Nature has stirred the admiration and awe of peoples in all ages. The love and appreciation of its beauty have enriched painting and music, poetry and prose. When rightly understood, "nature's gentle doings," as a poet expressed it, teach grand lessons. They inspire and uplift human thought and thus aid in rending the veil of materialism with its ugliness and drabness, its limitations and fears.
The Scriptures draw freely on nature for comparisons and symbols. The green pastures and still waters of Palestine, its rocks, hills, and mountains, the heavenly bodies, the eagle soaring in the clear ether—all serve to convey a moral or to teach a spiritual truth. The Master, Christ Jesus, used the "doings" of nature to make his teaching plain to his simple hearers, particularly that of the divine Father's loving and abundant care for His children. "Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow," he begins one of his comparisons in his Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 6:28), words which have never since failed to comfort anxious hearts, and which will continue to comfort.
Yet the Master did not worship nature or commune with it; neither did he fall, like so many learned men of his day, into the error of pantheism. He rejected the belief of God as dwelling in matter and the material universe. To him Spirit and its perfect, immortal creations were the only realities of being. To those of his hearers who, in spite of what he taught of God as the only cause, were blind to the import of his mission and still clung to a false material sense of causation, he once said (Matt. 16:3), "Ye can discern the face of the sky; but can ye not discern the signs of the times?"
