receive the
tidings and their faith strong to embrace it, He said, Your life is
blighted, and your future is in the hand of taskmasters, yet be of good
cheer, for now your deliverance is undertaken by Him Whose being and
purpose are one, Who _is_ in perfection of enjoyment all that He _is_ in
contemplation and in will. The rescue of Israel by an immutable and
perfect God is the earnest of the breaking of every yoke.

And to the proud and godless world which knows Him not, He says,
Resistance to My will can only show forth all its power, which is not at
the mercy of opinion or interest or change: I sit upon the throne, not
only supreme but independent, not only victorious but unassailable;
self-contained, self-poised and self-sufficing, I AM THAT I AM.

Have we now escaped the inert and self-absorbed deity of Lucretius, only
to fall into the palsying grasp of the tyrannous deity of Calvin? Does
our own human will shrivel up and become powerless under the compulsion
of that immutability with which we are strangely brought into contact?

Evidently this is not the teaching of the Book of Exodus. For it is
here, in this revelation of the Supreme, that we first hear of a nation
as being His: "I have seen the affliction of My people which is in Egypt
... and I have come down to bring them into a good land." They were all
baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea. Yet their carcases fell
in the wilderness. And these things were written for our learning. The
immutability, which suffers no shock when we enter _into_ the covenant,
remains unshaken also if we depart from the living God. The sun shines
alike when we raise the curtain and when we drop it, when our chamber is
illumined and when it is dark. The immutability of God is not in His
operations, for sometimes He gave His people into the hand of their
enemies, and again He turned and helped them. It is in His nature, His
mind, in the principles which guide His actions. If He had not chastened
David for his sin, then, by acting as before, He would have been other
at heart than when He rejected Saul for disobedience and chose the son
of Jesse to fulfil all His word. The wind has veered, if it continues to
propel the vessel in the same direction, although helm and sails are
shifted.

Such is the Pauline doctrine of His immutability. "If we endure we shall
also reign with Him: if we shall deny Him, He also will deny us,"--and
such is the necessity of His being, for we c