Who Is The Anti-Christ?

Who is Antichrist? In summary, Antichrist is the false messiah who seeks, and likely achieves, world domination so that he can destroy Israel and all followers of Jesus Christ in the last days.

We think of the prefix "anti" and think of one opposed to Christ and we mistakenly identify him with the worst of tyrants. Now the prefix "anti" can mean opposed or against, but it can also mean, "instead of." Instead of Christ.

Antichrist will be a substitute for Christ. He will be as much as like Christ as it is possible for a tool of Satan to be like Christ.

1. Antichrist will be wanted--not rejected.

Continued below:  click the link!

https://www.crosswalk.com/church/pastors-or-leadership/ask-roger/what-is-the-difference-between-christ-and-antichrist.html?utm_source=Daily%20Update&utm_campaign=Crosswalk%20Daily%20Update&utm_medium=Email&utm_content=2462153

LET US DRAW NEAR TO THE THRONE OF GRACE!

Hebrews 4:16

Let us then fearlessly and confidently and boldly draw near to the throne of grace (the throne of God's unmerited favor to us sinners), that we may receive mercy [for our failures] and find grace to help in good time for every need [appropriate help and well-timed help, coming just when we need it].

https://t.e2ma.net/click/wsyycg/4yscfwb/kjbth3b

The Throne of Grace

Let us therefore draw near with boldness unto the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy, and may find grace to help us in time of need.—Heb 4:16.

In the closing sentences of this chapter the writer winds up the long exhortation to steadfastness by an inspiring allusion to the sympathy of the great High Priest, who has passed out of this time-world, through the veil of the visible heavens, into the celestial-world; and he takes care that his last word shall be of a cheering character, and also so manages that the conclusion of this hortatory section shall form a suitable introduction to the next part of his discourse. For the third time Christ is designated a High Priest and there are ascribed to Him, as such, attributes which are to form the theme of the next great division of the Epistle, wherein the priestly office of Christ is elaborately discussed. The writer re-invites the attention of his readers to the High Priest of their confession, and in doing so uses words every one of which contains an assertion which he means to prove or illustrate, and which being proved will serve the great end of the whole Epistle—the instruction and confirmation of the ignorant and tempted.

Then, when he has, by brief, pregnant phrase, hinted the thoughts he means to prove, the writer proceeds to address to his readers an exhortation, which is repeated at the close of the long discussion on the priesthood of Christ, to which these sentences are the prelude. In doing so, he gives prominence to that feature of Christ’s priestly character of which alone he has as yet spoken explicitly—His power to sympathize, acquired and guaranteed by His experience of temptation. He presents Christ to view as the Sympathetic One in golden words which may be regarded as an inscription on the breast-plate of the High Priest of humanity. To this strong assertion of Christ’s power to sympathize is fitly appended the final exhortation: “Let us therefore draw near with boldness unto the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and grace for seasonable succour.”

Confidence of Approach

“Let us draw near with boldness.”

1. The word “boldness” is somewhat incongruous; it neither conveys the original nor does it correspond to our sense of propriety. The thought would be far more beautifully and far more naturally represented by a more literal translation—“Let us come with frank confidence” to the throne of grace. The word literally means, if we go to the etymology of it, “speaking everything.” You can easily understand how naturally that becomes an expression for the unembarrassed, unrestrained, full outpouring of a heart. You cannot pour out your heart in the fullest confidence to a person you do not respect, but if you are with some one you entirely trust, how swiftly the words flow, and how very easy it is to tell out the whole heart. Just so with this great word of the writer of this Epistle, descriptive of the temper and disposition with which men are to go to God—with confidence, full, cheerful, and unembarrassed, and expressing itself in full trust, exactly as we have it in one of the Psalms: “Ye people, pour out your heart before him.” Yes, let it all flow out, just as you would do to husband or wife, or lover or friend, or the chosen companion to whom you can tell everything.

2. We need not, however, discard the familiar word “boldness”; it is enough if we know what kind of boldness it is. Not the boldness of presumption; for if we would “serve God acceptably” it must be “with reverence and godly fear.” Not the boldness of self-will; but ever praying—“Father, Thy will.” Not the boldness of selfmerit; but saying, with Daniel, “We do not present our supplications before thee for our righteousnesses, but for thy great mercies.” It is the boldness of reliance on God’s own nature and promise. He has bidden us pray, assured response, and promised help. He means what He says. So we may come with reliance, though with reverence; with earnestness, though with submission; with confidence, though with penitence; with the boldness of a child telling all its griefs and wants to a pitying parent—the boldness Jesus encouraged in the parable of the importunate widow, and rewarded in the case of the Syrophenician mother.

Prayer in the fullest sense—the prayer that is wrought in us by the Spirit and presented by the Christ of God; prayer that wins the King’s ear—is the last triumph of the life of grace. Prayer in the noblest sense implies a concentration of all man’s united energies. Coleridge shortly before his death said these words to a friend who has recorded them: “I do not account a solemn faith in God as a real object to be the most arduous act of the reason and the will. Oh, no, my dear sir, it is to pray with all my heart and strength, with the reason and with the will, to believe that God will listen to your voice through Christ, and verily do the thing He pleaseth thereupon. This is the last, the greatest achievement of the Christian’s warfare on earth. ‘Teach us to pray, O Lord.’ Here he burst into a flood of tears, and begged me to pray for him.” The highest energy the human heart is capable of is to pray, like St. Paul, with the spirit and the understanding. But few may reach this victory, and it is deeply consoling to remember that it is a Throne of Grace before which we kneel, and that though our prayers may be marred and faultful, yet our Mediator interprets them in the ears of our loving Father, while the Spirit helps our infirmities and gives life and power to the failing, dying heart.1 [Note: W. Robertson Nicoll, Sunday Evening, 339.]

To come boldly, it is to come frequently. At morning, at noon, and at night will I pray. We use to count them bold beggars that come often to our door. To come boldly, it is to ask for great things when we come. That is the bold beggar, that will not only ask, but also choose the thing that he asketh.2 [Note: Bunyan.]

The Throne of Grace

“Let us draw near with boldness unto the throne of grace.”

1. The word “throne” commonly suggests power, majesty, sovereignty, wealth; but God’s throne is here described as one of grace. His generosity is as boundless as His wealth. He bestows blessing not upon the ground of desert or according to any measure of merit, but according to “the exceeding riches of his grace in kindness towards us in Christ Jesus.” Having, in the fulness of His benevolence, not “spared his own Son, but delivered him up for us all,” He stands ready with Him and through Him, “freely to give us all things.” He is the God of love, the Father of mercies, the God of all comfort and consolation, who daily loadeth us with benefits, who preventeth us with the blessings of His goodness, and who in the riches of His grace hath abounded towards us in all wisdom and prudence. It is to give prominence to this aspect of the character of God that the writer represents Him here as seated on a throne of grace. Mercy no less belongs to Him than majesty. If He is the God of glory, He is also the God of all grace. The throne, therefore, on which He sits is represented as a throne of grace—a throne which rests on grace, which is upholden by mercy, and from which blessing flows forth in a free and plenteous stream to the unworthy, the wretched and the lost. The glory that surrounds God’s throne, as He manifests Himself to His creatures, is a glory before which the highest of them veil their faces; they are unable to gaze on its exceeding lustre; but the form in which it arranges itself is that of a rainbow, the token of mercy and the pledge of blessing, so that even the guilty and the fallen can approach with confidence to ask of Him who sits on that throne mercy and favour.

Mercy is that eternal principle of God’s nature which leads Him, even at the cost of infinite self-sacrifice, to seek the temporal good and eternal salvation of those who have opposed themselves to His will. In the words of Martensen: “Viewed in relation to sin, eternal love is compassionate grace.” God’s continued impartation of natural life is a foreshadowing, in a lower sphere, of what He desires to do for His creatures in the higher sphere—the communication of spiritual and eternal life through Jesus Christ. When He bids us love our enemies, He only bids us follow His own example.1 [Note: A. H. Strong, Systematic Theology, i. 289.]

2. And what is grace? Grace, of course, is the New Testament word for the undeserved favour and loving regard of God to man considered as weak, sinful, and unworthy; it is love which has its own motive, apart from any regard to worthiness in the object upon which it falls. Grace is its own real impulse and motive, and grace is set in Scripture as the opposite of desert; it is of grace, not of works, and so forth. It is set as the antagonist of sin and unrighteousness and all evil, and so runs up to the idea that it expresses the unmerited, self-originated, loving regard of God to us poor miserable creatures, who, if dealt with on the ground of right and retribution, would receive something very different indeed. But this text says that the throne of grace is the throne of God. The throne is based and established, as it were, in grace, out of which this undeserved love flows in broad, full streams. Whatever else there may be in the Divine nature, the ruling sovereign element in Deity is unmerited love and mercy and kindly regard to us poor, ignorant, sinful creatures, which keeps pouring itself out over all the world. God is King, and the kingly thing in God is infinite grace. Then we can scarcely but bring into connexion with this grand idea the other phases which the Old Testament gives to the same thought. Read such words as these: “Justice and judgment are the habitation of his throne”—“God sitteth on the throne of his holiness”—“The throne of thy glory.” Yes, the throne of justice and of judgment. White and sparkling—cold and repellent. The throne of glory—flashing and dazzling, coruscating and blinding, glittering and shimmering, ready to smite the diseased eye. “The throne of his holiness.” Yes, lofty, far up there, towering above us in its pure completeness, and we poor creatures, being ourselves blinded and dazed, and far away from Him, down amidst the lowlands and materialities, and all that majesty in the heavens—the justice and judgment, the holiness and glory—all that is only the envelope and wrappage; the living centre and heart of it is a pure, lambent glow of tenderness, and the throne is truly the throne of grace. The “throne” gives us all ideas of majesty, sovereignty, dominion, infinitude, greatness. The thought that it is “the throne of grace” sheathes all these in the softest, tenderest, most blessed folds of love—unmerited, free, spontaneous—simply because He is God, and not on account of any goodness in us.

