Reading the first five verses of Peter, fourth chapter, first epistle. For as much then as Christ hath suffered for us in the flesh, arm yourselves likewise with the same mind. For he that has suffered in the flesh has ceased from sin, that he no longer should live the rest of his time in the flesh to the lusts of man, but to the will of God.
For the time past of our life may suffice us to have wrought the will of the Gentiles when we walked in lasciviousness, lusts, excessive wine, revelings, banquetings, and abominable idolatries; wherein they think it strange that ye run not with them to the same excessive riot, speaking evil of you, who shall give account to him that is ready to judge the quick and the dead.
Now this of course is addressed to a Christian, and I might for the sake of refreshing our knowledge, define again a Christian as one who has fled for refuge to Christ, who has identified himself with Christ, and has received life from Christ. Now that’s stating in other language what is meant by believing on Christ.
There are three prepositions: to Christ, with Christ, from Christ. If you’ll remember these, that a Christian is one who has fled for refuge to Christ. It is not cowardice that makes us flee for refuge when we are in grave peril. It would be moral recklessness amounting to insanity, or a man were in fifty degrees below zero weather, and he knew a few feet away, half a mile away, there might be a shelter, who would boldly stand still and freeze to death rather than seek refuge in the shelter.
So, a moral being in a moral universe who knows that his sins have imperiled him forever and learns that there is in the Rock of Ages, a refuge for sinners. He is not a brave man who refuses that refuge, he is a moral fool.
So, I do not hesitate to say that a Christian is one who has fled for refuge to Jesus Christ, and having fled to Christ, he has identified himself with Christ completely. His identification has become such that wherever Christ is, he wants to be. Whatever Christ stands for, he wants to stand for.
Whatever Christ is against, he wants to be against. Christ’s friends, he wants to be his friends. Christ’s enemies, he is willing should be his enemies. The work Christ is interested in, he wants to do. What Christ is not interested in, he takes very lightly and gives little attention to. He has identified himself with Christ,
And Christ has given him life. For this is not mental, it’s spiritual. Christ has given life to this man, and I will give him eternal life. And no man is able to pluck him out of my hand, and thus he has life. He has received life from Christ. He has identified himself with Christ, and he has fled for refuge to Christ.
Now there are two phrases here, both have the word “time” in it. The time past, he said, and then the rest of his time. The time past and the rest of his time.
Now the time past, he said, of our life may suffice us. I think there is a bit of irony here. Haven’t you had enough, he says. The time past of our life may suffice us to have walked in lasciviousness, lusts, drinking, revelings, banqueting, and idolatry. That is, he is not giving us a rundown on all that we did. He is simply giving us some samples of the way we lived, and the way the people of the world live now. All the people of the world, for all have sinned.
These are not taken by any means to include everything a sinner does, or a Christian used to do, but he simply gives a sample, lasciviousness, and drinkings, and revelings, and banquetings, and idolatries, touching all phases of our social and religious lives.
Now he said, in time past you lived like that, but it can end now, because God maketh all things new. Let us repent of our sins, and let us be very sorry for them, but let us not be discouraged by them.
Let us not in any wise permit them to discourage us from believing, for God is the one who maketh all things new. And this, in grace, is the land of beginning again. You had a bad beginning and you went on in a bad way, but at any time you choose, you may begin another kind of life, and call that life that is past, the time past.
Now, second, the rest of his time. The time past of our lives we all know. Everybody knows how old he is after they get to be quite small, or quite large, they know how old they are, and sometimes they count them on their fingers.
I asked a chubby little girl one time how old she was. She held up four fingers and said three. She had been saying three, and holding up three, and they told her, now, it was four, so she held up four and said three.
So even the little ones know how old they are, and we all know that. Your time past, what has it been? Your time past may have been ten years, 15, 17, 21, 27, 34, 43, 54, 70, whatever it is, you know your time past. But I want to ask how many of you could tell me what the rest of his time will be.
You know what the time past has been. What is the time yet before you? I wonder if you know. Could you guarantee one year? Could you promise me that you would still be here two years from now? Could any of you now stand, raise your hand, and say, pardon me, I will be here 12 months from now. What is the rest of your time? Your time past you know. You celebrate its passing. People bring you things.
We men get ties, reminding us that we’ve had another birthday. That’s the time past. But what is the rest of our time? Will you tell me, has anybody given you any present celebrating the rest of your time? What a foolish thing to do.
Nobody knows whether he will have another birthday. Is there one here who would stand and say, I’ll bet on the next three months? I’m sure of the next two months. Is there anyone here that can say, I’m sure of the next month? Nobody knows.
My friend, Mr. Collett of Beulah Beach, Ohio, whom I have known for the last 25 years, but indigestion, he thought, and the doctor said, take it easy. Well, he said, all right, so he painted his house. And he went to bed that night, got up the next morning, and I think before he could get dressed, tumbled over on the floor and was dead. He didn’t expect that, didn’t expect that at all. He fully believed that he had a long time, the rest of his time.
If anyone had said to him the night before, Brother Collett, what’s the rest of your time? Well, he’d have said, I want to finish painting my house, and then I’ve got a meeting I want to hold in thus and thus town, and then I want to take in this convention and be a Bible teacher there. But he didn’t have much rest of his time. What’s the rest of your time?
Now the Bible says that the rest of his time, the time past, he lived a certain way, but for the rest of his time, he lives to the will of God.
Old Thomas à Kempis says, oh, how wise and happy is he that now laboreth to be such an one in his life, as he will desire to be found at the hour of his death.
Now it says here that for the rest of your time, you’re not going to live the way you did for the time past. And so they think it’s strange, they, that vague pronoun without any antecedent. They think it’s strange. Who are they?
Well, it is a technical term meaning a worldly people who are not renewed, who have not fled for refuge to Christ, who have not identified themselves with Christ, and who have not received life from Christ. They, whoever they may be, rich or poor, old or young, far or near, they, think it’s strange that you run not with them as you used to do.
Now that’s another characteristic, a lesser characteristic, but it’s a truly one characteristic of a Christian. He is one who no longer runs with them. Doing this has ruined many a beginner.
I’ve said it here, I repeat it, that there have been those who have gone into the altar room and have on their knees tearfully told God they were tired of the past and they wanted to be a Christian. Then they have got up and gone out to run with the people they used to run with. The result has been tragedy and failure in that Christian life.
Tragedy and failure in the Christian life because we have run with those that we should not have run with. That ye run not with them, they think it very strange. Our worldly friends know only one life, only one, that is the life they now live. They know only one life and they feel that to leave that life would be to die.
But a Christian has found another life more real, more exciting, more satisfying than the life he had before, and he’s living that life to the will of God. But the sinner, doesn’t know this. He only thinks there is or thinks there is only one kind of life and only one life.
And it’s not uncommon for a young person who is trying to follow the Lord to hear this said about him. Well, what does he do? What kind of life does he live? Oh, how dead that is. How meaningless that is. No fun in that. That’s the common approach to the Christian by the world. They think it’s strange because they’re not informed that you have another life.
It’s like this. The disciples, in their imperfection, came to our Lord Jesus and they said, Master, we have brought you meat and bread. He was sitting on the well’s edge in Samaria. The woman at the well had been talking with him, he with her, and they said, How do you have anything to eat, nobody having brought you anything? And he said, I have meat to eat that you know not of. They thought he hadn’t eaten because he hadn’t eaten the food they were used to.
But He said, I recognize another kind of food and another kind of life. And I have been living and eating my Father’s food and giving help to the needy, and that is life to me.
So, the Christian, constantly coming against people that do not understand him, they mark him off as being dead because he no longer lives the kind of life he used to live, nor run with them to the same excess of living or dying. So, the Christian is considered strange.
Now let’s just toss that around a little bit, that word, strange. Do you know what strange means. It’s from the same word as we get our word stranger. A stranger is someone that’s not integrated in the landscape, that isn’t socially a part of the group, a newcomer. Stranger, they used to greet each other out in our West; a man would appear, and it was not an opprobrious term. It was simply a term meaning we don’t know who you are, good morning stranger.
