Our Lord and Nature
George H. Morrison
Matthew 6:28
Our Lord, the lover of mankind, was a lover also of the world of nature. It called Him, and calling spoke to Him; it was His inspiration and His rest. When you love a person you never can quite hide it. There are some secrets nobody can hide. You say I shall never mention the beloved, but the birds of the air are carrying the tidings. So in the Gospels, given for our redemption, one is never far away from nature, just because the Master loved it so. He loved Peter, and you see Peter there. He loved John, and John is in the picture. But He also loved the sparrows and the lilies and the wind that blows where it will-and the Gospels have to give house-room to them all.
No doubt the Master's love of nature sprang in part from the setting of His birth. The world is always vocal to the Hebrew, and our Lord was born of Hebrew lineage. It is a curious thing that the word Jew carries for us the suggestion of the city. We picture the Jew in the markets of the world and not against the background of its greenness. But as a matter of historic fact, the Jew was the nature-lover of antiquity, far more responsive than the Roman and with a deeper vision than the Greek. You can often tell what a nation gives its heart to by the relative wealth of its vocabulary, and in nothing is the Hebrew language richer than in its vocabulary of the open world. It has two or three different words for sun and moon, two or three different words for grass and corn, ten words descriptive of the rain. Into that heritage our Savior entered. He was born of a race that brooded on the world. He was the son of Abraham, who watched the stars and of Isaac, who meditated in the fields at eventide. And if the glory of nature shines on the Gospel page, we owe it in part to the ordering of heaven which sent the Son into a Hebrew home.
Yet when you study the Old Testament and then turn to the teaching of our Lord, what arrests is not the similarity, ...
George H. Morrison
Matthew 6:28
Our Lord, the lover of mankind, was a lover also of the world of nature. It called Him, and calling spoke to Him; it was His inspiration and His rest. When you love a person you never can quite hide it. There are some secrets nobody can hide. You say I shall never mention the beloved, but the birds of the air are carrying the tidings. So in the Gospels, given for our redemption, one is never far away from nature, just because the Master loved it so. He loved Peter, and you see Peter there. He loved John, and John is in the picture. But He also loved the sparrows and the lilies and the wind that blows where it will-and the Gospels have to give house-room to them all.
No doubt the Master's love of nature sprang in part from the setting of His birth. The world is always vocal to the Hebrew, and our Lord was born of Hebrew lineage. It is a curious thing that the word Jew carries for us the suggestion of the city. We picture the Jew in the markets of the world and not against the background of its greenness. But as a matter of historic fact, the Jew was the nature-lover of antiquity, far more responsive than the Roman and with a deeper vision than the Greek. You can often tell what a nation gives its heart to by the relative wealth of its vocabulary, and in nothing is the Hebrew language richer than in its vocabulary of the open world. It has two or three different words for sun and moon, two or three different words for grass and corn, ten words descriptive of the rain. Into that heritage our Savior entered. He was born of a race that brooded on the world. He was the son of Abraham, who watched the stars and of Isaac, who meditated in the fields at eventide. And if the glory of nature shines on the Gospel page, we owe it in part to the ordering of heaven which sent the Son into a Hebrew home.
Yet when you study the Old Testament and then turn to the teaching of our Lord, what arrests is not the similarity, ...
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