I was told a year ago that I
was supposed to live five weeks and a
good number of people were praying for me.
And I learned about an old brother.
In fact, I was down at Old Sound.
He came into my trailer.
And he's not at all a man who
would present himself, push himself forward, but a
very humble, godly man whom I had come
to respect.
He rather limited acquaintance that I had had
with him.
He was an old brother in his eighties,
very rugged old fellow, worked with a pick
and shovel around on campus.
But he came in and sat down and
told me that he had gone to the
altar and been anointed in my behalf.
I got out of the hospital on the
29th of January, last January.
And he went back to his room and
he said to the Lord he was praying
again.
The Lord asked him if he would be
willing to die for me.
He said, you are willing to be anointed,
would you be willing to die?
The old brother faced that a while on.
Then arose and wrote it out, signed his
name, that he'd be willing to die for
me.
Well, God gave me a touch somewhere.
I didn't know this for about a year.
I learned I was supposed to live five
weeks, but I'm in better shape than I
was last year.
Physically, by the help and grace of God.
And I owe much to the old brother
from that angle.
There have been a few things I have
been able to do this year that will
maybe kind of top off my ministry.
I don't want to stay not a day
longer than the Lord wants me to stay
here.
I don't want to go a day before
he wants me to go.
But as I face the future, I face
it with some curiosity.
For a number of years, I wondered what
it would be like to make the crossing.
I think it's Olin Curtis who tells us
that when we come to the article of
death, for the first time in our existence,
we will be absolutely alone.
Never has been a time up till then
that there wasn't something or somebody that you
could touch or be conscious of beside yourself.
You could see something before sight began to
function in your infant eye.
You became conscious of somebody by touch.
That newborn infant is conscious of a mother's
breast.
And consciousness begins to develop.
And sight comes, and then hearing develops.
And we broaden out our scope of information
or attaining information.
But down there at the end, we'll be
absolutely alone.
Your loved ones may be in the room,
and you may be looking at them, but
sight fails.
The eyes may be open, but sight doesn't
function.
They're talking to you, you hear them, but
that fades out.
No longer can you hear.
And they may take you by the hand,
but you become insensible of that.
Your soul is leaving your body, and you'll
be absolutely alone with yourself.
That'll be something, sir.
Be alone, just absolutely alone with yourself.
Some years ago, when I read it, I
came to another field of thinking related to
that.
When you come to defining death, death is
not annihilation, certainly.
We do not believe that.
Writing a little catechism back in 44, I
wrote it, I think, in 42, and it
printed, copyrighted 44, I was feeling for a
definition of death that would be adequate for
all three aspects, spiritual death, physical death, eternal
death.
And I came up with something like this.
It is that change of condition and separation
from present environment that man has no power
to reverse.
That'll fit spiritual death, it'll fit physical death,
it will fit eternal death.
Adam was not annihilated when he died the
day he sinned.
Somebody said he didn't die that day, he
lived 930 years.
I say he died that day.
I'm a little premature in some things I
may want to repeat here, but the light
went out in his soul.
His soul had been illuminated by the presence
of the Spirit of God.
There was a withdrawal of that spirit.
We call it theologically a deprivation with an
attendant deprivation.
The light went out.
Moral faculties with no light degenerate.
And when he was driven out of the
garden, he didn't have a tool in his
hand, not a shovel or a saw, an
axe or a hammer.
And there was no house built nor tent
pitched or a ceiling.
He had sin in his heart, guilt in
his conscience, fear in his mind, an angry
God behind his back, and a cursed earth
under his feet.
I say he died.
He was on his road to hell, didn't
know it.
And if something didn't happen before he arrived,
he'd certainly arrive.
He was a wanderer on an island of
time, which is an island, I call it
an island, in the sea of eternity.
You journey across it, I journey across it,
and a step off into the sea of
eternity.
But then I raised the question, he was
separated from his present environment.
He'd been in the garden, taken out of
it.
Condition was changed from a holy being to
a depraved being.
He couldn't reverse that.
He had absolutely no power to change it.
When you come to physical death, you have
the same thing.
Change of condition and separation from present environment,
and you can't reverse it.
You can't change it.