“Less and less, I think, grows the consciousness of seeking God. Greater and greater grows the certainty that He is seeking us and giving Himself to us to the complete measure of our present capacity. That is Love, not that we loved Him, but that He loved us. I am sure that we ought to dwell far more upon God’s love for us than on our love for Him. There is such a thing as putting ourselves in the way of God’s overflowing love and letting it break upon us till the response of love to Him comes, not by struggle, not even by deliberation, but by necessity, as the echo comes when the sound strikes the rock. And this, which must have been true wherever the soul of God and the soul of man have lived, is perfectly and finally manifest in the Christhood of which it is the heart and soul.1 [Note: Phillips Brooks: Memories of His Life, 606.]

(1) It is the opinion of some that, in the phrase “the throne of grace,” an allusion is made to the so-called mercy-seat in the Jewish temple, on which God is represented as sitting enthroned, and where He heard the supplications of His people presented by the high priest, when He accepted their oblations, and from which He dispensed to them the blessings that they needed. For this, however, there seems no sufficient reason. The writer has no call here to refer to the mercy-seat; and it is unlikely that, in seeking to raise the minds of his readers to the elevation of specifically spiritual worship through Christ, he would clothe his sentiments in language borrowed from the outward Jewish worship; to say nothing of the fact that “mercy-seat” is a rendering which has nothing in the original to justify it, and that Jehovah is nowhere represented as “sitting enthroned on it,” but rather as sitting on a throne upborne by the cherubim, from which He looked down on the blood-sprinkled lid which covered, and, as it were, hid from view, the covenant broken by Israel, and demanding the punishment of the transgressors.

(2) Others have thought that this throne of grace is the mediatorial throne on which Christ sits, not the throne of God the Father. But though it is undoubtedly true that our Lord is now exalted to the throne of heaven, where He sits possessed of all power and authority, it does not appear that it is of this that our author is speaking here. His subject leads him to contemplate the priestly office and work of Christ rather than the regal, and the light in which we are taught to regard Him here is not so much that of the Being to whom we are to come as that of the Medium through which we are to come. As He has procured eternal redemption for us, and as He appears in the presence of God for us, we have access with confidence to the Most High. Through Him we have the introduction or privilege of entrance to the Father. Access to the throne of grace, then, is access to God the Father, as seated on that throne. Such language is of course figurative: it describes God after the manner of men. But it does describe Him to us; it is not a merely ornamental figure, it is a figure designed vividly, and in a manner calculated to impress our minds, to convey to us certain ideas concerning God in His relation to us, ideas which it is of importance that we should receive, as intimately connected with the furtherance in us of a true and spiritual religion.

I suppose if I were more simple-minded I should have been thinking over my faults and failures, desiring to do better, making good resolutions. But I don’t do that. I do desire, with all my heart, to do better. I know how faltering, how near the ground my flight is. But these formal, occasional repentances are useless things; resolutions do little but reveal one’s weakness more patently. What I try to do is simply to uplift my heart with all its hopes and weaknesses to God, to try to put my hand in His, to pray that I may use the chances He gives me, and interpret the sorrows He may send me. He knows me utterly and entirely, my faults and my strength. I cannot fly from Him though I take the wings of the morning. I only pray that I may not harden my heart; that I may be sought and found; that I may have the courage I need. All that I have of good He has given me; and as for the evil, He knows best why I am tempted, why I fall, though I would not. There is no strength like the abasement of weakness; no power like a childlike confidence.1 [Note: A. C. Benson, The Upton Letters, 317.]

“Holy of Holies,” awful name—

Where, in a still retreat,

The Presence of the Godhead dwelt,

Upon the mercy-seat:

Veiled from the eye in darkness dim,

Enthroned between the cherubim.

Once in the year, within the veil,

In mystic robes arrayed,

The High Priest entered, and with blood

An expiation made:

But blood of victims could not cleanse

And purge the guilt of man’s offence.

O Great Redeemer! God and Man,

Victim and Priest in one;

Thou, entering Heaven with Thine own Blood,

Didst once for all atone;

Thou hast removed the awful cloud,

Which once the oracle did shroud.

Now a bright Rainbow o’er the Throne

Sheds lustre from above,

Where showers of Judgment mildly shine,

Gilded by beams of Love;

Thy Blood, O Lamb of God, is there,

Pleading for us with ceaseless Prayer.

Cleansed by that Blood, we now approach

Boldly the Throne of Grace:

O may we, following the Lamb,

Come to that Holy Place;

Lord, who for us didst deign to bleed,

Be Thou our help in time of need!1 [Note: Christopher Wordsworth.]

3. To the throne we should come with hearts that harbour no treason; to the throne we should come with large petitions as those who expect greatly; to the throne we should come with the deepest sincerity and earnestness, remembering how high and wonderful a thing it is to enter the brightness of its radiance. But knowing its own flaws, its faultiness, its feebleness, the spirit rests on the thought that the throne is a throne of grace. Often and often we can approach it only with broken words, with wandering hearts, with ignorant desires, with passionate sobs and sighs. There is One who is there to interpret with loving tenderness our tears, our dim longings for deliverance and purity. Often we can come only defiled within and without. We come to the throne with defects of faith, defects of knowledge, defects of life, but they may all be overlooked and forgiven. We come with griefs we cannot name, but we come to Him whose eyes behold with compassion our most intimate and secret and shameful miseries. We are living in a year of grace and we are living under the reign of grace. Those who approach an earthly throne may be troubled infinitely by some breach of custom or etiquette, but the place of our sanctuary, our glorious high throne from the beginning, is a throne of grace.

We are called to the throne of grace, not to the throne of law. Rocky Sinai once was the throne of law, when God came to Paran with ten thousand of His holy ones. Who desired to draw near to that throne? Even Israel might not. Bounds were set about the mount, and if but a beast touched the mount, it was stoned or thrust through with a dart. O ye self-righteous ones who hope that you can obey the law, and think that you can be saved by it, look to the flames that Moses saw, and shrink, and tremble, and despair. To that throne we do not come now, for through Jesus the case is changed. We are still on praying ground and pleading terms with God, and the throne to which we are bidden to come, and of which we speak at this time, is the throne of grace. It is the throne set up on purpose for the dispensation of grace; a throne from which every utterance is an utterance of grace; the sceptre that is stretched out from it is the silver sceptre of grace; the decrees proclaimed from it are purposes of grace; the gifts that are scattered adown its golden steps are gifts of grace; and He that sits upon the throne is grace itself. It is the throne of grace itself. It is the throne of grace to which we approach when we pray.1 [Note: C. H. Spurgeon.]

The way is open to the throne of grace,

Draw near, and in the name of Jesus plead;

It was for sinners that He shed His blood,

Looking to Him, come now with all thy need.

The Father waits to hear thy humble prayer,

And Jesus speaks, Ask and thou shalt receive;

Most gracious is the call, the promise great,

Full blessing will be thine if thou believe!

The Blessings Obtained

“That we may receive mercy, and may find grace to help us in time of need.”

1. Our chief and comprehensive request at the throne of grace must ever be mercy and grace. The first prayer of penitence is, “God be merciful to me a sinner.” He who atoned for sin is before the throne to plead for sinners. Grace includes more than mercy. It is seasonable succour at all times. If mercy forgives our failings, grace helps us not to fail. We need mercy to pardon, grace to purify; mercy to give life, grace to nourish it; mercy to rescue us, grace to guide us; mercy to lay the foundation of the temple, grace to complete it to the top-stone. Grace every day, in all circumstances: in prosperity, lest we forget God; in adversity, lest we distrust Him; in temptation, lest we fall; in conflict, lest we yield; in anguish, lest we faint. Our great encouragement is that on the throne is One who has known the need of help from God, from angels, and from men.

There are two who are unfit for showing mercy: he who has never been tried; and he who, having been tempted, has fallen under temptation. The young, untempted, and upright, are often severe judges. They are for sanguinary punishment: they are for expelling offenders from the bosom of society. The old, on the contrary, who have fallen much, are lenient: but it is a leniency which often talks thus: Men must be men—a young man must sow his wild oats and reform. So young ardent Saul, untried by doubt, persecuted the Christians with severity, and Saul the king, on the contrary, having fallen himself, weakly permitted Agag to escape punishment. David, again, when his own sin was narrated to him under another name, was unrelenting in his indignation: “The man that hath done this thing shall surely die.” None of these was qualified for showing mercy aright. Unthinkingly we should say that to have erred would make a man lenient; it is not so. That truth is taught with deep significance in one of the incidents of the Redeemer’s life. There stood in His presence a tempted woman, covered with the confusion of recent conviction. And there stood beside her the sanctimonious religionists of that day, waiting like hell-hounds to be let loose upon their prey. Calm words came from the lips of Him who “spake as never man spake,” and whose heart felt as never man felt. “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone.” A memorable lesson of eternal truth. Sinners are not fit to judge of sin—their justice is revenge, their mercy is feebleness. He alone can judge of sin—he alone can attemper the sense of what is due to the offended Law with the remembrance of that which is due to human frailty—he alone is fit for showing manly mercy, who has, like his Master, felt the power of temptation in its might, and come scathless through the trial. “In all points tempted—yet without sin”; therefore, to Him you may “boldly go to find mercy.”1 [Note: F. W. Robertson.]

