The Planter of the Ear must Hear 2
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II. But, secondly, THE NOTION THAT GOD CANNOT SEE AND HEAR IS AN ABSURD NOTION. According to our text, it is proved to be unreasonable. “He that planted the ear, shall he not hear?” Think of that argument for a little. Here is a creature which has ears, and can hear. The God who created that being, can he not hear? Has he given to his creature more than he has himself? Has he made a creature which excels himself in essential faculties? Has he bestowed a sense which he himself never had? How can it be? The God that makes a man with ears to hear, must possess hearing himself. The very idea of hearing seems to me to necessitate that he who conceived the idea, was himself able to hear. He could not have borrowed the idea, for there was no other being but himself in the beginning: where took he the thought, but from his own being?
That the mind of man should be reached by the gate of the ear, by an impression upon an auditory nerve, is a wonderful conception. If you do not think so, because you are so used to it, I would like you to tell me whether you could invent a sixth sense. You have hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling, seeing. Will you invent another? You have not the power to invent another sense; and the idea of any sense which now exists must have been equally a feat of boundless wisdom, impossible to a being who could not hear and see. He that invented the idea, also planned the way by which hearing would become possible. What an intellect was that which forged the link between matter and mind, so that the movements of particles of air, and the impression made by these upon the drum of the ear should turn into impressions upon mind and heart!
God must have every power in perfection, or he could not have contrived and constructed such an admirable instrument as the ear. I should not think the time ill-spent if I were able to give you a lecture upon the human ear. We know far less about it than we do concerning the eye; and my own knowledge of it is so scant that I can only glance at the subject. That outer portion which we commonly call the ear, is only the vestibule of curious, intricate, winding passages, which communicate with chambers of bone and vaults of ivory. Curtains are stretched along these passages, membranes which tremble as the head of a drum, or vibrate like a tambourine. Between two of these parchment curtains a chain of very small bones is extended. Have you ever heard of the stirrup-bone? Rows of fine threads, or nerves, convey the motion, or the sound, into the brain, and there the soul sits waiting for the news. It is all wonderful.
Nor must I forget to remind you that the ear is “planted.” The important parts-the real ear-are so deeply seated in the head, as to be beyond a mere external inspection. The lobe of the ear is like a leaf above ground, but the hearing organ is “planted” in the skull; it is placed very near the brain, and operates on both sides of it, so as to keep the whole mind in communication with sounds from every quarter. The ear is set deep, and its chambers-some filled with air, and some filled with liquid-are thus protected from much harm, which might otherwise come to them from the outer world.
Au aurist who explained to you the mechanism of the ear should make you feel that an undevout aurist is mad. The infinite wisdom of God is seen in this gate of sense; and it is there in far greater measure than we can perceive. And can you believe that this marvellous instrument for hearing was made by a deaf God, or a dead God, or an impersonal power; or that it came into existence through “a fortuitous concourse of atoms”? I know not the precise terms in which they now attempt to describe creation without a Creator, design without a designer; but I can only say that those who believe in ears created by an unhearing force or being, have more faith than I can muster. No, I venture to say that their faith has overleaped itself, has climbed to the top of the ladder and gone down on the other side; so that, instead of being great faith, it has rotted into gross credulity. To fly from the difficulties of faith to the impossibilities of unbelief, is a singular infatuation. I prefer to believe in a personal, intelligent First Cause.
But even if you had an ear made-and I suppose that it would be no very great difficulty to fashion, in wax or some other substance, an exact resemblance to an ear-could you produce hearing then? God alone gives the life which hears. That particular point in which motion is translated into audible sound-where is that? That thing which hears-I mean not the vibrating parchment, nor the telephonic nerves, but that living something which is informed by the nerves, and reads their message-where and what is that something?
The surgeon searches with his knife, but he declares that he cannot find it. No, he cannot find it: it has fled before his instrument of search. But this much is sure-once gone he cannot restore it. He could not make it at the first, nor renew it when once departed. Not the whole troop of surgeons and physicians of all the hospitals could suffice to create a soul. There is a spiritual something-the true man, and this it is which God makes. Do you know yourself? Could you put your finger on yourself? Oh, no; that mystic being, that strange, half Godlike existence, the soul, is not within the range of our senses. He that made the soul, has he no soul? Can he not hear?
O sirs, the argument is plain enough It needs no elaboration. It carries conviction at first sight. To imagine that the Creator of life does not see and hear is absurd; and yet the devil tempts gracious people, the best of people, at times to think that the Lord does not observe them in their trials. “ Oh,” say they, “God is too great, surely, to hear me, a poor sinful woman, or a frail, ignorant man. His greatness must prevent his hearing me.” Yet, surely, you would not think the Lord deaf because you are unworthy. You would not attribute to him a greatness which would really involve littleness. If you make him so great that he is deaf, or so grand that he is blind, you have dishonored him.
