C. H. SPURGEON,

at the metropolitan tabernacle, newington,

On Lord’s-day Evening, July 23rd, 1876.

“And I will pour upon the house of David, and upon the inhabitants of Jerusalem, the spirit of grace and of supplications: and they shall look upon me whom they have pierced, and they shall mourn for him, as one mourneth for his only son, and shall be in bitterness for him, as one that is in bitterness for his firstborn.”-Zechariah 12:10.

Notice, in this verse, the very remarkable change of persons which you find in it; for you have, first, the first person, and then, the third: “They shall look upon me whom they have pierced, and they shall mourn for him.” It is the same Person who speaks in each case, and he is speaking concerning himself in both instances, so it is very remarkable that he should first say “me” and then say “him.” What is this but another illustration of the Unity of the Godhead, and yet the Trinity of the adorable Persons in it. Notice that the One who, in this chapter, speaks of himself as “me” and “him”, is none other than Jehovah, who made the heavens and the earth. Read the first verse: “The burden of the word of the Lord for Israel, saith the Lord, which stretcheth forth the heavens, and layeth the foundation of the earth, and formeth the spirit of man within him.” The Creator of the heavens and the Creator of our spirit is the same Person who was pierced, and who says, “They shall look upon me.” Yet there is a distinction, for we next read, “They shall mourn for him.” Jesus Christ is God, and therefore so speaks of himself; yet is he also man, and therefore he is spoken of in the third person. There are other instances in which the divine and human in Christ Jesus are spoken of in a very remarkable manner. Turn, for instance, to the 50th chapter of the prophecy of Isaiah, and the 3rd verse: “I clothe the heavens with blackness, and I make sackcloth their covering.” No one but God could truly saw that. Now turn to the 6th verse. I need not read the two intervening verses, but I will put the 3rd and the 6th together: “I clothe the heavens with blackness, and I make sackcloth their covering … I gave my back to the smiters, and my cheeks to them that plucked off the hair: I hid not my face from shame and spitting.” Can you realize the tremendous descent from the Godhead of him who clothes the heavens with blackness, and covers them with sackcloth, to the manhood of him who gave his back to the smiters, and his cheeks to them that plucked off the hair? That is another illustration of the truth which is so singularly implied in our text, where we read that “Jehovah, which stretcheth forth the heavens, and layeth the foundation of the earth, and formeth the spirit of man within him,” also says, “They shall look upon me whom they have pierced.”

The next point I want you to notice is, the remarkable fact that Jesus Christ was crucified and pierced. Did it never strike you as being very singular that he should have been pierced? When the Jews brought Jesus to Pilate, he said to them, “Take ye him, and judge him according to your law.” Would you not have supposed that the Jews, on hearing that, would at once have seized the opportunity of putting Christ to death according to their law? They accused Jesus of blasphemy, saying, “We have a law, and by our law he ought to die, because he made himself the Son of God.” You know that the death ordained by the law of Moses for a blasphemer was by stoning; and, if I had not read any of the Old Testament prophecies, or the New Testament narrative, I should have felt morally certain that, when Pilate said, “Take ye him, and judge him according to your law,” they would have taken him away, and stoned him to death; and I should have felt all the more certain that this would be the case because such was the animosity and hatred of the high priests especially against him that I should have thought that each one of them would have wanted to cast the first stone at him. But when he was sentenced to be crucified, the act of putting him to death was left to the Roman soldiers; and it is to me very surprising that, as the Jews had an opportunity of stoning him themselves, they did not avail themselves of it. Why was this? Why, because this ancient prophecy had said, “They shall look upon me whom they have pierced;” and because another still more ancient prophecy had said, “They pierced my hands and my feet.” Therefore, Jesus Christ must die by crucifixion, and not by stoning.

There is another very notable thing in connection with this prophecy. The piercing of the hands and feet of Christ by the nails, might, perhaps, not seem sufficient to carry out the idea of the prophecy: “They shall look upon me whom they have pierced;” so, when our Lord hung upon the cross, when “he was dead already,” as the Roman soldiers said when they came round to break the legs of the criminals to put an end to their sufferings, one of the soldiers, who had never read the Old Testament, and knew nothing about what was written there, probably just to gratify his heart’s cruel instinct, takes his spear, and thrusts it into the heart of Christ, “and forthwith came there out blood and water.” Now, if that had been done by someone who knew about the prophecy, it might have been said that there was some collusion to fulfil the prophetic Scriptures; but, as this Roman soldier was a barbarian, who did not believe at all in the Jewish Scriptures, is it not a remarkable thing that this prophecy should have been fulfilled through his spear being thrust into the heart of Jesus Christ as he hung upon the cross? So now, as you read these words, “They shall look upon me whom they have pierced,” adore the infinite wisdom of God, who was able to give the prophecy hundreds of years before its fulfilment in the most singular and literal manner.

Our text is a prophecy of the conversion of the Jews. They practically pierced the Saviour when they clamoured for his crucifixion, although Pilate tried to make a way for his escape, and the whole Jewish race has continued to endorse their dreadful deed. Most of the Jews who are now living still reject Christ with the utmost scorn and contempt. The very mention of his name often produces a manifestation of the greatest fury. They call him “the Nazarene.” I would not like to mention the various opprobrious epithets by which our Lord is called by the Jews. I marvel not that they speak of him as they do; for, as they reckon him to be an impostor, it is but natural that they should heap scorn upon him. But, in doing so, they show that they accept the act and deed of their forefathers, and so his blood is upon them and upon their children, according to the terrible imprecation uttered to Pilate. But the day is coming when all this will be changed. Israel, still beloved of the Lord, the firstborn of all the nations, shall yet recognize Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of David, as being the true Messiah; and then there will come over Israel such a sorrow for having rejected the Messiah as no nation ever knew before. They will look back on all the hundreds or thousands of years during which they have been a people scattered and peeled, exiled from their own land, which was the glory of all lands; and they will then realize that what Isaiah and the other prophets wrote was plain and clear, and that they ought to have seen it before. Judicial blindness has happened unto them even until the present day, but they will see then, and there will never be any other Christians in the world such as they will make, so devout, and earnest, and so anxious to do the will of God in all things. Then will the Gentiles also be gathered in when Israel shall at last receive her King. The first Christian missionaries were of the seed of Abraham, and so shall the last and most successful ones be. God will graft in again the natural branches of the good olive tree, together with us who were, by nature, only wild olive trees, but who have, by grace, been grafted into the good olive tree. O glorious day when that comes to pass; may God send it soon, and may some of us, if not all, live to see it! Yet remember that, though it will be a day of great joy to the repentant Jews, it will also be to them a day of deep sorrow as they recall their long rejection of their dear Lord and Saviour.

I want to remind you that the way in which the Jews will come to Christ is just the way in which you and I also must come to him if we ever come to him at all. They are to come mourning for him, and sorrowing especially because they crucified him. But you and I also crucified him just as much as the Jews did, at least in a certain sense, of which I am going to speak to you; and, consequently, when we come to Christ, we must come in just the same way that the Jews are to come to him. In fact, there is no difference, in this matter, between the Jews and the Gentiles. There is similar sin in each case, and the same Saviour; and when we come to Christ, it must be with the same kind of mourning and the same kind of faith with which Israel shall come in the days when God, in his mercy, shall gather her to himself.

My subject is to be-Evangelical sorrow, godly sorrow for sin; and my first remark concerning it is, that wherever it exists, it is always a creation of the Holy Spirit: “I will pour upon the house of David, and upon the inhabitants of Jerusalem, the spirit of grace, and of supplications: … and they shall mourn.” There never was any real godly sorrow, such as worketh repentance acceptable unto God, except that which was the result of the Holy Spirit’s own work within the soul.

True evangelical repentance is not produced by mere conscience, however much the conscience may be aroused and instructed. The Spirit of God must operate upon the heart; otherwise, the natural conscience cannot rise to the heights of true repentance.

It is not the product of mere terror. I believe that men can be driven into a sort of repentance by preaching to them the wrath of God, or by a sense of that wrath overtaking them in times of sickness or of the approach of death. But terror alone is hardening, rather than softening in its influence. It produces a repentance that needeth to be repented of, but it cannot produce evangelical sorrow for sin.

And, certainly, true repentance can never be produced in the soul by any outward machinery. Attempts have been made to produce it by covering the so-called “altar” with drapery of a certain colour,-violet is, I think, the proper colour to represent repentance,-and by darkening the “church” as it is called, and by tolling a bell at a certain time during the service, and by a sort of spiritual charade, acting the tragedy of the cross with mimic blasphemy, or, rather, with real blasphemy, and a shameful mimicry of the crucifixion of our Lord. Surely, no true repentance will ever be wrought in that way. People may be made to weep, and made to feel, by such travesties; but no spiritual result comes of it any more than of the weeping which may be produced at the theatre by some pathetic scene that is acted there. No, no; the preaching of the gospel is the ordained means of getting at men’s hearts, and the Holy Ghost’s power alone can lead men to repent of their sins, and trust in the Lord Jesus Christ for salvation.

Therefore it follows that genuine mourning for sin comes as a gift of divine grace: “I will pour upon the house of David, and upon the inhabitants of Jerusalem, the spirit of grace.” Grace comes into the heart, and enlightens the understanding, so that the man understands what his criminality is in the sight of God. Then the grace of God operates upon the conscience so that the man sees the evil and the bitterness of the sin which he has committed against the thrice-holy Jehovah. Then the same grace affects the heart, so that the man beholds the infinite graciousness and eternal love of Christ, and then begins to loathe himself to think that he should ever have treated Christ so ill. So, by a work of grace upon the soul, and not by any other process, does the Spirit of God make men weep for sin so that they hate it, and turn away from it.

This work of grace is always attended by prayer. Notice the promise in the text: “I will pour … the spirit of grace and of supplications.” Despairing repentance dares not pray, so that is not the kind of repentance that God accepts. Remorse for sin has often been wrought in men’s minds, and it has driven them to despair, and that despair has prevented them from praying. But the godly repentance, which the Holy Ghost gives, always sets the sinner praying. Judas Iscariot repented, after a fashion; but he could not pray, so he went out, and hanged himself. God save all of you from a prayerless, tearless repentance! But if you repent of sin, and at the same time really pray, then I believe we have the right to say that God has poured upon you the spirit of grace and of supplications; and that your mourning for sin will prove to be a godly sorrow that will work in you every blessed thing. God grant to you more and more of this grace as long as ever you live!

This leads me to make a further remark, which is, that true repentance is continuous in a Christian. When a man mourns for sin as he ought to do, he does not leave off mourning as long as he is in this world. I am sure of this because we are told that it is “the spirit of grace and of supplications” that God pours upon his people. Now, grace abides in the Christian all his life, and supplication also abides in the Christian all his life; so that we may infer that the third gift of the Spirit, namely, mourning for sin, will also abide in the Christian as long as ever he lives. I have frequently quoted to you the saying of good old Rowland Hill, that the only thing he regretted about going to heaven was that he supposed he should have to say “Good-bye” to repentance when he entered the pearly gates; “but,” said he, “she has been my sweet companion, together with faith, all my pilgrim journey, and I expect to have these two graces with me as long as I am in this world.” Oh, yes, beloved; we have not done with repenting, and we never shall have done with repenting as long as we are here. The more we rejoice in God, the more we repent to think that we should ever have sinned, and that we do still sin against him. The more we see of the loveliness of Christ, the more we repent that we ever were blind to it. The more we taste of his amazing love, the more we smite upon our breasts, and grieve to think that we should ever have refused him, and should have felt no love in our hearts in return for his great love to us. If you have done repenting, brother, the Holy Spirit has done working in you; for, as long as he works, grace, supplications, and repenting all go together.

Now, having shown you that, wherever there is true evangelical mourning for sin, it is the work of the Spirit of God, I pass on to remark, in the second place, that, wherever there is this acceptable mourning for sin, it is caused by looking to Christ.

“They shall look upon me whom they have pierced.” What is the inference from that fact? Why, that repentance is not a preparation for looking to Christ. Do you not see that? The looking is put first, and the mourning afterwards. Yet I know what many of you have thought. You have said to yourselves, “We must mourn for sin, and then look to Christ to pardon it.” That is not God’s order, and we must always be careful to keep all truths in the order in which he has put them. Remember, sinner, that there will never be a tear of acceptable repentance in your eye till you have first looked to Jesus Christ. “Oh, but!” says someone, “I have had many terrors and horrors concerning sin, yet I have never looked to Christ.” Then, all those terrors and horrors are unacceptable. They may be the work of conscience, or, perhaps, partly even the work of the devil himself; but evangelical repentance begins with a believing look at Christ. Thou must first fix thine eye upon Christ before thou canst truly repent. And I tell thee that all thy repentings, apart from believing in Jesus, are of no value, of no avail; therefore, away with them! If thou weepest for sin without fixing thy gaze upon Christ, thou wilt have to weep again over thy repentance, for it is itself another sin. Look away from everything else to Jesus, for he can melt that hard heart of thine, and enable thee to repent. Do not, as our proverbs say, put the cart before the horse, or put the fruit into the ground instead of the root; but begin with looking unto Jesus, and then true repentance will surely follow.

But what is there, in looking to Christ, to make a man hate sin, and repent of it? I answer that,-Looking to him, we see how sin hates purity. There was an eloquent, flowery preacher, who, as he delivered his discourse, one Sunday morning, exclaimed, “O Virtue, fair and beauteous maid, if thou shouldst once descend from heaven to earth, and stand amongst the sons of men, they would be all charmed by thy beauties, and would fall down and worship thee!” It so happened that there was a certain plain, blunt preacher, who was not at all an eloquent orator, who had to preach, in the afternoon, in the same building; and having heard the morning discourse, he ventured to repeat the apostrophe to Virtue which I quoted just now, and when he had finished the quotation, he said, “But, O Virtue, thou didst descend from heaven to earth in the form of Jesus Christ, the Son of God; but did all men worship thee? Nay, they vilified thee, they abhorred thee, they said, ‘Let him be crucified;’ and they took thee, and nailed thee to the accursed tree, and put thee to a shameful death!” The death of Jesus Christ upon the cross was an impeachment of the whole world. It showed how bitterly fallen man hates perfection; and if Christ were to come again to the earth as he came before, men would again crucify him; and if Christ’s disciples were more like their Lord, I doubt not that they would be far more persecuted than they now are, even as they were in the ages that are past.

Further, when we look on Jesus Christ upon the cross, we see sin’s ingratitude to love. Christ was not merely pure and perfect, but he came to earth upon no errand but that of love and mercy. There were no thunderbolts in his hands with which to smite the guilty, but even his enemies said, “This man receiveth sinners, and eateth with them.” He himself said, “God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved.” Love and pity to men were in his bosom, yet see how the world treated him. It would not have pure benevolence in its midst. The Friend of men, the greatest philanthropist who ever lived, loving the most degraded, and seeking to uplift them,-they took him, and nailed him to the cross of wood. O sin, what an accursed thing thou art, that thou didst not only hate purity itself, but also perfect purity combined with infinite love, and that thou didst shoot thy sharpest arrows into the heart of the best Friend that man has ever had!

