Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 2964
“We trust in the living God.” 1 Timothy 4:10.
IF we are inclined to grieve because everything around us changes, our consolation will be found in turning to our unchanging God. If we lament the ills of mortality, it will be wise for us to turn to Him “who only has immortality.” If our earthly joys fade and die, it is a blessed thing for us to be able to go to the fountain of undying joy and there to drink deep draughts of bliss which shall cause us to forget our misery.
Without any further preface, I ask you to follow me while first, in a very simple manner, I speak upon the great truth of the existence of the living God. And then, secondly, while I draw practical inferences from that existence. Before I close my discourse, I shall have a question to put to you.
I. First, for a little while, let us think of THE GREAT TRUTH OF THE EXISTENCE OF THE LIVING GOD. Paul wrote to Timothy, “Therefore we both labor and suffer reproach, because we trust in the living God.”
He meant, by that expression, first, that God is truly existing and not like the dead gods of the heathen, which are no gods at all—which, in fact, have no existence as gods. Vast multitudes have bowed down before images of wood, or stone, or ivory, or gold—but of them all it might truly be said, “Eyes have they, but they see not; they have ears, but they hear not; noses have they, but they smell not; they have hands, but they handle not; feet have they, but they walk not; neither speak they through their throat.” It is a sure sign that a man’s understanding is dead when he can worship a dead god! But you and I, Beloved, “trust in the living God.” He is the God who made Heaven and earth and all that is in them. He is the God who supports the whole universe by the power of His almighty arms. He is the God who rules and overrules in Nature, Providence and Grace. He is the true God, the only real God—no dream God, no phantom or myth conjured up by imagination, but a real God, the only living and true God! May we worship Him, then, with real worship, real adoration and true sincerity of heart! What a blessing it is for us that we are able to worship the true God! We might have been left, as our remote ancestors were, to seek after God, if haply we might find Him, or to worship gods that are no gods and be lost in the mazes of superstition, unable to find the Most High. But “God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, has shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the Glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” and, therefore, “we trust in the living God,” the real God!
A second meaning of this expression, I have no doubt, lies in the fact of God’s self-existence and independence. ’ ‘We trust in the living God,” who is “living” in a very emphatic sense. You and I are living, but our existence is entirely dependent upon the will of God. Although He has given us immortal spirits, yet that immortality only comes to us by reason of the Divine decree. And the glorious immortality of Believers comes to them by virtue of their vital union with their ever-living Head, their Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. We have no independent immortality—it is not inherent in us and it must be sustained by perpetual emanations of the Divine Power. It is a fire which could not maintain its own glow. It must be fed, or it would go out. But God is self-existent, the great I AM—and if all His creatures would cease to be, He would be just as completely God without them as with them—
“He sits on no precarious throne, Nor borrows leave to be.”
His is a fire which burns without fuel—a sun which scatters light without itself diminishing! God is independent, self-existing, the only really “living” being in the entire universe in the fullest and most emphatic sense of the word, “living.”
What a joy it is to worship such a God as this, because nothing can diminish His life, His force, His power! If His courts are sustained, not by the tribute of men, but by His own wealth. If His sovereign state stands, not by the might of armies, but by His own Omnipotence and if He, Himself, is All-Sufficient, not because He gathers up all things into Himself, but because all things are from Him, and are all in Him in their germ and seed—is He not a God whom we all ought to worship—in whom, worshipping, we may joyfully trust—and relying on whom we may be perfectly at rest, for He cannot fail us, neither can He fail Himself in any respect or degree?
A third meaning of the expression, “living,” in Paul’s declaration, “We trust in the living God,” I have no doubt is to be found in the fact of the existence of God through all eternity There was a time when you and I, who are now alive, were not alive. And there will be a time when, as far as this world is concerned, we shall be numbered with the dead. But there never was a period in which God did not live. He always was and always is and always will be “the living God.” Let your thoughts fly back to eternity if you can—for, mark you, all our ideas of eternity are very shallow and superficial. We cannot form any clear notion of what, “eternity,” means, and the very fact that we speak of a “past” eternity proves that we have to bring it down to our finite apprehension and to use inaccurate words to express our imperfect and incorrect ideas! But far back, when the sun, moon and stars—and the whole universe slept in the mind of God, as a forest sleeps within an acorn cup—even then God was “the living God.” Before the first ray of light had broken in upon the pristine darkness—yes, before there wasany darkness—before anything was created—God was “the living God!” And He was just as great and as glorious as He is now. Without an angel to sing His praise, or a human being to look up to Him with holy reverence or with tearful repentance—yet still independent of them all, He was “the living God!” What a blessing it is for us that it was so! There was never a period in which Satan could plot and plan against us, but that God had eternally existed before him. That evil spirit is but the infant of a day compared with God, the Eternal of all the ages, the Everlasting Father who was always able to anticipate everything that could possibly occur, knowing beforehand all that might be detrimental to us, countermining every mine of the archenemy and baffling all the old serpent’s cunning in such a way as, in the end, to add still more to His own Glory!