“No,” say you, “but, surely, God does not see and hear everything. Look at my great sorrow; why does he allow it to grow and deepen? What keen miseries are caused by my thoughts! As George Herbert puts it, ‘My thoughts are all a case of knives.’“ Just so; and yet the Lord knows and permits it all in love to your soul. He does not forget you; but, “like as a father pities his children,” so does he pity you. Do not be led astray by the idea that you are passed over and forgotten by your God. “He counts the number of the stars, he calls them all by their names”; and he knows you, also, specially and individually.
I marked a floweret in the center of a beech-wood in the New Forest. Surrounded by the princely trees of the wood, it smiled from the sod a modest beauty. I thought to myself, “When do you see the sun? Does his light and glory ever cheer you?” I tarried in that forest, and watched the sunbeams smiling through the interlacing branches of the trees; and while I lingered I marked how, ever and anon, the sun found out a way to pour his golden glory direct into the center of that flower, which glowed and smiled as heaven thus communed with its littleness.
Rest assured that God, who is our sun, thinks of the least of us. We are not neglected weeds of the moorland. The Lord sees us. We do not waste our sweetness on the desert air; for God is there. Those valleys among the virgin mountains of the foot of man, are trodden by the great Husbandman. Those are his holy places, his private gardens, his secret haunts; and the flowers which bloom in them are as plants of a royal garden, which make glad the heart of the King.
So too, you hidden ones, your God does not forget you; no, though you may be tempted to think that he does not hear and see everything, for men are so vile, and error is so rampant, and he puts up with their provocations; yet he considers all. I have been inclined to cry out myself, as the Psalmist did, “Why have you withdrawn your hand, even your right hand? pluck it out of your bosom.”
That the Lord lets evil doctrine have so long a day is a great disquietude to a lover of truth. Ah! but the Lord hears every blasphemy, and marks it, and the day will come, as surely as he lives, when he will lift his right hand to smite down the edifices of error, and they shall be before him as a bowing wall and a tottering fence. “The way of the wicked he turns upside down.” “Trust in the Lord for ever.” In the cloudy and dark day look for the light. He does see: he does hear: he must work for truth and righteousness. Shall he that made the ear not hear? Shall he that formed the eye not see? Be not guilty of so absurd a thought as to fancy that these evil days are not watched over of the Lord.
III. But now, thirdly and briefly, THAT GOD HEARS HIS OWN MUST BE ESPECIALLY CERTAIN, from the very argument of the text. “Why?” say you. Why, because they have new and spiritual ears, and they have God-given spiritual eyes; and he that planted the spiritual ear, shall he not hear? and he that formed the spiritual eye, shall he not see? It has come to pass, my brethren, that now when God speaks by his Spirit we hear him, blessed be his name!
Time was when his threatenings spoke to us as with noise of thunder; but we would not hear them. Now we are humbled in the dust by his anger. He has given us ears which are joined to hearts of flesh. When he speaks by way of invitation, and says, “Seek my face,” we answer, “Your face, Lord, will I seek.” Do you imagine that if God has given us the grace to hear his voice, he will not hear us when we lift up our voices to him?
Rather let us each one say, “I will hear what God the Lord will speak; for he will speak peace unto his people and to his saints.” Did he give you a new ear only that you might hear him chide you? Did he intend never to regard your answer to his rebukes? Does he convince you of sin without intending to grant you a Savior? Does he bring you to hear the law and to confess sin, and ask for pardon; and can he not, will he not, hear you? Has he made you to hear of judgment to torment you before your time? Will he shut his ears to your humble prayers? I will not believe it.
He that gave you those spiritual ears meant to say something worth your hearing, and he meant to hear you when you cried to him. He has spoken, and some of us are tonight full of ecstasy at what we have heard him say. Has he not said, “Call upon me in the day of trouble: I will deliver you, and you shall glorify me”? If you hear him speak, he will hear you speak. Oh, that you would sit at his feet and ask him to speak on; and then you may be sure that he has inclined his ear unto you! He has created in the minds of some of you a sense of need, and will he not pity you?
