HIS MARVELOUS WORKS by C. M. Snow

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Feb 5, 1902

HIS MARVELOUS WORKS.

By C. M. Snow

Vernal Falls, Yosemite Valley; height 350 feet. Here the Merced River takes its second great plunge to reach the floor of this most beautiful valley.

In the wonders that are done in the earth men see “as through a glass darkly” the power of Him who spoke the worlds into being. Standing at the foot of a mighty waterfall, where a river has been tumbling down for ages, and listening to the deep reverberations of its tireless tongue, louder than the roar of the lightning express, deeper than the boom of guns,—the littleness of man comes home with crushing weight. I have listened for hours to the thunderous roar of this mill-race of the Infinite, and wondered what must be the power of Him whose tuneful toy it was and is. He has cut the river bed as with a knife and dropped it three hundred fifty feet, and then sent its boiling waters with tremendous impetus down a fearful chasm between the great, trembling sounding-boards of the mountainsides, whose vibrations we feel as well as hear. We climb the dizzy stairs cut in the rocky cliff, till our feet are on the brink of the mighty plunge, and look down into the rainbow-painted basin where the waters swirl and writhe and struggle with the Titan rocks. Farther up the chasm, another, higher fall sends down its foaming waters. Far behind another, and still higher, is looping down a filmy, wind-swung drapery out of the very clouds two thousand and six hundred feet above; and to the right glitters a rainbowed ribbon of the purest meltings of the mountain snows, fluttering and folding and swaying and almost vanishing in the air, as it curls down from its dizzy height, singing in the wind. Beyond this is another, a bridal veil, whose woof is the rainbow, draping a sheer mountain-side nine hundred dizzy feet. And here the shattered mountain peaks are pointing constant fingers to the sky, as if to tell the beholder who is the Author of it all.

TRULY, “great and marvelous are Thy works, Lord God Almighty; just and true are Thy ways, Thou King of saints.” All over the world are these footprints and finger-prints of the Maker of the heavens and the earth. Where can we hide that we do not find some memorial of the hand that shaped the universe? Here, it is a tiny leaf, sipping the dewdrops of the early morn; there, it is a Vernal Fall, beating its tons of water into pearls of floating mist. Here, it is a pebble forming deep down in the caverns of the earth; there, it is a mighty sun blazing out in untold glory across the abyss of a thousand million miles. Here, it is a tiny insect invisible to the naked eye; there, it is the buried bones of a mastodon, telling their own story of the watery grave that closed over the wickedness of the ancient world. Here, it is a tiny rill wandering down a mountainside; there, it is a mighty river plowing a furrow through the great sea, and tempering the cold winds that sweep down from the Arctic. Here, it is the grace of a kindly deed in a tender child; there, it is a mighty wave of Christian progress, bearing the last message of a long-suffering God into the highways and byways of a sinful world. He breathes upon us in the winds that fan our cheek; He showers us with His blessings in the dew and rain; He prolongs our lives that we may learn to know Him; and in it all holds out the never-fading promise of eternal life to all who will to do His will.

THERE is an eternal purpose in the wondrous works which His hands have fashioned in the earth. The psalmist tells us that “He hath made His wonderful works to be remembered.” Ps. 111:4. Had the hands of man shaped the wonders which we see, the heart of man would have turned within to find the source of power and life; but it is the Creator’s purpose that man should see Him and remember Him in the mighty works which He has done. So He has peopled the earth with a myriad reminders of Himself, that man might have no just excuse for forgetting Him and turning his feet into the paths that lead to wickedness and death. Men have chosen to

forget Him; have chosen their own ways; have sought for pleasure in the ways of death, and have reached the goal toward which their wayward feet were speeding. “As they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind” (Rom. 1:28); and in the chambers of those reprobate minds they hung the pictures of all the villainy and vice which Satan could invent. When they had forgotten God, there was nothing in the earth or in the ways of men that could check the speed of their downward course. With their hand tight clasped in the hand of Death, they raced to ruin.

THEN came the proclamation of the Gospel message, calling men back to a memory of God. The Lord Himself taught men with His own lips to see the Creator in the things which He had made. So He filled His teachings with parables, and based His parables on the flowers of the field, the birds of the air, the grass, and various things in which the hand of God is seen. Sin had clouded the vision of mankind so that it could not see God in His works, and blurred the image of God in man. Christ’s work was to sweep away the mists and clouds which sin had brought, and to restore in man that image which he had well-nigh lost. With a clearer vision and a truer image of his Maker, he could now go forth to help in that glorious work of restoring that image and clearing that vision in the great teeming world around him. And so the great commission comes to the regenerated man, “Go ye therefore, and teach all nations.” Matt. 28:19. They went, and they taught as He had taught “with signs following;” taught those who had forgotten God to see Him in His works, and to know Him by His power to cleanse and purify the heart that had known only wickedness.

THE wonders of the deep and the wonders of the hills are all of God, for He “alone doeth wonders.” Nebuchadnezzar, when he had seen the miracles which God had wrought, declared, “How great are His signs! and how mighty are His wonders!” Dan. 4:3. That heathen king was just arousing from the universal forgetfulness of the heathen world, and was learning to see God in the works which He performed. His kingdom stood long after he himself had been gathered to his fathers. Pharaoh refused to humble himself, refused to see God in the works which were done before him, and perished with his host in the waters that parted for those who listened to the voice of God. These are types of the present time. There are those who will not see God in their creation or the mighty works which He has done, and they will perish in the last great overthrow. But there are others who will see the Creator in His handiwork, will see Him in His wonderful work for and in them, will yield their will to His will, accept the sacrifice which He has made in their behalf, and will finally see and hail Him with joy when He comes to claim His own.

SO LET us reach out after Him, that our ears may be attuned to hear the still, small voice that is ever speaking to us; that our eyes may be opened to see Him in all His wonderful works about us; that the image of God may be restored in us; and that we may learn to glorify God in our bodies and in our spirits which are His. The wonders of the hills hold no secret from the true child of God; the glory of the cataracts is not a mystery to him; and he finds in every tree, or shrub, or flower, or waterfall a voice that speaks to him of the One who ever liveth, the Wonderful Counselor, the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace. C. M. SNOW.