Our age is wonderful, not merely in the number of strange and unprecedented things happening in it, and in the strange and unprecedented character that belongs to it as a whole, but also in the prominence of wonder as an element in the view which it takes of itself. It is wonderful because it is an age of wonder. The comfort of the text is comprehended under two words: the first "safety," and the second "enlargement." These describe the two needs of every man's life, and these two needs both find a supply in the assurance that what are wonders and mysteries to us are perfectly clear to God, within whose life our lives are hid.
I. Remember where so much of the sense of danger and the sense of unsafety in life comes from. It is not from the things that we see and that we have known all along; it is from the half-seen forms that hover upon the borders of reality and unreality from things which evidently are something, but of which we cannot perfectly make out just what they are. At sea it is not the ship whose shape you can perfectly discern, all whose movements you can follow; it is the ship that hovers like a dim ghost in the fog, moving by an unseen hand, evidently there, but all bathed in mystery that is the ship you fear may strike you. It is not clear, sound, well-proved, certain truths that frighten men for the stability of their faith; it is the ghostly speculations, the vaguely-outlined, faint suggestions that hover in the misty light of dim hypotheses; it is the forms of truth that peer out of just opened but not explored chambers of new sciences these are the things that make the dim, uneasy sense of danger that besets the minds of so many believers. If any so-called discovery which men are teaching me today is really true, God has known it all along. "Do not be frightened," He says. "I cannot be taken by surprise." "If it be marvellous in the eyes of the remnant of this people, should it also be marvellous in Mine eyes?" He who believes truth only as the way to God he who regards opinions as valueless, except as they agree with the infallible judgments of God is the man for whom all life is safe, and whose faith faces the changing thoughts and destinies of the world, however astounding they may seem, without a thought of fear.
II. Such a man is also free. If He who sits at the centre of everything, and sees the visions of the universe with the perfect clearness of its Maker if God can really speak so that we can hear Him, and say, "It is impossible to you, but it is not impossible to Me; it is marvellous in your eyes, but it is not in Mine" if He can say that of any task which is overwhelming men with its immensity that word of His must snap our fetters, that word of His must set free the little strength of all of us to strike our little blows, must enlarge our lives, and send them out to bolder ventures with earnestness and hope.
Phillips Brooks, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xxiii., p. 361.
References: Zechariah 8:6. Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. xxix., No. 1747; S. Macnaughten, Real Religion and Real Life,p. 147. Zechariah 8:13. Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. ix., No. 543.Zechariah 8:16; Zechariah 8:17. A. H. Jones, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xi., p. 310.