Perhaps you have not reached any farther than to know your needs and dangers; but he gave you this knowledge. You are hungry and thirsty; you had not these spiritual appetites once; he gave them to you. Why? Wherefore? You were not hungry for mercy; you were not thirsty for righteousness until his Spirit came and gave you life, and with that life the soul-hunger. Will he not satisfy the hunger he creates? Will he not fulfill the desire he has implanted? I never heard of such cruelty as for a man to gather together five hundred poor people from the street who had learned to draw tight their hunger-belts and bear privation, and on a sudden to excite a ravenous hunger in them, and then turn them adrift, and say, “Go your ways; I have made you feel your necessities most terribly; but I have nothing else for you. I have shown you your true condition; I have made you know what destitution you feel. Be off with you!”
God will not treat you thus. It is not like him. He that planted holy longings, and hungry pinings, and spiritual appetites, must intend to supply them. He that has made you hear the voice of your need, will hear it himself. He is far quicker of hearing than you can be, and your wants appeal to his heart before your heart is awake to them. “He that planted the ear, shall he not hear?” He that gives spiritual life will live himself to sustain that life.
In addition to this, he makes us long after holiness; will he not work it in us? I might say of myself and many dear brothers and sisters here, that we habitually desire to be holy, and to be wholly free from sin. We cannot endure evil. A preacher once declared that when Paul cried, “O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?” he was not a Christian. That shows how very little that preacher knew about the matter. No man but a true believer would have such anguish on account of sin. Just in proportion as he became a Christian of the highest order, would he cry out in an agony when he found evil thoughts and tendencies within his nature. It is when we begin to loathe sin, and any leaning towards sin, and when we grow wretched because of a single evil thought, that we have grown in grace, and are far advanced, and are reaching towards that other verse, “Thanks be to God, which gives us the victory.”
A true believer must hate sin with an intense hatred; and when the Lord has given him to do so, he may be sure that the same Lord will give deliverance from the power of evil. He who makes you hate sin will answer to that detestation, and deliver you from that which you so greatly loathe. Does he make you pine after holiness, and will he deny you holiness? Do you hear his voice of command, and will he not hear your prayer for help to obey? Does your child pine to be good, and can you help him to be good, and will you not do so? To the ear which God has enabled to hear his call the Lord will lend his own ear to hear prayer. Surely, the very holiness of God that puts into us a desire to be holy is a guarantee to us that he will help us to be holy. He that makes us long for purity will work it in us. It may be, he will put us in the furnace; but by some means he will purify us as silver is refined. He that planted the desire after holiness is himself holy, and will work holiness in his people.
Do you not sometimes sit down and indulge a day-dream of what you had wished to be? Do you not wake up, and put down your foot, and say, “This is what I resolve to be, God helping me. I will endeavor to live nearer to my Lord, and to be more like my Lord Jesus.” Then you feel a fire burning upon the altar of your heart. You feel that you must put forth all your energies in the divine life, and press forward after the highest degrees of grace. Be encouraged by this condition of desire, for your Lord will not deny it to you. “He that planted the ear, shall he not hear?” He that planted in your heart the desire after this high ideal will hear you as you cry to him for aid in the sacred enterprise. The Creator answers to that which he has created: “He will fulfill the desire of those who fear him.”
Do you pray, brothers and sisters? I know you do; but do you really believe that God hears you? I cannot help thinking that a great mass of prayers are poured into a vacuum. I cannot shake off the thought that brethren seem often to be praying into the eternal emptinesses, pleading with an infinite nothing. They say the proper words, but they mean little or nothing by them. Does God hear prayer? Do you answer, “Yes”? Then let us pray as if we truly believed that he did. When we are done praying, let us expect him to answer us.
When we go into the bank with our cheques, we hand them in, take up the money, and are gone. Do we deal thus at the Bank of Faith? Do we plead the promise? If so, the Lord counts out the money; but do we take it up? I fear we leave it on the counter. The Lord might say, “Is that man gone? Gone without what he came for? He pleaded my promise, and has he gone away content without my reply?” Is it your habit to go to the throne of mercy and ask for the mere sake of asking? Do you grind at a mill for the mere pleasure of grinding? Surely he that asks receives; and if he does not, he should enquire the reason why. A little time before prayer, to prepare the petition, would much help towards reality in prayer. A little time after prayer, to consider when and how the blessing is to be used when the Lord sends it, would be a further aid to faith.
Sometimes the angels come to our letter-boxes and cannot put in the answers because the boxes are fastened down by unbelief. We are not prepared to receive what God is prepared to give. Let us pray, believing that as surely as God has given us an ear he has an ear himself, and will hear our pleadings. “He that planted the ear, shall he not hear?” Brethren, we are at this time greatly concerned about the Master’s kingdom. Some of us have no other trouble comparable to our anxiety about the cause of God and truth. We mourn as we see the evil leaven leavening the whole lump. Do you not think that the great Head of the church is as much concerned about it as we are? It is his own kingdom; it is, therefore, more upon his mind than it can be upon ours. It is God’s own truth which is denied: it is his own Son that is dishonored.