Well, a stranger was someone that was strange, his garb was strange, his face was strange, maybe even his language was strange. And if you get different enough from people, you get queer to a point of laughter.
Dr. Max I. Reich, that great Jewish saint, wore a little beard, and he told me that, rather ruefully, that he used to have to take a good deal of abuse from boys and girls on the street, who would look at his beard and then look at each other, and then smile. He was strange because he had a beard.
If we were as natural as we ought to be, we’d be strange without a beard, because nature put a beard on in the front of the average man’s face, and we cut it off, and if anybody leaves it on, we say he’s strange.
Now isn’t that strange? That we mutilate nature and say that’s natural, and then if nature just has its way, we say that’s strange. And when the boy in the Navy or somewhere in the service, just for the fun of it, sends home a picture of himself with a two weeks beard, everybody roars with good-natured laughter. It doesn’t look like the boy that went into the service so well-groomed and carefully looked after. He’s been out on a trip, and so he let his beard grow.
I’ve seen pictures like that, and they don’t even look like themselves. They look strange when actually they only look natural. They look strange after they get through cutting off their beard. But the point is that anything is strange when it’s not like the rest of the things around about it.
Toss a German down in the midst of English-speaking people, and his accent immediately marks him. He’s strange because his tongue is a little thicker and his voice a little further down than the American.
Take a Frenchman, his voice is in his nose, and he’s different because he talks up in his nose. You have to have adenoids to speak French. And he’s strange because he’s strange, no, only because he sounds a little different from what we’re used to. So a Christian is considered strange.
Brethren, I want to repeat what I said here some weeks ago. I am not going to waste any tears on anybody who comes whimpering to me for sympathy because people think he’s strange from following Christ. We’re hearing it in the newspapers these days.
A little school reads the Bible, a teacher reads a few verses, and maybe they say the Lord’s Prayer together. Some little fella sits there whose parents are atheists, and he thinks he is, poor little misguided innocent chap.
And the parents memorialize the school board, and they say, we want to enter an official protest. It embarrasses our little boy when they read Scripture. He’s taught at home the Scripture is not true, and he is embarrassed when they all bow their heads and say the Lord’s Prayer, and he doesn’t believe in the Lord’s Prayer. They think he’s strange. We want to offer a protest.
What kind of cowards are they anyhow? You Christian parents know that your children went through grade school and then through high school marked as being queer, and you made no protests. Christians know there’s no use to make a protest. Of course, they think we’re queer, but queer means different that’s all, and of course we’re different, and woe be to the Christian that isn’t.
And the moment that it can’t be said of a Christian, he’s different, he has disgraced his testimony and sold out his faith, for it is the mark of a church that they are people who are different. They think it’s strange that you’re different, but says Peter, don’t put in a protest, don’t hire a lawyer, don’t memorialize anybody, don’t approach the school board.
They who shall give account to God. There’s his answer. Those who think we’re strange and insist upon saying so with much laughter, they shall give an account to God and not to the Christian. God never made me a judge over anybody, and he never made you a judge. He made us witnesses, but not judges.
So never call your critics to account. Explain to them if you can, but if they will not accept the explanation, then fall silent. Silence is the most eloquent answer to some critics, and we have the example of our Savior for that. When they were questioning Him and abusing Him, He was silent.
And he said, why don’t you speak to me? Don’t you know that I have the power to release you or the power to crucify you? Then He spoke and said, you don’t have any power at all except God gives it to you. It’s in my Father’s hands, and then fell silent.
And the silence of the Lamb has been one of the wonders of the centuries, that the Lamb was silent. He was led as a sheep to the slaughter, and as a lamb He was without speech. Never try to call your critics to account. Silence is always and often the best. And he says in the first verse that this example we take from Christ. For as much as Christ has suffered, arm yourselves likewise with the same mind.
So we have Jesus as our example. Sure, we’re different. If we aren’t different, woe be to us in the day of Christ. Of course we’re strange. And being strange, they will think us strange. But being strange only because you’re morally cleaner than somebody else isn’t anything to disgrace you.
Some of you men work. My good friend sitting back there told me some years ago about having to go to banquets with his business, and he drank water or grape juice, and they drank liquor. Was he strange? Sure, he was strange. But if one of them gets in trouble, who will they come to for prayer? To the strange fellow who wouldn’t drink liquor.
Some of you work in offices where yours is the only clean mouth in the office. The rest of them are borderline dirty or dirty outright. And you’ve got the only clean mouth. And they ride you by telling off-color jokes, trying to stir you. And you don’t laugh, and you don’t go along with it. You’re strange. Sure, you’re strange.
A clean thing is always strange when cast down in the middle of dirty things. A clean mouth is always a strange mouth when surrounded by unclean mouths. A pure heart is strange when surrounded by impure hearts. An honest man is strange when in the midst of dishonest men. But it’s a good kind of strangeness.
And the Church of Jesus Christ should be strange, queer, different, because she is clean-mouthed, she is honest, and she is pure-minded. But they think it’s strange that you’ll run not with them, but don’t you try to ride them for it now, because they’re going to give account to God who’s able to judge the quick and the dead, and not to you. You’re a witness but not a judge.
And Christ is your example. He suffered and kept still. You and I can afford to do it.
And really, I don’t think it’s too serious, myself. I don’t think it’s too serious. I’ve been thought strange, but you let a sinner go long enough and far enough and he’ll become strange the other way.
When a man becomes a raper or a murderer or a bank robber, he’s strange too. And the world puts him in jail as being queer and different and strange and dangerous. But he’s different over on the other side.
The Christian is different on the righteous side.
Hello, stranger. God bless you.
And the stranger you are, the better you will be. We Christians who have fled for refuge to Jesus, have identified ourselves with Jesus, and have received life from Jesus, today we celebrate in the Lord’s Supper.
The Unpardonable Sin, What it is and What it is Not
Pastor and Author A.W. Tozer
February 6, 1955
In the 8th chapter of John, coming to verse 48 and on: and answered the Jews and said unto Him, say we not well that thou art a Samaritan and hast a devil? And Jesus answered, I have not a devil, but I honor my Father, and you do dishonor Me. I seek not mine own glory, there is One that seeketh and judgeth. Verily, verily, I say unto you, if a man keep My saying, he shall never see death. Then said the Jews unto Him, now we know that thou hast a devil. Abraham is dead, and the prophets, and thou sayest, if a man keep my sayings, he shall never taste of death. Art thou greater than our father Abraham, which is dead? And the prophets are dead. Whom makest thou thyself?
See in verse 48, they said, say we not well. Isn’t it true what we said? And that takes us back to the 7th chapter, verse 20. The people answered and said, Thou hast a devil. Who goeth about to kill thee? We wince when we read that. Thou hast a devil, talking to the Son of God. And in 10:20, that’s repeated. Many of them said, He hath a devil and is mad. Why hear ye him? Don’t listen to him, he’s got a devil and he’s crazy.
Now, four times in John, this is said, that the Lord had a devil. It’s said elsewhere also, but it’s recorded these four places in John. And it requires that we deal with this distasteful subject tonight. And I should like to handle it by showing that this is the sin that can never be forgiven, commonly called the unpardonable sin.
And I want to treat it like this, that there is a sin that can never be forgiven, what it is not, what it is, why it cannot be forgiven, and how we can know that we have not committed it. And that’s a little five-point sermon, which I hope to get through without too much difficulty. There’s just about as much lift in this as there is in, I can’t think of any simile. This has no wings in it, no lift of any sort. You’re in ugly, dark theology here. And you’re just going to have to grit your teeth and take it. It’s a bitter medicine, but it’s here.
Now, there is a sin that can never be forgiven. That is found several places in the Bible. For instance, in Mark 3:22 and following, these words. And the scribes which came down from Jerusalem said, He hath Beelzebub, and by the prince of the devils cast he out devils. And he called them unto him and said unto them in parables, how can Satan cast out Satan? And if a kingdom be divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand.
