October 28 Daily Devotional

Bible Reading:

Psalm 22:9:

⁹But thou art he that took me out of the womb: thou didst make me hope when I was upon my mother's breasts.

Devotional:

God's hidden walk is not alone different on the part of one child of God from that of another, but this difference is also inwardly connected with every one's disposition, character, nature and temperament.

Where there are two persons that live close to God, the one practices this not only differently from the other, but the way and the manner of it on the part of each is connected with each one's disposition and nature of soul and even of body.

Therefore, you are never able to watch the nearness unto God of another and imitate it. It is no lesson that you can learn by heart. Every one must herein seek his own way until God the Lord makes him find it.

The being near unto, the holding converse with, God can never be anything else than the result, the product of our own personal spiritual life. With you, therefore, if it is not imitated but real, it will of itself assume its own form which wholly corresponds to your nature, and which would not at all do for another.

This tends, in the first place, to comfort you and to put you at ease.

Frequently, indeed, it happens that a dear, godly, but extremely simple child of God hears the story told by others of a fellowship with God which he can not grasp; or reads of an intimacy on the part of Augustine and others with the Eternal Being in a measure and form which far, very far, exceeds his own experience. This makes him doubt whether he himself will ever come near unto Him. "This can never be the case with me," he thinks, and yet so the hidden walk must be.

Thus Satan annoys the souls of the simple.

For this is not so. With Augustine, that great spirit, it was bound to be so and could not have been otherwise, but for this very reason, it cannot and never shall be so with the humble and the plain. What it was with great saints would not suit your particular case.

But next to this comforting thought, there is also in this a strong stimulus and spur for you.

It imposes upon you the obligation, from your own nature and in connection with your own spiritual existence, to produce from your own soul's life your own form of hidden fellowship with your God. It will not do to say: "To the height of an Augustine, I can never come!" No, just because you are no Augustine renders it impossible for you mechanically to do what he did. But you are called of God, and held responsible by Him to seek from yourself and for yourself that individual and only path, along which you, and no one else, can come to this hidden walk and persevere therein.

This does not mean that there is not a blessing in hearing others tell how they sought and found the Lord. Or that the reading of what certain great spirits have written about their nearness to God can not edify us inwardly. It surely can. The humblest poet can learn from Bilderdyk and Shakespeare. The humblest artist can profit by the works of Rubens and Rembrandt.

All this can be productive of great good.

Only, as the one and the selfsame bread forms in each individual's system its own blood and maintains its own life of the nerves, thanks to the inner processes of digestion; so likewise there can be one holy material on which many subsist, but always with every individual the inner spiritual feeding has a process of its own, and leads to an individual result.

Not alone in the case of Paul, but also of Jeremiah and David the Holy Scriptures explain to us the cause of this particular character in every one's hidden walk with the Eternal Being.

The twenty-second Psalm bears a strongly marked Messianic character, and only in its application to the Man of Sorrows does this song of bitterest grief of soul come to its own. But yet it would utterly lead us away from the right path of exegesis, if we should not let this psalm start out from David's own experience of soul, and if we should not begin with applying it to the Psalmist himself.

As Paul declares (Galatians 1:15), "that it hath pleased God to separate him from his mother's womb, and to call him by his grace," and as we read in Jeremiah (1:5):

"Before I formed thee in the belly, I knew thee: and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee," so also David confesses that the Lord's concern about him began already before he was born.

For, thou, so he sang in the twenty-second Psalm: "Thou indeed art he that took me out of the womb, thou didst make me hope when I was upon my mother's breasts. I was cast upon thee from the womb, thou art my God since my mother bore me."

Entirely apart from the deeper significance of all this as applied to the Messiah, it was yet from David's own inner life that this conviction was born concerning his own walk with God, and it should not be lost from sight that in the hundred and thirty-ninth Psalm apart from his calling as a chosen Servant of the Lord, he applies it altogether generally to the forming and creation of the human being.

"Thou hast covered me in my mother's womb. I will praise thee, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Marvelous are thy works, and that my soul knoweth right well. My substance was not hid from thee, when I was made in secret and curiously wrought in the lowest part of the earth. Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being imperfect, and in thy book all my members were written, which in continuance were fashioned, when as yet there was none of them."

This is spoken outside of David's special calling in an altogether general human way, and in singing this psalm the Church has never hesitated to apply this to herself.

Thus to form a right estimate of the beginning and the development of our hidden walk with God, we should go back not merely to our conversion, but back of our conversion to our conception and birth

The way in which every one of us shall find his own, personal walk with his God, was written in God's Book in days before we were formed.

If you say that Jeremiah and Paul did not state this fact in connection with their personal initiation into fellowship with God, but very definitely in connection with their calling, as Prophet the one, and as Apostle the other, it is readily granted.

But conversely, it is equally certain that in behalf of their calling as Prophet and Apostle, the personal spiritual development of each was of highest significance. In their prophetic and apostolic calling they have had to fight and to wage spiritual battle. Their official life was not lived apart from their soul-life. In the fact that already before their conception God the Lord had preordained in them everything they should need in behalf of their calling, there was included that at the same time their spiritual quickening, training and development had equally been provided for on God's part before their birth, and that in their conception and birth such a human person was called into being, as the case required, in order that he should be able to enter upon such a spiritual condition and fulfill such a spiritual calling.

In whatever way, therefore, we take it, the three strong statements of David, Jeremiah and Paul, always contain this positive teaching that already before and in their conception and birth, the Lord their God has so ordained and created them as man, both as regards soul and body, that, both in their spiritual and bodily creation, everything was found that was necessary in order later on to discipline them in this particular way and insure their spiritual development.

If now we apply this to ourselves, we should not doubt but that, likewise, our conception and birth, entirely apart from our own yet unconscious condition, was a work of God, after His counsel and compass, and under His holy working.

As concerns the unique character of our disposition of soul, our gifts and talents, our form of existence, and even of our body, there is here no accident at play, no caprice, no fate, but the counsel and the working of our God.

Thus we have not been made as we are, in order that God subsequently might consider what He might make of us. No, everything here has been thought out. Here everything forms one whole. Here from the beginning everything is directed to a final end, by an omniscient, fore-seeing and Almighty God and directed at the same time to what is required at every point of the way, in order to attain this final end.

If now this final end is your everlasting salvation, and if your spiritual inner life, including your hidden walk with God, leads to this end, then it cannot be otherwise than that the whole appointment, regarding the form in which after soul and body you should be born, was from the first immediately connected with what once as child of God you were to be, and with the particular way in which God would be willing to receive you, you yourself, in distinction from others, into His holy, hidden walk.

If experience with people daily teaches you that sometimes you meet people who have much in common with yourself, and you with them, but that yet you never meet with any one of whom you can say in every respect: "Such am I, this person is precisely my double," then there must be in your disposition of soul and in your bodily existence something that is different from others. And this not by chance, but after God's will and counsel. And all this individuality that constitutes your person is in turn no play of natural wealth, but is thus and not otherwise disposed, because you had to seek your hidden walk with your God in your way and along your way, and because, in order to find this way and to be able to walk it, you were in need of such a disposition of soul and of such a manner of existence.

This sets you free from people, even from godly people who press their piety upon you, but you are bound thereby to your God, personally, in everything, from your conception and birth.

For consider, and forget not, that the twenty-second Psalm also says: "Thou didst make me hope, when I was upon my mother's breasts."

And to cause to hope so that the soul itself hopes, is to evoke an inner working from the soul itself.

David reckons his spiritual life from the moment when as infant he cradled at his mother's breast.

* * * * * * *

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.