The drop of water--and a giant being!

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(Charles Spurgeon, "God's Estimate of Time" 1862)

"Surely the nations are like a drop in a bucket; they are regarded as dust on the scales; He weighs the islands as though they were fine dust!" Isaiah 40:15

Within the compass of a drop of water we are told that sometimes a thousand living creatures may be discovered; and to those diminutive creatures, no doubt, their size is something very important. There is a creature inside that drop which can only be seen by the strongest microscope--but it is a hundred times larger than its neighbor, and it feels, no doubt, that the difference is amazing and extraordinary.

But to you and to I, who cannot even see the largest of these creatures with the naked eye, the larger animalcule is as imperceptible as his dwarfish friend--they both seem so utterly insignificant that we squander whole millions of them, and are not very penitent if we destroy them by thousands.

But what would one of those little imperceptible animals say if some prophet of its own kind could tell them that there is a 'giant being' living that would reckon the 'whole world of a drop of water' as nothing, and could take up ten thousand thousand of those drops and scatter them without exertion of half its power; that this 'giant being' would not be encumbered if it should carry on the tip of its finger all the thousands that live in that great world--a drop of water; that this 'giant being' would have no disturbance of heart, even if the great king of one of the empires in that drop should gather all his armies against it and lead them to battle?

Why, then the minuscule creatures would say, "How can this be? We can hardly grasp the idea?"

But when that microscopic philosopher could have gotten an idea of man, and of the utter insignificance of its own self, and of its own little narrow world--then it would have achieved an easy task, compared with that which lies before us when we attempt to get an idea of our great God.

We think of the infinite nature of God in being able to marshal all the stars, and govern all the orbs which bespangle the brow of night; but I take it to be quite as great a wonder that He should even know that such insignificant nothings as we humans are in existence, much more that He should count every hair of our heads, and not allow one of them to fall to the ground without His express decree.

The Infinite is as much known in the 'small' as in the 'magnanimous', and God may be as really discovered by us in the drop of water as in the rolling orb. But this is astonishing of God--that He even observes us!

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