OPEN INTERCOURSE WITH GOD.
By Horatious Bonar

      It does not seem a strange thing that the creature and
      the Creator should meet face to face, and that they
      should hold intercourse without any obstructing
      medium.
       We may not understand the mode of communication
      between the visible and the invisible, but we can see
      this, at least, that He who made us can communicate
      with us, by the ear or the eye or the touch. He can
      speak and we can hear; and, again, we can speak and He
      can hear. His being and ours can thus come together,
      to interchange thought and affection: He giving, we
      receiving; He rejoicing in us, and we rejoicing in
      Him: He loving us, and we loving Him. He can look on
      us, and we can look on Him; He "guiding us with His
      eye" (Psa 32:8), and we fixing our eye on His, as
      children on the eye of a father, taking in all the
      love and tenderness which beam from His paternal look,
      and sending up to Him our responding look of filial
      confidence and love. Not that He has "eyes of flesh,
      or seeth as man seeth" (Job 10:4); but He can fix His
      gaze on us in ways of His own, and make us feel His
      gaze, as really as when the eyes of friends look into
      each other's depths. "He that formed the eye shall He
      not see" (Psa 94:9). He who made the human eye to be
      "the light of the body" (Matt 6:22),--that organ
      through which light enters the body,--in order that He
      might pour into us the glory of His own sun and moon
      and stars,--can He not, through some inner eye which
      we know not, and for which we have no name, pour into
      us the radiance of His own infinite glory, though He
      be the "King invisible" (1 Tim 1:17),--He "whom no man
      hath seen nor can see" (1 Tim 6:16),--the "invisible
      God" (Col 1:15). He can touch us; for in Him we live
      and move and have our being:[2] and we can lay hold of
      Him, for He is not far from any one of us; He is the
      nearest of all that is near, and the most palpable of
      all the palpable. It would seem, then, that open and
      free and near intercourse with the God who made us
      arose from His being what He is, and from our being
      what we are: as if it were a necessity both of His
      existence and of ours.
       That He should be our Creator, and yet be
      separated from us, seems an impossibility; that we
      should be His creatures, and yet remain at a distance
      from Him, seems the most unnatural and unlikely of all
      relations. Intercourse, fellowship, mutual love, then,
      seem to flow from all that He is to us, and from all
      that we are to Him.
       We can conceive of no obstruction, no difficulty
      in all this, so long as we remained what He has made
      us. There could be nothing but the sympathy of heart
      with heart; a flow and reflow of holy and unobstructed
      love.
       Unhindered access to the God who made us seems
      one of the necessary conditions of our nature; and
      this not arising out of any merit or worthiness on the
      part of the creature, but from the fitness of things;
      the adaptation of the thing made to Him who made it;
      and the impossibility of separation between that which
      was made and Him who made it. The life above and the
      life below must draw together; heart cannot be
      separated from heart, unless something come between to
      put asunder that which had by the necessity of nature
      been joined together. Distance from God does not
      belong to our creation, but has come in as something
      unnatural, something alien to creative love, something
      which contravenes the original and fundamental law of
      our being.
       The tree separated from its root, the flower
      broken off from its stem, are the fittest emblems of
      man disjoined from God. Such distance seems altogether
      unnatural. The want of vital connection, in our
      original constitution, or the absence of sympathy,
      would imply defect in the workmanship, of the most
      serious kind,--and no less would it indicate
      imperfection on the part of the Great Worker.
       God made us for Himself; that He might delight
      in us and we in Him; He to be our portion and we His;
      He to be our treasure and we His.[3] He made us after
      His own likeness; so that each part of our being has
      its resemblance or counterpart in Himself: our
      affections, and sympathies, and feelings being made
      after the model of His own. We are apt to associate
      God only with what is cold and abstract and ideal;
      ourselves with what is emotional and personal. Herein
      we greatly err. We must reverse the picture if we
      would know the truth concerning Him with whom is no
      coldness, no abstraction, no impersonality. The
      reality pertaining to the nature of man, is as nothing
      when compared with the reality belonging to the nature
      of Him who created us after His own image. In so far
      as the infinite exceeds the finite, in so far does
      that which we call reality transcend in God all that
      is known by that term in man. We are the shadows, He
      is the substance. Jehovah is the infinitely real and
      true and personal: and it is with Him as such that we
      have to do. The God of philosophy may be a cold
      abstraction, which no mind can grasp, and by which no
      heart can be warmed; but the God of Scripture, the God
      who created the heavens and the earth, the God and
      Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, is a reality,--a
      reality for both the mind and heart of man. It is the
      infinite Jehovah that loves, and pities, and blesses;
      who bids us draw near to Him, walk with Him, and have
      fellowship with Him. It is the infinite Jehovah who
      fills the finite heart; for He made that heart for the
      very purpose of its being filled with Himself. Our joy
      is to be in Him; His joy is in us. Over us He resteth
      in His love, and in Himself He bids us rest. Apart
      from Him creaturehood has neither stability nor
      blessedness.
