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THE SMALL MOMENT

For a small moment have I forsaken thee; but with great mercies will I gather thee. In overflowing wrath I hid my face from thee for a moment; but with everlasting lovingkindness will I have mercy on thee, saith Jehovah thy Redeemer. For this is as the waters of Noah unto me; for as I have sworn that the waters of Noah shall no more go over the earth, so have I sworn that I will not be wroth with thee nor rebuke thee. For the mountains may depart, and the hills be removed; but my lovingkindness shall not depart from thee, neither shall my covenant of peace be removed, saith Jehovah that hath mercy on thee.—Isaiah 54:7–10.

Our text speaks of a “small moment.” But it is the moment of wrath, when God has forsaken us and hid His face from us; while the waters of Noah go over the earth, the mountains depart, and the hills are removed. In a “small moment” Adam sinned and in “a small moment” Christ died on the cross. But how great was and is the darkness of these small moments. Measured by the endless ages of the mountains, the sea, and the stars, my life, also, is but a “small moment.” But when I consider that the riddle of my life is the moment of my guilt and punishment, it seems to me the endless times are no longer than this “small moment.” The dark, grievous years, through which the nations of the earth are now going, will be regarded in the future as “a small moment,” of which one may speak in the shortest words; a curious picture from the distant past in which few will be interested. But what then will appear as a mere drop, our unrighteous deeds and sufferings, our woe and helplessness, is, in this “small moment” of the present, a great ocean, for it is our wrong, our woe, our distress. Sometime there will be for each of us a “small moment” when we die, die as our fathers did. The narrow gap behind us will quickly be closed up and the small track which we have made will soon be obliterated. But the small moment will determine whether we shall go from reality into nothingness or from nothingness into reality. All our earlier decisions will be questioned, and, by a knife’s edge, it will be decided whether our way has led into eternal life or into eternal death. And this will be most difficult—in no case can we ourselves give the answer; neither by what we wish, nor by what we know, nor by what we are. Dies irae, dies illa (day of wrath, that day); who, O Lord, can stand in thy presence?

What is meant by a “small moment,” when the smallest moment through the weight of its content outweighs thousands of years, when it is at hand, not in the past, not in the future, but in the present. Should not the moment, of which the prophet speaks, be just as long as time? Or will there be a moment in time, of which, when it has come, we can speak with the same dreadful seriousness as the prophet speaks of the “small moment,” and which will turn it into a really weighty, great, unending moment? Yes, it is a “small moment,” says the word of God. But that it is small does not seem true to men—one cannot merely say so. When it is said, it is either one of those cheap consolations with which men try to comfort one another or it is true, mighty, comforting, redemptive as the spoken, revealed, unbelievable word of God, which one can only believe.

A “moment of wrath,” the prophet calls it. At any rate he does not think of comforting us as men seek to comfort one another. He does not try to make easy what becomes easy only when it is taken to be altogether difficult. He tells us that the door of our prison is bolted on the outside and can be opened only from the outside. In answer to the question: Why this “moment,” so “small” and yet so great, is so mysterious? he says what one scarcely dare say after him: “Because God is angry, because he has forsaken us, because he has hid his face from us.” That is what is meant by this “moment.”

Or do we understand it better? O yes, at any rate, we may understand it better. We need much grace and truth before we really will accept the word of the Bible concerning the wrath of God. No more and no less is needed than that which was first told us: “My lovingkindness shall not depart from thee, neither shall my covenant of peace be removed.” Whence could we know what time is, if we did not know what eternity is? Whence would we know that, without God, we are lost, if we would not be saved through God? In Jesus Christ we know what eternity is, that we are saved through God. But before we know this and since we constantly forget it, we simply cannot bear to hear of the wrath of God; we oppose it with innumerable restrictions, mitigations, and open or secret protests. You may have looked deep, yea very deep, into the goodness and the badness of man; you are not ready to grant that the last word that may be said by us, from our point of view, is that man is under wrath, indeed under the wrath of God. Perhaps you are a severely humiliated and, through the discipline of life, a broken man; but something within you rises in protest when you are told that God is, for you and all of us, really and truly a hidden God.

