Greaten God

Taken from Spurgeon's sermon on Luke 1:46 - Mary's Magnificat

Dear friends, albeit that this magnifying of the Lord is an occupation to be taken up by all Christians, do not let us think little of it. To magnify the Lord seems to me the grandest thing we mortals do, for, as I have already said, it is the occupation of heaven. When the saints of the Most High pass into their glorified state they have nothing else to do but to magnify the Lord. The word signifies, to put it in a Saxon form instead of a Latin one, to "greaten God." We cannot make him really greater, but we can show forth his greatness. We can make him appear greater. We can make others have greater thoughts of him, and that we do when we are praising him. We can ourselves try to have greater and yet greater thoughts of him—make him to our apprehension a greater God than we once knew him to be; and this, I say, is no mean occupation, because it is followed in heaven by all redeemed and perfected spirits. Even here, it is the end of everything. Praying is the end of preaching, for preaching and hearing are nothing in themselves except men be brought to Christ and led to prayer. But then praying is not the end: praising is the end of praying. Prayer is the stalk of the wheat, but praise is the ear of the wheat: it is the harvest itself. When God is praised, we have come to the ultimatum. This is the thing for which all other things are designed. We are to be saved for this end, "To the praise of the glory of his grace, wherein he hath made us accepted in the Beloved." We are not saved for our own sakes. How often does the Scripture tell us this in sense, and sometimes in words, "Not for your sakes do I this, saith the Lord God, be it known unto you; be ashamed and be confounded for your own ways, O house of Israel." The glory of God is to my mind the highest conceivable end—it certainly is the chief end of my being. So, my dear brother, if you cannot go out to preach—if after looking over all your condition you feel that your sickness and other circumstances may excuse you from active service, and even if you are compelled to keep your bed, do not suppose that you are useless as to the highest end of your being. You may still serve it by lying upon the couch of pain and magnifying the Lord by patience. Have you ever looked at those lovely lilies which adorn our gardens with their golden petals and their milk-white leaves? How they praise God! And yet they never sing. You do not even hear a rustle, but they stand still and praise God by existing—by just, as it were, enjoying the sun and the dew, and showing what God can do. A genuine Christian shut up under pain and sickness may glorify God by being his beloved child, by receiving the love of God, by showing in his common-place daily character, which is only noticeable from its holiness, what the grace of God can do. Oh may this be the occupation of us all since it is so noble a pursuit! "My soul doth magnify the Lord." Come, what are you doing to-night? Have you been during this day murmuring and complaining and grumbling? End that, and begin praising. Some of you are farmers, and I have no doubt you have grumbled because of the weather. I do not wonder, but I hope that you will not do it any more, but rather believe that God knows better about skies and clods and clouds and crops than you do. If we had the management of the weather, I have no doubt we think we should do it very splendidly, but I question whether we should not ruin all creation. Our great Lord and Master knows how to manage everything. Let us cease from all criticism of what he does, and say, "My soul does not grumble. My soul does not complain; I have taken up a better business than that. 'My soul doth magnify the Lord.' That is her one engagement from which she will never cease."

Never say, "It is of no use inducing such a man to attend the means of grace. He is a blaspheming wretch. All that he would do if he heard a sermon would be to make sport of it for the next week. I have no faith in taking such a man to hear a ministry which he would be sure to ridicule." Such unbelieving talk is making little of God. Is it not so? Is it not dishonoring God to think that his gospel cannot reach the most depraved hearts? Why, if I knew that a man had seven thousand devils in him, I believe the gospel could drive them all out. Get the sinners under the sound of the word, and the worse they are, oftentimes, the more does God love to display the greatness of his grace in casting down the power of their sin. Believe great things of God. I can honestly say this—that since God saved me I never doubted his power to save anybody. All things are possible now that he has brought me to his feet, and kept me these years as his loving child. I must think great things of God who has done such great things for so great a sinner as I am. Greaten God, my brethren; greaten God. Believe great things of him. Believe that China can be made into a province of the celestial kingdom. Believe that India will cast her riches at Jesus' feet. Believe that the round world will yet be a pearl on Christ's finger-ring. Do not go in for the dispiriting, despairing, unmanly, un-Christly ideas of those who say, "The world is not to be converted. It is a poor wreck that will go to pieces, and we are to fish off here and there one from the water-logged hulk." Brethren, never believe that we are to stand by and see the eternal defeat of God. Deem not that our God is unable to win upon the old lines, and must needs shift the plan of the campaign. It shall never be said that God could not save the world by the preaching of the gospel, and by the work of the Holy Spirit, and therefore must needs bring in the advent of the Lord to do it. I believe in the coming of the Lord, but, blessed be his name, I believe also that the battle which he has begun in the Spirit he will fight out in the old style, and finish with a victory in the very manner in which he opened the conflict. It pleases him by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe, and it will please him to continue to do so till the whole round earth shall ring with hallelujahs of praise to the grace of God, who by the feeblest of his creatures shall have defeated sin, and death, and hell. Do not get into a desponding state of mind, and rush into half-insane theories of prophecy in order to excuse your unbelief and idleness. Never throw down your weapons, and pretend that the victory is to be won by doting and dreaming: we are to fight to the end with the same weapons, and in the same name. We will drive the devil out of the world yet, by the grace of God, by the old, efficient weapons of the Word of God and the Spirit of God. Greaten God, and magnify his name, by believing in the success of the gospel of his dear Son.