       Free and open intercourse with the God who made
      us, is one of the necessities of our being.
      Acquaintanceship with Him, and delight in Him, are the
      very life of our created existence. Better not to be
      than not to know Him, in whom we live, and move, and
      have our being. Better to pass away into
      unconsciousness or nothingness, than to cease to
      delight in Him, or to be delighted in by Him.
       The loss of God is the loss of everything; and
      in having God we have everything. His overflowing
      fulness is our inheritance; and in nearness to Him we
      enjoy that fulness. He cannot speak to us, but
      something of that fulness flows in. We cannot speak to
      Him without attracting His excellency towards us. This
      mutual speech, or converse, is that which forms the
      medium of communication between heaven and earth. Man
      looketh up, and God looketh down: our eyes meet, and
      we are, in the twinkling of an eye, made partakers of
      the divine abundance.[4] Man speaks out to God what He
      feels; God speaks out to man what He feels. The finite
      and the infinite mind thus interchange their
      sympathies; love meets love, mingling and rejoicing
      together; the full pours itself into the empty, and
      the empty receiveth the full.
       The greatness of God is no hindrance to this
      intercourse: for one special part of the divine
      greatness is to be able to condescend to the
      littleness of created beings, seeing that creaturehood
      must, from its very nature, have this littleness;
      inasmuch as God must ever be God, and man must ever be
      man: the ocean must ever be the ocean, the drop must
      ever be the drop. The greatness of God compassing our
      littleness about, as the heavens the earth, and
      fitting into it on every side, as the air into all
      parts of the earth, is that which makes the
      intercourse so complete and blessed. "In His hand is
      the soul of every living thing, and the breath of all
      mankind" (Job 12:10). Such is His nearness to, such
      His intimacy with, the works of His hands.
       It is nearness, not distance, that the name
      Creator implies; and the simple fact of His having
      made us is the assurance of His desire to bless us and
      to hold intercourse with us. Communication between the
      thing made and its maker is involved in the very idea
      of creation. "Thy hands have made me and fashioned me:
      give me understanding, that I may learn Thy
      commandments" (Psa 119:73). "Faithful Creator" is His
      name (1 Peter 4:19), and as such we appeal to Him,
      "Forsake not the work of Thine own hands" (Psa 138:8).
       Nothing that is worthless or unloveable ever
      came from His hands; and as being His "workmanship,"
      we may take the assurance of His interest in us, and
      His desire for converse with us.[5]
       He put no barrier between Himself and us when He
      made us. If there be such a thing now, it is we who
      have been its cause. Separation from Him must have
      come upon our side. It was not the father who sent the
      younger son away; it was that son who "gathered all
      together and took his journey into the far country"
      (Luke 15:13), because he had become tired of the
      father's house and the father's company.
       The rupture between God and man did not begin on
      the side of God. It was not heaven that withdrew from
      earth, but earth that withdrew from heaven. It was not
      the father that said to the younger son, Take your
      goods, pack up and be gone; it was that son who said,
      "Father give me the portion of goods that falleth to
      me," and who, "not many days after, took his journey
      into the far country," turning his back on his father
      and his father's house.
       "O Israel! thou hast destroyed THYSELF" (Hosea
      13:9). O man! thou hast cast off God. It is not God
      who has cast off thee. Thou hast dislinked thyself
      from the blessed Creator; thou hast broken the golden
      chain that fastened thee to His throne, the silken
      cord that bound thee to his heart.
       Yet He wants thee back again; nor will He rest
      till He has accomplished His gracious design, and made
      thee once more the vessel of His love.