Quotes about Nature

Would the Lord have dressed the flowers with a beauty that runs freely to meet our eyes if it were wrong to be moved by such beauty? Would He have endowed them with so sweet a fragrance that flows freely into our nostrils if it were wrong to be moved by the pleasantness of such fragrance?

The sins of the saints are pardonable, not because of their nature as saints, but because they obtain pardon from God's mercy.

But the nimbleness of the human mind in searching out heaven and earth and the secrets of nature, and when all ages have been compassed by its understanding and memory, in arranging each thing in its proper order, and in inferring future events from past, clearly shows that there lies hidden in man something separate from the body.

Adam did not take away the will, but made it a slave where it was free. It is not only prone to sin, but is made subject to sin.

Can we conceive that man was so placed in the earth as to be ignorant of his own origin, and of the origin of those things which he enjoyed?

The law itself does not produce sin; it finds sin in us. It offers life to us; but we, being evil, derive nothing but death from it.

The true knowledge of God is not only to know him as the maker of the world, but also to be persuaded that the world is directed by him, and further to know the nature of that direction.

We acknowledge, indeed, that Christ in human nature is called a Son, not like believers by gratuitous adoption merely, but the true, natural, and, therefore, only Son, this being the mark which distinguishes him from all others. Those of us who are regenerated to a new life God honours with the name of sons; the name of true and only-begotten Son he bestows on Christ alone. But how is he an only Son in so great a multitude of brethren, except that he possesses by nature what we acquire by gift?

God was pleased to indicate and typify both the gift of future and eternal felicity by terrestrial blessings, as well as the dreadful nature of spiritual death by bodily punishments, at that time when he delivered his covenant to the Israelites as under a kind of veil.

When Paul reminds the Galatians of what they were before they came to the knowledge of Gods he says that they "did service unto them which by nature are no gods," (Gal. 4:8). Because he does not say ??????, was their superstition excusable? This superstition, to which he gives the name of ?????, he condemns as much as if he had given it the name of ??????.

Now God's image is the perfect excellence of human nature which shone in Adam before his defection, but was subsequently so vitiated and almost blotted out that nothing remains after the ruin except what is confused, mutilated, and disease-ridden. Therefore in some part it now is manifest in the elect, in so far as they have been reborn in the spirit; but it will attain its full splendor in heaven.

We should forever keep in mind that we must not brood on the wickedness of man, but realize that he is God's image bearer.