Yet even that is not all that a sight of Christ upon the cross shows to us, for it also shows us man’s abhorrence of God; for, after all, that which excited the bitterest enmity of the world was the Godhead of Christ, his Divine attributes. Jesus Christ was God, and he came to this earth; and wicked men, though they could not kill God, went as near to it as they could by killing Christ, who was God as well as man. We use the word “regicide” when we speak of a man who kills a king, and we rightly use the word “Deicide” in speaking of the crime of which the world made itself guilty when it put Christ to death. It was the ever-blessed Son of God whom wicked men nailed to the tree; and the world would commit the same crime again if it could. If all men were gathered together, taking the human race as it now is, and it were put to the vote, “Shall there be any God?” every fool would hold up his hand for “No God.” “The fool hath said in his heart, No God.” And as the mass of mankind belong to that category, in spiritual things, they say, “No God.” It is quite possible that I am addressing some people who would be delighted if it could be said to them, “Now, if you hold up your finger, there will be no more religion to bother you, no judgment-day for you to dread, no resurrection, no hell, no heaven; in fact, God himself will be put away; so far as you are concerned, there will be no God.” What good news it would be to you if it were really so, for the thing which troubles you now is that there is a God. Well, that only shows that you also are among those who are guilty of the death of Christ, for, if you could do it, you would extinguish God himself; and this is what they did, as far as they could, when they nailed the Son of God to the cross of Calvary.

But, dear friends, when we rightly look to Christ, we see that our guilt was so great that only an infinite sacrifice could atone for it. Our sin comes home to us; at least, mine comes home to me. I see Christ upon the cross, and my self-righteousness says, “I did not crucify him.” But my conscience replies, “No, but you heard, for many years, about Christ being put to death, without being at all affected by that fact; and, therefore, you virtually sanctioned the dreadful deed, by not reprobating it; and you were not moved to any feeling of shame even though Jesus died in your room and place.” That is all true, my Lord. For many a day, I thought nothing of thee. Then my conscience added, “You know that, when Christ came to you, in the preaching of the Gospel, for a long while you refused him. Many a time, your conscience was awakened, and you were urged to accept Christ as your Saviour; but you said, ‘I will not have this Man to reign over me.’ ” Yes, Lord, that also is true. I, who now love thee with all my heart, once refused thee;-nay, not merely once, but a thousand times I refused thee; and so I did what the Jews of old did,-rejected thee. Ah, beloved! we chose the pleasures of the world, instead of the love of Christ, so that we were as bad as they were who said, “Not this man; but Barabbas.” We chose the poor, paltry, trivial joys of time and sense, and let the Saviour go. Must not all of you confess that you were guilty in this respect?

Possibly, I am addressing some who, in the days of their ignorance, even cursed the name of Jesus, and persecuted or ridiculed his people. You have a loving sister, of whom you used to make what you called “rare fun” because of her love to Christ, and you knew that you were wounding Christ himself through one of his followers. Perhaps there was someone whom you used to persecute very violently for being a lover of the Lord. If you did so, you were persecuting Jesus, even as Saul of Tarsus did. Do not say that you never spat in his dear face, do not say that you never scourged his blessed shoulders. You have done so, as far as you could do it; in spirit you have done it, though not in very deed. Look to him now; look to him now; and, as you see him on the cross, and see what wicked men did to him there, say, “They were only doing it in my place,-doing what I should have done if I had been there,-doing what I have, in effect, done for a great part of my life.”

Even we, who have believed in Jesus, must accuse ourselves of guilt concerning our treatment of our dear Lord, as we look into his face. He has forgiven us, blessed be his dear name! He has not a word to say against us. There is nothing but love in his heart toward us; but we cannot forgive ourselves for all the wrong we have done to him. Oftentimes, we have plaited a crown of thorns, and put it on his head, as the soldiers did. That silly talk, when we ought to have been telling out his gospel;-those doubts and fears, that wicked unbelief, when we ought to have been fully trusting him;-that love of the world, that greed of gain, when we ought to have been honouring him with our substance;-all this was the plaiting of thorny crowns to put upon his blessed brow. Ah, yes! we may well look at him, and mourn; who among us can look at him, and not mourn? God forgive us if we can do so!

My time is almost spent; but I was going to show you, in the third place, that evangelical sorrow for sin is the chief of sorrows. Whenever it comes into the heart, it is not a sham sorrow, but a very real one. Our text says, “They shall mourn for him, as one mourneth for his only son, and shall be in bitterness for him, as one that is in bitterness for his firstborn.”

The grief of one who has lost his only child is very acute. There is hardly a more painful errand on which a minister of the gospel, or any other Christian, has to go, than to visit a family in which the only child lies dead. There is real sorrow there, for they are thinking that their name will not be continued; and their dear child was one in whom they took great delight. An only child is usually very much beloved; so, for that child to die, causes special sorrow; and it is a great grief for a man to lose his firstborn,-the beginning of his strength, in whom he had taken such pride. Well now, such is the kind of grief that a true Christian feels concerning his sin. May we have it more and more, O Lord! It were better that I lost every child-better that I lost life itself-than that I should sin against thee; that is a cruel crime which may well make me mourn.

The prophet then goes on to compare the mourning for sin to the mourning of the whole nation when Josiah died, and the land rang with bitter lamentations for the loved monarch who had been slain in battle. The weeping men and wailing women went through every street, and Jeremiah, the weeping prophet, was the chief mourner among them all. Now, such is the sorrow of a soul when it realizes that it crucified Christ. It is a sweet and blessed sorrow; but, still, it is a very deep and real one. I ask that I may be made to feel more and more of it.

“Lord, let me weep for nought but sin,

And after none but thee;

And then I would-oh, that I might!-

A constant weeper be.”

I must not dwell upon this sacred topic, but close with what would have been my fourth division if there had been time for it. That is, that evangelical repentance does not itself cleanse us from sin.

Are you startled by that statement? Then, read the 1st verse of the 13th chapter: “In that day there shall be a fountain opened to the house of David and to the inhabitants of Jerusalem for sin and for uncleanness.” Now, dear friends, if mourning for sin took the sin away, there would not be any need of the cleansing fountain; but, although the mourning was so real and so bitter, it did not take away the mourners’ sin. Toplady was right when he sang,-

“Could my zeal no respite know,

Could my tears for ever flow,

All for sin could not atone:

Thou must save, and thou alone.”

But while evangelical repentance does not take away sin, wherever it is present, it is a proof that sin is taken away. If thou hast repented of thy sin, and hast believed in Jesus, then thou hast been cleansed in the open fountain, and that same blood, which has cleansed thee from guilt, will yet prove that it can also cleanse thee from the power of sin. Am I addressing any who are now mourning on account of sin? “Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted.” That blessedness awaits you, for “blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered.” Go and confess your transgression unto the Lord; say to him, with David, “Against thee, thee only, have I sinned.” Go and stand at the foot of the cross, and view the flowing of your Saviour’s precious blood; and while you stand there, and mourn for him, the Holy Spirit will be pleased to bear witness with your spirit, and you shall have the blessed assurance which will enable you to know that the blood of Jesus has washed all your sin away, and you shall go on your way rejoicing,-hating the sin that made him suffer, and praising the grace that has forgiven it.

Ere I close, I would that some poor sinner, instead of trying to mourn for sin, would first look to Jesus Christ upon the cross, for that is the way to be made to mourn for sin. Instead of thinking that repentance can cleanse you, look to the finished work of Jesus, and believe in him, for that is the only way by which pardon can come to you. May God bless us all, and keep us ever repenting, and ever believing, and he shall have the praise and the glory for ever and ever! Amen.

Exposition by C. H. Spurgeon

ZECHARIAH 12, and 13:1

Chapter 12 Verse 1. The burden of the word of the Lord for Israel, saith the Lord, which stretcheth forth the heavens, and layeth the foundation of the earth, and formeth the spirit of man within him.

Note how this chapter begins: “The burden of the word of the Lord for Israel,”-not against Israel. The gospel is always, to the true preacher of it, the burden of the Lord; but, to those who receive it, it is a burden of blessing, a load of mercy. To those who reject it, it will become a burdensome stone, crushing them to their eternal ruin. God grant, in his infinite mercy, that none of us may belong to the last class!

2. Behold, I will make Jerusalem a cup of trembling unto all the people round about, when they shall be in the siege both against Judah and against Jerusalem.

This is a promise of God’s abounding mercy to his chosen people Israel. When he comes to their aid, they shall be a cup of trembling to their enemies. Those enemies will try to swallow them, but they will find that they are drinking a cup of poison, which will cause their own death. Oh, that the day might soon come when God would remember his ancient people, the Jews, and bring them back to their own land, as he certainly will do in the fulness of time; and when he has done it, then it shall come to pass that all who fight against them shall find his people to be as a cup of trembling to them.

This promise, which is to be literally fulfilled to God’s chosen people, the seed of Abraham, is also spiritually true to all believers. Christian, your enemies cannot really hurt you. If they could drink you up, as men drink a cup of wine, you would be a cup of trembling to them, they would find that they had taken in more than they wanted. All the persecutors of the Church of God, in smiting this stone, have themselves been broken on it. They have found that they have undertaken a task which has ended in their own destruction. Woe unto the man who fights against the Church of the living God! Victory must always come to the Lord’s people, for greater is he who is with them than all that can be against them.

3. And in that day will I make Jerusalem a burdensome stone for all people: all that burden themselves with it shall be cut in pieces, though all the people of the earth be gathered together against it.

This is true literally, but it is also true spiritually. As the Church of God is to be a cup of trembling to its enemies, so is it also to be a burdensome stone. They do not like it; they cannot bear it. They would, if they could, get rid of the spiritual Church of God; but they cannot get rid of it. There it is,-a stone, cut out of the mountain without hands, which will grow until it fills the whole earth, and breaks in pieces everything that opposes it. Those who set themselves against God, and against his Christ, shall find themselves crushed to atoms by this mighty stone.

4. In that day, saith the Lord, I will smite every horse with astonishment, and his rider with madness:

The chief strength of Jerusalem’s enemies lay in horses and chariots; but God bids his people not to fear them, for he knows how to overcome all power, whether it be the power of cavalry or the power of infantry. He knows how to smite every horse with astonishment, and every rider with madness, for, “as the mountains are round about Jerusalem, so the Lord is round about his people, from henceforth even for ever,” and he can protect them against the most powerful foes that may assail them.

4. And I will open mine eyes upon the house of Judah,

It looked as if the Lord had been asleep, but now he says, “ ‘I will open mine eyes upon the house of Judah,’-I will look at them, and note their sufferings, pity their griefs, plan for their good, and come forth for their defence.”

4. And will smite every horse of the people with blindness.

Their enemies shall not be able to see them, but God will see them, and he will deliver his people, and overthrow all their adversaries.

5, 6. And the governors of Judah shall say in their heart, The inhabitants of Jerusalem shall be my strength in the Lord of hosts their God. In that day will I make the governors of Judah like an hearth of fire among the wood, and like a torch of fire in a sheaf; and they shall devour all the people round about, on the right hand and on the left: and Jerusalem shall be inhabited again in her own place, even in Jerusalem.

The literal prophecy is that the seed of Israel shall go back to their own land, and shall prevail over their adversaries; but the spiritual meaning is that the Church of God shall have great power among the people of the earth. They shall have fire put into them,-the fire of the Holy Ghost; and they shall be like a lighted firebrand amongst the wood, or as a flaming torch in a sheaf of corn; and you know how soon the sheaf would be burnt up. If God has put within you fire from heaven, you will be sure to burn, and those with whom you live will soon feel the flame. Place one really gracious man in any district, and if he is thoroughly on fire with the Holy Spirit, it will be like throwing a blazing firebrand into a field of dry corn. What a conflagration will there be! The Lord send us many such blessed burnings!

7. The Lord also shall save the tents of Judah first, that the glory of the house of David and the glory of the inhabitants of Jerusalem do not magnify themselves against Judah.

God will begin by saving the most defenceless. The tents of the people were easily swept away by their powerful foes. “Therefore,” says the prophet, “the Lord shall save the tents of Judah first.” As for the people in the strongly defended city of Jerusalem, he would protect them, but he would do it in such a way that they should not take the glory to themselves. God is always very jealous of his own honour. He will save us, but it will be in a way that shall prevent our pride from glorying in it. He will never allow one saved soul to be able to say, “I saved myself,” or “I contributed to the merit which has brought me to heaven.” No; God must have all the glory,-every jot and tittle of it; and all his people are glad that he should have it.

8. In that day shall the Lord defend the inhabitants of Jerusalem; and he that is feeble among them at that day shall be as David; and the house of David shall be as God, as the angel of the Lord before them.

What a blessed thing it is when the Lord strengthens all his people, so that the weakest amongst them are as strong as that ruddy-faced youth who smote Goliath, and the strongest of them are like the swift-winged angels of God, ready to do his bidding! Oh, that this church might be in that blessed state! You remember how it is written that, when Israel came up out of Egypt, “there was not one feeble person among their tribes.” When will the whole Church of Christ get to be in that condition? O ye feeble ones, lay hold upon the promise now before us, and do not rest till it is fulfilled in you! “He that is feeble among them at that day shall be as David; and the house of David shall be as God, as the angel of the Lord before them.”

9-11. And it shall come to pass in that day, that I will seek to destroy all the nations that come against Jerusalem. And I will pour upon the house of David, and upon the inhabitants of Jerusalem, the spirit of grace and of supplications: and they shall look upon me whom they have pierced, and they shall mourn for him, as one mourneth for his only son, and shall be in bitterness for him, as one that is in bitterness for his firstborn. In that day shall there be a great mourning in Jerusalem, as the mourning of Hadadrimmon in the valley of Megiddon.

No doubt these verses refer, primarily, to the great mourning when King Josiah fell in battle, when all the people wept and mourned for many days because their king had been slain by the arrows shot by the archers. But this is also typical of the lamentation of a heart when it is broken on account of the death of Christ. Sorrow for sin is to be after the fashion of that great national mourning of which Jeremiah sang so plaintively in the Book of Lamentations.

12. And the land shall mourn, every family apart; the family of the house of David apart, and their wives apart;

For this was to be a personal sorrow, in which both husbands and wives must weep on their own account.

12. The family of the house of Nathan apart, and their wives apart;

Perhaps these names are mentioned to indicate different classes and orders of persons,-the family of the house of David the king shall mourn, and the family of the house of Nathan the prophet shall mourn. Both David and Nathan had long since gone, but their descendants were still called by their names.

