Genesis 9:12-17 And God said, This is the token of the covenant which I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you… While we are looking at the objects of nature, as well as at the events of Providence and the mysteries of grace, from below, God is looking at them from above. While we are gazing at the thundercloud with terror, and cowering under it, God sees it from a serene sky, and cast far beneath His feet. While the shadow of eclipse is darkening whole continents, the sun seems as bright a mote as ever it did to the eye of God. When a world or a system of worlds has ceased to shine, it appears to God as the melting of a little patch of snow on a spring mountain does to us. But while this is true in one view, it is also in another true; that often what seems little to us is great in the sight of God. The common order of men see no beauty in the rainbow; the man of science thinks little of it except as a complete analysis of light; the poet sings its splendour; the Christian, even while admiring, seldom thinks of it as a God built bulwark against the return of the waters of Noah; but the Almighty never rears again its arch, or looks upon it when reared, without remembering His promise; it is to Him His original oath, cast in aerial architecture, transcribed in letters of gold. And so, too, with things of a moral kind. The difference between the famous contradictory conclusions of the two knights in reference to the golden and silver sides of the shield, is only a type of the difference between the estimates formed of various subjects by God and by man; only a type, because both these were right, and right equally; whereas God's thoughts are not only not as our thoughts, but are ineffably nearer the truth. How solemn and how humbling to remember that, whatever we are looking at or thinking on, whether in the physical or moral world, God is looking at, and judging of too, from a far superior point of view; that our notions of things differ from His now by exaggeration, now by diminution, and now by distortion, but are never exactly the same; and that, even if they differ by a single iota, they are so far wrong. This consideration might indeed well drive us to despair, for how can we tell what are God's views, were it not that in the Bible, echoing too the voice of conscience, the "God within the breast," we are not altogether left to conjecture as to the Divine "thoughts," and all its writers justly can boast that they have the mind of God. (G. Gilfillan.) Parallel Verses KJV: And God said, This is the token of the covenant which I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you, for perpetual generations: |
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