GOD GLORIFIED IN
REDEMPTION.
And I will sanctify my
great name which was profaned among the heathen, etc. - Ezekiel xxxvi. 23,
24.
THE character of a government may be read in the condition
of its subjects. Are they turbulent, in their habits lawless, in their religion
superstitious? With coasts full of harbours, and mountains rich in minerals,
with a genial climate and a productive soil, are they clothed in rags, housed
in cabins, steeped to the lips in poverty? These are the certain signs of bad
government. Fields overrun with weeds, fences falling into ruins, the plough
rotting in the flooded furrow, and hungry cattle bellowing on scanty pastures,
these are the sure signs of bad husbandry. And yonder ragged family, who at
school hours idly roam our streets, the unwashed face and tangled hair
bespeaking no mother’s kindness, beggary hung upon their back, hunger in
the sunken eye and pale emaciated features, these are the sure and too common
signs of an unhappy parentage. They suggest the picture of a lodging at the top
of some filthy stair, or in some dingy den of a cellar, where a miserable
father, the neglected victim of disease and poverty, lies stretched upon the
floor, or, still more likely, where a brutal drunkard is the cruel tyrant of
his children, and the daily terror of his wife. Thus we - judge of a sovereign
by his subjects, of a husbandman by his farm, and of a father by the state of
his family.
It may be, it were indeed unfair, to apply this rule to our
faith and its Founder. Yet men have done and will do so; and thus the cause of
God and of religion has had to suffer grievous injury at the hand of its
nominal friends. By their coldness, their worldliness, their mean selfishness,
their open sinfulness, the little apparent difference between them and those
who make no profession at all, nay, sometinies, by their glaring inferiority to
the latter in the blow and fruit of the natural virtues, professing Christians,
like venders of a bad coinage, have exposed genuine piety to. suspicion. Their
hands have inflicted its deepest wounds on the cause of Christ. In true
kindness of heart, sweetness of temper, open-handed generosity, the common
charities of life, many mere men of the world lose nothing by comparison with
such professors; and how are you to keep the world from saying, Ah! your man of
religion is no better than others; nay, he is sometimes worse? With what
frightful prominence does this stand out in the answer, never to be forgotten
answer, of an Indian chief to the missionary who urged him to become a
Christian. The plumed and painted savage drew himself up in the consciousness
of superior rectitude ; and with indignation quivering on his lip and flashing
in his eagle eye, he replied, Christian lie! Christian cheat! Christian steal !
- drink ! - murder! Christian has robbed me of my lands and slain my tribe!
adding, as he turned haughtily away, The Devil, Christian! I will be no
Christian. May such reflections teach us to be careful how we make a religious
profession! And having made the profession, cost what it may cost, by the grace
of God let us live up to it; and act it out. It is better not to vow, than,
having vowed, not to pay.
These remarks are suggested by the fact already
adverted to in the previous discourses - that the interests of divine truth and
the name of God suffered in Babylon, in consequence both of the miserable
outward condition and more miserable moral condition of the people of Israel.
Reduced to bondage, sunk lower still, for, compared to a sinner, how free is a
slave! they exceeded their masters in crime, plunging into greater excess of
riot. The heathen, who overlooked the sins of which the misery of the people
was the righteous punishment, naturally enough concluded, that the God of a
race so wretched and so worthless must be a weak, perchance a wicked one. Thus
his name was profaned, and Jehovah himself dishonoured; until the time arrived,
when, arising to plead the cause that was his own, he sanctified his great name
in the fortunes of his people, and in the sight of the heathen.
Passing
over the special application of these words to the Jews, and looking at them in
their prophetical connection with the scheme of redemption. I now remark
1. That God might have vindicated his honour and sanctified his name in our
destruction.
He sanctified his name in the emancipation of his ancient
people. By one blow, he struck the fetters from a nation’s limbs. And when
baptizing them with his Spirit, and giving them favour in the sight of kings,
he brought back these weary exiles with songs and gladness, then God was
sanctified in the midst of all the heathen. How beautifully were his power,
wisdom, holiness, and goodness, illustrated in the renewed character, and
joyous homes, and happy fortunes of his people! Now, God might undoubtedly have
sanctified himself in them otherwise, vindicating his character in such
destruction upon Zion, as he here threatens upon Sidon, Behold I am against
thee, 0 Sidon, and I will be glorified in the midst of thee, and they shall
know that I am the Lord when I shall have executed judgment in her, and shall
be sanctified in her; I will send with her pestilence and blood into her
streets; and they shall know that I am the Lord.
