Bible Commentaries

The Burden of Nineveh

Nahum 1:2).

That was true for the day. The prophecies of Nahum 1:3-5).

That is the God of nature. Where are his worshippers now? Do you find them standing on the mountain-top, drenched with rain, worshipping in the beautiful temple of Nature? Never. By arrangement and of set purpose they may have been caught in a tempest, but they never braved it in order to worship the God of nature. They love to hear morning worship the lark; evening worship the nightingale; delightful service the south-blowing breeze, the fragrant air. Away with such mockery if you call that the God of nature! He is God of nature also when he thunders and lightens, and shakes the mountains and melts the rocks. Where are you, then, you lovers of the lark, and devotees of the nightingale, where are you then? You speak of the God of nature as if he were the leading florist of the universe, as if he were the chief gardener who had laid out all his walls and terraces and parterres for your benefit. The God of nature can be as furious as the God of the Church, or the God of the inner and spiritual temple. The Lord writes his whole signature upon the volume of nature. On that volume he has written: "It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God." Our God is a consuming fire: the volcano is the inkhorn in which he dips his pen that he may write his fury, his grandeur, and his sensitive majesty. We hold that the God of nature is the God of the Bible, and that the God of nature properly and fully interpreted is just as many-sided as is the God of revelation; and we protest against the squashy, useless, pithless sentimentality that goes out on Sunday morning because the lark is singing, and because the wind is in the south. That is the God of one side of nature; but the God of nature is as complex as is the God of Nahum 1:14).

That is how history is made. We wonder how certain houses have run to nothing. God did it We have said, Where are the great and the mighty who ruled the civilisation of gone ages? The Lord said, "No more of thy name shall be sown": that seed is done, the crop must be changed. It is thus that God keeps the fields of life going; it is thus that God intermixes the growths of civilisation and progress, so that we belong to one another. The great man has a club foot. He did not want it. No: but that connects him with a certain part of his ancestry that he ought not to forget. The poor man is disabled and humiliated and racked with pain; true: but in intervals he writes for immortality; his thoughts are birds that sing for evermore. He did not want to have that ailing, aching, rheumatic, staggering frame; but God reminds him that he is aristocratically descended by the mind. How often that lineage is forgotten! Is a man descended from some duke who murdered men? Then his remotest scion is supposed to be a gentleman. But is there no lineage coming down from Isaiah and Ezekiel , from the poets, the thinkers, the leaders of the world's highest thought? On one side of your nature you are as plebeian as the clods you plough; on the other, by your power of prayer you are taken into the masonry of the angels, by your gift of thought you have a chief seat in the assembly of the immortals, by a tender soothing sympathy you are invited to sit with Christ on his throne. There are two lineages: the lineage of the bones, which may come to much or nothing as the case may be; and the lineage of the soul, aristocratic as God. We cannot be engrafted into the lower lineage, but, blessed be that Cross that makes Calvary the pivot of the universe, blessed be that Cross that makes heaven possible to the worst, each of us may be taken into the household of God, may be enfranchised in the Jerusalem that is above, may be set among the stars that shall go out no more for ever. To declare this is to preach the everlasting gospel.