Notes of.a sermon preached by the Rev. C. E. Darwent in Union Church, Tientsin, on April 23 and in Union Church, Shanghai, May 21
Teat:—Isaiah XXVII1; 21.—strange work, and bring to pass "That he may do His work, His His act, His strange act."
Sir George Adam Smith, the best authority on Isaiah, says that this is the prophet's most powerful and eloquent chapter. In that case it must deserve our attention once in a while, though it seldom gets it I have looked through my interleaved Bible, which I have kept mesh diligently for years, and can find but one reference to the chapter, and that not to this weird passage. The whole "clergy and ministers of all denominations" seem to have made a conspiracy to pass it by. My old friend Bishop Hall of Norwich, to whom I always refer, is a disappointment on this passage. I often wonder, if we all get to heaven—which I observe most people at the present day expect they will do quite easily—whether we shall be able to tell people like Bishop Hall, how disappointed we have been with them. No one had a keener eye for a good text than the late Joseph Parker of the City Temple, yet he has nothing to say about it. Even he, who knew his Bible better than most men, missed it.
What then does Isaiah say in this excerpt from an eloquent address? Ho says that God docs queer things. In fact, the repetition of it seems to mean that the prophet intends to say that God does very queer things. It took a bold man to say that. The English paper, "Trath," used to have a "Queer Story' every week. And some of them were queer ones, as you will remember. They were eagerly read. We are a queer race, and we like queer things, and we like to read about them, but, ordinarily, we should hesitate to say that God does queer things. We should draw the line at that. Happily the Bible writers are hok men. You will often notice that they are bold enough to say things that we think but are too great cowards to say. Or, it may be, we think God is easily' offended. What does "queer' mean? Etymologists are not quite sure of its origin, but they suggest the German quer. Quer means "'across," as in Querstrasser, cross-street; querbalken cross-beam, There can be no doubt about it. Thus it means something that runs across your expectations, that acts just as you expect it not to act, that knocks your anticipations clean out. So it has come to mean odd, whimsical. We shall take it in its normal sense of upsetting expectation, doing just what you would not expect. A man once said to me, "When you give out your text, I always forecast in my mind as rapidly as I can, your line of treatment, and I am always wrong." I said, "Ah, it is a good thing you cannot, for, if you could, I should soon be done, for it would mean that I should be very commonplace." In this sense Isaiah says God does queer things, "that He may do His work, His strange work, and bring to pass His act, His strange act."
Exauptes in Nature.
Let us turn to nature and see how true this is, that God has done things in extraordinarily strange ways, in such queer ways that no attempt of man's to forecast how He would do them could have succeeded. There is light. It looks stable and solid and motionless. Yet, as a fact, it is a seething ocean of waves, billions of them passing per second. How does our eye stand: the racket of the bombardment of such swiftly moving waves? The speed of light is about 183,000 miles per second. Think of it! The utter unexpectedness of this discovery! And colours. As I understand it, thera are no colours in things; colour is just the result of the action of light on different materials. One would think a bull's-eye was, per se, red, but it appears that it is nothing of the kind. Indeed, is anything just what it seems? Then matter! Made of atoms! They look solid when nicely put together as oak or iron, but a block of oak or iron is a whirling mass of dancing particles. Nay, even an atom is itself a kind of solar system of whirling particles, still smaller, and when one changes place with another a new element is formed.
Nothing is solid. I learnt that lesson as a boy when an uncle fresh from sea shot a tallow candle from his pistol through a deal door. It is queer indeed. We ask, What is anything?' And no one can tell us what it ultimately is There is the interior temperature of our body and blood, somewhere about 98 degrees Fahrenheit. Why, of all things in the world, 98 degrees Fahrenheit? I have never heard any explanation. All the doctors can do is to get it down if it has gone. up. Queer, that our very life depends on a few degrees of heat! Yet so it does. Then there is that very queer connexion between us and carbonic acid gas. Dr. Alfred Wallace, as I understand him, tells us that, unless there were one part in 10,000 of carbonic acid gas in the ordinary air, we should all die. Yet he says one per cent. would kill us all off the earth. It is all very queer—'a_ strange work" indeed, as Isaiah says—for the gas is a poison which makes us all get headaches if a room is not ventilated; that is, if the carbonic acid gas is not driven out. And it is just as queer that there must be one part in a million of ammonia in the air. Why one in a million and one in 10,0004
Turning to the animal world, things are just as unexpected, just as queer. Birds are the most beautiful of creatures. Who would have anticipated that birds have been evolved from reptiles? The skylark up there in the blue heaven, descended from a reptile in the mud! It looks as if God delighted to do things in a way that no one in his wildest moment of speculation would ever have thought of. Yet it is a good world. Yes, things work out very well. The lark sings quite nicely, though descended from a reptile, The late professor Helmholtz said that the eye is not ideally perfect. Perhaps not, but it is a good eye. It can see a star billions of miles away. And while all that about carbonic acid gas and ammonia is queer, it all works very well, and we keep very well, and it looks as if God was quite justified in pronouncing it all "very good." The whole creation works extraordinarily well.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.