2. There is no fellowship with God possible on the footing of what people call “disinterested communion.” No, we have always to go to Him to get something from Him. The question is, What do we expect to get? The text tells us. It is not temporal blessings, not the answers to foolish desires, not the taking away of thorns in the flesh, but mercy and grace to help—inward and spiritual blessings. But what are these? The one expresses the heart of God, the other expresses the hand of God. We may obtain mercy as suppliants coming boldly, confidently, frankly, with faith in the Great High Priest, to the throne of grace. There we get the full heart of God. We stand before Him in our filth, in our weakness, with conscience gnawing at us in the sense of many infirmities, many a sin and shortcoming and omission, and on the throne, so to speak, is a shoot of tender love from God’s heart to us, and we get for all our weakness and sin pity and pardon, and find mercy of the Lord in that day. And then in getting the full heart of God, with all its Divine abundance of pardoning grace, and tender, gracious pity, we get, of course, the full hand of God to obtain mercy, and find grace, the bestowment of the needful blessings, the obtaining of grace in time of need, the right grace. There are no blunders in the equipment with which He supplies us. He does not give me the parcel that was meant for you; there is no error in the delivery. He does not send His soldiers to the North Pole equipped for warfare in Africa. He does not give this man a blessing that the man’s circumstances would not require. No; God cannot err. The right grace will be most surely given to us to help us in time of need, or, as the words may perhaps be more vigorously and correctly translated, find grace for timely aid, grace punctually and precisely at the very nick of time, at the very exact time determined by heaven’s chronometer, not by ours. It will not come as quickly as impatience might think it ought; it will not come so soon as to prevent an agony of prayer; it will not come in time enough for our impatience, for murmuring, for presumptuous desires; but it will come in time to do all that is needed.

You remember the narrative of that great final battle on the plains of Waterloo. For long weary days brave men died by the thousands; the afternoon of the last day was wearing rapidly away, the thin red living line getting thinner and thinner, the squares smaller and smaller at each returning charge—but at last, just before the daylight faded, just before endurance could do no more, there comes old Blücher at last and gives the order, and the whole line bore down upon the enemy and scattered them. Ah, help came at the right time, not so soon that the courage of our brave soldiers had not been tested, but before despair had settled upon the ranks, and in time for a great and perfect victory. “Let us therefore draw near with boldness unto the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy, and may find grace to help us in time of need.”1 [Note: A. Maclaren.]

An old Scottish divine, Robert Walker, makes some apt observations on finding grace to help us in time of need. The grace, he remarks, that we are encouraged to ask is grace for present need, and not present grace for future supposed necessities. It is no uncommon thing for serious people who suspect their own sincerity to forecast some trial of the severest kind, and to pass judgment upon themselves, according to the present state and temper of their minds with respect to that supposed trial. What shall I think of myself? saith one; it is required of a disciple of Jesus, that he take up his cross; but so feeble am I, that my nature shrinks at the remotest prospect of suffering. Alas! saith another, instead of desiring “to depart, and to be with Christ,” death is to me the “king of terrors”: when I think of dissolution, my heart dies within me; what shall I do when the fatal period is come? By such unwarrantable experiments do many perplex and discourage their souls, and weaken their hands for present duty. I call them unwarrantable experiments, because they are not only beside the Scripture rule but directly contrary to it. Our Lord hath commanded us to “take no thought for the morrow,” but to leave the morrow to take thought for the things of itself; because “sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.” Grace to suffer is for a suffering season; grace to die is for dying moments: then, but not before, is the time of need. Are you solicitous about grace for future emergencies? Let me ask you, I pray, have you got all the grace you need for present duty? If you think you have, I can, without further inquiry, assure you that you are mistaken. At this very moment you need grace to cure your anxiety and distrust, to check your impatience and presumptuous curiosity. Cast your care upon God for every needful support when you shall be called to suffer and die; and come to His throne for grace that may enable you to live to some good and useful purpose in the meantime. Till the present time cease to be a time of need, it is indecent, it is foolish, to look beyond it, and to distress yourselves with a premature anxiety about the morrow.1 [Note: Robert Walker, Sermons on Practical Subjects, 225.]

Wants and needs are different things. We often want what we do not need, and need what we do not want. We distinguish between young wants and needs, and “know how to give good gifts to our children.” Is not the infinite Mind wise enough, and the infinite Love strong enough, to subordinate our wants to our needs and disappoint us in the short run, if need be, to develop and delight us in the long one? Real needs override incidental wants; we cannot always have what we please, if we are to have what God pleases—and what is best for us. To want what God wishes, is a swift way to have His wishes come true, and to have our real needs amply supplied.2 [Note: M. D. Babcock, Thoughts for Every-Day Living, 24.]

Jesus calls on us to claim God as a helper as He did, and then with that help to resist evil as He did; to contend against trial in His solitary reliance on His Father; to win inward vigour, inward peace, by living for work and dying for love; not to be indifferent, dreaming, but to hunger for righteousness, to strive to enter in at the strait gate, to lay down our life for the sheep, to rise incessantly out of dreams into daylight. God will not make us do that by miracle. But He will be in it when we begin it, or desire to begin it, as our help and strength, a very present power. Not the weakening help or the degrading strength which by taking everything out of our hands leaves us undeveloped and unexercised, but the help which is inspiration, and the strength which flows from encouragement; nay, more, which flows from the consciousness of being loved, from knowledge of the glorious character of Him who loves, and from the mighty motives which the knowledge that we shall gain perfection wakes within us to enkindle work, to sweeten trial, to enlarge thought, and to fill work, thought, and trial with healthy joy. In one word, God does not make us grow into His likeness, He helps us through the laws of our nature to grow into it ourselves.3 [Note: Stopford A. Brooke.]

MY WAYS ARE HIGHER THAN YOUR WAYS

As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts(Isaiah 55:9, NIV).

https://youtu.be/jlU3RVBY-V0

MESSAGE  "For as the sky soars high above earth, so the way I work surpasses the way you work, and the way I think is beyond the way you think.

For as the heavens, are higher than the earth,.... Than which there cannot be conceived a greater distance:

so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts; which may denote the heavenliness of the ways and thoughts of God, the eternity and unsearchableness of them, and their excellency and preciousness; as well as the very great distance between his ways and thoughts and men's which this is designed to illustrate.

https://youtu.be/RAi_https://youtu.be/RAi_6G6nHC8

Isaiah 55:8-9

The Highest is the Most Forgiving

For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.—Isa 55:8-9.

In this chapter we have a great evangelical discourse on the Return from Exile, which is very grandly conceived. Israel was not going back to be as before, but to become the mistress and mother of nations. “Nations that knew not thee shall run unto thee because of the Lord thy God.” And along with that enlarged political influence there was to be a new satisfaction of heart; in that deep hunger which cannot be appeased with bread, God’s gift would bring them rest. The promise was well-nigh inconceivable, and it was not made easier by the lowliness of the condition, for what was to “ring in the full satisfaction” was nothing higher or more revolutionary than obedience; all the needed changes in the mind of statesmen and in the mood of the exiled people were suspended on that. “Hearken diligently unto me,” saith God, “and ye shall eat that which is good,” “hear and your soul shall live.” Obedience, which, in the experience of every one has passed unrecognised a hundred times, was suddenly to work a transformation; and men, in listening, seemed to hear a fairy tale from worlds of other dimensions and powers than this, for things like that do not happen on the level of this arid and commonplace earth. To the exiles it sounded much as the preaching of the gospel sounds to some of ourselves, who do not doubt that satisfaction is a good thing, and whose heart runs out in desire for a little more worth the name; but in this sober world, where still the second best prevails, how can it be? In all our churches there are people who have settled it in their minds that, essentially, this promise is not true, but belongs to the delusive phraseology of religion where word and thing do not keep pace.

1. The glory of the preaching of a noble religion is that it “bears our intellect, conscience, emotions, imagination out beyond this world,” and enables us to realise another scheme of powers than our senses have discovered; and that is what the prophet here attempts. Where man’s faith was hindered he thrusts in the bare assertion that God’s thoughts and ways are not like ours. If things are really of the size and force which commonly are attributed to them there would be no room for a gospel to work; but then the world is built in God’s way; it is a grander world than we yet have dreamed, with secrets of power yet unexplored. There are height and depth within it, and what we count impossible is possible with God.1 [Note: W. M. Macgregor, Jesus Christ the Son of God, p. 91.] “My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are my ways your ways.”

2. The consideration that God’s nature is unlike to ours, that His thoughts are not as man’s thoughts, His ways not as man’s ways, is adduced, in the passage immediately before us, as a reason why a sinful being should have all the more hope for mercy at His hands. But there is a point of view from which we must hold the very opposite of this proposition to be the truth. Neither morality nor religion would be possible if, deeper than any dissimilarity, there were not a real and essential likeness between God’s nature and ours. Morality is not obedience to an arbitrary authority, but sympathy with the principle or spirit of God’s law. Religion is the communion of the soul with God, but betwixt beings absolutely unlike there could be no communion. It is just because God’s nature is essentially one with ours—His that of the Father of spirits, ours that of spirits made in His own image, after His own likeness; it is because what we call thought, intelligence, mind, is in essence the same in God and in us—in Him the infinite thought or reason, in us that of beings to whom the inspiration of the Almighty hath given understanding; it is, finally, because when I say, “God is Love,” I can ascribe to Him as that which constitutes the deepest essence of His nature that same feeling which binds human hearts together, and, as by a hidden yet all-powerful solvent, melts their separateness into unity;—in one word, it is because in the profoundest sense of the words, God’s thoughts are as our thoughts, and God’s ways as our ways, that we can understand the revelation He has given of His will, and enter into that spiritual fellowship with Him in which true religion consists.1 [Note: John Caird.]https://t.e2ma.net/click/wsyycg/4yscfwb/kjbth3b

Let us accordingly consider (1) the Likeness of God’s Ways to ours, and (2) their Unlikeness.

I.   The Likeness of God’s Thoughts and Ways to Ours

1. If our thoughts were not in a measure like God’s thoughts, we should know nothing about Him. If our thoughts were not like God’s thoughts, we should have no standard for life or thinking. Righteousness and beauty and truth and goodness are the same things in heaven and earth, and alike in God and man. We are made after His image, poor creatures though we be; and though there must ever be a gulf of unlikeness, which we cannot bridge, between the thoughts of Him whose knowledge has no growth or uncertainty, whose wisdom is infinite and all whose nature is boundless light, and our knowledge, and must ever be a gulf between the workings and ways of Him who works without effort, and knows neither weariness nor limitation, and our work, so often foiled, so always toilsome, yet in all the unlikeness there is (and no man can denude himself of it) a likeness to the Father. For the image in which God made man at the beginning is not an image that it is in the power of man to cast away, and in the worst of his corruptions and the widest of his departures he still bears upon him the signs of likeness “to Him that created him.” The coin is rusty, battered, defaced; but still legible are the head and the writing. “Whose image and superscription hath it?” Render unto God the things that are declared to be God’s, because they bear His likeness and are stamped with His signature.

