“Thou, Lord, in the beginning didst lay the foundation of the earth.”
He is under a covering as well as on a foundation. He did not pitch that canopy, nor fix those lights, nor hang those curtains by whose silent closing and withdrawing the light is heightened or dimmed. “The heavens are the work of thy hand.” But will these last? Will this earth that I stand upon last? No; I see on it the marks of age and decay as on myself. Like me it will perish. And those heavens that are over me, they shall perish—will all things perish? Will everything that is go out of being? “Thou remainest.” They shall wax old, it is true, but that is only as if a garment waxed old; “As a vesture shalt thou fold them up and they shall be changed.” All this that the eye can see above, below, around, is to the great King but as the robe upon the Sovereign to his person, and dominion, and when he folds up that vesture and lays it aside he will command another wherewith to show his glory to his subjects. “They shall perish; but thou remainest; and they all shall wax old as doth a garment; and as a vesture shalt thou fold them up, and they shall be changed: but thou art the same, and thy years shall not fail!”
We have here a preacher, a listener, a subject: changeful nature, mortal man, immutable Godhead.
Changeful nature is a perpetual preacher, evermore proclaiming to us the twofold lesson, our own mortality and God’s immutable glory and power. “Thy years shall not fail.” What strange language applied to the Divine Being—perfectly natural as applied to us—“years!” Our life is finite, our life is measured, our life is dealt out to us in parcels. For us to speak of our “years” is natural, but when we look up to Him that is unmeasured, infinite, eternal, then this word “years” becomes but the representative of our small transient life when trying to contrast itself with his broad and Infinite Being. We are constantly speaking of two things wherewith we find ourselves related—space and time: and what are they? We hardly know. We know but something like this: space is a measured distance in infinity; time a measured duration in eternity.
We are launched in the midst of a sea of eternity, and all the time that comes to us comes by solemn public measurement, measurement conducted in the most formal and stately manner by the hand of the Creator. He made that heaven from which we can never shut
our regard—we must see it; and in it He set those lights “for signs and for seasons and for days and for years.” He might easily have given us a being that would have flowed on evenly from its beginning to its close without anything to mark it off into stages. We may almost watch a sunbeam starting from the sun and racing all the way to our world, passing over it, far on beyond it, till our eye and even our thought cannot follow it, and never anything to check or register its progress.
But not so the career that God has appointed to us. Everything is dealt to us under an economy of measure, of trust and of account. “For signs”—He set those things above us for signs. Cannot earth be a sign to herself? Cannot man be his own directory? Cannot the seas and the mountains and the rivers and trees and houses be their own tokens? Try this. Let that ship at sea, on which the fog has settled, ask the waves to say where is north, south, east or west; and when the gale springs up and the clouds cover the heavens let her ask the winds to tell how far from port. No, if the heavens give no signs she has none, she cannot tell where she is or whither she is going.
Suppose you find yourself within a mile of the house in which you were born: you know,
as you think, every step of the way as well as you know your own bedroom; but there is neither sun nor moon nor star, the heavens are completely shut off and you are left to earth alone. Will the trees tell you the way? Will the houses show themselves? Will the road be its own exhibitor? No, if heaven fails you you cannot even see your own hand. You are under the perpetual preaching of the sky, that all your hours and all your movements are dependent upon heaven!
“For seasons” as well as for signs. The Lord might easily have established our lifetime under a different economy; might have given us one perpetual summer, or a perpetual spring, or a uniform co-existence of all the seasons, the fruits being sown, ripening and reaped simultaneously. But not so. He has settled two things so clearly that none, even the most sordid worm that ever wriggled under the clay, showing himself above it as little as possible, can help seeing them. First a fixed order that nothing can change and that proclaims one Lord, one will, one dominion, one plan. The seasons come in regular succession. Every man living knows when the summer is gone that winter is coming. That will not and cannot be changed. Were the whole world to conspire in one effort