13. The family of the house of Levi apart, and their wives apart;

The priests, as well as the kings and the prophets, were to be represented in this universal mourning.

13. The family of Shimei apart, and their wives apart;

Shimei, or Simeon, as the Septuagint gives it,-which may either represent the scribes, or else may refer to the people in general. These shall all mourn, personally and separately, for him whom they have pierced.

14. All the families that remain, every family apart, and their wives apart.

Why these chapters were divided here, I cannot imagine, for it is clear that the passage should run right on.

Chapter 13 Verse 1. In that day there shall be a fountain opened to the house of David and to the inhabitants of Jerusalem for sin and for uncleanness.

HOLINESS DEMANDED

A Sermon

Published on Thursday, September 22nd, 1904,

delivered by

C. H. SPURGEON,

at the metropolitan tabernacle, newington,

On a Lord’s-day Evening, in 1862.

“Holiness, without which no man shall see the Lord.”-Hebrews 12:14.

One feels most happy when blowing the trumpet of jubilee, proclaiming peace to broken hearts, freedom to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound. But God’s watchman has another trumpet, which he must sometimes blow; for thus saith the Lord unto him, “Blow the trumpet in Zion, and sound an alarm in my holy mountain.” Times there are when we must ring the tocsin; men must be startled from their sleep, they must be roused up to enquire, “What are we? Where are we? Whither are we going?” Nor is it altogether amiss for the wisest virgins to look to the oil in their vessels, and for the soundest Christians to be sometimes constrained to examine the foundations of their hope, to trace back their evidences to the beginning, and make an impartial survey of their state before God. Partly for this reason, but with a further view to the awakening and stirring up of those who are destitute of all holiness, I have selected for our topic, “Holiness, without which no man shall see the Lord.”

There has been a desperate attempt made by certain Antinomians to get rid of the injunction which the Holy Spirit here means to enforce. They have said that this is the imputed holiness of Christ. Do they not know, when they so speak, that, by an open perversion, they utter that which is false? I do not suppose that any man in his senses can apply that interpretation to the context, “Follow peace with all men, and holiness.” Now, the holiness meant is evidently one that can be followed like peace; and it must be transparent to any ingenuous man that it is something which is the act and duty of the person who follows it. We are to follow peace; this is practical peace, not the peace made for us, but “the fruit of righteousness which is sown in peace of them that make peace.” We are to follow holiness,-this must be practical holiness; the opposite of impurity, as it is written, “God hath not called us unto uncleanness, but unto holiness.” The holiness of Christ is not a thing to follow; I mean, if we look at it imputatively. That we have at once; it is given to us the moment we believe. The righteousness of Christ is not to be followed; it is bestowed upon the soul in the instant when it lays hold of Christ Jesus. This is another kind of holiness. It is, in fact, as every one can see who chooses to read the connection, practical, vital holiness which is the purport of this admonition. It is conformity to the will of God, and obedience to the Lord’s command. It is, in fine, the Spirit’s work in the soul, by which a man is made like God, and becomes a partaker of the divine nature, being delivered from the corruption which is in the world through lust. No straining, no hacking at the text can alter it. There it stands, whether men like it or not. There are some who, for special reasons best known to themselves, do not like it, just as no thieves ever like policemen or gaols; yet there it stands, and it means no other than what it says: “Without holiness,”-practical, personal, active, vital holiness,-“no man shall see the Lord.” Dealing with this solemn assertion, fearfully exclusive as it is, shutting out as it does so many professors from all communion with God on earth, and all enjoyment of Christ in heaven, I shall endeavour, first, to give some marks and signs whereby a man may know whether he hath this holiness or not; secondly, to give sundry reasons by way of improvement of the solemn fact, “Without holiness, no man shall see the Lord;” and then, thirdly, to plead hard, in Christ’s stead, with those who are lovers of gain, that they may bethink themselves ere time be over, and opportunity past.

First, then, brethren, ye are anxious to know whether ye have holiness or not. Now, if our text said that, without perfection of holiness, no man could have any communion with Christ, it would shut every one of us out, for no one, who knows his own heart, ever pretends to be perfectly conformed to God’s will. It does not say, “Perfection of holiness,” mark; but “holiness.” This holiness is a thing of growth. It may be in the soul as the grain of mustard-seed, and yet not developed; it may be in the heart as a wish and a desire, rather than anything that has been fully realized,-a groaning, a panting, a longing, a striving. As the Spirit of God waters it, it will grow till the mustard-seed shall become a tree. Holiness, in a regenerate heart, is but an infant; it is not matured,-perfect it is in all its parts, but not perfect in its development. Hence, when we find many imperfections and many failings in ourselves, we are not to conclude that, therefore, we have no interest in the grace of God. This would be altogether contrary to the meaning of the text. As it is not so much my present purpose to show what this holiness is as what it is not, I think, while I am endeavouring to undeceive those who have not this holiness, those who are not condemned may reasonably draw some comfortable inferences as to their own pursuit of this inestimable grace.

Well, now, let us note four sorts of people who try to get on without holiness. First, there is the Pharisee. The Pharisee goes to work with outward ceremonies. He pays tithes of all that he possesses,-his anise, his mint, his cummin,-everything, even to the tithe of his parsley-bed, he gives. He gives alms to the poor, he wears his phylacteries, and makes broad the borders of his garment;-in fact, anything and everything that is commanded ceremonially he most punctiliously attends to; but, all the while, he is devouring widows’ houses, he is living in the practice of secret sin, and he thinks that by ceremonies he shall be able to propitiate God, and be accepted. Sinner, pharisaic sinner, hear the death-knell of thy hopes tolled out by this verse: “Without holiness,”-and that is a thing thou knowest nothing of,-“no man shall see the Lord.” Thy ceremonies are vain and frivolous; even if God ordained them, seeing thou puttest thy trust in them, they shall utterly deceive and fail thee, for they do not constitute even a part of holiness. Thou canst not see God till thy heart be changed, till thy nature be renewed, till thine actions, in the tenor of them, shall become such as God would have them to be. Mere ceremonialists think they can get on without holiness. Fell delusion! Do I speak to any Ritualist who finds himself awkwardly situated here? Do I speak to any Romanist who has entered into a place where, not the works of the law, but the righteousness of Christ is preached? Let me remind you again, very solemnly, my hearer, that those fine hopes of yours, built upon the manœuvres of the priests, and upon your own performances, shall utterly fail you in that day when most you shall need them. Your soul shall then stand in shivering nakedness when most you need to be well equipped before the eyes of God. These men know not true holiness.

Then there is the moralist. He has never done anything wrong in his life. He is not very observant of ceremonies, it is true; perhaps he even despises them; but he treats his neighbour with integrity, he believes that, so far as he knows, if his ledger be examined, it bears no evidence of a single dishonest deed. As touching the law, he is blameless: no one ever doubted the purity of his manner; from his youth up, his carriage has been amiable, his temperament what every one could desire, and the whole tenor of his life is such that we may hold him up as an example of moral propriety. Ah, but this is not holiness before God. Holiness excludes immorality, but morality does not amount to holiness; for morality may be but the cleaning of the outside of the cup and the platter, while the heart may be full of wickedness. Holiness deals with the thoughts and intents, the purposes, the aims, the objects, the motives of men. Morality does but skim the surface, holiness goes into the very caverns of the great deep; holiness requires that the heart shall be set on God, and that it shall beat with love to him. The moral man may be complete in his morality without that. Methinks I might draw such a parallel as this. Morality is a sweet, fair corpse, well washed and robed, and even embalmed with spices; but holiness is the living man, as fair and as lovely as the other, but having life. Morality lies there, of the earth, earthy, soon to be food for corruption and worms; holiness waits and pants with heavenly aspirations, prepared to mount and dwell in immortality beyond the stars. These twain are of opposite nature; the one belongs to this world, the other belongs to that world beyond the skies. It is not said in heaven, “Moral, moral, moral art thou, O God!” but “Holy, holy, holy art thou, O Lord!” You note the difference between the two words at once. The one, how icy cold; the other, oh, how animated! Such is mere morality, and such is holiness! Moralist!-I know I speak to many such,-remember that your best morality will not save you; you must have more than this, for without holiness,-and that not of yourself, it must be given you of the Spirit of God,-without holiness, no man shall see the Lord.

Another individual, who thinks to get on without holiness, and who does win a fair reputation in certain circles, is the experimentalist. You must be aware that there are some professed followers of Christ whose whole religious life is inward; to tell you the truth, there is no life at all; but their own profession is that it is all inward. I have had the misery to be acquainted with one or two such. They are voluble talkers, discoursing with much satisfaction of themselves, but bitter critics of all who differ from them in the slightest degree; having an ordained standard as to the proper length to which Christian experience should go, cutting off everybody’s head who was taller than they were, and stretching every man out by the neck who happened to be a little too short. I have known some of these persons. If a minister should say “duty” in the sermon, they would look as if they would never hear him again. He must be a dead legalist,-a “letter man”, I think they call him. Or, if they are exhorted to holiness, why, they tell you they are perfect in Christ Jesus, and therefore there is no reason why they should have any thought of perfection in the work of the Spirit within. Groaning, grunting, quarrelling, denouncing,-not following peace with all men, but stirring up strife against all,-this is the practice of their religion. This is the summit to which they climb, and from which they look down with undisguised contempt upon all those worms beneath who are striving to serve God, and to do good in their day and generation. Now I pray you to remember that, against such men as these, there are many passages of Scripture most distinctly levelled; I think this is one among many others. Sirs, you may say what you will about what you dream you have felt, you may write what you please about what you fancy you have experienced; but if your own outward life be unjust, unholy, ungenerous, and unloving, you shall find no credit among us as to your being in Christ: “Without holiness, no man shall see the Lord.” The moment you know a man who is drunk on a Saturday night, and then enjoys So-and-so’s preaching on a Sunday; the moment you know a man who can tell you what a child of God should be, and then appears himself exactly what he should not be, just quit his company, and let him go to his own place, and where that is, Judas can tell you. Oh, beware of such high-fliers, with their waxen wings, mounting up to the very sun,-how great shall be their fall, when he that searches all hearts shall open the book, and say, “I was an hungred, and ye gave me no meat; I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drink … Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these my brethren, ye did it not to me.”

There is another class of persons, happily fewer than they once were, but there are some among us still,-opinionists, who think they can do without holiness. These, too, it has sometimes been my misfortune to know. They have learned a sound creed, or perhaps an unsound one, for there are as many Arminians as Calvinists in this line,-they think they have got hold of the truth, that they are the men, and that, when they die, the faithful will fail from among men. They understand theology very accurately. They are wiser than their teachers. They can-

“A hair divide

Betwixt the west and north-west side.”

There is no question about their being masters in divinity. If degrees went according to merit, they would have been dubbed “D. D.” years ago, for they know everything, and are not a little proud that they do. And yet these men live a life that is a stench even in the nostrils of men who make no profession of religion. We have some of this kind in all congregations. I wish you would not come here. If we could do you good, we might be glad to see you; but you do so much hurt to the rest, and bring so much discredit upon the cause at large, that your room would be better than your company. You listen to the sermon, and sometimes perhaps have the condescension to speak well of the preacher, who wishes you would not. Yet, after the sermon is done, on the road home, there may be a public-house door just opened at one o’clock, and the brother refreshes himself, and perhaps does so many times. Even if it be the holy day, it is all the same, and yet he is a dear and precious child of God. No doubt he is in his own estimation. And then, during the week, he lives as others live, and acts as others act, and yet congratulates himself that he knows the truth, and understands the doctrines of the gospel, and therefore he will surely be saved! Out with thee, man! Out with thee! Down with thy hopes! “Without holiness, no man shall see the Lord.”

“No big words of ready talkers,

No mere doctrines will suffice;

Broken hearts, and humble walkers-

These are dear in Jesus’ eyes.”

Heart-work, carried out afterwards into life-work,-this is what the Lord wants. You may perish as well with true doctrines as with false, if you pervert the true doctrine into licentiousness. You may go to hell by the cross as surely as you may by the theatre, or by the vilest of sin. You may perish with the name of Jesus on your lips, and with a sound creed sealed on your very bosom, for “except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.” “Be not deceived; God is not mocked; for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.” Now, if any of you belong to either of these four classes, I think you cannot help knowing it, and, being destitute of gospel holiness, you have good cause to bewail your character, and tremble for your destiny.

But, to help you still further, brethren, that man is destitute of true holiness who can look back upon his own past sin without sorrow. Oh, to think of our past lives! There were some of us who knew the Lord at fifteen years of age, but those fifteen years of unregeneracy,-we can never forget them! Others may say, “We did not know him till we were fifty or sixty.” Ah, my dear brethren! you have much to weep over, but so have those of us who knew the Lord in early life. I can look back upon God’s mercy with delight, but I hope I shall never be able to look back upon my sins with complacency. Whenever a man looks to any of his past faults and shortcomings, it ought to be through his tears. Some men recall their past lives, and talk of their old sins, and seem to roll them under their tongues as a sweet morsel. They live their sins over again. As it was said of Alexander,-

“He fought his battles o’er again,

And twice he slew the slain.”

There are those who revel in the memory of their iniquities. They live their life in imagination over again. They recollect some deed of lewdness, or some act of infamy; and, as they think it over, they dare not repeat it, for their profession would be spoiled; but they love the thought, and cultivate it with a vicious zest. Thou art no friend to true holiness, but an utter stranger to it unless the past causes thee profound sorrow, and sends thee to thy knees to weep and hope that God, for Christ’s sake, has blotted it out.

And I am quite sure that you know nothing of true holiness if you can look forward to any future indulgence of sensual appetites with a certain degree of delightful anticipation. Have I a man here, a professed Christian, who has formed some design in his mind to indulge the flesh, and to enjoy forbidden dainties when an opportunity occurs? Ah, sir! if thou canst think of those things that may come in thy way without tremor, I suspect thee: I would thou wouldst suspect thyself. Since the day that some of us knew Christ, we have always woke up in the morning with a fear lest we should that day disown our Master. And there is one fear which sometimes haunts me, and I must confess it; and were it not for faith in God, it would be too much for me. I cannot read the life of David without some painful emotions. All the time he was a young man, his life was pure before God, and in the light of the living it shone with a glorious lustre; but when grey hairs began to be scattered on his head, the man after God’s heart sinned. I have sometimes felt inclined to pray that my life may come to a speedy end, lest haply, in some evil hour, some temptation should come upon me, and I should fall. And do you not feel the same? Can you look forward to the future without any fear? Does not the thought ever cross your mind,-“He that thinketh he standeth may yet fall”? And the very possibility of such a thing,-does it not drive you to God’s mercy-seat, and do you not cry, “Hold thou me up, and I shall be safe”? There is no doxology in Scripture which I enjoy more than that one at the end of the Epistle of Jude: “Now unto him that is able to keep you from falling, and to present you faultless before the presence of his glory with exceeding joy, to him be glory.” I say you are a stranger to holiness of heart if you can look forward to a future fall without great alarm.

