Next Sunday night I want to talk about
the Omnipotence of God, the Lord God Omnipotent.
Tonight I am to speak on the Eternity
of God, and there are two texts that
I want especially to mention.
One is in Isaiah 57, that familiar text,
For thus saith the High and Lofty One
that inhabiteth Eternity, whose name is Holy.
I dwell in the high and holy place
with him also that is of a contrite
and humble spirit, to revive the spirit of
the humble and to revive the heart of
the contrite ones.
He calls himself here the High and Lofty
One that inhabiteth Eternity.
Then an equally familiar passage in Psalm 90,
Lord, thou hast been our dwelling place in
all generations.
Before the mountains were brought forth, wherever thou
hadst formed the earth and the world, even
from everlasting to everlasting thou art God.
From everlasting to everlasting thou art God, said
Moses about God.
Thus saith the High and Lofty One that
inhabiteth Eternity, said God about himself.
Now I am to try tonight to emphasize
that which everybody believes but don't believe is
a rule with sufficient clarity and emphasis to
make it worth their while.
It is my belief that if this Church
can make the whole Church see how wonderful
God is, how great God is, and demonstrate
the wonder of God to the people, to
the Church, and can arouse and spark other
men to preach about these same truths, that
it will raise and elevate the spiritual level
of the Church very markedly.
So I want tonight to talk about the
Eternity of God.
I have taken two texts here, and let
me say a few words about both of
them.
First, this word, the High and Lofty One
that inhabiteth Eternity.
Eternity, of course, is a noun.
It's the state of being eternal.
Then we have words here, eternal and everlasting
and forever.
There are those who have said that such
words as eternal and everlasting and forever do
not mean time without end, everlasting.
They do not mean lasting forever or eternally.
We have read into it the concept of
everlastingness and endlessness.
It only means to the end of the
dispensation, to the end of the age.
The High and Lofty One who inhabiteth Eternity,
eternal only means to the end of the
age, everlasting only means to the end of
the age.
The reason men have taken that attitude is
that they want to escape the doctrine of
hell some way or other, because the scriptures
say that hell is everlasting.
They can't bring themselves to believe what God
has said about hell.
Why they say the word everlasting doesn't mean
lasting forever, because God uses it about the
hills.
He says the everlasting hills.
Therefore, the word everlasting, eternal, forever and all
that, those words cannot possibly mean lasting forever.
I'll tell you one thing.
I have a Bible here, and if I
thought that the word eternal, as referred to
God, meant only lasting to the end of
the age, I'd just fold my Bible up
and go home and wait for the end.
If I had a God that only lasted
so long, that didn't have eternity and all
the concepts of eternity in his heart, I
couldn't possibly find it worthwhile to preach.
Why be a pro-tem Christian and why
have a pro-tem God?
I believe that God is eternal.
You see, the Hebrew has combed and exhausted
itself and wrung its language as you wring
a towel to get the last drop of
meaning out of it just to say that
God is forever and ever, endlessly, unto perpetuity,
a world without end.
And the Greek language in the New Testament
has done the same.
There aren't any other words in the Greek
language that can be used to mean unto
perpetuity, having no end, going on and on
and on and on endlessly and forever.
There aren't any other words that the language
could use.
And then when we come to our English,
we have the concept of endlessness.
And if we have that concept of endlessness,
then there must be somewhere endlessness, or how
could we have a concept of that which
doesn't exist and which our concept would be
greater than the reality, which is plain foolishness
as everybody can see.
So we haven't any other words to use.
Eternal, everlasting, forever, unto perpetuity, a world without
end.
All of those words mean just what they
say.
And when God talks about himself, that's what
he means.
I am the lofty one who exists eternally,
forever, unto perpetuity, a world without end.
And we come to the second text, from
everlasting to everlasting thou art God.
The Hebrew lexicon tells us that you could
use the words here from the vanishing point
to the vanishing point, because actually in its
root that's what it means.
From the vanishing point of the past to
the vanishing point of the future.
But whose vanishing point?
Not God's.
It's man's vanishing point.
