_THE PROPHECY OF NATURE._
"When I consider Thy heavens, the work of Thy fingers, the moon and the
stars, which Thou hast ordained; what is man, that Thou art mindful of
him? and the son of man, that Thou visitest him? For Thou hast made him
a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and
honour. Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of Thy hands;
Thou hast put all things under his feet."—PSALM viii. 3-6.
"But now we see not yet all things put under Him."—HEB. ii. 8.
The Eighth Psalm is a very striking one. It lifts the mind of the reader
to a lofty height where he seems to have soared above sin and sorrow. It
exults in man's greatness and Nature's grandeur. It is not Hebrew and
theocratic, but human and universal. What it says is said of man as man;
of man as he ought to be, was meant to be, may be. The subject is
Humanity.
The New Testament writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews takes what is
said in this psalm to be true of Christ, and he thinks that he has a
right to find in the words a prophecy of Christ's coming. If you read
the psalm without thinking of what is said in the Epistle you would not
immediately apply it to Christ. How, then, is there a real connection
between this old Hebrew utterance and the coming of our Lord?
It is a fact that the patriarchs expected the coming of some great and
wonderful blessing in the future, and it is a fact that in the coming of
Christ a gift came to men in the lines of anticipated blessing; but far
greater than they ever dreamed of.
Reflecting on those predictions and anticipations of future blessing,
might there not be in the very structure of the world, of the material
universe itself, in the course of events as they have fallen out in
history, something to lead men to expect the advent of their Christ? God
makes His plans looking, as a wise man looks, to the end. We should
expect, then, in all the foundation-laying, that that was provided for
and expected which should be the crown of all.
Is there not in creation an aspect of things which makes men think that
there is something great and grand in store for their race? The writer
of this psalm conceived his poem as he stood in the open fields and
looked up into the solemn sky, and watched the unhasting and untiring
motion of the shining stars—worlds upon worlds burning and throbbing in
the abyss of space. Away from the hum and tumult of men, no one can look
at those hosts of silent stars without a subdued and awed sense of the
mystery of being, of the infinite possibilities that the universe
discloses. The star-studded heaven at night makes a man irresistibly
think of God. It makes a man think, too, of himself. The silence, the
shining, the mystery and the solemnity of the starry heavens make a
man's beating, living life, as it were, become heard. A man is intensely
conscious of himself. That is exactly what passed through the heart of
this writer. It was not he who chose to have these thoughts, no more
than it is our wish to have these thoughts. God was playing upon the
strings of this man's heart—more directly, more rigorously in him, but
just as He plays upon the strings of your own when you have had great
solemn thoughts of God on a dark night, beneath the burning stars. The
man's thoughts went up, and then they went down into himself, when he
looked up into heaven, when he saw the moon and the stars, when he
realised all their wondrous being, the regularity, the order, the
vastness, the distance; then he thought of God, and God became great and
grand and majestic, and then he burst out, "O Lord, our Lord, how
excellent is Thy name in all the earth!" That is what he said. Then he
looked into himself, his own conscious life, met its failure, and his
first thought was of his own terrible pettiness. In the face of these
countless worlds revolving in the far heaven, "what is man?" And then
there came another thought to him: "And yet how great is man!" That
mighty moon, millions of times vaster than man, does not know its own
shining, its lustre, its own motions, its majesty. It is blind, and
deaf, and dumb, and insensate, and man sees it and wonders at it,
measures and weighs it, and understands its nature; and so man in all
his meanness, in all his smallness, in all his weakness, in all the
fragility of his life, is greater far than sun and moon and stars, and
all revolving worlds. How little is man—and yet how great, O God! Here
down below on earth man watches the stars, and up in heaven God watches
them too. Man thinks, God thinks; man creates, God creates; man loves,
God loves; so little, so great, and yet so like; Father and child, the
One so grand, the other so insignificant.
Then he turned to the earth on which he stood, and with a grandeur of
soul he recognised man's position on earth sharing the likeness of God,
gifted with God's power of thought and of plan, of will and of love; man
stands lord of all lower things that have been made, king and ruler with
power to control, with mastery to move them, he is lord and master over
all their ways, uncontrolled by aught, undismayed by aught, king, god of
earth: "Thou hast made him ruler over all the works of Thy hands."
Is it not a grand poem, that? If I could read to you the best poems
written in other lands by men of other days, by men of other faiths, if
I could compare the thoughts of this psalm with other thoughts of God's
plan and of man's position, you would understand what I mean when I say
the psalm is grand, the psalm is a revelation of man and of God.
If I had the capacity or the time to try and show you how these thoughts
about God and about Nature and about man, give man all the dignity, all
the elevation of character, all the powers and abilities to shape and
fashion the world he is in, one could not but wonder at the grandeur of
that psalm. The faith about God, and the faith about man's destiny
written down in that psalm—that faith is the Magna Charta of humanity
that has emancipated men from the slavery to sun, moon and stars, and
all the powers of Nature.
