God Is the Eternal
Our general subject is. The God of the Bible; the God of the Bible as distinguished from the god of “Theosophy” and the god of “Christian Science” and the god of “Spiritualism” and the god of “New Thought” and the God of “Unitarianism” and the God of “the New Theology” and the god of “Modern Philosophy,” and the god of “Modernism” in general. In our earlier studies of this general subject. The God of the Bible, we have already seen: first, that The God of the Bible is a Personal God; second, that The God of the Bible is essentially Spirit, invisible, and incorporeal, but that He has manifested Himself to men in a visible form, and that He has a form now in which He manifests Himself in the celestial world; third, that according to the teaching of the Bible there is but one God, but that in this one God there are Three Persons, God the Father, God the Son (Jesus Christ) and God the Holy Spirit; and fourth, we have seen that God is everywhere, but that He manifests Himself in the fullness of His Presence and glory in Heaven in a way that He does not manifest Himself here on earth.
The special subject of this chapter is. The God of the Bible: God is the Eternal I Am. He Always was, Always is and Always Shall be. And he is Always the Same. I have five texts. You will find the first text in Ex. 3: 13-15:
“And Moses said unto God, Behold, when I come unto the children of Israel, and shall say unto them. The God of your fathers has sent me unto you; and they shall say to me, What is his name? what shall I say unto them? And God said unto Moses, I am That I Am: and He said. Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I am hath sent me unto you. And God said moreover unto Moses, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, Jehovah, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, hath sent me unto you: this (i. e., Jehovah) is my name forever, and this (i. e., the name Jehovah) is my memorial unto all generations.’’
You will find the second text in Gen. 21:33:
“And Abraham planted a tamarisk tree in Beersheba, and called there on the name of Jehovah, the Everlasting God.”
You will find the third text in Isa. 40:28:
“Hast thou not known? hast thou not heard? The everlasting God, Jehovah, the Creator of the ends of the earth, fainteth not, neither is weary; there is no searching of His understand¬ ing.”
You will find the fourth text in Ps. 90: 1-4:
“Lord, thou hast been our dwelling-place in all generations. Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever thou hadst formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, thou art God, Thou turnest man to destruction; and sayest, Return, ye children of men. For a thousand years in thy sight are hut as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night.’’
And the fifth text you will find in Ps. 102:24-27:
‘T said, O my God, take me not away in the midst of my days: thy years are through¬ out all generations. Of old didst thou lay „ the foundation of the earth: and the heavens are the work of thy hands. They shall perish, but thou shalt endure; yea, all of them shall wax old like a garment; as a vesture shalt thou change them, and they shall be changed: but thou art the same, and thy years have no end.”
All these passages of Scripture are from the Old Testament and two of the five are from the first two books of the Bible. These passages were written about thirty-three hundred and seventy years ago, and one of the utterances here recorded was made by Abraham something like three thousand and eight hundred years ago. Yet these passages present to us a conception of God of the profoundest philosophical wisdom and of the loftiest conceivable sublimity, unequaled by any¬ thing even in this day of advanced thinking, except in so far as men have derived their thoughts of God from the Bible. How did Isaiah, and David, and Moses, and Abraham, living in such a far away past, many centuries before even the earliest ethnic philosophers had worked out their vague and indefinite and now entirely antiquated conceptions of God, attain to such a lofty view of God? There is but one rational answer to such a question: namely, God Himself supernaturally revealed Himself to them and declared to them these great truths about Himself; and the Bible is, even in its most ancient parts, beyond an honest question a supernatural Book, a Supernatural Revelation, and the Unique and Inerrant Inspiration of the Bible is a scientifically proven fact. Modern religious liberalists and “Biblical critics” have made long, laborious, scholarly, subtle, and determined efforts to prove the contrary, and to make us believe that a Supernatural Revelation and Inerrant Inspiration were impossibilities, but the actual facts in the case, which we all have here right before our eyes to-day, demonstrate the utter silliness of their so-called “science,” they are sciolists and not scientists.