Two methods of glorifying
his name are open to God. He is free to choose either; but by the one or the
other way he will exact his full tale of glory from every man. In Egypt, for
instance, he was glorified in the high-handed destruction of his enemies; and
glorified also in the same land by the high-handed salvation of his people. In
the one case he proved how strong his arm was to smite, and in the other how
strong it was to save. Ere he was done with Egypt’s king, see what a
terrible answer he gave to the insolent question, Who is the Lord that I should
serve him? He was sanctified before Pharaoh, when, hurrying to the banks of the
Nile, and turning pale at the sight, the tyrant saw them filled with blood:
blood brimming in every goblet, and blood flowing in every channel. God was
again sanctified before Pharaoh, when he saw the same skies raining down ice
and fire. God was again sanctified before Pharaoh, when, startled at midnight
by a nation’s wail, and summoned to the bed of his eldest son, he saw him
stiff and dead, smitten by the angel of death.
And God was again sanctified
before Pharaoh, when, as he looked along the watery vista, he saw Moses come
down In the grey of morning, and watching the last Hebrew safe on shore,
stretch his rod out upon the deep, whose waves, roaring on their prey, now rush
from either flank on the power of Egypt, and bury pale rider and snorting
horse, all that bannered army, in their whirling waters. The sea, refusing
God’s enemies a grave, flings them out in contempt upon her shore. Moses
stands over the body of the king; and as he gazes on that glassy eye which had
lost its haughtiness, and on those lips whose insolence the waters had washed
away, how might he stoop down, and say, Now you know who is the Lord! Oh! had
the seal of death been broken, removed from these blue speechless lips, what
but this had been their solemn utlerance, Let the potsherds strive with the
potsherds of the earth; woe to the man that striveth with his Maker.
In
like manner, God sanctified his name on the plains of Sodom, sanctifying it, on
the one hand in the destruction of his enemies, and on the other in the
preservation of Lot. Ah! then the world ceased to doubt his character; and
perhaps angels ceased to wonder that such wickedness was allowed on earth. The
light of the city’s conflagration illuminated his holiness; and the throne
of a righteous God seemed to rise up in dread and awful majesty amid the
smoking ruins. And how was he sanctified, also, in that wretched fugitive who
has crossed but half the plain! a wife, she comes not to a husband’s call;
a mother, she stirs not to her children’s piercing cry. Look at that white
and spectral form that stands there with its head turned on the burning ruins,
and the cold grey eyes staring large on Sodom, and the surprise, horror, that
seized her soul, as she felt her warm flesh hardening into stone, carved on
these rigid features. Remember Lot’s wife. She stands there an example of
God’s power to sanctify his name; an awful, warning lesson to the end of
time. Deep on the statue’s stony brow these words are engraven - No man
having put his hand to the plough, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of
God.
Since there are two ways open to God, by either of which he may
sanctify his great name, he might therefore, at the fall, have vindicated his
justice by swift and unsparing vengeance, by destroying the whole human family.
What unsparing vengeance did he execute on the fallen angels! Of these there
was no wreck or remnant saved. Not one escaped. No ark floated on the waters,
to which, like Noah’s dove, a flying angel, pursued by wrath, might turn
his weary wing. Can it be doubted, that the measure meted out to fallen angels,
God might have meted out to fallen men ? - sanctifying his great name in our
ruin rather than in our redemption.
Now, before I show how he sanctifies
himself in the redemption of his people, let me warn you, that what God might
have done with all, he shall do with some; certainly do with all those who
despise and reject, or even neglect salvation. How shall ye escape if ye
neglect this great salvation? The trees shall burn that will not bear. Be
assured that God loses nothing in the end. He will make a profitable use of
every man; extracting glory out of all, even from the curnberers of the ground.
If you are not good for fruit, you shall serve for fuel. God indeed is not
willing that any of you should perish; willing, most willing, rather that the
sinner should live, he follows him to the precincts of perdition, to the gate
of hell, crying, Turn ye, turn ye, why will ye die? Yet be warned in time. You
cannot evade the alternative; this or that you must choose, to honour God by
your active or your passive obedience. This day I set before you life and
death. Will you do His will in heaven, or suffer it in hell? God help you, like
Mary, to choose the better part! How terrible these words! God hath made all
things for himself, yea, even the wicked for the day of wrath.
II. God
sanctifies his name, and glorifies himself in our redemption.
It is
easy to destroy, to inflict irreparable injury on character, virtue, life.
