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The whole of revelation reposes on this broad platform: how God and nature stand to one another. Now, there are two opposite extremes into which our conceptions on this point may fall. We may immerse God in nature; or we may isolate nature from God.

1. We immerse God in nature if we treat nature as itself possessed of properties which are strictly personal; as when, for example, we accustom ourselves to think of it as originating its own processes, as intending its own results, or as conscious of its own plan. Men talk of nature as though it were aiming at certain ends, striving to accomplish them, adapting itself to new conditions, overcoming fresh obstacles, and so forth. The corrective lies in the scriptural idea of creation as an act of will of One who is outside of material being. Scripture is strictly philosophical when it traces all phenomena, all change, ultimately to a will. But will is an attribute of personality; and the Person whose will determines that nature should be what it is must be a Person not Himself included in the nature which He wills shall be. He is God. Again —

2. We may unduly isolate nature as God's workmanship from God the worker. We do this, e.g., when we conceive of the universe as teaching us nothing of God, being only a whirl of material change without spiritual meaning; or when we represent it as a machine which, being somehow endued with a given stock of force, must go on so long as the force lasts, like a watch that has been once wound up. To separate the work from the worker after this sheer and mechanical fashion may do some harm to science, and it leaves hardly any foothold for religion. Again, the spiritual conception of creation will furnish the corrective. According to it, God is personally separate from and above nature, yet for all that He has put into His handiwork His own thoughts. We may fairly say that both sides of the idea lie in embryo in the solitary phrase, "By the Word of the Lord were the heavens made." For the word of any person serves two functions: it is the organ of command, conveying an act of will; it is also the organ of expression, revealing the speaker's nature. Stupendous conception of primary force! The force of personal will, resident in the Supernatural Being, in the one sole unmade, unborn Person, who is that He is; is, and was, and is to come, the Almighty. The sole cause; sole origin of being; sole efficient factor in the beginning; is this act of volition or self-determination of an Infinite Personal Will. "He spake, and it was done; He commanded, and it stood fast." It accords with experience; it satisfies philosophy; not less does it meet the religious necessities of the spirit; for if I am to worship at all, where shall I find a nobler object of worship than the Person who will give being to all beings but Himself? On the other hand, the word of a speaker while it utters his will must no less reflect, consciously or unconsciously, his inner self. It seems to me that in this Biblical conception of nature as the revelation of its Maker we find the common root whence have grown two very dissimilar growths of the ancient and of the modern world. The great fact of the whole ancient world was this, that its multiform religions started from a nature basis. The sun and stars, the reproductive forces of animal and vegetable life, the decay and revival of the year, the wondrous cycle, in short, of cosmic change through which nature accomplishes herself, was the common fact which very early riveted the attention of primitive man, till out of it there grew up in many lands, under many shapes, a system of religious observance everywhere the same in principle. Being whose thoughts these objects revealed, men began to adore the symbol, and to forget the Invisible Person behind it. Easy and rapid was the downward plane to idolatry and polytheism and gross fetish worship. Yet what is worth noting is, that such nature religions would have been impossible had not nature really spoken to unsophisticated men a Divine message, had it not been charged to their souls from the first with Divine ideas. We are far enough removed now from that early stage of human experience. The world is grown aged, and the work of its age is not to worship nature, but to master it. Yet this modern science which leads to the utilisation of physical forces for human needs is not less an outgrowth from the same root. For all our power over nature reposes immediately on our correct reading of natural laws. Observation of naked facts will never put into man's hand the sceptre of the physical world, Naked facts must lead on to the discovery of law; and law is the Divine idea governing the facts; and when man has discovered and mastered that Divine idea, then he becomes in his degree a divinity on earth, a lord over matter, a maker and disposer in his turn. What does this mean but that we come to read behind phenomena the thought and will of One whom, because He is a personal Spirit as we are, we can comprehend? We reach the secret principles on which He makes, not made merely but is ever making, the world; and when we thus know His mind, or on what lines His will moves, we enter upon a share of His dominion; we fall in with His working plan; we, too, govern by imitating Him. I have cited both ancient nature worship and modern nature study as alike dependent for their possibility upon the same truth of Scripture; this, namely, that nature, being made by God's Word, speaks to us His thoughts. But if I desired conclusive evidence how insufficient is this revelation of itself to guide men to friendly communion with God, where could I find any more conclusive than is furnished by the history both of ancient nature religions and of modern science! Of the one the tendency was more and more to immerse God in nature, till He was wholly lost in His own handiwork. Of the latter — modern science — the tendency very decidedly is to isolate nature from God, as a wholly separate existence whose relationship to its Author (if any) is at least unknown. This moral revelation, which began with Abraham and culminated in Jesus Christ, admits of being both compared and contrasted with the older nature revelation.