When you come to the judgment, if you're
so unfortunate as to be lost eternally, you'll
be resurrected to appear before the infinite God,
there to become the object of his wrath.
No man becomes the object of the wrath
of God until that hour.
He is judged and tasked into the lake
that burneth with fire and brimstone, which is
the second death.
I'd better cut that off because there are
some things right there that I want to
pick up and maybe elaborate upon a little
farther.
But I ask myself, is that what Jesus
meant when he said, He that liveth and
believeth on me shall never die?
You'll never come to a place where you're
absolutely alone.
I like to think that.
I may come to a place where I
can't see my kinfolk.
I can't hear them, and I'm not sensible
of their touch.
But I want him there.
And so that there is such a thing
as living to die.
That's what I want to be doing, living
to die.
And I've wondered what it'll be like to
close your eyes here and fade out and
open them there.
I don't know.
And by the grace of God, I want
to be ready when that hour comes.
And for the privilege of being here, I
thank God and you.
Trust that what we have to say will,
from service to service, will be of benefit
to you.
Now it's very seldom that I use notes
once in a while.
I've taught homiletics a few times, believe it
or not.
You may not recognize that from the way
I go about things, but I've told the
youngsters, don't do what I do, do as
I tell you to.
The matter of whether to preach with notes
or not is a debatable thing.
Some of my good friends have said if
I tried to without notes, I'd be in
the brush so far I never could get
out.
My good friend R.G. Flexon told me
that.
And he preaches with copious notes.
We've worked together a number of times, and
when he sees me working without them, then
he sometimes talks to me afterward.
Well, C.G. Finney and his head had
notes he could write on the back of
a calling card.
A single word meant more to him than
a whole paragraph to some other people.
Well, whatever the Lord would want, now I've
written down just a few things here, so
I, maybe I won't use them, I don't
know.
But if I have to or feel like
I want to, I will.
But the subject that, if you want a
subject in these lectures, the first one will
be the God we worship.
The God we worship.
I wonder if you know how much you
know about him.
I know so little.
But what little I do know is so
wonderful that I'll be glad to know more.
One of the most sublime and profound statements
that you will find in all literature is
the first verse of the Bible.
In the beginning God created.
You have a tremendous statement there.
You have an adequate first cause for everything
that is in existence.
I don't care what it is that's in
existence.
You have the cause for it right there.
In the beginning, God.
When I think of what God has done
by way of material universe, and I know
so little about that.
I'm not an astronomer nor a scientist in
any area in that field.
But I remember reading years ago about a
constellation or a planet out there in the
constellation Orion that they call Betelgeuse.
And they told me, and I've read it
numbers of times since, that it is so
large that this whole solar system could be
placed inside it.
Our Earth could continue to rotate around the
sun inside that with 25 million miles to
spare.
That's all in one planet.
My God put that out there.
And you go to thinking about the material
universe, you have something to think about.
God created.
In the beginning, God.
God never tries to prove that he is.
There's absolutely nothing in the book to prove
that there is a God.
There is a statement that a man's a
fool who denies it that there is.
Fool has said in his heart, there is
no God.
He could do what the psalmist did, scan
the heavens.
The heavens declare the glory of God.
Firmament showeth his handiwork.
Day unto day uttereth speech.
Night unto night showeth knowledge.
And there's not a language in which their
voice is not uttered.
And any man that can stand that is
a fool to say there isn't a God.
We could go out into that.
Now the old theologians called it the cosmological
argument.
Some people say it's old.
I said that doesn't mean it isn't good
and it isn't true.
It's a solid, sound argument for the existence
of God.
Cosmos is there.
And it's not only there, but it's evidently
controlled by somebody.
Did everything just happen to be in the
order that the orderliness of the cosmos argues
for this God?
The being of this God, the power.
A creator big enough to make and to
sustain and to rule, keep it in order.
Suppose he'd stop just one time and the
sun wouldn't come up tomorrow morning.
I tell you we'd have a lot of
atheists converting.
Yes, sir.
We'd just have one little thing go wrong
with this planetary system.
And you'd understand.
But now there is no way of giving
demonstrative proof that there's a God.
You can't demonstrate, prove demonstratively.
There's no demonstrative argument for his existence.
I can demonstrate to you that 2 and
2 is 4, or that 4 and 3
is 7.
I can demonstrate that.
But you can't demonstrate that there is a
God.
All you can offer is moral proof.
You cannot give demonstrative proof.
You can offer moral proof, which makes it
more reasonable to believe than to disbelieve.
In other words, God does not force morality.
You can't force morality.
Morality is the result of a moral agent
choosing and volitionally carrying out what he chooses
to carry out.
And I, the moral argument would be, where
did this come from?
Did it just pop into existence by a
cosmic explosion somewhere?
Is that how things came into existence?
I read about men telling how many millions
of years, why they get so they can
do a thousand million years ago, this happened
as though they were right there.
I sat on the bank of a river
in Illinois.
I was in the officer's training school at
the time, World War I.
A fellow was lecturing to us in the
field of geology.
With all the confidence of a man that
had been right there and seen it, he
said, 500,000 years ago, this was the
condition here.
I went back to my barracks and got
my Bible out, searched in vain.
Now, I do not know when the beginning
was that God created.
I would tell you that.
He doesn't either.
Could have been 500 million years ago.
I belong to what is known as the
Restorationist School of Bible Students.
That the original creation, whatever it was, we
don't know when it was.
I belong to that school.
If you wish to criticize me there, you're
welcome to do that.
You don't have to agree with me.
I tell students that many times.
You don't have to agree with me, but
you're going to have to know what I'm
talking about if you get a passing grade.
Well, that's fair, isn't it?
I'm not here to make people little emerys.
I'm here to help them to learn the
issues that we're facing.
Learn all they can about them.
You don't have to agree with me.
Never did ask a student to do that.
I want to be a Calvinist.
When they go off from under my instruction,
they're free to be that.
I'm not trying to convert them from Calvinism
to Arminianism.
I'd like to, because I think Arminianism is
right.
But that's not my aim.
They themselves must make the decision.
I do not know of a case, and
that's not anything, any credit to me.
Understand that, please.
If I converted a man, then the next
fellow could convert him, too.
But I have never known a Calvinistic young
man to come face-to-face with the
issues just like they are and go out
the scene.
I've had a number sit under me in
theological class.
I've never known them to go out the
scene.
One young man stood with a book in
his hand open that I had asked him
to write either a critique or a review,
book review, digest.
He had it open.
He said, Brother Emery, I can't agree with
this fellow.
I said, You don't have to.
You don't have to.
You have to know what he's teaching.
Well, it was a rock-ribbed Calvinistic book
he was reading.
The Sovereignty of God by Pink, Arthur Pink.
If you haven't read it, you have.
You know he's a rock-ribbed Calvinist.
This fellow thought he was a Calvinist, had
been for 22 years, Baptist.
He said, I can't agree with this fellow.
I said, You don't have to, sir.
All I want you to know is to
look at it.
Here it is by one of their own
writers without any varnish.
You know exactly what he's trying to tell
you.
He said when he started, it seemed so
logical.
He said, I can't go with this.
Well, again I said, You don't have to.
He snapped his fingers.
He said, You know, after you've been in
this 22 years, you can't throw it off
like that.
I said, I'm not asking you to do
that either.
I just want you to know the field.
You arrive at your own conclusions.
I'd rather a man be that than to
jump and then wonder why he jumped.
I want him to know what he's facing.
So when you come to the matter of
trying to give demonstry proof that there is
a God, you can't do that.
You can give moral proof.
And the power of God is manifested in
the cosmos.
And the orderliness is there too, but it's
not quite so prominent.
We look and think usually of the cosmos
in its greatness, the majesticness of it, and
then the orderliness.
But when we come to the teleological argument,
the purpose of things, we look at flowers.
Who can make a flower?
Nobody but God.
You find the architect of that lily, that
orchid, or that rose, and you found God.
People may make imitation, but they don't have
the odor.
Bees don't work on them.
You don't get any honey from them.
There's something about the program of God in
the field of nature about us.
I heard old Seth Reese say one time
a lot of things in this world he
didn't understand.
That he didn't understand how power, what power
it would take to push sap through a
hundred foot of hardwood log.
But he knew it happened.
I don't understand how sap is pushed up
apparently out there to stalk the leaves on
the cherry tree.
The buds come out, then the leaves.
Then when the fruit is there, if that
sap, those leaves, fall off from that tree,
that sap doesn't come up.
Apparently it pushes the buds and the leaves,
then the leaves fall.
I don't know.
But I know in a cherry orchard, and
I lived in the fruit belt of West
Michigan, you go out and sometimes it looks
like somebody's been out there with a little
muzzleloading shotgun like they used to hunt with.
It wasn't choked.
And birdshotting, it just, you know, spread all
over when it went out.
The leaves just full of little holes, just
like birdshot had gone through.
Those leaves will not pull the sap up.
They'll fall off after a bit.
The cherries are large, full size.
They turn red at a distance.
You might look and say, man, wouldn't that
be good cherry picking.
No leaves to bother us.
But you get a little closer, and they're
sickly red, kind of a jar.
They aren't any good.
Now, I don't understand that.
But I'm like my little children.
When they would talk among themselves, I'd hear
them off in the other room or somewhere.
One would be talking and said, I don't
know, but Daddy does.
I don't understand that, but my father does.
There are a lot of things I don't
know, he does.
And I'm glad I can worship him.
He's the God I worship.
Now, in the 89th Psalm, at the 14th
verse, you have a statement regarding this God.
Justice and judgment are the habitation of thy
throne.
Mercy and truth shall go before thy face.
Psalm 89, 14.
In the midst of that, there's a pronoun,
personal pronoun, thy.
Justice and judgment are the habitation, and the
margin says the establishment of thy throne.
Take that pronoun, thy.
It speaks of a personal being.
But you know, there's a lot of people
who claim to be worshipers of God.
I wonder if they have any idea at
all of the God of the Bible.
This, to me, is a tremendous text.
The first time my attention was called to
it, I think, was sometime back in the
30s, early 30s.
I was speaking at a Bible school chapel
for a week.
And coming out of a revival meeting, I
was to give the five days there before
I went to the next meeting.
And I was asking the Lord for something
that I could use to help those young
theologues.
My attention was drawn to this verse.
I thought I would start with it.
But working without an outline, I started.
And the thing was bigger when I stopped
the first chapel than it was when I
started.
And I used it all five chapel mornings.
Justice and judgment are the habitation of thy
throne.
Take that pronoun, thy.
It speaks of a personal being.
Personality requires certain things.
Without it, you do not have personality.
I think Dr. John Miley, one of Methodism's
great theologians, said that it takes intelligence, sensibilities,
and will to constitute personality.
Now some would use another word for sensibilities.
They'd use emotions or feelings or something.
But I like it the way John Miley
gave it.
Intelligence, sensibility, and will.
If you're lacking in any part of that,
it's not personality.
Well, if there is a God, a person,
a very personal God, what is God like?
Well, I said I do not know of
any better way to approach the study of
God than to work through the creature that
he made in his own image and after
his own likeness.
So I look at a man and I
say, there's a person.
God's a person.
This man was made in the image and
after the likeness of God.
And if he is, he has the faculties
of being that God has.
Now when the man sinned, and I don't
want to get into that area, only just
to point this up, when he sinned, he
lost the moral image of God, but he
did not lose personality likeness.
He retained, far as I know, Adam in
the garden saw through a pair of eyes
just like I see.
He would hear through a pair of ears
just like I hear.
He had a pair of hands that would
feel just like I feel.
He had a tongue and a palate that
could taste just like I taste.
He had all the powers of personality that
I have, but the moral faculty went dead
on him.
Light went out in his soul.
But if the man retains those personality faculties,
then could I say that God sees, the
Bible says he does, but the Bible says
God is a spirit.
He doesn't have any eye to see with.
He doesn't need one.
Every organ that you have sitting right here,
you will have when you're lying in a
casket if you lie in a casket.
It has an eye, but it can't see.
Every faculty, every organ that you have sitting
right here, you will have when you're lying
in a casket if you lie in a
casket.
Maybe Jesus will come before we get that
far.
But if you lie in a casket, you
will have every organ that you have now,
you will have then.
But the organ that you have limits the
faculty that you have.
God isn't limited.
He doesn't have an organ to bother him.
