Some of the great nouns of the Eden tongue—­the God tongue—­He spelled out big.  He spelled out purity, the natural life of Eden; and obedience, the rhythmic harmony of Eden; and peace, the sweet music of Eden; and power, the mastery and dominion of Eden; and love, the throbbing heart of Eden.  It was in biggest, brightest letters that love was spelled out.  He used the biggest capitals ever known, and traced each in a deep dripping red, with a new spelling—­s-a-c-r-i-f-i-c-e.

Jesus is God, following us up.

You see, the heart of God had been breaking—­is breaking over the ways things have been going down on this planet.  Folk fail to understand Him.  Worse yet, they misunderstand Him, and feel free to criticize Him.  Nobody has been so much slandered as God.  Many are utterly ignorant of Him.  Many others who are not ignorant yet ignore Him.  They turn their faces and backs.  Some give Him the cut direct.  The great crowd in every part of the world is yearning after Him:  piteously, pathetically, most often speechlessly yearning, blindly groping along, with an intense inner tug after Him.  They know the yearning.  They feel the inner, upward tug.  They don’t understand what it is for which they yearn, nor what will satisfy.

For man was made to live in closest touch with God.  That is his native air.  Out of that air his lungs are badly affected.  This other air is too heavy.  It’s malarial, and full of gases and germy dust.  In it he chokes and gasps.  Yet he knows not why.  He gropes about in the night made by his own shut eyes.  He doesn’t seem to know enough to open them.  And sometimes he will not open them.  For the hinge of the eyelid is in the will.  And having shut the light out, he gets tangled up in his ideas as to what is light.  He puts darkness for light, and light for darkness.

Once man knew God well; close up.  And that means loved, gladly, freely.  For here to know is to love.  But one day a bad choice was made.  And the choice made an ugly kink in his will.  The whole trouble began there.  A man sees through his will.  That is his medium for the transmission of light.  If it be twisted, his seeing, his understanding, is twisted.  The twist in the will regulates the twist in the eye.  Both ways, too, for a good change in the will in turn changes the eyes back to seeing straight.  He that is willing to do the right shall clearly see the light.

But that first kink seems to have been getting worse kinked ever since.  And so man does not see God as He is.  Man is cross-eyed Godward, but doesn’t know it.  Man is color-blind toward God.  The blue of God’s truth is to him an arousing, angering red.  The soft, soothing green of His love becomes a noisy, irritating yellow.  Nobody has been so much misunderstood as God.  He has suffered misrepresentation from two quarters:  His enemies and His friends.  More from—­which?  Hard to tell.  Jesus is God trying to tell men plainly what He is really like.