The glorious doctrine of the atonement-when we hear it scoffed at we burn with indignation, and our heart breaks with grief. Does not the Lord’s heart also burn with indignation when the precious blood is trampled on? Is he indifferent to all this apostasy and heresy? Depend upon it, he is not; for “He that planted the ear, shall he not hear?” and he that has sworn to glorify his Son, will he forever stand still when that Son is dishonored, even in his own church?
IV. I have done when I say just this one thing more: A BELIEF THAT GOD HEARS AND SEES HAS A VERY BENEFICIAL TENDENCY UPON THOSE WHO FIRMLY HOLD IT. It works good in a thousand ways. Time would fail me to recount a few of them. It may suffice to take a thought or two, and turn the matter over in our minds. If we feel that God sees and hears, what an incentive it is to do right, and to be valiant for the truth! Soldiers will play the man in the presence of their prince. If our Lord looks on, what will we not do and dare? The same sense of his presence will act as a check to any and every deed of sin. We cannot indulge the thought of evil when the Lord himself hears that thought. Does the Lord look on, and shall I sin in his divine presence? Shall I grieve Jesus when the Beloved of my soul is himself close to me, and watches, with regretful eye, each sinful movement?
The solemn conviction that God hears is a check to evil, and a stimulus for good. It acts grandly as a preservative against the desire of applause and the fear of man. He who knows assuredly that God hears him, will speak the truth though all the world should listen, or though no one but God should hear him. It was a beautiful word which was spoken by a soldier to an open-air preacher not long ago. A friend who was preaching in the street, had gathered a considerable audience; but as a troop of soldiers went by, with colors and martial music, the people were dispersed, and the preacher was left almost alone. A soldier, who for some reason was marching outside the ranks, called to him, “Go on, sir: God loves to hear you praising his Son Jesus.”
True; most true. God delights in the glories of Christ. What a grand audience you have if the Lord hearkens and hears you praising his Son! Do the despisers grind their teeth when they hear Jesus preached? Never mind. Let them wear out their hearts in wrath; they cannot rob Jesus of a beam of brightness. Keep on praising your Lord and Savior; for if men who have ears to hear will not hear, yet be sure your heavenly Father will not fail to listen. We do not want applause from men, since God hears us. If the Queen were by, and a soldier performed a deed of valor, and a person were to say to him, “You did well, and you may be proud that Corporal Brown and Sergeant Smith saw you and approved of what you did.” “Oh,” says he, “I care nothing for corporals and other petty officers; Her Majesty herself looked at me, and said, ‘Well done.’ She will, with her own hands, put the Victoria Cross upon me in due time. That is the reward I seek.”
If God sees me, it is a small matter who may or who may not see and approve. We need to grow thus healthily independent of human judgment; for he who fawns for smiles, or trembles at frowns, will never lead a noble life for long.
The assurance that God sees and hears, is a wonderful care-killer. Why should I be anxious? My heavenly Father knows that I have need of these things. What if I am in trouble? This my Father knows. Brethren, if the Lord knows our soul in adversity, and if his eye is ever upon us, are we not safe? Know that you serve one whose eyes are upon the righteous, and whose ears are open to their cry, and you will live above care. And, oh, how this will tend to promote your fellowship with God! When your heart sings, “He leads me; he hears me; he knows the way that I take”; then are you filled with a sense of fellowship with the Eternal God. How we love him who hears us always! Since he is always seeing us, we learn to see him. “You God see me is a word which brightens up our sad hearts until we also see God. We pass through the trouble, and toil, and temptation, and turmoil, of this mortal life with serene spirit, since it is written, “Jehovah-Shammah, the Lord is there.”
Suffering is no small thing, if we suffer in full submission to the will of him that hears and sees us. If he is but with us, all question is ended. We cheerfully say, “It is the Lord: let him do what seems him good.” As long as his father was captain of the ship, his little son never knew a fear; for he was sure his father could steer the vessel safely to the haven. Be of good cheer, our Father who sees and hears us, is in the midst of his people, and not so much as one of them shall perish. If the Lord were away, or asleep, or deaf, we might be in a trembling mood; but while his ear and eye are open to us, we cannot tolerate mistrust. A little altering the quaint poet’s lines, we may say-“ Though winds and waves assault my keel, He does preserve it; he does steer, Even when the bark seems most to reel. Storms are the triumph of his are, He cannot hide his eyes, much less his heart.” Go, speak with the wise Planter of the ear; for he will surely hear.
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