These words express a conviction which lies at the root of all natural as well as all revealed religion, a conviction which may be regarded as a distinctive feature, which separates that conception of God's nature which is properly a religious one from that which is merely a philosophical speculation, a conception without which indeed there can be no real belief in God at all.
I. The root and groundwork of all religion is the impulse which leads men to pray. In this is found the primary source from which all inquiries concerning the nature of God must set out, and to which all must ultimately return, viz., of man's relation to God as a person to a person, of man's dependence upon God, of man's power to ask and God's power to give such things as that dependence makes necessary.
II. If we turn to the sacred record of God's creation of the world, we cannot overlook or mistake the two great religious truths which stand side by side on its page, the twofold revelation of one and the same God as the Creator of the material universe and as the personal Providence that watches over the life and actions of men. The whole scheme of Holy Scripture from the beginning to the end is one continuous record of God's love and care for man in creation, government, redemption; and as such it is a revelation, not for this or that age alone, but for every generation of mankind, as our best and truest safeguard against an error into which human thought in every age is very prone to fall. Modern sophistry is ready to tell us that one law of cause and effect reigns supreme over mind as well as matter, that the actions of man, like the other phenomena of the universe, are but links in a chain of rigid and necessary consequences. Against this perversion Scripture furnishes a standing protest, and if read aright, a safeguard. God is revealed to man as He is revealed to no other of His visible creatures, not as God merely, but as our God, the personal God of His personal creatures.
H. L. Mansel, Penny Pulpit,No. 447.
The Gospel and the magnitude of creation.
Objection has been taken to the Gospel from the vastness of creation as displayed in astronomy. So far as we can see, that objection takes one of two shapes either that man, looked at in the light of such a universe, is too insignificant for this interposition, or that God is too exalted for us to expect such an interposition from Him.
I. As regards man, the professed aim of the Gospel is his deliverance from spiritual error and sin and his introduction to that which alone can satisfy the wants of his nature the favour and fellowship of the God who made him. This is a sphere of action entirely different from astronomy, and at its very first step as much higher as mind is above matter. It is the presence of life above all, of intelligent life which gives significance to creation, and which stands, like the positive digit in arithmetic, before all its blank ciphers. (1) The mind of man receives a further dignity when we turn from its power over the material to its capacity in the moral world. It is able to conceive and to reason from those distinctions of truth and falsehood, right and wrong, good and evil, which underlie and govern the spiritual world, as the laws of mathematics do the material. Here, if anywhere, mind grasps the absolute and infinite; and because it is able to do this, it holds rank above the highest things that eyes can see or heart conceive in the physical creation. (2) To this dignity of mind, derived from its power of thought, we have to add its value in the light of immortality.(3) So far from what God has done for the world of matter in the fields of astronomy being any reason for discrediting what the Gospel declares He has done for the world of mind in man, it should be a reason for believing it. If He has lavished so much pains and skill upon a universe of death, what may we not anticipate for one of life?
II. We come now to the second form which the objection may take that as the Gospel revelation sets man in a rank that is too high, so does it bring God too low.In the character of a really great man we require a balance of qualities to satisfy us. This is a principle which we are justly warranted in applying to God. In astronomy we see Him touching the extremity of omnipotence;and if His character is not to be one-sided, we may expect to see Him touching in some other work the extremity of love.We shall seek it vainly all through creation if we do not meet with it in the Gospel. It alone discloses depths of compassion transcending even those heights of power, and points us to a Being who crowns His own nature, as He crowns us, "with loving-kindness and tender mercy." When we take this view, we see that man has been placed in this world in the midst of concentric circles of Divine attributes, which become charged with deeper interest as they press in closer towards him. The inmost circle of fatherly love and forgiving mercy remains in the approach of God to the individual soul. Such a circle there must be; and when we feel its clasp on our hearts, we learn, in the language of the poet, "that the world is made for each of us."
J. Ker, Sermons,p. 227.
The nocturnal heavens at once symbolise and demonstrate the concealed existence and attributes of God, just as the presence and symmetry of a man are made known to the distant spectator when the shadow of his person, in sharp outline, falls upon a brightly illuminated surface. In such a case we do not indeed see the man, nor, strictly speaking, is it more than his exterior form of which we have direct evidence; nevertheless we do not fail to fill up in idea what is wanting in formal proof; and we think almost as distinctly of the person as if he stood, without a screen, fronting us in the blaze of light. Thus it is that both in the vastness and the richness of the visible universe the invisible God is adumbrated.
I. We may boldly affirm that earth is not too small a globe to be thought worthy of giving birth to the heirs of immortality; nor is man too diminutive a being to hold converse with his Creator, or to be amenable to the Divine government. The very multiplicity of worlds, instead of favouring such a conclusion, refutes it by showing that the Creator prefers, as the field of His cares and beneficence, limited and separate portions of matter rather than immense masses. It is manifest that the omnipotent wisdom and power laves to divide itself upon the individuality of its works.
II. But if we must not indulge this feeling, the tendency of which is to quash every aspiring thought and to reduce us from the rank we hold to the level of the brutes, our alternative is another which, without checking any noble emotion, at once imposes a restraint upon presumption, and leads us to estimate more rightly than otherwise we should the consequences of our present course. To exist at all as a member of so vast an assemblage of beings, and to occupy a footing in the universe such as it is, involves incalculable probabilities of future good or ill.
I. Taylor, Saturday Evening,p. 124.
I. How is God mindful of man? He is mindful of man at every moment of his existence mindful of infancy, of boyhood, manhood in the toils of active life, of age, when all other mindfulness terminates, and when the ties of earth have been loosened one by one.
II. He is mindful of us inasmuch as He has provided all things needful for our existence. Nature brings the keys of her magnificent treasure-house, and lays them, a vassal, at the feet of man.
III. He is mindful of us, again, because He has provided everything, not only for our existence, but for our happiness. If you want to see how He has not left the world to itself from the beginning, take its history from Adam downward. And when, in the fulness of time, the Son of God was incarnate in furtherance of the purpose of the Father, surely God was mindful of His creatures then. The visit of Christ was (1) a visit of humility, and (2) a visit of atonement.
IV. Since the Son has ascended up to heaven, God has been mindful of man in the operations and influences of the Spirit.
V. He is mindful, too, in the dispensations of His providence. The great end of man's existence in the present life is to prepare for a better. He is so thoroughly earthly, so wedded to the scenes of time, that vigorous means are needed in order to wean him from earth and attach him to the skies. It would save us from misery sometimes if we could only regard our afflictions as having this disciplining and corrective end.
W. Morley Punshon, Penny Pulpit,No. 3608.
Reference: Psalms 8:3; Psalms 8:4. Bishop Temple, Rugby Sermons,3rd series, p. 91.