The Doe of the Dawn: A Christian World View. . .No. 1

THE DOE OF THE DAWN AND THE HOUND OF HEAVEN

There is evidence that one of the great hymns of Israel, Psa. 22. was sung to the tune, unknown to us of course, of “The Hind of the Dawn.” The imagery is that of a lonely deer, lost from the herd during the night, standing on a craggy hill at dawn gazing into the distance in hope of finding its way again. The dawn finds the doe lost and bewildered, longing for home.

Man is like that. Lost in the darkness of sin and despair, he feels forsaken and is smitten by loneliness. Like the troubled doe in search of home, his longing look into the distance seems futile. “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? ,” he cries, “Why art thou so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning?” (Psa. 22:1) Like the lost doe, man sometimes supposes that God has forsaken him to the point that he makes no response to his cry for help, as with the psalmist: “Oh, my God, I cry by day, but thou dost not answer, and by night, but find no rest.”

But the psalmist’s plight does not imply any conclusion that there is no God. It is in fact that God is that lies at the heart of man’s predicament, for if there were no God man’s anxiety would be understandable. If man were indeed alone in the universe there would be no need to cry out, for there would be no one to hear. Since “thou art holy, enthroned on the praises of Israel,” as the psalmist declares, why must man feel as forsaken as a lost deer?

While the psalm may reflect a troubled faith it nonetheless reflects a deep faith. “My God, my God” and “Oh, my God” are not the cries of an unbeliever. God’s faithfulness is not questioned; the man is only bewildered as to why God does not respond. He notes how his fathers trusted God and that God delivered them: In thee they trusted and were not disappointed. It is that Why me, God? kind of feeling that we all indulge in now and again in our self-pity.

The doe of the dawn thus serves as a symbol of man’s search for a God who appears to hide himself. Perhaps the prophet Isaiah “found” God as much as any mortal in history and yet he could say, “Truly, thou art a God who hidest thyself.” Even Moses, who spoke with God “as a man speaks with his friend,” was not allowed to see the glory of God, however much he sought it. “You cannot see my face,” the Lord said to him, “for man shall not see me and live” (Ex. 33:20). If we think of how God waits with patience for man’s response, one theme of the psalms is how man waits longingly for God. Not only is man to “stand in awe of him,” the psalmist says, but to wait for him all the day long. Isaiah urged those in captivity to “wait for the Lord” and thus renew their strength (40:31).

So, the doe of the dawn stands in the crag, longing and waiting. Psa. 42:1-3 says it well: “As a hart longs for flowing streams, so longs my soul for thee, 0 God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When shall I come and behold the face of God?” He goes on to name the problem felt by every believer once in awhile: “My tears have been my food day and night, while men say to me continually, ‘Where is your God?’”

Where is your God? is always the taunt of an unbeliever in the face of a world full of suffering and injustice, while the believer, even when his faith does not waiver, is left perplexed by the hiddenness of God. This perplexity is keenly evident in the suffering of the Christ upon the cross, who drew upon the lines of “the Hind of the Dawn’ as he hung there.

“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?,” cried Jesus upon the cross (Matt. 27:46), which reveals his familiarity with Ps. 22, and he may have quoted the whole of it as he hung there, or a substantial part of it, for the events of the crucifixion are in part a fulfillment of that prophetic psalm. For a moment in history the Christ was the lonely deer in search of rest. Verses 7 and 8 describe how the sufferer was mocked and ridiculed and how they wagged their heads at him, saying, “He committed his cause to the Lord; let him deliver him.” All this comes to pass quite literally at the cross, according to Matt. 27:39-44, including the taunt “He trusts in God; let God deliver him now.”

Verse 18 of the psalm says, “They divide my garments among them, and for my raiment they cast lots,” which is an unlikely detail for an ordinary sufferer in Old Testament times. This unique detail finds literal fulfillment at the cross of Jesus. Jn. 19:23-24 tells how they tore his undergarments into four parts, one for each soldier, but as for his tunic (raiment), which was seamless and woven from top to bottom, the soldiers said, “Let us not tear it, but cast lots for it, to see whose it shall be.” The apostle John, who was an eyewitness to these events, recognized this as a fulfillment of Scripture, quoting Ps. 22:18.

While the Christ, suffering as a crucified criminal, saw himself in that moment as God-forsaken, he nonetheless was confident of the faithfulness of God and was assured that somehow, in the mystery of it all, God was there. He was not only a lost deer but a lamb slain, as the imagery tells us, but he was confident that the purposes of heaven were being realized. Heb. 5:7-10 puts it this way: “In the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to him who was able to save him from death, and he was heard for his godly fear. Although he was a Son, he learned obedience through what he suffered, and being made perfect he became the source of eternal salvation to all who obey him, being designated by God a high priest after the order of Melchizedek.”

