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I. THE UNIVERSAL PRESENCE OF THE FATHER AT WORK.

1. Men do not imagine God to be near them in actual presence. They acknowledge Him as Creator chiefly because it relieves them of the greater difficulty of otherwise accounting for the existence of things.

2. In addition to this scientific concealment there is a figurative disguise of the Divine presence. The grand creations we invest with personality, and the spaces and elements we people with airy shapes of poetry and romance. These imaginations serve for the Divine Being, and to introduce Him boldly into conversation is considered bad taste or something worse. What a symptom of our universal ungodliness, "God is not in all our thoughts"!

3. But while being enemies to neither science nor imagination, let us open our Bibles and look on the works of God in their light. We let a ray fall on a flower, a structure, a strata, and we exclaim, "The work of Thy fingers." If you ask us about genera, species, and laws of variation, we leave them to scientists. We cannot detect half so many qualities as they can, but we see our Father at work. If you tell me that the instinct of a bird leads it to pick up a grain accidentally scattered, is it less true that our heavenly Father feedeth it? David was no mean naturalist, yet when he speaks of the sustentation of animals, their dissolution, and the renewal of their generations, he passes over the laws of these changes and only sees the Father at work .(Psalm 145:15, etc.). This is not mere poetry; it is written in the largest spirit of science. But a higher Authority, when referring to a flower, affirms that the Father clothes it, and when bidding His disciples imitate the trustful and uncareful birds, He adds, "Your heavenly Father feedeth them."

II. IF THE FATHER IS WORKING AROUND US WHAT A SECURITY WE ENJOY. Each one of us may say, "My Father worketh for me." "When I consider the heavens," etc. I say, "Can I have a separate place in the Father's heart." He responds, "The very hairs of your head are all numbered." It is sometimes hard to realize this; then in my loneliness I hear the expostulation from one who knoweth my frame and remembereth that I am dust, "Why sayest thou, O Jacob?" (Isaiah 11.). Thus "He giveth power to the faint." We are not alone, for the Father is with us.

III. THE FATHER WORKETH NOT BECAUSE AN INTELLIGENT BEING IS NECESSARILY ACTIVE, BUT FOR SOME GREAT DESIGN WHICH THE TRIUNE GOD IS ADVANCING AND MUST COMPLETE. This work, extending over many generations, may be called the second genesis. After the first creation God did not, as the Jews supposed, enter on a Sabbath of inaction. His primal work was done, but the Sabbath was as full of work as the six days, but work of a nobler kind. The Spirit that moved on formless matter must now move on mind. Evil had come into being, and evil is to mind what chaos is to matter. God spent His Sabbath in making a new heaven and a new earth, not of matter, but of mind. Who shall write the history of God's Sabbath work for man? The Bible is but a chapter of it. Eternity will unroll the volume. But following the Bible, how evident is the progressive design of love — the Father working in counsel; the Son in personal revelation; the Spirit in influence; and looking more closely we observe the Divine Son is the centre of this more glorious genesis. From Adam to John, all revelations pointed to Christ, and the Father is now drawing all men to Him. All men are proceeding Christward.

(E. E. Jenkins, LL. D.)

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KJV: After this there was a feast of the Jews; and Jesus went up to Jerusalem.

WEB: After these things, there was a feast of the Jews, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem.