Part 7 (2/2)

The first chapter of the book of the prophet Isaiah is called ”The vision of Isaiah, the son of Amoz, which he saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem, in the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah.” Now this is one prophecy by itself, in the shape of a poem; for in the old Hebrew it is written in regular verses. The second chapter begins with another heading, and is the beginning of a different poem; so that this first chapter is, as it were, a summing up of all that he is going to say afterwards; a short account of the state of the Jews for more than forty years. And what is more, this first chapter of Isaiah must have been written in the reign of Hezekiah, in those very religious days of which I was just speaking; for it says that the country was desolate, and Jerusalem alone left. And this never happened during Isaiah's lifetime, till the fourteenth year of Hezekiah, that is, till this great spread of the true religion had been going on for thirteen years. Now what was Isaiah's vision?

What did he, being taught by G.o.d's Spirit, SEE was G.o.d's opinion of these religious Jews? Listen, my friends, and take it solemnly to heart!

”Hear the word of the Lord, ye rulers of Sodom; give ear unto the law of our G.o.d, ye people of Gomorrah. To what purpose is the mult.i.tude of your sacrifices unto me? saith the Lord: I am full of the burnt offerings of rams, and the fat of fed beasts: and I delight not in the blood of bullocks, or of lambs, or of he-goats. When ye come to appear before me, who hath required this at your hand, to tread my courts? Bring no more vain oblations; incense is an abomination unto me; the new moons and Sabbaths, the calling of a.s.semblies, I cannot away with; it is iniquity, even the solemn meeting. Your new moons and your appointed feasts my soul hateth: they are a trouble unto me; I am weary to bear them. And when ye spread forth your hands, I will hide my eyes from you; yea, when ye make many prayers, I will not hear: your hands are full of blood. Wash you, make you clean; put away the evil of your doings from before mine eyes; cease to do evil; learn to do well, seek judgment, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow... . How is the faithful city become an harlot! it was full of judgment; righteousness lodged in it; but now murderers. Thy silver is become dross, thy wine mixed with water; thy princes are rebellious, and companions of thieves; every one loveth gifts, and followeth after rewards: they judge not the fatherless, neither doth the cause of the widow come unto them.

Therefore, saith the Lord, the Lord of hosts, the mighty one of Israel, Ah, I will ease me of mine adversaries, and avenge me of mine enemies.” ...

Again, I say, my friends, listen to it, and take it solemnly to heart! That is G.o.d's opinion of religion, even the truest and soundest in wors.h.i.+p and doctrine, when it is without G.o.dliness, without holiness; when it goes in hand with injustice, and covetousness, and falsehood, and cheating, and oppression, and neglect of the poor, and keeping company with the wicked, because it is profitable; in short, when it is like too much of the religion which we see around us in the world at this day.

Yes--it was of no use holding to the letter of the law while they forgot its spirit. G.o.d had commanded church-going, and woe to those, then or now, who neglect it. Yet the Lord asks, ”Who hath required this at your hands, to tread my courts?”... He had commanded the Sabbath-day to be kept holy; and woe to those, then or now, who neglect it. Yet He says, ”Your Sabbaths I cannot away with; it is iniquity, even the solemn meeting.” The Lord had appointed feasts: and yet He says that His soul hated them; they were a trouble to Him; He was weary to bear them. The Lord had commanded prayer; and woe to those, then or now, in England, as in Judaea, who neglect to pray.

And yet He says: ”When ye spread forth your hands, I will hide mine eyes from you; yea, when ye make many prayers, I will not hear.” And why?--He himself condescends to tell them the reason, which they ought to have known for themselves: ”Because,” He says, ”your hands are full of blood.” This was the reason why all their religiousness, and orthodoxy, and church-going, and praying, was only disgusting to G.o.d; because there was no righteousness with it. Their faith was only a dead, rotten, sham faith, for it brought forth no fruits of justice and love; and their religion was only hypocrisy, for it did not make them holy. No doubt they thought themselves pious and sincere enough; no doubt they thought that they were pleasing G.o.d perfectly, and giving Him all that He could fairly ask of them; no doubt they were fiercely offended at Isaiah's message to them; no doubt they could not understand what he meant by calling them a hypocritical nation, a second Sodom and Gomorrah, while they were destroying idols, and keeping the law of Moses, and wors.h.i.+pping G.o.d more earnestly than He had been wors.h.i.+pped since Solomon's time. But so it was. That was the message of G.o.d to them; that was the vision of Isaiah concerning them; that there was no soundness in the whole of the nation, ”from the sole of the foot to the crown of the head, nothing but wounds, and bruises, and putrefying sores”--that is, that the whole heart and conscience, and ways of thinking, were utterly rotten, and abominable in the sight of G.o.d, even while they were holding the true doctrines about them, and keeping up the pure wors.h.i.+p of Him. This, says the Lord, is not the way to please me.

”He hath showed thee, oh man, what is good. And what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy G.o.d?” To do justly, to love mercy, and then to walk humbly, sure that when you seem to have done all your duty, you have left only too much of it undone; even as St. Paul felt when he said, that though he knew nothing against himself; though he could not recollect a single thing in which he had failed of his duty to the Corinthians, yet that did not justify him. ”For he that judgeth me,”

he says, ”is the Lord.” He sees deeper than I can; and He, alas! may take a very different view of my conduct from what I do; and this life of mine, which looks to me, from my ignorance, so spotless and perfect, may be, in His eyes, full of sins, and weakness, and neglects, and shameful follies. ”To walk humbly with G.o.d.” Not to believe that because you read the Bible, and have heard the gospel, and are sharp at finding out false doctrine in preachers, and belong to the Church of England, that therefore you know all about G.o.d, and can look down upon poor papists, and heathens, and say: ”This people, which knoweth not the law, is accursed: but WE are enlightened, we understand the whole Bible, we know everything about G.o.d's will, and man's duty; and whosoever differs from us, or pretends to teach us anything new about G.o.d, must be wrong.” Not to do so, my friends, but to believe what St. Paul tells us solemnly, ”That if any man think that he knows anything, he knows nothing yet as he ought to know”--to believe that the Great G.o.d, and the will of G.o.d, and the love of G.o.d, and the mystery of Redemption, and the treasures of wisdom which are in His Bible, are, as St. Paul told you, boundless, like a living well, which can never be fathomed, or drawn dry, but fills again with fresh water as fast as you draw from it. That is walking humbly with G.o.d; and those who do not do so, but like the Pharisees of old, believe that they have all knowledge, and can understand all the mysteries of the Bible, and go through the world, despising and cursing all parties but their own--let them beware, lest the Lord be saying of them, as He said of the church of Sardis, of old: ”Thou sayest, I am rich, and increased with goods, and have need of nothing, and knowest not that thou art wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked.”

How is this? What is this strange thing, without which even the true knowledge of doctrine is of no use; which, if a man, or a nation has not, he is poor, and blind, and wretched, and naked in soul, in spite of all his religion? Isaiah will tell us--What did he say to the Jews in his day?

”Wash you, make you clean; put away the evil of your doings from before my eyes. Do justice to the fatherless, and relieve the widow!” ”Do that,” says the Lord, ”and then your repentance will be sincere. Church building and church going are well--but they are not repentance--churches are not souls. I ask you for your hearts, and you give me fine stones and fine words. I want souls--I want YOUR souls--I want you to turn to me. And what am I? saith the Lord. I am justice, I am love, I am the G.o.d of the oppressed, the fatherless, the widow.--That is my character. Turn to justice, turn to love, turn to mercy; long to be made just, and loving, and merciful; see that your sin has been just this, and nothing else, that you have been unjust, unloving, unmerciful. Repent for your neglect and cruelty, and repent in dust and ashes, when you see what wretched hypocrites you really are. And then, my boundless mercy and pardon shall be open to you. As you wish to be to me, so will I be to you; if you wish to become merciful, you shall taste my mercy; if you wish to become loving to others, you shall find that I love you; if you wish to become just, you shall find that I am just, just to deal by you as you deal by others; faithful and just to forgive you your sins, and to cleanse you from all unrighteousness. And then, all shall be forgiven and forgotten; ”though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be white as snow: though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool.”

