" Take heed, brethren, lest there be in any of you an evil heart of unbelief, in departing from the living God " (Heb. 3:12).

The greatest fact in the universe is the fact that God IS. As God was before His universe, creation has its existence by reason of Him, and is sustained by Him in all its immensity, from the greatest star down to the tiny atom. Because He is the Creator of all things, therefore He is the greatest Fact, the one Reality in whom and from whom all other realities have their existence.

Why should we need to be reminded that God is the living God ? Why is it necessary to speak of Him as ' living " ? We rightly distinguish between a dead and a living man, but by the very fact that God IS, He must be the " living God," who always was, is now, and ever shall be, the " living God."

" Change and decay in all around I see :0 Thou who changest not, abide with me."

It is just because we are so prone to forget God, to forget that He is the great " I AM," that He has constantly to remind us that He lives. The greatest prone-ness of man is to forget or to leave out God. In psalm 78 a striking thing is said about Israel – who are just a sample of the rest of mankind – it says of that nation, " Yea, they turned back, and tempted God, and limited the Holy One of Israel." That word " limited " is from a root which means to " rub out " or " erase." That, alas. is what man has been doing since the beginning of his sad history. He has been trying to erase God from his memory and from his heart. In the first act of sin, of man's rebellion against God, the underlying idea suggested by the evil one, in partaking of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, was to raise man to equality with God-" Ye shall be as God." And the inference is, if man could become as God, he could do without God- become his own master, direct his own affairs, and be independent of God. In this way God would cease to be God to man – no longer a living Reality to the soul of man, but God only in name. And the history of Adam's descendants has been a sad repetition of the same apostasy from God. Like Israel, so the rest of the human race have sought to remove the living God from their consciousness-limiting, or erasing Him from their account.

What is said of this in the psalm quoted is the more striking, because the incident especially referred to occurs at a time when God was daily working mighty miracles for His people. By a wonderful series of deliverances by His almighty power, God brought the people to the border of the land " flowing with milk and honey," and invited them to go in under His escort and protection; it was just then, mind you, that they " turned back and tempted God and limited the Holy One of Israel " (Ps. 78:41).

Now this is what the apostle is speaking of in the passage before us. He is warning us against having within us an " evil, (or, wicked) heart of unbelief in departing from the living God." It is true that he was writing to those who were Hebrews by birth, and as such in especial danger of giving up Christ in returning to a religion of the flesh, which God had now given up ; first, because Christ (to whom the whole sacrificial services pointed) had come and fulfilled all that the types figuratively expressed; and, second, because Judaism could not really bring man to God. But, as we have just said, Israel is but a sample of mankind everywhere, and if the danger of departing from the living God existed for them, it exists for us too. We must not suppose that the Holy Spirit warns of that which has no danger for us.

The constant effort to eliminate God is illustrated in every false gospel. In the true gospel, God must be everything to the sinner, or nothing. But in the multitudinous voices of the day which come out of the imaginations of man's fallen reason, or direct from Satan, God is not allowed to be ALL in all, and thus virtually becomes nothing. If the God of our salvation shares His glory with the creature whom He undertakes to save from sin and Satan's power, He ceases to be the God He declares Himself to be :"I AM JEHOVAH, that is my name :and my glory will I not give to another, neither my praise to graven images " (Isa. 42:8). It is just His glory that He, and none other, is GOD-the living God; and to share that glory with any of His creatures He cannot, much less with the gods of man's inventions.

In the favorite but silly doctrine of "Evolution," we plainly see this attempt to " limit," or erase, God from man's mind. In the most charitable view of it, Evolution places God so far back into the unknown past, that He may as well not exist at all. He has flung a universe into being, or rather planted a tiny germ of life somewhere, out of which all other life has evolved, and He has retired where no one can find Him, leaving the world to itself, to work out its own destiny. In view of this wretched idea, we do well to listen to His challenge of old. "Am I a God at hand, saith the Lord, and not a God afar off ? … Do not I fill heaven and earth ? saith the Lord " (Jer. 23:23). The same thing may be said of the wicked work of the so-called " Higher Critics." If we take away the miraculous element from the Bible, and make it a book to be accounted of on the basis of mere human composition, we have certainly erased God from it. And this is exactly what is behind this wicked effort. Satan at one time attempted to take the Word of God from the people by force, but having failed, he endeavors to do the same thing by subtler means, and has enlisted men who have a name for being wise, to rob us of God Word, and thus of God its Author, by telling us that the revelation of God in Scripture is a myth.

There are other ways still-ways that come closer home to the people of God, in which God is limited by them. In our daily lives, in the incidents which go to make up our lives, we are privileged to see God's hand in everything. If He is our God in salvation, He is also our God in everything else. If He controls the fall of a sparrow, must He not supervise the life, and everything in the life, of every one of His own, and of all His creatures ? Why should we not look for Him in all our circumstances, and delight to trace His hand in the details of our life as in the great features of His government ? If His wisdom and power are seen in the tiniest flower or insect, as well as in the mighty orbs in illimitable space, why is He not to be found by us in all that goes to make up our lives, in things small as well as great ? Let us always look upon Him as the " living God," who loves us and gave Himself for us in the gift of His Son, and has pledged in this way to also " freely give us all things." Wm. Huss