Again, methinks you have great cause for questioning, unless your holiness is uniform; I mean, if your life is angelic abroad and devilish at home. You must suspect that it is at home that you are what you really are. I question whether any man is much better than he is thought to be by his wife and family, for they, after all, see the most of us, and know the truth about us; and if, sir, though you seem in the pulpit, or on the platform, or in the shop, to be amiable, Christian, and God-like to the passer-by, your children should have to mark your unkindness, your want of fatherly affection for their souls, and your wife has to complain of your domineering, of the absence of everything that is Christ-like, you may shrewdly suspect that there is something wrong in the state of your heart. O sirs, true holiness is a thing that will keep by night and by day, at home and abroad, on the land and on the sea! That man is not right with God who would not do the same in the dark that he would do in the light; who does not feel, “If every eye should look upon me, I would not be different from what I am when no eye gazes upon me; that which keeps me right is not the judgment and opinions of men, but the eye of the Omnipresent, and the heart of the Lord who loves me.” Is your obedience uniform? Some farmers I know, in the country, maintain a creditable profession in the village where they live; they go to a place of worship, and seem to be very good people: but there is a farmer’s dinner once a year, it is only once a year, and we will not say anything about how they get home,-the less that is said, the better for their reputation. “It is only once a year,” they tell us; but holiness does not allow of dissipation even “once a year.” And we know some who, when they go on the Continent, for instance, say, “Well, we need not be quite so exact there;” and therefore the Sabbath is utterly disregarded, and the sanctities of daily life are neglected, so reckless are they in their recreations. Well, sirs, if your religion is not warranted to keep in any climate, it is good for nothing. I like the remark which I heard from one of the sailors on board ship in crossing the Irish Channel. A passenger said, to try him, “Wouldn’t you like to attend a certain place of amusement?” which he mentioned. “Well, sir,” said the sailor, “I go there as often as ever I like; I have a religion that lets me go as often as I think proper.” “Oh, how is that?” he enquired. “Because I never like to go at all,” was the reply; “I do not keep away because of any law, for it is no trial to me; but I should be unhappy to go there.” Surely the fish, were it asked if it did not wish to fly, would reply, “I am not unhappy because I am not allowed to fly; it is not my element.” So the Christian can say, “I am not unhappy because I do not spend my nights in worldly society, because I do not join in their revelry and wantonness; it is not my element, and I could not enjoy it. Should you drag me into it, it would be a martyrdom which to my spirit would be alike repulsive and painful.” You are a stranger to holiness if your heart does not feel that it revolts at the thought of sin.

Then, let me further remark, that those who can look with delight or any degree of pleasure upon the sins of others are not holy. We know of some, who will not themselves perpetrate an unseemly jest, yet, if another does so, and there is a laugh excited upon some not over-decent remark, they laugh, and thus give sanction to the impropriety. If there is a low song sung in their hearing, which others applaud, though they cannot quite go the length of joining in the plaudits, still they secretly enjoy it; they betray a sort of gratification that they cannot disguise; they confess to a gusto that admires the wit while it cannot endorse the sentiment. They are glad the minister was not there; they are glad to think the deacon did not happen to see them just at that moment; yet still, if there could be a law established to make the thing pretty respectable, they would not mind. Some of you know people who fall into this snare. There are professing Christians who go where you at one time could not go; but, seeing that they do it, you go too, and there you see others engaged in sin, and it becomes respectable because you give it countenance. There are many things, in this world, that would be execrated if it were not that Christian men go to them, and the ungodly men say, “Well, if it is not righteous, there is not much harm in it, after all; it is innocent enough if we keep within bounds.” Mind! mind! mind, professor, if thine heart begins to suck in the sweets of another man’s sin, it is unsound in the sight of God; if thou canst even wink at another man’s lust, depend upon it that thou wilt soon shut thine eye on thine own, for we are always more severe with other men than we are with ourselves. There must be an absence of the vital principle of godliness when we can become partakers of other men’s sins by applauding or joining with them in the approval of them. Let us examine ourselves scrupulously, then, whether we be among those who have no evidences of that holiness without which no man can see God.

But, beloved, we hope better things of you, and things which accompany salvation. If you and I, as in the sight of God, feel that we would be holy if we could, that there is not a sin we wish to spare, that we would be like Jesus,-O that we could!-that we would sooner suffer affliction than ever run into sin, and displease our God; if our heart be really right in God’s statutes, then, despite all the imperfections we bemoan, we have holiness, wherein we may rejoice, and we pray to our gracious God,-

“Finish, then, thy new creation,

Pure and spotless let us be.”

Now, then, for the second point very briefly indeed: “Without holiness, no man shall see the Lord;” that is to say, no man can have communion with God in this life, and no man can have enjoyment with God in the life to come, without holiness. “Can two walk together except they be agreed?” If thou goest with Belial, dost thou think that Christ will go with thee? Will Christ be a pot companion for thee? Dost thou expect to take the Lord of love and mercy with thee to the haunts of sin? Professor, dost thou think the just and holy One will stand at thy counter to be co-trader with thee in thy tricks? What thinkest thou, O man! wouldst thou make Christ a sharer of thy guilt? and yet he would be so if he had fellowship with thee in it. Nay, if thou wilt go on in acts of unrighteousness and unholiness, Christ parts company with thee, or, rather, thou never didst have any fellowship with him. Thou hast gone out from us because thou wert not of us; for, if thou hadst been of us, doubtless thou wouldst have continued with us. And as to heaven, dost thou think to go there with thine unholiness? God smote an angel down from heaven for sin, and will he let man in with sin in his right hand? God would sooner extinguish heaven than see sin despoil it. It is enough for him to bear with thine hypocrisies on earth; shall he have them flung in his own face in heaven? What, shall an unholy life utter its licentiousness in the golden streets? Shall there be sin in that higher and better paradise? No, no; God has sworn by his holiness-and he will not, he cannot lie,-that those who are not holy, whom his Spirit has not renewed, who have not been, by the regenerating power of the Holy Spirit, made to love that which is good, and hate that which is evil, shall never stand in the congregation of the righteous. Sinner, it is a settled matter with God that no man shall see him without holiness.

I come to my last point, which is, pleading with you. Doubtless, there are some in this vast crowd who have some sort of longings after salvation and after heaven. My eye looks round; yes, sometimes it has been my wont to gaze with sorrow upon some few here whose cases I know. Do I not remember one? He has been very often impressed, and so impressed, too, that he has not been able to sleep. Night after night he has prayed, he has wrestled with God, and there is only one thing in his way, and that is drink, strong drink! By the time that Wednesday or Thursday comes round, he begins to forget what he heard on Sunday. Sometimes, he has taken the pledge, and kept it three months; but the craving has been too strong for him, and then he has given all resolutions and vows up, and has plunged into his besetting sin worse than before. Others I know in whom it is another sin. You are here now, are you? You do not come of a morning, and yet, when you come at night, you feel it very severely; but why not come here in the morning? Because your shop is open, and that shop seems to stand between you and any hope of salvation. There are others who say, “Well, now, if I go to hear that man, I must give up the vice that disquiets my conscience; but I cannot yet, I cannot yet.” And you are willing to be damned for the sake of some paltry joy? Well, if you will be damned, it shall not be for want of reasoning with you, and weeping over you. Let me put it to you,-do you say that you cannot give up the sin because of the profit? Profit! Profit, forsooth! “What shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” What profit have you obtained hitherto? You have put it all into a bag full of holes; what you have earned one way, you have spent in another; and you know that, if this life were all, you surely have not been any the better for it. Besides, what is profit when compared with your immortal soul? Oh, I adjure you, lose not gold for dross, lose not substance for shadows! Lose not your immortal soul for the sake of some temporary gain!

But it is not profit with some of you, it is pleasure, it is a morbid passion. You feel, perhaps, for some particular sin which happens to beset you, such an intense longing, and in looking back upon it afterwards, you think you could give up everything but that. Young man, is it some secret sin which we must not mention, or is it some private guilt which is hidden from all hearts but thine own? O soul, what is this pleasure, after all? Weigh it, weigh it; what does it come to? Is it equal to the pain it costs thee now, to the pangs of conscience, to the agonies of remorse? When an American doctor, who had led a loose life, came to die, he seemed to wake up from a sort of stupor, and he said, “Find that word, find that word.” “What word?” they asked. “Why,” he said, “that awful word,-remorse!” He said it again,-“Remorse!” and then, gathering up his full strength, he fairly seemed to shriek it out,-“Remorse!” “Write it,” said he, “write it.” It was written. “Write it with larger letters, and let me gaze at it; underline it. And now,” said he, “none of you know the meaning of that word, and may you never know it; it has an awful meaning in it, and I feel it now,-Remorse! Remorse!! Remorse!!!”

What, I ask, is the pleasure of sin contrasted with the results it brings in this life? and what, I ask, is this pleasure compared with the joys of godliness? Little as you may think I know of the joys of the world, yet so far as I can form a judgment, I can say that I would not take all the joys that earth can ever afford in a hundred years for one half-hour of what my soul has known in fellowship with Christ. We, who believe in him, do have our sorrows; but, blessed be God, we do have our joys, and they are such joys-oh, such joys, with such substance in them, and such reality and certainty, that we could not and would not exchange them for anything except heaven in its fruition.

And then, bethink thee, sinner, what are all these pleasures when compared with the loss of thy soul? There is a gentleman, high in position in this world, with fair lands and a large estate, who, when he took me by the button-hole after a sermon,-and he never hears me preach without weeping,-said to me, “O sir, it does seem such an awful thing that I should be such a fool!” “And what for?” I asked. “Why,” he said, “for the sake of that court, and of those gaieties of life, and of mere honour, and dress, and fashion, I am squandering away my soul. I know,” he said, “I know the truth, but I do not follow it. I have been stirred in my heart to do what is right, but I go on just as I have done before; I fear I shall sink back into the same state as before. Oh, what a fool I am,” said he, “to choose pleasures that only last a little while, and then to be lost for ever and for ever!” I pleaded hard with him, but I pleaded in vain; there was such intoxication in the gaiety of life that he could not leave it. Alas! alas! if we had to deal with sane men, our preaching would be easy; but sin is a madness, such a madness that, when men are bitten by it, they would not be persuaded even though one should rise from the dead. “Without holiness, no man shall see the Lord.”

“But,” I hear someone say, “it is impossible; I have tried it, and I have broken down; I did try to get better, but I did not succeed; it is of no use, it cannot be done.” You are right, my dear friend, and you are wrong. You are right, it is of no use going about it as you did; if you went in your own strength, holiness is a thing you cannot get, it is beyond you. The depth says, “It is not in me;” and the height saith, “It is not in me.” You can no more make yourself holy than you could create a world. But you are wrong to despair, for Christ can do it; he can do it for you, and he can do it now. Believe on him, and that believing will be the proof that he is working in you. Trust him, and he that has suffered for thy sins, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, shall come in, and put to rout the lion of the pit. He will bruise Satan under thy feet shortly. There is no corruption too strong for him to overcome, there is no habit too firm for him to break. He can turn a lion to a lamb, and a raven to a dove. Trust him to save thee, and he will do it, whosoever thou mayest be, and whatsoever thy past life may have been. “He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved;”-that is, he shall be saved from his sins, and delivered from his evil practices; he shall be made a new man in Christ Jesus by the power of the Spirit, received through the medium of his faith. Believe, poor soul, that Christ is able to save thee, and he will do it. He will be as good as thy faith, and as good as his own word. May he now add his own blessing to the word I have spoken, and to the people who have heard it, for his own sake! Amen.

Exposition by C. H. Spurgeon

PSALM 32

Verse 1. Blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered.

The Lord can bless the man who is full of sin only when his sin is covered by the atonement-the propitiation-which hides his sin even from the sight of God; and he is a truly blessed man who, although he knows himself to be a sinner, also knows that his sin is forgiven and covered.

2. Blessed is the man unto whom the Lord imputeth not iniquity, and in whose spirit there is no guile.

He is an honest, truthful, guileless man. A man cannot be a blessed man while he is double-minded, while he has craft, or what is here called guile, within him. A sincere and guileless heart is an evidence of grace, so “blessed is the man unto whom the Lord imputeth not iniquity, and in whose spirit there is no guile.”

But, David, how did you obtain this forgiveness? Let us hear the story of your experience.

3, 4. When I kept silence, my bones waxed old through my roaring all the day long. For day and night thy hand was heavy upon me: my moisture is turned into the drought of summer. Selah.

He tells us that he had such a sense of guilt that he could not rest; and until he made confession of his sin to God, he became sick in body as well as in soul. It seemed as if his very bones, the most solid part of his frame, were beginning to decay under the influence of his grief; and he was getting worse and worse in the brokenness of his spirit till he seemed like a dried-up country in which there is no dew. His moisture was turned into the drought of summer. Yes, David; but how did you get rid of your sin? We see how deeply you felt it; how did you get clear of it?

5. I acknowledged my sin unto thee, and mine iniquity have I not hid. I said, I will confess my transgressions unto the Lord; and thou forgavest the iniquity of my sin. Selah.

You see, as long as he covered his sin, God did not cover it; but when he no longer tried to hide it, but made an open confession of it, then God blotted it out, and covered it up for ever. There was but a believing confession of sin, and David’s heart was at rest at once. Shall we not try the same remedy? Will we not go to God, and say, “Father, I have sinned”? Is there any better course than that? Is it not right to acknowledge a wrong? Is it not the simplest and safest way to go at once to him who blots out sin, and ask for mercy?

6, 7. For this shall every one that is godly pray unto thee in a time when thou mayest be found: surely in the floods of great waters they shall not come nigh unto him. Thou art my hiding place: thou shalt preserve me from trouble; thou shalt compass me about with songs of deliverance. Selah.

Surely, if God has given us the pardon of our sin, he will give us everything else that we need. If he has delivered us from hell, he will certainly deliver us from trouble.

8. I will instruct thee and teach thee in the way which thou shalt go: I will guide thee with mine eye.

The forgiven man is afraid of going wrong again; he is as anxious about his future life as he was about his past sin. So the Lord meets him, and gives him the gracious promise contained in this verse.

9. Be ye not as the horse, or as the mule, which have no understanding: whose mouth must be held in with bit and bridle, lest they come near unto thee.

Do not be hard-mouthed; be obedient to God’s will; be tender of heart, and willing of spirit. The Lord will make his children go in the right way somehow or other; he will put a bit into their mouths if nothing else will do it, but it would be much better for them if they would be of tender and gentle spirit, and would yield at once to his gracious and holy will.

