The Biblical Illustrator
Psalms 103:22
Bless the Lord, all His works in all places of His dominion.
The illimitable vastness of the universe
How does our conception of the universe differ from that of David? It differs, among other things, mainly because we know, and he did not know, of infinite time, peopled with innumerable existences, on infinite space, crowded with unnumbered worlds. To David the earth probably seemed comparatively a thing of yesterday. We know of ages when the earth may have been a nebulous mass; of ages more when it was certainly one tangled growth of gigantic vegetation; of ages more when it was trodden by huge and fearful lizards--dragons of the prime, tearing each other with lethal armour of incomparable deadliness. We look at a piece of chalk, and we know that to form it took the spoils of millions of living organisms; and the man sinks powerless before the effort to conceive the years which it must have taken, by ordinary processes, to build up the white ramparts of our coasts. Yes, the knowledge of the deeps which geology reveals, so far from rendering too dim for us, tends only to brighten for us the image of a Father’s love. We know that that Father is caring for us now, and geology has simply proved to us that He was caring for our race, it may be, a billion of years before it appeared upon our globe. But if science has thus widened for us the horizons of time, still more illimitably has it widened for us the horizons of space; still more completely has it annihilated man’s self-importance about his race, and about the globe on which he lives. To the ancients, for instance, the world was a very centre of all things, and a very image of immovable stability. To us it is an insignificant speck in the heavens of no material importance, and with no centrality about it; and, so far from being fixed, we know that it is rolling, with incessant revolution, on its own axis, whirling, at immense velocity, round the sun, “spinning,” as one has said, “like an angry midge, in the abyss of its own small system, of which it is but one out of one hundred planets and asteroids, and of which the farthest of these planets rolls three hundred thousand millions of miles round the sun upon its sullen and solitary round.” Again, to the ancients, and to David, the moon was but an ornament of the night, a silver cresset hung by God’s hand in heaven, to illumine the darkened earth. To us it is, indeed, this, and we thank God for it, and also for its services, unknown to our forefathers, of attracting the waters, and so causing to roll, from hemisphere to hemisphere, that great tidal wave which purifies the world. But we have also learnt with amazement what the moon is. We know that it is a small world, in structure like our own; but without atmosphere, without clouds, without seas, without rivers, rent with enormous fissures, scathed and scorched with eruptive violences, a burnt-up cinder, a volcanic waste, the wreck, for all we know, of some past home of existence, a corpse in night’s highway, naked, fire-scathed, accursed; and if, in the complications of her silent revolutions,
“She nightly, to the listening earth,
Repeats the story of her birth,”
yet that story presents us with so blank a mystery, that it forces our acknowledgment that it may seem as if its one blank hemisphere was only turned to this earth and its science in mocking irony, as though to convince us, against our will, that what we know is little--what we are ignorant of immense. Then, once more, turn to the sun. The ancients saw its splendour; they felt its warmth; they thanked God for its glory. To David it was, as you know, “as a bridegroom cometh forth out of his chamber, and rejoiceth as a giant to run his course.” It was thought a monstrous extravagance when one of the Greek philosophers said that it was a fiery mass, and another that it was about the size of Attica. But what is it to us? Look at the bas-relief of the tomb of Newton in Westminster Abbey, and there you will see the little genius weighing the sun, and the earth, and the planets on a steelyard. Yes, we know its weight; we know its distance; we know its revolution. We know even, of late years, by spectrum analysis, of what metals and gases it is composed. No human language can express its awfulness. That great orb, as we have discovered, bursts and boils with a horrible impetuosity, such as no human imagination can conceive; and yet this vast, portentous globe of fire is made to subserve the humblest purposes of man. Once more, for a moment, turn to the stars. Turn to the millions of stars in the Milky Way. Our sun is neither more nor less than just one, and one unimportant, star in that Milky Way. To David, when he said that the heavens declared the glory of God, only were known two or three thousand stars visible to the naked eye. To us are known somewhere about fifty millions. And, yet, I say again that the Christian is not in the least appalled by all this vastness. Space is nothing to that God who extends through all extent, and in the hollow of whose hand all those worlds lie as though they were but a single water-drop. But, by the telescope, better without it--
“Man may see
Stretched awful in the hushed midnight,
The ghost of his eternity.”