I. God Is the Eternal I Am
The first thing that these sublime utterances of Isaiah, David, Moses, and Abraham make clear is that, God is the Eternal I Am. With Him there is neither past nor future, it is all one Eternal Present. He never began to be and He will never cease to be. GOD AL¬ WAYS IS. Our present day scientists are telling us of the vast antiquity of the globe on which we live, which we call the Earth. They once talked of the many thousands of years that it had been in existence; but now they talk of the many millions and hundreds of millions of years of its existence. That is very largely guesswork, and guesswork of the most baseless character; but they have so constantly iterated and re¬ iterated their guesses that they have now with them all the force of scientifically proven certainty. With the average so-called ‘‘scientist” of the present day, the constant repetition of a hypothesis or of a wild guess, or even of a lie has all the force of scientific demonstration. Ask him how he knows the Evolutionary Hypothesis, even in its most sweeping and daring and utterly unsubstantiated forms, to be true, and he re¬ plies, “Why, all scientists are agreed about it.” Yes, but why are they agreed about it? Upon what scientifically ascertained facts and unescapable logical inferences from those facts do they base their opinion? And again all you get is the reply that “they are all agreed about it.” This form of argument has no weight whatever with any man who is familiar with the history of scientific and philosophical opinions and who therefore knows that over and over again through the many centuries of human thinking all the philosophers and “all the scientists” have been perfectly agreed upon what we all now know to be error. If any one is well informed and is also candid, he will not accept any theory simply on the ground of a statement that “all scientists are agreed about it.” When you ask this class of “scientists” how they know that there was not only a cave man or cave men, as of course we all know there have been and still are, but how they know that the whole present human race are descendants of primitive cave men again they reply, “All scientists are agreed about it.” But why are they agreed about it? Is there any scientific or historical proof that the races living upon earth to-day are descended from a primitive cave man, a man part beast and part man? They reply again, “All scientists are agreed about it.” Yes, but why are they agreed about it? Every particle of real evidence about the men of thousands of years ago is that they were men of a high type intellectually and that they had wrought out a fine and well developed civilization. But supposing the scientists are right in this matter of the vast antiquity of the earth, suppose that this earth is millions of years old, and there is nothing in the first chapter of Genesis, properly understood, and literally interpreted, to prove that it is not; for the careful and thorough student of the first chapter of Genesis knows that there is a great gap of no one knows how many centuries or chiliads between Gen. i: i and Gen. 1: 3, I say, even if these suppositions that this earth. is hundreds of millions or billions of years old, are true, even in that case, when this earth began to exist these hundreds of millions or billions of years ago, when the stars and sun and moon began to be, God Already WAS. In the very first verse in the Bible He is seen, ‘’in the beginning,” as already existing, and as “creating the heavens and the earth.” Go back, back, back, back, endlessly and eternally back, and God always is, and speaking to Moses out in the desert over thirty-four hundred years ago, when Moses asked who He was, Jehovah replied, “/ Am that I Am, and my name is I AM, I Am the Eternal I Am.”
There is an eternity back of us as well as an eternity ahead of us and the God of the Bible is as Isaiah says in one place, Isa. 57: 15, “the high and lofty One that inhabiteth eternity.” Eternity has no end at either lOO end, ahead of us or hack of us, and God is through it all, God has no beginning and no ending.
Of course it is impossible for the finite mind to conceive of eternity, especially of an eternity back of us. When we try to think of an eternity back of us the question inevitably arises with every really thought¬ ful person, if there is an endless eternity back of us how then did we ever get to the present moment? And, of course, we cannot answer it. But the thought that there is not an eternity back of us is equally in¬ conceivable by the finite mind; for if you say that there is not an eternity back of us, the question inevitably arises, If there is not an eternity back of us, go back to the starting point, however many millions or billions of years back of us that may be, what was before that? And again no answer is possible, and you are landed in an equally unfathomable and impenetrable fog of impossibility and inconceivability. There is an eternity back of us, there must be; and the utterly inconceivable is at the same time the certainly true. And God throughout all the eternity back of us is the Eternal I Am, and He is the Eternal I Am to-day, and in the Eternity still ahead of us He will always be the Eternal I Am. As the Psalmist puts it (and, by the way, in this instance Moses himself is the Psalmist), ‘‘Even from everlasting to everlasting, thou art God.’’
