ir
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 fr