Part 2 (1/2)
The river grows larger by its tributaries, but where is the tributary that can enlarge the One out of whom came everything and to whose infinite fullness all creation owes its being?
Unfathomable Sea: all life is out of Thee, And Thy life is Thy blissful Unity.
Frederick W. Faber The problem of why G.o.d created the universe still troubles thinking men; but if we cannot know why, we can at least know that He did not bring His worlds into being to meet some unfulfilled need in Himself, as a man might build a house to shelter him against the winter cold or plant a field of corn to provide him with necessary food. The word necessary is wholly foreign to G.o.d.
Since He is the Being supreme over all, it follows that G.o.d cannot be elevated. Nothing is above Him, nothing beyond Him. Any motion in His direction is elevation for the creature; away from Him, descent. He holds His position out of Himself and by leave of none. As no one can promote Him, so no one can degrade Him. It is written that He upholds all things by the word of His power. How can He be raised or supported by the things He upholds?
Were all human beings suddenly to become blind, still the sun would s.h.i.+ne by day and the stars by night, for these owe nothing to the millions who benefit from their light. So, were every man on earth to become atheist, it could not affect G.o.d in any way. He is what He is in Himself without regard to any other. To believe in Him adds nothing to His perfections; to doubt Him takes nothing away.
Almighty G.o.d, just because He is almighty, needs no support. The picture of a nervous, ingratiating G.o.d fawning over men to win their favor is not a pleasant one; yet if we look at the popular conception of G.o.d that is precisely what we see. Twentieth century Christianity has put G.o.d on charity. So lofty is our opinion of ourselves that we find it quite easy, not to say enjoyable, to believe that we are necessary to G.o.d. But the truth is that G.o.d is not greater for our being, nor would He be less if we did not exist. That we do exist is altogether of G.o.d's free determination, not by our desert nor by divine necessity.
Probably the hardest thought of all for our natural egotism to entertain is that G.o.d does not need our help. We commonly represent Him as a busy, eager, somewhat frustrated Father hurrying about seeking help to carry out His benevolent plan to bring peace and salvation to the world, but, as said the Lady Julian, I saw truly that G.o.d doeth all-thing, be it never so little.' The G.o.d who worketh all things surely needs no help and no helpers.
Too many missionary appeals are based upon this fancied frustration of Almighty G.o.d. An effective speaker can easily excite pity in his listeners, not only for the heathen but for the G.o.d who has tried so hard and so long to save them and has failed for want of support. I fear that thousands of younger persons enter Christian service from no higher motive than to help deliver G.o.d from the embarra.s.sing situation His love has gotten Him into and His limited abilities seem unable to get Him out of. Add to this a certain degree of commendable idealism and a fair amount of compa.s.sion for the underprivileged and you have the true drive behind much Christian activity today.
Again, G.o.d needs no defenders. He is the eternal Undefended. To communicate with us in all idiom we can understand, G.o.d in the Scriptures makes full use of military terms; but surely it was never intended that we should think of the throne of the Majesty on high as being under siege, with Michael and his hosts or some other heavenly beings defending it from stormy overthrow. So to think is to misunderstand everything the Bible would tell us about G.o.d. Neither Judaism nor Christianity could approve such puerile notions. A G.o.d who must be defended is one who can help us only while someone is helping Him. We may count upon Him only if He wins in the cosmic seesaw battle between right and wrong. Such a G.o.d could not command the respect of intelligent men; He could only excite their pity.
To be right we must think worthily of G.o.d. It is morally imperative that we purge from our minds all ign.o.ble concepts of the Deity and let Him be the G.o.d in our minds that He is in His universe. The Christian religion has to do with G.o.d and man, but its focal point is G.o.d, not man. Man's only claim to importance is that he was created in the divine image; in himself he is nothing. The psalmists and prophets of the Scriptures refer sad scorn to weak man whose breath is in his nostrils, who grows up like the gra.s.s in the morning only to be cut down and wither before the setting of the sun. That G.o.d exists for himself and man for the glory of G.o.d is the emphatic teaching of the Bible. The high honor of G.o.d is first in heaven as it must yet be in earth.
From all this we may begin to understand why the Holy Scriptures have so much to say about the vital place of faith and why they brand unbelief as a deadly sin. Among all created beings, not one dare trust it itself. G.o.d alone trusts in himself; all other beings must trust in Him. Unbelief is actually perverted faith, for it puts its trust not in the living G.o.d but in dying men. The unbeliever denies the self-sufficiency of G.o.d and usurps attributes that are not his. This dual sin dishonors G.o.d and ultimately destroys the soul of the man.
In His love and pity G.o.d came to us as Christ. This has been the consistent position of the Church from the days of the apostles. It is fixed for Christian belief in the doctrine of the incarnation of the Eternal Son. In recent times, however, this has come to mean something different from, and less than, what it meant to the early church. The Man Jesus as He appeared in the flesh has been equated with the G.o.dhead and all His human weaknesses and limitations attributed to the Deity. The truth is that the Man who walked among us was a demonstration, not of unveiled deity but of perfect humanity. The awful majesty of the G.o.dhead was mercifully sheathed in the soft envelope of Human nature to protect mankind. Go down,' G.o.d told Moses on the mountain, 'charge the people, less they break through unto the Lord to gaze, and many of them perish'; and later, Thou canst not see my face: for there shall no man see me, and live.'
