The Water of Life, and Other SermonsKingsley, Charles
Religion
The Water of Life, and Other Sermons
Kingsley, Charles
Church of England -- Sermons; Sermons, English -- 19th century
Next (and this is most important), these different cherubim were not
independent of each other, each going his own way, and doing his own
will. Not so. Ezekiel had found in them a divine and wonderful order,
by which the services of angels as well as of men are constituted.
Orderly and harmoniously they worked together. Out of the same fiery
globe, from the same throne of God, they came forth all alike. They
turned not when they went; whithersoever the Spirit was to go, they went,
and ran and returned like a flash of lightning. Nay, in one place he
speaks as if all the four creatures were but one creature: ‘This is the
living creature which I saw by the river of Chebar.’
And so it is, we may be sure, in the world of God, whether in the earthly
or in the heavenly world. All things work together, praising God and
doing His will. Angels and the heavenly host; sun and moon; stars and
light; fire and hail; snow and vapour; wind and storm: all fulfil His
word. ‘He hath made them fast for ever and ever: He hath given them a
law which shall not be broken.’ For before all things, under all things,
and through all things, is a divine unity and order; all things working
towards one end, because all things spring from one beginning, which is
the bosom of God the Father.
And so with the wheels; the wheels of fortune and victory, and the fate
of nations and of kings. ‘They were so high,’ Ezekiel said, ‘that they
were dreadful.’ But he saw no human genius sitting, one in each wheel of
fortune, each protecting his favourite king and nation. These, too, did
not go their own way and of their own will. They were parts of God’s
divine and wonderful order, and obeyed the same laws as the cherubim.
‘And when the living creatures went, the wheels went with them; for the
spirit of the living creature was in the wheels.’ Everywhere was the
same divine unity and order; the same providence, the same laws of God,
presided over the natural world and over the fortunes of nations and of
kings. Victory and prosperity was not given arbitrarily by separate
genii, each genius protecting his favourite king, each genius striving
against the other on behalf of his favourite. Fortune came from the
providence of One Being; of Him of whom it is written, ‘God standeth in
the congregation of princes: He is the judge among gods.’ And again,
‘The Lord is King, be the people never so impatient: He sitteth between
the cherubim, be the earth never so unquiet.’
And is this all? God forbid. This is more than the Chaldæans saw, who
worshipped angels and not God—the creature instead of the Creator. But
where the Chaldæan vision ended, Ezekiel’s only began. His prophecy
rises far above the imaginations of the heathen.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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