The word “thought” would have no more meaning for me than the words “red” or “green” to a man born blind, if it were not that I have the key to it in the principle of thought or intelligence within me, and that when anything is asserted or denied of the thoughts of God, the proposition is intelligible only because it tacitly implies that thought in God is essentially the same with that which I call thought in me.1 [Note: John Caird.]

2. All knowledge of Divine things begins in a sense of our kinship with God. It is impossible to gain any strong, soul-dominating impression of the Eternal unless we recognise that in the stupendous presence which fills heaven and earth, there is a centre of personal consciousness, not unlike that upon which the sense of our identity rests. God thinks His counsels, chooses His lines of action, loves, and also welcomes the love which is offered to Him, according to the self-same scheme upon which human nature is constituted, and its functions proceed.

This opening up of the mind of God to the mind of man, with the very assurance that, worms of the dust though we be, we are reading the thoughts and exploring the ways of the Creator, is at once the starting-point and the goal of all human knowledge, in the treasure of history, the consecration of science and philosophy, the inspiration of religion natural and revealed, so that whoever cuts off this intercourse between God and man, through the manifestation of His very mind and heart to us, involves all things in darkness, and covers us with the shadow of death.

This is the method of the Old Testament, and Jesus also followed it. We see it in His parabolic teaching, which rests on the assumption that, as the Son of Sirach says, “all things are double one against another,” and the spiritual world the counterpart of the natural, as Mrs. Browning says,

Consummating its meaning, rounding all

To justice and perfection, line by line,

Form by form, nothing single nor alone,

The great below clenched by the great above.

And we see it also in the name which He gave to God. He called Him “the heavenly Father,” and I like to regard this as a reminiscence of His sweet and happy childhood in the house of the carpenter of Nazareth. The Evangelist describes Joseph as “a righteous man,” and the term means rather, in Biblical phraseology, “a kindly man,” as St. Chrysostom explains it, “kind and sweetly reasonable (χρηστὸς καὶ ἐπιεικής).” Jesus remembered gratefully the fatherly goodness which had sheltered and sustained His helpless childhood, and, searching the whole domain of human experience, He could discover no fitter emblem of the infinite goodness of God.1 [Note: D. Smith in Religion and the Modern World, p. 188.]

3. With respect to the very matter of Divine forgiveness of which the text particularly treats, and which it seems to represent as altogether different from human forgiveness, the Bible is full of representations which seem to imply the very reverse. When it is declared that “As a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth them that fear Him”; when it is said, “If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask Him”; when we are told to pray, “Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors”; and when our Lord sets forth as the type of that love and tenderness which, in our furthest aberrations from goodness, God bears to us, the love which no ingratitude has been able to exhaust, no depth of infamy to render hopeless of its object, the mingled sorrow and pity and joy of an earthly father over his prodigal yet penitent child—what have we in all this if not the assurance that we may know God by human analogies, that if we would learn what love and pity and forgiveness are in God’s heart, we have only to look into our own; so that, even as regards that very characteristic of the Divine nature of which the text treats, there is a sense in which we must not deny, but assert, that God’s thoughts are as our thoughts, and God’s ways as our ways.

I was told once of an old man in a Yorkshire village, whose son had been a sore grief to him. One day a neighbour inquired how the lad was doing. “Oh, very bad!” was the answer. “He’s been drinking again, and behaving very rough.” “Dear, dear!” said the neighbour. “If he was my son, I would turn him out.” “Yes,” returned the father, “and so would I, if he was yours. But, you see, he’s not your’s; he’s mine.”2 [Note: Ibid. p. 189.]

Think of the parable of the Prodigal Son, or that great saying of His, that triumphant argument a fortiori: “What man is there of you, who, if his son shall ask him for a loaf, will give him a stone; or if he shall ask for a fish, will give him a serpent? If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father which is in heaven give good things to them that ask Him?” (Mat 7:9-11). The postulate here and everywhere in our Lord’s teaching is the kinship between God and man and the consequent reasonableness of interpreting the Divine by the human. As Browning has it:

Take all in a word: the truth in God’s breast

Lies trace for trace upon ours impressed:

Though He is so bright and we so dim,

We are made in His image to witness Him.

II

The Unlikeness of God’s Thoughts and Ways to Ours

We have not gone far in our search for God before we feel the check-rein and are constrained to admit that, whilst there are points of contact between His being and ours, there are also points of enormous dissimilarity. We have worked from the scale of the dwarf, and the larger mensuration is beyond us. There is a basis for common fellowship in the elemental truths which arise from these methods of comparison: but we must not make God according to a petty, mundane ground-plan and transfer the limitations of human life and character to His incomparable person and government.

1. God’s ways and thoughts are unlike ours in their superhuman perfection. The whole Bible is but an expansion of one sentence, one utterance of the Eternal, “I am Jehovah.” Hence the revelation must be incomplete; for who could fully reveal Himself to His creatures would be no God; and it must also be astonishing and amazing; for a professed record of any part of God’s thoughts and ways that did not land in mystery and tend to wonder would be self-condemned, and proved to be neither true nor Divine. It is not only here and there that God’s thoughts and ways are superhuman, but throughout, just as a circle is everywhere a circle, and nowhere a square, or capable of being reduced to the latter figure. How man can at all lay hold of God, or, with his infinite and infinitely inferior mental faculties, frame any conception of Him, this is the wonder and has sometimes been the stumbling-block of philosophy; and it is only removed out of the way by devoutly and thankfully accepting the fact that we do know Him (though darkly), and are so far made in His image, that there may be and ought to be reverential contact and communion with Him.

God’s method of teaching us would not be by a revelation if the finite could adjust itself at once to the infinite mind. In a revelation we have presented to us some of the unassimilated disparities between God’s thoughts and ways and those of His creature man. Without realising it we verge upon the impiety of assuming that God has nothing to teach us, and that we may have something to teach Him. You do not hope to master Newton’s Principia with as much ease as you grasp snippets of toothsome frivolities in the columns of the daily press. You ought not to think the Most High as easy to understand as a plain, plodding, transparent neighbour. Is it seemly to expect that the Mighty God will adopt our methods and put Himself into step for all time with the dwarfs of earth? This gross, phenomenal self-complacency, this thrice-assured infallibility, proof against all doubt of itself, is an offence. God does sometimes bow the heavens and strangely condescend to our infirmity, but it would be a poor kindness to us if He were to make those infirmities, rather than His own higher thoughts and surpassing ways, the limit of His self-revelations and the bounds of our destiny. We are not slowly evolving ourselves into the knowledge of God, but God is meeting us with a vast body of truth concerning His being and His providential ways, the vaster part of which yet remains to be touched and assimilated.

Our nature may be like God’s, but it is not the measure of God’s. Even one human being is often a mystery to another. The words and actions of one who is far in advance of us in wisdom and goodness are often unintelligible to us. It is the penalty of greatness to lose the sympathy of meaner men. A great man is indeed the exponent of the truest spirit of humanity, but for that very reason he is often misunderstood by the men among whom he lives. His motives are purer, his aims nobler, his actions determined by wider principles, his whole career in life regulated by ideas more far-reaching and comprehensive than those of ordinary men. And so, just for this very reason that he is truer to the perfect ideal of humanity than they, it may be said that His thoughts are not as their thoughts, nor His ways as their ways. Much more, obviously, must this be said of Him whose image and goodness are infinite. Man is made in the image of God, but God is not the reflection of imperfect man. There is much in us and in all our thoughts and ways which we cannot transfer to Him, and if we attempt to do so, we only ascribe to the object of worship, as has often been done, our human weakness and errors, sometimes even our follies and crimes.1 [Note: John Caird.]

2. They are unlike in their comprehensiveness. It is a wonderful and beautiful turn which the prophet here gives to the thought of the transcendent elevation of God. The heavens are the very type of the unattainable; and to say that they are “higher than the earth” seems, at first sight, to be but to say, “No man hath ascended into the heavens,” and you sinful men must grovel here down upon your plain, whilst they are far above, out of your reach. But the heavens bend. They are an arch, and not a straight line. They touch the horizon; and there come down from them the sweet influences of sunshine and rain, of dew and of blessing, which bring fertility. So they are not only far and unattainable, but friendly and beneficent, and communicative of good. Like them, in true analogy but yet infinite superiority to the best and noblest in man, is the boundless mercy of our pardoning God:—

The glorious sky, embracing all,

Is like its Maker’s love,

Wherewith encompassed, great and small

In peace and order move.

The lesson is one of humility, but also of consolation; for the depths of God’s mind are depths of truth, of wisdom, and of love; and therefore we may be not only cast down, but also lifted up as we study in this lofty chapter these great words: “For My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways My ways, saith the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways, and My thoughts than your thoughts.”2 [Note: J. Cairns.]

3. They are unlike in their moral and intellectual estimates. Can we estimate the moral difference between the human and the Divine? God spends the incomputable term of His eternal Being in ministries of unwearied grace,—upholding the weak, doing good to all, setting forth in mighty deeds His truth and righteousness, so proving within Himself that “it is more blessed to give than to receive”; whilst we, though outwardly blameless, have spent much of our time in gathering for self-enrichment, taking toll of our neighbours, asserting our place in the world, bringing others into captivity to our will. And, compressed as we are into moral dwarfishness by the traditions of an imperfect society, we think a selfish scheme of life quite defensible. The Divine nature, like a fountain, is ever pouring itself forth in benediction, without taint of self or stain of darkness; whilst human nature is a turgid, devouring whirlpool, sucking down into its depths whatever may chance to drift within its range. When we think and act, we are weighted by the incubus of past aggressiveness and dishonour; but when God thinks and acts, His character of age-long goodness uplifts all His ideals beyond the uttermost heights.

