A Devotion from Horatio Bonar

“Christ … the wisdom of God. “
-1 Corinthians 1:24

Our age is eager in its pursuit of knowledge. It professes to be a truth-loving and a truth-seeking age. It is quite awake to science and thoroughly in love with its marvels. It has obtained insight into the processes of that which is called “nature.” It has witnessed one substance, and another and another, yielding up their hidden wonders. It has seen earth and sea and air giving out their treasures, and it has wrung the deepest secrets from every region of being. It has taken possession of unreclaimed territory and covered the waste places of former days with verdure and fragrance and beauty.

Its fields of discovery lie all around us, near and far. Wherever it has turned its steps, it has found stores of truth. What a profundity of miracle there is contained in every ray of light, every drop of dew, every pebble of the brook, every fragment of rock, every blade of grass. What an exemplification of order and law there is revealed in every natural process—the motion of earth and sun and stars, the flow of tides, the rush of the breeze, the braiding of the rainbow on the cloud, the change of seasons, the springing, growth, blossoming, and fruit-bearing of flower and shrub and tree!

These are the works of God, the laws of God, the daily miracles of God. In all of them wisdom is seen, divine wisdom—wisdom as profound as it is perfect, as incomprehensible as it is glorious, as magnificent in its minuteness as in its vastness—in the grain of sand as in the mighty mountain, in the blush of the unnoticed desert flower as in the splendor of a new-lighted star.

In all this there is wisdom, wisdom that we do well to study. Yet all these are only parts, mere fragments, and, even when gathered together, they still form only the minutest portion of a whole, whose dimensions are vaster than the created universe—a whole of which nothing less than the infinity of Godhead is the measure. There is some proportion between a drop and the ocean, between the stream and the fountain, between a beam and the sun, between a moment and a million of ages, but there is no proportion between the fragments of wisdom that lie scattered over creation and the great whole, which can be contained in no treasure-house except that which is infinite and divine.