Job 37:18 Have you with him spread out the sky, which is strong, and as a molten looking glass? For beauty, for inspiration, for health and refreshment, for a sense of freedom and enlargement, is there anything like the sky when the earth does not bury it out of sight by her vapours, nor foul and tarnish it by her smoke? Or again, for teaching and for sublimest instruction, for tenderness and for strength, for measurelessness and everlastingness, is there anything like the sky? How it attracts us and draws us all out of doors, makes it impossible for us to live within any doors! We must be under the sky. And how it rewards us! The first step when we leave the threshold, what a meeting between a man's face and the face of the sky! It is a spirit and life to us. It bathes us. It is anodyne in the evening, it kisses us in the morning. It is vital enough, intense enough to enter and flow through the centre of every blood globule, every nerve and every atom. More, it positively is soul for our soul, for it kindles thought and affection; yea, still more, it is inmost spirit for our inmost spirit, for God is in the sky and gives Himself to us through it. If you do not receive God through the sky that is your fault; it is neither God's fault nor the fault of the sky. For I, at any rate, am conscious of receiving God every day of my life through the sky. Hence the sky feeds our reverence; quickens worship; teaches us how to worship; puts all littleness and partiality out of our worship; makes our worship large, and grand, and impartial as the sky; takes fear and distrust from us, creates in us faith and a hope that will not die. When you feel dark and doleful within the narrow prison of your own personality, do go out to God's sky, liberate yourself, let your soul expand in its openness. There is an infinite hope for us in the sky, and God has put it there. All prophets, therefore, and these Scriptures refer us to the sky. You know how full the prophets of this Old Book are of reference to the sky and to Him who stretched it out. "God alone stretcheth out the heavens," saith Job. "O Lord, my God," says David, "Thou art very great;...Who stretchest out the heavens like a curtain." The sky is a veil or a curtain between His glory and the outer glory. But what we call the outer glory — sky — is His glory come through. His vitality presses on the bike curtain. The blue curtain is pervious in every point to His Spirit. The tender infinite sky is God's remoter robe, and His robe is full of Him — full of His virtues. He holdeth back the face of His throne, and hangeth the blue curtain before it. Let me note here that the word translated sky in our text is plural in the Hebrew, and means "the ethers" or the tenuous atmospheres which are intermediate between our heaven and that other glory which mortal eyes cannot see. And in justifying the words "stretcheth out" and "spreadeth," as applicable to the "ethers" or the sky, let us observe, once for all, that the things most solid and those most attenuated are all one substance. Strictly, there is but one substance in the visible and invisible universe. The ether of the sky is just as metallic as gold, or silver, or steel. These metals may any day be made ether again. Nothing is so solid and nothing so strong as the everlasting sky. It is the "stretched out" spirit substance; the sweet transparency. It is the image and the mirror of the invisible God, and one word expresses both, the ether and His Spirit. The breath of God is what we call Holy Spirit, and the "stretched out" sky simply clothes His breath or spirit to us who are so dull of comprehending His Spirit — the great, clear, infinite sky — so that it is the manifestation, the image of the Spirit of God. We must allow God to hang the picture before us; He knows what we want. We are wise enough to follow this Divine method in putting pictures before the eyes of our little ones, and having awakened wonder and secured their interest we then proceed to give them the ideas of which the pictures are the signs. Now of all pictures, the infinite curtain dotted over with its innumerable golden suns is the picture. It is God holding before our eyes the shadow of Himself. The boundless, over-arching tent which is spread over all the worlds and heavens of His children is simply the image of His own boundlessness. It is one, like God — fathomless, measureless, strong, and endless. As of all scenes the sky is first and largest, likewise among things serviceable it is of the very first use. It is the infinite, the invisible servant of God. It is the first of all His ministering angels. It is always blessing us and without a sound. It is always teaching us. It teaches us more than all sounds and voices ever taught us or ever can teach. It teacheth us concerning the Spirit of God, concerning the face of God, and concerning the operation of God. And if you want to learn what His Trinity is, I implore you not to learn it from men, or books, but from God's teaching. It is the Father representing His own adorable Trinity to His children, and how unspeakably superior to all our definitions, whether Athanasian or otherwise! "Lift up your eyes," He says, "and behold My infinite ether, behold it by day and behold it by night. When you have considered with admiration and reflection My infinite ether, then consider the sun which is in the bosom of the ether, the child, the only begotten of the infinite ether. Then, thirdly, think of the breath of the ether coming down into your blood and frame, and of the beam of light, both alike proceeding from the Father, and the Son, from the infinite ether and from the sun in the sky. It is impossible to imagine either a more expressive or a more impressive teaching about Father, Son, and Holy Spirit than God has made the sky. From the sky we have breath for the lungs and light for the eyes, and from the adorable Trinity the breath and illumination of His Spirit for our eternal life. Think of the infinitude of the living spirit which is behind the ether, and think of that central light which lightens all the suns, which the suns simply reflect, and think again of the living spirit and the living light giving themselves to every atom child in the universe for the eternal life of every child of the