DECLARED the prophet of old: "Jehovah is the true God; He is the living God, and an everlasting King." Jer. 10:10. Sings the psalmist: "Jehovah is righteous in all His ways, and gracious in all His works." Ps. 145:17.
These are great self-evident facts of what an eternal God must be.
Temporally, it is often made to appear that Might makes Right, and therefore in great Might is continuance. But so it only seems. The thought is an illusion, a lie.
Only in Right is everlasting Might. Right may seem to fail, truth may seem to die; but
"Truth crushed to earth will rise again,
The eternal years of God are hers."
Jehovah is righteous because He is true. He is an everlasting King because He is righteous. He is righteous and gracious at all times in all places because He is unchangeably true. He is Eternal Love.
Was He the cause of the earthquake?—No. Did He slay indiscriminately men, women, and children, good and evil, sinful and righteous?—No. "God is love;" "God is righteous in all His ways, and gracious in all His works." "I, Jehovah, change not." Mal. 3:6. "With whom can be no variation, neither shadow that is cast by turning." James 1:17.
But is He not King of the Universe?—He "The Most High ruleth in the kingdom of men." Dan. 4:25. He is the "everlasting King."
How may we harmonize with His character these awful catastrophes, cataclysms, disasters, calamities?
Listen: God is a God of law. All His laws are of the same character as Himself. "The law of the Lord is perfect." Ps. 19:7. "All Thy commandments are righteousness." Ps. 119:172. "The law is holy, and the commandment holy, and righteous, and good." Rom. 7:12.
In harmony with that holy law is—
Continuance of Life.
"In the way of righteousness is life, and in the pathway thereof there is no death." Prov. 12:28. "The commandment was ordained to life." Rom. 7:10. Therefore if God's law had always been observed, no blot or blight, no curse or death, would ever have marred the perfect universe of God.
God made His creatures free to choose His way of everlasting righteousness and live, or to follow their own way of selfishness and die. Deut. 30:19. No true character can be formed by force. God made the will of angel and man free, and even Deity will not enter its sacred circle except by permission.
The highest created being in all the universe, proud of the glory and beauty God had placed upon him, as tho it were his own, rebelled; aspired in selfishness to the throne of Eternal Goodness, and fell. (Read of that once angel in Eze. 28:11-17 and Isa. 14:10-12.) That very rebellion
Charged God with Injustice.
The righteous law perverted became sin. The life became death. To this world Lucifer brought the same spirit charging God with falsehood and injustice. Man believed the lie, and in this planet God's law and life in His creatures was again perverted, perverting every law of the physical and material on lower planes.
If God had then destroyed the accuser, the revolter, nothing would have been settled, and truth and righteousness could not thus have been vindicated. God must wait till all His intelligent creatures could see if they would that He was right and sin was wrong.
"The Evil can not brook delay.
The Good can well afford to wait."
God in His Son gave Himself for the transgressors; they repudiated it as unworthy of themselves; they would save themselves,—a delusion which is in the base of every false religion.
Sin began to bear its fruitage of misery, wo, and death. All physical nature became affected. The whole creation groaned and travailed in pain, and still does. Storm and tempest swept over what was once the home of peace. Love became hatred. Peace became strife. Order became confusion. Cosmos became chaos. Mental and spiritual troubles drive men mad, disease the body, and bring death. Spiritual law transgressed, perverted by earth's king—man—perverted the laws of earth, and all the ills of earth have followed. "The creation was subject to vanity, not of its own will, but by reason of him who subjected it"—its earthly head, man. "The whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now." Rom. 8:20, 22.
Did God's good law cause it?—Not at all, but the transgression of that law by the choice of angels and men.
All That We See of Evil
—the storm, the tempest, the pestilence, the drought the flood, the famine, the volcano, the earthquake, are all the result of the perversion of perfect law which God can not restrain, or the universe could never learn the evil of its own choice, that "sin, when it is full-grown, bringeth forth death." James 1:15. And God waits, charged with all the ills of the universe; accused as cruel, vindictive, made to be the author of all earth's ills, and of eternal torment beyond. Still He waits, knowing that the awful lessons of earth will teach the truth now to some, and that when mercy no longer restrains a fruitage that sinful man has ever invited, eternal right will be vindicated, and those who have set themselves in opposition to His counsel will perish in the destruction they have invited in their choice of principles. They have made the living law of God their adversary, and fall before it. They demonstrated in their seed-sowing of choice and its results, the law of God and of nature, "Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap."