10. Many sorrows shall be to the wicked:

Godly men also have many sorrows, but then they always have sweets with their bitters; but “many sorrows shall be to the wicked,” and there will be no sweets to go with them.

10. But he that trusteth in the Lord, mercy shall compass him about.

He shall have mercy all round him. He who trusts his God shall find that the golden compasses of divine mercy shall strike a circle of gracious protection all round him: “mercy shall compass him about.”

11. Be glad in the Lord, and rejoice, ye righteous: and shout for joy, all ye that are upright in heart.

Godly men ought to be glad men. They have a right to be happy. They recommend the gospel when they are so, and they are the true sons of the King of kings when they do not go mourning all their days.

SLEEPERS AROUSED

A Sermon

Published on Thursday, September 29th, 1904,

delivered by

C. H. SPURGEON

at the metropolitan tabernacle, newington,

On Thursday Evening, July 27th, 1876.

“But Jonah was gone down into the sides of the ship; and he lay, and was fast asleep.”-Jonah 1:5.

We are told, before this fact is mentioned, that the Lord sent out a great wind into the sea to overtake the bark in which Jonah was sailing for Tarshish. The great wheels of providence are continually revolving in fulfilment of God’s purposes concerning his own people. For them, winds blow, and tempests rise. It is a wonderful thing that the whole machinery of nature should be made subservient to the divine purpose of the salvation of his redeemed. I was in a diamond-cutting factory at Amsterdam, and I noticed that there were huge wheels revolving, and a great deal of power being developed and expended; but when I came to look at the little diamond,-in some cases a very small one indeed,-upon which that power was being brought to bear, it seemed very remarkable that all that power should be concentrated upon such a little yet very precious object. In a similar style, all the wheels of providence and nature, great as they are, are brought to bear, by divine skill and love, upon a thing which appears to many people to be of trifling value, but which is to Christ of priceless worth; namely, a human soul. Here is this common-looking Jew,-Jonah, named, according to the general rule that names go by contraries, “a dove”, for, at any rate, on this occasion, he looked more like the raven that would not come back to the ark; and for this one man,-this altogether unamiable prophet,-the sea must be tossed in tempest, and a whole shipful of people must have their lives put in jeopardy. This truth is a very far-reaching one. You cannot well exaggerate it. The vast universe it but a platform for the display of God’s grace, and all material things, that now exist, will be set aside when the great drama of grace is completed. The material universe is but scaffolding for the Church of Christ. It is but the temporary structure upon which the wonderful mystery of redeeming love is being carried on to perfection. See, then, that, as the great wind was raised to follow Jonah, and to lead to his return to the path of duty, so all things work together for the good of God’s people, and all things that exist are being bowed and bent towards God’s one solemn eternal purpose,-the salvation of his own.

But note also that, while God was awake, Jonah was asleep. While storms were blowing, Jonah was slumbering. It is a strange sight, O Christian, that you should be an important item in the universe, and yet that you should not know it, or care about it;-that for you all things are keeping their proper place and time, and yet that you are the only one who does not seem to perceive it; and, therefore, you fall, into a dull, lethargic, sleepy state. Everything around you is awake for your good, yet you yourself are slumbering even as the fugitive prophet was while the storm was raging.

I am going to speak upon the case of Jonah, first, as we may regard it as a useful lesson to the people of God; and, secondly, as it may be considered as an equally valuable warning to the unconverted.

First, then, I shall use the case of Jonah as a useful lesson to the people of God; and I may very fairly do so when we remember who Jonah was.

First, Jonah was a believer in God. He worshipped no false god; he worshipped only the living and true God. He was a professed and avowed believer in Jehovah. He was not ashamed to say,-even when his conduct had laid him open to blame, and when there was nobody to support him,-“I am a Hebrew; and I fear the Lord, the God of heaven, which hath made the sea and the dry land.” Yet, though he was a believer in God, he was in the sides of the ship, fast asleep. O Christian man,-a real Christian man, too,-if you are in a similar condition, how is it that you can be slumbering under such circumstances? Should not the privileges and the honour, which your being a believer has brought to you by divine grace, forbid that you should be a slumberer, inactive, careless, indifferent? I may be addressing dozens of Jonahs, those who are really God’s people, but who are not acting as if they were chosen of the Most High; but are forgetful of their election, their redemption, their sanctification, the life they have begun to live here below, and the eternal glory that awaits them hereafter.

Beside being a believer, or as a natural consequence of being a believer, Jonah was a man of prayer. Out of the whole company on board that ship, he was the only man who knew how to pray to the one living and true God. All the mariners “cried every man unto his god.” But those were idle prayers because they were offered to idols; they could not prevail because they were presented to dumb, dead deities. But here was a man who could pray,-and who could pray aright, too,-yet he was asleep. Praying men and praying women,-you who have the keys of the kingdom of heaven swinging at your girdle,-you who can ask what you will, and it shall be done for you,-you who have, many a time in the past, prevailed with God in wrestling prayer,-you who have received countless blessings in answer to your supplications,-can you be, as Jonah was, sleeping in the time of storm? Can it be possible that he, who knows the power of prayer, is restraining it;-that he, to whom God has given this choice privilege, is not availing himself of it? I fear that this may be the case with some of you; and looking at Jonah, a praying man sinfully asleep, I cannot help feeling that I may be speaking to many others who are in exactly the same condition.

More than this, Jonah was not merely a believing man, and a praying man, but he was also a prophet of the Lord. He was one to whom God had spoken, and by whom God had spoken. He was a minister; that is to say, one of God’s own sent servants, though he was not in his proper place when he was in the ship sailing towards Tarshish. But can God’s ministers neglect their duty like this? If I had been asked at that time, “Where is the prophet of the Lord?”-perhaps the only prophet of his age,-at any rate, a man who was the very foremost in his time,-if I had been asked, “Where is he?” I should have said that he must be looked for amidst the masses of the dense population of Nineveh, carrying out his Master’s commission with unstaggering faith; or else that he might be looked for amidst the thousands of Israel, denouncing their idol gods and their wicked ways. But who would have thought of finding Jonah asleep on board such a ship as that? He is a seer, yet he sees not, for he is sound asleep. He is a watchman, but he is not watching, for he is slumbering and sleeping. Everything is in confusion; yet this man, upon whom rests the divine anointing, and into whose mouth God has put a message to multitudes of his fellow-creatures, is sleeping instead of witnessing. Come Mr. Preacher, see to yourself while I am talking about Jonah, and I will take the message to myself while I am talking to you; for this is a matter which ought to come home to all of us upon whom such great responsibilities are laid, and to whom such high privileges are given. But all of you, who love the Lord, are witnesses for Christ in some capacity or other; and it would be a very sad thing if you, who are called to speak in the name of the Lord, though it should only be in your Sunday-school class, or in a little cottage meeting, or to your own children, should be asleep when you ought to be wide awake and active. May the Lord awaken you; for you are the wrong person to be asleep! You, above all others, are bound to have both your eyes open, and to watch day and night to hear what God the Lord will speak to you, and what he would have you say to the ungodly or to his own chosen people in his name.

It is also worthy of notice that, at the very time when Jonah was asleep in the ship, he was not only a prophet, but he was a prophet under a special commission. He was not on furlough; he was, on the contrary, empowered by special warrant, under the King’s seal and sign manual, to go at once to a certain place, and there to deliver the King’s message; and yet there he is, asleep in this ship, and going in the very opposite direction to the one given him! When prophets sleep, it should be when their errand has been done, and their message has been delivered; but Jonah had not been on his Lord’s errand, nor had he delivered his Lord’s message; nay, he had refused to obey his Lord, and had run away from the path of duty, and here he lies, fast asleep, in the sides of the ship. O dear brothers and sisters, if we could truthfully say that our own work for the Lord was done, we might be somewhat excused if we took our rest. But is our life-work done? Mine is not; that I feel certain; it seems to be scarcely begun. Is yours finished, my brother, my sister? Have you so lived that you can be perfectly content with what you have done? Would it not be a cause of grief to you if you were assured that you would have no more opportunities of glorifying God upon the earth? I think you would feel that very much. Well, then, how can you be willing to be indifferent, cold, and dead, when so much of God’s work lies before you scarcely touched as yet? All that you and I have done, so far, has been like apprentice work; we have been just getting our hand in, we have not become journeymen in God’s great workshop yet; certainly, we cannot claim to be wise master-builders yet. Few of us, if any, have attained to that degree; so let us not go to sleep. O sir, shame on thee! Asleep in the early morning? A man may take his rest when he gets weary after a long day’s toil; but not yet, with all that work to be done,-with the King’s commission pressing upon us. With the call of the myriads of Nineveh sounding in his ears, Jonah, God’s appointed messenger, should not have been found asleep in the sides of the ship.

This, then, is who the man was. He was a believing man and a praying man, and a prophet, and a prophet under a special commission. But where was he? Where had he got to?

Well, he had gone down into the sides of the ship; that is to say, he had gone where he hoped he should not be observed or disturbed. He had gone down into the sides of the ship;-not among the cargo; the mariners threw that overboard, yet the noise did not wake the sleeping prophet. He was not upon the deck, ready to take a turn at keeping watch; but he had got as much out of the way as ever he could; and I have known Christian people try, as far as they could, to get out of the way. Possibly, they are not living inconsistently, or doing, as far as others can see, anything that is glaringly sinful; but they have just retired from their Master’s business. They have got into a little quiet place where nobody notices them. I wonder whether there is a Christian man, who has gone to live in a country village, where he has not yet said anything for Christ, although, when he lived in London, he was a busy worker for God. He has, like Jonah, gone down into the sides of the ship, into a quiet place where nobody can see him. Around him there are very few Christian people,-perhaps hardly any,-and he does not want anybody to know that he is a Christian. He would like now to live in quite a private way. If he were asked about himself, he would answer, as Jonah did, “I fear God;” but he does not wish to be asked anything about himself. He does not want people to fix their eyes upon him; he is afraid of being too conspicuous. He says that he always was of a retiring disposition, like the soldier, who ran away as soon as the first shot of the battle was fired, and so was shot as a deserter. He says that he is like Nicodemus, who came to Jesus by night, or like Joseph of Arimathæa, a disciple, but secretly, for fear of the Jews. He has gone down into the sides of the ship, though, at one time, he was one of the foremost workers for Christ.

He has gone, too, where he will not lend a hand in any service that needs to be done. He was in the Sunday-school once, but he says that he has had his turn at that, and does not intend to do anything more. He used to be, perhaps, a deacon of a church, but now he does not wish for such a position as that. He says there is a great deal of trouble and toil in connection with such offices, and he intends, for the future, to avoid everything that will give him trouble, or cause him the slightest toil. Once, he took delight in preaching the Word; and, in those days, if anybody had said that he would live to be silent, and not speak in Christ’s name, he would have been very angry at the man who made such a statement; but it has come true now. Jonah is not up on deck helping to hold the rudder, or to set a sail, or to do anything, not even a hand’s turn to help the poor labouring vessel. He has gone to sleep in the sides of the ship where nobody enquires about him, at least for the present, and where there is nothing for him to do.

Observe, too, that Jonah was stopping away from the prayer-meeting. Do you ask, “What prayer-meeting?” Why, every other man on board that ship was crying unto his god, but Jonah was asleep in the sides of the ship. He was not praying; he was sleeping, and perhaps dreaming, but he was certainly not praying; and it is a very bad thing when a true servant of God, a praying man, and one by whom God has spoken aforetime, begins to get into such a spiritually sleepy state that he not only does nothing to help the church, but he does not even join in prayer in the time of danger. Do you know anybody in such a state as that, my brother? “Yes,” you reply, “several.” Are you in that state yourself, brother? If so, let charity for people who are doing wrong begin at home; it may extend to others afterwards. But if this cap fits thee, wear it; and wear it till thou wearest it out, and hast improved thyself through wearing it.

This man, asleep in the sides of the ship, represents one who was not even taking any notice of what was going on around him. At first, he did not wish to be himself observed; but now, he does not care to observe others. What is the condition of the millions of heathen in foreign lands? That is a subject that he avoids; he is of opinion that they will be converted in the millennium, or that, even if they are not converted, their future lot may be a happy one. At any rate, it is a subject about which he does not concern himself. Jonah is asleep in the sides of the ship, and he appears quite content to let the millions of heathen perish. Then, with regard to the Church of Christ at home, sometimes he is told that everything is prospering, but from other quarters he is informed that we are all going to the bad. Well, he does not know which report is the true one, and he does not particularly care; and, as for the church of which he is a member, does he not care for that? Well, yes, in a certain fashion; but he does not care enough for the Sunday-school, for instance, to lend a hand there, or for the preaching society to lend a hand there. He never encourages the minister’s heart by saying that the love of Christ constraineth him to take his share of holy service. Jonah is asleep in the sides of the ship. He is not much noticed, if at all, for those around him have come to the conclusion that he is good for nothing; and he himself, as I have shown you, does not take much notice of what is going on, though all the while he is a man of God, a man of prayer, and one whom God has used in times past. I wonder whether these descriptions are at all applicable to any of my hearers. At any rate, I know that they represent, as in a mirror, the lives of many professors of religion. We trust they are sincere in heart in the sight of God; but, to us, their sleepiness is more apparent than their sincerity.

Now, further, what was Jonah doing at that time? He was asleep,-asleep amid all that confusion and noise. What a hurly-burly there was outside that vessel,-storms raging, billows roaring,-and Jonah was not a sailor, but a landsman, yet he was asleep. Certainly he must have been in a remarkable state to be able to sleep through such a storm as that. And what a noise there was inside the ship as well as outside! Everybody else was crying to his god; and the mariners had been throwing the cargo out of the ship, so they must have stirred the whole place up from one end to the other. There seems to have been scarcely any opportunity for anybody to rest, yet Jonah could sleep right through it all, no matter what noise the men made as they pulled the ropes, or threw out their wares, or what outcries they made as they presented their prayers to their idol gods. Jonah was asleep amid all that confusion and noise; and, O Christian man, for you to be indifferent to all that is going on in such a world as this, for you to be negligent of God’s work in such a time as this, is just as strange. The devil alone is making noise enough to wake all the Jonahs if they only want to awake. Then there are the rampant errors of the times, the sins of the times, the confusions of the times, the controversies of the times, all these things ought to wake us. And then, beyond the times, there is eternity, with all its terrors and its glories. There is the dread conflict that is going on between Christ and Belial,-between the true and the false,-between Jesus and antichrist. All around us there is tumult and storm, yet some professing Christians are able, like Jonah, to go to sleep in the sides of the ship. I think, brethren and sisters, if we are spiritually awake, if we only look at the condition of religion in our own country, we shall often be obliged at night to lie awake literally, and toss to and fro, crying, “O God, have mercy upon this distracted kingdom, and let thy truth triumph over the Popery which many are endeavouring to bring back among us!” But, alas! the great multitude of believers have little or no care about this matter; they do not even seem to notice it, for they are sound asleep in the midst of a storm.