How vast is the difference even among men in this respect. The ideas of James Chalmers, the apostle of New Guinea, and of the cannibals who clubbed and ate him, were not made of the same stuff. General Gordon and the Arab slave-raiders, whose power he set himself to break up, thought in divergent grooves and represented antagonistic schemes. The philanthropist who founds a Garden City and the pitiless Shylock who rackrents a slum have antithetic views of life because of the contrasted types of character which give impact to their notions. The passions cooped up in our close criminal communities do not produce rare art, seraphic music, supreme literature. The dreams flitting through Pentonville, Dartmoor, or Broadmoor brains, and the dreams cherished in a Peace Congress, would make books for different sections if written down and presented to a library.1 [Note: T. G. Selby, The Strenuous Gospel, p. 12.]

In the early years of the last century Walter Scott, poet and novelist, took a voyage round the north and west coasts of Scotland in company with Stevenson, the lighthouse constructor. Scott went for pleasure, and wherever they landed spent his time in visiting ruined castles, talking with the old gossips of the hamlets and picking up local traditions, which he afterwards wove into his fascinating stories. Stevenson was sent out by Trinity House to survey the coast, mark out dangerous reefs, and choose the best sites for lighthouses. Scott landed when the weather was fair and the sea smooth. His friend faced the gales in open boats, visited jagged rocks over which the surf boiled, and braved countless dangers, because he was commissioned to find out where warning beacons must be fixed and lighthouses placed, and how in the coming generations imperilled lives could be saved. When the storm outside shakes doors and windows we sit by the fireside deriving pleasure from the wizard’s books; but the seaman battling with the waves finds salvation through the thought and work of the romance writer’s comrade. The two men were the best of friends, and as they met day by day had many interests in common. But their thoughts ran in different directions because the one had no responsibilities and was catering for the tastes of his admiring readers, whilst the other bore upon his soul a great burden of human life. Their paths diverged, for their duties varied and their minds were acting in different grooves. God thinks with the burdens of a doomed race resting upon His soul of love, and acts to ransom them from the power of destruction. His thoughts and ways are beyond ours, even as the heavens are higher than the earth.1 [Note: T. G. Selby, The Strenuous Gospel, p. 15.]

4. More particularly God’s thoughts and ways are unlike ours in their estimate of sin.

1. God knows us more thoroughly than any human being can. The estimate which a human censor forms of us is not based on any immediate knowledge, but is an inference from our outward conduct and bearing. But this estimate may easily be an erroneous one, inasmuch as our actions may only partially betray us, may in many ways be an inadequate or deceptive expression of character. Would any of us like that a human eye should read our thoughts and feelings, draw back the curtain of reserve, of conventional propriety, of decorous looks and regulated speech, and see our undisguised selves for a single day? Would there be nothing to abate the observer’s good opinion of us, nothing revealed which neither our words nor deeds nor outward aspect betrays? We do not need to speak of concealed sins or crimes, the facts of which are unknown to the world, and which, if they were known would brand our name with dishonour and infamy; for in so far as these things are concealed, it is obviously nothing in the nature of human actions themselves but only in the accident of their being unobserved or undetected, that makes a man seem in the eyes of men better than he is, and gains him exemption from shame and censure. But what needs more reflection is that from the very nature of the thing there is much in a man’s outward character and spirit that never comes above-board, or only partially and fitfully, and which cannot form an element in the judgment of those who measure us only by overt acts. There is an inner life which no mortal eye sees, a great hidden element of character seething beneath the surface, which only the occasional outflash or unexpected outbreak betrays. There are, for instance, lurking in many a man’s nature evil tendencies which lack of opportunity has kept latent. The unregulated appetite, the secret lust, the cowardice, covetousness, or malignity, the frail virtue which, if but the hour of opportunity came, would present but a feeble front to temptation, may be there within the man’s breast; but the conditions that would convert inclination into action have been lacking, and like the latent disease that has not become active, or the subterranean fire-damp which the flame has never reached, it lies harmless and hidden from observation.

If there be an inspection which is intercepted by no softening veil, before which all disguise and ambiguity are gone, which sees us through and through; if there be a moral estimate which takes into account all that men are and have been and done—secrets which perhaps have never been told, burdens of guilt that have been borne for years in silent anguish, smouldering tendencies to vice, unhallowed passions straining against the leash of self-control and social propriety, every rude, bad thought, every impure imagination, every meanness and weakness, every act of cowardly silence or sham disinterestedness—if, I say, there be a moral Judge before the broad, unshaded, piercing light of whose inspection all that we are is thus laid bare; and if betwixt him and a fellow man a sin-stained soul had its choice who should be its judge, by whose decision its fate should be determined, might we not deem it impossible to hesitate for a moment? “I can bear,” might he not well say, “man’s inspection, but not God’s; before the tribunal of a mortal there is room for hope, but what hope or help can there be for a guilty soul at the bar of the Omniscient? Let me fall into the hands of man and not into the hands of God, for His thoughts are not as man’s thoughts, nor His ways as man’s ways.”

And yet it is just because God’s thoughts and ways are not as man’s, because His righteousness is infinitely exalted above man’s that therefore the unrighteous may “return unto the Lord” with the assurance that “He will have mercy upon him, and to our God” with the confidence that “He will abundantly pardon.”1 [Note: John Caird.]

Undoubtedly a man naturally knows that sin is an evil, and without this knowledge, indeed, he would be incapable of committing sin, since in any action a man is guilty only of the evil which his conscience apprehends. But this natural perception of sin is more or less confused and indistinct. Our Saviour on the Cross prayed for His murderers in these words: “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.” He did not mean that they were ignorant that they were doing wrong, for then they could have needed no forgiveness, but that they did not realise the full atrocity of the deed. They were acting guiltily indeed, but inadvertently and blindly. And the same may be said of very many sinners. Sin is for the most part a leap in the dark. A man knows he is doing a dangerous thing, but he does not realise the full danger. He does not take in the full scope of his action, nor its complete consequences. St. Paul speaks of the deceitfulness of sin, and the expression describes very well the source of that disappointment and unhappiness which often overtakes the transgressor, when he finds himself involved in difficulties from which it is all but impossible to extricate himself, and sorrows which he never anticipated. It is the old story. Sin “beginneth pleasantly, but in the end it will bite like a snake and will spread abroad poison like a serpent.”

2. God is more angry than we are. In God there is an immitigable abhorrence and hatred of evil, to which, in our keenest moments of aggrieved sensibility, we only faintly approximate. The easy, good-natured divinity who makes everything comfortable is not the God of the Bible. There He has a frowning as well as a smiling face, an aspect, not of feeble benignity, but of terror and wrath and relentless hostility to evil and evil doers. If mercy mean foregoing just indignation and letting off from punishment, then there is no mercy in God. He is the most merciless, relentless, inexorable of all beings. If sin and misery were disconnected, if in all the universe one selfish soul could ever escape wretchedness and live on at peace, it would be a universe over which God had ceased to rule. Wherever a sinful soul exists in all time and space, there, sooner or later, in its loneliness and anguish, as of a worm that dieth not and a fire that is not quenched, there is the proof that the justice of God demands, and will not abate aught of its terrible satisfaction.

Frankly we have to recognise that there are two ways of it, two measurings of the value of things, two views of life; and, soon or late, we must make our choice of this or that. The common temptation is to shirk the choice. Within the Church of Jesus are multitudes of entirely worldly people, whose standard and aim are of this world. They live themselves, and they teach their children to live, under the domination of the ideas of society, and yet they never doubt that they are good Christians. If we believe Christ, that cannot be; the man who heard but did not do seemed to Him like a man building a house without a foundation, which topples about him. We learn in life that there is a religion which is not Christ’s religion. In our churches there is a veiled paganism, hard, scornful, unforgiving, fashion-ridden, and the mischief of it lies not in what these people do so much as in what they think; and in returning to God the first necessity is that they forsake their thoughts.

There is nothing more false and immoral than the weak, sentimental tenderness with which crime and criminals are sometimes regarded. It is a spurious benignity that always recoils from severity, shrinks from the sight of pain, and would treat vice and crime as a thing to be wept over with effusive sensibility and not to be sternly condemned and punished. The hysteric cry for remission of a criminal’s sentence that occasionally bursts forth from foolish women and still more foolish men, has in it nothing of the spirit of true Christian charity.

Béranger speaks of “the God of good-natured folk,” a God not unreasonably strict, who can, on occasion, be blind to human slips; and in Christian churches many prayers are addressed to that “Dieu des bons gens.” The trouble is that, when penalty begins to press, these people have no faith to help them. A God who does not make too much of little sins they can understand, but a God who forgives, when the sin is very great, passes all their comprehension; and when the evil days come they are left without a hope.1 [Note: W. M. Macgregor, Jesus Christ the Son of God, p. 93.]

5. But the purpose of the prophet in telling us that God’s thoughts and God’s ways are higher than ours is that He may give us to understand His readiness to forgive. We may turn the words about in many ways and put meanings into them, but what was first in the prophet’s intention was to assert that God forgives, as He does all else, on a large scale.

The “for” at the beginning of each clause points us back to the previous statement, and both of the verses of our text are in different ways its foundation. And what has preceded is this: “Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts: and let him return unto the Lord, and he will have mercy upon him; and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon.” That is why the prophet dilates upon the difference between the “thoughts” and the “ways” of God and men.

We may not say that God forgives just as man forgives, that mercy goes forth from Him towards the offender in the same measure and for the same reasons as mercy from man to his offending brother. It is possible for man to be cruel when God is kind, and to be weakly lenient where God is stern. There are occasions when the culprit might hope for escape were men alone his judge; there are occasions when, shrinking from the merciless censure of human judges, the sinful soul might well cry out, “Let me now fall into the hand of the Lord; for very great are His mercies: but let me not fall into the hand of man.”

(1) In the first place, it may be observed that, contrary to what might be supposed, it is not in point of fact, even amongst men, the best and purest who are found to be the severest censors and judges of others.