Our text should be used as a GUIDE IN OUR THEOLOGY. We will finish with that. Here is a very useful test for young disciples who are beginning to study God's word. "My soul doth magnify the Lord." If you will carry this with you it will often save you from error, and guide you into truth. There is certain teaching which makes a great deal of man: it talks much of man's free-will, ability, capacity, and natural dignity. It evidently makes man the center and end of all things, and God is placed in a position of service to his creature. As for the Fall: father Adam slipped and broke his little finger, or something of the kind, but this theology sees no great ruin as the result of the fall. As for salvation: it is a slight cure for a small ill, and by no means the infinite grace which we consider it to be. Dear brethren, let those have this theology who like it, but do not you touch it even with a pair of tongs. It is of no use to man, for it mistakes his position, and only ministers to his pride. Man's place is not on the throne, but at the foot of the cross. Listen to another theology, in which the sinner is laid low, his sinfulness is exposed, his corruption is unfolded, Christ's redemption is magnified, free grace is extolled, and the Holy Ghost is adored. That is the theology for you, believe it: that is the theology of the Scriptures, accept it. I do not think that you will often be led wrong if this be your mode of judgment: that which glorifies God is true, and that which does not glorify God is false.

Sometimes you will meet with an undoubted teaching of God's word which you do not understand. You know that the doctrine is taught in the word, but you cannot make it coincide with some other truth, and you cannot quite see, perhaps, how it glorifies God. Then, dear brother, dear sister, glorify God by believing it. To believe a doctrine which you see to be true by mere reason is nothing very wonderful. There is no very great glory to God in believing what is as clear as the sun in the heavens; but to believe a truth when it staggers you—oh, gracious faith! oh, blessed faith! You will perhaps remember an illustration taken from Mr. Gough, where the little boy says, "If mother says it is so, it is so if it is not so." That is the kind of believing for a child towards its mother, and that is the sort of believing we ought to exercise towards God. I do not see the fact, and I cannot quite apprehend it, but God says it is so, and I believe him. If all the philosophers in the world should contradict the Scriptures, so much the worse for the philosophers; their contradiction makes no difference to our faith. Half a grain of God's word weighs more with us than a thousand tons of words or thoughts of all the modern theologians, philosophers, and scientists that exist on the face of the earth; for God knows more about his own works than they do. They do but think, but the Lord knows. With regard to truths which philosophers ought not to meddle with, because they have not specially turned their thoughts that way, they are not more qualified to judge than the poorest man in the church of God, nay, nor one-half so much. Inasmuch as the most learned unregenerate men are dead in sin, what do they know about the living things of the children of Cod? Instead of setting them to judge we will sooner trust our boys and girls that are just converted, for they do know something of divine things, but carnal philosophers know nothing of them. Do not be staggered, brothers and sisters, but honor God, glorify God, and magnify him by believing great things and unsearchable—past your finding out—which you know to be true because he declares them to be so. Let the ipse dixit of God stand to you in the place of all reason, being indeed the highest and purest reason, for God, the Infallible, speaks what must be true.

So, then, I come back to where I started. Let us go forth and practically try to magnify the name of the Lord. Go home and speak well of his name: gather your children together and tell them what a good and great God he has been. Some of you who have a swarm of youngsters could not do better than spend half an hour in telling them of his goodness to you in all your times of trouble. Leave to your children the heirloom of gratitude. Tell them how good the Lord was to their father, and how good he will be to his children: tell your servants, tell your work-people, tell anybody with whom you come in contact what a blessed God the Lord is. For my part, I never can speak well enough of his adorable name. He is the best of masters, his service is delight; he is the best of fathers, his commands are pleasure. Was there ever such a god as our God, our enemies themselves being judges?

