HH, Sir Godfrey Gregg D.Div

“Thy way is in the sea, and thy path in the great waters, and thy footsteps are not known.” Psalm 77:19

The Secrecy of God’s Approaches to the Soul

You who are students of the Scripture know what a favourite thought the secrecy of God was with Jesus Christ. It is not in the whirlwind that the kingdom comes when it makes its lodgment in the heart. Christ will not strive nor cry nor lift up His voice in the streets–those steep streets that lead into the soul. The kingdom comes as if a man should sleep, and the seed should spring up he knows not how. The kingdom comes just as the leaven comes, and who is so watchful as to see it rise? When Christ was born at the inn in Bethlehem, choirs of angels were singing in the sky. And when Christ comes again there will be the sound of the trumpet and a light so bright that every eye shall see Him.

But when Christ comes into the human soul, He comes with a voice so soft that none can hear it except the ear on which the message falls. Christ does not ride in an uproar to the soul; Christ steals in quite secretly. The kingdom cometh not with observation, and here the kingdom is the King. His knock is so clear that when He knocks, you hear it, but His knock is so soft that no one else can hear it. To everyone else, it is an ordinary footstep, and to everyone else, it is an ordinary hand. But to you, there is a wound upon the hand and the print of the nails upon the feet. To you it is CHRIST, and He is yours forever in infinite and redeeming love.

The Secrecy of Christ While on Earth

Notable, too, is this element of secrecy in the life of Christ when He was here on earth. God hid Him under the garb of poverty and set Him amid the silence of the hills.

When a man has a message that he burns to make known, you know the passion that rises in his heart. You know how the beckoning hand of London calls him, and how he is restless till he has reached the capital.

But when God had a message, He despised the capital and passed it by and all the glories of it, and He sent His Son into a secret place where the wind was fresh upon the hills. There He was born, and men were in the inn jesting and drinking and knew not it was He. And kings were rioting and scholars pondering and armies marching with the imperial eagles. But not a whisper broke upon that riot nor hushed the play of the children in the streets nor fell on the legionaries with a sense of awe as at a greater captain than their own. Wrapped in the secrecy of distant Galilee, moving obscurely amid obscurer villages, shrinking when men would hail Him king, craving for Bethany in crowded streets–that was the signet on the hand of God; that was the seal of the divine procedure. The footsteps of Jesus of Nazareth were the footsteps of God, and yet His footsteps were not known.

TO BE CONTINUED TOMORROW …