Man looks back as far as he can
look, and he then turns around and looks
forward as far as he can look.
He looks back until he can't see any
further, until it vanishes, and then he looks
forward until he can't see any further, until
human thought falls exhausted and human eyes can
no longer see.
And that's the future, unto perpetuity, unto the
vanishing point, man's vanishing point, a world without
end.
Other meanings of the word are concealed and
out of mind.
From the time concealed to the time concealed
thou art God.
From the time out of mind to the
time out of mind thou art God.
Now that's what it says, my brethren.
And I'd like to have you tonight do
something, if you could.
I'd like to have you shake your head
real hard to get all the wheels going,
and then try to stretch your mind all
you can, and think, if you can, about
the past.
I'd like to have you think Toronto out
of existence.
I'd like to have you begin to think
there's no Toronto here, there isn't a spot
here, there isn't anything here but some Indians.
And then I want you to go back
and think all those Indians away.
There isn't an Indian anywhere now, that's before
the Indian got here.
And I want you to go on back
to that and think away Canada.
And then I want you to go on
back to that and think away the North
American continent, and then think away all this
earth of ours, that where the earth is
now, think beyond that way back until there
isn't any earth now.
We're back where there isn't any earth.
And then let's go back to that and
think where there isn't any planet, and where
there are no planets, and where there are
no stars.
The stars that we see dotting the clear
night sky have all vanished away and there
are no stars.
And we go on back to that until
there is no Milky Way and no anything.
Where we go to the throne of God
and think away the angels and the archangels
and the seraphim and the cherubim that sing
and worship before the throne of God.
Think them all away until there is no
creation.
Not an angel waves its wing, not a
bird flies in the sky, there's no sky
to fly in.
Not a tree grows in the mountain, there's
no mountain for a tree to grow in.
But God lives and loves alone the ancient
of days, world without end to the vanishing
point, back as far as the human mind
can go.
There we come to God, my brother, and
you have God.
The great Augustine said, What then art thou,
O my God?
What I ask but the Lord.
God, or who is God?
Save the Lord.
God most high and most excellent, most potent
and most omnipotent, most piteous and most just,
most hidden and most near, most beauteous and
most strong, never new, never old, making all
things new, yet bringing old age upon the
proud, and they know it not, gathering yet
needing nothing, sustaining, pervading, protecting.
Yes, O my God, my life, my holy
one, what is this that I have said?
And what saith any man when he speaks
of thee?
Yet woe to them that keep silence, seeing
that even they that say most are dumb.
But O thou, O Lord God, whoever livest
and in whom nothing dies, since before the
world was, and indeed before all that can
be called before, thou existest and art the
God, the Lord of all creation, fixedly abiding
all causes of all unstable things, and the
changing source of all things changeable, and the
eternal reasons of all things reasoning and temporal.
This was said by the great Augustine, that
mighty saint of God.
We come to this God now, and where
God is not dependent upon his world, God
is not dependent upon kings and presidents, God
is not dependent upon businessmen and preachers, God
is not dependent upon boards and deacons, God
is not dependent upon anything.
We have thought our way out and passed
back, until there is no history now, back
to God himself, God the Eternal One.
And I say now that God never began
to be.
I want you to kick that word began
around a little bit in your mind, and
think about it.
Began, began.
Our good friend Brother Newell always says, I
asked him if that was a good Canadian
word, and he didn't know whether it was
or not.
But he talked about commencing, and I talked
about beginning.
But I reminded him the scripture didn't say,
in the commencement God made heaven and earth,
but in the beginning God made heaven and
earth.
Well, God never began to be.
Began, you see, is a word that doesn't
affect God at all.
There are so many concepts that don't affect
God, and so many ideas that don't touch
God at all.
The concept of beginning is such as creation.
When God spoke and things began to be,
in the beginning God created.
But before the beginning, there wasn't any beginning.
Before, there wasn't any before.
If you can follow Augustine back to the
time when there wasn't any before.
When we've gone back so far that we
run in a circle.
The old writers used to say, the old
theologians, that eternity is a circle.
Round and round the circle we go.
