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Deuteronomy 30:20:
20That thou mayest love the LORD thy God, and that thou mayest obey his voice, and that thou mayest cleave unto him: for he is thy life, and the length of thy days: that thou mayest dwell in the land which the LORD sware unto thy fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to give them.
Sin propagates itself nowhere more rapidly than in Religion.
Religion, as the service of the Triune God, is the highest, the best that enriches our human heart. But the best is always the first that is exposed to corruption.
The Almighty created and supports in this world, outside of Europe and America, a thousand million people who continually die and are replaced, but who in this coming and going are and remain utterly estranged from the secret of salvation. Missions have done something, but what is this compared with the thousand millions of Asia and Africa and the united forces of Islam and heathendom?
These millions and millions, especially in Asia, are by nature very susceptible to religious impressions, much more so in fact than most of the nations of Europe. But they choose their own way and are dead to all true knowledge of the way of the Lord. And every morning and every evening that God from His Throne looks down upon those millions in Asia and Africa, there is always wanting among them the echo to the chorus of praise and adoration on the part of the heavenly hosts. They kneel before all sorts of things, but never before the Triune God.
It is very true that compared with this nightly darkness in Asia and Africa, in Europe and America it is light. You will scarcely find in these parts of the world a single village where the Sacraments of Baptism and Holy Communion are not administered, where, large or small, there is no church of Christ, and where there are not found some deeply spiritual souls who live very near unto God.
But does this make it a secret that in the thickly populated cities and even in larger villages the great majority of people are either utterly estranged from the service of the Lord, or merely outwardly adhere to it without attaching to it a spark of spiritual reality?
When this degeneration and corruption of religion took on proportions of too serious a character, a gigantic effort was put forth to purify the service of the Lord, to reform and to transform it, and this at first worked admirably. But look at the conditions that prevail in the religious world today and confess whether we do not face a new disappointment, and whether the half of the population in these so-called Christian countries is not estranged again from all inward, spiritual religion.
It is true that by the Reveille and by the spread of infidelity a Christian revival ensued, which fortunately is still in progress; but how unpleasantly you are affected, again and again, in these very circles that have been revived, by the coldness, formalism and lack of sacred fire.
And when at length you look at the narrowest circle of the families which still hold themselves in touch with the service of the Lord, and examine with some care what degree of warmth the spiritual life there attained and maintained, how constant is the disappointment that awaits you, and the question forces itself upon you, again and again, whether this is all that these people feel, and can spare, for their faithful God and Father.
Yea, when finally you look at your own family, and, closer still examine your own heart, and ask yourself what in home and heart the spiritual life is that you live with and for your God, and what it ought to be in view of His Fatherly faithfulness—who is not conscious, again and again, of the cry of despair which forces the question to the lips whether constant, inward, devoutly tender, increasing Godliness has become impossible for us?
And this question can in part only be answered in the affirmative.
Sin is so enervating and so weakening, that even in the most godly circles, real inward religion is at a low level, and only in moments of unusual tension does it rise a few degrees higher.
And the sad result of it all is, that God truly still looks down upon this world every morning and every evening, and faithfully continues to care and to provide for His fourteen hundred millions of human children, but that only here and there from a devout heart the psalm of worship and of pure love ascends to Him.
And yet, in everlasting love God continues, age upon age, to entice us by His Word, to call us and to draw us to this full, inwardly true and all-sufficient religion, which finds its terse expression in the supreme commandment that "thou shalt cleave unto the Lord thy God" (Deuteronomy 30:20).
It is the image of the child at the mother's breast, who literally cleaves to her and hangs on her, cherishes itself in the warmth of the mother-life, feeds and satisfies itself at the fountain of her breast and cries the moment it feels itself apart from her.
And this supreme commandment that you must depend on God and cleave unto Him enters a protest against all merely outward religion and against every endeavor to reduce religion to mere form.
It does not exclude thinking on God, but it does say that to be busy with your God intellectually is not in itself religion. It demands that you shall confess the Name of your God before the world, but it denies you the right to imply that this confession of God's Name is the whole of religion. It demands a holy life and the abounding in good works, but it takes away from you the illusion that real piety can ever satisfy itself with this. It is very solicitous that you should hold in honor the outward forms of religion, but it opposes the idea that you should ever mistake these forms for the essence of religion itself. Apart from zealous activity in the cause of God religion is inconceivable, but it continually impresses it upon you that though you were to devote all of your life to Him, yet, had no love, you would remain "as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal."
It does not tolerate and will not allow you ever to make your boast of having real religion, as long as you have not come to a personal fellowship in the secret walk and communion of soul with your God.
