Isaiah 36:19

Where are the gods?

Hamath

Hamath at the north border of the Holy Land, a large town on the Orontes, depopulated by the Assyrian in 720. Arpad, Aradus, a town on the coast, now a heap of ruins. Sepharvaim, or Sipar, a town to the north of Babylon, built on both sides of the Euphrates. (B. Blake, B.D.)

Inquiry for gods:

These inquiries may, by a slight accommodation, be used as showing some characteristics of false gods, and showing, by implication, the glory and worship which are due to the one living Lord. Men have a distinct right to inquire for their gods. Almighty God Himself does not shrink from this test of personality and nearness. He will be inquired of. He has proclaimed Himself accessible. “Come now, let us reason together.” God is within reach of the heart of man; and religion, as well as bringing with it a Divine fear, brings with it also a Divine companionship. Men cannot live on mere sublimity. Man cannot get hold of infinitude. He must have something that he can lay the hands of his heart upon. God must give miniatures of Himself, which little children even can put away in the hiding-places of their love as their chief jewels. (J. Parker, D.D.)

What is a man’s god?

A man’s god is whatever is the supreme object of his admiration and trust. It may be beauty, it may be strength, it may be money, it may be fame, it may be self-righteousness, it may be self-confidence. Now there are times in life when a man instinctively or by force inquires for his god; and he who cannot, in such critical hours, find his god, has made the profoundest and saddest spiritual mistake in the bestowment of his affections and the gift of his trust. There are times when you are dissatisfied with yourself; when you feel your utter nothingness. Take a season of utter prostration, when the strong man is withered. At such a time we look out for something greater than ourselves. Is there no one who can meet us in this extremity of feebleness, who can come down to us, not in the thunder of His great power, but in the condescension of His almightiness? Look at a time of commercial panic, business distress, when no man knows whom to trust. Man cannot be satisfied then without the supernatural; he may even drift into superstition. Atheists pray when they are in extreme pain or peril. There are times when all men either come quietly, with reverence and tenderness, to seek God who has withdrawn for a moment, or when they are startled, are frightened into momentary devotion. (J. Parker, D.D.)

Man-made gods

1. Some people have made money their god, and there is not a more helpless god in all the temples of idolatry. He will never come to you in the crisis of your life. He will make little compromises with you, help you over divers stiles, solve certain little problems for you. But when your soul is in agony, when your life has wrought itself down to the one last spasm, he will be a dumb god. We brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out. If you could take a five-pound note with you across the grave into yonder invisible mysterious world, nobody would know what it was. You would have to explain it, and nobody would believe you. You might hold it up, and show the watermark, and lecture upon it, and turn it round and round, and nobody could change it.

2. There is another god that some men are making. Its name is Luck! Some men say, “Things will not turn out so badly after all. I have always been able to get upon the sunny side of the road, and something will occur to get me upon that side again. I have trusted the chapter of accidents. My chances have always turned out right, and they will turn out right again.” There never was so mocking an idol as luck. The young man who throws in a game of that kind and is lucky, will have another game to play. He has another competitor who will force him, and say, “Now you must have the dice out again.” The name of that last competitor is Death, and he will play you. The young man says, “I do not want to play.” Death grasps him by the throat, and says, “You shall play!” Now he gets hold of his dice-box, and Death always wins.

3. Some men’s god is a well-favoured countenance. They trust to their shape, figure, bearing, expression. They say, “My face is an introduction, a certificate, a guarantee: wherever I go a space is cleared for me.” A very superficial god! I can imagine such persons brought into circumstances which will try their god severely. Yonder is a man lofty in stature, portly in bearing, commanding in all the attributes of external person. He says that he feels a pain piercing him. He is taken home, and betakes himself to his bed. His physician comes to his room and says, “This is a case of small-pox.” That god of his will be dug in the face till the man’s own mother will not know him, and the sister who loved him best will pray to escape from his presence. God can blotch your skin! God can send poison into your blood! And you, who sneered at ungainly virtue, at unfavoured honesty, may be a corrupt, worm-eaten, pestilent thing in the dirt! What, then, if any man should say to you, Where is thy God? (J. Parker, D.D.)

The revelation of the true God in times of human need

This part of the subject is not free from difficulty. Many a man has felt the most intense pain on observing what he supposed was God’s absence from the scene of human affairs. This difficulty must be grappled with if we would be honest to all sides of our great subject. In reply to this difficulty I suggest three things.

1. As a mere matter of fact, attested by a thousand histories known in our own experience, God has appeared in vindication of His name and honour.

2. As a first principle in sound theology, it must be admitted that God Himself is the only true judge as to the best manner and time of interposition. By so much as He is God this point at least must be conceded. Let us be fair to the Almighty, as we would be fair to man. Stephen was taken by the mob, dragged out and stoned. “Where was his God then?” was once the mocking inquiry of a well-known freethinker. Go to Stephen himself for an answer; and when he, outraged and dishonoured, said with his dying breath, “Lord, lay not this sin to their charge,”--to have wrought in the human soul, under circumstances so tragic and terrible, a desire like that, was to do more for Stephen than if he had been lifted up by myriads of angels out of the hands of his murderers and set in the sun! Do not let us forget God’s spiritual gifts to us. Though the stones were falling upon him and he was in the last agonies, he said in a whisper, the sound of which shall survive the voices of all thunders and floods, “I see heaven opened, and Jesus standing at the right hand of God.” It is only in crises, in extremities such as these, that the highest reach of faith is realised, and that faith itself becomes victory.

3. Then the very absence of God, being dictated by wisdom and controlled by love, must be intended to have a happy effect upon human faith. When God is absent, what if His absence is intended to excite inquiry in our hearts? It is in having to grope for God we learn lessons of our own blindness and weakness and spiritual incapacity. (J. Parker, D.D.)

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