Actually, it's your soul that sees, it isn't
this.
Your soul is the seeing thing.
Your soul is the sinning thing, we'll find
out later.
Your soul is what sees, but your soul
is gone.
The eye can't see, because the thing that
sees through the eye isn't there.
But that eye limits me.
I can't see through that wall.
Well, that wall doesn't mean anything to God.
He can look right through it.
I suppose, separate all the atoms and every
piece of wood or mortar that's out there.
Just look right through it like it wasn't
there.
God sees your heart and my heart.
The heart of all you preach to.
I look at your face.
I wonder what kind of a fellow you
are.
And each of us try to evaluate the
other fellow, you know.
I had a very good friend.
We were very good friends.
We sat on all kinds of boards together.
District council and examining board and school board
and, well, just about all the district boards
that were where we had been on together.
We were not at all alike.
He was probably six inches anyway, taller than
I, and thin.
Well, I haven't always been as heavy as
I am now.
But I said to him, brother, naming him,
we're like a couple of dogs, two strange
dogs coming together.
They're about a block apart.
They see each other.
They stick their nose up and they sniff
a little.
They take a few steps and they sniff
and they stop and look and, you know.
I said, those dogs are trying to take
each other's measure before they get together.
And I said, we're like that.
You think you have my measure and I
think I have yours.
He laughed.
I said, if frankness becomes cruelty or diplomacy
becomes deception, in either case we've missed the
trail of holiness.
And my danger is that my frankness I'll
become cruel.
Your danger is that in your diplomacy you'll
become deceptive.
He just laughed.
He thought he knew me.
I thought I knew him.
I look at your face.
I study your walk.
I study all I can about you.
If I'm interested and then form a judgment.
But brother, that judgment could be so far
off.
God looks at your heart as he looks
at my heart.
And nothing escapes his notice.
For there's nothing hidden from the eyes of
him with whom we have to do.
He doesn't have an organ that he has
to limit himself by.
The light's too bright.
My organ won't function.
The light's too dim.
In fact, I told brother, I got lost
in the light this morning.
I was coming down 13 and I got
in that little town, I still can't remember,
La Palla, is that it?
And when 13 turned, the sun was just
coming up, shining right down that road.
And I couldn't see anything.
I backed in and turned around.
I don't know how many turnarounds I did
there, but I was trying to find where,
I was pretty sure it started south out
of that town somewhere.
And I sure didn't want to keep driving
east against that.
I got lost in the light.
Why?
Because I looked through an organ.
The light's too bright.
My organ's no good.
The light's too dim.
My organ's no good.
A brick wall, a board wall, anything will
block my vision.
But there isn't anything that will block his.
The darkness and the light are both alike
to thee, That's what the book says.
God is a great pattern in whose image
man was made.
Man had a faculty.
God has a faculty.
I can only look a limited distance.
God looks, shall I say, to the end
of eternity?
No.
I don't know what eternity means.
There's no end to it.
He's infinite.
There isn't anything in all the universe, anywhere,
he doesn't see.
It's no wonder that Ezekiel tells about him
being full of eyes before and behind.
There's no place you can escape the eye
of the Lord.
The righteous don't want to escape.
The wicked may want to hide us from
the face of him, fall on us, but
mountains wouldn't do it.
No way to escape the eye of the
Lord.
But this same Lord who looks at everything
and sees it, this same God has the
faculty of hearing.
But again, I don't believe he has any
ears, for he's spirit.
God is a spirit.
But he can hear without an ear.
Isn't it a fact that the ear limits
our faculty?
The sound, the vibrations are too rapid, we
can't hear them.
They tell us that there's some little bird,
I don't remember which one, that can sing
out of the range of our organ.
They've watched that little bird singing, and the
little throat is vibrating and the beak is
open, and they hear the note going higher,
higher, higher, and it keeps on when they've
lost the sound.
The little bird is still vocalizing.
It's gotten so far, the vibrations have become
serenity.
I can't hear them.
They don't register.
But you let them go down, down, down,
slower, slower, and we see the old string
vibrating, we can't hear any sound.
But it never is lost to the ear
of God.
Now, the Bible talks about the ear of
the Lord, the eye of the Lord, the
nose of the Lord, the hand of the
Lord, and all of that.