We saw a while ago how the New Testament critics and Modernists and New Theology men are trying to discredit Paul, and thereby are in reality discrediting themselves. The Old Testament critics have turned their heaviest artillery upon Moses, to discredit him lOI
even if they cannot discredit any one else. We see from these passages which I have read you, how by so doing they also are discrediting themselves. The God of Moses, who wrote about 1450 B.C., was a far greater and far more wonderful Being than the God of Professor Gerald Birney Smith, ^’Professor of Christian Theology” of the University of Chicago in 1922 A.D., or than the god of any of the “Modernist” “Professors of Theology.”
The very name “Jehovah,” the distinctive name of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God of the Old Testament and the God of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ as well, also sets forth this great truth of the eternity of God. This name is derived from the frequently used Hebrew verb meaning “to be” (in the first person, present, indicative, I am), and sets forth the thought that God is Eternal and Immutable, The Eternally Existing One, One “who will never he other than He is” This significance of the Name Jehovah comes out clearly in two of the texts that I announced in opening, Gen. 21:33; Isa. 40:28; as you will see if you will study these texts carefully, which we will not now take time to do.
No words of human comment can add anything to the sublimity of this Divinely given Bible conception of God. The wonderful truth of the Eternity of God, that God is the Eternal / Am, is not one so much to be commented upon as to be meditated upon by each one of us in “the secret place” alone, until our souls are filled with wonder and awe and adoration and worship and unhesitating and absolute faith. In view of this great truth about God we see new significance in the words of our Lord Jesus uttered in His prayer the night before His crucifixion, “And this is life eternal, that they should know thee the only true God, and Him whom thou didst send, even Jesus Christ’’ (Jno. 17:3). And in John’s words in his First Epistle, written undoubtedly not only by inspiration but also with the words of our Lord in his mind, “We know that the Son of God is come, and hath given us an understanding, that we know him that is true, and we are in him that is true, even in his Son Jesus Christ. This is the true God, and eternal life. My little children, guard yourselves from idols” (I Jno. 5:20, 21).
In the Bible revelation of God we find this attribute of Eternity ascribed not only to the Father but also to the Son, Jesus Christ, as well. In Phil. 2: 6 and the following verses we are told that the Divine Per¬ son Who emptied Himself of His Divine form and Divine glory and took upon Him “the form of a servant” and “was made in the likeness of men” and thus became incarnate in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, and then became “obedient even unto death, yea, the death of the cross,” before thus becoming incarnate, ‘’existed in the form of God.” The Greek participle translated “being” in the Authorized Version and “existing” in the Revised Version is a peculiar and deeply significant word, and seems to indicate “to exist originally” (see margin R. V.), and in any case the verse points to the eternal pre-existence of our Lord Jesus Christ. The same thought is found in John 1:1, 14, where we are told that the Eternal Word Who became flesh in the person of Jesus of Nazareth already ^‘in the beginning.’^ The exact words are: “In the beginning was the Word,” i. e., in the very beginning of all created things He already was. We find the same thought again in Heb. i: 6-12, where in speaking of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the writer says:
“And when he again bringeth in the firstborn into the world he saith, And let all the angels of God worship him. And of the angels he saith. Who maketh his angels winds, And his ministers a flame of fire: but of the Son he saith, Thy throne, O God, is forever and ever; And the sceptre of uprightness is the sceptre of thy kingdom. Thou hast loved righteousness, and hated iniquity; therefore God, thy God, hath anointed thee with the oil of glad¬ ness above thy fellows. And, Thou, Lord, in the beginning didst lay the foundation of the earth; and the heavens are the works of thy hands: They shall perish; but thou continuest: and they all shall wax old as doth a garment; and as a mantle shalt thou roll them up, as a garment, and they shall be changed: but thou art the same, and thy years shall not fail.”