And back before there was any circle, then
God was.
Now, God didn't begin to be.
God was.
God didn't start out from somewhere.
God just is.
And it's good that we get that in
our mind.
Time, you see, is a creature word because
it has to do with the things that
are.
It has to do with the throne of
God, maybe.
At least it has to do with the
angels and the sea of fire and the
cherubims and all the creatures that are around
the throne of God.
They began to be.
There was a time when there wasn't an
angel and then God said, let there be.
And there was an angel.
And that angel began to be.
But there never was a time when God
was not and somebody said, let God be.
And God was and began to be because
if that were true, then the one who
said, let God be, would have to be
God.
And the God about whom he said, let
be, wouldn't be God at all but a
secondary God who wouldn't be worth our trouble.
So God back there in the beginning created.
God was, that's all.
Now, time can't apply to God, I have
said.
C.S. Lewis gave us an illustration which
I'd like to pass on to you.
If you can think of eternity, of infinitude,
as a broad sheet of paper, a pure
white sheet of paper extending infinitely in all
directions.
And then think about time's beginning as a
man taking a pencil and drawing a line.
Now, the beginning of that little line, an
inch long on an infinitely extended sheet of
paper as broad and wide as the heavens
or wider.
And that little piece of paper has a
little line drawn and that line is time.
It begins and it moves an inch and
ends.
And it begins on the paper and it
ends on the paper.
So time began in God and will end
in God.
And it doesn't affect God at all.
God is unaffected by time.
No age can heap its outward years on
thee.
Dear God, thou art thyself, thine own eternity.
So God dwells in an everlasting now.
You and I are creatures of time and
change.
And it's now and was and will be
and yesterday and today and tomorrow.
We will live.
That's why we get nervous breakdowns.
Is it a nervous breakdown or nervous breakdown,
some of you teachers?
Anyhow, that's why we get nervous breakdowns.
Because we're always just one jump ahead of
the clock, you see.
Just one jump.
Get up in the morning and look at
that clock and let out a gasp of
dismay and rush to the bathroom, brush your
teeth there downstairs for breakfast and eat a
half-cooked egg and rush out to catch
the commuter bus.
And that's time.
See, time is after us.
That's time.
But God Almighty sits in his eternal now.
And all the time that ever was moved
in the heart of God.
So the time is only a tiny mark
upon the bosom, the infinitely extended bosom of
eternity.
No age can heap its outward years on
thee.
O great God, thou art thyself, thine own
eternity.
God has no past.
And I want you to hear that.
And I want you to shake your head
hard here because this is an idea that
the old fathers knew but that we, their
children, don't seem to care much about.
We like to be entertained, you know.
This is the day of religious entertainment.
We have little saintlings and the saintlings have
to be given a kindergarten church or they
won't come out.
They have to be entertained.
Well, I've done a lot of evil in
my time, God knows.
And if it wasn't for the blood of
the Lamb, I'd roast in the devil's hell.
But there's one thing I've never done and
that's entertain the saintlings.
I refuse to do it.
God didn't say, go ye into all the
world and put on a show for my
tiny, undeveloped, retarded children.
He said, go into all the world and
preach the gospel and teach them to do
and observe all that I said.
So I've had many sins, God knows, but
I'm not going to add to any of
my sins the entertainment of the saints.
If the saints have to be entertained, they're
not saints.
God's saints ought to be able to think
on eternal things.
God has no past.
Now, I took off there on a tangent,
but I come back to it, that God
has no past.
You have a past, you see, my friend.
It isn't really very long, although some of
you wish it wasn't so long.
But your past isn't very long, really, just
a short time.
You date back there a little way, but
not very long.
But God has no past.
And God has no future.
Why doesn't God have a past or a
future?
Because past and future are creature words and
they have to do with time.
They have to do with the flowing motion
of time.
But God is not riding on the bosom
of time.
Time is a little mark across the bosom
of eternity.
And God sits above time in eternity, dwelling
in eternity from everlasting to everlasting.
Thou art God.
And here is the wonderful thought, my friend,
that God has already lived all of our
tomorrows.
