Isaiah 26:9 With my soul have I desired you in the night; yes, with my spirit within me will I seek you early… If you take the Bible, and study this subject from Genesis to Revelation, it will grow upon you how magnificently awful is this sovereignty of God. Take the ten plagues of Egypt; they were an early lesson in human history about this sovereignty of God, that reaches through all things as well as to all creatures. In these ten plagues, for instance, we have examples of God's control over the forces of nature. In those same plagues we have illustrations of God's control over animated nature. And we have illustrated God's control over those subtle and mysterious influences that we cannot define, and the nature of which we do not understand, but which lie at the bottom of disease — the murrain among cattle, the boils and the blains, the death of the firstborn. Now, if we pass along in this remarkable history we shall next meet, in Exodus 23, the declaration, "I will send the hornet before you, and drive out the people of the land of Canaan, that ye may take possession." We go still further, and we read, in the Book of the Psalms, that He "called for the famine"; as though the famine were an obedient servant, summoned to the Master's presence, to go forth and do the Master's bidding. In these Psalms we are likewise told that He makes the winds His messengers, and the flames of fire His ministers. In Isaiah 54 we are told distinctly, "I have created the waster to destroy." We pass to the Book of Jonah, and Jonah is a revelation of the sovereignty of God in human affairs. For instance, we are told here, in four separate places, how the Lord had "prepared a great fish" to swallow Jonah, and He "spake unto the fish." "The Lord prepared a gourd," and made it to come up over Jonah. "The Lord prepared a worm," that it might smite the gourd. The Lord "prepared a vehement east wind," that it might smite upon the head of Jonah. Notice the comprehensiveness of these declarations. God controls the wind, which is not an intelligent form of life; God controls the gourd, which belongs to the vegetable kingdom; God controls the worm that is among the insects; God controls the great fish that is among those that swim the waters. Turn now to the Book of Joel 1:4. And what does he say in Joel 2:25? "And I will restore to you the years that the locust hath eaten, the cankerworm, and the caterpillar, and the palmerworm, My great army which I sent among you." There is no more sublimely awful verse in the whole Old Testament than that — "My great army which I sent among you." And just think what an army is this going forth in four detachments one after the other! The student of history will observe that about three times in a century there comes among men some form of disease with regard to which science is utterly ignorant and impotent. No one knows how to prevent it, no one knows how to cure the disasters which it engenders. And it is another remarkable fact, that just as soon as science begins to have a limited control over these forms of scourge a new plague develops about which they know nothing; simply shewing that Almighty God has not surrendered the throne of the universe, nor given up His control even over the malignant and destructive forces of nature. If God did not keep the scourges of nature doing their work, the human race would rot in its own iniquity. (A. T. Pierson, D. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: With my soul have I desired thee in the night; yea, with my spirit within me will I seek thee early: for when thy judgments are in the earth, the inhabitants of the world will learn righteousness. |
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