The Eternity of the third person of the Divine Trinity, the Holy Spirit, is also taught in the Bible, e. g., in Heb. 9: 14 He is spoken of as “The Eternal Spirit.” Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are die One Jehovah, the Eternal I Am. They existed from all eternity and will exist to all eternity.
In this wondrous truth of the Eternity of the Triune God of the Bible, we get the answer to the question that a very shallow and very silly class of agnostics and atheists ask you when you urge that the marks of intelligent design everywhere in the whole universe from the largest star to the minutest animalculse prove the existence of an intelligent designer and creator of the material universe. Then they ask “Who made God?” The great truth we are now studying answers the question, He was never made, He never began to be. He always Was, He always Is and He always Shall be.
II, God Always the Same,
But the Bible teaches us not only that God is the Eternal I Am, that He always Is, is from all Eternity and to all Eternity; but the Bible also teaches that, He is always the same. In James i: 17 we read:
“Every good gift and every perfect gift is
from above, coming down from the Father
of lights, with whom can he no variation,
neither shadow that is cast by turning.”
The figure used in this verse is taken from the variations, the changing phases of the moon and some of the other heavenly bodies, and the thought is that there are no variations with God as there are with the moon, but that He is ever and always the same. In the Old Testament also we find the same great truth. In Mai. 3: 6 Jehovah declares:
“I, Jehovah, change not.”
God never changes in His character or His purposes. He is always ever just the same from all Eternity and to all Eternity. The extreme Evolutionists tell us that there is a constant evolution or change going on in all forms of Being. It is not true. In the one and only Being who has existed from all Eternity there has not been one particle of change from all Eternity back of us and will be none to all Eternity ahead of us. “If this is true, how is it then,” some one may ask, “that we are told in Jonah 3:10: “And God saw their works, that they turned from their evil way; and God repented of the evil, that he had said that he would do unto them; and did it not?” The answer to this seemingly puzzling question is very simple. It is just because God did not change, just because He remained absolutely the same in His character, infinitely hating sin and in His purpose to visit sin with judgment, that when Nineveh changed in its attitude toward sin, God necessarily, just because He did not change in His character changed in His attitude toward Nineveh and in His dealing with Nineveh. If God always remains the same, if His attitude toward sin and righteousness is unchanging, then must His dealings with men change as they turn from sin to repentance. His character remains forever the same and His purpose as to how to deal with sin remains ever the same, but for that very reason His dealings with men change as they change from a position that is hateful to His unchangeable hatred of sin to one that is pleasing to His unchangeable love of righteousness.
But the objector will still ask, “If it is true that God is always the same, how then is it that we are told in Gen. 6:6, 7: “And it repented Jehovah that He had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart. And Jehovah said, I will destroy man whom I have created?” This question may seem a little more puzzling than the former one, but the answer to this is also simple. It is this: Man’s wicked¬ ness had become so great on this earth and so abhorrent to God that his very creation (which God Himself had brought to pass) was the object of great grief to God. This was not because God had changed but because He remained the same that He always had been in His infinite hatred of sin. This does not necessarily imply that God wished, all things considered, that He had not created man. It only means just exactly what it says, ^‘that because of man’s great and ever-increasing sin it ‘grieved God’ that He had made man on the earth.” Many things that you and I do are a grief to us, and yet, everything considered, we do not wish that we had not done them. By God’s repenting that He had made man is meant as the context (v. 7) clearly shows, that He turned from his creative dealings with man to His destroying dealings, just as the Bible puts it, “And Jehovah said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the ground.” This destruction of man whom He had created was necessitated by man’s sin, the unchangeably Holy God must destroy man who has become so sunken in sin.
