Psalm 144:5 Bow your heavens, O LORD, and come down: touch the mountains, and they shall smoke. Bow thy heavens, and come down. This prayer follows on the acknowledgment of man's frailty and transitoriness. His sphere is altogether below God, who must stoop down to help him. God's intervention involving his condescension may be illustrated in several spheres. To create material things; to remedy the disturbance of things; to provide for the wants of things; to recover self-ruined things; - all involve the Divine condescension. I. TO CREATE MATERIAL THINGS. We want the mind of a Hindu philosopher in order to conceive of God as an absolute, uncaused, unrelated, independent existence; eternally and infinitely happy in himself, without what we call "personality," because without relations. Just in the measure in which we can conceive such a being, we can realize his condescension in coming out of the abstract into the concrete, and making, and putting himself into relation with, a world of things. II. TO REMEDY THE DISTURBANCE OF THINGS. Once let things be in any sense separate from himself; once let there be forces (which we call laws) in nature, and free-will in man, and God's order will be sure to get disturbed. But he may be sublimely indifferent to the disorder in his creation. It is his condescension that he is the constant Rectifier of the difficulties and disasters which come in his creation. III. TO PROVIDE FOR THE WANTS OF THINGS. What impresses us so greatly is the minuteness of attention which creation daily needs. We bow ourselves to do a thousand insignificant but necessary things in our households. How God must bow himself to guard the life of every grass-blade, and to feed every gnat that hums in the summer evening! IV. TO RECOVER RUINED THINGS. This brings to view the havoc which man's sin has made in individual lives and in God's fair world of things. For there is a ruin of the world which answers to the self-ruin of man. Why should not God let things go, and leave men to ruin themselves, and the world in which they dwell, if they please to do so? He is not bound to intervene. If he does, it can only be in condescending love. - R.T. Parallel Verses KJV: Bow thy heavens, O LORD, and come down: touch the mountains, and they shall smoke.WEB: Part your heavens, Yahweh, and come down. Touch the mountains, and they will smoke. |
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