IT It is not from the insignificance of man that God's dwelling within him is so strange. It is as much the glory of God to bend His attention on an atom as to uphold the universe. But the marvel is that the habitation which He has chosen for Himself is an impure one. And when He came down from His magnificence to make this world His home, still the same character of con- descension was shown through all the life of Christ. Our God selected the society of the outcasts of earth, those whom none else would speak to.^
II.
God's Humbleness.
He whose lifetime is infinite duration, whose dwelling-place is infinite space, — He who before the earth and the world were made was no younger, neither will be older when they are all consumed, — whose presence reaches out to the farthest fixed star that eye or telescope has ever descried floating upon the far verge of the universe, and occupies beyond in all the orbits of worlds yet undiscovered, and still beyond in the regions of space where is naught but the possibility of future worlds, and fills all this immensity to repletion, — that this " high and lofty One that ^ F. W. Robertson, Sermons, 3rd series, p. 243.
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ISAIAH 419
inhabiteth eternity" should euter into some poor, crushed, and broken human spirit, that trembles at the very whisper of His voice, and should make the narrow recesses of that heart His abode, His home — this is the mystery and glory of the Godhead, — not alone that He should be infinite, eternal, immortal, invisible, but that, being all these. He should yet be apprehended by the little mind of a man, and call Himself that man's Friend and Comforter and Father.
IF I have showed you what is wonderful. Come, now, and I will show you what is more wonderful. For I will show you these infinite spaces of the sky, and the glory of them, and the in- numerable host of starry worlds, gathered up in a moment of time, within the tiny pupil of a human eye. It is wonderful that the heavens and the hosts of them should be so great; but that, being so great, they should be able to become so infinitely little, — this passes all wonder. The shepherd stretched upon the ground amid his sheep gazes up into the starry depths, and finds them wonderful ; but never thinks how far more wonderful than the heavens which he beholds is himself beholding them. As he lies gazing, long lines of light, from planet and star and constella- tion, come stretching on through the infinite void spaces, to centre on the lenses of his drowsy eye. Side by side, and all at once, yet never twisted or confused, these ten thousand rays of different light enter the little aperture in the centre of the eye which we call the pupil. There they cross, in a point which has no dimen- sions, and separate again, and paint in microscopic miniature upon the little surface of the retina, behind the eyeball, the inverted facsimile of the visible heavens. There, in the ante-chamber of the brain, marches Orion, with his shining baldric and his jewelled sword ; there glow Arcturus and Sirius, and the steadfast North Star ; there pass the planets to and fro ; and the far-off nebulae are painted there with suffused and gentle radiance — all the heavens and the glory of them gathered in that slender filament of light, threaded through that tiny aperture, painted by their own rays upon that little patch of nervous network, apprehended, felt, known through and through by that finite human mind. How far stranger and sublimer a thing is this than the mere bulk of the worlds, or the mere chasms of void space in which they hang weltering ! ^
1, Four ways may be mentioned in which the humility of God in His dealings with men manifests itself.
^ L. W. Bacon, The Simplicity thcU is in Christ, p. 321.
420 THE GREAT TEXTS OF THE BIBLE
1. In the friendship He offers and gives to the poorest of mankind. The broad cleavage of social caste is one of the most familiar facts of life now as in all former times. God simply ignores it. He is the Friend of all — the Friend of the prosperous and the comfortable — if they will only take Him, making their prosperity and comfort a brighter and happier thing, but none the less the Friend of the hard-struggling on whom the burden of existence presses sore. There is many a man and woman in straitened circumstances whom people in a better position would not deign to notice or be seen speaking to on the street. But the Most High has no such feeling. Nor does He deem it beneath Him to have the poor professing His name and openly claiming friendship with Him. All the loftiness of His position creates not the slightest gap of sympathy between Him and the lowliest child of man. And there are burdened hearts in the obscurest ranks of society that feel the joy of His companionship in their life-battle, and know that the King of the Universe is with them as they struggle on.
2. Again the humility of God is seen in His anxiety to lift up the most unworthy. Perfectly free from what we call pride of position. He is also perfectly free from what we know as pride of character. Holy as His Name is, and jealously as He guards His holiness, there is no holding of Himself aloof from the un- holy. In fact, the most wonderful thing about God is His persistent endeavour to get into touch with men and women in their sinfulness, and to rescue them from it. The mission of Christ was the humility of God in practical action — God making the first move, God stooping down among the sinful and un- worthy to raise and redeem them.