In this ever-changing world, a world that has changed more rapidly in its business, its politics, its international relations, and in its civilization and dominant ideas, in its science and philosophy, in its ethics and in its religion during the last eight years than in any other period of its history, and amid the startling and sometimes appalling changes that are taking place in men and women, sometimes in the men and women we most intimately know and most dearly love, what a comfort and what a joy it is to know that there is one Being who never changes one particle, that He is always the same, ‘hhe same yesterday and to¬ day, yea, and forever” (Heb. 13:8). When your head is bewildered and your heart is sick amid the rapid changes that are taking place to-day in institutions, and in things, and in men, and even in preachers and other religious leaders, just look up to God and behold Him and rejoice in Him as the One who is always absolutely the same, the same in His infinite wisdom, the same in His infinite righteousness, the same in His infinite Holiness, the same in His infinite power, and the same in His infinite love. There is scarcely another thought in the whole range of glorious Bible truth more comforting than that. Oh, I not only worship and adore but rejoice in and rest in this God of the Bible, the Unchangeable God, God the Father, Son and Holy Ghost.
III. God Is Self -existent.
There is one more thought that we must consider in connection with the Eternity and Immutability of God, the God of the Bible, “the only true God”; that is, that God has not only always existed and is always the same, but also, God is self -existent. God not only exists from all eternity but He exists from Himself. This tremendous thought is found in our Lord’s own words in Jno. 5: 26 where He says:
“The Father has life in Himself.’’
Not life derived from any one else or from anything else but ‘’life in Himself” He is self-existent. Then our Lord added regarding Himself, the second person of the Divine Trinity, that the Father had given to Him, “the Son also to have life in Himself,” The same great thought is found also in that most profoundly philosophical discourse that was ever delivered on this earth, Paul’s sermon on the Areopagus in Athens, to the Epicurean and Stoic philosophers, recorded in Acts 17: 24-28:
“The God that made the world and all things therein. He, being Lord of heaven and earth, dwelleth not in temples made with hands; neither is He served by men’s hands, as though He needed anything, seeing He Himself giveth to all life, and breath, and all things; and He made of one every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth, having determined their appointed seasons, and the bounds of their habitation; that they should seek God, if haply they might feel after Him, and find Him, though He is not far from each one of us: for
in Him we live, and move, and have our be-
In this thought also, the thought that God is eternally self -existent, we have the answer to the very silly atheistic question mentioned a few minutes ago, “Who made God?” The self-evident answer is, “He was not made; He is eternally self-existent.”
Such is the God of the Bible, the only God whom the true Christian worships, the God whom to know is Eternal Life (Jno. 17:3), “the only true God.” Well might John, who himself records so many of these utterances of Jesus Christ, and who also wrote so many of these profound statements about God, well might he say in I Jno. 5: 20, 21: “We know that the Son of God is come and hath given us an under¬ standing, that we know Him that is true, and we are in Him that is true, even in His Son Jesus Christ. This is the true God, and eternal life. My little children, guard yourselves from idols’” (that is, from any god but this God).
Just one thought in closing: Since God always was and always will be, and since He is always the same. Who is so worthy of our unwavering confidence and of our absolute surrender to Himself as He? And what is so worthy of our unhesitating confidence as ‘His Word? The history of human science and human philosophy since the dawn of man’s thinking and reasoning has been a history of constant change. What all philosophers and scientists regard to-day as forever settled is entirely unsettled to-morrow. What all scientists accept in one century as, e. g., the Ptolemaic System (or, theory of the universe) is rejected by all scientists of another century. The well established science of to-day is the butt of ridicule of all thinking men of to-morrow. But God’s thought never changes, it is always the same, and it is always true. What fools we are then to give up the unchanging and eternally true Word of the Self-existent, Eternal and eternally Unchanging God for the ever-changing scientific and philosophical theories of constantly changing man.