And if a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand. If Satan rise up against himself and be divided, he cannot stand. But hath an end. No man can enter into a strong man’s house and spoil his goods, except he will first bind the strong man. Then he will spoil his house. In verse 28, verily I say unto you, all sins shall be forgiven unto the sons of men, and all blasphemies wherewithsoever they shall blaspheme. But he that shall blaspheme against the Holy Ghost hath never forgiveness but is in danger of eternal damnation. Then verse 30, because they said, he hath an unclean spirit. That is, it’s like this. This he said, because they said, he hath an unclean spirit.
Now I’ve copied here on a card to read to you two texts, that is the same text, out of two different translations. Listen to this. Believe me, there is pardon for all the other sins of mankind, and the blasphemies they utter. But if a man blaspheme against the Holy Spirit, there is no pardon for him in all eternity. He is guilty of a sin which is eternal. This was because they were saying, he has an unclean spirit. That’s Knox translation. In the Barclay,
I assure you that all the sins the sons of men commit, and all the blasphemies they utter are pardonable. But whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit shall have no forgiveness forever. He is guilty of eternal sin because they said, he has an unclean spirit.
Now, I don’t think we need to go any further in showing that there is a sin that can never be pardoned, because our Lord states it here in unequivocal language. It is not an obscure text hidden away. It is not buried in obscurity. There are no variations of readings that I can discover any place in the various translations.
Sometimes a tough passage will more than be too much for the finest minds, because they have differences of readings in the various old manuscripts. But there’s nothing like that here. This is it. There are no marginal explanations, no place that I can discover at any rate, and I’ve got, as I said this morning, I wouldn’t know how many translations. And it’s just here, Jesus said it plainly, that there is an eternal sin. Which, as basic English has it, his sin will be with him forever. He never can get released from it. Now that’s what Jesus, our Lord, said.
Now I suppose that there has scarcely been a doctrine in the New Testament that has been worse misunderstood than the doctrine of the unpardonable sin. And I very much wish that you’d give me a hearing tonight. And that you would not be just passing it over as waiting it out so you can get out, but that you’d listen to me. It may help you, and it may be God’s voice to you.
A great many people think they have committed the unpardonable sin, and some have gone so far that it has become a mental weight on them, a fixed idea. They believe it, and they believe it so firmly, and they’re so very humble about it, and so very self-effacing and modest, they feel as if, well, I ought to perish, I ought to be damned. I’ve done it, I ought to be damned. And they think they’ve committed the unpardonable sin.
And then there’s a lot of loose preaching about the unpardonable sin. It’s a trick subject. It’s something you can usually get a lot of people to come to hear. A man can be sure at least somebody will be out if he preaches on the unpardonable sin. I had this to deal with tonight. God knows I didn’t choose it.
But first, next, or rather, I want to talk about what the unpardonable sin is not. That there is such a sin has been declared in Mark and in Matthew, fully and developed and explained by our Lord.
Now, what it is not, and I am going only to take these sins, which people often think are the unpardonable sins. The first one is irreverence toward God. There are those who believe that if you curse God, that that’s unpardonable sin. That irreverence and sacrilegious conduct toward God constitutes the unpardonable sin. Well, now that isn’t so, and there are many reasons why it is not so.
But let’s put it like this. Do you not know that there are millions of people who have been irreverent? Millions of people or have been millions of people over the past centuries, who have been irreverent, who have cursed and sworn and used the name of God and Christ, and I’ve even heard them curse in the name of the Virgin Mary, as if it were not bad enough, they had to curse the very Mother of Jesus. I’ve heard that. And some of you have heard it, in curse words. Not that certainly that she’s any part of the Godhead. But that the blasphemy against Jesus actually went toward the mother of Jesus. I’ve heard that.
And yet there are, no doubt in heaven tonight, millions of redeemed people, who later on, like the prodigal in the far country, after irreverence and cursing and using the name of Christ in vain and trampling it under their feet, later they came to themselves and humbly and meekly came back to the Father’s house and were received and they were washed from their pollution and cleansed from their iniquity. And tonight, they’re with God, either walking on earth as good Christians or living there waiting for the consummation.
Now, if irreverence and blasphemous talk, if that was the unpardonable sin, how could it be then that thousands, if not millions, certainly millions over the centuries and thousands living today that had been, as we say, blasphemers, are now Christians? And so taking the name of the Lord in vain is not the unpardonable sin. There are two thoughts there. The irreverence toward God and taking the name of the Lord in vain. And neither one of those sins is the unpardonable sin.
I suppose that if I were to ask for testimony tonight, which I don’t intend to do, and I were to say, I’d like to ask some of you men that used to use the name of God in profanity, in profane language, and tonight you’re a happy Christian, would you stand? I’m sure some of you men would get up and stand.
I can’t recall that I ever used the name of God. I certainly used language that wouldn’t be printed in the front page of the newspaper when I was a young fellow. But I doubt whether I ever did that or not. But I have known many people that did, and later turned to the Lord Jesus, and were completely forgiven and received as though they had never done it, so that blasphemy, that is, profanity, is not the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost.
And then there are those that think that breaking vows and promises made to God, as they put it, lying to God. They’ll say, oh, but I lied to God. I promised God I would do something, and I didn’t do it. I broke my vow. I lied to God. So, they try to pin the unpardonable sin on their poor, discouraged souls because they’ve broken vows and promises and lied to God.
Well, if I were to ask everybody here that’s a Christian now, a happy, conscious Christian that has never broken a vow, but has kept all your promises to God, never told God a lie in all your life, if I were to ask you to stand, there wouldn’t be one of you that would have had the temerity to stand on your feet. Because broken vows and promises and lying to God and breaking our trust and faith certainly have been common things, and yet they are pardonable and cleansable. And the blood that our sister sang about can sweep over the soul and destroy all those sins.
And so, any sin that a man commits, such as irreverence toward God, taking the name of God in vain, breaking vows and lying to God, and later turns to God and is forgiven and pardoned and lives a happy Christian life and has a joyous testimony through the power of the blood, that can’t be the unpardonable sin.
Then the fourth, sin that people say, and always for themselves, they never blame it on others, they always blame it on themselves: resisting or quenching or grieving the Spirit. The Bible talks about resisting the Spirit, talks about quenching the Spirit, and talks about grieving the Spirit. And there are those who say, well, but I resisted the Holy Ghost, I quenched the Holy Ghost, I grieved him, and I know I’ve committed the unpardonable sin.
Now, to commit any sin is to quench the Spirit. To commit any sin is to resist the Spirit. To commit any sin is to grieve the Spirit. So that you cannot commit any sin, a man can’t get angry, a Christian can’t get angry without grieving the Spirit. He can’t be jealous without grieving the Spirit. He can’t be stingy without grieving the Spirit. He can’t be self-righteous without grieving the Spirit.
So, any sin grieves the Holy Ghost, any sin quenches the Holy Ghost, and you’ve got to resist the pulsations of the Holy Ghost to commit any sin. And to say that grieving, quenching, or resisting the Holy Ghost is the unpardonable sin is to write it full and say that every sin is the unpardonable sin. And how many are there here now, happy in Christ this very night, that have resisted the Holy Spirit back there?
Suppose I hear the gospel, and I resist for a year. Have I resisted the Holy Spirit? I have resisted the Holy Spirit. And at the end of that year, under the pressure of God and my friends and prayers, I break and yield and give myself to Him and enter into this happy spiritual life.
And surely resisting the Holy Spirit can’t be the unpardonable sin, because I resisted Him, and I was pardoned. Surely quenching the Spirit can’t be, for a man who quenched the Spirit has been pardoned, as well as grieving the Spirit.
All right, suicide, that’s fifth. Some say that suicide is the unpardonable sin. Now I speak a parable unto you. Of course, if a man commits suicide, he’s sane and he’s lost, that is, he’s unsaved, and he’s sane and he kills himself, naturally he puts himself where he can’t repent, he’s out of the picture. God doesn’t forgive out in the next world, he forgives in this world only. I suppose in that sense, suicide can’t be forgiven, but that’s not what Jesus was talking about.