The psalm is a true conception of man's relation—upwards to God, and
downwards to Nature. It has been perfectly described by a German
commentator as a poetical echo of creation! A psalm, a poem, such as
this flings a spell about you. You forget actualities. It is so good, it
seems so true, it is so human, it is so living, you yield your soul to
it, you are filled with its glow and joyfulness, you are warmed with its
strength and triumph. You hail it;—and then you begin to think, you look
round, and what do you see? Mankind lord over lower things, yourself
lord over your own body, master of your appetites? Your neighbours
kings? The best of men enslaved! Bound down by the greed of gain! So
that the nobler powers of mind and body, and soul, are degraded and
cramped in them—men and women slaves of superstition, slaves of
prodigies and foolish fancies wrought into their very nature.
"We see not yet all things put under him." If exultation was the mood
made by the picture of the psalm, depression is the mood made by the
picture of mankind; and are we to end with that? No. The writer to the
Hebrews has given us the key by which we can unlock the secret, and have
confidence in the triumph of man's better nature, and hope for a better
future.
Let us look a little deeper into things, let us do men justice. Has man
ever acquiesced in his sinful, sorrowful slavery? Never. It is always
under protest that he regards it. It is always with a sense of fallen
greatness. It is always with discontent. It is always with an
unconquerable conviction that man was made for something better. Proof,
do you want? Why is it when you read a story of heroic generosity, like
that of the captain who gave away his own life for that of a wretched
boy the other day, that you feel life to be worth living? What is the
meaning of that sense of grandeur, of greatness, of triumph, that comes
over you? How is it? What is it? When you see a brave deed of
self-denial; at another time, when we hear of a cruel, mean deed
done—how do we feel towards each? Are we all bad? If that were our
natural lot we should acquiesce in the evil deed, we should have no
shock, no surprise; instead of that there is a sense of surprise, and
revolt. There is an error somewhere—a disaster, a calamity. It is a
sin—sin—a thing that robs us of our heavenly nature. Do we recognise it
as a part of human nature? No. Sin is unnatural, sin is horrible. That
is the meaning of the death scene in Macbeth. A knock at the door
reveals to the murderer the distance his crime has set between him and
the simple ordinary life of man. Sin is something unnatural, it is a
calamity, an intrusion, it ought not to be there. Fellowship with God!
Impossible to us! Why? Because we were never meant to have it? No. If
there be a God at all, if He made this world, if He made men to think,
and feel and understand, then God meant the world to be like a written
book that should speak of Him. Why does not all Nature so speak to man?
Because we have sinned, because we have lost the lineage, because we are
not like Christ, the sinless Son: to Him the lilies had the touch of God
on them, the birds in every song proclaimed His praise.
So, then, while we see that all things are not put under man, we see
plainly that God meant it otherwise, and that God made man to be lord of
creation. What God does not wish is hardly likely to stand. If man has
missed being what he was meant for, there is good possibility that he
may regain it. If God be love, there is certainty. I enter a
master-painter's studio, and I see upon his easel a spoiled picture. I
can see the majesty of the design, the beauty of the ideal, but from
some defect in the pigment or flaw in the canvas, it has gone wrong; it
is blurred and dim and spoiled. But not so to himself; that man will not
allow the disaster to prevent him creating in visible form the vision of
beauty that once charmed his heart. The man would not be a man of will
and determination if he allowed the disaster to hinder him in his
purpose. God is unchangeable. God is God.
Man is not what God made him for; man is not what God made him to be;
and God is God. His purpose may lapse for a little, His designs may be
delayed on the way, but if the beginning points to the grand end, that
end will be reached. God meant it. God means it. God shall do it.
We stand farther on along the track of God's providential dealings with
men. We see more than the writer to the Hebrews saw. He, too, remembered
that psalm when he described man as he ought to be. Why did he still let
it live and exist as a thing that is true? He could wait. What was he
waiting for? And what were the singers thinking of as they chanted that
psalm? They thought of a good time coming, they thought not the less of
the disaster, they thought of God redeeming men, of God causing a Man to
be born who should be a Deliverer, they thought of Him reaching out
hands of help to all who came to Him, and the writer to the Hebrews
writes truly when he says that that is prophesied of Christ. It is a
prediction of His coming. God cannot be foiled. Man is not yet what God
created him to be, the crown of all the earth-creation, but in the
divine heart and mind there has been that vision—man wanting but little
of exaltation to be next to God—man the lord of all—and the writer to
the Hebrews was able to say, "God has achieved it; in Christ, crowned
King and Lord of all creation, the psalm is fulfilled."
What depth of meaning and of wonder, of future joy and triumph, there is
in that feeling he has of Christ as the Flower and Fruit of God's design
in all creation! What depth of meaning there may be I do not dare to
fathom, of good to all mankind; but this I will think,—that in the end
of time when all things have been summed up and restored in Jesus
Christ, when God shall have gathered together in one the broken threads,
when the whole creation that with man groaneth until now, shall be
delivered from its bondage—God will be seen not to have failed. What
future revelation of grandeur, and of Divine goodness, and of redemption
beyond our utmost thoughts, there may be, I do not think we were meant
to know. I do not think we should dare to dogmatise; but we were meant
to have our eyes drawn away to that glorious, radiant, splendrous
future, and we are bidden there to see all God's loving pity and wise
provision for us. Ah! God is working; He is creating, loving; He is
providing, planning; He is redeeming creation, gathering together into
one grand whole a restored humanity and a ransomed creation; and all
mysteriously and strangely wrought into a great unity with Christ, and
through Christ, with God.