You haven't lived your tomorrows.
A man, what was his name, wrote a
book called All Our Yesterdays, or just Our
Yesterdays, a great book of its sort that
I read when I was a boy, Our
Yesterdays.
But God has no yesterdays and he has
no tomorrows.
Now, somebody wants to jump right on my
back and say, Now, hold on a minute,
didn't the Scripture say Jesus Christ the same
yesterday, today and forever?
Yes, my friend, but it's not his yesterday.
It's your yesterday and my yesterday and the
yesterday of the man out on the street
there or sitting looking at television tonight.
Jesus Christ the Lord is the one who
came out of Bethlehem, out of Judea, whose
goings forth had been even from everlasting.
And he can have no yesterdays and no
tomorrows because yesterday is time and tomorrow is
time, but God surrounds it all and God
has already lived tomorrow.
And the great God who was present at
the beginning when he said, Let there be
and there was, is also now present at
the end when the worlds are on fire
and all creation has dissolved and gone back
into chaos and old night.
And only God and his redeemed saints remain.
So remember that, that God has already lived
our tomorrows.
I wonder if that could be the reason
that men can prophesy.
Now the ability to foretell with precision an
event that will take place three thousand years
from now, how can that be?
Well, it might be, and I think maybe
it is, that a prophet in the Spirit
is up in God where he's seeing as
God sees the end from the beginning.
Do you remember that passage?
He sees the end from the beginning.
So God way up there takes it, the
end from the beginning, and looks down and
that's where we ought to be really, my
friends.
We ought not to be down here looking
up through the clouds.
We ought to be up looking down.
Sometimes I ride planes here and there and
any of you may have had the same
experience times without number.
You go up there and pretty soon you've
got sunshine, so much sunshine.
If you're going to read or write you've
got to shut the little curtains to keep
the sun off of your paper or book.
But down below you see a solid carpet
of thick clouds.
You find it very difficult to understand how
anybody can be down there saying, Oh, what
a cloudy, overcast, gloomy day this is.
It isn't cloudy and overcast and gloomy up
where you are.
You're looking down on it.
People down there are looking up at it.
So they say it's cloudy and gloomy and
overcast.
You're looking down on it and saying, Oh,
that's the floor down there.
But up in the ceiling it's as clear
and bright as can be and there isn't
a cloud in the sky.
So that if you insist on being down
here looking up, you're going always to have
an overcast sky and the devil will see
to it.
But if you'll remember that your life is
hid with Christ in God, then you'll be
looking down on it and not looking up
on it.
Now, the scripture says in this book, this
psalm here, that because God is eternal, that
we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.
You see, God is in our today because
God was in our yesterday and God will
be in our tomorrow.
God is the one that you can't escape.
You can't escape God by denying Him because
He will be there anyhow.
You can't escape Him by defining Him as
meaning something else because He will be there
anyway.
God is.
And because God is, then God is here
and God is now and God dwells in
an everlasting and eternal now.
When God talked with Abraham way back yonder,
when God talked with Abraham and Jacob and
Isaiah, He had already lived in the New
Jerusalem because the New Jerusalem is in the
heart of God and all the things that
will be are in God.
And God isn't subject to the flow of
time.
Now, Christ as the Eternal Son is timeless.
You see, don't you, that when you think
about Jesus, you've got to think twice.
When you think about our Lord, you've got
to think of His humanity and His deity.
He said lots of things that made it
sound as if He wasn't God.
He said other things that made it sound
as if He wasn't human.
He said, for instance, before Abraham was, I
am.
That made it sound as if He antedated
creation.
And then He said, I can of myself
do nothing.
I look to my Father and as I
hear, so I speak, the Father worketh in
me.
And so that made it sound as if
He wasn't divine.
He said, my Father is greater than I,
and that made it sound as if He
wasn't God.
And He said, I and my Father are
one, and that made it sound as if
He wasn't human.
But the fact is, He's both.
He talked about Himself as divine and He
talked about Himself as human.
And when Jesus talked about Himself as human,
then He had the words that were humble,
lowly words.