Falling with murderous strokes on yonder noble tree, the woodman’s axe
demolishes in a few hours what it has required the springs and summers, the
dews, and showers, and sunbeams of centuries to raise. Look at that bowering
gourd, under whose green and grateful shade the prophet sits! Emblem of all
happiness that has its root in earth, it falls by the feeblest of means, a
worm’s teeth. The poisonous east wind breathes on its leaves, the hot sun
glares on them, and they wither away. Au ounce of lead, one inch of steel, a
drop distilled from a serpent’s fang, even a grain of sand lodged in the
passages of life - any one of these is fatal. How quickly they turn this
living, delicate, wondrous frame-work, into a heap of undistinguishable dust, a
handful of cold black mould! It is both more difficult and more noble to repair
than to destroy. In this material body man destroys what God only can make; but
in this more precious and immortal soul, Satan destroys what God only can save.
It needs but a devil to ruin a human spirit; it needs Divinity to redeem it. It
needs but a villain to steal peace and virtue; it needs a divine power to
restore the stolen jewels. How much easier is it to kill a man than cure him?
to be an executioner than a physician? To sit robed on the bench of justice,
and, assuming her fatal cap, to condemn a poor pale wretch to die; to draw the
bolt, and launch a soul into another world; to stand on the field of battle,
and with levelled musket, by a slight motion of the finger, to dash a
fellow-creature into eternity - these are easier than to bless a bed of pain
with one hour of sweet, gentle sleep. It is less difficult to stop this pulse
for ever, than bring down its death gallop to the calm and measured march of
health. And as, in such cases, man’s glory is more illustrated by curing
than killing, even so God’s glory is more pre-eminent in redemption than
it had been in our everlasting ruin.
Excepting of course the
preacher’s, for with Paul we magnify our office, of all earthly
employments it appears to me that the physician’s is the noblest; and that
of all arts the healing art is the highest, offering to genius and benevolence
their noblest field. We would cast no disparagement on the brave and gallant
spirits, who have guarded a country’s shores. Some of them have offered
most illustrious examples of soldiers, true both to an earthly crown and a
Saviour’s cross; yet we know that the aim of a warrior is ingeniously to
invent, and his business effectively to use, instruments of destruction. His
greatest achievements are wrought where deadly wounds are suffered; his
proudest triumphs are won where flames, kindled by the torch of war, blaze over
blood-stained hearths, and, horrible to think of! where fields are fattened
with human gore. His laurels are watered with tears ; his hurricane course is
marked by destruction; and it is his unhappy lot, perhaps the unhappiest view
of arms as a profession, that he cannot conquer foes but at the sacrifice of
friends. In the eye of reason, and of a humanity that weeps over a suffering
world, his is surely the nobler vocation, and if not more honoured, the more
honourable calling, who sheds blood not to kill, but cure; who wounds, not that
the bleeding may die, but live; and whose genius ransacks earth and ocean in
search of means to preserve life, to remove deformity, to repair decay, to
invigorate failing powers, and restore the rose of health to pallid cheeks. His
aim is not to inflict pain, but relieve it; not to destroy a father, but,
boldly standing between him and death, to save an anxious wife from widowhood,
and these little children from an orphan’s lot. And if, although they be
woven around no coronet, those are fairer and fresher laurels which are won by
saving than by slaying, if it is a nobler thing to rescue life than destroy it,
even when its destruction is an act of justice, then, on the same principle,
God most glorified himself when revealed in the flesh, and speaking by his Son,
he descended on a guilty world; his purpose this, I came not to judge the
world, but to save it; and this his character, The Lord God, merciful and
gracious, long-suffering, and abundant in goodness and truth.
Apart,
however, from this general consideration, I remark that the scheme of
redemption is eminently illustrative of the attributes of Jehovah. For example
-
I. His power is glorified in the work of salvation.
The path
of redemption is marked, and its pages are crowded with stupendous miracles. At
one time God stays the waves of the sea; at another he stops the wheels of the
sun; and now, reversing the machinery of heaven to confirm his word, he makes
the shadow travel backwards on the dial of Ahaz. Heaven descends to earth, and
its exalted inhabitants, mingling with men, walk the stage of redemption. Here
one angel speaks out of a burning bush; and there another leaps on a burning
altar, and, with wing unscorched, ascends to heaven in its flame. Here a
prophet, exempted from the law of death, goes up to glory in a fiery chariot;
and there another, entombed alive in the belly of a whale, goes down into the
depths of ocean. In opposition to the laws of nature, a body that should have
gravitated to the earth, floats, from the top of Olivet, upward into the
ambient air. Across the surface of a lake which frost never bound, and winter
never paved with ice, walks a human form, stepping on from billow to billow.
