Job 28:17 The gold and the crystal cannot equal it: and the exchange of it shall not be for jewels of fine gold. In the first place I remark that religion is superior to the crystal in exactness. That shapeless mass of crystal against which you accidentally dashed your foot is laid out with more exactness than any earthly city. There are six styles of crystallisation, and all of them divinely ordained. Every crystal has mathematical precision. God's geometry reaches through it, and it is a square, or it is a rectangle, or it is a rhomboid or, in some way, it hath a mathematical figure. Now religion beats that in the simple fact that spiritual accuracy is more beautiful than material accuracy. God's attributes are exact. God's law exact. God's decrees exact. God's management of the world exact. Never counting wrong, though He counts the grass blades and the stars, and the sands and the cycles. His providences never dealing with us perpendicularly when those providences ought to be oblique, nor lateral when they ought to be vertical. Everything in our life arranged without any possibility of mistake. Each life a six-sided prism. Born at the right time; dying at the right time. There are no happen-sos in our theology. If I thought this was a slipshod universe I would go crazy. God is not an anarchist. Law, order, symmetry, precision. A perfect square. A perfect rectangle. A perfect rhomboid. A perfect circle. The edge of God's robe of government never frays out. There are no loose screws in the world's machinery. It did not just happen that Napoleon was attacked with indigestion at Borodino, so that he became incompetent for the day. It did not just happen that John Thomas, the missionary, on a heathen island, waiting for an outfit and orders for another missionary tour, received that outfit and those orders in a box that floated ashore, while the ship and the crew that carried the box were never heard of. The barking of F.W. Robertson's dog, he tells us, led to a line of events which brought him from the army into the Christian ministry, where he served God with world-renowned usefulness. It did not merely happen so. I believe in a particular Providence. I believe God's geometry may be seen in all our life more beautifully than in crystallography. Job was right. "The crystal cannot equal it." (T. De Witt Talmage.) Parallel Verses KJV: The gold and the crystal cannot equal it: and the exchange of it shall not be for jewels of fine gold.WEB: Gold and glass can't equal it, neither shall it be exchanged for jewels of fine gold. |
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