When He talked about Himself as divine, He
talked with words that startled and shook people.
He said, speaking about the inspired scriptures, you've
heard it was said, but I say unto
you, put a period down there, why He
could talk like God and then He could
talk like man.
So we've always got to think about the
Son of Man, Jesus Christ the Lord, in
two ways.
When the fullness of time was come, God
sent forth His Son, born of a woman,
born under law, that He might set free
and deliver those who all their lifetimes were
subject to bondage.
Well, that means His humanhood.
And then He was slain from the foundation
of the world.
What can that mean?
How could He be slain from the foundation
of the world?
Why, when God laid the heaven and the
earth and caused the grass to be upon
the hills and the trees to be upon
the mountains, when God made the birds to
fly in the air and the fish to
swim in the sea, God had already in
His heart lived Calvary and the resurrection and
the glory and the crown.
So He was slain before the foundation of
the world.
We pray to God sometimes as though God
were panicky, as though God were in as
great distress as we are, and we pull
out our watch and look at it.
I refuse to wear a wristwatch.
See, those two wrists have never been fettered
by a wristwatch yet.
And if the Lord would help me, I'll
never wear a wristwatch because it's bad enough
to have it in my pocket where it's
difficult to get to.
But to have to look at the miserable
thing all the time and know that time
is getting away from me, I think I'd
panic.
But God never panics because God never looks
at any clocks or any watches.
The fullness of time was the time when
God had ordered it.
And when the time came, Mary gave birth
to her boy and he was born and
lived and died just for the unjust to
bring us to God.
So the Eternal Son has lived through all
time.
And the baby that was born in Bethlehem's
manger did not take its origin in Bethlehem's
manger.
And the baby that came from the womb
of the virgin did not take his origin
in the womb of the virgin.
The Eternal Son didn't.
The baby did.
The human baby did, but the Eternal Son
did not.
And so we stand before God tonight.
We stand before God.
Time like an ever-rolling stream bears all
its sons away.
They fly forgotten as a dream dies at
the opening day.
Now I don't like to be gloomy, but
you might as well face up to facts.
And that is, the time like an ever
-rolling stream is carrying a lot of people
away.
My wife and I were discussing it here
some time ago.
Said it looks as if every time we
get a letter from back home, somebody else
is dead.
Somebody else is gone.
Well, it's natural.
You can expect it, you know.
When they threatened to kill, take the head
off of Epictetus.
No, it was kill his son, I think
he said.
Well, I never said that I had begotten
an immortal son.
He knew he had to die.
And everybody has to die.
A time like an ever-rolling stream is
burying its sons away.
Do you know, my friends, that there are
trees out in California, the redwood or the
sequoia trees?
I've seen them.
I walked around an old tree.
I'm trying to think the day of the
name of that tree.
It had a name on it, kind of
a plaque there, and a name.
It was either the captain or the colonel
or some such name they'd given it.
And I walked around the thing, you know.
I'm an old farmer, and I don't have
to have a foot rule.
I can just walk it off, you know,
three steps to a yard.
And I walked around the thing, and it
was 51 feet around, 51 feet.
I kicked a little dirt to get my
start, and then I walked around that tree
hugging it as tight as I could.
And when I got around there, it was
51 feet.
And I remembered dimly enough mathematics to show
me that it was 17 feet through, 17
feet from one side of that tree to
the other side of that tree.
Now that's a sequoia tree, and they go
up as high as 300 feet, which means
30 stories in the air.
Towering 30 stories high, and as much as
17, and I'm sure there are larger ones.
That was not the largest, only among the
large ones.
17 feet through.
So there's a sequoia tree.
How long did it take that to grow
up?
Well, now I'm giving you, and I don't
know I could be wrong, but the scientists
say this.
I don't quote scientists too often because they
change their minds and leave a man out
on a limb.
But they have said, those who are supposed
to know, that some of those sequoia trees
go back as far as Abraham.