Magnify his name by the brightness of your countenances. Rejoice and be glad in him. When you are in sorrow and must needs fast, yet appear not unto men to fast, but anoint your faces and still wear a smile. Let not the world think that the servants of a king go mourning all their days. Make the world feel what a great God you serve, and what a blessed Savior Christ is, and thus evermore let your soul magnify the Lord. God grant you grace to do so, for Jesus' sake. Amen.

The Goldilocks Theory of the Universe

(and the Mother Bear Solution)

by Steve Owen

Have you ever heard something on the radio that made you wonder whether or not it was April 1st? Something so strange that you wondered whether you were listening to a comedy programme rather than to Current Affairs? I can only assure readers that I really did hear what I’m about to describe, and that it was broadcast on the B.B.C. In my secular work, I have to drive a good deal and recently, having heard enough music for a while, I switched over my radio to B.B.C Radio Five, a ‘news and current affairs’ channel. An interview had just started with a scientist (I didn’t catch his name) concerning his new conception, the Goldilocks Theory of the Universe.

His thesis was this: the Universe as we know it shows a multitude of features that makes it ideal for life. He mentioned the structure of atoms and molecules; the force of gravity, which is neither too great nor too small; the quantities of vital elements like oxygen and carbon, which are found in exactly the right amounts; the ready combination of oxygen and hydrogen to make water with its unique properties, and several others. It looks, he said, almost as if the Universe had been especially designed for life. At this point the interviewer interrupted him to ask if that was not then the logical assumption to make. Perhaps it had indeed been designed? “Ah, no,” He replied. “You cannot allow the idea of a Designer into your thinking, because that is unscientific. Also, it merely moves the problem of the Universe back a stage. After all, who designed the Designer?”

The scientist continued that the only possible answer to the dilemma of the Apparently Designed Universe is the ‘Goldilocks’ Theory. Readers will recall that when Goldilocks came to the house of the three bears, she did not immediately find a bowl of porridge that she liked; rather, she found three seemingly identical bowls. On inspection, however, she found that the contents of two of these bowls were quite unsuitable. One was much too salty and another much too sweet. She didn’t like them at all. It was only when she tasted the porridge in the third bowl, that she found that it was ‘Just Right.’ It may be, declared the scientist, that the Universe is very much like that. Just as there were three parallel bowls of porridge, from which Goldilocks found one that was edible, so perhaps there are many parallel universes, possibly millions of them, out of which the one that we live in is the only one that is ‘Just Right’ for life.

Well, my first thought on hearing this was the scientist was guilty of tautology. A universe, by definition, is unique- ‘uni-‘ means one. You cannot have multiple ‘universes,’ or if you do, you need to call them something else. My second thought was that it was a case of life imitating art. Perhaps this scientist has been watching the science-fiction television series, Stargate, where intrepid travellers bob from one parallel ‘universe’ (‘multiverse’?) to another. This led me to my third conclusion, which is that whatever it is that this man was proposing, it isn’t science. Science deals with facts and evidences that can be demonstrated. What we have here is an idea without the slightest evidence to back it up. It can be neither proved nor disproved because there is no test to discover whether or not these parallel ‘universes’ exist and therefore nothing that can be done to show that they do not. Before 1969, it was possible to argue that the Moon was made of green cheese, because no one had yet gone to the Moon, chipped a bit off, brought it back and tried to spread it on a cracker. The fact that it could not be disproved, however, did not make the Green Cheese Theory of the Moon genuine science.

This seems to be the way with modern science. It has been observed that comets lose a portion of their mass every time they approach the Sun. It has been worked out that if the Solar System is more than a million or so years old, almost every comet would have wasted away to nothing by now. You might suppose that this would make astronomers think for a moment; “Hold on! Perhaps the Universe isn’t as old as we thought.” Not a bit of it! They have invented a great layer of comets, just outside the Solar System, called the Oort Cloud, and they suppose that comets just fall out of it from time to time. The only problem with this wonderful solution is that there is not the slightest evidence that the Oort Cloud exists. No one has ever observed it; but this of course is its great strength. If there is no evidence for it, then it cannot be disproved until some astronaut flies to the edge of the Solar System, looks for it and finds it isn’t there.