The honor of God may lie close to your heart and you gladly will grant that His thoughts are higher than our thoughts; but for the sake of the very honor of God, as you imagine, you will deny that His thoughts are so much higher than our thoughts as to compel us to concede that for “a small moment he has forsaken us.” If there is a God, you will say: “All this must be taken as figurative language.” But how do you know this? What do you call “God”? Is He what you try to think for yourself of God and what you can think of Him—or is He the One who has revealed Himself and whom men can only believe? He, who believes in the revealed God, will not quarrel about His hiddenness. You say: “I live!” You are able to lay hold of God in the world of reality or as the author of your corporal, psychic, spiritual, religious being. True, you live, but you live no other than a life subject to death from the crown of your head to the sole of your foot. What do you know of aught beyond? What do you know of the presence of God in your present life? But, you will say, in my conscience I have come to terms with my God. I reply: “Can you come to accord, in your conscience, with God about anything else than this: that you are under judgment?”

You complain: “How disturbing, how intolerable, how unsatisfactory is the picture of our condition, if things are thus!” And you remind yourself of Jesus Christ. Men say that through His coming the world has become another world and that we are no longer under the law of the Old Testament. But would not Jesus pray today as He prayed then: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me!” And did He do this only that we might be spared the necessity of facing the truth of human life, which is the same yesterday and today? Or may we turn away from this truth because it is so disturbing and unsatisfying? And then you reply: “But God cannot always be angry, nor can he wholly have forsaken us!” Now you are really close to what the prophet says. For he says explicitly: “A small moment have I forsaken thee! For a short time have I hid my face from thee!” But listen closely! He speaks of that which remains when nothing else remains for us. He speaks of the God whom he has found and who has found him. When he says: “not always, not altogether!” he does not wish thereby to justify and to save either himself or the world; he knows that he cannot do that; he knows that the “moment” is the moment of the wrath of God. Why do you defend yourself against this? Is not, perhaps, the very defense itself, which we put up with more or less ground against the word of God’s wrath, proof of the truth of this word? May it not have been just this that Adam was the man who made paradise impossible for himself and was driven out into a world upon which God’s wrath rests, into a world in which the mountains always depart and the hills are always moved—this creature that will have everything; that will be moral, good, pious; but that will not acknowledge that in him there is nothing to save and to justify, so that with his own knowledge of good and evil he can only die?

Is the shadow in which we walk perhaps so dark because all of us are bearing our own torches with so much ardor and refuse to have them taken from us? Is perchance the need which man suffers, nothing else than man himself who wants to judge instead of permitting himself to be judged? Is it perhaps so difficult for us to hear and heed and believe the words of the most blessed promise, with which the prophet would point us beyond the “small moment” of wrath, because we stand in the midst of this “small moment,” as sure as we are human beings whether we would or not, and yet we are always stirred to revolt and rebellion against the truth, against the meaning of this “moment”? O that for a second only we could see ourselves from without (as we see others). How as upright citizens, as cultured men, as Christians, or simply as men we always defend ourselves, defend ourselves against the fact that we are under the wrath of God. If we could hear the arguments that we put forth to show that it cannot be so bad with us; if we could see and hear how out of these arguments and of this attitude with which we deny God what belongs to Him, all the guilt and with it all the punishment which we suffer have come from the beginning of the world—then with one accord we would say Yes to that which we dispute. Yes, God is angry with us, has hid his face from us, has forsaken us, has let us follow our heart’s desires. How else could we be as we are? Just because we fight against it, because we are building up our whole life upon the will to do as though we stood in normal relation and fellowship with God, we prove how true that is which we fight against.

And when we no longer fight and lay down arms, we acknowledge and confess how it stands with God and us. I have said already this cannot happen unless we have heard what is spoken through the prophet: “Hear ye! But with great mercy will I gather thee! But with everlasting lovingkindness will I have mercy on thee! But my lovingkindness shall not depart from thee! neither shall the covenant of peace be removed.” Take heed that by repeating three times the awful “But!” he says this wholly other? And parenthetically he adds, as if God permitted him to share his counsel: “I have sworn that I will not be wroth with thee nor rebuke thee!” And for the sake of the second he spoke the first. Only because he speaks that glorious word, does he speak this dreadful word. Only where this light is can that shadow fall. That may be the way, this is the goal. And the way is here for the sake of the goal, not the reverse. That may be called knowledge but this the truth; and the truth is before knowledge; and when the truth is here, knowledge ceases. Or, that the truth of man, this the truth of God; and this is greater, infinitely greater, than the truth of man, and only by beginning with it can that be known. Behold, now the prophet says that which hitherto we have missed; what we thought we had to add by deceitfully limiting or supplementing. Does it not become clear to us how much richer, more powerful, and more believable, the threefold “but” of the prophet sounds than the little “and yet!” which we keep ready for our justification and deliverance? Do we not keenly feel the difference between that which on our lips is only a pious wish that will never be fulfilled, and that which on his lips is a promise that bears its fulfilment with it? He received them at that moment when all their pious and impious wishes became dumb. Not therefore—but then “spoke the Lord.” What is the content of this promise?