The captive of the grave becomes its conqueror ; and, laying aside its
cerements as night-clothes left in bed, he walks forth on the dewy grass at the
break of day - the prisoner has bound his jailor and carried off the keys. Over
Bethlehem’s fields, angels with the light of their wings turn midnight
into day; and shepherds, who watch their flocks, are regaled by voices of the
skies, the song of heaven over a babe, who has a virgin for his mother, and a
stable for his princely birth-place. Nor less remarkable, the deaf are
listening to the songs of the dumb, and the blind are gazing on the dead alive;
a dumb beast takes speech and rebukes the hoary seer; ravens desert their young
to cater in the fields for man; and angels abandon heaven to hold watch by the
grave of one whom his God forsook, his country rejected, his friends
r’epudiated, and none but a thief confessed. And amid these wonders and
thousands more, acted before men’s eyes on the stage of redemption, and
all so illustrative of the presence and power of God, the crowning wonder, the
wonder of wonders, is He that works them; the son of a virgin! dust and
Divinity! Creator - and creature! the mystery of godliness, God manifest in the
flesh. Truly this is the Lord’s doing; it is marvellous in our eyes.
But to glance at the change wrought by redemption on man himself, what
amazing power does it display! What a glorious combination of benevolence and
omnipotence! Punishment is confessedly easier than reformation. Nothing is more
easy than, by the hand of an executioner, to rid society of a criminal; but to
soften his stony heart, to turn his steps from the paths of crime, to wean him
from vice, to get him to fall in love with virtue, to make the cunning rogue,
the brutal ruffian, an honest, high-minded, kind, and tender man - au.! that is
another thing. Hence, among politicians callous of heart, and deaf to the
groans of suffering humanity, the preference given to prisons over schools, to
punishment over prevention. Well, then, since it is confessedly easier -
easier, but not better, nor cheaper - to punish than reform, I say that
God’s power is more illustriously displayed in pardoning one guilty, in
purifying one polluted man, than if the law had been left to take her sternest
course, and bury our entire family in the ruins of the fall. We honour justice
when she holds the balance even, and, before a land that cries for blood,
brings out the murderer to hang him up in the face of the sun: Whoso sheddeth
man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed. Yet, like the noble-minded
Romans, who decreed a crown to the man that saved a citizen, we would hold him
worthy of highest honours who brings a criminal from his cell, so changed as to
be worthy, not only of being restored to the bosom of society, but of rising to
a place in the senate, or filling some post of dignity beside the throne. That
were an achievement of brilliant renown, a victory over which humanity and
piety would shed tears of joy.
To compare small things with great,
something like this, but unspeakably nobler and greater, God works in
salvation. For example - In John Bunyan, he calls the bold leader of village
reprobates to preach the Gospel; a blaspheming tinker to become one of
England’s famous confessors, and from the gloomy portals of Bedford jail,
to shed forth the lustre of his sanctified genius to the furthest limits of the
world, and adown the whole course of time. From the deck of a slave ship he
summons John Newton to the pulpit; and by hands defiled with Mammort’s
foulest and most nefarious traffic, he brings them that are bound out of
darkness, and smites adamantine fetters from the slaves of sin. In Paul, the
Apostle of the Gentiles, he converts his Son’s bitterest enemy into his
warmest friend. To the man whom a trembling church held most in dread, she
comes to owe, under God, the weightiest obligations, In that man she has her
boldest champion, her greatest logician, the most gallant of her defenders, her
grandest preacher, the prince of apostles, the largest contributor to this
imperishable volume.
How much better for these three stars to be shining in
heaven, than quenched in the blackness of darkness. Better for the good of
mankind; better for the glory of God. In them, and in all yonder sainted
throng, has not God more illustriously displayed his power, than if he had
crushed them by the thunders of his vengeance, and buried them in the depths of
hell? The power of divinity culminates in grace. Oh, that we also may be made
its monuments, built up by the hands of an eternal Spirit to the memory and
glory of the cross! And why not? Look at these men! Think what they were;
behold what they are! The thief of the cross bends from his throne in glory,
and bids you hope. Addressing your prayers to him whose ear is never heavy that
it cannot hear, nor his hand shortened that it cannot save, be this your
earnest, your urgent cry, Awake, awake, put on strength, 0 arm of the Lord.
Awake, as in the ancient days in the generations of old.