And you daren’t read your own opinion into what Jesus taught us. He taught us something else altogether, and it’s not suicide. Let’s put it like this. Suppose that a man decides that he’s been around here long enough, he’s disgusted with himself and with his wife and with the government and with income tax and jobs and dumb clerks and stenographers and mean policemen and sickness and weariness, and he just decides, well, I’ve been around here long enough.
So, he gets himself an old rope and mounts into the attic. These modern apartment houses don’t furnish any place for a man to go, the attic is the approved place, but there’s no attic. But suppose he goes into the attic and jumps off of a stool, but he misjudged the length of the rope, and all it does is knock him out. Wife hears a racket and comes up and hears he’s hanging completely unconscious, but still alive. She cuts him down and slaps him back to life again, and he wakes up, and usually when a suicide has been unsuccessful, they all want to live again.
A fellow will jump in the water and then paddle like a dog for the shore. But he says, well, I’ve had enough of this, I didn’t think hanging would be so painful. So, he decides that he won’t commit suicide.
A year later, he goes to an evangelistic meeting, to a church, and he hears the gospel and says, why didn’t I hear this before? And immediately gives his heart to the Lord and is converted. Now he was unconscious trying to commit suicide, and if his wife hadn’t heard the stool fall over, he would have committed suicide. So as far as he was concerned, he was a suicide, but he didn’t die.
So, God forgives him, and there’s a lot of people like that, that have been forgiven after they’ve tried suicide. Now suicide isn’t the unpardonable sin, yet I repeat, if you want to use words loosely, you can say that if a man kills himself and dies, as they used to say, unshriven, that is, without forgiveness, certainly he’s gone. But he died just as any other sinner died. That was not the unpardonable sin of which Jesus spoke.
And then another one is rejecting Jesus. And this is the one the preachers are always talking about. I don’t understand. I wish the preachers all listened to me. But why they insist on making these mistakes, I don’t know. They say rejecting Jesus is the unpardonable sin. How did they get that way? Where did they get the idea? Who told them? There’s only one person in the Bible that ever talked about the unpardonable sin and explained it, and he didn’t say it was rejecting Christ.
Now, if a man rejects Christ right down to the end of his life and dies rejecting Christ, naturally he won’t be forgiven. But in that case every sin he committed was unpardonable because he didn’t accept Christ nor repent of his sins, he died in his sin. But that’s not the unpardonable sin.
Let’s put it around like this again. I don’t suppose there’s a single Christian here that accepted Jesus the first time and the Holy Ghost tried to win you. I don’t think so. Rarely does anybody come to Christ the first time. They reject a while, they resist a while, they say no a few times, and some say no for years. And that’s rejecting Jesus.
And if rejecting Jesus is the unpardonable sin, then they never could be pardoned. But after a week or a month or a year or two years or five years, the pressure of their conscience and of the pleadings of God’s people and the prayers of the saints becomes too much. And down they go and give their hearts to the Lord and rise in newness of life. Rejecting Jesus was not the unpardonable sin, because they’d rejected Him a long time and still been pardoned.
Now, it may be you’ve heard that all your life, that rejecting Jesus was the unpardonable sin, and it’s hard, of course, to brainwash anybody that has a wrong notion about the unpardonable sin.
Now the next thing is, what it is, what is the unpardonable sin? All right, let us go back to Mark again. Scribes which came down from Jerusalem said, He hath Beelzebub, and by the prince of the devils casteth he out devils. Verse 28, Verily I say unto you, all sin shall be forgiven unto the sons of men, and blasphemies, wherewithsoever they shall blaspheme. But he that shall blaspheme against the Holy Ghost hath never forgiveness but is in danger of eternal damnation. Verse 30, This he said, because they had said, He hath an unclean spirit. There’s your explanation, our Lord has given it.
So, no one dares change that now. Nobody dares introduce anything. It’s here, the Lord has said it. He said that it was calling him a devil and attributing to the devil the work he’d been doing by the Holy Ghost. He said, If I by the finger of God cast out devils.
He’d been casting out devils in the Spirit by the Holy Ghost, and they had said it is by the devil that he casts out spirit. But it was by the Spirit that He was casting out evil spirits.
So they had attributed to the devil the works of the Holy Ghost, and that is the unpardonable sin. And verily I say unto you, that he that doth this, doth this, hath no forgiveness, but his sin will be with him forever. And though the foulest mouth blasphemer, and the resister, and the curser, and the liar, and the thief, may be forgiven, when we attribute to the devil, to devils, to demons, for that’s what the word means, the work of the Holy Ghost, that is the unpardonable sin.
Now why can it not be forgiven? It is a sin. Why then select that sin and say, now that sin marks a man forever and brands him with the mark of Cain? He never can be pardoned.
Well, in Matthew 12:32, there’s quite an explanation there. And He tells us that to speak against the Son is pardonable. You can blaspheme the Son of God and be pardoned. And many who blasphemed the Son of God as he hung on the cross were later pardoned. And many who have cursed Jesus Christ, many a Jew who spits when he hears the name of Jesus, has later been converted, and now he’s ashamed and sorry, but he knows it’s not unpardonable. He blasphemed the name of Jesus, but God pardoned him because he knew he was ignorant. And when he repented, he forgave him, so that to speak against the Son is pardonable. But to speak against the Spirit is not, and why? If you’ll read Matthew 12:32 and following.
Well, the Father or the Son may be external to a man. One of the greatest evangelists, for the moment I can’t think of his name, but he was one of the greatest evangelists of Moody’s time and a little before. What was that man’s name. He had been an atheist and gone around delivering speeches against God and Christ and was converted and went back on the platform as an evangelist.
Now, reason and the weakness of the flesh and bad information and fear may influence a person to speak against God, and it may also influence a person to speak against Christ. Many a Jew raised in a rigorous Hebrew home of Orthodox Jewry, he’s been taught that that’s a bad name. He spits when he mentions that name. He’s been taught wrongly, he’s ignorant, reasoned, he’s all messed up, he’s confused. Tradition and bad doctrine has spoiled him.
That’s not the unpardonable sin. He can spit and curse Christ, and if he believes and repents later, he’ll be converted, because that’s external to the man. God’s external to the man, Christ’s external to the man.
And so, the flesh, I say, and fear and hopes and ignorance and bad instruction can lead a man to speak against God or Christ. But Brother, the Holy Ghost is that distilled essence of the Godhead, and he is not external. He goes direct to the human spirit, and he communicates himself inwardly and intimately.
And there is the profoundly mystical element in Christianity. Christianity is not built around, nor does it rise out of, an external God. But it is built around and rises out of that God made internal by the Holy Ghost. And so, God on His throne, running His universe, Christ at His right hand, pleading for the Church may be external to the man, but when the Holy Ghost has come, He will convict the world, and He is here.
And so, He communicates Himself inwardly, past reason, past teaching, past everything to the moral perception, to the conscience, to the spirit of the man. And spirit impinges on spirit, and the blessed life-giving spirit of the universe, the spirit of God the Father and God the Son, impinges upon the spirit of man, clear into the precincts beyond that man’s reason, beyond his teaching, beyond his fears and prejudices, straight through to the ancient man. And anybody then, under those circumstances that can call this one a devil, has morally and spiritually deteriorated to the point of no return.
I’m going to describe the people that Jesus described. They cannot distinguish good from evil. They cannot distinguish God from Satan.mAnd yet they are convinced of their own purity and wholly unaware of their condition. And I say all this carried to the point of no return. The man who curses God or challenges God to kill him, that may be up on the top of his head here, in his poor little old dark brain cells.
But after the Holy Ghost has penetrated through past a man’s defenses through to the sacred sanctum and there has made Himself known, and then we turn and say, this is the demon, this is the devil, this is done by the devil.