And that before Abraham's time, those very trees,
now not the species, but those very trees,
that when Abraham left the desert of the
Chaldees and followed the gleam of faith downward
to the Negev, down where he finally established
his great nation in the land we now
call Palestine of the Holy Land, when Abraham
said to Sarah, come on, and said to
his nephew, come on, and he got
his
wife, and he and he got
his son, and he got his son, and
he got his son, and he got his
son, and he got his son, and he
got
his
son, and he got his son, and he
got his and he got his son, and
he got his son, and he got
his and he got his son, and he
got his son, and
he got his and he got his and
he got his son, and
he got his son, and he got his
son, and he got his a
h h Abraham walked in Ur of the
Chaldees, those trees were growing out there, and
when the Greeks were thinking their great thoughts
and writing their funny plays, those trees were
a little taller and still growing out there.
And when Rome took over and became the
Iron Kingdom and brought the world to her
feet and the soldiers of Rome went everywhere
conquering and to conquer, the trees out on
the California coast were a little bit taller.
And when the British people got out of
the woods and stopped eating acorns and began
to wash behind their ears and clean up
and look human, why, the trees were a
little taller than they had been before.
Now in case any of you take offense
at this, let me quote to you.
There was an English prime minister one time
by the name of Disraeli.
Disraeli was a Jew.
They changed him to Lord Beaconfield and he
came to the House of Lords in London.
And he got up to make a speech,
and he didn't do so well that time,
and one of the old Lords got up
then and he referred to Lord Beaconfield as
this new-made Lord.
And Beaconfield leaped to his feet and he
said, I'd have the honorable member to remember
that when his ancestors were eating acorns in
the forest of Brittany, mine were princes in
the House of David.
He was a Jew, you know.
So if any of you are worried about
my saying you ate acorns, one of your
own prime ministers said so, and I quote
him.
All right.
And long before, long before William the Conqueror
came across the channel and started all this
fuss and mess that we've been in for
the last God knows how many years, and
long before Columbus went soaring around or sailing
around and discovered a little piece of land,
and then they went further north and called
it Americus, naming it after Americus of Vespucci.
And now we have America.
Long before Canada was here, those trees are
out there, and way back there when George
Washington, you know, crossed the Delaware, somebody painted
a picture of George crossing the Delaware standing
up in the boat.
Anybody said anybody's fool enough to stand up
in the boat didn't deserve to win a
war, and I think they're right about it.
He was standing up there.
Long before that, and long before there was
any communism or fascism or Nazism, and long
before there were airplanes, and long before there
were any of the modern things, the trees
grew up there, those sequoia trees, looking down
upon generation after generation of man, generation after
generation, looking down on the eternal God from
his everlasting now.
Watch the little tribes of men go and
get up and live a few little while
and lie down and die, and another generation
comes.
My brother and sister, remember this, that God
is to you a necessity.
Now when I preach the gospel of Jesus
Christ and say, Come unto me, all ye
that labor and are heavy laden, and I
will give you rest, quoting the lovely words
of Jesus that warmed my heart when I
was a boy and helped bring me to
him, when I quote those words and when
I quote the words of the gospel, that
whosoever believeth on him should not perish, but
have everlasting life, I am doing you a
tremendous favor, because you need God, you need
God.
We slaves to time, find the immortality and
find it in God and find it nowhere
else.
We sing.
We didn't sing it tonight, but we've been
singing, Oh God, our God, our help in
ages past.
What ages past?
God's ages past now.
God lives in now.
Our ages past, the brief race of men,
our help for years to come, the race,
the race, our help for years to come,
and your help and my help for years
to come, and this God, be thou our
guide while life shall last, and our eternal
home.
I need to guide myself, be thou our
guide while life shall last.
I need a guide.
I need somebody to guide me.
I can't go alone.
I'm too small and I'm too weak and
I'm too stupid and I'm too vulnerable.
A microbe so small I can't see it
can get in my nose and start down
my neck and the next thing you know
it's in my lungs and the next thing
you know I have pneumonia.
Then I'm gone.
That's we poor little creatures.
I need immortality and eternity and you'll only
find it in God and you'll only find
God through Jesus Christ the Lord.
