Thence my soul with price immense.

“And for this let men and angels,

All the heavenly hosts above,

Choirs of seraphims elected,

With their golden harps of love,

Praise and worship,

My Redeemer without end.”

Since that first dark hour of conviction I dare say you have passed through other fearful depressions of spirit, very similar to this which is recorded of Hezekiah. You have not descended quite so deep into the pit as you did at the first, but yet you have known bitter sorrows and have been deliivered from them. Are you this morning happy in the Lord? Are you again rejoicing? Then say with the king,-“Thou hast in love to my soul delivered it from the pit of corruption. The Lord was ready to save me: therefore we will sing my songs to the stringed instruments in the house of the Lord.”

There cometh speedily a time when we shall sing this song more sweetly in a better land than this, where there shall be none of these mists to hang about us, but changeless, everlasting noonday without a cloud. In heaven how sweetly shall we sing this song upon our stringed instruments, when there shall be no corruption left in us, but we shall be pure as the soul of God himself, perfect as Christ our Redeemer. What hymns of gratitude shall we chant before the throne, when standing on the heights of heaven we gaze into the deeps of hell; when from our perfection we remember the fall and all the ruin of it from which almighty grace uplifted us! Glory be unto the Lord for ever, for “In love to my soul thou hast delivered it from the pit of corruption.” Hallelujah! This is the deed which grace has done.

Now, we have to notice the power which performed it. To my mind the truth herein set forth is the delicious food for meditation, but it is not readily to be brought forth in preaching. Hear ye the words-“Thou hast loved my soul out of the pit of corruption.” Love wrought the rescue. Love did it all; let love wear the crown. I was asleep in my sin, but thou, O love, didst arouse me with a kiss. Only when I began to hear that Jesus loved poor souls unto the death, and therefore came to seek and save sinners, did I begin to wake from my deadly lethargy. Do you, my brethren, recollect when the first thought entered into your minds that after all there was hope, for God was full of love? Did not that thought bestir you? Did not the Lord love you out of the sleep of sin? Moreover, you loved sin, and the wages of it, and the world looked very pleasantly upon you while it enthralled you: at last you came to know that the love of God was sweeter far than the love of sin, you had a glimpse of Jesus’ dear marred visage, all bedewed with spittle and with blood, and he appeared so much more fair and lovely than your sin that you began to feel that sin and you must part. Thus the Lord loved you out of your love of sin. His sweet love made sin nauseous to you, you were weary of it, and would have no more of it. Do you recollect that when you fell into despair and said, “I have been such a sinner that I must die in my sin,” you were uplifted from the pit of unbelief? I know that I was borne out of it upon the eagle wings of love. The Lord loved me out of it; he shed abroad such love in my soul that I could not be an unbeliever any longer. Just as an iceberg must surely melt when once it is borne along by the Gulf Stream, so my unbelief was compelled to dissolve in the warm stream of his dear love. Believe him? How could I disbelieve him when I saw his love to sinners, and heard of his death for the very chief of them, even for such as I was. He loved me out of my unbelief. But then I felt so weak I could do nothing; I was afraid to unite with his people, and afraid to make confession of my faith for fear I should dishonour him. Then he came and loved me out of my timorousness, shed his love abroad in my heart so powerfully that I became strong with strength of his giving, and knew myself to be safe because I was in his keeping. Then did I come forward and confess his name and unite with his saints, for I felt that I could trust my Lord to keep me even unto the end, for his love had loved me out of my weakness. I am telling the story as though it were about myself, but, brother, I mean it about you as well, you have wandered sometimes since then, you have gone away from your Lord into worldliness and much that you unfeignedly deplore; and who is it that has led you back to peace and holiness? Who has been the Good Shepherd and restored your soul? My loving Lord has driven me back sometimes with sharp words of rebuke, but oftener he has loved me back with attractive tenderness. What a wonderful magnet love is! It draws our iron hearts to itself. Its sway is kindly but irresistible. We wander hither and thither, in the instability of our minds, till a memory of the days of love comes over our spirit, and straightway we can rest no longer in the things of earth after which we have so wickedly gone astray, but we say, “I will return unto my first husband, for it was better with me then than now” A moment’s memory of the days of our espousals makes the heart sick with longings to return to her home in the bosom of Jesus. He loves us out of our backslidings. Perhaps you have fallen into lukewarmness, and are chilly and lifeless, and what is the way to raise you out of that horrible state? Is it not a way of love? When the Laodicean church was neither cold nor hot, and even her Beloved was ready to spue her out of his mouth, how was she bidden to rise out of her condition? Did not the Lord say, “Behold, I stand at the door and knock.” Christ’s coming to commune with the church was the cure of her indifference. When the love of God is shed abroad in the soul you feel no longer sleepy and indifferent, but your spirit girds herself with zeal as with a cloak, and your heart glows with vehement flames of affection. How truly does our poet sing-

