Now what strikes me as singular about this great doxology is the characteristics, or, to use a technical word, the attributes, of the divine nature which the Apostle selects. They are all those which separate God from man; all those which present Him as arrayed in majesty, apart from human weaknesses, unapproachable by human sense, and filling a solitary throne. These are the characteristics which the Apostle thinks receive added lustre, and are lifted to a loftier height of honour and glory,' by the small fact that he, Paul, was saved from sins as he journeyed to Damascus.
It would be easy to roll out oratorical platitudes about these specific characteristics of the divine nature, but that would be as unprofitable as it would be easy. All that I want to do now is just to note the force of the epithets; and, if I can, to deepen the impression of the remarkableness of their selection.
With regard, then, to the first of them, we at once feel that the designation of' the King' is unfamiliar to the New Testament. It brings with it lofty ideas, no doubt; but it is not a name which the writers of the New Testament, who had been taught in the school of love, and led by a Son to the knowledge of God, are most fond of using. The King' has melted into the Father.' But here Paul selects that more remote and less tender name for a specific purpose. He is the King'--not eternal,' as our Bible renders it, but more correctly the King of the Ages.' The idea intended is not so much that of unending existence as that He moulds the epochs of the world's history, and directs the evolution of its progress. It is the thought of an overruling Providence, with the additional thought that all the moments are a linked chain, through which He flashes the electric force of His will. He is King of the Ages.'
The other epithets are more appropriately to be connected with the word God' which follows than with the word King' which precedes. The Apostle's meaning is this: The King of the ages, even the God who is,' etc. And the epithets thus selected all tend in the same direction. Incorruptible.' That at once parts that mystic and majestic Being from all of which the law is decay. There may be in it some hint of moral purity, but more probably it is simply what I may call a physical attribute, that that immortal nature not only does not, but cannot, pass into any less noble forms. Corruption has no share in His immortal being.
As to invisible,' no word need be said to illustrate that. It too points solely to the separation of God from all approach by human sense.
And then the last of the epithets, which, according to the more accurate reading of the text, should be, not as our Bible has it, the only wise God,' but the only God,' lifts Him still further above all comparison and contact with other beings.
So the whole set forth the remote attributes which make a man feel, The gulf between Him and me is so great that thought cannot pass across it, and I doubt whether love can live half-way across that flight, or will not rather, like some poor land bird with tiny wings, drop exhausted, and be drowned in the abyss before it reaches the other side.' We expect to find a hymn to the infinite love. Instead of that we get praise, which might be upon the lips of many a thinker of Paul's day and of ours, who would laugh the idea of revelation, and especially of a revelation such as Paul believed in, to absolute scorn. And yet he knew what he was saying when he did not lift up his praise to the God of tenderness, of pity, of forgiveness, of pardoning love, but to' the King of the ages; the incorruptible, invisible, only God'; the God whose honour and glory were magnified by the revelation of Himself in Jesus Christ.