But yet, happily, perhaps, for us, simultaneously with this abyss of non-existence beyond man, God has revealed to us an infinitude of life below Him. Take an animalcula, and Pascal will tell you that, however small its body, it is yet smaller in its limbs, and there are joints in those limbs, veins in those joints, blood in those veins, drops in that blood, humour in those drops, vapour in that humour, and an abyss even below this--an immensity of invisible life; so that man, we say, is suspended between two infinities--an abyss of infinity below, and of nothingness above, him. He is a mean between the nothing and the all--nothing compared to the infinite, infinite compared to the nothing. Is not this, at least, a lesson of humility? Should it not compel man rather to contemplate in silence than to inquire with presumption? “Such knowledge is too deep and wonderful for me; I cannot attain to it.” “What is man that Thou art mindful of him, and the son of man that Thou so regardest him?” Here, for the Christian, at any rate, lies the solution of the dark enigma, the removal of the painful perplexity, the removal of the intolerable weight. Man is nothing in himself. He is as small, as mean, as abject as you please. He is but a fragment of the dust to which he shall soon return. Yes, but in himself nothing, in God man is every-thing--sacred, holy, sublime, immortal, a child of God, a joint-heir with Christ. What is vastness, then, to the Christian that it should appal him? It is nothing; it is less than nothing. It does not oppress or crush him. He is greater than those worlds. He is more immortal than all those clustered suns. They are, after all, but gas and flame; but he lives, and he is immortal, and he is created in the image of God. (Dean Farrar.)
Bless the Lord, O my soul--
The perils of the spiritual guide
In the two preceding verses the psalmist had similarly demanded that the Lord’s works should praise Him--“Bless the Lord, ye His angels,” etc. In our text, as though he would no longer invoke separately any order of being, or any department of creation, he summons the whole universe to join in the glorious work--“Bless the Lord, all His works in all places of His dominion”; and after this most comprehensive demand, is there anything else from which he can ask praise? Yes, he subjoins, “bless the Lord, O my soul.” It seems as if a sudden fear had seized the psalmist, the fear of by any possibility omitting himself; or, if not a fear, yet a consciousness that his very activity in summoning others to praise, might make him forgetful that he was bound to praise God himself. Alas! how possible, how easy, to take pains for others, and to be neglectful of oneself: nay, to make the pains we take for others the reason by which we persuade ourselves that we cannot be neglecting ourselves. Religion of all matters is that which will least bear to be handled professionally: in the mere way of business or occupation. If we once come to handle spiritual things as though they were objects of merchandise or topics for essays, if we come to speak of them with the language of barren speculation, so that the description of the tongue outruns the experience of the heart; alas for the condition of the minister! But it may be well that we consider a little more in detail how that danger may be guarded against, which it has been our endeavour to expose. How shall the guide who feels his mind deadening to the influence of the natural landscape, through the frequency of inspection and the routine of describing it to strangers,--how shall he prevail in keeping his mind alive to the beauties of the scene, the wonders and splendours which crowd the panorama? Let him not be satisfied with showing that panorama to others; let him not look upon it merely in his professional capacity, but let him take frequent opportunities of going by himself to various points of view that he may study it under all possible aspects, now when the shadows of evening rest darkly on the water, now when the sunshine sleeps lovingly on the valley, now when the storm is abroad in its strength, now when the spring mantles hill and plain with its loveliness, and now when winter reigns in coldness and desolateness. Let him not be content with expounding the Bible, or with studying it with a view to his professional duties; let him be careful that he have his season of private meditation, when, like the guide, he may stand on Pisgah by himself, and for himself, not considering the scene with the eye of one who has to delineate the magnificent landscape, but rather with that of one who has to find in it a spot which he may call his own, and where he may fix his everlasting habitation. The more we engage in teaching others, in setting before others the blessings procured by the interference of Christ, the more tenacious should we be of seasons of private meditation and self-examination. For such seasons become then increasingly needful, lest we fancy our acquaintance with truth perfect, or our appreciation of it adequate, and thus shall we not only keep our own lamp well trimmed, but be more than ever fitted, by the blessing of God, to shed light on those who may be walking in darkness and the shadow of death. It is he who is daily schooling himself who is most likely to be instrumental in guiding others to God; the note struck within will produce the greatest vibration around; if I would waken an anthem of praise, I must first attune to thanks the chords of my own soul. (H. Melvill, B.D.).