“O Jesu, King most wonderful,

Thou Conqueror renown’d,

Thou sweetness most ineffable,

In whom all joys are found!

When once thou visitest the heart,

Then truth begins to shine,

Then earthly vanities depart,

Then kindles love divine.”

The ever-gracious Lord means to perfect that which concerneth you by the action of this self-same love. His gentleness has made you great, and his love will make you glorious. Divine love is the most sanctifying agency in the world; it is that which checked us before we knew the Lord when we ran so greedily after sin, and it is that which constrains us now that we live unto his name, for “the love of Christ constraineth us.” Behold then the love of the Spirit! Is not this most blessed medicine? We spoke of bitter draughts under our first head, and truly these have their virtue, but here the Lord’s love uses medicine like itself; yea, it becomes itself the medicine, and the Lord seems to say, “Here is my dear child sick, and I will restore him by giving him more love.” Divine love is a catholicon, a universal medicine. No spiritual disease can resist its healing power. The love and blood of Jesus, applied by the Holy Ghost, will raise up the saints from pining sickness and restore them from the gates of the grave. No heart, however like to granite it becomes, can long resist almighty love. The rebel may stand up in bold defiance, and stand out in daring obstinacy, but when he begins to feel God loves him he cries,

“Lord, thou hast won, at length I yield;

My heart, by mighty grace compell’d,

Surrenders all to thee;

Against thy terrors long I strove,

But who can stand against thy love?

Love conquers even me.

If thou hadst bid thy thunders roll,

And lightnings flash, to blast my soul,

I still had stubborn been;

But mercy has my heart subdued,

A bleeding Saviour I have view’d,

And now I hate my sin.”

We must briefly notice the modus operandi of this love. “Thou hast embraced my soul out of the pit of corruption.” Yonder is the child in the pit, and the father wishing to save it, goes down into the pit and embraces his beloved one, and so brings him up to life and safety again. After this manner did Jesus save us. He embraced us by taking our nature, and so becoming one with us. It is by embraces that he regenerates converts and sanctifies us, for he comes into union with us by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. All our lives he communes with us and embraces us with arms of mighty love, and so uplifts us from the pit of corruption. In this way also he will bring us right up out of our fallen estate into perfection of holiness, by continuing the divine embrace, pressing us nearer, and nearer, and nearer still to his dear, loving heart, till all sin shall be pressed out of us. He will by one eternal embrace of unchanging love lift us out of the pit of corruption into a state of absolute perfection wherein we shall dwell with him for ever. Glory be unto God for all this. He who has tasted of this cannot but sing as Hezekiah did upon his stringed instruments all the days of his life in the house of the Lord.

We have now with much delight to consider the promise of absolute pardon. “For thou hast cast all my sins behind thy back.” This king Hezekiah mentions as the cause of his restored peace and health. He could not be healed and cheered till the cause of disease was gone, and that was sin. Sin was the foreign element in his spiritual constitution, and as long as it was there it caused fret and worry and spiritual disease; but when the sin was gone then health and peace came back. Now let me take the words before us and set them forth in a few brief sentences, and bid you notice, first, the burden-sin. A heavy load, a weighty curse. Observe the owner of this burden: Hezekiah says, not sin only, but my sin. If any sins in the world are heavier than others they are mine. Brother, you feel yours to be so, do you not? Then take the next word, which is a word of multitude and note the comprehensiveness of that burden. All my sins. “Thou hast cast all my sins.” Let us spell that word, all my sins. What a row of figures it would take to number them all; as to the record of them, surely it would reach round the sky,-all my sins. In what balance shall they be weighed? What must the wrath be which is due to me on account of them? Think long and humbly of the words-all my sins.