Thy mercy greater is than any sin,

Thy greatness none can comprehend:

Wherefore, O Lord, let me Thy mercy win,

Whose glorious name no time can ever end:

Wherefore I say all praise belongs to Thee,

Whom I beseech be merciful to me.1 [Note: William Byrd, Psalms, Sonnets, and Songs.]

And if, thus, human goodness is the more merciful in proportion as it approaches nearer to perfection, if amongst the highest, heavenliest spirituality is the most tolerant, the last to let go the fallen or to lose its faith in human goodness, and the possibility for the worst of better things,—might we not conclude that when goodness becomes absolutely perfect, just then will mercy reach its climax and become absolutely unlimited?

2. Again, in proof of the assertion that God’s nature, in so far as it differs from man’s, makes Him more and not less likely to forgive, consider that in God there is not, and cannot be, any personal irascibility or resentment; He can never regard a sinful soul with any feeling of vindictiveness, any desire to extract from His sufferings reparation for wrong. There are certain defective theological notions according to which the relations of sinful man to God have been represented as turning on the principle of what is called “vindictive justice,” and the so-called “scheme of redemption” as based on the necessity of extracting from suffering, reparation for wrong. Now, there may be a true notion which men try thus to express, but the form in which they express it is erroneous and unworthy. In God, and therefore in that moral order of the world which is the expression of His nature, there is no vindictiveness, no personal resentment; and it is the utter absence of this in His nature that makes Him infinitely more forgiving than men, even the best of men, are.

Conceive for a moment what a change would take place in our relations to those who offend or injure us, how far it would go to the removal of everything that hinders forgiveness, if we could eliminate from our feelings every vestige of what is due to personal irritation or resentment. Conceive a man looking on all insults, wrongs, offences, with absolute, passionless indifference as regards his own personality, and contemplating them only with the pain and grief due to their moral culpability. Suppose, further, that, with a mind thus no longer agitated by personal feeling, no longer biassed by wounded self-love, he could see in the wrong or injury an evil inflicted on the wronger’s own nature far greater than any inflicted on himself, the exhibition of a morally diseased spiritual state so deplorable as to swallow up every other emotion than that of profoundest sorrow and pity for his wretchedness: and so, that instead of retaliating or inflicting fresh evil upon him, or never resting till the offence should be worked out in his misery, there should arise in the injured man’s breast an intense longing to cure the diseased spirit, to save him from himself and win him back to goodness—conceive such a state of mind, and though, as we depict it, it seems to imply a magnanimity and self-forgetfulness almost impossible in a being of flesh and blood, yet is it an exact representation of the heart and life of Him who was God manifest in the flesh, and therefore of the relation of God to all sinful and guilty men.

For what is the life of Christ on earth but a long, silent, immovable patience; an absolute, life-long superiority to personal feeling; a sorely-tried yet unshaken calm and freedom of spirit amidst insults and wrongs. He could feel, He could grieve, He was not incapable of anger, but where in the record of His life shall we find Him betrayed into one whisper of resentful or vindictive feeling for the ills He suffered at the hands of men? He moved through life exposed to almost ceaseless hostility, subjected to almost every form of injury that human hatred and cruelty could inflct—to scorn, contumely, misrepresentation of motives, treachery, ingratitude, desertion; He was subjected to foul personal indignities, disowned and deserted by the friends He most trusted, and, in His sore need, betrayed by one of them to His enemies. The tenderest, kindest, most loving Spirit that ever breathed, He lived rejected and despised of men, and He died amidst the cries and taunts of an infuriated mob. There were moments when His personal followers, amazed at His forbearance, would have unsheathed the sword in His defence, or called down heaven’s artillery on His persecutors. And yet never, from first to last, can we find in His history one slightest sign of personal irritation, one transient flash of exasperated sensibility, or cry for redress of His cruel wrongs. All other feeling in His breast was swallowed up in an infinite pity and sorrow for those at whose hands He suffered. He lived their unwearied benefactor, and He died invoking, amidst the paroxysms of His agony, heaven’s mercy on His murderers. And in all this He was to us the manifestation of that Being into whose nature personal irascibility can never enter, who has no personality apart from goodness—the incarnate image of that God who is long-suffering and slow to wrath, abundant in goodness and mercy, and who, exalted in the infinitude of His goodness far above the agitation of man’s resentful passions, declares that as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are His thoughts above our thoughts, and His ways above our ways, and that if the wicked will forsake his way and the unrighteous man his thoughts, and return unto the Lord, He will have mercy upon him, and will abundantly pardon him.1 [Note: John Caird.]

1. Now let us look at some of the ways in which we may see that God’s pardon outreaches the thoughts and the ways of men. And, first of all, let us consider the character of the sin which had to be forgiven. Man does not forgive where he has been insulted as God was in his rebellion. Nations do not tolerate blows aimed at their independence and their very existence; and therefore man’s revolt might have been expected to draw down swift and remediless destruction. We justly exalt the Fatherhood of God; but this great and glorious truth must be harmonised with the rest of God’s character, and with the conditions of the moral universe over which He presides. Sin in its very essence is a wilful attempt to dethrone, degrade, and even destroy God; and even the relation of fatherhood, with its duties to other children, may warrant and even necessitate the penal separation of the child or children, who would conspire to act out in the family, what sin is in the universe. That God’s thoughts should have been thoughts of peace, in such a crisis to a sinning world, is the wonder of unfallen beings and of those who are recovered. They cannot go back to that “counsel of peace,” in which, though every foreseen trespass demanded the exercise of justice, mercy yet rejoiced against judgment, without exclaiming: “This is not the manner of man, O Lord God.” “O the depth of the riches, both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past finding out!”

Wilt thou forgive that sin where I begun,

Which was my sin, though it were done before?

Wilt thou forgive that sin, through which I run

And do run still, though still I do deplore?

When thou hast done, thou hast not done;

For I have more.

Wilt thou forgive that sin which I have won

Others to sin, and made my sins their door?

Wilt thou forgive that sin which I did shun

A year or two, but wallowed in, a score?

When thou hast done, thou hast not done;

For I have more.”1 [Note: John Donne.]

2. The conditions imposed.—The sole and simple condition is repentance—that is to say, repentance which is renunciation. Is there anything in God which, if I now repent and turn with my whole heart to Him, bars the way to forgiveness, makes Him insist first on the satisfaction to His offended law which misery and suffering bring? Be my past life what it may—wasted, mis-spent, stained with the indelible traces of selfish and evil deeds—if now I break away from the past, hate it, renounce it, and in sincerest sorrow and penitence turn to offer up my soul, my life, my whole being to God, will He say: “No, till vengeance for the past have its due, till the demand of my law for penal suffering be satisfied, mercy is impossible, I cannot forgive?”

Is not such a thought a travesty of the nature of God, a misconception of what He, the All-good, All-loving, must regard as the sacrifice for sin that is best and truest? For what must be that sacrifice or satisfaction that is dearest to Righteousness or to the Infinite Righteous One? The misery of lost souls, the pain, the sorrow and dismay of their moral desolation, that knows no mitigation, and the smoke of a torment that rises up for ever? Oh no, offer that to Molech, but not to the God whom Christ has revealed. But the tear of penitence, the prayer of faith, the sighs of a contrite spirit, the love and hope that will not let go its hold on God, the confiding trust that from the depths of despair sends forth the cry, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before thee”; the yearning after a purer, better life, that finds utterance in the prayer, “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”—yes, I make answer, that is the sacrifice dearest to Him who despiseth not the sighing of a broken and contrite spirit, who hath said, “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest,” and whose gospel, proclaimed by the lips and sealed by the sacrifice and death of His dear Son, is but a glorious renewal of the ancient promise, “Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts: and let him return unto the Lord, and he will have mercy upon him; and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon.”

He discoursed with me very fervently and with great openness of heart, concerning his manner of going to God, whereof some part is related already. He told me, that all consists in one hearty renunciation of everything which we are sensible does not lead us to God, in order that we may accustom ourselves to a continual conversation with Him, without mystery and in simplicity.1 [Note: Brother Lawrence, The Practice of the Presence of God, p. 19.]

3. The measure of the forgiveness.—Nothing of which we have any experience in ourselves or in others is more than as a drop to the ocean compared with the absolute fulness and perfect freeness and unwearied frequency of His forgiveness. “He will abundantly pardon.” He will multiply pardon. “With him there is plenteous redemption.” We think we have stretched the elasticity of long-suffering and forgiveness further than we might have been reasonably expected to do if seven times we forgive the erring brother, but God’s measure of pardon is seventy times seven, two perfectnesses multiplied into themselves perfectly; for the measure of His forgiveness is boundless, and there is no searching of the depths of His pardoning mercy. You cannot weary Him out; you cannot exhaust it. It is full at the end as at the beginning; and after all its gifts still it remains true, “With him is the multiplying of redemption.”

The fault of all our human theories about forgiveness is that, in the process of explaining, we seem to narrow it; and thus we turn back to words which are better than human, as they come from Christ Himself, when He speaks of the father, who saw his son a great way off, and ran and fell on his neck. In that there is a grand theological artlessness; it seems to say that God forgives, not because a man is sorry, or because some condition or other is satisfied, but at the bottom of all, because, in His heart, He wants His son back again. And in three successive parables Jesus declared that God knows the human joy of finding things. “He will abundantly pardon.”

We scarcely know what forgiveness is on earth. Even after a reconciliation relations remain clouded. Men may not quarrel, but something of the grudge remains; and if they forgive it is for once or twice, for few have patience to go with Peter to the seventh time, and then the heart, with all its gathered rancour, gets its way. Forgiveness is a hard thing, hard to bestow and hard to receive, as most of us have found; and so long as we think of God in the light of that human experience, it must be with reluctance. But His ways are not as ours; when He pardons He pardons out and out, and He does not remember our sins.1 [Note: W. M. Macgregor, Jesus Christ the Son of God, p. 95.]