Let us now consider our scientist’s lordly rejection of the possibility of a Creator. He gave two reasons. The first one is that it’s unscientific. There’s a sense in which he’s right. You cannot prove God scientifically. He reveals Himself to those who diligently seek Him, not in a laboratory with a test-tube or Bunsen burner, but in prayer and in His word. But if God is true (and He is!), then any scientific theory that seeks to deny Him must be unscientific in that it is wrong. What science can and should say is that all the evidence points to a great Designer of the Universe. There is nothing unscientific about that; indeed, the scientist himself admitted as much at the start of the interview.

Our scientist’s second argument was that proposing a Creator only moves the problem back further. If there is a God, who made Him? There can hardly be a parent of a three year-old who hasn’t been asked this question: “Daddy, who made God?” And the answer to three year-olds down the ages has been the same; no one made God; He has always been and always will be. ‘Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty, who was and is and is to come’ (Rev 4:8 ). It is a scientific maxim that nothing can come from nothing; there has to be a first cause. The proponents of the ‘Big Bang’ theory say that in the beginning all the matter contained in the Universe was gathered together in one dense ball, and then it exploded. OK, if God is unscientific, so is this ball of matter; where did that come from? Who made it? Furthermore, if it had been there for countless billions of years- from all eternity- why did it suddenly explode at a certain point in time? The Law of Inertia states that a body at rest tends to remain at rest unless acted upon by an outside force. If everything was wrapped into this ball, what was left to act on it? It appears that the only scientific explanation of the Universe is that there is no Universe. If nothing can come from nothing then there can be only nothing and so nothing exists! The only problem with this theory is that it doesn’t seem to fit the observed facts, namely that we actually do exist.

I would now like to propound my Mother Bear Theory of the Universe. When Goldilocks entered the cottage of the three bears and saw the bowls of porridge, what thoughts might have entered her mind? Had she been an imaginative child, she might have thought of a ceramics factory to make the bowls and a shop to sell them. As she contemplated the porridge, her mind might have conjured up images of fields of oats, of cows being milked, and of great plantations of sugar cane in the West Indies. But the mere existence of ceramics, oats, milk and sugar does not make a bowl of porridge. I doubt that Goldilocks would have thought to herself, “Well, to make this porridge there must have been a spontaneous explosion in the kitchen and the oats milk and sugar must have been blown out of the kitchen (I don’t know how they got there in the first place) into the living room and on the way they must have mixed together and sort of cooked themselves whilst in the air and then they miraculously fell into the bowls which I suppose must have been here from all eternity, and because this is so wildly improbable, there must be countless millions of parallel houses where the same spontaneous explosion has occurred.” No, in order for there to be even one bowl of porridge, there has to be intelligent input. In other words, the fact of porridge pre-supposes someone to assemble the ingredients, cook and serve it.

Now Goldilocks could know something about the maker of the porridge merely from the fact of the porridge itself. She could know that the maker was sentient and that had the ability to make not one, but three bowls of the stuff, each one designed to suit a particular recipient. But of the character and intention of the maker she could know nothing until it was revealed to her. That the maker was actually a talking bear she would have had no inkling until Mother Bear came through the door and declared, “Someone’s been eating my porridge!” Only by revelation could Goldilocks know that Mother Bear had made the porridge for herself, Father Bear and Baby Bear and that she was likely to be extremely hostile to human porridge-stealers. So it was when these facts were revealed to her by the entrance of the three bears, that she knew how to react to the porridge-maker, and prudently she ran away ‘as fast as her legs would carry her.’

In the same way, humans can discount the idea of the Universe having somehow ‘come together’ and the laws of nature and science having just ‘happened.’ It is too ridiculous to be true. The former Astronomer Royal, Prof. Fred Hoyle, likened it to imagining that a whirlwind could go through a scrap yard and spontaneously assemble a jumbo jet. If even a bowl of porridge is too complicated to have occurred by chance, how much more the Universe! Someone therefore has designed this Universe and this planet on which we live. We can know something of Him, just by looking at what He has created. We can understand His infinite power and intelligence by considering the colossal vastness of space, the many features of design within it and the laws that govern and sustain it. As the Psalmist put it, ‘The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament shows His handiwork’ (Psalm 19:1 ). The apostle Paul tells us that men are ‘without excuse’ when they exclude God from their thinking (Rom 1:20 ) because, ‘Since the creation of the world, His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Divine nature.’

It is one thing, however, to know that there is a God- even the demons in hell know that (James 2:19 )- but another to come to know Him and to understand His gracious purposes for this world. These things cannot be discovered from nature, nor by science or philosophy (Job 11:7-9 ); instead, they have been revealed to us in His word. It is there that we discover that, ‘For so God loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whoever believes in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life’ (John 3:16 ).