Notice the remarkable order and alternation of pronouns in the first verse. My thoughts are not your thoughts,' saith the Lord. The things that God thinks and purposes are not the things that man thinks and purposes, and therefore, because the thoughts are different, the outcomes of them in deeds are divergent. God's ways' are His acts, the manner and course of His working considered as a path on which He moves, and on which, in some sense, we can also journey. Our ways' --our manner of life--are not parallel with His, as they should be.
But that opposition is expressed with a remarkable variation. Observe the change of pronouns in the two clauses. First, My thoughts are not your thoughts -you have not taken My truth into your minds, nor My purposes into your wills; you do not think God's thoughts. Therefore--your ways (instead of My,' as we should have expected, to keep the regularity of the parallelism) are not My ways '--I repudiate and abjure your conduct and condemn it utterly.
Now, of course, in this charge of man's unlikeness to God, there is no contradiction of, nor reference to, man's natural constitution, in which there are, at one and the same time, the likeness of the child with the parent and the unlikeness between the creature and the Creator. If our thoughts were not in a measure like God's thoughts, we should know nothing about Him. If our thoughts were not like God's thoughts, we should have no standard for life or thinking. Righteousness and beauty and truth and goodness are the same things in heaven and earth, and alike in God and man. We are made after His image, poor creatures though we be; and though there must ever be a gulf of unlikeness, which we cannot bridge, between the thoughts of Him whose knowledge has no growth nor uncertainty, whose wisdom is infinite and all whose nature is boundless light, and our knowledge, and must ever be a gulf between the workings and ways of Him who works without effort, and knows neither weariness nor limitation, and our work, so often foiled, so always toilsome, yet in all the unlikeness there is (and no man can denude himself of it) a likeness to the Father. For the image in which God made man at the beginning is not an image that it is in the power of men to cast away, and in the worst of his corruptions and the widest of his departures he still bears upon him the signs of likeness to Him that created him.' The coin is rusty, battered, defaced; but still legible are the head and the writing. Whose image and superscription hath it?' Render unto God the things that are declared to be God's, because they bear His likeness and are stamped with His signature.
But that very necessary and natural likeness between God and man makes more solemnly sinful the voluntary unlikeness which we have brought upon ourselves. If there were no analogy, there could be no contrast. If God and man were utterly unlike, then there would be no evil in our unlikeness and no need for our repentance.
The true state for each of us is that we should, as the great astronomer said he had done in regard to his own science, think God's thoughts after Him,' and have our minds filled with His truth and our wills all harmonised with His purposes, and that we should thus make our ways to run parallel with the ways of God. The blessedness, the peace, the true manhood of a man, are that his ways and thoughts should be like God's. And so my text comes with its indictment--You who by nature were formed in His image, you to whom it is open to sympathise with His designs, to harmonise your wills with His will, and to bring all the dark and crooked ways in which you walk into full parallelism with His way--you have departed into darkness of unlikeness, and in thought and in ways are the opposites of God.
Mark how wonderfully, in the simple language of my text, deep truths about this sin of ours are conveyed. Notice its growth and order. It begins with a heart and mind that do not take in God's thoughts, truths, purposes, desires, and then the alienated will and the darkened understanding and the conscience which has closed itself against His imperative voice issue afterwards in conduct which He cannot accept as in any way corresponding with His. First comes the thought unreceptive of God's thought, and then follow ways contrary to God's ways.
Notice the profound truth here in regard to the essential and deepest evil of all our evil. Your thoughts ; your ways,'--self-dependence and self-confidence are the master-evils of humanity. And every sin is at bottom the result of saying--I will not conform myself to God, but I am going to please myself, and take my own way.' My own way is never God's way; my own way is always the devil's way. And the root of all sin lies in these two strong, simple words, Your thoughts not Mine; your ways not Mine.'
Notice, too, how there are suggested the misery and retribution of this unlikeness. If you will not make My thoughts your thoughts, I shall not take your ways as My ways. I will leave you to them.' You will be filled with the fruit of your own devices. I shall not incorporate your actions into My great scheme and purpose.' Men Would not know His ways, And He has left them to their own.'
So here we have the solemn indictment brought by God's own voice against us all. The criminality of our unlikeness to Him rests upon our original likeness.
The unlikeness roots itself in thought, and blossoms in the poisonous flower of God-displeasing acts. It brings down upon our heads the solemn retribution of separation from Him, and being filled with the fruit of our own devices. Such is the indictment brought against every soul of man upon the earth, and there is built upon it the call to repentance and change, let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts.' The question rises in many a heart,' How am I to forsake these paths on which my feet have so longed walked?' And if I do, what about all the years behind me, full of wild wanderings and thoughts in all of which God was not?