Father in His visible heavens. God has given to us the sublimest teaching in the sublimest way. Now as if to insist that we must carry over the whole sky and all that is in the sky into our Gospel — and if you do not carry it into the Gospel then it is no Gospel of God, for wherever your Gospel came from I am certain that the first teaching of God is in His infinite sky — God shows us therein a mirror of Himself spread out before us. The sky is "a molten looking glass" to reflect God's face. Likewise we read, "Thy tabernacle, thy tent in which thou dwellest with thy children." But who can speak of the children folded within the infinite curtain of the sky? All worlds have, of course, their own atmospheres, but beyond their distinct atmospheres there is one ethereal mantle, one sky that includes them all. One blue tent comprehends all constellations and all planets, but nothing is so firm as this fixed tent. . Why do we call it firm? Because it is immovable. Winds blow and storms rage in your planetary atmosphere, but never in the ether. If ten thousand times ten thousand suns, which are now in the firmament, were to burn out and become extinct tonight, it would not in the very least touch or affect the infinite or the eternal ether which over-arches all worlds. It is imperturbable because it is God's image, like Himself, imperturbable, and yet infinitely delicate and tender. God breathes through this skyey tent, and His tent at every point inbreathes the breath of God. His sleeping and waking children throughout the universe sleep and wake throughout their Father's all-breathing tent of azure and of gold. "He stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain, and spreadeth them out as a tent for His children to dwell in," and He breathes through into the tent, into every spirit and bosom of every child, because the ethers are many. One ether above another, one ether within another, adapted to the diverse requirements of His children, and yet all the inner and inmost ethers of angels and of men, all the material heavens of immensity, and all the invisible heavens are but one Father's tent to dwell in. Lift up your eyes on high and behold the countless homes in your Father's infinite tent; the children of each orb in the sky, of incomputable number. How ineffable then is the thought of all the children of all the worlds and all the heavens in one tent of an infinite God. Scope enough opens here to admit of foreign travel to all eternity. There is also family enough here to occupy and interest us to all eternity. We shall have an everlasting opportunity of entertaining strangers and of being entertained by strangers. But the thing which specially concerns us is that beautiful transformation we are undergoing from being grubs of the earth to becoming God's butterflies of the sky — the transformation of God's children from being planetary children to becoming His children of the heavens. In the present form of our nature we can only live in the dense atmosphere of our own earth, but God is generating an inner man within us. He who asked us just now to think of Him who "formed us in the womb" asks us now to think of our outer form as a womb in which He is forming the inner creature which shall be able to breathe His ether, and after that the sublimer ether, until at last in our highest refinement we shall be able to breathe the sublimest ether, namely, the ether of His own presence and glory. Suppose, for an illustration of our formation and our transfiguration, that we take those strange denizens of our sky called comets, which appear to be planets in the making, that is, they so appear to me, and I shall so think of them till I am better instructed. They have all been generated and thrown off by some sun. All earths and comets are children of suns. The comets have too much of the fiery energy of their original. The comets are too recent; they require ages and ages to cool down — as our own planet did — before they can become grass-growing, fruit-growing habitations. But mark the beautiful process. To what immeasurable distance from their parent sun these comets rush, as though they were bent on entering the outer darkness! But behold in due time, perhaps in their hundredth year, if not then, in their seven hundredth year, or in their thousandth year, they begin to rush as fast back under the attraction of their parent the sun — just as fast as they had all the centuries been receding from the sun. What a process! Receive instruction. In travelling from the sun they are cooling, cooling, and bathing themselves in distant and more distant atmospheres, and impregnating themselves with foreign virtues, and then in returning to the sun they renew their energy and are impregnated with solar electricities. And this strange law of receding from and then advancing towards the sun continues until the happy balance is struck, and they become mild and temperate worlds. In the light of this law contemplate the present strangely inconsistent earth life of man. Child though he is of God, shot out of His bosom, yet there is in him a terribly strong tendency of turning his back on God, and rushing away in the strength of his own will, as though he would rush on to darkness, chaos, desert, hell, and find a region without God — without hope. But the moment comes — the moment of his greatest distance, perhaps his greatest sin — when he bethinks himself, pulls himself up and repents, bends round, turns, moves towards his God with all the earnestness that heretofore he went from Him, comet-like. Thus it is that he, too, acquires experience, w the experience of distance, the experience of darkness, the experience of his own fiery passions; and then the experience of God's breath, of God's harmonising truth, of God's pure, calm, changeless, eternal love, until ultimately he attains to great riches of nature, the riches of darkness, the riches of light, the riches of personality, the riches Of God, and becomes a divinely balanced character, a noble son of God. (John Pulsford.) Parallel Verses KJV: Hast thou with him spread out the sky, which is strong, and as a molten looking glass?WEB: Can you, with him, spread out the sky, which is strong as a cast metal mirror? |
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