Unseen Watcher
349
[535]
Every nation that has come upon the stage of action has been
permitted to occupy its place on the earth, that the fact might be
determined whether it would fulfill the purposes of the Watcher and
the Holy One. Prophecy has traced the rise and progress of the world’s
great empires—Babylon, Medo-Persia, Greece, and Rome. With each
of these, as with the nations of less power, history has repeated itself.
Each has had its period of test; each has failed, its glory faded, its
power departed.
While nations have rejected God’s principles, and in this rejection
have wrought their own ruin, yet a divine, overruling purpose has
manifestly been at work throughout the ages. It was this that the
prophet Ezekiel saw in the wonderful representation given him during
his exile in the land of the Chaldeans, when before his astonished gaze
were portrayed the symbols that revealed an overruling Power that has
to do with the affairs of earthly rulers.
Upon the banks of the river Chebar, Ezekiel beheld a whirlwind
seeming to come from the north, “a great cloud, and a fire infolding
itself, and a brightness was about it, and out of the midst thereof as
the color of amber.” A number of wheels intersecting one another
were moved by four living beings. High above all these “was the
likeness of a throne, as the appearance of a sapphire stone: and upon
the likeness of the throne was the likeness as the appearance of a man
above upon it.” “And there appeared in the cherubims the form of a
man’s hand under their wings.”
Ezekiel 1:4, 26
;
10:8
. The wheels were
so complicated in arrangement that at first sight they appeared to be
in confusion; yet they moved in perfect harmony. Heavenly beings,
[536]
sustained and guided by the hand beneath the wings of the cherubim,
were impelling those wheels; above them, upon the sapphire throne,
was the Eternal One; and round about the throne was a rainbow, the
emblem of divine mercy.
As the wheellike complications were under the guidance of the
hand beneath the wings of the cherubim, so the complicated play of
human events is under divine control. Amidst the strife and tumult of
nations He that sitteth above the cherubim still guides the affairs of
this earth.
The history of nations speaks to us today. To every nation and to
every individual God has assigned a place in His great plan. Today men