The foundation of God stands sure, as sure amid the terrible confusion of the twentieth century as in the days of power and apostolic energy of the first. It is steady, immovable, divine. Now this is an immense comfort to the man of God. There is that on which he can always rely.
The church may have drifted down from Ephesian warmth to Laodicean indifference. Things may be all out of order. It may and must be an impossibility to point out that church as a compact body giving true expression to the will of God. The greatest claim to this, as in Rome, is the deepest shame. The general failure is self-evident and a general restoration is hopeless.
“Nevertheless the foundation of God stands sure,” spite of all that remains. And what is this foundation? To give an answer to this question has called for abundant speculation. We find the word “foundation” in many places in Scripture, but in each its meaning can only be determined by the context. So here. A very cursory glance over the Second Epistle to Timothy shows us that the writer realized a sad breakdown in the profession of Christianity, that he was feeling it—all in Asia had forsaken him, while such as Hymenaeus and Philetus, as also the followers of Jannes and Jambres, together with such as Alexander the coppersmith, were all attacking, virulently and without remorse, the very truth which God had committed to the saints.
The ear was itching for novelty just because it had turned from the truth, and anything fabulous and foolish was greedily swallowed instead.
The Apostle felt all this in his day, and it is superfluous to say that the intervening centuries have but intensified and confirmed to us that of which he complained.
All was, and is, as bad as could be. The long night has been piteously dark. The church has eagerly awaited the dawn. She has sought to hold the fort, to stem the tide, and face the ever-truculent foe.
The contest seems in vain and yet she is sustained. The power of the living God is pledged to carry her through, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against her.
That pledge is His foundation. It is irreversible and irrevocable. It is a rock amid ocean; a solid footing amid quicksands; an anchor sure and firm; a divine guarantee for faith’s most absolute confidence amid storm and convulsion and universal collapse. Thank God for His foundation!
May He give to all His poor, tempest-tossed people, in a day of reproach and perplexity, when courage is well-nigh gone, to reckon on that foundation, to know that, come what may in the way of ecclesiastical failure and apostasy, there is one thing that cannot fail, nor alter, nor break down. “God’s foundation stands sure.” If it be God’s, how could it fail?
No, but we are prone to forget this, and to have regard more to that which is seen and temporal than to that which is unseen and eternal. But it is only in the latter that there is stability. May our eye be on God.