Expositor's Bible: The Gospel of St LukeBurton, Henry
Religion
Expositor's Bible: The Gospel of St Luke
Burton, Henry
Bible. Luke -- Commentaries
When the Greeks called man ὁ ανθρωπος, or the "uplooking
one," they did but crystallize in a word what is a universal fact, the
religious instinct of humanity. Everywhere, and through all times, man
has felt, as by a sort of intuition, that earth was no Ultima Thule,
with nothing beyond but oceans of vacancy and silence, but that it lay
in the over-shadow of other worlds, between which and their own were
subtle modes of correspondence. They felt themselves to be in the
presence of Powers other and higher than human, who somehow influenced
their destiny, whose favour they must win, and whose displeasure they
must avert. And so Paganism reared her altars, almost numberless,
dedicating them even to the "Unknown God," lest some anonymous deity
should be grieved at being omitted from the enumeration. The prevalence
of false religions in the world, the garrulous babble of mythology, does
but voice the religious instinct of man; it is but another Tower of
Babel, by which men hope to find and to scale the heavens which must be
somewhere overhead.
In the Old Testament, however, we find the clearer revelation. What to
the unaided eye of reason and of nature seemed but a wave of golden mist
athwart the sky--"a meeting of gentle lights without a name"--now
becomes a wide-reaching and shining realm, peopled with intelligences of
divers ranks and orders; while in the centre of all is the city and the
throne of the Invisible King, Jehovah, Lord of Sabaoth. In the breath of
the new morning the gossamer threads Polytheism had been spinning
through the night were swept away, and on the pillars of the New
Jerusalem, that celestial city of which their own Salem was a far-off
and broken type, they read the inscription, "Hear, O Israel: the Lord
our God is one Lord." But while the Old Testament revealed the unity of
the Godhead, it emphasized especially His sovereignty, the glories of
His holiness, and the thunders of His power. He is the great Creator,
arranging His universe, commanding evolutions and revolutions, and
giving to each molecule of matter its secret affinities and repulsions.
And again He is the Lawgiver, the great Judge, speaking out of the
cloudy pillar and the windy tempest, dividing the firmaments of Right
and Wrong, whose holiness hates sin with an infinite hatred, and whose
justice, with sword of flame, pursues the wrong-doer like an
unforgetting Nemesis. It is only natural, therefore, that with such
conceptions of God, the heavens should appear distant and somewhat cold.
The quiet that was upon the world was the hush of awe, of fear, rather
than of love; for while the goodness of God was a familiar and favourite
theme, and while the mercy of God, which "endureth for ever," was the
refrain, oft repeated, of their loftiest songs, the love of God was a
height the Old Dispensation had not explored, and the Fatherhood of God,
that new world of perpetual summer, lay all undiscovered, or but dimly
apprehended through the mist.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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