“God must love the common man, He made so many of them!”
I forget where I read these words, but they have remained in my mind, not because of their truth, but because of their plausibility. They have a nice, comforting flavor, but one doesn’t have to think for any length of time to realize how specious they are. For if value in the sight of the Almighty is to be measured by number, then the human race is nowhere in the divine esteem when compared to roaches, mosquitos, etc.
In any case God didn’t make men with distinguishing characteristics — the common and the less common, the inexpensive and the expensive. He made Man, and right through human history He has refused to accept human distinctions and standards of judgment. One whom the world calls a “common man” may be a pearl of great price in the sight of God. And conversely, one who is lauded in every generation as “great” may be (and probably is) beneath divine contempt.
Alexander the “Great” and Napoleon the “Great” have been reckoned as heroes right down from their own time, yet it is certain that in the eyes of God they were merely selfish, power-drunk murderers callously using millions of their fellowmen as so many pawns in a game of ambition. By contrast Jesus chose for immortality (in both the human and divine sense of the word) people such as the widow who cast the trivial sum of two mites into the temple offertory, and Mary, who anointed his feet. “Wheresoever this gospel is preached,” said Jesus of her, “this which this woman hath done shall be spoken of for a memorial of her.”
It has been thus in every generation. “To this man will I look, even to him . . . that trembleth at My Word.” By this test the objects of God’s special regard have been remarkably few and most of them insignificant by ordinary worldly judgments. A handful of people were saved out of the flood; another handful from Sodom; yet another handful from the destruction of Jericho. And the Lord Himself could muster only a meager handful of disciples after three and a half years of strenuous effort and appeal.
“I only am left, and they seek my life to take it away,” wailed downcast Elijah. But it was not true. “Yet have I reserved to myself seven thousand that have not bowed the knee to Baal,” the angel of the Lord said to him. The number of the faithful remnant was indeed small, but there were more than Elijah suspected, because their very character was such as to keep them away from the limelight. They were not the great ones of the earth, but in the sight of God they were the truly great. When Jesus said, “Blessed are the meek,” He was speaking about this class of individuals. In every generation they are hard to find, and especially in these last days of the Gentiles. “When the Son of Man cometh, shall He find faith on the earth?” Scripture foretells that in that same day “the kings of the earth, and the great men, and the rich men, and the chief captains, and the mighty men, as well as every bondman and every free man will hide themselves in the dens and in the rocks of the mountains; and will say to the mountains and rocks, Fall on us, and hide us from the face of Him that sits upon the throne.”
The Origin of the Organic World – Part One