Notice, also, that Jonah was asleep when other people were awake. All around us people seem to be wide awake, whether we are asleep or not. When I see what is being done by Romanists, and observe the zeal and self-denial of many persons who have dedicated themselves to the propagation of their false faith, I am astonished that we are doing so little for the true faith. Is it really the case that God has the dullest set of servants in the whole world? It is certain that men are all alive in the service of Satan; then we should not be half alive in the service of our God. Are the worshippers of Baal crying aloud, “O Baal, hear us,” and the devotees of Ashtaroth shouting, “Hear us, O mighty Ashtaroth;” and yet the prophet of Jehovah is lying asleep in the sides of the ship? Is it so? Does everything else seem to arouse all a man’s energies, but does true religion paralyze them? I have really thought, when I have been reading some books written by very good men, that the best thing for sending a man to sleep was a book by an evangelical writer; but that, the moment a man becomes unsound in the faith, it seems as if he woke up, and had something to say which people were bound to hear. It is a great pity that it should be so, just as it was a great pity that everybody should have been awake on that vessel with the exception of Jonah; yet I fear that it is still only too true that those who serve the living God are not half filled with the arousing fervour which ought to possess them for the honour of the Lord Most High.

Jonah was asleep, next, not only in a time of great confusion, and when others were awake, but also in a time when he was in great danger, for the ship was likely to sink. The storm was raging furiously, yet Jonah was asleep. And, believer, when you, and those about you, are in danger of falling into great sin through your careless living,-when your family is in danger of being brought up without the fear of God,-when your servants are in danger of concluding that religion is all a farce because you act as if it were,-when those who watch you in business are apt to sneer at Christian profession because they say that your profession is of very little worth to you,-when all this is taking place, and there is imminent danger to your own soul, and to the souls of others, can you still sleep in unconcern?

And Jonah was asleep when he was wanted to be awake. He, above all other men, was the one who ought to awake, and call upon his God. If anybody goes to sleep nowadays, it certainly ought not to be the believer in the Lord Jesus Christ. All things demand that Christians should be in real earnest. I know of no argument that I could gather from time or eternity, from heaven, or earth, or hell, to allow a Christian man to be supine and careless; but if I am asked for reasons why Christians are wanted to be in downright earnest and full of consecrated vigour in the service of God, those arguments are so plentiful that I have no time to mention them all. The world needs you; careless souls need to be awakened; enquiring souls need to be directed; mourning souls need to be comforted; rejoicing souls need to be established; the ignorant need to be taught, the desponding need to be cheered. On all sides, for every Christian man, there is an earnest cry; and, certainly, in these days, God has made a truly godly man to be more precious than the gold of Ophir; and that man, who keeps himself back from earnest service for God in such a time as this, surely cannot expect the Lord’s blessing to rest upon him. Verily, the old curse of Meroz may well be pronounced upon the man who, in this age, and under present circumstances, like Jonah, goes down into the sides of the ship, lies down, and goes to sleep.

Jonah was asleep, with all the heathen around him, upbraiding him by their actions. They were praying while he was sleeping; and, at last, it came to this,-that the shipmaster sternly addressed the prophet of God, and said, “What meanest thou, O sleeper?” It is sad indeed when things have come to such a pass that a heathen captain rebukes a servant of God; and yet I am afraid that the Church of God, if she does not mend her ways, will have a great many similar rebukes from heathen practices and heathen utterances. Look at the enormous sums that the heathen spend upon their idols and their idol temples and worship, and then think how little we spend upon the service of the living God. One is amazed to read of the lacs of rupees that are given by Indian princes for the worship of their dead deities; and yet our missionary societies languish, and the work of God in a thousand ways is stopped, because God’s stewards are not using what he has entrusted to them as they should. Think, too, of the flaming zeal with which the votaries of false faiths compass sea and land to make one proselyte, while we do so little to bring souls to Jesus Christ. One of these days you will have Hindoos and Brahmins talking to us in this fashion, “You profess that the love of Christ constrains you, but to what does it constrain you?” They even now ask us what kind of religion must ours be that forces opium upon the poor Chinese. They quote our great national sins against us, and I do not wonder that they do. I only wish that they could be told that Christians reprobate those evils, and that they are not Christians who practise them. But we must do more than even the best Christians are now doing, or else we shall have the heathen saying, as the semi-heathen at home do say, “If we believed in eternal punishment, we should be earnest day and night to rescue souls from it,”-which is to me a strong corroboration of the truth of that doctrine. We do not want any doctrine that can make us less zealous than we are. We certainly do not want any doctrine that can give us any excuse for want of zeal. Still, there is great force in the remark I quoted just now. We are not as earnest to save men from going down to the pit as we ought to be if we do indeed believe that they are hastening to that doom. The shipmasters are again rebuking the Jonahs. Those who believe in error, those who worship false gods, turn round upon us, and ask us what we mean. O Jonah, sleeping Jonah, is it not time that you were awake?

But why was Jonah asleep? I suppose that it was partly the reaction after the excitement through which his mind had passed in rebelling against God. He had wearied himself with seeking his own evil way; so now, after the disobedience to God of which he had been guilty, his spirit sinks, and he sleep. Besides, it is according to the nature of sin to give-not physical sleep, I grant you,-but to give spiritual slumber. There is no opiate like the commission of an evil deed. A man, who has done wrong, is so much less able to repent of the wrong, so much the less likely to do so. Jonah’s conscience had become hardened by his wilful rejection of his Lord’s commands, and therefore he could sleep when he ought to have been aroused and alarmed.

Besides, he wished to get rid of the very thought of God. He was trying to flee from God’s presence. I suppose he could not bear his own thoughts; they must have been dreadful to him. So, being in a pet against his God, and altogether in a wrong spirit, he hunts about for a snug corner of the ship, stretches himself out, and there falls asleep, and sleeps on right through the storm. O sleepy Christian, there is something wrong about you, too! Conscience has been stupefied. There is some darling sin, I fear, that you are harbouring. Search it out, and drive it out. Sin is the mother of this shameful indifference. God help thee to get rid of it! Brother, I am speaking to you with as much directness as I possibly can, yet not with more than I use towards myself. Have I, in my preaching, been slumbering and sleeping? If you find that I am not in earnest, I charge you, my brother in Christ, tell me of it, and wake me out of my sleep if you can, as I now tell you of it, and say, by all that God has done to you in saving you by his grace, and in making you his servant, give not up your soul to slumber, but awake, awake, put on strength, and arouse yourself, by the power of the Holy Spirit, to prayer and to the service of your God.

Thus I have spoken, perhaps at too great length, to Christians.

Now, more briefly, I want to give a warning to the unconverted.

Jonah, asleep on board that ship, is a type of a great number of unconverted people who come to our various places of worship. Jonah was in imminent danger, for God had sent a great storm after him; and, my unconverted hearer, your danger, at this present moment, is beyond description. There is nothing but a breath between you and hell. One of our beloved elders was with us here last Sabbath day; he is now with the spirits of just men made perfect; but if it had been the lot of any unconverted person here to suffer and to expire in the same manner, alas, how sad it would have been for you, my hearer! Driven from the presence of God, you would be cast into the outer darkness where there is weeping, and wailing, and gnashing of teeth. The sword of divine justice is already furbished, will you yet make mirth? Can you laugh and jest when there is but a step between you and death,-but a step between you and hell? An enemy to God, unforgiven, the angel of justice seeking you out as the storm sought out Jonah in that ship, “What meanest thou, O sleeper,” when the peril of everlasting wrath is so near thee?

You are asleep, too, when there are a great many things to awake you. As I have already said, there was a great noise in the vessel where Jonah was, a great noise inside and outside the ship, yet he did not awake. I do believe that many of you, unconverted people, find it hard to remain as you are. You get hard blows, sometimes, from the preacher. At family prayer, often, your conscience is touched. When you hear a passage from the Bible read, or when you hear of a friend who has died, you get somewhat aroused. Why, the very conversion of others should surely awaken you. If nothing else had awoke Jonah, the prayers of the mariners ought to have awakened him; and the earnestness of your mother and father, the pleading of your sister, the cries of new converts, the earnest anxieties of enquirers, ought to have-and if you were not so deeply sunken in slumber, would have-some influence over you to arouse you.

You are asleep, brother, while prayer would save you. If your prayers could not be heard, I think I should say, “Let him sleep on.” If there were no possibility of your salvation, I do not see why you should be aroused from your slumbers. Despair is an excellent excuse for sloth; but you have no reason to despair. “Arise, call upon thy God,” said the shipmaster to Jonah; and we say to you, “Friend, how is it that you are so indifferent, and do not pray, when it is written, ‘Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find;’ and when the facts prove the truth of the words of Jesus, ‘for he that asketh receiveth, and he that seeketh findeth’?” Heaven is within your reach, yet you will not stretch out your hand. Eternal life is so nigh to thee that Paul writes, “If thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved.” Assuredly, that man, who has food heaped up before him, but who sits down, and goes to sleep with his head in Benjamin’s mess, and yet will not eat of it, deserves to be starved. He, who can slumber when the river runs up to his very lip; he who is dying of thirst, yet will not drink, deserves to die; does he not? With such wondrous blessings set before you in the gospel,-with heaven itself just yonder, and the pearly gates set wide open, yet you are so indifferent that you despise the good land, and murmur, and refuse to accept the Saviour who would lead you to it,-why, surely, you must be sleeping the sleep of death! You are sleeping while God’s people are wondering at you, just as those mariners in the ship wondered at Jonah; and while they are weeping over you, and praying for you. There are some, in this place, who are the constant subjects of prayer. Some of you, who are seated here, do not perhaps know it; but there are those who love you, and who mention your name day and night before God; and yet, while they are concerned about you, you are not concerned about yourself. O God, if storms cannot awaken these sleeping Jonahs, awaken them by some other means, even though it be by one like themselves, or one even worse than themselves! Send a message that shall upbraid them. Set some blasphemer to ask them how they can attend the means of grace, and yet be undecided. I have known that to happen. I have known a coarse, vile-living man to accost a moral and excellent attendant on the means of grace, and say to him, “Why are you not either one thing or the other? If religion is all a lie, why don’t you be as I am; but if it is true, why don’t you become a Christian?” And verily may they put such questions as those to some of you.

O friends, I pray you, if you are out of Christ, do not pretend to be happy! Do not accept any happiness till you find it in him. To some of you, I would speak very pointedly. Are you sick? Do you feel that your life is very precarious? O my dear friend, you are like Jonah when the ship was like to be broken. Do not delay. Are there the beginnings of consumption about you? Is it supposed to be so? Do not delay. Has some relative been taken away, and does there seem some likelihood that you may have the same disease? Oh, do not sleep, but awake! Are you getting old, friend? Are the grey hairs getting thick around your brow? Oh, do not delay! For unsaved young people, it is wrong to sleep, for he that sleeps when he is young sleeps during a siege; but he that slumbers when he is old sleeps during the attack, when the enemy is actually at the breach, and storming the walls. Do any of you work in dangerous trades? Do you have to earn your bread where an accident might easily happen, as it has often happened to others? Oh, be prepared to meet your God!

But, having begun this list, I might continue it almost indefinitely; but I will end it in a sentence or so. Are you a mortal man? Can you die? Will you die? May you die now? May you drop dead in the street? May you go to sleep, and never wake up again on earth? May your very food or drink become the vehicle of death to you? May there be death in the air you breathe? May it be so? Will you one day, at any rate, have to be carried to your long home, like others, and lie asleep in the grave? Will you give account to God for the things done in the body? Will you have to stand before the great white throne, to make one of that innumerable throng, and to be there put into the balance to be weighed for eternity? If so, sleep not, I beseech you, as do others; but bestir yourself. May God’s Holy Spirit bestir you to make your calling and election sure! Lay hold on Jesus Christ with the grip of an earnest, humble faith, and surrender yourself, henceforth, to the service of him who has bought you with his precious blood. God grant to all of us the grace to awake, and arise, that Christ may give us life and light, for his dear name’s sake! Amen.

Exposition by C. H. Spurgeon

PSALM 51

Verses 1-5. Have mercy upon me, O God, according to thy loving-kindness: according unto the multitude of thy tender mercies blot out my transgressions. Wash me throughly from mine iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin. For I acknowledge my transgressions: and my sin is ever before me. Against thee, thee only, have I sinned, and done this evil in thy sight: that thou mightest be justified when thou speakest, and be clear when thou judgest. Behold I was shapen in iniquity; and in sin did my mother conceive me.

“It is not merely that I have sinned in practice, but I am a sinner by nature. Sin would not have come out of me if it had not first been in me. I am a mass of sin, and must therefore be loathsome in thy sight.”

6, 7. Behold, thou desirest truth in the inward parts: and in the hidden part thou shalt make me to know wisdom. Purge me with hyssop,-

Take the bunch of hyssop as the priests did; dip it into the basin filled with sacrificial blood: “Purge me with hyssop.” Apply the precious blood of Jesus to me,-

7, 8. And I shall be clean: wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow. Make me to hear joy and gladness; that the bones which thou hast broken may rejoice.

He feels like a man whose bones are broken, and he asks the Lord, by putting away his sin, to bind up those broken bones till every one of them should sing a song of gratitude to the Divine Healer.

9-13. Hide thy face from my sins, and blot out all mine iniquities. Create in me a clean heart, O God; and renew a right spirit within me. Cast me not away from thy presence; and take not thy holy spirit from me. Restore unto me the joy of thy salvation; and uphold me with thy free spirit. Then will I teach transgressors thy ways; and sinners shall be converted unto thee.

“If thou wilt only save me, I will tell everybody about it; I will be a preacher as well as a penitent. Rising from my knees, where I have been confessing my sin, rejoicing that thou hast blotted it all out, I will hasten away, and tell to others what a good God thou art, and they will believe my testimony, ‘and sinners shall be converted unto thee.’ ”

14. Deliver me from bloodguiltiness, O God,-

David had been guilty of the death of Uriah. It is a proof of his sincerity that he does not mince matters, but calls a spade a spade, and prays, “Deliver me from bloodguiltiness, O God,”-

14. Thou God of my salvation: and my tongue shall sing aloud of thy righteousness.

“I will not only preach, but I will also sing. I will be precentor as well as preacher. A Christian man can never do too much for the Lord who has so graciously pardoned him. David feels that he cannot do anything aright, either singing or preaching, by himself; so he adds,-

15. O Lord, open thou my lips; and my mouth shall shew forth thy praise. For thou desirest not sacrifice; else would I give it: thou delightest not in burnt offering.

