The Eternal God
The eternal God is your refuge,
And underneath are the everlasting arms (Deuteronomy 33:27).
Northallerton is a splendid market town in North Yorkshire, with a world-renowned gourmet food emporium. I once spent a very interesting time looking at produce you rarely see elsewhere. It was the first time I saw an octopus in a jar. I didn’t buy one! During my exploration, I came across some rock salt. The label read, “This rock salt is 200 million years old.” And on the bottom, it said, “Use by 20 August 2015”!
Scientists are very good at throwing large numbers at us. Once we get into space, we go beyond hundreds of millions into the realms of billions of light-years. The thing about all these numbers is that they describe distance and make us small.
But God is eternal. We cannot measure Him in light-years. He is outside of time, which He created to display Himself to us. He is beyond the dimensions which confine us, and the universe He sustains. John describes the deity of Christ, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made” (John 1:1-3). He does this, not to demonstrate distance, but to wonderfully introduce the nearness of God: “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14). Science touches our lives, not by telling us what is on Mars or where the next nearest sun is, but by injecting a life-saving vaccine into our arms. The glory of the heavens witnesses to the majesty of God, but His eternal love was only seen when He entered the world we inhabit, as our Saviour.
True Christian faith is centred in the Person of Jesus Christ. In his Easter message, our Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, reminded us of the words of Jesus: “I am the way, the truth and the life” (John 14:6). And how was this displayed? In the giving of Himself. Jesus came to where we were, not to bridge the gap between God and us, but to remove the distance. Some scientists stumble at God’s greatness being revealed in His lowliness. His majesty was not fully displayed in the stars He flung into the universe, but in the Person of Christ who stepped into His own creation. We don’t find God in the vastness of space, but in Jesus of Nazareth. It was not His distance which deals with our need, but His nearness. John would later write, “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, concerning the Word of life” (1 John 1:1). The greatest expression of the nearness of God was when Jesus Christ, the Son of God, stood in our place. He took all our sin and need upon Himself and died for our redemption, then rose again in the power of an endless life to become our eternal refuge. The arms outstretched at Calvary are the arms that carry us in eternal love from the moment we trust Him. It is the love we should never doubt.
