things we were saying at the beginning. The gray hairs which pictorially set forth spiritual and moral weakness, degeneracy, deflection; the gray hairs; well, what about them? God does not laugh at them, and God won't help us to hide them, so that they cannot be seen; and God won't pull up symptoms and leave the disease, and God will have no fellowship in the lying work of dyeing them another color. What will He do?

            As we are in the Old Testament we will first consult it for an answer. Listen to this:

"Jehovah, Who forgiveth all thine iniquities; Who healeth all thy diseases; Who redeemeth thy life from destruction; Who crowneth thee with loving-kindness and tender mercies; Who satisfieth thy desire with good things, so that thy youth is renewed like the eagle."

            Then the gray hairs disappear. That is a psalm.

            Let me turn over to a prophet preaching at the same time Hosea was, namely, Isaiah:

"They that wait for Jehovah shall renew their strength. They shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint."

            God alone is able to remove gray hairs from our spiritual and moral nature by taking away the de­structive forces of our strength which are producing the moral degeneracy.

            Let us turn to the New Testament and finish there. What is the cure for gray hairs, moral and spiritual? What is the cure for signs of disease? What is the way by which the evidences of senility morally and spiritually can be banished forever? What is the way?

"Ye must be born again."

            The new life that He gives will remove the disease, and put an end to the signs of weakness. May God arouse us if we are asleep; open our eyes if blind, so that it may not be true of us that the gray hairs are there without our knowing it.