ht 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