Daily Devotionals

Bowen's Daily Meditations

Devotional: November 5th

"As the heaven is high above the earth, so great is his mercy toward them that fear him." - Psalms 103:11.

Perfect love casteth out fear; but not the fear "here spoken of. There is no torment in this fear. It is at home in company with the most unlimited confidence. The man that trusts in God is the same as the man that fears God; the two expressions are convertible, and are over and over interchanged in the word of God. Let the man that thinks he fears God, see to it that he trusts in God: and let the man that thinks he trusts in God, see to it that he fears God.

He fears God who has a high sense of the value of his favor, and cannot bear that any cloud should come in for a moment between his conscience and the smile of God. He that is most assiduous in the endeavor to please God; who is most distressed at the thought of his displeasure; he to whom his commandments are not grievous; who beholds with satisfaction all the attributes of God; he it is that fears God. You observe that this fearer of God is in the enjoyment of God’s infinite mercy; so that the spring of his devotion is not the apprehension of wrath. The love of God shed abroad in his heart leads him to fear God.

How much David knew of the height of the heavens, what, estimate he formed of the distance of the heavenly bodies, we know not. Doubtless he viewed them as at distances more vast than any that separate the different points of the earth’s surface. He would have heard with much surprise a statement to the effect that a journey of four hours performed at the rate of the velocity of light, 200,000 miles a second, would take us only to the outskirts of our system; a journey of three or four years would take us to the first fixed stars; a journey of 60,000 years would take us to the stars of a certain distant nebula; and that we should even then be probably in the lower parts of creation. What would have been the effect of such a revelation as this, upon his mind? His conceptions of the power, wisdom, majesty, immensity of God, would have been vastly augmented; but think you that his conceptions of the mercy of God would have not been elevated? They would have been elevated; for the mercy of God is in the nature of God; grows as that grows upon us, expands as that expands before us; and when through Christ we have entered into relation to it, every star becomes an exponent of it, every interstellar space a link in the endless chain that measures it.

-