Psalms 145:13-14

Psalms 145:13

What we admire in these verses is their combining the magnificence of unlimited power with the assiduity of unlimited tenderness. The greatness of God is often turned into an argument by which men would bring doubt on the truths of redemption and providence.

I. An argument is attempted to be drawn from the insignificance of man to the improbability of redemption; one verse of our text is set against the other: and the confessed fact that God's dominion is throughout all generations is opposed to the alleged fact that He gave His own Son that He might lift up the fallen. But it ought at least to be remembered that man was God's workmanship, made after His image, and endowed with powers which fitted him for lofty pursuits. The human race may or may not be insignificant. No one can survey the works of nature and not perceive that God has some regard for the children of men, however fallen and polluted they may be. And if God manifest a regard for us in temporal things, it must be far from incredible that He would do the same in spiritual.

II. It is in regard to the doctrine of a universal providence that men are most ready to raise objections from the greatness of God as contrasted with their own insignificance. They cannot believe that He who is so mighty as to rule the heavenly hosts can condescend to notice the wants of the meanest of His creatures. (1) This reasoning betrays ignorance as to what it is in which greatness consists. It may be that amongst finite beings it is not easy, and perhaps not possible, that attention to what is minute or comparatively unimportant should be combined with attention to things of vast moment. But we never reckon it an excellence that there is not, or cannot be, this union. On the contrary, we should declare that man at the very summit of true greatness who proved himself able to unite what had seemed incompatible. We know not why that should be derogatory to the majesty of the Ruler of the universe which, by the general confession, would add immeasurably to the majesty of one of the earth's potentates. (2) Objections against the doctrine of God's providence are virtually objections against the great truths of creation. What it was not unworthy of God to form, it cannot be unworthy of God to preserve. Why declare anything excluded by its insignificance from His watchfulness which could not have been produced but by His power? The universal providence of God is little more than an inference from the truth of His being the universal Creator. (3) The doctrine of a universal providence is strictly derivable from the very nature of God. It is to bring God down to the feebleness of our own estate to suppose that what is great to us must be great to Him, and that what is small to us must be small to Him. Dwelling as God does in inaccessible splendours, a world is to Him an atom, and an atom is to Him a world. It is thus virtually the property of God that He should care for everything and sustain everything, so that we should never behold a blade of grass springing up from the earth, nor hear a bird warble its wild music, nor see an infant slumber on its mother's breast without a warm memory that it is through God as a God of providence that the fields are enamelled in due season, that every animated tribe receives its sustenance, and that the successive generations of mankind arise, and flourish, and possess the earth.

H. Melvill, Sermons before the University of Cambridge,p. 1.

Reference: Psalms 145:15; Psalms 145:16. Homiletic Quarterly,vol. ii., p. 261.