Surely, my friends, these things are worth taking to heart; for this is the sin which most destroys all men and nations--high religious profession with an unG.o.dly, covetous, and selfish life. It is the worst and most dangerous of all sins; for it is like a disease which eats out the heart and life without giving pain; so that the sick man never suspects that anything is the matter with him, till he finds himself, to his astonishment, at the point of death. So it was with the Jews, three times in their history. In the time of Isaiah, under King Hezekiah; in the time of Jeremiah, under King Josiah; and last and worst of all, in the time of Jesus Christ. At each of these three times the Jews were high religious professors, and yet at each of these three times they were abominable before G.o.d, and on the brink of ruin. In Isaiah's time their eyes seemed to have been opened at last to their own sins. Their fearful danger, and wonderful deliverance from the a.s.syrians of which you heard last Sunday, seem to have done that for them; as G.o.d intended it should.

During the latter part of Hezekiah's reign they seemed to have turned to G.o.d with their hearts, and not with their lips only; and Isaiah can find no words to express the delight which the blessed change gives him. Nevertheless, they soon fell back again into idolatry; and then there was another outward lip-reformation under the good King Josiah; and Jeremiah had to give them exactly the same warning which Isaiah had given them nearly a hundred years before. But that time, alas! they would not take the warning; and then all the evil which had been prophesied against them came on them. From hypocritical profession, they fell back again into their old idolatry; their covetousness, selfishness, party-quarrels, and profligate lives made them too weak and rotten to stand against Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon, when he attacked them; and Jerusalem was miserably destroyed, the temple burnt, and the Jews carried captives to Babylon. There they repented in bitter sorrow and slavery; and G.o.d allowed them after seventy years to return to their own land. Then at first they seemed to be a really converted people, and to be wors.h.i.+pping G.o.d in spirit and in truth. They never again fell back into the idolatry of the heathen. So far from it, they became the greatest possible haters of it; they went on keeping the law of G.o.d with the utmost possible strictness, even to the day when the Lord Jesus appeared among them. Their religious people, the Scribes and Pharisees, were the most strict, moral, devout people of the whole world. They wors.h.i.+pped the very words and letters of the Bible; their thoughts seemed filled with nothing but G.o.d and the service of G.o.d: and yet the Lord Jesus told them that they were in a worse state, greater sinners in the sight of G.o.d, than they had ever been; that they, who hated idolatry, were filling up the measure of their idolatrous forefathers' iniquity; that the guilt of all the righteous blood shed on earth was to fall on them; that they were a race of serpents, a generation of vipers; and that even He did not see how they could escape the d.a.m.nation of h.e.l.l. And they proved how true His words were, by crucifying the very Lord of whom their much- prized Scriptures bore witness, whom they pretended to wors.h.i.+p day and night continually; and received the just reward of their deeds in forty years of sedition, bloodshed, and misery, which ended by the Romans coming and sweeping the nation of the Jews from off the face of the earth.

So much for profession without practice. So much for true doctrine with dishonest and unholy lives. So much for outward respectability with inward sinfulness. So much for hating idolatry, while all the while men's hearts are far from G.o.d!

Oh! my friends, let us all search our hearts carefully in these times of high profession and low practice; lest we be adding our drop of hypocrisy to the great flood of it which now stifles this land of England, and so fall into the same condemnation as the Jews of old, in spite of far n.o.bler examples, brighter and wider light, and more wonderful and bounteous blessings.

XXI--THE UNFAITHFUL SERVANT

But and if that servant say in his heart, My lord delayeth his coming; and shall begin to beat the men servants and the maid servants, and to eat and drink and to be drunken; the lord of that servant will come in a day when he looketh not for him, and in an hour when he is not aware, and will cut him asunder, and will appoint him his portion with the unbelievers.--LUKE xii. 45, 46.

But why with the unbelievers? The man had not disbelieved that he had any Lord at all; he had only believed that his Lord delayed his coming. And why was he to be put with those who do not believe in him at all? This is a very fearful question, friends, for us, when we think how it is the fas.h.i.+on among us now, to believe that our Lord delays His coming.--And surely most of us do believe that? For is it not our notion that, when the Lord Jesus ascended up to heaven, He went away a great distance off, perhaps millions of miles beyond the stars; and that He will not come back again till the last--which, for aught we know, and as we rather expect, may not happen for hundreds or thousands of years to come? Is not that most people's notion, rich as well as poor? And if that is not believing that our Lord delays His coming, what is?

