SERMON XIII – William Elbert Munsey
Ezekiel’s vision (discourse II.).
The Mysteriousness of Providence.
” Then did the cherubims lift up their wings, and the wheels beside them ; and the glory of the God of Israel was over them above.” — Ezekiel 11:22.
THE structure and relative position of the wheels were complicated, M as it were a wheel in the middle of a wheel.” The wheels were probably of equal size, and the periphery of one was inserted at right angles, into the periphery of the other — a combination which made their revolutions so intricate and confounding no human mind could possibly understand and explain them. This symbolizes The Mysteriousness of Providence.
The dispensations of Providence are indeed mysterious. Cold dew is sprinkled upon our hopes, affections, and remembrances. Our expectations budding in the warmth of the human heart shoot out their blooming vines, but they soon grow pale and die among the chilling winds and icy hills of this world. Our babes wither within our arms. Our sons and daughters fade like some vernal plant whose root is nipped by a cankerworm in the blooming. Our wives and husbands depart when least we can spare them, and leave us broken-hearted. ‘ Our family altars are falling, falling, and their ruins will soon -be our tombs. Nations arise, and like some mad meteor career awhile in the political heavens, and expire in their own brilliancy. From the profoundest dirficulties and the most apparent contradictions are eliminated and established the highest principles of Christian civilization. The thunder-tread of revolutions tramples to dust institutions hoary in their antiquity, and grand in their history. Shivered grandeur and ruined nationalities lie scattered in anarchical confusion along the track of progress. Progression writes its name with blood, and the banners of its advance are humid with tears, and flaunted by sighs.
Involved as these wheels were they seemed contradictory in their motion. They seemed to cross each other’s motion in such a manner as to make an advance seem an impossibility. How true the application : the character of the Dispensations of Providence often appear to contradict the very ends they profess to promote. How they can promote peace on earth by rolling over fields of carnage and leaving the bloody impress of their gory rims along the highways of human history, is indeed mysterious. How they tend to usher in the millennial reign of Christ, whose distinguishing characteristic is purity, by producing commotions, and evolving from the turbulent waves, passion and sin in their corruptest and most violent forms, is indeed inexplicable. How they can eliminate and establish high principles of Christian reform by revolutions whose ostensible characteristics are war, pestilence, and famine, which prostrate the hopes of nations and drape a million of family altars in the escutcheons of the saddest woe, is a mystery we cannot understand. Yet every Christian philosopher versed in the history of the world knows that such are the facts.
How profoundly mysterious the dispensations of Providence ! How confused the wheels, how dark the clouds which envelop them, how irregular the fires which fiercely burn among them. The rims of the chariot wheels, symbolizing the dispensations of Providence, roll on to such heights, including in their circumference heaven, hell, and the universe — ” As for their rings,” says the prophet, “they were so high that they were dreadful.” Their circle is so stupendous, and we see so small a portion of it, — or, cut by the cord between the visible and invisible, so small a segment of it — that we cannot estimate its curve, hence cannot calculate its size, or where its ends unite and form a whole. To change the il- lustration, the circle of the dispensations of Providence forms an octagon, and we only see one side. The plans of God from the beginning to the end form a chain ; and our lives are too short for us to see but one link, and with some of us, so small a part of that one as to be unable to understand how it is joined to the link preceding, and the link following. The only ideas that we can form of the whole, from the one, are those of strength, unity, and direction ; and then the mind must assume that the links are all similar, that they are united the one to the other, and that the chain is straight. In other words, the plans of God are infinite, and are a unity, and we see so small a part of them, and understand that small part so imperfectly, that the mind has not the requisite data to reason to a satisfactory knowledge of the whole. An unbroken cloud of mystery overhangs the fields of Providence, and the immensity of the sweep of its dispensations confounds us.
The mysterious in Providence and religion, is wise. It excites and develops faith. Our beliefs, the groundwork of faith, are as essential in the human mind in making up human character, as our cognitions. They both have their respective realms — the realm of belief lies under the other, outside the other, and above the other, is infinite in its boundary ; and includes all that makes life in this world durable. The relations between God and man are such, and the condition of man is such, and the philosophic action of faith and its reflex influences upon the soul and mind are such, that faith only as distinguished from knowledge, can constitute 8 the rewardable condition forming the basis of the construction of Christian character.
It is morally sublime to see a Christian standing among what appears to him as clashing discords, and sweeping contradictions, with his foot upon the promises of God, calm and trustful. Revolutions may rage ; nations may tear into shreds existing governments, and out of the fragments weave new ones ; the chariot of God’s Providence with its whirl- wind, clouds, and fires, may roll over the plains and mountain tops, shake the world, and shiver the foundations of all human institutions ; yet his towering faith raises its head into eternal sunshine, grasps the hand of God, and leans against the Celestial Throne. His brightest hopes may lie dismantled and blighted at his feet — every golden thread dis- severed, yet though a tear trembles down his cheek, he lifts his eyes to heaven and says, ” It is all for the best,” ” whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth.” Creation careering may topple its planets into chaos, and the grand old arches of the universe may come crashing down, the roar of its fragments astounding hell into frightened silence ; yet his faith is as unshaken as the Mount of God upon which his Father sits a universal sovereign in the Heaven of heavens.
The motions of the wheels may be contradictory, they may cross each other’s motion, they may even seem to go backward, or seem to go backward as often and as easily as they go forward ; yet the prophet says, ” they moved straight forward ” — not contradictory, but harmonious ; not to the right or left, but a straight forward ; ” not backward, but advancing, and advancing when they seemed to go back- ward.
The prophet says that the creatures and wheels “were full of eyes round about.” Eye is an emblem of intelligence and ubiquity. ” Full of eyes,” is perfection of intelligence in ubiquity. Then the creatures emblematical of the instrumentalities of Providence, and the wheels emblematical of the dispensations of Providence, are guided by ubiquitous and perfect intelligence.
