The Sole Eternity Of

The Sole Eternity Of God
by Sylvester Hassell

THE GOSPEL MESSENGER
Devoted to the Primitive Baptist Cause
Sylvester Hassell, Editor ---- J.E.W. Henderson, Associate Editor


Williamston, N.C., November 1904
The Sole Eternity of God

The Scriptures uniformly represent God as the Creator of all things out of nothing, and as, therefore, the only Eternal Being. He is the Eternal God, and there is none beside Him. Matter is not eternal, as heathnism and infidelity maintain; every one of the seventy-five kinds of atoms of which matter is composed has, in every molecule or combination, its definite and particular weight, measure, number, and proportion—all the qualities of a manufactured article, proving that it was made by a Being of infinite and eternal wisdom and power. And so do the mysterious, incomprehensible qualities of every angelic, human, and animal spirit prove that the Divine, infinite, and eternal Spirit was its creator (Num. xvi. 22; xxvii. 16; Eccles. xii. 7; Colos. i. 16). God alone is the Great 'I AM,' filling past, present, and future with His holy and august presence—the 'Eternal God'—'the High and Lofty One that inhabiteth eternity, whose name is Holy'—'the same yesterday, today, and forever' (Exod. iii. 14; Deut. xxxiii. 27; Isa. lvii 15; Heb. xiii. 8). Every creature had a beginning, and is, therefore, not eternal. It was only in the Covenant of Redemption that God loved and chose His people in Christ before creation, when as yet there was none of them (Psalm cxxxix. 16). In the sublime and profound nineteenth Psalm, Moses touchingly contrasts the eternity and sovereignty of God with the transitoriness and dependence of man. He says: 'Lord, Thou hast been our dwellingplace in all generations' (not before all generations, when there were no generation, but in all generations, that is, during all the sinning and dying generations of men God is the dwelling place, the home, the refuge, the shelter, the comfort, the loved and sure rest of all His believing people). And then in the next sentence or verse, to show the everlasting strength and stability of this rest, Moses says: 'Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever thou hadst formed the earth or the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, Thou art God,' or 'Thou art, O God,' as rendered by the most exact scholars. In the 357 times that the verb 'art' occurs in the King James translation of the Old Testament, it is not in the original in only one passage, and that is in a question in Daniel ii. 26—'Art thou able to make known unto me the dream which I have seen, and the interpretation thereof?' In all the other 356 passages, the translators have supplied the word to make sense in English. The word 'art,' in Psalm xc. 2 is supplied in the Septuagint or Old Greek version of the Old Testament made about 300 years before Christ, and generally quoted from by Christ Himself and His Apostles; and it is given in the Jewish-English Bible, translated in 1891 by Isaac Leeser, and used by the American Jews, and it is not even marked as supplied (included in parentheses), because the Hebrew nearly always omits the word even when it is implied. If we run the first two verses of the 90th Psalm into one sentence, and omit the implied and supplied verb 'art,' we make the two parts of the sentence inconsistent with themselves, and the latter part is inconsistent with our creatureship. In the first part of the sentence, we declare that the Lord has been our dwelling place in all generations; and, in the second part of the sentence, we declare that God was our dwelling place before the mountains were brought forth, or ever (or before) he had formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, a statement which, if true, would make God our dwelling place not in but before all generations, and which would make us as eternal and uncreated as God Himself. No scholar of ancient or modern times, so far as I have ever seen or heard, has ever made such an inconsistent and inaccurate translation of the first two verses of this oldest and grandest of the Psalms. The life that God freely gives His loved, chosen, and redeemed people is His own eternal life; and poor, sinful, frail, dying worms, they have no eternity only in Him. And to speak of the eternal, vital union of God and His people is to say that they are as eternal and uncreated as Himself, which is utterly unscriptural and untrue. I would like to see this fading relic of Manichaean two-seedism entirely disappear from among our people. Salvation is by grace, and not by virtue of our joint eternity with God. The difference between a few Primitive Baptists on this subject is now, like the most of their other differences, more in expression than in reality.
S. H.