Christians today appear to know Christ only after the flesh. They try to achieve communion with Him by divesting Him of His burning holiness and unapproachable majesty, the very attributes He veiled while on earth but a.s.sumed in fullness of glory upon His ascension to the Father's right hand. The Christ of popular Christianity has a weak smile and a halo. He has become Someone-up-There who likes people, at least some people, and these are grateful but not too impressed. If they need Him, He also needs them.
Let us not imagine that the truth of the divine self-sufficiency will paralyse Christian activity. Rather it will stimulate all holy endeavor. This truth, while a needed rebuke to human self-confidence, will when viewed in its Biblical perspective lift from our minds the exhausting load of mortality and encourage us to take the easy yoke of Christ and spend ourselves in Spirit-inspired toil for the honor of G.o.d and the good of mankind. For the blessed news is that the G.o.d who needs no one has in sovereign condescension set Himself to work by and in and through His obedient children.
If all this appears self-contradictory - Amen, be it so. The various elements of truth stand in perpetual ant.i.thesis, sometimes requiring us to believe apparent opposites while we wait for the moment when we shall know as we are known. Then truth which now appears to be in conflict with itself will arise in s.h.i.+ning unity and it will be seen that the conflict has not been in the truth but in our sin-damaged minds.
In the meanwhile our inner fulfilment lies in loving obedience to the commandments of Christ and the inspired admonitions of His apostles. It is G.o.d which worketh in you.' He needs no one, but when faith is present He works through anyone. Two statements are in this sentence and a healthy spiritual life requires that we accept both. For a full generation the first has been in almost total eclipse, and that to our deep spiritual injury.
Fountain of good, all blessing flows From Thee; no want Thy fulness knows; What but Thyself canst Thou desire?
Yet, self-sufficient as Thou art, Thou dost desire my worthless heart.
This, only this, dost Thou require.
Johann Scheffler
Chapter 7.
The Eternity of G.o.d This day our hearts approve with gladness what our reason can never fully comprehend, even Thine eternity, O Ancient of Days. Art Thou not from everlasting, O Lord, my G.o.d, mine Holy One?
We wors.h.i.+p Thee, the Father Everlasting, whose years shall have no end; and Thee, the love-begotten Son whose goings forth have been ever of old; we also acknowledge and adore Thee, Eternal Spirit, who before the foundation of the world didst live and love in coequal glory with the Father and the Son.
Enlarge and purify the mansions of our souls that they may be fit habitations for Thy Spirit, who dost prefer before all temples the upright heart and pure. Amen.
The concept of everlastingness runs like a lofty mountain range throughout the entire Bible and looms large in orthodox Hebrew and Christian thought. Were we to reject the concept, it would be altogether impossible for us to think again the thoughts of prophets and apostles, so full were they of the long dreams of eternity.
Because the word everlasting is sometimes used by the sacred writers to mean no more than long-lasting (as 'the everlasting hills'), some persons have argued that the concept of unending existence was not in the minds of the writers when they used the word but was supplied later by the theologians. This is of course a serious error, and, as far as I can see, has no ground in serious scholars.h.i.+p. It has been used by certain teachers as an escape from the doctrine of eternal punishment. These reject the eternity of moral retribution, and to be consistent they are forced to weaken the whole idea of endlessness. This is not the only instance where an attempt was made to slay a truth to keep it quiet lest it appear as a material witness against an error.
The truth is that if the Bible did not teach that G.o.d possessed endless being in the ultimate meaning of that term, we would be compelled to infer it from His other attributes, and if the Holy Scriptures had no word for absolute everlastingness, it would be necessary for us to coin one to express the concept, for it is a.s.sumed, implied, and generally taken for granted everywhere throughout the inspired Scriptures. The idea of endlessness is to the kingdom of G.o.d what carbon is to the kingdom of nature. As carbon is present almost everywhere, as it is an essential element in all living matter and supplies all life with energy, so the concept of everlastingness is necessary to give meaning to any Christian doctrine. Indeed I know of no tenet of the Christian creed that could retain its significance if the idea of eternity were extracted from it.
'From everlasting to everlasting, thou art G.o.d,' said Moses in the Spirit. 'From the vanis.h.i.+ng point to the vanis.h.i.+ng point' would be another way to say it quite in keeping with the words as Moses used them. The mind looks backward in time till the dim past vanishes, then turns and looks into the future till thought and imagination collapses from exhaustion: and G.o.d is at both points, unaffected by either.
Time marks the beginning of created existence, and because G.o.d never began to exist it can have no application to Him. 'Began' is a time-word, and it can have no personal meaning for the high and lofty One that inhabited eternity.
No age can heap its outward years on Thee; Dear G.o.d! Thou art; Thyself, Thine own eternity.