No instruments of Providence — and all things are instruments— and no dispensation of Providence moves at random, or as it may happen. All is under the control of a Perfect and Ubiquitous Intelligence, which removes all chance out of the universe. But there never was, and never can be, such a reality as chance. Atheism, or the No God, of unbelief has cast its shadow upon the axes of all the de- signs of the universe, and the name of the shadow is chance. But still all events, and all worlds, move along the pathway of one intelligent design ; God the Designer is King, and the eyes burn in the shade, and look out from all the shadows, and wo to the sinner upon whom their gaze fiercely kindles. ” With thine eyes shalt thou behold and see the reward of the wicked.” ” The eyes of the Lord are in every place, beholding the evil and the good,” said Elihu. When the patriarch of Uz was bowed to the dust, and the chariot went sounding on, he said, ” His eyes are upon the ways of man, and he seeth all his goings. There is no darkness, nor shadow of death, where the workers of iniquity may hide themselves.”
The instruments and dispensations of Providence work with a design. Chance is but an ocular spectrum, the complementary colors of Atheism, it is unreal, yet really unworthy of an intelligence. The living creatures and wheels are instinct with eyes. A perfect intelligence governs their movements. The fires which burn are dreadful, the lightnings which flash are terrific — But O, the eyes that look from every wing, and foot, and hand, and face of the living creatures, and from axle, nave, spoke, and straik of every wheel , blazing with a fiery intelligence, and kindling with design — are an apparition which makes the blood of wickedness creep cold, chills the heart of iniquity, and sends terror throughout sin’s dominions, and shakes the knees of hell.— The eyes of a basilisk are not more deadly.
But the wheels in this vision do not support the cherubim, nor the firmament and throne above. They roll by the side of the cherubim, and under the firmament. They had no organic connection with either. The only bond of union between them was that the same spirit and life pervaded all. There is a higher reason for the use of the wheels in this vision than simply the perfection of the rhetorical figure of a chariot. I have given you several already, but there is another : The wheels were round and formed a circle. The circle is the very symbol of completeness, perfection, the infinite. It is the basis figure in the universe.
Cast a stone from several places upon the earth perpendicularly into the air, and they will return towards a centre, the same centre, a common centre implying a circle. Throw a stone horizontally and it will describe a curve as it de- scends to the ground, acknowledging a centre implying a circle. In those substances ” in which cohesion is so far counteracted by repulsion that the particles move freely on each other,” as in fluids and liquids, we see this fundamental law beautifully illustrated. The dewdrop laughing on the rose’s petal in the blush of the morning, is a glittering circlet brighter than the diamond. Look at it quickly, for if it catches a glimpse of the rising sun, it will spread its tiny wings and fly away. The vesicles of the cloud when they burst or unite, and the rain sets in, each drop is a little globe. Let the sun shine upon the shower, and we have that beautiful meteor, the rainbow, its ” prismatic spectra arranged in the circumference of a circle.” The melted lead in its de- scent from the top of the shot tower forms spheres before it reaches the pool which cools and catches it.
Even the wind has its circuits, and describes forevei curves and circles. Says Solomon, “it whirleth about continually, and . . . returneth again according to his circuits.”‘ The translation is bad, the literal meaning is more intensive. Let two currents of air coming from opposite directions meet, and a whirlwind is created, rotating and progressing with such speed as to tear trees up by the roots. . The mass of air thrown into motion has its axis and moves in a circle. Some say the cause is electricity. Let ocean currents from different directions meet, and whirlpools are made, the water moving in a circle.
The nebulae, if Laplace was right, revolving its tremendous circumference, and every part of it, the axle included, describing a circle, threw off successive rings or circles of matter, which cooling and contracting, sought respectively common centres, and worlds were made ; each world as it was keeping up the circular motion — turning upon an axis, and travelling along an orbit. Satellites are spherical and they circle their primaries. Planets are spherical and they circle their suns — carrying their moons with them. Suns, too, are spherical, and they too, taking all their planets with them, take up their grand march around some common centre. The immensity of their orbit confounds us. How far and wide the continuation in the multiplication of universes, God only knows — God. whose being and perfections, have the circle for their emblem. And thus worlds and suns in magnificent circumrotation, a circle in the middle of a circle, a wheel in the middle of a wheel, move on under the eye of God to the completion of their cycles and destiny. In a circle tramps all the seasons, bringing around the same order of things, in everlasting monotony, never reaching any goal. Nature and all its appearances, a wheel in a wheel, moves in ever-recurring circles.
Men are born, mature and die — they are children at first, and children at last — they come naked into the world, and naked they go out of it. History all the time repeats itself. Generations and events travel in circles, and so does thought and all its modes. On sweep the cycles : the events of the age are but types of what will occur again far down the centuries ; and the events of this age were typed far back per- haps in a prehistoric one. The heavenly bodies have their cycles, so does man, and mind, and history. On sweep the cycles. ” That which hath been is now ; and that which is to be hath already been ; and God requireth that which I past.” ” The thing which hath been, is that which shall be and that which is done is that which shall be done : and there is no new thing under the sun. Is there anything whereof it may be said, See, this is new ? It hath been already of old time, which was before us.” On sweep the cycles ; and to insure an advance above the cyclic law of repetition and monotony, which cuts off all progression in the things of earth, and nature, and time ; and to bring man in his des- tiny upon higher circles, and to give him a goal worthy of a man to aspire to, and of a God to give — in all the cycles, in all the circles, roll the wheels, roll the cycles, roll the circles of God’s eternal Providence. Then, on and up sweep the cycles — on and up roll the circles — on and up revolve the wheels.