"the earth is full of His unfailing love." Ancient Wonders, Present Phenomena and outright Natural Wonder.

 

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The above meme from the New International Version says, "the earth is filled with God's unfailing love".  We could but marvel if we tried to take it all in via our senses, and be overcome by the experience of nature.

We see Hawaii and other situations around the world, and see some miracles unfolding, each with their own impetus, each with their own unknown purpose.  California soon to get massive Hurricane flooding, too.

Miracles and wonders unfolding in the world today, such as it as ever been, in some ways, such to give us a sense of awe at the scope and scale of various things.

Elsewhere, I wrote that God also created Light so we could take it all into our senses, and for the unsighted, they too have ways to sense the world around them.  No one is without--even prisoners behind thick walls know the wonders and perils of nature.

People tend to go back and forth, that God works through nature, and yet others that God "is" nature, and back and forth, ad infinitum, with never a clarifying moment afforded to either.

What we do know, God created nature, whether it is called a "part of Him" or a "tool of His".

Right now, we are suffering our own wonder in the Southeastern USA: heat and humidity, along with almost daily thunderstorms, but this pales compared to things like tornadoes and typhoons in other parts of the world, and we here know we've been served comparatively well by nature, as we watch our crops come to fruition, the corn crop, and the later cotton crop, and other things.

In our own region, thunderstorms generally bring a temporary drop in the heat, and also most times bring rain as well.  This has served us well, so far, and the crops have had a nice bit of rainfall, even if the peak heat of the day chafes those same crops.  On their own with the rain and heat, some Sunflower seeds I planted have came up nearly a meter tall each, though the specimens are crowded and could use a more regular regimen of food and water.

One can look with the usual alarmism at nature, but nature has been somewhat random in the past, with even the largest mightiest rivers said to have frozen and points in antiquity, or the Hanging Gardens of old, residing in what is now desert land.  Or the ancient written record of giant grape bundles in the comparatively barren region of Israel and surroundings.

What was the very Garden of Gethsemane in which Jesus prayed to God, seems now to be a barren plantless crag.

Things change.  The port of Alexandria, along with much of its ancient coastline, underwater today, with people having lived there as late as 800 AD, but again, now underneath the Mediterranean Sea.

Such also, man made wonder of the Inca and Maya, large cities built of stone, that could, themselves, stand the test of time, and yet the builders and administrators falter and their stories are lost in the fog of centuries, their names forgotten, their cities abandoned, and their reasons both lost and forgotten.

Some memes from the book of Romans.

 

"Consider it all joy...."

"Consider it all joy" James writes, "when you fall into temptation, for temptation works patience, and patience will have its own fruits."

What does this mean when we're "dead to the world"?

We are at once, spiritually separated, but also in fellowship with believers, and then, sometimes at our own peril, reaching to others with the Good News.  

St Anthony was one that completely separated himself from the world, taking to a cave in the desert.  One would think he might become bored or discouraged, but no.  He found variety, and even alone in a remote cave, there were temptations that assailed him.

You see that he removed himself from the world, stuck out alone, and could work in no way for others.  That's the different with some of us, that some are more busy in their own sandbox, while yet others take to the field: as the Bible points out, we all have our own unique talents, some for reaching out, and some for other things.

In removing himself from the world, St Anthony made a difficult decision, and indeed, history doesn't inform us as to why he made that choice.  Only Anthony knew what difficulties came to him in his regular life, what he had to flee when he chose to go into complete solitude.

But for us?

"Consider it joy."

The rewards of patience mean that we've played the game and seen how the world comes at us, and to an extent, we learn to be unflapped, unphased, by so much of the world's trickery, we become partly sullen and strong in the face of some of Satan's wiles.

The work of patience is a kind of spiritual armor that the believer takes up, a toolkit or a defensive weapon that we use to protect ourselves from the temptations and trials of the world around us.

"strength and beauty are in His sanctuary" Psalm 96 and the church.

 "strength and beauty" are in there.  Not because only perfect people go to church, but because we find our own spiritual strength and beauty there.  We come in broken and humble, perhaps humiliated or impoverished, and the love of God comes to us and strengthens us; forgiveness strengthens us.

Psalm 94, and some NIV memes.

 

Spurgeon on the very thought of Christ being a healing thing.

The Christian knows that God looks upon him as standing in union with Jesus. Union to the risen Lord is a consolation of the most abiding order; it is, in fact, everlasting. Let sickness prostrate us, have we not seen hundreds of believers as happy in the weakness of disease as they would have been in the strength of hale and blooming health? Let death's arrows pierce us to the heart, our comfort dies not, for have not our ears full often heard the songs of saints as they have rejoiced because the living love of God was shed abroad in their hearts in dying moments? Yes, a sense of acceptance in the Beloved is an everlasting consolation.

-Charles Spurgeon

From the void primeval, and then becoming the era of God's love.

"before the sun is just a bright spot in the night time..."

Light, hermanos, is the creation of God.

"Light, be" says our wondrous Creator.

Naturally, such as in the void of space, the light is not diffuse, and there is no bright sky such as we know it.  The sun is just like a really blight light bulb, whereas here on the surface of the Earth, the entire sky has brightness when the sun is shining.

Think of it such that one cloud passes before the sun mid-day.  The sky doesn't go completely dark, you see, because there is luminance, or a measurable brightness about it. 

But in the dead of night, the world is more like the days of old, save for the stars shining, the days of creation, before there was light.  In those days, the apostle John cryptically states, "the Word was with God".

The uncreated universe, the void primeval, and God thought to fill that with something, and such the manifesting of love began, and then after, a fellowship in His Word.

I say all this lest we forget what it was, and what it yet could be, as God's miracles unfold and unfurl here in our world.