God cares little for the mere outward forms of worship; Ritualistic observances are nothing to him: “Thou desirest not sacrifice; else would I give it: thou delightest not in burnt offering.” Though these were the fixed ordinances of the Lord under which David lived, yet he was enabled to look beyond them to something higher and better.

17-19. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise. Do good in thy good pleasure unto Zion: build thou the walls of Jerusalem. Then shalt thou be pleased with the sacrifices of righteousness, with burnt offering and whole burnt offering: then shall they offer bullocks upon thine altar.

When we come to God, and are saved by him, then ordinances take their proper place. You cannot teach a man how to live until he is born; and you cannot teach him what his spiritual life is to be until he is born again; all religious rites and ceremonies which precede the new birth go for nothing. First there must be the inward life, the broken heart, the contrite spirit, and then everything else drops into proper order. Mind this; God help us all to mind it well!

THE PLUMBLINE

A Sermon

Published on Thursday, October 6th, 1904,

delivered by

C. H. SPURGEON,

at the metropolitan tabernacle, newington,

On Lord’s-day Evening, August 27th, 1876.

“Thus he shewed me: and, behold, the Lord stood upon a wall made by a plumb-line, with a plumbline in his hand. And the Lord said unto me, Amos, what seest thou? And I said, A plumbline. Then said the Lord, Behold, I will set a plumbline in the midst of my people Israel: I will not again pass by them any more.”-Amos 7:7, 8.

God usually speaks by men according to their natural capacity. Amos was a herdaman. He was not a man of noble and priestly rank, like Ezekiel, nor a man of gigantic intellect and mighty eloquence, like Isaiah. He was a simple herdsman, and therefore God did not cause him to see the visions of Isaiah, or dazzle his mind with the wondrous revelations that were given to Ezekiel. God’s rule is, “Every man in his own order;” and if we depart from that, we get out of place ourselves, and we are apt to try to make others do that which they are not fit to do, and then blame them when they fail to accomplish what they should never have attempted. God always uses his servants in the best possible way, and as they ought to be used; so, when the herdsman Amos had a vision, he simply saw a piece of string with a plumb of lead at the bottom of it,-a plumbline,-a thing which he could easily understand. There was a mystery about the vision, but the vision itself was not mysterious. It was a very simple emblem indeed, exactly suited to the mind of Amos, just as the visions of Ezekiel and Isaiah were adapted to the more poetic minds of men of another class. You and I, dear brethren, may be very thankful if God should use us as he did Amos; and, if he does, we must not be aping the Isaiahs and Ezekiels. If we see a plumbline, let us preach about a plumbline; and if God should ever enable us to understand the visions of Zechariah or Ezekiel, then let us preach about them. Let every preacher or teacher testify according to the measure of light and grace that God has given him; then we shall do well. Amos can see a plumbline, and he sees it well; and when he has seen it, he tells out what he has seen, and leaves God to set his seal upon his testimony.

Now, on this occasion, we have nothing before us but this plumbline, but there is a great deal to be learnt from it. The first thing is this, the plumbline is used in construction; secondly, the plumbline is used for testing what is built; and, thirdly, it appears from the text that the plumbline is used in the work of destruction, for the casting down of that which is found not to be straight.

First, the plumbline is used in construction. We are told, in the text, that “the Lord stood upon a wall made by a plumbline,” that is to say, a wall which had been constructed with the help of a plumbline; and, therefore, he tested it with that which was supposed to have been used in its construction, which was a fair and proper thing to do. If the wall only professed to be run up without a plumbline, then it might be hard to try it with the plumbline; but as it was a wall which professed to have been constructed according to the rules of the builder’s art, it was fair and reasonable that it should be tested by the plumbline.

First, then, dear friends, a plumbline is used in building when it is done as it ought to be; and I remind you that God always uses it in his building. Everything that God builds is built plumb, and straight, and square, and fair. You see that rule at work in nature; there is nothing out of proportion there. Those who understand these things, and look deeply into them, will tell you that the very form and size of the earth have a connection with the blooming of a flower, or the hanging of a dew-drop upon a blade of grass; and that, if the sun were larger or smaller than it is, or if the material of which the earth is formed were more dense, or different in any degree from what it is, then everything, the most magnificent and the most minute, would be thrown out of gear. Someone of old used to say that God is the great Arithmetician, the great Master of geometry; and so he is. He never makes any mistakes in his calculations; there is not anything in the world that he has made in a careless manner. The mixing of the component parts of the air we breathe is managed with consummate skill; and if you could resolve a drop of water into its original elements, you would be struck by the wisdom with which God has adapted the proportions of each particle so as to make a liquid which man can drink. Everything is done by order and rule, as in the changes of the various seasons, the movements of the heavenly bodies, and the arrangements of divine providence. God always has the plumbline in his hand. He never begins to build, as a careless workman would, that which might turn out to be right, or might turn out to be wrong; but he makes sure work of all that he does.

In spiritual matters, it is very manifest that, whenever God is dealing with souls, he always uses the plumbline. In beginning with us, he finds that the very foundation of our nature is out of the perpendicular; and, therefore, he does not attempt to build upon it, but commences his operations by digging it out. The first work of divine grace in the soul is to pull down all that nature has built up. God says, “I cannot use these stones in my building. This man has been behaving himself admirably in some respects, and he thinks that he is building up a temple to my honour and glory with his own natural virtues, his own good works, and other things of a like character. But all this must be dug out.” The man has taken a great deal of pains in putting it together, but it must all come out, and there must be a great hole left; the man: must feel himself emptied, and abased, and humbled in the sight of God; for, if God is to be everything to the man, then he himself must be nothing; and if Christ is to be his Saviour, he must be a complete Saviour, from beginning to end. So, the foundation of human merit must be cleared right out, and flung away, for God could not build squarely upon it. With such a foundation as that, the plumbline would never mark a perpendicular wall.

After all human merit has been flung out, the Lord begins his gracious work by laying the foundation stone of a simple faith in Jesus Christ, and that faith, though simple, is very real. When a man professes to convert his fellow-man, he only gives him a fictitious faith which is of no value to him; but when God saves a sinner, he gives him real faith. There may be little knowledge of the truth, but the little that the man knows is truth; and faith, though it be but as a grain of mustard seed, if it be of the right sort, is better than that faith which is as big as a mountain, yet all of the wrong sort, which will not stand in the time of testing. But the faith, which the Holy Spirit gives, is the faith of Gold’s elect, the real faith which will endure even the tests which God applies to it.

Side by side with that faith, God puts true repentance. When a man attempts to convert his fellow-man, he gives him a sham repentance, or perhaps he tells him that there is no need of any repentance at all. Certain preachers have been telling us, lately, that it is a very easy matter to obtain salvation, and that there is no need of repentance; or if repentance is needed, it is merely a change of mind. That is not the doctrine that our fathers used to preach, nor the doctrine that we have believed. That faith, which is not accompanied by repentance, will have to be repented of; so, whenever God builds, he builds repentance fair and square with faith. These two things go together; the man just as much regrets and grieves over the past as he sees that past obliterated by the precious blood of Jesus. He just as much hates all his sin as he believes that his sin has been all put away.

The Lord never builds anything falsely in any man, or teaches him to reckon that to be true which is not true; but he builds with facts, with substantial verities, with true grace, and with a real and lasting work in the soul. When the Lord builds in a man, he builds with the plumbline in the sense of always building up that which is towards holiness. Have any of you fallen into sin? Rest assured that God did not build you in that way. Have sinful desires and lustings after evil been excited within you by any doctrine to which you have listened? Then, you may be sure that it was not of God. “By their fruits shall ye know them,” is an infallible test of doctrines as well as of disciples; and if any of you have embraced any form of doctrine which hinders you from being watchful, prayerful, careful, and anxious to avoid sin, you have embraced error, and not truth, for all God’s building tends towards holiness, towards carefulness, towards a gracious walk to the praise and glory of God. When the Lord builds a man up, he makes him conscientious, makes him jealous of himself, makes him detect the very shadow of sin, so that, before the sin itself comes upon him, he holds up his all-covering shield of faith, that he may be preserved from its deadly assaults. You may always know God’s building because it is pure building, clean building; but if anybody builds you up in such a style that you can talk of sin as a trifle, and think that you may indulge in it, at least in a measure, with impunity, that is certainly not God’s building.

And, blessed be his name, when our souls are really given up into the Lord’s hands, he will continue to build in us until he has built us up to perfection. There will come a day when sin, which now makes its nest in this mortal body of ours, shall find this body dissolving and crumbling back to the earth of which it was made; and then our emancipated spirits, delivered from the last taint and trace of sin,-free from even the tendency to evil,-shall soar away to be with Christ, which is far better, and to wait for the trumpet of the resurrection, when the body itself shall also be delivered from corruption, for the grave is a refining pot; and, at the coming of Christ, our body shall be pure and white, like the garments of a bride arrayed to meet her bridegroom, and the soul, re-united with the body, shall have triumphed over every sin. This is the way that God builds. He does not build us up so that we can go to heaven with our sin still working in us. He does not build us up to be temples for him to dwell in, and let the devil also dwell in us. Antinomian building is not according to the fashion of God’s building; but God builds up surely, solidly, truthfully, sincerely, and until we have reached that state of perfection which makes us fit for heaven.

Now, beloved, as God thus uses the plumbline in his building, I gather that we also should use the plumbline in our building. First, with regard to the upbuilding of our own soul, I would urge upon myself first, and then upon you next, the constant use of the plumbline. It is very easy to seek after speed, but to neglect to ensure certainty. There is such a thing as being in a dreadful hurry to do what had better never be done, or else be done in a very different style. We see some people, who become Christians in about two minutes; and I am devoutly thankful when that is really the case. We see some others become full-grown Christians in about two days, and instructors of others in the course of a week; and, very speedily, they attain to such vast dimensions that there is no ordinary church that is big enough to hold them. That is very quick work; that is the way that mushrooms grow, but it is not the way that oaks grow. I urge you all to remember that, often, the proverb “the more haste, the less speed,” is true in spiritual things as well as in temporal. My dear brother, if you only grow an inch in the course of ten laborious years, yet that growth is real, it is better than appearing to grow six feet in an hour, when that would only be disease puffing you up, and blowing you out. Often and often, the soul needs to use the plumbline to see whether that which is built so very quickly is really built perpendicularly, or whether it does not lean this way or that. As the work goes on, we should frequently stop, and say to ourselves, “Now, is this right? Is this real? Is this true?” Many a time, if we did that, we should have to fall upon our knees, and cry, “O Lord, deliver me from exalting myself above measure, and counting myself to be rich and increased with goods, when, all the while, I am wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked.”

I would like you young men who are here to use the plumbline when you begin your spiritual life-building. I mean this; your father and mother are members of a certain church, but do not you, therefore, go and join that church without a thorough investigation of the principles on which it is founded. Use the plumbline to see whether it is all straight and square. Try all the doctrines that are taught, and do not embrace that which is popular, but that which is Biblical. Then, try with the plumbline the ordinances of the church; do not submit to them simply because other people do so, but use the plumbline of Scripture to test them all. You know that, as a body, we are not afraid that you will ever read your Bibles too much. We, as Baptists, have no objection to your bringing everything that is taught to the test of the Bible, for we know that we should be the gainers if you were to do that; but, instead of using the plumbline of the Bible, many people have a newly-invented test,-the Book of Common Prayer, or Minutes of the Conference, or something else equally valueless. Now, whatever respect I have for books of that sort, I prize my Bible infinitely above them all, and above all the volumes of decretals of popes, and councils, and conferences put together. I should not like to feel that I had been building, and building, and building, and building, and yet that there had been a radical error in the whole structure, for I had commenced with a mistake, and I had been building myself up, not in the most holy faith of the apostles, but in the most mischievous error of my own notions. Do, I pray you, apply the Bible plumbline continually to all your beliefs, and views, and practices.

But, even before you do that, use the gospel plumbline to see whether you really were ever born again, for our Lord Jesus said to Nicodemus, “Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.” Do test yourselves as to whether you have really believed in Jesus Christ, for “without faith it is impossible to please God;” and if you have believed in him, take care that, while you think you are getting more faith, more love, more patience, more of every grace, you keep the plumbline going; otherwise, you may get a great deal into the structure that you will have to take out again, and you will get the building out of the perpendicular, and the whole of it may come down with a crash.

And this plumbline is also to be used upon all work that is done on behalf of other people. There is much teaching, which has been given with a pure motive, but which, nevertheless, cannot endure this test. There are some little sects, still existing upon the face of the earth, that were formed with much labour by their originators; but they are evidently not gold, or silver, or precious stones, for they are passing away with the lapse of time. I would like, as a minister of the gospel, to do for God that which will endure the supreme test of the day of judgment. I should not like to build up a great church here, and then, when I was dead and gone, for it to be scattered to the four winds, and to learn in heaven that I had been mistaken except as to the matter of my own salvation; and that, consequently, while some good was done, there was ill done as well. No; we must constantly use the plumbline, so that what we build may be perpendicular, and may stand the test of the ages, and the test of God’s great judgment seat. Look to it, sirs, ye who are diligent, that ye are diligent in spreading truth, and not error. See to it, ye who count up your many converts, that they are real converts, and not the mere fruit of excitement. See to it, ye who plod on from day to day so industriously seeking to save souls, that they are really saved, and truly brought to Christ; for, if not, your work will be in vain. Churches that are built in a hurry will come down in a hurry; wood, hay, and stubble, that look all right in the building, will look terrible in the burning, when the day of the trial by fire shall come.

So that is our first point, that the plumbline is to be used in the construction of the building.

Secondly, the plumbline is to be used for testing the building when it is built.

Do not let us judge either ourselves or one another simply by the eye. I have frequently thought that a building was out of the perpendicular when it was not; and I have sometimes thought it perpendicular when it really was not so. The human eye is readily deceived, but the plumbline is not; it drops straight down, and at once shows whether the wall is upright or not. We must continually use upon ourselves the plumbline of God’s Word. Here is a wall that needs to be tested,-the wall of self-righteousness. This man thinks he is all right. He never did anything very wrong. Moreover, he is religious in his way. He says that he has kept the law from his youth up. That is a fine piece of wall, is it not?-with some very handsome stones inlaid therein with fair colours. You are very proud of it, my dear friend; but if I put the Bible plumbline to your life, you will be astonished to find how much out of the perpendicular it is. The plumbline is according to this standard, “If any man will be saved by his own works, he must keep the law of the Lord perfectly; for he, who is guilty of the breach of any one of God’s commandments, has broken the whole law: ‘therefore by the deeds of the law there shall no flesh be justified in his sight.’ ” That condemns your wall, does it not?-because you have not at all times kept the whole law in the fulness of the meaning which Christ gave to it. If you are to be saved by works, there must not be a single flaw in the whole wall of your life. If there is, it is not in the perpendicular.