But at the same time, it tells us
God is a spirit.
Now, the God of the Bible is infinite
in all of his faculties.
Seeing, hearing, feeling.
I often wonder if his relationship to the
universe is likened to our relationship to a
body.
I have a soul housed in a body.
How it engulfs it, I do not know.
But you touch any part of my body,
whatever my soul is, it knows that, unless
I'm paralyzed.
And sometimes silly things strike me just.
They told me this summer about somebody who
came to Victory Grove Camp Meeting, that's right
at the edge of Albany, New York.
A woman of the fashionable set came in
all dolled up, and she had a little
pooch in her arm.
Brought it into the tabernacle and sat down
right on the front seat with the pooch
down beside her.
Well, there was an old sister.
One of the old, tight, holiness women, you
know, sitting behind her.
She saw that dog, she didn't think it
had any business in the house of God,
nor do I.
There was an old brother up on the
platform talking about it like I do about
it.
God.
That put it back.
My friend on the platform, they said, just
convulsed with laughter.
The pooch took off, and the woman after
it never did come back.
Well, it had sensibilities, though it was an
animal.
And you, you touch any part of my
body.
And I don't know what my soul is,
nor where it is, nor how it involves,
but I know it has feelings.
And I somehow wonder if God doesn't indwell
the universe like my soul indwells my body.
He knows everything that's going on in it,
just as sensible of it, as though it
were in the I itself.
It's my hand.
I know it's hit my hand.
I've hit my hand a few times with
a hammer.
Well, it didn't have to hit my eye.
My eye knew what had happened.
It knew where to look and knew all
about it.
Well, I don't understand the God of the
Bible.
I don't comprehend Him.
But I thank God one day I apprehended
Him.
I read this a long time ago, that
a God comprehended is no God at all.
And I stood on that through these years.
And some university students have come to me
to tell me they appreciated that.
If I could comprehend God, I'd be bigger
than He is.
But I bless God I can apprehend Him.
That is, I can know Him and He
can know me.
I can call Him Father and He can
call me Son.
And we can make love to each other.
Now, not only do we have God with
eyes and with the faculty of seeing and
the faculty of hearing, we have a God
that can create.
I do not know what the image would
be like unless it would be in our
imagination.
We're the image of the great pattern.
He was the pattern.
We became the image.
Limited, infinite.
He's infinite.
We're finite.
He can see everything.
We can see only in a limited way.
He can hear everything.
We can only hear when vibrations are within
our range.
I have a creative faculty.
Mine isn't as active as some people's.
I call it my imagination.
I tell you, I had a big home.
I had a big library.
I've been an avid reader for all my
life, I reckon, since I began to read.
I, in my boyhood dreams, daydreaming, I had
a mansion.
I've never seen it.
Because I build soap bubbles, he builds worlds.
He speaks.
There it is.
I dreamed, and it never was.
The imagination of man seems to me to
be his creative faculty.
Some men see things, they must see them
before they come into existence.
Then they have to work to that end.
I think about some of the bridges, the
Mackinac Bridge, North Michigan, five miles long, a
little over, I think.
The engineer saw that in his mind before
you ever saw it.
They build those skyscrapers, somebody has a vision,
they see that.
Brother's building here, he had a vision, he
saw something before it began to take shape.
But it takes him a long time to
get that imagination, that thing he saw in
his imagination, into reality.
Doesn't take God long.
Just speak.
He spoke, and it stood fast.
Well, I bless God that this God that
the psalmist is talking about is my God,
the God I worship.
Now, let's keep watch of my time here.
I didn't know exactly when I started, and
I usually pile on 45, 50 minutes, I
think 50 minutes is a classroom period.
We try to stay somewhere in that.
But looking at this again, justice and judgment
are the habitation of thy, here's a person,
thy throne.
Somewhere in the universe of God there's a
center for personality.
I do not know what the center of
personality is.
I've dealt with people who were materialistically minded,
but when you come to personality, the Bible
talks about a heart that's not this physical
heart.
It talks about some things that proceed out
of the heart.
Read it in Mark chapter 7, about verses,
what, 21, 22, out of the heart proceed.