And when a man full of the Holy Ghost stands before that man and he in his blind fury says, that’s a devil in you, as they did of Jesus, that’s it. A deterioration, a moral and spiritual deterioration has taken place here. There’s been a breakdown in the cells of the spirit. And that person can no longer distinguish good from evil. And the strange and ominous thing is that they do usually live good lives.
These people to whom Jesus spoke were good livers. They were among the very best livers. They were Pharisees, they were scribes, they were rabbis, they were people who lived a moral life that not even our Lord could find fault with. And it was an external righteousness. They didn’t know the mysterious Spirit. They didn’t know God at all.
He told them bluntly; you don’t know God. He said, you don’t know the Father. You’re of the seed of Abraham, but you don’t know God because you don’t know the Holy Ghost. He’s never come to you; you’ve never let Him. He can’t talk to you, and yet you’re living all right. You’re tithing your mint and cumin and you’re living all right. Jesus never told a near-religious sinner that he’d committed the unpardonable sin. He only said that those who committed the unpardonable sin were religious people who were souls who had deteriorated, and their spirits had rotted to a point of no return where they couldn’t know good from evil.
Oh, they knew stealing was wrong. They knew adultery was wrong, but there was something vastly, infinitely worse inside of them. A devil lay within, a spirit of evil lay within, and they didn’t know it. So, they attributed that devil to the Holy Son of God and were convinced of their own purity.
And this was one of the things that Jesus fought against all the time He was on earth. He went about everywhere telling them they were whited sepulchers, they were serpents, they were false teachers, they were liars, they were sons of the devil, because they were fully convinced of their own purity and wholly unaware of their condition. Here had come among them the Light, the Light that lighted every man.
Here was among them the One who should rise on the Gentiles and shine to the uttermost parts of the earth. The very Light of God in whom was no darkness was shining among them. They looked Him full in the face and said, it’s darkness. To say anything else would have meant to repent, would have meant to turn on themselves, would have meant to admit that they were wrong.
Now, I’m going to say something to you here that I’ll stand back of, so don’t come to me and say, Mr. Tozer, don’t you think that was extreme. No, I wouldn’t have said it if I had. Here it is.
There are people, and they hang around churches, too, a lot of them. They will go to hell before they will ever admit that they themselves are wrong. They simply–you can’t get it. They will pray, O Lord, we’re no good, we’re as filthy rags, but it never occurs to them that means me, my ego, myself. They don’t want to lose face. They don’t want to admit, it’s I, Lord, it’s I. No, they’re right, I’ve met them.
And there will be lovely, nice people until you cross them, or suggest they were wrong on something. And then blind, black fury leaps out of their hearts. They will not believe that they’re not all perfect. Such persons either have committed, or are on their way to commit, the unpardonable sin of a religious person that will go to the altar when twenty-five others go and cover up his own personal needs. That will testify humbly as long as others testify so that he can hide himself in the group and lives his life carefully so as to protect his own ego, but never breaks, never honestly repents, never.
He may pray and pray, and ask for prayer requests, and say, would you pray, and this man should be prayed for, and I think we ought to pray. But just cross him, just let him know that you think he isn’t perfect. Black fury will leap out, just as it did here. These were religious people. Jesus had come and healed the sick, and then said to the sick, now here’s Rabbi so-and-so, a wonderful leader, I want you to meet him.
If he said to some fellow that he’d cast the devil out, come over here, Abraham, I want you to meet Rabbi Ben-Ammi here, Bon Ami. I want you to come and see him. He’s a wonderful leader in Israel.
If Jesus had rubbed their fur the right way, and scratched their backs, and given them degrees and told them how wonderful they were, they’d have gone along with Jesus. But they were wrong, and He knew it, and His way and theirs intersected. And where they intersected, fire flew, because they would not believe they could be wrong. They were on their way to, or had already committed the unpardonable sin, for it’s an ingredient in this condition that we’re perfectly sure we’re right.
Now, any sin that is repented will be forgiven. But there is a sin that can never be repented, because to commit it, the heart first has to be beyond repentance. How can we know that we’ve not committed it?
Well, no one can ever know that he has. At least if I take my Bible for it here, and I’ve been now, it’s been a long time, I’m not telling you how long, but brother, it’s been longer than some of you, your father and mother, hadn’t even met. Some of them hadn’t even been born.
And I’ve been reading my Bible, and studying it, and praying and thinking, and finding out all I could find out. And if I have arrived at anything like truth on this, then I am safe in saying that no one can ever know that he has committed the unpardonable sin, for the simple reason is he doesn’t believe he could, and he laughs it off, scorns it.
For the reason given above, he has deteriorated to the point of no return. Like the brain cells that are injured, doctors will say I’m awfully afraid that brain cells are so badly injured. They can never be put back.
You can mend a broken arm, you can graft skin on a burned face, you can put a tube in some place, even a windpipe. You can do a lot of things, but when brain cells break down, there’s no putting them back. That’s deterioration to the point of no return. And these who committed it didn’t know they had, and never can know they had, because before they could, they had arrived at a place where they couldn’t know they had.
Now, I think I told you this before, but I want to tell you again. I told it over the air, I think, the other day. Several years ago, over at Beulah Beach, Ohio, a young woman wanted to talk with me, and I said, all right, right after dinner, we sit right here on the porch.
So, after dinner, we sat down there on the porch together, and she had a friend with her, some woman older than she. She’d committed the unpardonable sin this woman had. And I told her she hadn’t, and told her why, and dismissed her, and she went away very joyful and said, oh, thank you, thank you, and she believed everything I said.
But I hadn’t more than left the beach until I got a long letter from her. She had all right, committed the unpardonable sin. I wrote her a letter back, told her again she hadn’t, and told her why. And I think I got an acknowledgment saying, oh, thank you, that comforts me very much, I know I haven’t.
And then I was over in Hawthorne, New Jersey, Ridgewood, New Jersey, I think to be exact, where I was staying at the time, I was preaching in Hawthorne, the phone rang, and they said long distance, and I went to the phone with this woman in Ohio. She had, I guess, called my wife and found out where I was, then called me there. She said, Mr. Tozer, it’s back on me again, I know I’ve committed the unpardonable sin. Well, I told her again, and she meekly said, thank you, sir, always called me sir so nicely, all right, thank you, sir, thank you, sir. And I said, well, here it is again. And I went to finish my meal, and almost dismissed her from my mind.
And I did forget all about the woman for about a year. At the end of that time a letter came, oh, what a letter. It leaped and danced like the leaves of the forest. And I opened it up, and she said, I’ve been ashamed to write to you. Shortly after this, that last time that I talked with you, God wrought the deliverance in my life. And she said, oh, what a joyful life I’m living now. And she said, I should have written long ago to tell you, it’s okay, you don’t have to pray for me now, it’s all well, but she said, I was just ashamed, she said, wasn’t I awful the way I acted?
Well, she was, but she was in trouble. She thought she’d committed the unpardonable sin. But I don’t know who reached her. I guess maybe a little something I said, plus a lot of prayer and help on other people’s part found her. I think she’s from Cleveland, if I remember. But what a joyful woman she was when she wrote that last letter. Well, I wrote and said thanks very much, and that was that.
Now, I want to describe the fellow who hasn’t committed the unpardonable sin. He’s uncertain whether he has or not and is all badly confused about what the unpardonable sin is. You can write his name mighty high; he hasn’t committed it. If he had, he wouldn’t be uncertain at all, he wouldn’t know he hadn’t.
And he wouldn’t be confused, he would be as clear as daylight that he was one of the saints and would be getting a three-way mirror to look at his head in order that he might know what size crown to order. He’d be perfectly sure of himself.
But the fellow who’s uncertain and confused and downcast and in trouble; I went to a doctor one-time years ago, this one in Cleveland too, went to a doctor, oh, a good many years ago. I was having pains, and he sat me down and talked with me. He said, I can tell you fellows when you come through the door. I said, what is it? He said, nurse, nurse. And he gave me a pat and fixed me up and sent me out. But I didn’t like that so well.