Here is another wall, built by a man who says that he is doing his best, and trusting to Christ to make up for his deficiencies. Well, my dear friend, your wall is sadly out of the perpendicular, because there is a text which says, “Christ is all;” and I know that the Lord Jesus Christ will never be willing to be put side by side with such a poor creature as you are, to be jointly used with yourself to your soul’s salvation. Remember that, in the gospel plan, it is not Christ and Co.; it must be all Christ, or no Christ at all. So, if you are depending partly upon self, and partly upon him, my plumbline shows that your wall is out of the perpendicular, and that it will have to come down.

Another man is depending upon rites and ceremonies. Now, there are some very strong texts in Scripture concerning that matter. Here is one: “To obey is better than sacrifice, and to hearken than the fat of rams.” Wilt thou come before God bringing the blood of beasts or costly offerings? Hath he not told thee that, to come before him with a broken and a contrite heart, and, especially, to come unto him through the merit of the one great sacrifice offered by his Son, is the only acceptable way of approaching him? The most gorgeous ceremonies in the whole world cannot save a single soul. That wall is out of the perpendicular, and must come down.

Here is another man, who says, “I am, as often as I can be, a hearer of the Word.” I am glad that you are; but if you are only a hearer, and not a doer of the Word, your wall is out of the perpendicular; for, if it is good to hear what is right, it is better still to do it; and your condemnation will be all the more terrible if you have known what you ought to do, and yet have not done it. There are many of you, who come here, and who have been coming for a long time, who, I hope, will be led to do much more than simply come to hear; for I trust that you will be led, by the Holy Spirit, to lay hold on eternal life. If not, your wall will not endure the test of the Bible plumbline, which plainly shows that you are quite out of the perpendicular.

There are many other bowing walls, beside those I have mentioned, but I cannot stop to try them now. I would, however, most earnestly urge you all to remember that, if you do not test yourself by the plumbline of God’s Word, if you are God’s servant, you will be tried and tested. Have you never known what it is to be laid aside, on a bed of sickness, and to have everything about you tried? In times of acute pain, I have had every morsel of what I thought to be gold and silver put into the fire, piece by piece, by the Master himself, until he has put it all in. Thank God, some of it has been proved to be gold; and has come out all the brighter for the testing; but, oh, how much of it has proved to be alloy, or even worthless dross! You can have a great deal of patience when you have not any pain; and you can have a great deal of joy in the Lord when you have got joy in your worldly prosperity; and you can have any quantity of it when you have no troubles to test its reality. But the real faith is that which will endure the trial by fire. The real patience is that which will bear intense agony without a murmur of complaint. The Lord will test and try you, my brother, sooner or later, if you are his. He will be sure to use the plumbline, so you had better use it yourself. It may save you much anxiety in the future if you stop now to question yourself, and to enquire whether these things be real and true to you or not.

And remember, once more, that God will use the plumbline, at the last great day, to test everything. How many of us could hear, without a tremor, the intimation that God had summoned us to appear before his bar? O my brethren and sisters, if the great scales of divine justice were swinging from this ceiling now, and the Judge of all said to you, “Step in, and let me see what is your weight,” is there one of us who could solemnly and sincerely rise, and say, “Lord, I am ready for the weighing”? Yes; I trust that many could say, each one for himself or herself, “There is not anything good in me, but my hope is fixed on Christ alone; and though I am not what I ought to be, nor what I want to be, nor what I shall be, yet ‘by the grace of God I am what I am.’ My profession of being a Christian is not a lie, it is not a pretence, it is not a piece of religious masquerade; it is true, great God; it is true.” My brother, my sister, if you can say that, you may step into the scales without any fear, for the contrite and believing heart can endure being weighed. But into the scales you will have to go whether you are ready or not. Your building will all have to be tested and tried. Some of you have built fine mansions, and towers, and palaces; but the plumbline will be applied to them all, and it is God himself who will use the plumbline in every case. No counterfeit will be allowed to pass the pearly gates, nor anything that defileth, or worketh abomination, or maketh a lie. At the last great day, none shall pass from beneath the eye of the Judge of all without due examination. He will not suffer even one of the guilty to escape, nor condemn any one of those who have been absolved for Christ’s sake. It will be a right and just judgment that will be given in that day; but judgment there will be.

My last point is this, the plumbline is used in the work of destruction.

When a city wall was to be battered down, the general would sometimes say, “This wall is to be taken down to this point, and then the plumbline was hung down to mark how far they were to go with the work of destruction. They thus marked out that part which might be spared, and that which must be destroyed.

Now, in the work of destruction, God always uses the plumbline, and he goes about that work very slowly. He shows that he does not like it. When the Lord is going to save a sinner, he has wings to his feet; but when he is going to destroy a sinner, he goes with leaden footsteps, waiting, and warning many times, and while he waits and warns, sighing, and crying, “How shall I give thee up?” He even goes so far as to use an oath, saying, “As I live, saith the Lord God, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked; but that the wicked turn from his way and live.” God never brings men to judgment, as the infamous Judge Jeffreys did, in a great haste. He would hurry them off to the gallows, with indecent speed; but, at the last great day, there will be a solemn and stately pomp about the whole dread assize,-the sounding of the trumpet, the bursting of the graves, the setting up of the great white throne, the opening of the books, and the majestic appearance of him from whose face heaven and earth will flee away. And when the judgment begins, it will not be without due order, nor will it be without keen perception of all differences. There will hang the infallible plumbline. That which is perpendicular will be declared to be perpendicular, and that which bows will be shown tottering to its fall; for, before the Judge’s eye, and before the eyes of the assembled universe, shall hang a plumbline, with these words above it, “He which is filthy, let him be filthy still; … and he that is holy, let him be holy still.”

The whole judgment shall be according to the plumbline. Not a soul, in that great day, will be sent to hell who does not deserve to go there. If there be any man, who can plead that it would be unjust to condemn him,-if he can truthfully prove that he has been obedient up to the measure of his light,-if he can prove that justice is on his side,-God will not do an unjust turn to him, or to any other man. Those awful gates, that grind upon their iron hinges, never yet opened to receive a soul damned unjustly. It would be impossible, in the very nature of things, for such a thing to happen. If any man could truly say, “This is unjust,” he would have taken away the sting of hell, for this is the essence and the soul of hell, “I am wrong, and can never get right. I am wrong, and do not want to get right; I am so wrong that I love the wrong, and make evil to be my good, and good to be my evil. I hate God, for it is impossible, while I am in such a state as this, that I can be otherwise than unhappy; and this is the greatest hell that can happen to a man,-not to love God, and not to love right.” That is the flame of hell, the worm that gnaws for ever,-that being out of gear with God,-that being out of harmony with the Most High for ever. I ween that there needs to be no fiercer hell than that. So, the final judgment will be according to the plumbline, so that no one will be condemned unjustly. You talk to me about the fate of the heathen who have never heard the gospel, and I reply, “I know very little about them; but I know that God is just, so I leave them in his hands, knowing that the Judge of all the earth will do right.” There will not be one pang, to a soul in hell, more than that soul deserves,-not a single spasm, of despair, or a sinking in hopelessness, that is imposed by the arbitrary will of God. It will be a terrible reaping for them, when they reap sheaves of fire; but they will only reap what they have sown. There will be an awful pouring out of divine vengeance upon the vessels of wrath fitted to destruction; but no one will be able to say that the judgment is unjust. The lost will themselves feel that they only have to eat as they baked, and to drink as they brewed. It will all be just to them; and this is what will make the teeth of the serpent of hell, and the flame of its fire,-that it is all just,-that if I were myself judge, I must condemn myself to what I have to suffer. Think of that, and escape from the wrath to come.

And as that plumbline hangs there, in that great day of account, there will be differences made between some lost men and other lost men. All hell is not the same hell, any more than all flesh is the same flesh. That man knew his Lord’s will, and did it not; lay on the lashes to the full that the law allows. That other man did not obey his Lord’s will; but then, he did not know it, so he shall be beaten with few stripes. Few will be too many for anyone to bear; so do not run the risk of them. But, oh, the many stripes, what will they be? There are the lost that perished in Sodom and Gomorrah,-those filthy beings whose sins we dare not think upon. There they are, and there is the hell they suffer. There hangs the plumbline; and, by his unerring justice, God awards their doom. But what will he award to you, and you, and you, who have heard the gospel simply and plainly preached, and yet have rejected Christ? You will have to go lower down in hell than the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah, for God’s plumbline tells us that sin against light is the worst of sin, and that the wilful rejection of the atoning blood flowing from the loving Saviour’s wounds, is the climax of all iniquity. That is how the plumbline will work. And when you come up, you rich man, who have spent your money in sin,-and when you come up, you poor man, who work so hard,-there shall be a difference between the one of you and the other,-between the seducer, whom the world allows to enter into her drawing-room, and the poor girl whom he led astray; for, though both are guilty, God will make a difference, not as men make it here, but quite the other way. The man of talent, and of rank, and of position, who frittered away his whole existence in the life of a butterfly,-there will be a difference between his sentence and that of the obscure, uneducated individual, who did sin, but not as he did who had the greater gifts. To put one talent in a napkin, brings its due punishment; but to bury or misuse ten talents, shall bring a tenfold doom; for there will hang that plumbline, and by the rules of infinite justice everything shall be determined.

“This is dreadful talk,” some of you may be saying. It is; it is; and it is a dreadful business altogether for the lost,-that being driven from God’s presence when you die,-hearing him say, “Depart, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels.” You do not like to hear about this, and I do not like to preach about it; only I must do so, lest you come unto that place of torment because I failed to warn you. Then might you say, in your despair, “O cursed preacher! O unfaithful minister! You tried to tickle our ears with pleasant things, but you left out all allusions to the wrath to come. You toned down the truth, you softened it, and now we are ruined for ever through your wicked desire to please our foolish ears.” O sirs, you will never be able truthfully to say that, for I do pray you to escape from that awful future. Run no risk of it. I think every one of you would like to have his house insured against fire, and to know that, as far as proper title-deeds go, whatever you have is held on a good tenure. Then, I implore you, make sure work for eternity by laying hold on Christ Jesus. Yield yourself up to him, that he may make you right where you are wrong, put you in gear with God, and set you running parallel with the will of the Most High; that he, indeed, may build you up on the perpendicular, on the solid foundation of his eternal merits by faith, through the power of the ever-blessed Spirit,-that you may be so built that, when God himself holds the plumbline, it may hang straight down, and he will be able to say, “It is all right.” Happy will you be if you hear his verdict, “Well done, good and faithful servant; thou hast been faithful in a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things. Enter thou into the joy of thy Lord.”

May God grant this mercy to every one of you, for Jesus Christ’s sake! Amen.

Exposition by C. H. Spurgeon

1 CORINTHIANS 3

Verse 1. And I, brethren, could not speak unto you as unto spiritual, but as unto carnal, even as unto babes in Christ.

Their spiritual part had not grown strong, their old carnal nature still had the preponderance, so Paul was obliged to address that which was the bigger half of them.

2. I have fed you with milk,

That is a blessing.

2. And not with meat:

That is not a blessing. It is a great privilege to be fed even with the simple doctrines of grace, with the milk of the gospel; but it is a higher boon to have such a spiritual constitution as to be able to eat the strong meat of the Word.

2, 3. For hitherto ye were not able to bear it, neither yet now are ye able. For ye are yet carnal: for whereas there is among you envying, and strife, and divisions, are ye not carnal, and walk as men?

As ordinary, unregenerate men.

4. For while one saith, I am of Paul; and another, I am of Apollos; are ye not carnal?

Is not this just how common, ordinary men would do? Where is your spiritual-mindedness if you so act?

5. Who then is Paul?

Mark, it is Paul himself who asks this question. He puts his own name here in order to show that he does not despise Apollos any more than he despises himself.

5-9. Who then is Paul, and who is Apollos, but ministers by whom ye believed, even as the Lord gave to every man? I have planted, Apollos watered; but God gave the increase. So then neither is he that planteth any thing, neither he that watereth; but God that giveth the increase. Now he that planteth and he that watereth are one; and every man shall receive his own reward according to his own labour. For we are labourers together with God: ye are God’s husbandry.

Ye are God’s tilled ground.

Then the apostle works out the same thought under another image, turning from agriculture to architecture.

9, 10. Ye are God’s building. According to the grace of God which is given unto me, as a wise masterbuilder, I have laid the foundation, and another buildeth thereon.

Paul began the churches; he was the first preacher of the gospel in Corinth, and also in other places; and other preachers followed in his footsteps. When a man lays a good foundation, he always feels anxious that those who come after him should build in the same substantial manner as he has begun. It is a great grief to a man if he sees that, after he has laid a foundation of truth, somebody else follows, and builds up an error on the top of it. Alas, men do that still sometimes.

10-15. But let every man take heed how he buildeth thereupon. For other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ. Now if any man build upon this foundation gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, stubble; every man’s work shall be made manifest: for the day shall declare it, because it shall be revealed by fire; and the fire shall try every man’s work of what sort it is. If any man’s work abide which he hath built thereupon, he shall receive a reward. If any man’s work shall be burned, he shall suffer loss: but he himself shall be saved; yet so as by fire.

If he be a good man, he builds for God; though he may build mistakenly, and say much that he ought not to have said. He shall escape, as a man flies out of a burning house, but all his work is gone. What a dreadful thing that would be, at the end of life, to get into heaven, but to have seen that all your life’s work had been a failure; to have been building a great deal, but to see it all burned; or to know, as you die, that because it was not God’s truth, it would all be burned!

16, 17. Know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you? If any man destroy the temple of God,-

For so it should run,-

17. Him shall God destroy;

If any man should pull down that which Paul built for God, if any man shall pull down that which any faithful minister of Christ has built before him, “him shall God destroy;”

17, 18. For the temple of God is holy, which temple ye are. Let no man deceive himself. If any man among you seemeth to be wise in this world, let him become a fool, that he may be wise.

For that kind of folly is the doorstep of true wisdom.

19. For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God.

All that which calls itself philosophy, and talks about its culture, and so on, is foolishness with God, just as much to-day as it was among the Greeks.

19. For it is written, He taketh the wise in their own craftiness.

They call themselves wise, but they shall all be taken in their own craftiness.

20, 21. And again, The Lord knoweth the thoughts of the wise, that they are vain. Therefore let no man glory in men.

Men are poor things to glory in.

21, 23. For all things are your’s; whether Paul, or Apollos, or Cephas, or the world, or life, or death, or things present, or things to come; all are your’s; and ye are Christ’s; and Christ is God’s.

Glory be to his holy name!

Hymns from “Our Own Hymn Book”-103, 614, 641.