But, you may answer, the Creed says plainly, that He ascended into heaven and sits at the right hand of G.o.d. Ah! my friends, those great words of the Creed which you take into your lips every Sunday, mean the very opposite to what most people fancy. They do not say, ”The Lord Jesus has left this poor earth to itself and its misery:”

but they say, ”Lo, He is with you, even to the end of the world.”

True, He is ascended into heaven. And how far off is heaven?--for so far off is the Lord Jesus, and no farther. Not so far off, my friends, after all, if you knew where to find it. Truly said the great and good poet, now gone home to his reward:

Heaven lies about us in our infancy.

And if we lose sight of it as we grow up to be men and women, it is not because heaven goes farther off, but because we grow less heavenly. Even now, so close is heaven to us, that any one of us might enter into heaven this moment, without stirring from his seat.

One real cry from the depths of your heart--”Father, forgive thy sinful child!”--one real feeling of your own worthlessness, and weakness, and emptiness, and of G.o.d's righteousness, and love, and mercy, ready for you--and you are in heaven there and then, as near the feet of the blessed Lord Jesus, as Mary Magdalen was, when she tried to clasp them in the garden. I am serious, my friends; I am not given to talk fine figures of poetry; I am talking sober, straightforward, literal truth. And the Lord sits at G.o.d's right hand too? you believe that? Then how far off is G.o.d?--for as far off as G.o.d is, so far off is the Lord Jesus, and no farther. What says St. Paul? That ”G.o.d is not far off from any one of us--for in Him we live, and move, and have our being” ... IN Him ... . How far off is that? And is not G.o.d everywhere, if indeed we can say that He is any where? Then the Lord Jesus, who is at G.o.d's right hand, is everywhere also--here, now, with us this day. One would have thought that there was no need to prove that by argument, considering that His own blessed lips told us: ”Lo, I am with you, even to the end of the world;” and again: ”Wheresoever two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.” And this is the Lord whom people fancy is gone away far above the stars, till the end of time! Oh, my friends, rather bow your heads before Him here this moment. For here He is among us now, listening to every thought of our poor sinful hearts... . He is where G.o.d is--G.o.d IN whom we live, and move, and have our being--and that is everywhere. Do you wish Him to be any nearer, my friends? Or do you--do you--take care what your hearts answer, for He is watching them--do you in the depth of your hearts wish that He were a little farther off? Does the notion of His being here on this earth, watching and interfering (as we call it nowadays in our atheism) with us and everything, seem unpleasant and burdensome? Is it more comfortable to you to think that He is away far up beyond the stars? Do you feel the lighter and freer for fancying that He will not visit the earth for many a year to come? In short, is it in your HEARTS that you are saying, The Lord delays His coming?

That is a very important question. For mind, a pious man might be, as many a pious man has been in these days, deceived by bad teaching into the notion that Jesus Christ was gone far away. But if he were a truly pious man, if he truly loved the Lord, that would be a painful thought--as I should have fancied, an unbearable thought--to him, when he looked out upon this poor miserable, confused world. He would be crying night and day: ”Oh, that thou wouldest rend the heavens and come down!” He would be in an agony of pity for this poor deserted earth, and of longing for the Saviour of it to come back and save it. He would never have a moment's peace of mind till he had either seen the Lord come back again in His glory, or till he had found out--what I am sure the blessed Lord would teach him as a reward for his love--that it was all a dream and a nightmare, and that the Lord of the earth was in the earth, and close to him, all along; only that his weak eyes were held so that he did not know the Lord and the Lord's works when he saw them.

But that was not the temper of this servant in the Lord's parable. I am afraid it is by no means the temper of many of us nowadays. The servant said IN HIS HEART, that his master would be long away. It was his heart put the thought into his head. He took to the notion HEARTILY, as we say, because he was glad to believe it was true; glad to think that his master would not come to ”interfere” with him; and that in the meantime he might be lord and master himself, and treat everyone in the house as if he himself was the owner of it, and tyrannise over his fellow-servants, and enjoy himself in luxury and good living. So says David of the fool: ”The fool hath said in his heart, there is no G.o.d;” his heart puts that thought into his head.

He wishes to believe that there is no G.o.d; and when there is a will there is a way; and he soon finds out reasons and arguments enough to prove what he is so very anxious to prove.

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