We too are sons and we too learn through suffering, even the suffering of feeling God-forsaken and lost, even when we are neither forsaken nor lost.

Man is like the doe of the dawn. He is, even as an unbeliever, in some sense “the dwelling place of God,” as A. W. Tozer puts it, God is the “I am” in each of us. “Deep inside every man,” Tozer says, “there is a private sanctum where dwells the mysterious essence of his being.” Because of this each of us has his own encounter with God in some manner. The crucial issue is whether, like the doe of the dawn, we eagerly search after the God who seems to be both near and far away. The issue is also whether we will allow God’s spirit to dwell within our private sanctum or whether our spirit is left to dwell there alone.

The fallenness of man means that God’s spirit departed from man’s private sanctum because of his rebellion and sin, where at first it chose to dwell, leaving man alone. But that inner sanctum longs for the fellowship of God, and “He is not far from any of us, for in him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). Man’s renewal or redemption means that God returns to make his home in man’s heart. Our thesis is that man longs for this fellowship, even when he is unaware of it. Man is thus the doe of the dawn in search of home. While the anesthetics of our wayward world may blunt man’s longing for fellowship with God, they cannot destroy it. And herein lies man’s hope.

The Hound of Heaven

But our thesis is twofold. Man not only by the nature of his being seeks after God, but God by the nature of his being seeks after man. He is, in the words of the poet, “the Hound of Heaven” who relentlessly pursues man “down the night and down the days, down the arches of the years.” It stands out in bold relief and remains a glorious contradiction, for man seeks after a God that hides himself while God pursues a man who refuses to be found “lest, having Him, I must have naught beside,” as the poet concludes.

It is a contradiction that resolves itself in extravagant faithfulness. God can be found, the prophet assures us, “when you seek me with all your heart” (Jer. 29:13), and man does allow the Hound of Heaven to overtake when “I knew His love Who followed,” the poet tells us. This defines religion as a love story, which is what I Jn. 4:19 is telling us: We love, because he first loved us. It is a matter of God’s faithfulness and man’s responsiveness, all grounded in love. God’s pursuit is relentless only because of his great love, while man’s yielding is final only because his heart is touched by that love.

We see it in the call of Moses, where God says “I have seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt, and I have heard their cry because of their taskmasters; I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them” (Ex. 3:7-8). How majestic those verbs of action!

I have seen.

I have heard.

I know.

I have come down.

The Hound of Heaven is in pursuit of his people, and he never lets up. It is the gospel in the Old Testament, for we have a God who sees affliction, hears prayers, knows how much it hurts, and who comes down. He is always coming down! And his pursuit of us may be through others, for he prepared Moses for the task with I will send you and I will be with you. Stephen began his summary of God’s pursuit of man with “The God of glory appeared to our father Abraham” (Acts 7:2). But it is in Christ that God’s quest of man found its fullness: “God did not send the Son into the world to judge the world; but that the world should be saved through him” (Jn. 3:17).

Nature itself bears witness to God’s pursuit. “The heavens are telling the glory of God and the firmament proclaims his handiwork,” Ps. 22:1 assures us, while the apostle Paul observes that “Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made” (Rom. 1:20). God’s handiwork makes manifest the perfect qualities of his nature. So clear is this revelation of God’s invisible nature in things created that man is without excuse when he worships the creature rather than the Creator.

Human nature as well as nature testifies to God’s quest of man. Deep inside us all is the sense of Heaven’s presence. Man’s consciousness of himself bears witness to something within him that is greater than himself. This universal sense of the holy within us all supports the thesis that every person at some point in life comes face to face with God. This is why man has never succeeded in ignoring God. Even boastful atheism is often an indication that the Hound of Heaven is hot on the trail.

The lines from Ps. 139 seem as appropriate for the unbeliever as the believer:

Whither shall I go from thy Spirit?

Or whither shall I flee from thy presence?

If I ascend to heaven, thou art there!

If I make my bed in Sheol thou art there!

If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea,

Even there thy hand shall lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me.

And in his poem Francis Thompson may speak for the believer as well as the unbeliever when he explains why man is reluctant to allow the Hound of Heaven to overtake him:

I fled Him, down the night and down the days;

I fled Him, down the arches of the years;

I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways

Of my own mind; and in the midst of tears

I hid from Him, and under running laughter.

(For though I knew His love Who followed,

Yet was I sore adread

Lest, having Him, I must have naught beside.)

--- the Editor