I had a look about me like a dyspeptic. I didn’t know I looked like a dyspeptic. I got over that and don’t have any trouble anymore, but I did. And he knew me. He said, I know you fellows want to see you come. I didn’t like to think I fell into a category, but I know these people who think they’ve committed the unpardonable sin; the phone rings, Mr. Tozer, yes, well, this is so-and-so, never heard of him. Could I see you next week? Yes. Well, what’s time convenient for you? Well, could it be one o’clock? I work until noon. Yeah, all right, one o’clock.
So, I hurry through my lunch hour and come back at one o’clock, and he comes in. I know him when he crosses the threshold. He’s a spiritual dyspeptic. He is just in one little easy jump of a happy, joyous Christian life, but he’s a gloomy dyspeptic. He thinks he’s committed the unpardonable sin. Always be sure he hasn’t, for if he had, he would make broad his phylacteries, and make big his Bible, and bulge his tracts, and would come in without a trace of penitence, without a trace of humility. He hadn’t committed the unpardonable sin. He’d never think of it.
So, the fellow who’s discouraged and gloomy and despondent and worried about himself, don’t bother your head about him. Pray that God will show him the facts. He hadn’t committed the unpardonable sin.
And the fellow that goes around asking questions and writing in the Moody Monthly and King’s Business, our hope, someone wanting to know, what’s the unpardonable sin? He hasn’t committed it. You never heard of any of those Pharisees coming to Jesus and saying, O Master, I’m afraid I’ve committed the unpardonable sin. Never one of them. None of those rabbis ever came to him and said, O Master, I’m afraid, I’m afraid I’ve gone to the point of no return. Not one of them.
If anybody had come to Jesus like that, and they might easily have, and probably did, some of them, he’d have said, the Father forgives and pardons all sins unto the sons of men. Thou canst, it’ll let them out into the light.
So, anybody who’s worried about it, whether he has committed the unpardonable sin, hasn’t. Anybody who’s uncertain and confused, hasn’t. Anybody who’s distressed to the point where he’s asking questions and asking people to pray for him, he hasn’t. Anybody who’s become so frightened he can’t pray anymore, and I’ve met some of them.
They think they’ve committed the unpardonable sin, and they always go to the Bible and look up the verses that do them harm. They always look up the passage that says, say, the tenth of Hebrews and the sixth of Hebrews, there remaineth therefore no more sacrifice for sin. They wag their head and go out. If that described them, they’d never have come in.
The self-righteous man never worries that there’s no more sacrifice for sin. The self-righteous man whose spiritual life has deteriorated until he’s capable of committing the unpardonable sin, he never worries for fear there’s no hope for him, and he’s never frightened. And pray? Sure, he can pray. He can pray to the Father he knows as his friend, because he’s got the covenant, but in his deep heart of hearts he doesn’t know God from the devil.
In his deep heart of hearts, he doesn’t know good from evil, he only knows external good and external evil, but he’s never become acquainted with the depths of depravity in his own heart. And he’d crucify God before he would admit himself a sinner. It’s all right for you to admit yourself a generic sinner.
There are many a man who believes in total depravity that thinks it’s touched everybody but him. Now, if you ask him, he’d say, oh, certainly, certainly, I was born in sin, conceived in iniquity, and all my righteousness are filthy rags. But he doesn’t believe that. He’s lying to his own soul. Cross him sometime, challenge him sometime, charge him with doing something wrong sometime. See what he’ll do, blow up, turn red, curse you out.
Well, the inability to feel spiritual distress is a mark of a terrible condition. I don’t say it’s a proof of the unpardonable sin, I say it’s a proof that we’re on our way to it.
Oh, I can’t say too often, if you can be sorry for sin, thank God for the ability to be sorry. Some people can’t. Some religious people can never be sorry. Their religion lies in texts, forms, the fact they were sprinkled, took communion, confirmed. But there’s never been anything inside. And they’re deteriorating fast.
Wouldn’t you feel terrible if a doctor would say to you, I’m awfully sorry to tell you, I wish you’d bring your wife down, and you and your wife would sit there and a specialist would say to you, now, I’m sorry to tell you this, but your brain is deteriorating. You’ve got a strange disease, and the cells are breaking down one after the other, and before very long, you won’t even be able to tell your own name, you won’t know your people.
Wouldn’t you go home blue? Wouldn’t that be awful? I’d go home and say to my people, well, that’s what he told me, now expect anything from here on in. And how much worse to know that by self-righteousness and self-love and a brassy unwillingness ever to admit we’re wrong, basically wrong, have deteriorations taking place in many lives, religious lives.
I don’t say saved people. Saved people can’t commit the unpardonable sin. A saved man cannot commit the unpardonable sin. These were not saved people; they were religious people. There’s a vast difference. But to know that that deterioration takes place, to know that it’s taking place and that little by little the spirit is getting obtuse, its eyes are going out, its blindness is coming off, deafness is taking over, and pretty soon it will be confined within its own skull in darkness.
How terrible. But nobody ever knows that. Nobody ever knows it because the people it’s happening to would laugh at me for preaching and scorn and curse Jesus for saying something and say, ah, you’ve got the devil in you. I’m a Jew. Look at me, circumcised the eighth day, my lineage is in the temple. I know who I’m born of, I’m not born of fornication, what are you talking about? Didn’t I say you were a devil and were crazy? He knew who he was.
I’m a Methodist, I’m a Baptist. I heard Dr. Simpson preach. I give to missions. I prayed all night one night with Leonard Ravenhill. Sure you did, but you’ll never believe how bad you are. I tell you, a little penitence will go a long way, a little sorrow for sin.
Two men went up into the temple to pray. One stood thus and prayed with himself, O God, I thank thee I am not as other men. The other man bowed his head on his chest, beat that same chest, and said, God have mercy on me, a sinner. The Lord smiled and said, ah, that’s the way I like to hear him talk, and he went down to his house justified.
I said to Philip Newell over the phone the other day, the two classes of men they tell me in the world, the good people who think they’re bad and the bad people who think they’re good. And I never met a real Christian in my life, never met a Christian in my life who was a humble follower of the Lord Jesus Christ that ever believed he amounted to anything. You always take the humble low place and admit you’re no good.
So, the world is filled with people who think they’re good and aren’t, and with saints who are only too ready to admit they’re no good. All their righteousness is of God.
I don’t want to close on this low, funereal note. I want to give you some scripture here. God gave this to me a few years ago, as certainly as if it had been given to me by divine inspiration. It was here several hundred years before I was ever thought of, or born, even. But God gave this to me. Did you ever have God give you a chapter, did you? Ever have God give you a chapter that was just as real to you as if nobody else had ever read it, and for a moment you wondered if they ever had.
Well, God said to me, fear thou not, for thou shalt not be shamed. Neither be thou confounded, for thou shalt not be put to shame, for thou shalt forget the shame of thy youth. No, that’s not the way it should be read. For thou shalt forget the shame of thy youth, and shalt not remember the reproach of thy widowhood anymore.
For thy Maker is now thine Husband, the Lord of Hosts his Name, the Redeemer, the Holy One of Israel, the God of the whole earth shall he be called. For a small moment have I forsaken thee, but with great mercies will I gather thee. In a little wrath I hid my face from thee for a moment, but with everlasting kindness will I have mercy on thee, saith the Lord thy Redeemer. For this is as the waters of Noah unto me, for as I have sworn the waters of Noah should no more go over the earth, so have I sworn that I would not be wroth with thee, nor rebuke thee.
Now, I’ve taken verse 9 as certainly for me as if it had never been written to anybody else in the universe. God promised he’d never get angry with me again, and that worries me a little bit. No, I can get worried about more blessed things.
So, the other day I was telling God, up here in my study, now Father, this sounds awful, this is terrible. Suppose I do a lot of things I shouldn’t, you promised you’d never rebuke me nor get angry with me as long as the world goes on.
Suppose I do things I shouldn’t, but something said in my heart, I know how to handle my children. I’ll take care of that. I’ll discipline you, I’ll chastise you, I’ll make you sweat, I’ll bring you around, I’ll see to it you don’t get away with anything, but I’ll never be angry again.