Again one may ask himself whether one can and may seriously repeat after him what he has said here. But the Bible is open, let us read it to the end. True, the prophet says God will not always be angry, nor has he wholly forsaken us. True, God reveals himself, rending the veil of his secrecy just there where it seems to be most impervious. True, God is in the center of our life, just there, where, through death, is confirmed what our life in truth is. No, God is not angry forever; He is angry so long as time lasts, but His grace is eternal. And if it is the disagreeable human pride in which God’s wrath takes form, punishing us with that with which we sin, it is true also that this pride is not eternal, that it lasts only as long as time; eternal is the other—the forgiveness which destroys sin, though we still must bear its penalty; eternal is the truth that we are God’s dear and humble children. And, understand it well, there is no time that is without eternity, no condemning human truth without a comforting divine truth, no earthly goalless way without the light of the heavenly goal. We are not what we appear to be, that is, what we have made and are ever making of ourselves in our rebellion and revolt. We are not what we must acknowledge and confess ourselves to be, far removed from God, separated from God, laden with the divine curse. How could we acknowledge ourselves as such, if we were not already the children of grace and mercy?

Our acknowledging and our confessing are indeed true to that which we are at the moment; grace, that triumphs in our acknowledgment and confession, is eternal. And while it triumphs, the moment is to the “small moment” as an island in the endless ocean. And now the mountains may depart and the hills be removed, yea, the “moment” may be death and hell itself, it is still only the “moment.” “My loving-kindness shall not depart from thee, neither shall my covenant of peace be removed.” But, remember, this is not a truth like other truths. One cannot affirm or defend it or formulate it into a system. With each breath we would be deprived of the right and the ability to say this, if God had not said it. One can hear it only as God’s promise. As a discovery and conclusion of man, it is mere folly. The prophet does not let us doubt that it is only true because God does and will do it: “I will gather thee, I will have mercy on thee, I will not be angry with thee.” Take this “I” away, and you will take everything away! Let it be understood then that we do not do this, we do not know this, we do not have this. God does and knows and has this, and we await it as our heavenly inheritance.

To wait for Him in hope and to be happy, because the Spirit confirms in our hearts what the Word says: “I will … saith the Lord!”—that is our portion. For the moment continues, and does not cease to be the moment of wrath. And so we also will not cease to be (without the Spirit and the Word which are God’s) children of the Old Testament, by nature children of wrath. The answer to the second great word, that the prophet speaks, can only be faith. And faith that is not empty-handed is not faith.

But can we indeed believe? Is not everything only an artificial human comfort with which we deceive ourselves? What shall I say? The Christian Church must learn again to proclaim the word of God’s grace and to listen to it as to God’s word. Otherwise it cannot be believed. Without this we hang and hover half way between as those who are apparently dead: not really condemned and not really pardoned, not really abandoned to the wrath of God and not really happy in hope, all by halves, all weak, all only “as if,” all only figuratively and with reservation.

Perhaps this is the greatest calamity of our time, that such preaching and hearing of the word of grace, as the word of God, has been taken from us and has not yet been restored to us. And yet we hunger and thirst for reality, for the reality of revelation, without which faith, even though it removes mountains, has no reality to speak of; it is only our little faith. The prophet says: “Thus saith the Lord, thy Redeemer, the Merciful One.” This is reality. Christ in his witnesses is reality for which we hunger and thirst. We may doubt their witness and we do so continually; but we can also believe it, overcome our “no” through its “yes.” God be praised, “who according to his great mercy, begat us again to a living hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead!” He who will conquer us is the Spirit in whom we pray: “Our help and our beginning is in the name of the Lord who hath made heaven and earth.”