Now, see the Lord comes to deal with them! He takes them all, and what does he do? He casts them. “Thou hast cast all my sins.” What a deed of omnipotence! What a divine cast! None but Jehovah Jesus himself could even have lifted all my sins, but he did lift them, and, like another Atlas, he bore them upon his shoulders; and having done that even till he sweat great drops of blood and bled to death, he then took the whole mass of my sins and cast them as far as the east is from the west; nay more, he cast them behind Jehovah’s back. Where is that? Behind God’s back; where can that be? Men throw things behind their back when they cannot bear the sight of them. Our sin is loathsome and abominable to God, he will not look upon it, and so he casts it behind his back. But then he is a just God, and he must punish iniquity; it must come before the eye of his holiness to be avenged. We have not, therefore, seen as yet the full meaning of the passage. No, it means that the Lord becomes oblivious of his people’s sins. Somebody said the other day concerning a certain piece of business, “I shall never think of it again; it is gone as though it had never been.” The Lord means all that concerning his people’s sins: “I shall never think of them again, they are quite gone as far as I am concerned, I have thrown them where I shall never see them any more, their sins and iniquities will I remember no more.” What a gracious mode of pardoning sin! God himself passes an act of oblivion and declares, “I will not remember their sins.” He looks upon his people who have been so provoking, and are still so prone to sin, and yet he beholds no iniquity in Jacob, nor perverseness in Israel. He sees his people washed in the blood of the Lamb, robed in the righteousness which is in God by faith, and he beholds in them neither spot nor wrinkle, nor any such thing, for he has cast their sins so far away that they are out of sight of omniscience and out of mind of omnipresence. Again, I would remind you of the words, “behind thy back.” Where is that? All things are before God’s face: he looketh on all the works of his hands, and he seeth all things that exist. Behind his back! It must mean annihilation, non-existence, and non-entity. O my soul, thy God has flung thy sin into non-entity, and effectually made an end of it: he treats thee as though it never had been, and far as his justice is concerned through the vicarious sacrifice of Christ, it is to the Lord as though we had never transgressed at all. “Thou hast cast all my sins behind thy back.”

I do not think I need preach any longer upon this subject. Go home and turn it over in quiet meditation under the overshadowing of the divine Spirit. Dear child of God, endeavour to get a grip of this great privilege of perfect pardon, and never let it go. May the Holy Ghost seal it home to you. You are right in bringing your sins before your own face and mourning over them; that is where they should be, but do not at the same time forget that they are forgiven. When a man casts his sins behind his back God will put them before his face: but when in penitence a believer sets his sins before his own face to mourn over them then the Lord in mercy declares that he will cast them behind his back. Oh believer in Jesus, thy sin is gone for ever. Be thou restful, happy, secure, for thou art accepted in the Beloved. Thy sin has ceased to be. The longest lines can never reach the bottom of that sea into whose depths Jehovah has cast them; the utmost industry of the devil can never travel into that land which does not exist, even the land which lies behind Jehovah’s back, into which he has cast thy sin. Who would not be a believer in Jesus? Even if he were sore sick, and had to lie like Hezekiah, on the bed of death, who would not be a believer? Even though he had to cry out Marah, Marah, bitterness twice over, who would not be a believer, and be embraced out of his misery by that mighty love which abolishes the sin of the penitent? Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, O sinner, and this shall be thy portion also by God’s abundant mercy. Amen.

Portion of Scripture read before Sermon-Isaiah 38.

Hymns from “Our Own Hymn Book”-103, 243, 283.