We have just as much right to draw God’s natural attributes to the scale of the monad as to draw His moral attributes to the scale of a man. If God forgives at all, He will do it with God like freedom and grandeur. If He permits us to crawl across His threshold, He will not merely tolerate our return, but welcome us with music and priceless gifts. Alas! alas! we put into the matchless mind which delights in mercy poor Simon Peter’s thought of a forgiveness stretched and strained to seven times, whilst all the time His mercy outsoars and outspeeds ours, as the path of a sun outsoars the track of a glow-worm in the ditch. His thoughts are not bound by our petty precedents of limitation.

When Dr. Moffat began his labours in Africa, one of his earliest converts was a chief called Africaner. This Africaner was the terror of the colony. He had the ferocity of a desperado, and wherever his name was pronounced, it carried dismay. When Africaner was brought to the knowledge of the truth, it seemed such a great thing that it was described by those who knew him, as the eighth wonder of the world. But God is doing such work every day. Christ is charged to save to the uttermost. He does not improve, but renew. The stupendous thing is giving life to the dead.2 [Note: A. Philip, The Father’s Hand, p. 182.]

4. The method of it.—How utterly unlike to any means of man’s devising are those which God has chosen for the recovery of His lost creatures to His favour and His image! That God’s Son should become incarnate and die on the cross for the world’s redemption; that God’s Spirit should descend into the guilty and polluted hearts of sinners, and work out there a blessed transformation; and that all this should be effected by the free and sovereign grace of God Himself, and laid open to the very chief of sinners, as the unconditional gift of His love, this, as universal experience attests, is something so far from having entered into the heart of man, that it needs incessant effort to keep it before him, even after it has been once revealed.

The world had four thousand years to learn the lesson. God had made the outline of it known to His Church from the beginning. He had raised up a special people to be the depositaries of the revelation; and He had taught them by priests and prophets, by types and signs without number. And yet when redemption came, how few received it, how few understood it; so that when the Saviour was actually hanging on the Cross, and finishing the work given Him to do, it is questionable, if so much as one, even of His own disciples, comprehended the design, or saw the glory of His sacrifice.

We cannot believe God gave His only begotten Son for the spiritual healing and salvation of His enemies, since such an act would be impossible to us. No hero of whom we have read or heard is equal to a like sacrifice. It defies probabilities. Is not this a sign that the Gospel, and the message within it, was thought out in a mind transcending ours, and the way of the Cross was a way suggested by no analogies of history.

All religion has been pressed with this problem, how to harmonise the perfect rectitude of the Divine nature and the solemn claims of law with forgiveness. All religions have borne witness to the fact that men are dimly aware of the discord and dissonance between themselves and the Divine thoughts and ways; and a thousand altars proclaim to us how they have felt that something must be done in order that forgiveness might be possible to an all righteous and Sovereign Judge. The Jew knew that God was a pardoning God, but to him that fact stood as needing much explanation and much light to be thrown upon its relations with the solemn law under which he lived. We have Jesus Christ. The mystery of forgiveness is solved, in so far as it is capable of solution, in Him and in Him alone. His death somewhat explains how God is just and the justifier of him that believeth. High above men’s thoughts this great central mystery of the Gospel rises, that with God there is forgiveness and with God there is perfect righteousness.

When my thoughts about life are put away that I may get God’s thoughts, Christ becomes the gift of God’s heart to me, a Deliverer in whom the power of my new life consists, an Enlightener from whom I learn to think of God and man. “If any man be in Christ,” says Paul, “he is a new creature: old things have passed away, behold they have become new.” His former judgments, his estimate of great and small are changed; he finds himself in a new washen earth. It is no power of earth that can work a change like that, but the redeeming will of God, who is able also to subdue all things unto Himself.1 [Note: W. M. Macgregor, Jesus Christ the Son of God, p. 100.]

Enough, my muse, of earthly things,

And inspirations but of wind;

Take up thy lute, and to it bind

Loud and everlasting strings,

And on them play, and to them sing,

The happy mournful stories,

The lamentable glories

Of the great crucified King!

Mountainous heap of wonders! which dost rise

Till earth thou joinest with the skies!

Too large at bottom, and at top too high,

To be half seen by mortal eye;

How shall I grasp this boundless thing?

What shall I play? What shall I sing?

I’ll sing the mighty riddle of mysterious love,

Which neither wretched man below, nor blessed spirits above,

With all their comments can explain,

How all the whole world’s life to die did not disdain!2 [Note: Abraham Cowley.]

The Highest is the Most Forgiving

NO WEAPON

Isaiah 54:17

But no weapon that is formed against you shall prosper, and every tongue that shall rise 

against you in judgment you shall show to be in the wrong. 

This [peace,righteousness,security, triumph over opposition] is the heritage of the servants of 

the Lord [those in whom the ideal Servant of the Lord is reproduced]; this is the righteousness or the vindication which they obtain from Me [this is that which I impart to them as their justification], says the Lord.

No weapon that is formed against thee shall prosper,.... All weapons of war, as the Targum, which are made with a design to hurt and destroy the people of God, shall be rendered useless; not one of them shall prosper to the advantage of their enemies, or so as to answer their design; nor to the hurt and prejudice, ruin and destruction, of the saints:

and every tongue that shall rise against thee in judgment; that shall raise any calumny upon thee, or bring any charge against thee, or enter into a lawsuit with thee, litigate a point with thee in any court of judicature, or claim, in right and law, a power, authority, and dominion over thee, as the pope of Rome does over the consciences of men:

thou shalt condemn; disprove and roll off the calumny, refute the charge and accusation, put to silence the clamours and pretences of wicked men, carry the cause against them, and shake off the yoke of bondage they would bring them under; and, instead of being condemned by them, condemn them. By "weapon" may be meant all the attempts made by force to ruin the interest and church of Christ in the world, such as the bloody persecutions of the Roman emperors, who, though they made sad havoc of the professors of Christianity, and designed hereby to have rooted it out of the world, and thought they should have accomplished it, yet could not do it; so far from it, that the Christians yet more and more increased, insomuch that it became a common saying, that the blood of the martyrs was the seed of the church; also the wars of the Papists with the Albigenses and Waldenses, and all the cruel methods they have taken by fire and faggot, and the bloody inquisition, to hinder the growth of what they call heresy; yet all have been in vain, a reformation has taken place, and many nations have embraced the truth, and shook off the yoke of Popery; together with all their efforts since to crush the Protestant interest; and though the kings of the earth will be stirred up, and gather together to the battle of the Lord God Almighty, they will not succeed, but be overcome and slain, and the beast and false prophet at the head of them will be taken and cast alive into the lake of fire: and by the "tongue" may be designed the edicts of the Pagan emperors, forbidding the exercise of the Christian religion, and threatening the preachers and professors of it with imprisonment, confiscation of goods, and death itself; and the anathemas, bulls, and interdicts of the popes of Rome, as well as the reproaches, scandals, and calumnies uttered by the emissaries of that church against all that depart from it; together with the errors and heresies of false teachers of all sorts in all ages of the world, which, though levelled against the faith and doctrine of the church of Christ, have not been able to subvert it, nor ever will:

this is the heritage of the servants of the Lord; this, with all that is said in this chapter, is the part, portion, and privilege, that such shall enjoy who serve the Lord Christ, and not antichrist; they shall be treated rather as sons than as servants, and have an inheritance assigned them; not only protection from all enemies, and absolution from all charges, but they shall receive the reward of the inheritance in heaven, that which is incorruptible and undefiled, and reserved there, since they serve the Lord Christ:

and their righteousness is of me, saith the Lord; the vindication of their righteousness, of their cause, and of their character; or the reward of their righteous works in a way of grace; even all that righteousness and true holiness that is in them, and that righteousness which is imputed to them, and by which they are justified, are from the Lord; by which they are secured from all the charges of law and justice, and, from all the accusations of men and devils, and which will answer for them in a time to come, and acquit them at the bar of God before men and angels; see Rom 8:33.

Promises Based on the Will of God

Come now, you who say, "Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a city, spend a year there, buy and sell, and make a profit"; whereas you do not know what will happen tomorrow.

 For what is your life? It is even a vapor that appears for a little time and then vanishes away. Instead you ought to say, "If the Lord wills, we shall live and do this or that." (Jas 4:13-15)

Promises based on the will of God is the additional category of acceptable promises that we will consider. People are frequently heard making predictive promises. "I will be a more faithful husband next year." "I will get better grades in school this semester." "I will not repeat my personal failures of last year." "I will improve the profitability of my business this quarter." Such promises are only acceptable in God's sight, if they are made contingent upon the will of God. Instead, we ought to say, "If the Lord wills, we shall live and do this or that."

The will of God is to be the determining factor for all our days. 

God used James to reprimand the self-willed approach to living. "Come now, you who say, "Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a city, spend a year there, buy and sell, and make a profit." Such promises indicate the arrogance that people can embrace within their lives. "But now you boast in your arrogance" (Jas 4:16). Such arrogance prohibits us from living by grace, because grace is imparted to the humble heart. "Be clothed with humility, for 'God resists the proud, but gives grace to the humble' " (1Pe 5:5).

David was a notable example of one who humbly yielded to, and sought after, the will of God. "I delight to do Your will, O my God . . . Teach me to do Your will, For You are my God" (Psa 40:8; Psa 143:10). Paul's comprehensive commitment to God's will could be seen even in the way he stated predictive promises about his personal travel plans. As he left Ephesus, he stated, "I will return again to you, God willing" (Act 18:21). When writing to Corinth, he promised "I will come to you shortly, if the Lord wills" (1Co 4:19).

Ultimately, the Lord Jesus Christ taught and lived in a manner that set the will of the Father as the absolute standard. Concerning how we should pray, He taught, "In this manner, therefore, pray: Our Father in heaven . . . Your kingdom come. Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven" (Mat 6:9-10). He Himself prayed in this way. "O My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from Me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as You will" (Mat 26:39).

Dear Father, I seek You for a heart that is fully committed to Your will. May I delight in Your will each day. May I speak of future days only in terms of Your will— "If it is Your will, I shall live and do this or that."

