01.C 01. God's Dignity and Man's Insignificance
GOD’S DIGNITY AND MAN’S INSIGNIFICANCE “What is man that thou art mindful of him?” — Psalms 8:4.
While affirming the Scripture doctrine of prayer we cannot here be unmindful that many earnest Christians are not a little embarrassed with a vagueness of belief and even skeptical suggestions as to the need of prayer and whether God can or does really answer prayer in case one prays.
Before passing to the more practical discussion of what constitutes real praying, if anything helpful can be said to one who is beset with the difficulties just mentioned, it ought to be said just here. The following few pages are not, therefore, meant in any sense as a reply to the “modern thinker” with his scientific (?) objection to prayer. It is barely possible that even a “modern thinker” may have a little yet to learn, and after we have all gotten through down here, is it not still barely possible that some things will be made a little plainer up there? But the one thing that the “modern thinker” ought to learn first is the one thing from which he is probably farthest away, namely, that he can learn more about God and the mysteries of His government through his conscience and his heart and actual obedience to the Word of God than he ever can with all his brains when these things are forgotten. But what we are now to say is said to relieve, if possible, and possible to a large degree it certainly is, the embarrassment of mind concerning this matter that annoys at times even the earnest Christian. You esteem highly the privilege of prayer; you feel quite sure you would rather comfort yourself with God’s promise to answer prayer than anything man might say to prove the answer to prayer a reasonable thing, and yet you have found your mind at times searching after a purely rationalistic basis upon which to ground the possibility of answered prayer, and the search has landed you in something of perplexity and possibly not a little doubt. Confused somewhat after the fashion of Nicodemus in his attempt to understand the mystery of regeneration, you find yourself saying to yourself as he did to Christ, “ How can these things be?”
It is not, of course, to be presumed that one must refrain from prayer until he thoroughly understand whatever mystery may surround the subject. As well refrain from wearing the warm garment until there are no mysteries surrounding the process by which the grass growing on the hillside is converted, after entering the sheep’s stomach, into wool growing on its back. As well refrain from eating till you have learned the chemical constituents of the food of which you are about to partake.
Yet we are told to love God with our mind and so far as our reason will take us we are certainly privileged and obligated to go, but reason is bounded, and were we to believe nothing but what we can understand, we leave no room for faith at all and both worlds become cold and dark and cheerless. What transcends reason you may be asked to believe, but what can be shown to be contrary to reason you never will be asked to endorse.
Some of these prayer perplexities we are now going to examine.
One of them relates to the infinite dignity and exalted character of God. How can such a Being concern Himself with the ’petty affairs of so insignificant a creature as I? Is it not a piece of inexcusable presumption as well as derogatory to the character of the Almighty to suppose that One so glorious and so infinitely great can stoop to an interest in the concerns of man who, after all that can be said about his position among created things, is but “a worm crawling on the surface of one of God’s smallest planets”?
We reply to the one who is thus thinking, that your idea of true dignity is false and mistaken. Such dignity as you have in mind often belongs to human royalties, but is in itself beneath the true dignity of the King of kings. You have thought such condescension to be unworthy of One so exalted, whereas it is one of His brightest glories that His love and His care extends to the small and insignificant as well as the great and important. The God who paints the evening sunset is the God who touches the butterfly’s wing with its gorgeous hues. The God who planned the organ harmony of the spheres is the God who fashioned with such delicate care that sweetest of musical instruments in the throat of the nightingale. He feeds the fowls, clothes the grass and arrays the lilies in their more than Solomon-like glory. Are you not as important as these?
It was not beneath God’s dignity to create so unimportant a being as yourself.
Why, then, should His glory be tarnished if He lends His thought to your wants and your necessities? Augustus Thompson has well said, *’ If He numbers your hairs, will He not also, your tears?”
But, after this truth is gratefully appreciated, let us be reminded in the next place that the perplexity in question arises partly from a mistaken conception of man’s true place in creation. You have thought of this vast universe with its immeasurable space filled with innumerable worlds swinging about each other, and you have thought of God as having something more important to do than to busy Himself with the trivial affairs of so unimportant a being as yourself. But possibly in God’s estimation man is not of such infinitesimal consequence after all. Bulk is not the highest test of greatness. If it were, the question, “Of how much more value is man than a sheep?” would find its answer in the difference of avoirdupois. But if man reads aright the Word of God he will know that he outweighs in worth ten thousand times all the sheep the world has ever held; and if he interpret aright the significance of his mental and moral endowments, if he seriously reflect upon his place and influence in the developing world of which he is a part, he will not find it hard to believe that God has crowned him with a glory and honor far above all the other forms of life about him; and unless a huge bulk of senseless matter is nobler than that which lives and feels, and unless this last be nobler than that which thinks and aspires after God, we need not feel that man is too insignificant and of too little worth to attract the attention and the care of Him whose handiwork he is. Man is God’s own child; he is “Nature’s sceptered king”; for his coming God had busied Himself preparing the earth through all the untold ages of the past; and unless God, who is Himself all intelligence and goodness, is more interested in things than He is in souls; unless He is more concerned about the fowls of the air than He is about the child of His own likeness, we need not feel that He is too exalted or too busy to take account and care for even you and me.
“I know not where His islands Lift their fronded palms in air;
I only know I cannot drift Beyond His love and care.”