And I’ll never be wroth nor rebuke you while the world stands. For the mountains shall depart and the hills be removed, but my kindness shall not depart from thee, neither shall the covenant of my peace be removed, saith the Lord that hath mercy on me. In righteousness thou shalt be established.
Whose righteousness? You answer me. Whose? His. Thou shalt be far from oppression, for thou shalt not fear, and from terror for it shall not come near thee. Behold, they shall surely gather together, but not by me. He said, you’ll have a lot of enemies, and they’ll get a lynching bay up for you, but not by me. I didn’t send them. Whosoever shall gather against thee shall fall for thy sake.
Behold, I have created the smith that bloweth the coals in the fire, and that bringeth forth an instrument for his work, and I have created the waters to destroy. And no weapon that is formed against thee shall prosper. And every tongue that shall rise against thee in judgment thou shalt condemn, for this is the heritage of the servants of the Lord, and their righteousness is of me, saith the Lord.
So, I took off the old coat called Tozer, and put on the robe called my righteousness, that is, Christ’s righteousness. And I’m not worried about myself, because I know I belong in hell, and the man who knows he belongs in hell can’t go there, because that’s the penitent man, the penitent soul can’t perish. If you’re a penitent soul, oh, that we might be penitential, sobbing for sins, willing to confess and admit and acknowledge.
That kind of soul can never die, that kind of soul can never commit an unpardonable sin. God has spoken. Arise, my soul, arise, shake off thy guilty fears, the bleeding sacrifice in thy behalf appears. For all the self-righteous crowd, deteriorating, going to pieces, breaking down, going to the point of no return, righteous, moral, living well, going to church, but never suspecting nor dreaming how bad they are. For them there is no repentance, for them there is no forgiveness, their sin will be with them forever.
But the man who beats his breast and says, God, have mercy on me, the sinner, can’t perish. He can’t, nor can he commit the unpardonable sin. Penitence, my brother, I plead it, I ask you. Learn to repent.
Dr. R.R. Brown once said in this pulpit, we have lost the art of repentance, the holy art of repentance. It’s that that keeps us healthy, it’s that that keeps us right with God.
So, learn to repent, learn to be penitential. Every day tell God about yourself, and then every day say, arise, my soul, arise. I was a guilty sinner, but Jesus died for me.
These two things must be held in suspension in the human mind. How bad I was, how good God is; how evil I was, how powerful the blood is; how certainly I’m bad, and how wonderful the grace of God is to save the bad man. These two things must always be before us, may be way out there in the consummation when we see Him and His name is on our forehead, maybe we’ll forget our record. But until we do, let’s keep two things before us, how bad we were, and how wonderfully powerful the dying Lamb is now that He’s at the right hand of the Father. Keep those two things before you and you have nothing to worry about.
So, any of you gloomy people, you spiritually skeptics that are going around lashing yourself like a flagellante, making fun of our Roman Catholic friends, and you’re doing penance every day, hating yourself, wishing you were dead and hadn’t been, calling yourself names. You think you’ve committed the unpardonable sin.
No, no, you’re just not looking in the right direction, you’re looking inside. I beg of you, look unto Jesus, the author and finisher of your faith, and you’ll forget about yourself for a little while.
Now, in the 8th chapter of John, verse 51. Verily, verily, I say unto you, if a man keep my saying, he shall never see death. If a man keep my saying, he shall never see death.
Now I want to begin with death and go on with the life this evening. I begin by saying that death is a fact in the world. If we were to take the fact or the thought of death out of all literature, there would scarcely be a major work left in any language.
If we were to take the idea of death out of art, some of the greatest, most, I would say, or at least a large percentage of the great masterpieces of the centuries would collapse. If we were to take the idea of death out of music, some of the greatest compositions in all the world would collapse or would never have been written.
If we were to take the fact of death and the idea of death out of history, the whole of all human history would have to be rewritten, and if we were to take the idea of death out of religion, religion itself would be otherwise than what it is. Death is a fact.
Now the Bible makes it very clear what the origin of death is. It says in Genesis 2:17, But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil thou shalt not eat, because the day thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die. And in Romans 5:12, it says that sin entered into the world and death by sin.
So, the origin of death is sin. Sin is the father, and if the devil is the grandfather, sin is the father of death. We know that death is a fact in the world, a fact that is woven in to all the doings of mankind. And we know its origin, it came from sin.
And then we know something of the nature of death as well. Death is not a substance. Do not try to personalize it and make a substance out of it. If it were a substance, we might discover some way to destroy death. If death were a substance, a thing that we could get our hands on, that we could know how to deal with, we might be able to handle it. But it is not a substance, and it is not a being. Death is not a being.
Now right here you’re going to have to do some thinking, and I recommend that we do some thinking. That is, we really use our minds and try to think ourselves, by the grace of God, free from some things that hold us in bondage. We are, for instance, in bondage on this matter of our concept of death. We think about death as a being, and we preachers haven’t helped it any, and the poets haven’t helped it any, and the artists haven’t helped it any, because we tend to apostrophize death. They show death as a man with a skull for a head and a scythe.
Other concepts of death have been painted onto the canvases. And in Milton, death becomes a being that sits at the gate. And in all of our thinking, we talk about Adam opening the gate and death coming in.
We tend to apostrophize death and make death a being. Death is not a being. Death is not a personality or an individual that you could get a hold of and destroy. That’s not possible, because death is not a being any more than death is a substance.
Death, my brethren, and this is infinitely worse, if death were a substance, we might destroy that substance with an atom bomb or a cobalt bomb. If death were a being, we might send some FBI throughout the universe and run him down and slay him. But death is not a being.
Death is separation. Death is eternal negation. Death is a rending. Death is a separation of the soul from God. Death is a separation of the soul from the body. Death is a separation of the total man from heaven and God.
In the garden there was a rending that could be heard in all the universe when the soul of the man was rent from God and God was separated from man and the light went out in the hearts of mankind. And in that second death yonder, which is yet to be, there will not be a great being walking with a scythe. There will be something infinitely worse than that.
If it were a great being with a scythe, we might call on the archangel Michael, who might come with his hosts and destroy him. But it will not be a being with a scythe. It will be an ultimate separation, a final rending of the soul from God, never to be reunited, world without end, and that is the second death.
The whole being of the man will be separated from heaven, so that he will never unite again with the heaven which in Adam once he knew when he was in fellowship with God.
I say that death is a negation, death is an everlasting, “no.” Death says no to everything.
If it is continuance, and there is something in the human bosom that wants to continue, that wants to go on, a man wants to live on and go on, and death says no. If it is fulfillment, a man feels that he is only a blueprint, and that the great structure hasn’t been erected, and he’s got to go, he gets old before the building is erected. He feels there is work to be done, and he hasn’t finished it yet, and he wants to continue. But death is a negation, death says no.
And he talks about happiness. He feels that he was made of God to enjoy, to let his whole being enter out into something that God has given him to enjoy. But death says no. It says no to light, and it says no to peace, and it says no to life. And the whole being of the man pants after more and fuller life, but death says no.
And the presence of God, which is the heaven of all beings, I do not hesitate to say that if God were to go into the hell below and smile, it would turn into a heaven immediately by the light of that smile. And if God were in his heaven above to turn his holy face and frown, heaven would turn into a hell by the darkness of that frown. It is the smiling presence of God that makes heaven, heaven, and it is the absence of God’s smile that makes hell the hell that it is and will be.
So, to the presence of God, after which the soul of mortal man longs as a fish longs after water, as a bird longs after the freedom of the air, so the soul of man longs after God.
God has made us in His being, in His image, and our beings will never find fulfillment until they find it in union with God. But death says no to that as it says no to everything. Death, I say, is an everlasting negation, an everlasting no.
And death is our enemy, of course, for that reason, 1 Corinthians 15:25, 26, that Jesus Christ must reign until He has put all enemies under His feet, and the last enemy to be destroyed is death. And it tells us, we know from what I have just said, why death is an enemy. It’s an enemy to me, it’s an enemy to my permanence. Everybody wants to live on.
