earth is the Lord’s and the fulness thereof, the world and they that dwell therein.” Yes, the right Word is spoken. But why does it enlighten us so faintly? Why does it not penetrate our ears and issue from our lips? Why do we not ascend, as it is said later in our Psalm, “into the hill of the Lord,” and stand, even amidst the need which surrounds us, in the holy place? Why is it not true and real to us and why do we not live by that Word: “the earth is the Lord’s.” Why, then, do we live on as though it is not true, if it is true? We know how the whole world waits to live by it. But we are ourselves “world.” We are never able to accomplish it in our own little lives, so as to allow salvation and truth to come to light. We live our days as though not a flicker of light would reveal itself. How poor our words are, how darkened are our spirits! How little we seem able to say to the great need and darkness of our times. We scold about the newspapers because they seem to thrash straw in their daily reports, but we ourselves know no better. Even our Christian words, our sermons and pious observations, are so helpless, faltering, lacking in light and spirit. They sound pious, but from them proceed the same far-distant hopelessness and perplexity, the same obstinate and despairing spirit which proceeds everywhere from books and men. The sad part of it all is that we speak and hear the word of God as a mere word of man, it no longer possesses its unique power and meaning.
Here undoubtedly lies the deepest reason of our need. The word of God is there, it is verified to us that God is Lord, and if we could accept it we would be helped. But we cannot. A bolt is fixed in place, it requires certain hands, different hands from our own, to open. “Clean hands” are required for it, say the words of our text. There is a darkness there which robs us of our vision. Even when we have the clearest, divine word of promise before us, it does not tell us anything. And we cannot get anything out of it. It requires men with other hearts than our own to see God’s light. He who has “a pure heart,” say the words of our Psalm, can “ascend into the hill of the Lord.” There is a power of temptation which frustrates us when we would and should believe. “Should God have said …?” and by it our faith is severed at its roots. It requires men in our places who have “not lifted up their souls to falsehood,” to break the bonds of this temptation, says the Bible.
“He who has clean hands”—this is the primary thing which is told us. Clean, guiltless hands open the bolt that closes the entrance to the redeeming and freeing things which God has to say to us. To understand what is meant we may imagine that all of us, without exception, are sitting, as it were, in a prison which we have erected around ourselves and keep on building through our foolish, frivolous, cruel and unclean living, thinking and doing. And when God lays His hand upon us, when He directs His words to us, it is that He wants to overlook all this; He wants to divorce us from it; He wants to forgive us. “The earth is the Lord’s and the fulness thereof.” He wants to tell us that all this imprisonment is invalid. It does not belong to you; that is not the real you. That is your imprisonment and God wants to look upon that as removed, as though it did not exist; He wants to look upon you without imprisonment. You are free before Him and through Him. But we must let that be done for us. We must learn to look upon our lives and ourselves that way, look upon them in the light of the judgment and grace of God. We must divorce ourselves from the old existence, we must become ashamed of our imprisonment. Something in us wants to be ashamed of itself. Something in us wants to believe that all this does not really belong to our real selves but that it is an imprisonment. This something we must give its right; it must be helped to break through. We must not be callous or hardened. For what separates us from God is not our sins, but our unwillingness to have our sins forgiven! We must really give God our hands when He walks toward us and desires to take them. The hands of men which are taken out of guilt and laid in the hands of God and which He takes are “clean hands,” for God forgives sin. Such hands unbolt the door which keeps us from redemption. But he who loves his sins more than God who wants to forgive them—with such a one God cannot speak.
This callousness of heart might happen in the finest and most spiritual manner. For instance, we might assent to all that God’s word says, but always apply it to others, to the unfaithful, the godless world. We conceive the strife for God and His things as a strife which we should direct against other folks—here the good, there the bad—and we are on the side of God as soldiers of the army of light. Then we shout “the earth is the Lord’s and the fulness thereof”; yes, and we shout it with a peculiar enthusiasm and zeal, but in the end we mean our own things, the things of our own religious party or movement. But in the same measure that we strive against other folks for our own things especially when it becomes important whether we shall keep the upper hand, in that same measure we thicken the walls of our prison and do not have anything more to do with God’s word, even if we are ever so familiar with it. God does not ask about the right of our life, He asks about the wrong of our life, for He does not want to help us into the saddle, but He wants to forgive us so that He alone might be right. Where is our unrighteousness, our sin, our weakness, and where are those sinful, wrong, and weak hands extended to God that He might take and make them into clean hands? This is the main thing, the only thing. As long as we have so many right deeds and habits to impose upon others, just so long are there no “clean hands,” and just so long will no active striving help us even if it is the noblest. We are still imprisoned, and God cannot do for us what He wants to do.
The words of our text tell us a second thing. We are perhaps ready to acknowledge and substantiate the truth that the earth is the Lord’s and the fulness thereof, but only as a truth at which we have arrived by the power of our own human insight, which we have validated by the power of our own experience. We add perhaps with a dash of pride, that it is a truth in line with all other truths, knowledge, experiences, and convictions which, in the course of life, we accumulate that the darkness of our existence may be a little clarified. But God is a jealous God, for He will be sole validator of what He says, and He will not be considered as a bit of human wisdom in line with others. Words of the Bible are remarkably poor in capacity for falling in line with words from the classics of philosophy and religion. That “the earth is the Lord’s” is not a clever saying of man’s life-experience, for it is a truth too great for man to express, know and perceive, as he would express, know and perceive other truths. God and the divine is not a subject of our perception or measurement. That He has created the world and that it is His—that is not a scientific fact to be taught, and we must be careful not to allow it to become such. It is true, but true from God and not from us. There is an eternal world, but we cannot see it, not even as a city above the clouds, and we would do well not to forget that when our artists represent it as such to us. Perhaps it would be better for them to let these things be.
As far as our knowledge is concerned, God is hidden. He does not ask, as he draws near to us: “Do you understand me?” But he asks: “Will you, in spite of the fact that you do not perceive me, will you put yourself in my hands and let yourself be led by me, even through the night?” In our own times there is a strong tendency, whether through science or through earnest investigation of the Bible, to get behind the plan, existence, and government of God. Whoever has understanding, who really understands God, will not meddle with these matters. To understand God means to bow before God, to pray to God, to make God authoritatively valid without understanding Him. To come to this position a cleansing of the desire to understand with one’s own powers is required. It requires the insight that only God Himself can place us upon the path that leads to Himself. It requires the insight that revelation is necessary. That is what is meant by the “pure heart” which alone is able to pierce through the darkness in which God lives. It signifies that a renunciation is necessary which acknowledges that all our knowledge about God comes from the knowledge that we know nothing, except what He wills to reveal to us. “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” A person cannot give himself a new heart, but he can plead for it. And in this pleading, if it is earnest and humble, there lies concealed the purity of heart. And in this purity lies the promise, “He shall receive a blessing from the Lord, and righteousness from the God of his salvation.”
But is it not possible that this knowledge, this perception of the majesty of God and His word, might be reduced to mere human knowledge?—perhaps to a teaching, a theology, or a sermon, which we might possess as we possess other things? Yes, that is possible. It has always and frequently happened in Christianity. Not for nought are we