Well, that's the seed of life, the very
center of personality.
Now, I don't think of God as the
pantheists would think of Him, just spread out
in everything.
Everything you see is God, no.
Because here it talks about a throne.
And yet it tells me that God is
everywhere, present.
Whither shall I flee from thy presence?
Said the psalmist.
Whither can I go from thy spirit?
That if I go here, if I go
there, no matter where I go, thou art
there if I make my bed in hell.
Behold thou, the words aren't there or supplied,
but it seems to me that the psalmist
is saying that a man that goes to
hell will be jarred when he faces God
there.
You just take a look.
The words aren't there, I think, or supplied.
If I make my bed in hell, behold
thou, not going to get away from God.
What do we mean here?
What's the issue?
I don't know how God could be omnipresent.
I'm not omnipresent.
I don't know how He could be omnipresent
and be localized or centralized on a throne,
but the Bible says He is.
Whether I understand it or not is beside
the point.
I believe a lot of things I don't
understand.
I believe them upon the evidence that's presented
to me, but I stand here occupying space
enough to accommodate a couple of hundred pounds
of advertive boys, but I'm pushing my personality.
You could sit back in there, I think,
with Lao Tzuang Yen and my wife, and
you'd find it back there too.
I'm extending my personality by means of the
faculties of my being.
Just as far as I can see, my
faculties reach.
Just as far as I can hear, my
faculties reach.
Just as far as I can make myself
heard, my faculties reach.
I'm present.
You go home and say, Emery was there.
Well, I occupied this little space, but I
trust I'm where you are too.
I trust I'm pushing my personality out.
Something about me, beside my voice, something that's
feelingly there.
I don't understand that either, but I know
I've been in the presence of people, and
that I wish I could just stay that
close.
Oh brother, he said there were some people
into whose presence he goes when he leaves.
He felt like he needed a spiritual bath.
He didn't touch them, they didn't touch him,
but there was something emanating from them that
made him feel like he wanted a bath.
I said when I heard him say it,
yes sir, there are other people into whose
presence I go, when I leave I feel
as though I've had one.
They haven't touched me, I haven't touched them,
but I felt, I felt the power, I
felt the presence, I felt something about them
that I couldn't see, an intangible something.
Well, I do not know how God projects
himself to the ends of the universe, but
I know if I can project my personality
out through this building and as far as
I can see or hear or make myself
heard, I don't have any problem about God
sitting on a throne somewhere just seeing and
projecting his personality.
Well, eternally, brother, eternally and infinitely, there is
no place, you couldn't go any place in
the universe that you wouldn't come in contact
with him.
That's what the psalmist is trying to tell
us.
This throne, sitting on a throne, a throne
speaks of authority.
A throne is where kings, rulers sit.
And I've often wondered if men who talk
about God so vividly take his name in
profanity so fluently.
I've wondered if they'd ever stop to think
that he's looking right into their heart.
He knows every thought.
I know what your thoughts are far off.
He saw you before the atoms came together
to make your body.
Why, as yet, there were none of them,
said the psalmist.
He knew all about that because his knowledge
is infinite.
He doesn't have to reason to conclusions.
I have to gather evidence.
He knoweth the end from the beginning.
It's instantaneous, knowing now.
And he sits on a throne, which means
he governs all that he's created.
He's a ruler.
God ruleth over all.
And because he does, I'm going to have
to give an account to him one day.
I thank God that I made my peace
with him and I worship him.
He is the God I worship.
He's infinite in all of his faculties.
Who hath known the mind of the Lord
or who hath been his counselor?
Certainly Emory never was.
And I don't believe any other human being
or angelic being was.
He was the infinite God.
Having all knowledge, being everywhere present, having all
power, searching out all hidden things, knowing my
heart like I don't know it myself.
And then one day I'm going to have
to be done in the body.
I worship to thee.
I worship.
And I thank God it's not just form.
My heart worships.
My heart worships God and then in return
he loves me.
He said, Jesus said, If a man love
me, he shall be loved of my Father
and I will love him and manifest myself
to him.
And that's what I live for.
Periodic manifestations of the Son of God to
my heart.
God loves me.
He loves me.
I love him.
And we have a fellowship together.
Period.