Now what strikes me as singular about this great doxology is the
characteristics, or, to use a technical word, the attributes, of the
divine nature which the Apostle selects. They are all those which
separate God from man; all those which present Him as arrayed in
majesty, apart from human weaknesses, unapproachable by human sense, and
filling a solitary throne. These are the characteristics which the
Apostle thinks receive added lustre, and are lifted to a loftier height
of 'honour and glory,' by the small fact that he, Paul, was saved from
sins as he journeyed to Damascus.
It would be easy to roll out oratorical platitudes about these specific
characteristics of the divine nature, but that would be as unprofitable
as it would be easy. All that I want to do now is just to note the force
of the epithets; and, if I can, to deepen the impression of the
remarkableness of their selection.
With regard, then, to the first of them, we at once feel that the
designation of 'the King' is unfamiliar to the New Testament. It brings
with it lofty ideas, no doubt; but it is not a name which the writers of
the New Testament, who had been taught in the school of love, and led by
a Son to the knowledge of God, are most fond of using. 'The King' has
melted into 'the Father.' But here Paul selects that more remote and
less tender name for a specific purpose. He is 'the King'--not
'_eternal_,' as our Bible renders it, but more correctly 'the King of
the Ages.' The idea intended is not so much that of unending existence
as that He moulds the epochs of the world's history, and directs the
evolution of its progress. It is the thought of an overruling
Providence, with the additional thought that all the moments are a
linked chain, through which He flashes the electric force of His will.
He is 'King of the Ages.'
The other epithets are more appropriately to be connected with the word
'God' which follows than with the word 'King' which precedes. The
Apostle's meaning is this: 'The King of the ages, even the God who is,'
etc. And the epithets thus selected all tend in the same direction.
'Incorruptible.' That at once parts that mystic and majestic Being from
all of which the law is _decay_. There may be in it some hint of moral
purity, but more probably it is simply what I may call a physical
attribute, that that immortal nature not only _does_ not, but _cannot_,
pass into any less noble forms. Corruption has no share in His immortal
being.
As to 'invisible,' no word need be said to illustrate that. It too
points solely to the separation of God from all approach by human sense.
And then the last of the epithets, which, according to the more accurate
reading of the text, should be, not as our Bible has it, 'the only
_wise_ God,' but 'the _only_ God,' lifts Him still further above all
comparison and contact with other beings.
So the whole set forth the remote attributes which make a man feel, 'The
gulf between Him and me is so great that thought cannot pass across it,
and I doubt whether love can live half-way across that flight, or will
not rather, like some poor land bird with tiny wings, drop exhausted,
and be drowned in the abyss before it reaches the other side.' We expect
to find a hymn to the infinite love. Instead of that we get praise,
which might be upon the lips of many a thinker of Paul's day and of
ours, who would laugh the idea of revelation, and especially of a
revelation such as Paul believed in, to absolute scorn. And yet he knew
what he was saying when he did not lift up his praise to the God of
tenderness, of pity, of forgiveness, of pardoning love, but to 'the King
of the ages; the incorruptible, invisible, only God'; the God whose
honour and glory were magnified by the revelation of Himself in Jesus
Christ.
II. And so that brings me, in the second place, to ask you to look at
the facts which glorify even such a God.
Paul was primarily thinking of his own individual experience; of what
passed when the voice spoke to him, 'Why persecutest thou Me?' and of
the transforming power which had changed him, the wolf, with teeth red
with the blood of the saints, into a lamb. But, as he is careful to
point out, the personal allusion is lost in his contemplation of his own
history, as being a specimen and test-case for the blessing and
encouragement of all who 'should hereafter believe upon Him unto life
everlasting.' So what we come to is this--that the work of Jesus Christ
is that which paints the lily and gilds the refined gold of the divine
loftinesses and magnificence, and which brings honour and glory even to
that remote and inaccessible majesty. For, in that revelation of God in
Jesus Christ, there is added to all these magnificent and all but
inconceivable attributes and excellences, something that is far diviner
and nobler than themselves.
There be two great conceptions smelted together in the revelation of God
in Jesus Christ, of which neither attains its supremest beauty except by
the juxtaposition of the other. Power is harsh, and scarcely worthy to
be called divine, unless it be linked with love. Love is not glorious
unless it be braced and energised by power. And, says Paul, these two
are brought together in Jesus; and therefore each is heightened by the
other. It is the love of God that lifts His power to its highest height;
it is the revelation of Him as stooping that teaches us His loftiness.
It is because He has come within the grasp of our humanity in Jesus
Christ that we can hymn our highest and noblest praises to 'the King
eternal, the invisible God.'
The sunshine falls upon the snow-clad peaks of the great mountains and
flushes them with a tender pink that makes them nobler and fairer by far
than when they were veiled in clouds. And so all the divine majesty
towers higher when we believe in the divine condescension, and there is
no god that men have ever dreamed of so great as the God who stoops to
sinners and is manifest in the flesh and Cross of the Man of Sorrows.
Take these characteristics of the divine nature as get forth in the text
one by one, and consider how the Revelation in Jesus Christ, and its
power on sinful men, raises our conceptions of them. 'The King of the
ages'--and do we ever penetrate so deeply into the purpose which has
guided His hand, as it moulded and moved the ages, as when we can say
with Paul that His 'good pleasure' is that, 'in the dispensation of the
fulness of times, He might gather together in one all things in Christ.'
The intention of the epochs as they emerge, the purpose of all their
linked intricacies and apparently diverse movements, is this one thing,
that God in Christ may be manifest to men, a nd that humanity may be
gathered, like sheep round the Shepherd, into the one fold of the one
Lord. For that the world stands; for that the ages roll, and He who is
the King of the epochs hath put into the hands of the Lamb that was
slain the Book that contains all their events; and only His hand,
pierced upon Calvary, is able to open the seals, to read the Book. The
King of the ages is the Father of Christ.