And even though you may thank God for the grace that at times, in earnest, passionate prayer, personal fellowship with Him in Christ is heavenly food for your soul, it still continues to tell you that such occasional seeking after Him is not the true, not the full religion, because real religion demands that without cessation you shall cleave unto Him and uninterruptedly hang, as it were, on Him.
And such hanging upon God means that from moment to moment you shall feel that He is with you in your heart, that you shall ever be expecting Him, and that with all the powers of your soul you shall hold yourself fast by Him.
As a matter of fact, however, even they whose lives are most saintly here on earth will confess that such a state and condition of soul is impossible on this side of the grave. Our heart is not attuned to it, and life round about us is not in the spirit of it. Far from it. And to acknowledge this openly and candidly is simple honesty, provided that this confession goes hand in hand with self-accusation and shamefacedness.
There have indeed been those who have tried to attain this highest good. For the sake of thus cleaving solely unto God, men and women in every age have renounced the world and have secluded themselves in cell or hermitage. But even though they were able to shut out the world from their retreat, their heart they took with them, and it was the heart itself that continually stood in the way of the more intimate fellowship with their God.
This was possible in Paradise, and it has become so again in the congregation of the saints made perfect above.
But it is not within reach here on earth. To withdraw ourselves from life in the world lies not in our province. We have rather therein to fulfill a calling and render a service to God. It is equally impossible to separate ourselves from our heart. The heart goes always with us.
But God knows us. He knows that of which we are made. He ever remembereth that we are but dust. And our guilty lack of ability to attain this highest good, which our sin has rendered unattainable, He covers with gracious forgiveness.
Only you are not to rest content with this. Neither should you resign yourself to it. You should place the imperfection of your religion ever more clearly before your eyes. You must make accusation against yourself. And this very self-accusation will become a stimulus to you the more earnestly to seek from day to day and from week to week to make real this more intimate fellowship with your God.
And herein the difference between superficial and real religion shows itself.
The superficial worshiper understands that he can never attain unto such an unbroken cleaving to God. So he simply pursues the even tenor of his way calmly and unconcernedly, and never comes to know the hidden walk with Him.
On the part of all deeper and truer piety, on the other hand, it is a matter of genuine grief, that this fellowship of soul with the faithful, loving Father is interrupted with such frequency. It trembles every time it perceives that it has lost again its hold on Him. It rebukes itself and takes hold of itself to resume again this interrupted communion. And the end of it is, that the moments that are spent with and near unto God increase, and that, on the other hand, the moments of the breach with Him become less.
To cleave unto the Lord, with all the heart and soul and consciousness—is, then at first a heavenly joy which perhaps may be tasted only once a month. Gradually it becomes the communion of soul without which no week passes. By degrees it becomes an elevation of soul which repeats itself almost daily. And with progress like this there is joy in God many times a day, and even by night upon waking, the nearness of the Lord is consciously felt.
And although, even so, the highest still remains beyond our reach, this cleaving unto God begins to occupy ever wider room in our life.
And not only intimacy with God in solitude, but, much more, intimacy with God in the midst of our busy life becomes the booty of the soul.
It is then no longer a singing after Asaph: "As for me, it is good to be near unto God," but it becomes a singing like Asaph from the blessed experience of one's own heart.
* * * * * * *This devotional classic offers 110 meditations on a single thought from Psalm 73: "As for me, it is good to be near to God." The author states, "The fellowship of being near unto God must become reality ... it must permeate and give color to our feeling, our perceptions, our sensations, our thinking, our imagining, our willing, our acting, our speaking. It must not stand as a foreign factor in our life, but it must be the passion that breathes throughout our whole existence."
The meditations reflect the blending of spiritual vigor with doctrinal loyalty so consistently expressed in the life of Abraham Kuyper. These are devotions with true substance, avoiding the extremes about which Kuyper adds a word of caution: "Stress in creedal confession, without drinking from the Living Fountain, runs dry in barren orthodoxy, just as truly as spiritual emotion, without clearness in confessional standards, makes one sink in the bog of sickly mysticism."
Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920) was a Dutch political leader and Calvinist theologian. Elected to parliament in 1874, he became Prime Minister in 1901 and served in that capacity until 1905. As a theologian, he revived a systematic, orthodox Calvinism. He founded the Free Reformed Church and the Free University of Amsterdam. His other works include Principles of Sacred Theology, Lectures on Calvinism, and The Work of the Holy Spirit
Further information about Abraham Kuyper's life can be seen in the translator's "Biographical Note"; further information about To Be Near Unto God can be Abraham Kuyper's "Preface" to that book.
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