Let me say to you that I am
not here trying to plead the cause of
one who's failed.
I am pleading the cause of one who's
conquered absolutely and sits at the right hand
of God now in eternity.
One time I remember being in a museum.
I went to Field Museum, a very famous
museum, and I had half a day or
so and so I went around looking at
things there and I wandered into the Egyptian
room.
Now the Egyptian room is in the basement.
There's a certain poetic eloquence about all that,
that it's in the basement where it ought
to be.
And there in the basement was the Egyptian
room and there were mummies there.
Now the mummy is the human body wrapped
up as you know and mummified and born
so it lasts through the years.
They'd taken some of them and partly unwrapped
them to show them off.
Old fellows there, their teeth had fallen out
and their chins had met their noses centuries
ago and they had them wrapped up.
There they were.
And then there were little babies there and
I saw one little chap.
He was probably seven years old and we
had a seven-year-old boy and I
looked down at that mummified baby boy and
I began to grieve.
I stood there and looking, I walked from
one crypt to the other looking at these
mummies, these human beings.
Some of them were kings incidentally.
Now they were lying all wrapped up there
in gun sack and dry enough that you
had to keep the wind off of them
or they'd have blown away.
Dust, dust, dust.
And I saw it and I saw the
fallen in eyes and the fallen in cheeks
and I saw the tough leathery arms that
had been uncovered for the occasion.
There they were.
They were human beings and they had been
before England was.
They had been before Greece was.
They had been before Rome.
They were from the, from the dynasties of
the kings and before the Egyptian kings had
built the pyramids.
And I walked around down there till I,
I got gloomy and though I'm kind of
sensitive and easily affected and I began to
get gloomier and gloomier and feel more miserable
all the time.
And it was past noon and I was
hungry and they had a restaurant down there.
How silly can you get?
The restaurant was, the restaurant was just next,
next room over or two from, from the
mummies.
And I couldn't eat.
I couldn't have eaten if they'd have given
me, if they'd have given me caviar and
hummingbird tongue.
I couldn't have eaten.
I, I just was sick, sick in my
heart, sick in my body, sick to think
that man made in the image of God
had to die and turn to dust.
And I walked out of there and went
over to the elevated line and got an
elevated train for the south side out where
I live.
And I was about as gloomy as they
come.
And when I get gloomy, Brother Indy Gould
is, is bright, is light by comparison.
I don't get that very often, but something
like that did at that time.
And I went out of there so gloomy
that I had the book with me and
I had a book of poems by an
English poet by the name of Thomas Chown.
And I, I got a hold of one
of those poems and it was called The
Last Man.
Did you ever read it?
I had just come from looking at dead
men.
And now here was a little fanciful story
written by a man who believed in Jesus
Christ.
And a little story, beautifully written, for he
was a master craftsman, though not perhaps one
of the greatest of the poets, he was
a good one.
And he, he envisioned a little dreamer vision
that he had about seeing the human race
down to the last man.
He said they'd killed each other by guns
and there'd been pestilences and famines and wars
and all sorts of things had whittled the
human race down till there was only one
man left.
Everybody else was dead.
Almost sounds as if he'd heard of the,
the hydrogen bomb.
But everything was down to one man.
And this man was awfully sick, leaning on
his elbow, high up on a promontory looking
out over the western ocean.
And the sun was going down into the
sea setting.
And he knew it would be the last
sunset he would ever see for the rattle
of death had already come and his eyes
were getting glazed.
But he could still think and still talk
a little.
So as he gazed out at the setting
sun, he began to talk to the sun.
And he said something like this to the
sun.
He said, by him recall to breath who
captive led captivity and robbed a grave of
victory and took the sting from death.
Then, after he had reminded himself that there
was one who had risen from the dead
and had come out and robbed the death
of its sting and taken away the victory
from the grave.
Why, he spoke to the sun.
Here's what he said to the sun.
He said, go, son, while mercy hold me
up on nature's awful waste, to drink this
last unbitter cup of grief that man shall
taste.
Go, tell the night that hides the face.
