Isaiah 40:26

THE UNIVERSE AND MAN

Isaiah 40:26. Lift up your eyes on high, &c.

We find in the text—not obscurely, not ambiguously, but with the clearness and positiveness of knowledge—

I. That God should not be confounded with His works, but apprehended as the personal and living Author of all. This faith is conspicuous throughout the whole Bible. The first verse of the Book is an explicit declaration of it. On this foundation the Book rests, and from it it is never moved. In this the Bible writers stood alone in the world. The wisdom of Egypt and Assyria gave them no countenance; they lacked the sympathy, to a large extent, of their own nation. This old Hebrew faith stands as firmly in the light of modern science. Sir Isaac Newton declared that the cause of the universe could not be mechanical; Galileo saw God as clearly as Newton in the heavens, whose scientific prophet he was.

That we moderns know more of the material universe scientifically than did the ancients is not to be questioned; but while the Hebrew writers used popular language, they were preserved from mixing the false or inaccurate science of their times with their religious teachings. But while they knew less of the vastness of the universe than we do now, they did not feel it less. The modern scientist’s awe in the contemplation of it may not be in proportion to his knowledge; the Hebrews knew enough and saw enough to produce the profoundest feeling, and more scientific knowledge would scarcely have added to the depth or intensity of their feeling.

II. That which God created He sustains. “For that He is strong in power, not one faileth.” But are not the laws of Nature self-working and constant? Constant, certainly; self-working, in the sense of being independent of their Author, as a well-made clock is of its maker, is not, to say the least, so evident. The Hebrew Scriptures affirm the constancy of Nature more consistently than some modern scientists. God said, “Let the earth bring forth grass,” &c., and the fruittree yielding fruit “after its kind.” “God created every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after its kind. And God saw that it was good.” “And God made the beast of the earth after its kind, and cattle after their kind, and everything that creepeth upon the earth after its kind.” And man, we may add, has produced “after his kind.” Nature has been constant; all history proves it. The Bible traces it to its source in an ordinance of the Creator. God saw that it was good. Good it was,—a most beneficent decree (H. E. I. 3157). Anything else would have turned human forethought and activity into folly, and would have furnished a new illustration of the old Greek notion of a fortuitous concourse of atoms. It is not by the Bible, nor by believers in it, that the constancy of Nature is now doubted; it is by a very bold and boastful section of scientific men, who do not believe that things have always produced after their kind. But the Bible asserts with equal explicitness a continued Divine agency in Nature. It tells us that God still causeth the grass to grow for the cattle, &c. (Psalms 104:14). “My Father worketh hitherto,” said Christ. The Sabbath-rest was not a cessation from Divine activity. The best of our living astronomers, as well as the greatest of the past, believe that “the heavens declare the glory of God,” that they are sustained in their immensely complicated but most orderly structure and relations by the power of their Maker; they accept the words of the prophet as containing the conclusion to which science shuts us up. Nor are they offended by the metaphoric or poetic form in which the sublime conception is here expressed; poetic in form, it is true in fact. How consoling is this thought! When we think of the physical possibilities of the universe or of our own globe, we may tremble. Our fear is allayed, not so much by the idea of the regularity and stability of Nature, as by the assurance that God reigneth (2 Peter 3:7)

III. These truths are made the foundation of comfort, primarily to the ancient Israel of God, and equally to all the spiritual Israel (Isaiah 40:27). The vastness of the universe in nowise detracts from nor diminishes God’s care over the human race. The prophet’s argument seems almost an inversion of our Lord’s (Matthew 6:26). Suns and stars are glorious things; we are as atoms and worms in comparison (Psalms 8:3). But if this feeling is turned into an argument to place us at a distance from God, there is a reply to it from His own mouth (Isaiah 66:1). More than this, the Bible story of creation gives us the keynote of the Bible idea of man. The earth was made for him, and he was made in the image of God. The material universe, which “was made glorious, has no glory in this respect, by reason of the glory that excelleth.” This idea lies at the foundation of the whole Christian scheme, which assumes both the “majesty and the misery of man.” If man is not a glorious being, he is not worth the expenditure by which he has been redeemed; if he is not fallen, he does not need the redemption of Christ. If we be “human atoms,” as a modern Pantheist calls us, without personal relations to God, “dots of animated jelly,” to be absorbed by and by into the mass from which we have been taken, assuredly the Christian redemption is uncalled for and incredible. The African traveller was cheered, when almost dying, by discovering a tuft of living moss. But if we understand things as the prophet did, not only every blade of grass that grows, but every star that shines, justifies faith in the providential love and care of our Heavenly Father. Happy if, in addition to this, we can enter into full sympathy with the apostolic argument! (Romans 8:32).—John Kennedy, D.D.: Christian World Pulpit, vol. vi. pp. 225–227.