“The eternal God is thy refuge,

and underneath are the everlasting arms.”

(Deuteronomy 33:27)

In his book The Art of Survival, Cord Christian Troebst tells about cases where people have been caught in a life or death emergency. The book shows how some survived because they were resourceful enough to make use of readily available supplies. Other did not survive because they were not resourceful enough to lay hold of and use the not-too-obvious, but neverthe­less available, life-sustaining necessities.

There was the New York couple whose car was stranded in a snowstorm back in the winter of 1956-57. They found shelter in a roadside shed with plenty of fuel at hand to keep them warm. “The man tried to light a fire in the stove with his sodden matches, but did not succeed. When all his matches were spent, he and his wife wrapped themselves in their coats and some old rags they found there, and lay down to die,” Troebst writes. They didn’t think of using the car cigarette lighter to light the fire when the matches failed.

On the other hand, there was the American soldier in the jungles of Southeast Asia who kept himself alive for twenty-two days by eating insects, grasshoppers, worms, and butterflies.

Then there was the family touring the Grand Canyon whose car broke down when they turned off the main road onto a side road. But they survived the 124-degree heat, the thirst, and the hunger, and were finally rescued because they were resourceful enough to drink the water in the car radiator, smear their lips and cheeks with lipstick to prevent sun blistering, feed themselves on wax crayons they found in the car and a pot of glue made from milk products, send up a smoke signal by burning an oil-soaked tire, and bury themselves neck deep in sand for protection against the stifling heat. They were rescued just as they were about to give up hope.

Just as there is an art of physical survival in times of emergency, so there is an art of spiritual survival, too. Many people become spiritual casualties when caught in life’s emergencies because they have not the resourcefulness to make use of the readily available, but not always too obvious, means of survival.

The Book of Deuteronomy describes the dramatic parting of Moses and the people of Israel. Moses knows that the time has come at last for him to die. He, who had liberated them from slavery in Egypt, led them safely through the wilderness with its dangers and hardships, delivered to them a moral law to order their personal and common lives, he, Moses — liberator, leader, lawgiver — soon will be with them no more. How will they survive? As his last great service to them, Moses gives his people this spiritual staff to lean upon in all life’s emergencies: “The eternal God is thy refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms.”

For every conceivable spiritual emergency life-sustaining supplies are available if only we are resourceful enough to find and use them. Resource­fulness in such emergencies is always dependent on three things: (1) an understanding of the divine nature, (2) knowledge of how the Eternal operates in his universe, and (3) making an intelligent response to these available rescue resources.

First, it is necessary that we understand something of the divine nature. “The eternal God is thy refuge.” There is a whole lot of meaning, not just words, packed in this declaration of Moses, “The eternal God is thy refuge.” The definition of God in the Shorter Catechism affirms what Scripture principally teaches about the nature of God, namely, his spirituality: “God is a spirit.”

The spirituality of the divine nature is further defined in the classical catechism answer by those three broad, mind-stretching terms: “infinite, eternal, and unchangeable.” What do they mean?

“Infinite” means without limit in spatial existence as finite man is limited. Human beings are all limited to existence at one place at a time, to one moment at a time, to one thought in the forefront of consciousness at a time. God is infinite, unlimited in all these categories and ten thousand times ten thousand categories of which we cannot even conceive.

“Eternal” means without beginning or ending. As man has a birth-date and a death-date, so he is temporal; God has neither and is eternal. Isaiah sets this contrast in the familiar lines, “All flesh is grass…. The grass withereth, the flower fadeth…. But the word of our God shall stand for ever.”

“Unchangeable” means constant, without change or fickleness or incon­sistencies. God is forever constant and dependable. When ninety-year-old Albert Schweitzer was laid to rest in the Lambarene jungle, the African tribesmen gathered to weep and mourn for the passing of the compassionate healer who had given his life for their sakes. But the newspaper reports recorded that when the funeral was over, those momentarily moaning and wailing Africans turned to the river and soon were laughing and slapping one another on the back. As it is the nature of man to be changeable in mood, emotion, and even morality, so is it by complete contrast for the divine nature to remain unchanging.

There are two dangers we all run in our thinking about God. One is the danger, as J.B. Phillips puts it so well in his book Your God Is Too Small, that we draw our God “too small.” We think of him as one who has nothing better to do than cater to our whims. We treat him like an errand boy or a bellhop: “Get me that job I’m praying for.” “Straighten out for me that wayward child.”

Or we treat him as a God of battles and ask his blessing on our armies alone.

Or we worship him as the God of a particular race or religion who is concerned with redeeming only those of a given skin pigmentation or who welcomes only those who are baptized a certain way or have been confirmed by the right bishop.

But the other error we tend to make, equally disastrous, is that we worship a God who is so large and latitudinarian that he is lost in the misty swirls of mysticism and syncretism. The words of our Shorter Catechism definition tend in that direction: “God is a spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable.” The danger is that they leave us with an impression of the divine nature as an oblong blur, a tranquil vacuum, an everlasting law of thermodynamics.

