God’s greatness
Big things and little things
At Harvest Thanksgiving, especially in country parishes, we decorate the church with flowers and fruit and vegetables. And you will often see one particular vegetable and the larger it is the better. I mean, of course, the vegetable marrow, and those who grow them pick out the biggest and the best for the Harvest Festival. In fact, you will often hear a really big one called a ‘Harvest Festival marrow’. And yet, although marrows are such fine and comfortable-looking things, and we love to see them growing larger and larger in the garden or allotment until they look as though they will burst, they are really no more wonderful than a little flower like a daisy.
In the entrance hall of the Natural History Museum in London there is the skeleton of a blue whale. Blue whales are huge, even bigger than the dinosaurs were, and the good news is that they are still alive today. They are the largest animals that have ever lived (1) and if you see the skeleton you will remember it all your life. But, although it is so wonderful, there are other things just as marvellous which are so small that you can’t even see them without using a microscope, which you probably know is an instrument that makes things look bigger. Have you ever looked at a single drop of pond water through a microscope? If you have you’ll know that you can see tiny little creatures darting about in all directions. Each one is a miracle as are all the other living things which God has made.
In fact the little things tell of his greatness as much as the big things do. God is so great that, even while he is guiding the mighty stars as they spin on their way though space, he still notices, as Jesus told us, each little sparrow as it hops to the ground (Matthew 10:29). As we sing in the hymn:
“he paints the wayside flower,
he lights the evening star;” (2)
The beauty of God’s creation
And that reminds us of something else about all that God has made: how beautiful it is. When the early settlers in the United States first saw the beauty and grandeur of the great, rolling prairies, such as you see in Western films, they called it ‘God’s own country’. And besides the beautiful scenery in Nature, there are also many beautiful things. There are plenty of them in gardens and in the woods and fields of the countryside, and in city parks. For you can find flowers almost anywhere – growing wild on railway embankments and the edges of motorways, clinging to stone walls and making cliff tops bright with colour.
And then there are beautiful butterflies with their lovely coloured wings, and birds like the robin and greenfinch and blackbird that come to our bird tables. God made all these lovely things and he has given us colour vision to see them with. He knows that we love colours and beautiful things and just as we wrap up Christmas presents in coloured paper to give to people as an expression of our love, so we can think of all the beautiful, coloured things in Nature as presents from God which show how much he cares for us.
God’s love and faithfulness
There have always been beautiful flowers and butterflies and birds. In Palestine there are many lovely flowers, and especially fine are the irises and gladioli which grow wild in great numbers. In springtime their gorgeous reds and blues and purples make the fields and pastures a picture. They are the lilies of the field which Jesus said are more beautiful than all the royal robes of King Solomon put together. You may remember the words, “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these (NRSV, Matthew 6:28,29).
If then God takes so much care over making the flowers which so quickly whither away, how much more must you and I, for whom he made them, matter to him?
In other words, as we look round at the fields and gardens and parks and at the decorations in church, what we see before us is a coloured picture of the Love of God.
And the regular seasons of springtime and harvest are a sign of God’s faithfulness to us and a reminder that we in our turn should be faithful to him and love him in return.
SUMMARY
1. The beauty of Nature shows us how great God is and how much he loves us.
2. The regular seasons of the year are a sign of God’s faithfulness to us and a reminder that we should be faithful to him and love him in return.
References
1. Natural History Museum (2017) The blue whale in Hintze Hall. Available from: http://www.nhm.ac.uk/bluewhale/hall/ (Accessed 20 August 2017) (Internet).
2. Claudius, M. (1782) translated by Campbell, J.M. (1861) We plough the fields. Available from: http://hymnary.org/text/we_plow_the_fields_and_scatter (Accessed 22 August 2017) (Internet).