Zion's Coming Salvation Zion's Coming Salvation

Isa 62:1-12.   Regarding Zion, I can't keep my mouth shut, regarding Jerusalem, I can't hold my tongue, Until her righteousness blazes down like the sun and her salvation flames up like a torch.

Foreign countries will see your righteousness, and world leaders your glory. You'll get a brand-new name straight from the mouth of GOD.

You'll be a stunning crown in the palm of GOD's hand, a jeweled gold cup held high in the hand of your God.

No more will anyone call you Rejected, and your country will no more be called Ruined. You'll be called Hephzibah (My Delight), and your land Beulah (Married), Because GOD delights in you and your land will be like a wedding celebration.

For as a young man marries his virgin bride, so your builder marries you, And as a bridegroom is happy in his bride, so your God is happy with you.

I've posted watchmen on your walls, Jerusalem. Day and night they keep at it, praying, calling out, reminding GOD to remember.

They are to give him no peace until he does what he said, until he makes Jerusalem famous as the City of Praise.

GOD has taken a solemn oath, an oath he means to keep: "Never again will I open your grain-filled barns to your enemies to loot and eat. Never again will foreigners drink the wine that you worked so hard to produce.

No. The farmers who grow the food will eat the food and praise GOD for it. And those who make the wine will drink the wine in my holy courtyards."

Walk out of the gates. Get going! Get the road ready for the people. Build the highway. Get at it! Clear the debris, hoist high a flag, a signal to all peoples!

Yes! GOD has broadcast to all the world: "Tell daughter Zion, 'Look! Your Savior comes, Ready to do what he said he'd do, prepared to complete what he promised.'"

Zion will be called new names: Holy People, GOD-Redeemed, Sought-Out, City-Not-Forsaken.

Authentic vs. Phony Faith

Christ, having been offered once to bear the sins of many, will appear a second time, not to deal with sin but to save those who are eagerly waiting for him. (Hebrews 9:28)

The question before us all is: Are we included in the “many” whose sins he bore? And will we be saved by his coming?

The answer of Hebrews 9:28 is, “Yes,” if we are “eagerly waiting for him.” We can know that our sins are taken away and that we will be safe in the judgment if we trust Christ in such a way that it makes us eager for his coming.

There is a phony faith that claims to believe in Christ, but is only a fire insurance policy. Phony faith “believes” only to escape hell. It has no real desire for Christ. In fact, it would prefer it if he did not come, so that we can have as much of this world’s pleasures as possible. This shows that a heart is not with Christ, but with the world.

So the issue for us is: Do we eagerly long for the coming of Christ? Or do we want him to wait while our love affair with the world runs its course? That is the question that tests the authenticity of faith.

Let us be like the Corinthians who were “wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Corinthians 1:7), and like the Philippians whose “citizenship is in heaven, and from it [they] await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ” (Philippians 3:20).

That’s the issue for us. Do we love his appearing? Or do we love the world and hope that his appearing will not interrupt our worldly plans? Eternity hangs on this question.

From “Loving the Second Coming and the Assurance of Salvation”

Solid Joys is now available as a podcast, read by John Piper.

JOSEPH WAS A GOOD MAN

Mat 1:19 And her [promised] husband Joseph, being a just and upright man and not willing to expose her publicly and to shame and disgrace her, decided to repudiate and dismiss (divorce) her quietly and secretly.

Mat 1:20 But as he was thinking this over, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream, saying, Joseph, descendantof David, do not be afraid to take Mary [as] your wife, for that which is conceived in her is of (from, out of) the Holy Spirit.

Mat 1:21 She will bear a Son, and you shall call His name Jesus [the Greek form of the Hebrew Joshua, which means Savior], for He will save His people from their sins [that is, prevent them from failing and missing the true end and scope of life, which is God].

Man’s extremity, God’s opportunity.—Was ever faith more tried than the Virgin’s, when for no fault of hers, but in consequence of an act of God Himself, her conjugal relation to Joseph was allowed to be all but snapped asunder by a legal divorce? Yet how glorious was the reward with which her constancy and patience were at length crowned! And is not this one of the great laws of God’s procedure towards His believing people? Abraham was allowed to do all but sacrifice Isaac (Genesis 22); the last year of the predicted Babylonish captivity had arrived ere any signs of deliverance appeared (Dan 9:1-2); the massacre of all the Jews in Persia had all but taken place (Esther 7; Esther 8); Peter, under Herod Agrippa, was all but brought forth for execution (Acts 12); Paul was all but assassinated by a band of Jewish enemies (Acts 23); Luther all but fell a sacrifice to the machinations of his enemies (1521); and so in cases innumerable since, of all which it may be said, as in the song of Moses, “the Lord shall judge His people, and repent Himself for His servants, when, He seeth that their power is gone” (Deu 32:36).—D. Brown, D.D.

Salvation from sin.—However absurd the statement may appear to one who has not yet discovered the fact for himself, the cause of every man’s discomfort is evil, moral evil; first of all, evil in himself, and then, evil in those he loves. With this latter I have not now to deal. The one cure for any organism, is to be set right—to have all its parts brought into harmony with each other; the one comfort is to know this cure in process.—1. Rightness alone is cure. Man’s rightness is to be free from wrongness, that is, from sin. The evil is in him; he must be set free from it—from the sin he is, which makes him do the sin he does. The sin he dwells in, the sin he will not come out of, is the sole ruin of a man. “This is the condemnation, that light,” etc. 2. Do you desire me to say how the Lord will deliver you from your sins? Such a question springs from the passion for the fruit of the tree of knowledge, not the fruit of the tree of life. Men would understand—they do not care to obey—understand where it is impossible they should understand save by obeying.—Geo. Macdonald, LL.D.

Jesus, the Saviour from sin.—This name given by Divine direction. Jesus, a Son of man, yet not chosen by man or self-elected as “Saviour,” but the elect of God (Isa 42:1). He may, therefore, be received with the utmost confidence. Jesus the Saviour not merely from the consequences of sin, but from the corrupting, enthralling, damning evil itself. This “the central idea of Christianity.” To dream of salvation in sin is as absurd as to think of “saving a man from drowning by keeping him under the water which is destroying him;” or of “recovering a man from sickness by leaving him under the malady which constitutes the complaint” (W. Jay). How does Jesus save from sin?

I. He has performed a work by which God, the infinitely righteous One, can deal with men in grace.—Human salvation could only be accomplished consistently with the eternal law of righteousness. But see Rom 3:21-26. Jesus is the true mercy-seat; the meeting-place of God and man.

II. He has shown us the true character of sin.—Presenting it in such a light that we may well loathe ourselves on account of it, and wish to be saved from it. We are bound to believe that only by His incarnation and sacrifice could human salvation become possible. What a tremendous evil, then, sin must be!

III. He has set us an example of holy living, and made a demand of discipleship.—His was a perfect obedience, prompted by a perfect love. His heart was pure; His life in all respects right and good. We are to be His disciples. “Learn of Me.” “Follow Me.” Discipleship means a gradual approximation to His own perfect character.

IV. He gives us His Holy Spirit to work in us this great salvation.—(Tit 3:5.) The Spirit represented as “the Spirit of Christ” (Rom 8:9). Not only because He proceeds from Christ, but also because He works in us a resemblance to Christ. Christ liveth in us (Gal 2:20), assimilating our characters to His own.—H. M. Booth.

“Jesus.”—There is more of power to sanctify, elevate, strengthen, and cheer in the word “Jesus” (Jehovah-Saviour) than in all the utterances of man since the world began.—C. Hodge, D.D.

The influence of holy character.—If to live with men diluted to the millionth degree with the virtue of the highest can exalt and purify the nature, what bounds can be set to the influence of Christ? To live with Socrates—with unveiled face—must have made one wise; with Aristides, just. Francis of Assisi must have made one gentle; Savonarola, strong. But to have lived with Christ must have made one like Christ, that is to say, a Christian.—Prof. H. Drummond.

Mat 1:22-23. Emmanuel.—1. The mystery of Christ’s wonderful conception was not altogether hid from the church under the Old Testament. 2. It was foretold that the child born should be God and man in one person, “Emmanuel.” 3. It was foretold that He should be believed in, and acknowledged to be God incarnate. “They shall call His name Emmanuel.”—David Dickson.

Emmanuel.—

I. The reality of the Incarnation.—The uncontroverted mystery of “God manifested in the flesh.”

II. The purpose thereby contemplated—viz. the laying open a way for our re-union with God.

III. The actual accomplishment of this purpose consequent upon our reception of Christ.—Actual union with God, a communion with Him as our Friend, Father, and final Joy.—Henry Craik.

Mat 1:23. “God with us.”—The great secret of our Christian joy lies in this fact, that we believe in a present, not in an absent Jesus; One who is Emmanuel—God with us. Try to get hold of that great fact of our Lord’s presence, and then you will see what results flow from it.

I. That fact should make us humble.—If the Son of God, King of kings and Lord of lords, chose to come to this earth in the lowliest manner; if He chose a manger to be born in, a workman’s home to live in, the commonest of clothing and of food, surely we, who profess to be His followers, have no right to be proud.

II. The fact of our Lord’s abiding presence ought to make us brave.—If God be for us, and with us, who can be against us? No temptation need be too strong to be conquered, no difficulty need be too hard to be surmounted, by those who know that God is with them—Emmanuel.

III. The fact of our Lord’s abiding presence ought to make us good to each other.—Look on your fellow-men, and learn from the incarnation to respect man, every man, as wearing the flesh which Jesus wears.—H. J. Wilmot-Buxton.

Mat 1:24-25. Joseph’s obedience.—1. From the time that a man is sure of God’s word and warrant, he should dispute no more, but stop his ears to all carnal reasoning. 2. A soul that knoweth the worth of Christ will be glad according to its power to do service to Him, or to any of those who belong unto Him. 3. When faith be holdeth the majesty of Jesus it breedeth fear and respect in the believer toward Him.—David Dickson.