ONE day, when I was a boy, my uncle invited me with some other young friends to have tea and spend the evening at his house.
During the evening we were asked to have some fruit and figs. Now I was very fond of figs, nothing was a greater treat to me. Well, while we were enjoying these good things, someone said, “I should not be much surprised if the dust on these figs is alive with insects.”
This seemed to me impossible, as I had never seen anything of the kind from figs before. I knew that rotten cheese and bad meat had insects, and stagnant water, too; but figs—the nicest of all things to my taste—could not, I thought, be like this.
“Let us see,” said my uncle; and he fetched his microscope from the next room, and soon had it adjusted on the table. He then took some dust from a fig and put it on a slip of glass, and placed it under the microscope.
After looking for a minute or two, he said, “Come and look for yourselves.” I ran to the table and looked through the tube, and to my surprise saw two or three insects that looked like tiny fat pigs. They seemed to be turning it over, and eating the best of the food.
Seeing us look so disappointed when we found that the sweet figs had such insects crawling over them, my uncle said, “Why, what has the glass done?”
We knew that the glass had done nothing except to open our eyes to the actual state and condition of the figs. My uncle said, “Surely it is better to know the truth than be deceived, though I fear by your looks that you wish you had not seen the insects, so that you might enjoy the figs more.”
I have never forgotten that evening, or the microscope and what it taught us, and I sometimes think whether the Bible is not a kind of microscope for us now, because it shows us the truth about everything; it reveals the true state of our hearts, and the true state in the world in which we live.
One of the things that the Bible tells us is, that by nature our hearts are deceitful above all things and desperately wicked. This is very unwelcome knowledge, but how much better it is to know our true state than to think we are all right and pleasing to God. Then it tells us the other side of it, how we may be cleansed from all our sins and evil ways —how we may be made fit for heaven and the presence of God through faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.
ML 04/14/1918