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TOPIC: Gordon, Samuel Dickey - Quiet Talks About the Healing Christ (Other Topics in this Collection)
SUBJECT: 19. Natural and Supernatural
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Natural and Supernatural
God is chary of the supernatural. He is lavish in nature. Nature is God in action. He loves nature's roads. He made them. He prefers them.
He will not hesitate for a moment to do the supernatural when the need calls for it. He will do a fresh act of creation, pure direct creation, before a single line of His Word is allowed to fail.
He will reach through and above the natural channels with the added touch before He will let one trusting child of His, in intelligent touch of heart and will, know disappointment. The flood of power, more than the usual thing, waits any emergency that plainly calls for it. But, God loves nature's regular paths. They are His own. Nature is God's way of working things out.
Christ avoids the sensational, the cheap, vulgar, catchy-in-the-bad-sense sensational. On more than one occasion He was at pains to avoid the crowd gaping for some touch of this morbid sort of sensationalism.
Though nothing is so sensational, in the good sense, as God's power in action in an unusual way in some sore emergency. Christ's miraculous healing created a tremendous sensation. And He made use of that sensation to teach of the Father's eager love, and gentle patience, and lavish power.
The supernatural has a touch of the spectacular to us, because we are not used to it. It is unusual. It catches attention at once. The natural hardly gets any attention, we are so used to it.
Nature is simple and quiet. The things that mean most to us, and to our daily lives, come noiselessly, softly. They work modestly. no one ever heard the sun or the moon, busily at work keeping the whole order of nature in blessed rhythm for our sakes.
The dew does its gracious work shyly. It's the small, warm, gentle rain that the soil welcomes most, and responds to most quickly. The air does its unfailing ministry so modestly we scarcely ever think of its presence, till some foul intruder spoils its sweet odour and neutralizes its life-giving power.
Truth is a Quaker. It wears a plain garb and talks in quiet gentle speech. It never calls attention to itself. It goes by almost unnoticed in the bustle of the street. But it breathes out a healthful atmosphere, and leaves a fragrant trail.
Error wears flashy clothes. It talks in loud, boisterous tones. It blusters, and swaggers the full width of the sidewalk. And the crowd stops and stares, and wists not that the air had been befouled. Error steals some truth for wings, else it would fall dead flat at once.
The Devil borrows truth's clothes, without asking permission. He talks in a loud, positive, there's-no-doubt-about-this voice. So men's eyes and ears may be caught and befouled.
Nature is simple. That's God's touch. Satan tangles things up. Truth is so simple as to seem too easy, sometimes. One instinctively says "of course." Sin makes life's problems complex. Truth is plain spoken and unpretentious. One becomes wary and weary of a cloud of words, many words, long, big-sounding words.
Christ is chary of the supernatural. He is lavish in nature. He gives so lavishly all the time that there would be no need of the other, the extra, the supernatural, if it were not for the terrible emergency of life.
Sin is forever setting life all askew, and making emergencies. A single touch of the supernatural quickly catches the eye. A flood of the natural, keeping the whole swing of life a-going, rarely gets a thought.
Yet, though already so lavish in His habitual giving, and so thoughtful about giving outside of this, Christ is on the eager run to give the more-than-common touch of power, the supernatural, when need be, to meet the ever present emergency so common in life.
Sin's ravages are epidemic. There's a wilful ignoring of the simple natural laws of the body. There's an ignorant disregard of nature's beneficent laws of action. There's a constant need of the supernatural touch. And Christ thought fully gives that touch in the way that will help us best and most.
Our well-being, body and spirit, is precious to Him. The integrity of His pledged Word He holds sacred. He is on the heels of evil, like a flash, before any trusting child of His shall be disappointed, or a scratch of His Word allowed to slip.