Frederick F. Faber Because G.o.d lives in an everlasting now, He has no past and no future. When time-words occur in the Scriptures they refer to our time, not to His. When the four living creatures before the throne cry day and night, 'Holy, holy, holy, Lord G.o.d Almighty, which was, and is, and is to come,' they are identifying G.o.d with the flow of creature-life with its familiar three tenses; and this is right and good, for G.o.d has sovereignly willed so to identify Himself. But since G.o.d is uncreated, He is not himself affected by that succession of consecutive changes we call time.
G.o.d dwells in eternity but time dwells in G.o.d. He has already lived all our tomorrows as He has lived all our yesterdays. An ill.u.s.tration offered by C. S. Lewis may help us here. He suggests that we think of a sheet of paper infinitely extended. That would be eternity. Then on that paper draw a short line to represent time. As the line begins and ends on that infinite expanse, so time began in G.o.d and will end in Him.
That G.o.d appears at time's beginning is not too difficult to comprehend, but that He appears at the beginning and end of time simultaneously is not so easy to grasp; yet it is true. Time is known to us by a succession of events. It is the way we account for consecutive changes in the universe. Changes take place not all at once but in succession, one after the other, and it is the relation of 'after' to 'before' that gives us our idea of time. We wait for the sun to move from east to west or for the hour hand to move around the face of the clock, but G.o.d is not compelled so to wait. For Him everything that will happen has already happened.
This is why G.o.d can say, 'I am G.o.d, and there is none like me, declaring the end from the beginning.' He sees the end and the beginning in one view. 'For infinite duration, which is eternity's self, includeth all succession,' says Nicholas of Cusa, 'and all which seemeth to us to be in succession existeth not posterior to Thy concept, which is eternity.... Thus, because Thou art G.o.d almighty, Thou dwellest within the wall of Paradise, and this wall is that coincidence where later is one with earlier, where the end is one with the beginning, where Alpha and Omega are the same.... For NOW and THEN coincide in the circle of the wall of Paradise. But, O my G.o.d, the Absolute and Eternal, it is beyond the present and the past that Thou dost exist and utter speech.'
When He was a very old man, Moses wrote the psalm from which I have quoted earlier in this chapter. In it he celebrates the eternity of G.o.d. To him this truth is a solid theological fact as firm and hard as that Mount Sinai with which he was so familiar, and for him it had two practical meanings: since G.o.d is eternal, He can be and continue forever to be the one safe home for His time-driven children. 'Lord, thou hast been our dwelling place in all generations.' The second thought is less comforting: G.o.d's eternity is so long and our years on earth are so few, how shall we establish the work of our hands? How shall we escape the abrasive action of events that would wear us out and destroy us? G.o.d fills and dominates the psalm, so it is to Him that Moses makes his plaintive appeal, 'So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.' May the knowledge of Thy eternity not be wasted on me!
We who live in this nervous age would be wise to meditate on our lives and our days long and often before the face of G.o.d and on the edge of eternity. For we are made for eternity as certainly as we are made for time, and as responsible moral beings we must deal with both.
'He hath set eternity in their heart,' said the Preacher, and I think he here sets forth both the glory and the misery of men. To be made for eternity and forced to dwell in time is for mankind a tragedy of huge proportions. All within us cries for life and permanence, and everything around us reminds us of mortality and change. Yet that G.o.d has made us of the stuff of eternity is both a glory and a prophecy yet to be fulfilled.
I hope it will not be found unduly repet.i.tious if I return again to that important pillar of Christian theology, the image of G.o.d in man. The marks of the divine image have been so obscured by sin that they are not easy to identify, but is it not reasonable to believe that one mark may be man's insatiable craving for immortality?
Thou wilt not leave us in the dust: Thou madest man, he knows not why; He thinks he was not made to die And Thou hast made him: Thou art just.
So reasons Tennyson, and the deepest instincts of the normal human heart agree with him. The ancient image of G.o.d whispers within every man of everlasting hope; somewhere he will continue to exist. Still he cannot rejoice, for the light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world troubles his conscience, frightening him with proofs of guilt and evidences of coming death. So is he ground between the upper millstone of hope and the nether stone of fear.
Just here the sweet relevancy of the Christian message appears. 'Jesus Christ ... hath abolished death, and hath brought life and immortality to light through the gospel.' So wrote the greatest Christian of them all just before he went out to meet his executioner. G.o.d's eternity and man's mortality join to persuade us that faith in Jesus Christ is not optional. For every man it must be Christ or eternal tragedy. Out of eternity our Lord came into time to rescue His human brethren whose moral folly had made them not only fools of the pa.s.sing world but slaves of sin and death as well.
Brief life is here our portion, Brief sorrow, short-lived care; The life that knows no ending, The tearless life is there.
There G.o.d, our King and Portion, In fullness of His grace, We then shall see forever, And wors.h.i.+p face to face.
Bernard of Cluny
Chapter 8.
G.o.d's Infinitude Our Heavenly Father: Let us see Thy glory, if it must be from the shelter of the cleft rock and from beneath the protection of Thy covering hand. Whatever the cost to us in loss of friends or goods or length of days let us know Thee as Thou art, that we may adore Thee as we should. Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.