And in like manner, that incorruptible God, far away from us because He
is so, and to whom we look up here doubtingly and despairingly and often
complainingly and ask, 'Why hast Thou made us thus, to be weighed upon
with the decay of all things and of ourselves?' comes near to us all in
the Christ who knows the mystery of death, and thereby makes us
partakers of an inheritance incorruptible. Brethren, we shall never
adore, or even dimly understand, the blessedness of believing in a God
who cannot decay nor change, unless from the midst of graves and griefs
we lift our hearts to Him as revealed in the face of the dying Christ.
He, though He died, did not see corruption, and we through Him shall
pass into the same blessed immunity.
'The King . . . the God invisible.' No man hath seen God 'at any time, nor
can see Him.' Who will honour and glorify that attribute which parts Him
wholly from our sense, and so largely from our apprehension, as will he
who can go on to say, 'the only begotten Son which is in the bosom of
the Father, He hath declared Him.' We look up into a waste Heaven;
thought and fear, and sometimes desire, travel into its tenantless
spaces. We say the blue is an illusion; there is nothing there but
blackness. But 'he that hath seen Me hath seen the Father.' And we can
lift thankful praise to Him, the King invisible, when we hear Jesus
saying, 'thou hast both seen Him, and it is He that talketh with thee.'
'The only God.' How that repels men from His throne! And yet, if we
apprehend the meaning of Christ's Cross and work, we understand that the
solitary God welcomes my solitary soul into such mysteries and sacred
sweetnesses of fellowship with Himself that, the humanity remaining
undisturbed, and the divinity remaining unintruded upon, we yet are one
in Him, and partakers of a divine nature. Unless we come to God through
Jesus Christ, the awful attributes in the text spurn a man from His
throne, and make all true fellowship impossible.
So let me remind you that the religion which does not blend together in
indissoluble union these two, the majesty and the lowliness, the power
and the love, the God inaccessible and the God who has tabernacled with
us in Jesus Christ, is sure to be almost an impotent religion. Deism in
all its forms, the religion which admits a God and denies a revelation;
the religion which, in some vague sense, admits a revelation and denies
an incarnation; the religion which admits an incarnation and denies a
sacrifice; all these have little to say to man as a sinner; little to
say to man as a mourner; little power to move his heart, little power to
infuse strength into his weakness. If once you strike out the thought of
a redeeming Christ from your religion, the temperature will go down
alarmingly, and all will soon be frost bound.
Brethren, there is no real adoration of the loftiness of the King of the
ages, no true apprehension of the majesty of the God incorruptible,
invisible, eternal, until we see Him in the face and in the Cross of
Jesus Christ. The truths of this gospel of our salvation do not in the
smallest degree impinge upon or weaken, but rather heighten, the glory
of God. The brightest glory streams from the Cross. It was when He was
standing within a few hours of it, and had it full in view, that Jesus
Christ broke out into that strange strain of triumph, 'Now is God
glorified.' 'The King of the ages, incorruptible, invisible, the only
God,' is more honoured and glorified in the forgiveness that comes
through Jesus Christ, and in the transforming power which He puts forth
in the Gospel, than in all besides.
III. Lastly, let me draw your attention to the praise which should fill
the lives of those who know these facts.
I said that this Apostle seems always, when he refers to his own
individual conversion, to have been melted into fresh outpourings of
thankfulness and of praise. And that is what ought to be the life of all
of you who call yourselves Christians; a continual warmth of
thankfulness welling up in the heart, and not seldom finding utterance
in the words, but always filling the life.
Not seldom, I say, finding utterance in the words. It is a delicate
thing for a man to speak about himself, and his own religious
experience. Our English reticence, our social habits, and many other
even less worthy hindrances rise in the way; and I should be the last
man to urge Christian people to cast their pearls before swine, or too
fully to
'Open wide the bridal chamber of the heart,'
to let in the day. There is a wholesome fear of men who are always
talking about their own religious experiences. But there are times and
people to whom it is treason to the Master for us not to be frank in the
confession of what we have found in Him. And I think there would be less
complaining of the want of power in the public preaching of the Word if
more professing Christians more frequently and more simply said to those
to whom their words are weighty, 'Come and hear and I will tell you what
God hath done for my soul.' 'Ye are my witnesses,' saith the Lord. It is
a strange way that Christian people in this generation have of
discharging their obligations that they should go, as so many of them
do, from the cradle of their Christian lives to their graves, never
having opened their lips for the Master who has done all for them.
Only remember, if you venture to speak you will have to live your
preaching. 'There is no speech nor language, their voice is not heard,
their sound is gone out through all the earth.' The silent witness of
life must always accompany the audible proclamation, and in many cases
is far more eloquent than it. Your consistent thankfulness manifested in
your daily obedience, and in the transformation of your character, will
do far more than all my preaching, or the preaching of thousands like
me, to commend the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
One last word, brethren. This revelation is made to us all. What is God
to you, friend? Is He a remote, majestic, unsympathising, terrible
Deity? Is He dim, shadowy, unwelcome; or is He God whose love softens
His power; Whose power magnifies his love? Oh! I beseech you, open your
eyes and your hearts to see that that remote Deity is of no use to you,
will do nothing for you, cannot help you, may probably judge you, but
will never heal you. And open your hearts to see that 'the only God'
whom men can love is God in Christ. If here we lift up grateful praise
'unto Him that loveth us and hath loosed us from our sins in His blood,'
we, too, shall one day join in that great chorus which at last will be
heard saying, 'Blessing and honour and glory and power be unto Him that
sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb for ever and ever.'