The Good News of God eBook

’Thou art worthy, O Lord, to receive glory, and honour, and power; for Thou hast created all things, and for Thy pleasure they are and were created.’

This is all that I can tell you.  It may be a very little:  but is it not enough?  What says Solomon the wise?  ’Knowest thou how the bones grow in the womb?’ Not thou.  How, then, wilt thou know God, who made all things?  Thou art fearfully and wonderfully made, though thou art but a poor mortal man.  And is not God more fearfully and wonderfully made than thou art?  It is a strange thing, and a mystery, how we ever got into this world:  a stranger thing still to me, how we shall ever get out of this world again.  Yet they are common things enough—­birth and death.  ’Every moment dies a man, every moment one is born:’  and yet you do not know what is the meaning of birth or death either:  and I do not know; and no man knows.  How, then, can we know the mystery of God, in whose hand are the issues of life and death?—­God to whom all live for ever, living and dead, born and unborn, in heaven and in hell?

So it is in small things as well as great, in great as well as small; and so it ever will be.  ’All things begin in some wonder, and in some wonder all things end,’ said Saint Augustine, wisest in his day of all mortal men; and all that great scholars have discovered since prove more and more that Saint Augustine’s words were true, and that the wisest are only, as a great philosopher once said, and one, too, who discovered more of God’s works than any man for many a hundred years, even Sir Isaac Newton himself:  ’The wisest of us is but like a child picking up a few shells and pebbles on the shore of a boundless sea.’

The shells and pebbles are the little scraps of knowledge which God vouchsafes to us, his sinful children; knowledge, of which at best St. Paul says, that we know only in part, and prophesy in part, and think as children; and that knowledge shall vanish away, and tongues shall cease, and prophecies shall fail.

And the boundless sea is the great ocean of time—­of God’s created universe, above which his Spirit broods over, perfect in love, and wisdom, and almighty power, as at the beginning, moving above the face of the waters of time, giving life to all things, for ever blessing, and for ever blest.

God grant us all to see the day when we shall have passed safely across that sea of time, up to the sure land of eternity; and shall no more think as children, or know in part; but shall see God face to face, and know him even as we are known; and find him, the nearer we draw to him, more wonderful, and more glorious, and more good than ever;—­’Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God Almighty, which was, and is, and is to come.’  And meanwhile, take comfort, and recollect however little you and I may know, God knows:  he knows himself, and you, and me, and all things; and his mercy is over all his works.

SERMON XXXV.  A GOD IN PAIN