Part 13 (2/2)

Turn to him; and you will find him unchanged; the same loving, forgiving Lord as ever. He requires no sacrifices, no great offerings on your part to win him round. All he asks is, that you should confess yourselves in the wrong, and turn and repent. Turn therefore to the Lord with all your heart, and with weeping, and with fasting, and with mourning--(which was, and is still the Eastern fas.h.i.+on); and rend your heart, and not your garments. And why?

Because the Lord is very dreadful, angry and dark, and has determined to destroy you all? Not so: but because he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness, and repenteth him of the evil.

Yes, my friends: and this, you will find, is at the bottom of all true repentance and turning to G.o.d. If you believe that G.o.d is dark, and hard, and cruel, you may be afraid of him: but you cannot repent, cannot turn to him. The more you think of him the more you will be terrified at him, and turn from him. But if you believe that G.o.d is gracious and merciful, then you can turn to him; then you can repent with a true repentance, and a G.o.dly sorrow which breeds joy and peace of mind.

So Joel thought, at least; for he tells them, that if they will but turn to G.o.d, if they will but confess themselves in the wrong, all shall be well again, and better than before.

Now, if Joel had been a heathen, wors.h.i.+pping the false G.o.ds of the Canaanites, he would have spoken very differently; he would have said, perhaps--Baal, the true G.o.d, is angry with you, and he has sent the drought.

Or, Ashtoreth, the Queen of Heaven, by whose power all seeds grow and all creatures breed, is angry with you, and she has destroyed the seeds, and sent the locusts.

Or, Ammon, the Lord of the sheep, is angry, and he has destroyed your flocks and herds.

But one thing we know he would have said--These angry G.o.ds want BLOOD. You cannot pacify them without human blood. You must give them the most dear and precious things you have--the most beautiful and pure. You must sacrifice boys and girls to them; and then, perhaps, they will be appeased.

We KNOW this. We know that the heathen, whenever they were in trouble, took to human sacrifices.

The Canaanites--and the Jews when they fell into idolatry--used to burn their children in the fire to Moloch.

We know that the Carthaginians, who were of the same blood and language as the Canaanites, used human sacrifices; and that once when their city was in great danger, they sacrificed at one time two hundred boys of their highest families.

We know that the Greeks and Romans, who had much more humane and rational notions about their G.o.ds, were tempted, in times of great distress, to sacrifice human beings. It has always been so. The old Mexicans in America used to sacrifice many thousands of men and women every year to their idols; and when the Spaniards came and destroyed them off the face of the earth in the name of the Lord--as Joshua did the Canaanites of old--they found the walls of the idol temples crusted inches thick with human blood. Even to this day, the wild Khonds in the Indian mountains, and the Red men of America, sacrifice human beings at times, and, I fear, very often indeed; and believe that the G.o.ds will be the more pleased, and more certain to turn away their anger, the more horrible and lingering tortures they inflict upon their wretched victims. I say, these things were; and were it not for the light of the Gospel, these things would be still; and when we hear of them, we ought to bow our heads to our Father in heaven in thankfulness, and say--what Joel the prophet taught the Jews to say dimly and in part--what our Lord Jesus and his apostles taught us to say fully and perfectly -

It is very meet, right, and our bounden duty, at all times and in all places--whether in joy or sorrow, in wealth or in want, to give thanks to thee, O Lord, Holy Father, Almighty, Everlasting G.o.d.

Through Jesus Christ our Lord, according to whose most true promise the Holy Ghost came down from heaven upon the apostles, to teach them and to lead them into all truth, and give them fervent zeal, constantly to preach the Gospel to all nations, by which we have been brought out of darkness and error into the clear light and true knowledge of thee and of thy Son Jesus Christ.

Yes, my friends, this is the lesson which we have to learn from Joel's prophecy, and from all prophecies. This lesson the old prophets learnt for themselves, slowly and dimly, through many temptations and sorrows. This lesson our Lord Jesus Christ revealed fully, and left behind him to his apostles. This lesson men have been learning slowly but surely in all the hundreds of years which have past since; to know that there is one Father in heaven, of whom are all things, and one Lord Jesus Christ, by whom are all things; that they may, in all the chances and changes of this mortal life, in weal and in woe, in light and in darkness, in plenty and in want, look up to that heavenly Father who so loved them that he spared not his only begotten Son, but freely gave him for them, and say, 'Father, not our will but thine be done. All things come from thy hand, and therefore all things come from thy love. We have received good from thy hand, and shall we not receive evil? Though thou slay us, yet will we trust in thee. For thou art gracious and merciful, long-suffering and of great goodness. Thou art loving to every man, and thy mercy is over all thy works. Thou art righteous in all thy ways, and holy in all thy doings. Thou art nigh to all that call on thee; thou wilt hear their cry, and wilt help them. For all thou desirest, when thou sendest trouble on them, is to make them wiser and better men. AND THAT THOU CANST ONLY MAKE THEM BY TEACHING THEM MORE ABOUT THYSELF.'

SERMON XXI. SALVATION

ISAIAH lix. 15, 16.

And the Lord saw it, and it displeased him that there was no judgment. And he saw that there was no man, and wondered that there was no intercessor: therefore his arm brought salvation unto him, and his righteousness it sustained him.

This text is often held to be a prophecy of the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. I certainly believe that it is a prophecy of his coming, and of something better still; namely, his continual presence; and a very n.o.ble and deep one, and one from which we may learn a great deal.

We may learn from it what 'salvation' really is. What Christ came to save men from, and how he saves them.

The common notion of salvation now-a-days is this. That salvation is some arrangement or plan, by which people are to escape h.e.l.l-fire by having Christ's righteousness imputed to them without their being righteous themselves.

Now, I have nothing to say about that this morning. It may be so; or, again, it may not; I read a good many things in books every week the sense of which I cannot understand. At all events it is not the salvation of which Isaiah speaks here.

For Isaiah tells us very plainly, from WHAT G.o.d was going to save these Jews. Not from h.e.l.l-fire--nothing is said about it: but simply from their SINS. As it is written, 'Thou shalt call his name Jesus, for he shall save his people from THEIR SINS.'

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