Only so are the calamities of earth the judgments of God; they are there by virtue of the power of a perverted law—power which, acting normally, would preserve life, but forced to abnormality proves destruction. The law of gravitation is a good law, a living law; it maintains the equilibrium of things; it holds men to the earth. But if a man should cast himself from a high elevation, presuming that the law would not operate, he would be dashed to death on the ground below. The power of the good law perverted proves evil. Infinite mercy has used infinite power to restrain these judgments, but finally, when man has rejected the love of God, spurned the cup of abounding and undeserving mercy for the last time, God will reluctantly give man his choice of sin and death. Man has identified himself with sin; he will perish with the sin he has chosen.
The Only Salvation.
There is salvation from the sin in Jesus Christ. In Him, the God-man, the perfect law was perfect life.
In man, the sinner, the perverted law became death. "The commandment which was ordained to life, I found to be unto death." Rom. 7:10. "To be carnally minded is death." Rom. 8:6. The law alone offers no hope to fallen man. His very nature makes him a slave to the flesh and to sin. But he who accepts of the Lord Jesus Christ as his substitute, his death to sin, his life to God, finds a salvation in righteousness which cleanses and overcomes all sin, triumphs over all the results of sin, all earth's woes and calamities, lives forever, in an earth made new.
"There is therefore now no condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus made me free from the law of sin and of death; . . . that the requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit." "The mind of the Spirit is life and peace;" and "the Spirit is life because of righteousness. But if the Spirit of Him that raised up Jesus from the dead dwelleth in you, He that raised up Christ from the dead shall give life also to your mortal bodies through His Spirit that dwelleth in you." See Rom. 8:1-11.16
There is salvation from all earth's sins and ills in Jesus Christ; "and in none other is there salvation." Acts 4:12. Only in Him can we form right characters, and it is character alone that counts; it is character which endures, and on that everlasting character in Christ Jesus the saved of God must build. For such characters God founded His everlasting kingdom.
There is no other way save God's way. We may question and quibble, we may doubt and reject, but if we are saved at all, it must be in Christ Jesus. "Behold, I lay in Zion a chief corner Stone, elect, precious; and He that believeth on Him shall not be put to shame. For you, therefore, that believe is the preciousness, but for such as disbelieve, the stone which the builders rejected, the same was made the head of the corner; and a stone of stumbling, and a rock of offense; for they stumble at the Word, being disobedient."
Question as we may, doubt as we will, laugh over the solemn warnings of His Word, the mighty shakings are yet to come. Everything that can be moved will be shaken by the voice of God when He shall come into His own, so that the things which can not be moved shall remain, and the things which can not be moved will be those builded into the character of Christ Jesus our Lord. His character tunnels the grave with everlasting righteousness, and reaches out into the eternal green meadows of God beyond. He was righteous; therefore death could not hold Him (Acts 2:24); and all those who are built on Him, tho calamity cover them here, tho the grave close over them, will live with Him to all eternity; and when the last great convulsions of perverted nature shake the cosmos of this world into the chaos of finished sin, those who are builded on the sure foundation, who have found the sure refuge, even tho death is witnessed on every hand, can sing:
Another view of the explosion east of Healdsburg. These trees are about 200 feet high, and the entire mass thrown out by the eruption was covered with them. The chasm left by the eruption is about 2,000 feet long and about 600 feet wide, and 75 to 100 feet deep in places.
"God is our refuge and strength,
A very present help in trouble.
Therefore will we not fear, tho the earth do change,
And tho the mountains be shaken into the heart of the seas;
Tho the waters thereof roar and be troubled,
Tho the mountains tremble with the swelling thereof.
There is a river, the streams whereof make glad the city of God,
The holy place of the tabernacles of the Most High.
God is in the midst of her; SHE SHALL NOT BE MOVED.
God will help her at the dawn of the morning.
The nations raged, the kingdoms were moved;
He uttered His voice, the earth melted.
Jehovah of hosts is with us;
The God of Jacob is our refuge."