1. The later revelation starts from and builds upon the earlier one. It is not so often recollected as it should be, but once seen it cannot be doubted that underneath every other relationship which the God of the Bible claims to sustain to us as Lawgiver, Father, Redeemer, Promiser, Saviour there lies this broad, original relationship of all — that He is our Creator. That tie to Him, which we share with even the dumb cattle and the dead earth, bears up and justifies all the rest. Man is a portion of the created universe, and its Maker must be his Lord and King.

2. It must be clear that such a revelation as we actually possess in the Bible is only possible if God be (as the Bible teaches) at once above nature, and yet present, self-revealed in nature. First of all, we are ourselves part of the world, and if we are to receive communications that transcend what the world itself can tell us, then He who gives them must stand outside of and above the world. The supernatural is impossible if God be inseparable from nature or be its slave. On the other hand, the actual revelation recorded in the Bible employed nature as its organ. In the revelation of new truth God is constantly found availing Himself of the old creation. Dreams, and visions, and voices to the ear, the thundercloud on Sinai, the cleft sea, dearth and the plague, the vicissitudes of war, conquest, and revolt were all turned into vehicles for teaching saving lessons to mankind. The whole of Bible teaching, too, attaches itself to the parables of nature. Above all, His final revelation of Himself is in the life of a Man, a true natural life resting on the physical basis of a true body, "born of a woman"; so that the highest of all revelations is in appearance the most human, the least supernatural.

3. The voice of the new revelation agrees with the voice of the old. To develop the congruousness of the Divine image in nature with the Divine image in Scripture would take too long; I only suggest it to you. The absolute unity of plan which strict research is daily proving more and more — a unity now known to reach as far as the planets in their spheres — attests that the Creator is one. And Scripture proceeds on the unity of God. (b) Throughout all nature we find a will at work whose method is to bind itself by orderly method and fixed law. This reveals a mind in God intolerant of what is arbitrary, eccentric, or illegal. All is variety, yet all is system. Now, the revelation of the Divine will in Scripture is likewise the revelation of a law, and its chief end is the reduction of moral anarchy to moral order. (c) Again, we are daily learning how patiently, and through what long, slow, even laborious processes God has been pleased to build up His physical universe, as though a thousand years were to Him of no more account than a single day, so long as the results are wrought by growth and evolution, rather than by sudden shocks or interventions. This is God's way in nature, and it has been His way in grace. (d) Once more, the God of nature avenges the transgression of every physical law by a sentient creature. Scripture discovers precisely the same features in the moral and spiritual rule of God. So far the two revelations walk abreast. Thanks be to God, the Gospel continues its parable where the voice of nature falters and grows mute. Of law, of transgression, of penalty and reward, of life and death, nature has no less to say than the Bible has. But of another law higher than that of penalty, of grace which transcends judgment, of the spiritual law of self-sacrifice, of redemption of life by life, and giving up of the just for the unjust, and forgiveness of sin and regeneration of the lapsed, — the physical universe is wholly, or all but wholly, silent.

(J. O. Dykes, D. D.)

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KJV: {To the chief Musician, A Psalm of David.} The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork.

WEB: The heavens declare the glory of God. The expanse shows his handiwork.