Long Live God!?!

sistine_chapel

The Eternal God

From eternity to eternity I am God. No one can snatch anyone out of my hand. No one can undo what I have done.

Is 43:13 (NLT)

By definition God belongs to eternity, not to time, and so is intrinsically immortal. The last Archbishop of Canterbury but one, Dr. Ramsey, appeared not to realize this when, to my amazement, at the end of a performance of Godspell, he rose to his feet and shouted, ‘Long live God,’ which, as I reflected at the time, was like shouting ‘Carry on eternity’ or ‘Keep going infinity.’ The incident made a deep impression on my mind because it illustrated the basic difficulty I met with when I was editor of Punch [magazine]: that the eminent so often say and do things which are infinitely more ridiculous than anything you can invent for them. That might not sound to you like a terrible difficulty but it is, believe me, the main headache of the editor of an ostensibly humorous paper. You go to great trouble to invent a ridiculous Archbishop of Canterbury and give him ridiculous lines to say and then suddenly he rises in his seat at the theater and shouts out ‘Long live God.’ And you’re defeated, you’re broken.”

Malcolm Muggeridge, The End of Christendom (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1980), 13.

HT: Raymond Ortlund

By His Permission and Appointment

christ_pantocrator

God’s Permission

Does not the Most High send both calamity and good?

Lam. 3:38 NLT

Now it seems to me as if you and I are enclosed in God. An arrow comes from the enemy’s bow. A man hates me writes an anonymous letter. Someone defrauds me. Some woman sets an unkind story afloat about me. The evil travels toward me. If God liked, He could let the arrow pass this way or that. But if my God opens and permits the evil to pass through His encompassing power to my heart, by the time it has passed through God to me, it has become God’s will for me. He permits it, and that is His will for my life. I do not say that the man will escape his just doom. God will deal with him. I am not going to worry myself about him. In early days, I have taken infinite pains to avert the evil that men wished to do me, or perhaps to repay them, or to show that the evil was perfectly unwarranted. I confess that I have ceased to worry about it. If you silence one man you will start twenty more. It is ever so much better for peace of mind to accept the will of God, to accept His permission and His appointment, to look up into His face, and say, “Even so, Father.”

F. B. Meyer, The Christ-Life for Your Life (Chicago: Moody Press, no date), 121.