Thou sawest the last of Adam's race on
earth's sepulchral clod.
The darkened universe defied to quench his immortality
or shake his trust in God.
He said, when the sun, when you're old
and burnt out and have gone to dust,
I'll still be living because I live in
him who captive led captivity and robbed a
grave of victory and took the sting from
death.
Well, you know what that did for me.
That lifted me up out of a merry
clay and established my emotions, at least on
the solid rock.
I had just come out of seeing all
kinds and shapes and sizes of kings and
queens and little babies and half-grown kids,
all done up in gunny sack and all
of them 3,000 years old.
I thought, oh, boy, that's where I'm headed.
And then I read this, and I thanked
God that my soul was lifted up.
And I came back home a joyful man,
remembering that no matter what you do to
the body, no matter how much you wrap
it up or embalm it, Jesus Christ recalled
back the human breath and took the sting
from death and gave victory to man, God
the eternal God.
Oh, my friend, you need God, for God
is your eternity.
You need God, for God is your tomorrow.
You need Jesus Christ, for Jesus Christ is
your tomorrow.
He's your guarantee of that which will be.
He is your resurrection and your life.
And when the sun has burnt itself out
and the stars have been folded up like
a garment and the heavens have been rolled
like a vesture and are no more, God
will be, for God dwells in an everlasting
now that nothing can get to.
And he takes his children who believe in
his Son into his bosom, into the heart
of the everlasting now.
So that's why I believe in the communion
of saints, brothers and sisters.
That's why I'm an Anglican when it comes
to that.
Although I'm not an Anglican, they wouldn't accept
me.
But I'm an Anglican when it comes to
the communion of saints.
I do not believe that one saint that
leaves the earth, goes anywhere but into the
heart and bosom of God to be a
timeless, endless, forever saint.
And I believe that all these great Hebrew
and Greek and English words that apply to
God apply to every man and woman who
is in the bosom of God.
Eternity and forever and unto perpetuity and world
without end.
I'll settle for that, won't you?
Somebody came along to me and said, we're
going to take you to heaven, but you
can only be up there for 20 years.
Oh, I'd be a miserable man.
I'd say, well, what's the good of getting
used to a place like that and learning
to love it and then have to leave
it in 20 years and have to go
out like a candle?
I can't see that.
But I accept for my own soul and
I accept for the soul of all the
Lord's children.
These are wondrous words, eternal and everlasting and
forever and unto perpetuity and world without end.
I accept the everlastingness of the saints.
Why can we believe in immortality?
Because God is eternal.
You see, that's basic to the doctrine of
immortality.
If God were not eternal, there could be
no immortality and no certain future for anybody.
There would only be cosmic dust who somehow
or other managed to get shifted into human
beings and trees and stars and then only
to be swept away again and blown into
immensity and forgetfulness.
But because God is eternal, we have our
home in God.
We can look forward with calm restfulness for
the time that shall be.
Our daughter wrote us the other day.
She said she'd been doing her housework, which
if I remember means washing iron, in their
poor little college apartment.
And she'd been listening to a record or
an album that I gave her, Bach's D
Minor Mass.
And I don't get excited.
It's Luther, not Catholic.
It's Luther.
But she said, when I get to heaven,
I want to meet Isaiah, David, Paul, and
Bach.
I know some others I want to meet,
some of the dear saints of God.
And I know they'll be all right.
They'll be all right.
There won't be any rot on them.
You can't rot in God.
There won't be any decay, and they won't
be old.
Jesus, our Lord, died when he was 33,
and 33 is the top peak of human
possibility if the body's healthy.
He died at 33, and we shall be
like him and shall see him as he
is.
So sister, if you want to know how
old you're going to be, you're going to
be 33 forever and ever and ever and
ever and ever.
You're not going to be the immature 20s.
You're going to be a ripe, mature 33
forever and ever.
Thank God, my brother and sister, the years
never can throw any outward signs on God,
and they never can on us either, through
Jesus Christ, the Lord.
Well, I think I must close at 25
minutes after 8, and I could go on
a while, but I'm not going to because
I want you to come back next week.