Wednesday, March 28, 2007

To the spiritual perplexity which exercised so many of the rarest souls of the nineteenth century, God appeared as a Being whom men desired to find but could not. But such a formula, though it truly represented one side of their situation, can never represent the whole of any human situation. For God is also a Being whom it ill suits any of us to find but from whom we cannot escape. Part of the reason why men cannot find God is that there is that in Him which they do not desire to find, so that the God whom they are seeking and cannot find is not the God who truly is. Perhaps we could not fail to find God, if it were really God whom we were seeking. And indeed the deepest reality of the situation is that contained in the discovery, which alone is likely at last to resolve our perplexity, that when we were so distressfully seeking that which was not really God, the true God had already found us, though at first we did not know that it was He by whom we had been found. There is a saying, “Be careful what you seek; you might find it.” And some who have sought God only as a complacent ally of their own ambitions have found Him a consuming fire.

... John Baillie (1886-1960), Invitation to Pilgrimage, Oxford University Press, 1942, and New York: Scribner, 1942, p. 23-24 (see the book; see also Deut. 4:23-24; Matt. 7:7; Luke 11:9; John 3:18-19; Heb. 12:27-29; more at Attitudes, Complacency, Fire, God, Knowing God, Search, Truth)

 
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Last updated: 03/02/17

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