It cannot be otherwise, seeing that God is one. All His words and acts are related to each other by being related to Him. He revealed Himself in history as the world's Redeemer, "here a little, there a little" as fallen men were able to receive it, and everything He made known concerning Himself agreed with itself and with all else that had been previously revealed.

In God there is no was or will be, but a continuous and unbroken is. In Him history and prophecy are one and the same. To us men, submerged in time, it may properly be said that prophecy is history foretold and history is prophecy fulfilled; but that is only because we are submerged. We look forward to events predicted and backward to events that have occurred; but God contains past and future in His own all-encompassing Being. To Him every event has already occurred, or perhaps it would he more accurate to say it is occurring. With Him there can never be a memory of things past nor an expectation of things to come, but only a knowledge of all things past and future as instantaneously present before His mind.

Everything that God is accords with all else that He is. Every thought He entertains is one with every other thought. His atittude toward sin and righteousness and life and death and human misery has not changed but remains exactly what it has been from the dark beginnings of precreation times before mankind had emerged into the stream of history.

The notion that the Old Testament differs radically from the New is erroneous. God wrote both and in them revealed certain spiritual laws which underlie all His creative and redemptive acts. These laws are one wherever they operate, in heaven or earth or hell. The Bible reveals God acting like Himself as He touches His creation; and an unchanging God is there seen acting according to moral and spiritual principles that can never change nor pass away.

In all this we must take into account the presence of sin, that evil mystery which for the time God permits to run amuck in the earth; or I should say that He is permitting it to run amuck in the universe - within certain sharply defined limits.

Sin has brought diversity, separation, dissimilarity, and has introduced divisions into a universe essentially one. Though we cannot hope now to understand this we must recognize it as a fact and withhold any final conclusion about it until the evidence is all in and we are by glorification morally and intellectually equipped to deal with it. Then it will be seen that God doeth all things well; now we are to believe without further proof. Faith reposes on the character of God and if we believe that God is perfect we must conclude that His ways are perfect also.

The concept of the unity of all things runs throughout the Sacred Scriptures. It is strongly emphasized in devotional theology and appears frequently in Christian hymnody. Such poets as Wordsworth made much of it. His long poem, "The Prelude," celebrates the organic unity of the world and shows every simple thing to be part of a created whole.

The work of Christ in redemption will achieve ultimately the expulsion of sin, the only divisive agent in the universe, and the unification of all things. "For it pleased the Father that in him should all fulness dwell; and, having made peace through the blood of his cross, by him to reconcile all things unto himself; by him, I say, whether they be things in earth, or things in heaven" (Col. 1:19, 20). The nearer the Christian soul comes to Christ in personal experience the more perfect becomes the internal unity even now.

The prophets and psalmists of the Old Testament wrestled as do we with the problem of evil in a divine universe, but their approach to God and nature was much more direct than ours. They did not interpose between God and His world that opaque web we modems call the laws of nature. They could see God in a whirlwind and hear Him, in a storm and they did not hesitate to say so. There was about their lives an immediate apprehension of the divine. They were not lonely amid impersonal laws as men are today. God was near to them, and everything in heaven and on earth assured them that this is God's world and that He rules over all.

I once heard a Methodist bishop say that when he was a very young minister he was called to the bedside of an elderly woman who had obviously but a few hours left for this world. The bishop admitted that he was badly frightened, but the old saint was completely relaxed and radiantly happy. He tried to commiserate with her and muttered something about how sorry he was that she had to die, but she wouldn't hear any such talk. "Why, God bless you, young man," she said cheerfully; "there's nothing to be scairt about. I'm just going to cross over Jordan in a few minutes, and my Father owns the land on both sides of the river."