God, Angels, Jesus Christ, and the Crucifixion, continued

Further on this subject, we have the following in Ex. 24v 1, 2, 9-12, 15-18:--

"And He (Jehovah) said unto Moses, come up unto the Lord, thou, and Aaron, Nadab, and Abihu, and seventy of the elders of Israel, and worship ye afar off. And Moses alone shall come near the Lord; but they shall not come nigh, neither shall the people go up with him .... Then went up Moses and Aaron, Nadab, and Abihu, and seventy of the elders of Israel, AND THEY SAW THE GOD OF ISRAEL. And there was under His feet as it were a paved work of a sapphire stone. and as it were the body of heaven in his clearness. And upon the nobles of the children of Israel He laid not His hand; also they saw God, and did eat and drink. And the Lord said unto Moses. Come up to Me into the Mount, and be there, and I will give thee tables of stone, and a law, and commandments which I have written, that thou mayest teach them And Moses went up into the Mount, and a cloud covered the Mount. And the glory of the Lord abode Upon Mount Sinai, and the cloud covered it six days. And the seventh day He called unto Moses out of the midst of the cloud; and the sight of the glory of the Lord was like devouring fire on the top of the Mount in the eyes of the children of Israel. And Moses went into the midst of the cloud, and gat him up into the Mount; and Moses was in the Mount forty days and forty nights."

All subsequent reference to these things is founded on the idea that they are related to a real person and presence. Thus we read in Numbers 12v 8 :--

"With (Moses) will I speak mouth to mouth, even apparently, and not in dark speeches, and the SIMILITUDE of the Lord shall he behold."

Again (Exodus 33v 11):--

"And the Lord spake unto Moses FACE TO FACE, as a man speaketh unto his friend."

Again (Deut. 34v 10):--

"And there arose not a prophet since in Israel like unto Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face."

Now, though the manifestation witnessed in these cases was a manifestation through angelic mediumship, yet the manifestation speaks to us of a Being higher and more real than that manifestation. It helps the mind to climb to some conception (though necessarily superficial and inadequate) of Him "who maketh His angels spirits; His ministers a flaming fire" (Psa. 104v 4)--who is "light, and in whom is no darkness at all" (I John 1v 5)--who "inhabiteth eternity" (Isa. 57v 15)---who is a "consuming fire" (Heb. 12v 29)--whom no man hath seen, nor (on account of our grossness and weakness of nature) can see; who only hath immortality, dwelling in the light which no man can approach unto (I Tim. 6v 16)--who is of purer eyes than to behold the iniquity of the children of men (Hab. 1v 13)--the everlasting God, the Lord, the Creator of the ends of the earth, who fainteth not, neither is weary, and there is no searching of His understanding (Isa. 40v 28).

"Who hath measured the waters in the hollow of His hand, and meted out heaven with a span, and comprehended the dust of the earth in a measure, and weighed the mountains in scales, and the hills in a balance? Who hath directed the Spirit of the Lord, or, being His counsellor, hath taught Him? With whom took he counsel, and who instructed Him and taught Him in the path of judgment, and taught Him knowledge, and showed to Him the way of understanding? . . . All nations before Him are as nothing, and they are counted to Him less than nothing, and vanity. To whom, then, will ye liken God? or what likeness will ye compare unto Him?" (Isa. 40v 12-18). Who can, by Searching, find out God? (Job 11v 7). Behold, God is great, and we know Him not; neither can the number of His years be searched out (Job 36v 26). His eyes are upon the ways of man, and He seeth all his goings.

The testimony before us is, that God is the only underived and self-sustaining existence in the universe. All other forms of life are but incorporations of the life which is in Him--so many subdivisions of the stream which issues from the great fountainhead. The following statements affirm this view :--

"The King of kings, and Lord of lords, who ONLY hath immortality, dwelling in the light which no man can approach unto" (I Tim. 6v 15, 16).

"IN HIM we live, and move, and HAVE OUR BEING" (Acts 17v 28).

"For out of Him (ex autou), and through Him, and to Him ARE ALL THINGS" (Rom. 11v 36).

"To us there is but one God, the Father, of whom ARE ALL THINGS" (I Cor. 8v 6).

Popular theology teaches that God' made all things "out of nothing." This is evidently one of many errors that have long passed current as truth. It has proved an unfortunate error; for it has brought physical science into needless collision with the Bible. Physical science has compelled men to accept it as an axiomatic truth that "out of nothing, nothing can come," and having been led to believe that the Bible teaches that all things have been made out of nothing, they have dismissed the Bible as out of the question on that ground alone. They have taken refuge by preference in various theories that have recognised the eternity of material force in some form or other.

The Bible teaches that all things have been made out of God --not out of nothing. It teaches, as the passages quoted show, that God, as the antecedent, eternal power of the universe, has elaborated all things out of Himself. "Spirit," irradiating from Him, has, under the fiat of His will, been embodied in the vast material creation which we behold. That Spirit now constitutes the substratum of all existence--the very essence and first cause of everything. All things are "in God," because embraced in that mighty effluence which radiating from Himself, fills all space, and constitutes the basis of all existence. In this way God is omnipresent; His consciousness is en rapport with all creation by reason of the universal prevalence of His Spirit, which is one with His personal Spirit-substance, in the way that light is one with the body of the sun. The idea of God's omniscience is too high for us to readily grasp, but we see it illustrated on a small scale in the fact that the human brain in certain sensitive states is conscious of everything within the radius of its own nervous effluence. Though located in the heavens, the Creator, by His universal Spirit, knows everything; and His infinite capacity of mind enables Him to deal with everything, contemplatively or executively, as the case may require.