Emblems of the Holy Spirit: The Dove
The next emblem of which I want to speak is the dove: gentle, meek, innocent.
You read of the wrath of the Lamb, but you never read of the wrath of the Spirit. We are told in one place that men sought to take the kingdom of heaven by violence, but Christ says that the meek shall inherit the earth. All the world uses the dove as the emblem of peace and purity. It sy-mbolizes harmlessness. It seldom fights, and is easily frightened.
I have read a beautiful legend about a conference held by the doves to decide where they should make their abode. One suggested that they should go to the woods; but the objection was made that there they would be in danger from hawks. Another mentioned the cities; but boys would stone them there, and drive them away or kill them. Presently .some dove suggested that they go and hide in the clefts of the rocks, and there they were safe. “Oh, ye that dwell in Moab, leave the cities and dwell in the rock, and be like the dove that maketh her nest in the side of the hole’s mouth” (Jer. xlviii: 28).
In the next place, the dove stands for meekness, humility. The hardest thing that the devil has ever had to do in this world, in my opinion, is to counterfeit humility, lie can counterfeit all the other graces better than humility. A hypocrite is never meek.
A prominent Edinburgh lawyer gave me tins thought: “Humility, the fairest and loveliest flower that grew in Paradise, and the first that died, has rarely flourished since on mortal soil. It is so frail and so delicate a thing that it is gone if it but looks upon itself; and they who venture to show it prove by that single thought they have it not.”
That is the lesson that we get from the emblem of the dove. D:. Gordon said once that when Noah sent the dove out of the ark it returned because it could not find a resting place; but when Jesus came up out of the Jordan, the dove found a resting place, and it came and rested on the Son of God. Full of meekness, full of gentleness and innocence. That is what we want to be. God calls us to be wise as serpents, but harmless as doves.