It is at this very point of escaping both the danger of having a God too vague and of having a God too small that the word and work of Jesus are so helpful to us. The fifteenth chapter of Luke’s Gospel contains three brief stories like fine-cut jewels: the lost coin, the lost sheep, the lost son. Here we see the infinity, the eternity, the unchangeableness of God, not simply as philosophical propositions, but as these divine qualities impinge on in­dividual human beings at the point of their deepest need.

As a woman who has ten coins and loses one of them or as a shepherd who has one hundred sheep and loses one of them is concerned over the single loss, and is busy searching for the lost, and is happy when the lost is found, so is God with his millions of children concerned when any one of them is separated from him by a rebellious spirit or by neglect. And God’s joy is boundless when that child’s spirit returns to him. The infinite God is not limited to a concern for a limited few. His infinite nature renders him capable of infinite compassion for an infinite number. Everyone is missed. Not one is surplus to infinite love.

More poignant and revealing still is the story of the prodigal son — the lost boy — who, when he comes to himself in the far country whence he has strayed from his father’s house, finds that the father’s love, though outraged and sinned against, remains steadfastly unchanged, eternally ready to receive him.

The divine nature of God is such that he is a “spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable,” impinging on every human being at every moment of his or her existence with inexhaustible resources for rescue in every emergency. “The eternal God is thy refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms.”

But it is not only necessary for us to understand something of the divine nature in order to avail ourselves of the resources at hand for survival in life’s emergencies; we need also to understand something of the divine activity.

Moses told his people that they could have every confidence that in every emergency always there would be “the everlasting arms.” What did Moses mean? Was he saying, “It doesn’t make any difference what fool thing you do; God will take care of you. That is the way he acts in the world. You never need to bother about what is right or wrong”?

Remember who’s talking. It is the stern lawgiver who gave his solemn oath that from God himself he had brought those commandments: Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not kill. Thou shalt not commit adultery. Thou shalt not covet. Thou shalt not bear false witness. Thou shalt have no other gods before me. Thou shalt keep the Sabbath day holy.

No! When Moses says, “underneath are the everlasting arms,” he means the everlasting arms of the maker and sustainer of this moral universe, who will not act capriciously. He is unchangeable in his moral nature and activity. We can count on that.

Paul Scherer, the Lutheran pastor and teacher, says in Event in Eternity that the best way to draw a diagram of the divine activity in human history is to draw a circle and label it “God’s will.” Then draw another circle about that one and in the space between the concentric circles write “God’s judgments.” Then draw a third circle and label that area “God’s grace.”

All this means that at the heart and center of life there is operating the divine moral law. A man may give a glad obedience to this and so order his life to remain within this blessed inner circle. But a man may also rebel and break away from living his life according to the divine will. If he does, inevitably he runs headlong into God’s judgments. Some men never get out of that second circle, but, Scherer says, “Beyond there is a third circle, drawn more widely still: the circle of God’s grace, which somehow like two great arms includes the rest…. It means that in and through, over and above, the will and the judgment there is a mighty, healing something at work in the world; that when you and I have blundered about and come to the end of our resources, there are still open to us great stores of pardon and reservoirs of power which we cannot even begin to tap till we have despaired of our own.”

What God is most active about in history, then, is rescue. And we all are like that poor woman Saint Luke described as having suffered from “a spirit of infirmity eighteen years, and was bowed together, and could in no wise lift up herself.” But those everlasting arms are there, and they are able, just as able as we are feeble.

But human survival is dependent on a third factor. We need not only an understanding of the divine nature and divine activity; our survival hinges on our making an intelligent human response. The Scriptures are full of assuran­ces, not only that the eternal purpose of God is rescue, but also assurances of the necessity of meeting God’s requirement of repentance. The prodigal son must come to himself and say to his father from his heart, “Father, I have sinned against heaven, and before thee, And am no more worthy to be called thy son: make me as one of thy hired servants.”

God is always ready to accept us, writes Bishop James Pike in his book A Time for Christian Candor, “to guide, to inspire, to comfort, to accept, to heal, to enrich; such barriers as there are to His thus operating in us, with us, and through us are in each of us and in our respective situations — not in Him.”

Pike gives this illustration: The famous cable cars of San Francisco are powered by a cable that is always running under the open middle track. If one car is stopped and another is running, it is just because the grip-man in the running car has let the clutch down to connect with the moving cable. In the case of the stopped car, it is simply that the operator has not linked the car with the moving power.

When the emergencies of life find us struggling for survival, we should never forget that the supplies and powers to sustain us are close at hand: “The eternal God is thy refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms.”

But more often than not, survival depends on resourcefulness, a resourcefulness that must surely include some knowledge of the divine nature, an understanding of the divine activity in human affairs, and an intelligent response from us to our God.