Luke 12:27 Consider the lilies how they grow: they toil not, they spin not; and yet I say to you… To the filial eye of Jesus Christ the moral world always shone through the natural world and glorified it. He saw all the beauty of Nature; nothing of all its great riches was lost on Him; and in a multitude of parables and other pictorial touches, He has set Nature in her endless operations and aspects before us. But our Lord could never for a moment rest in Nature, or look on her as an end in herself. To him the whole visible universe was eloquent with meanings and lessons, with reminiscences and presages that ennobled and glorified her, because they came through her from a better world out of which she too had sprung, and for the sake of which she was daily sustained and administered. The cornfields, the vine. yards, the flowers, the birds of the air, the flocks of sheep in the meadows, the sky, the clouds, the times of ploughing and sowing and reaping, the starry nights, and the all-enriching sun — all the powers, provisions, and aspects of Nature were dear and beautiful to Him; and all the more so, that their beauty and beneficence were not their own, but were all so many manifestations of the wisdom and power and goodness of His Father. The sun that rose on the evil and on the good was "His sun"; the rain fell on the just and the unjust from His windows; His Father fed all the fowls of the air, and clothed all the grasses of the field. Jesus Christ was the only true Minister and Interpreter of Nature she has ever had. He alone fully understood her place and appreciated her plan. He alone could reveal her, and set forth her whole message, because He saw her and rejoiced in her as the manifestation of His Father's wisdom, and the operation of His Father's hands. I suppose the beasts of the field see the greenness of the grass and the lustre of the flowers among which they feed their fill and lie down to rest. I suppose the eagle also sees the vast landscape over which he sails; but no one supposes that the brute cattle have any knowledge or enjoyment of the beauty amid which they browse, or that a ravenous bird is at all tamed by being bathed daily in the glorious sunlight. They have no eye wherewith to see the beauty of earth and sea and sky; Nature has no revelation of that kind to make to them. And there are too many men who are as beasts are before the beauty of Nature: they have eyes, but they see not; and ears, but they hear not. There are other men, again, who are entranced and enraptured with the glory of creation, but who are all the time as dead as a stone to the glory of God. But the immediate aim of Christ in this most exquisite passage is to lead us all to trust ourselves and all that concerns us to the Fatherly providence of Almighty God. These cabinet-pictures of animate and inanimate nature are not works of pure art, that is to say, they are not pure art in the sense of being without practical application to the needs and wants of men. They are as beautiful as if they stood here for their beauty alone; and they are as useful, as instructive, and as full of moral ends, as if they were barren of every other quality. We are so limited in our gifts and in our scope, that we have often to shut out all thought of use when we aim at a perfect work of art; just as, on the other hand, we are often compelled to neglect the pursuit of beauty when we are bent on utility. But both Nature and Art, with the language that best exhibits them, are all plastic and harmonious in the hands of Jesus Christ. He is not instructive at the expense of beauty; nor, when most beautiful in His words and works, is He less rich to those who sit at His feet. Pointing in the most perfect words to the fowls of the air as they are fed from the hand of God, and then at the lilies of the field as they outshine Solomon in all his glory, our Lord says to us, " So, only in better ways, does your Heavenly Father care for, and take all needful thought for you. Leave, then, all your over-thoughtfulness and anxiety to Him; He alone can fulfil all your thoughts and without anxiety make them good. Torture not yourselves with what is above your strength and beyond your scope. Take all thought for that part in your life and in His providence which He has appointed you. Do your daily task with all fervour and fidelity, but after your allotted thought has been taken and your appointed part accomplished, leave the issue with Him who holds all issues in His own hand. Plough your field to its utmost furrow; sow your seed with a liberal hand, and when the harvest comes put in the sickle and store up the hundredfold fruits. Sow your seed with all thoughtfulness in the seedtime, and leave it without more thought till the harvest. With the sowing of the seed your work is, for the time, done. Take your well-earned rest, and thus you will be the more ready for the arduous labours of the harvest. Do not wade about among the sprouting corn as if your restless feet would make the blade fill better, or the shock ripen sooner. The plough, and the seed-basket, and the sickle, and the threshing instrument, and the winnowing fan are all yours to make use of with all due thought and care, each at its proper season; but the former and the latter rains, the filling sun and the mellowing winds, are all in your Father's hand. 'I have planted,' said Paul, 'and Apollos watered; but God gave the increase.' Leave, then, your husbandry in His hands also. Take you no thought where He takes all." But the best thing in this rich and beautiful passage, and the thing to which it all leads up, is yet to come, and it comes in these noble and inspiring words: "But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and His righteousness." Having taught and illustrated in the happiest and wisest way the religious observation and use of Nature, and having by means of Nature risen above Nature and entered the all-embracing economy of Divine Providence, Christ now comes to that for which both Nature and Providence exist and operate, namely, for man, and for his pursuit and possession of righteousness. This is the end, this is the goal, this is the crown of all. He has already warned His disciples in never-to-be-forgotten words that their righteousness must far exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees; must indeed be a righteousness of another kind and quality altogether. Seek first, He would say, the solid righteousness of the ten commandments. "Think not that I am come to destroy the law or the prophets; I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil." Then seek the yet more spiritual righteousness of this sermon I am now preaching unto you. And if there be any other righteousness yet to be revealed, God will ere long open up and make offer of that also unto you. Sufficient for the Sermon on the Mount is the righteousness thereof. (A. Whyte, D. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: Consider the lilies how they grow: they toil not, they spin not; and yet I say unto you, that Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. |
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