A man builds a building and moves into it and says, I’m going to live here, I’m here permanently. He gets a job and says, I’m here permanently. But when he uses the word permanently, he has to cross his fingers because he knows it’s not so. Death says, no permanence for you.
Here’s a man with his family, his little children, and his good wife around the table, and he dreams, this will never be anything but what it is. This will be permanent, but death is in the world, and death says no. The enemy says this will not be permanent.
And the man stands up on the earth and feels the wind on his cheek and sees the rain as it falls from heaven above, and the surging, leaping life in him, and he feels, I’d like to live on and on.
But death says, no, your body is going to be separated rent from your body with a rending that can be heard in heaven and hell, and your friends will gather around your bed, and you’ll separate from your body. Body and soul will be torn apart with a bloody, ripping, rending, and you will not keep that body of yours.
His mind wants to be at peace, but death says, no, and his soul wants to be his own, but death says, no, it’s to be separated. You are to be shredded and torn and blown.
No, death is an everlasting enemy, an everlasting negation, with an eternal no on its lips. It’s against everything, against God and against man and against life and against peace and against happiness and against permanence and against fulfillment and against fruitfulness and against growth. Death is everywhere in the world and always it’s saying, no, no, no, no.
No wonder then, I say, no wonder that it’s the chief source of all fear. Hebrews 2:14, 15, tell us, those verses tell us, that the devil had the power of death, that all men fear death, that fear brings bondage, and therefore the devil through death keeps men in bondage. That’s what it tells us in Hebrews 2:14, 15.
The devil had the power of death. I said, has, but I change it, had the power of death, and all men fear death, and fear brings bondage, and the devil thus through fear and through death keeps men in bondage to fear.
And we also learn in the Scriptures that death is universal. I read five words in the old King James Version yesterday, five words that are forever and ever to take away any thought of permanence, any thought of this world or the satisfaction that this world could give. It’s these words: so death passed upon all, so death passed upon all, and that is the word that goes throughout all the universe.
There isn’t a tribe anywhere in the wide world that doesn’t have its death and its burial customs. There isn’t a city anywhere that doesn’t have a place where it takes out its dead and lays them respectfully away to await the judgment of the great day. Death passed upon all. This enemy, this negation, this no that follows all the races of mankind.
Yesterday was Lincoln’s birthday. We didn’t say anything about it today. I do not preach Abraham Lincoln. I preach Jesus Christ. But it’s an illustration anyhow. Here’s Abraham Lincoln, the great Lanky, the rail splitter that lived so long in Illinois.
Well, he was a great man and a good man, and I read an article today by Dr. Murch, editor of Action magazine, in which he proved that Lincoln was not only a Christian but that he had been a baptized member of the Campbellite Church. Did you know that? A baptized member of the Disciples Church. Well, Lincoln’s gone.
Why couldn’t they keep a great man like that around? We’ve got rats calling themselves men. Rats boring and chewing and gnawing their way through all Chicago society, everywhere, and a great man like that couldn’t stay. Death said, no, and the world said, we need Lincoln.
But death said, no, negation, negation, he can’t stay, I’m against it. So, separation, negation, no, is everywhere in all the wide world. And it’s the cause of fear. Men are kept in bondage to fear because death, separation, a breaking down, the destruction, annihilation is going, not annihilation, please, for I do not believe in annihilation.
I wonder in the light of this, that there isn’t a spot in all the world where death is not. Death has passed upon all. There isn’t a tribe, however small. There isn’t a city, however large. There isn’t a race, however cultured. There isn’t a group, however pure. But death has passed upon them, death the enemy, death the destroyer, death that yells its everlasting bold, “no” to all the hopes and plans of mankind.
How could this text be? And yet it is, and our Lord not only gave it, but he buttressed it with two of his famous verily, verily, twice. He says it verily, verily, if a man keep my sayings, he shall never see death.
And I looked up some other translations, and I have the Riverside translation, if a man keep my sayings, he will not look on death. Barclay, if a man keep my sayings, he will in no wise taste death forever. And Knox, if a man keep my sayings, to all eternity he will never see death. And another British translation, if a man keep my sayings, to all eternity shall never come in sight of death. That’s what he said, all right, all the translators agree.
I never like to get caught on a possible bad translation. If I’m going to bear it down and make a fact hinge upon a text, I’m going to check that text back into the Greek and out into the translations to see if that’s what He said.
Brother, that’s what He said, all right. And there isn’t anybody that can say anything else. That’s what He said, that if a man keep My sayings, he shall never experience death, he shall never look upon death, he shall never come in sight of death, he shall never taste death forever. Now here’s a solemn promise, a solemn promise, a declaration is here, as trustworthy as God and as good as the One who made it.
I have said a hundred times from this pulpit that a promise is only as good as the one that makes it. It is not the word of the promise, but the character of the one that spoke the word that makes the promise good. And there are many promises in the Bible, and the God who made the promises was not trustworthy, not one of the thousands would amount to anything. But the character of God gives body and meaning and foundation and assurance to all His promises.
So, when He says he shall never see death, the character of God is back to that. The Triune God who made heaven and earth and all things visible and invisible, God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, and Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord, and also the Holy Ghost, the Comforter, these three persons, the Holy Three, the character of God, all that God is, all that holds up the moral universe, all that makes heaven heaven, all that keeps the vast universe from being hell, is back to this, the character of God is back of this.
God said, if a man keep my saying, he will never see death, he will through all eternity never come in sight of death, they who are the beneficiaries, a man keep my sayings, what do you mean by that? Ah, that’s the Book of John, is a little different from the other books of the Bible. It has a different terminology, and its phrasing is a bit different.
So, what He said here, those who are the beneficiaries of atonement and who confirm it by obedience, the beneficiaries of atonement, oh, there have been some great historic facts in the world, listening friends, great historic facts. One of the great historic facts of the world was the fall of man.
When by sin he was rent from God and a vast gulf separated. That became one of the great epochs of the world and one of the great facts of the world, that sin broke God and man apart and that man, like a little island breaking loose from a continent, began to drift away further and farther from the mainland into the seas. That was one of the great facts of the world.
Another great fact of the world, perhaps the greatest of them all, was that God gave His only begotten Son to make atonement for that sin and to bridge the gulf, or rather not bridge the gulf. That is again where we get into semantic trouble, we get into the trouble that imagery brings us. For Jesus is not a bridge between God and man.
A bridge means that there are two bodies of ground, a bank here and a bank over there and something flowing between, and a bridge to carry across. It is only by straining our metaphors and figures that Jesus Christ is a bridge between God and man, for when He in His atonement is through with the soul, there is no river flowing between God and the soul of a man. There is union there.
If we could build a bridge between Dakar, Africa, and the coast of North Carolina, we would call that a bridge. Two continents lay hundreds of miles apart, but there were now bridges so we could drive over them. In one sense we could say they are one now, made one by the bridge.
But don’t think of Jesus Christ as One who bridged the gulf. He destroyed the gulf, He put it out of the universe, and God and man are now united in Jesus Christ, not by a bridge but by an everlasting union.
So, Jesus, in His atonement, the great fact of atonement. And Jesus said, he that keeps my sayings, he’s my follower, he’s joined himself to me, he’s my believer, he’s given himself to me, and he’s a beneficiary of my atoning work, he shall never see death. That’s what he said, and I believe that. I can die believing that and die in peace.
So here is the solemn declaration. And so, he enters now the world of the everlasting affirmation. Death is an everlasting negation, an eternal no, and life is an everlasting yes, an eternal affirmation. And that’s the difference.
And in Jesus Christ, they that keep his sayings, they that trust in Him, they that have identified themselves with Him in believing union, they have entered a new world, the world of the eternal yes, the everlasting affirmation.
So now, when we cry, O God, my soul longs to continue, and God says, yes! And when we say, O God, something in me wants fulfillment, I desire that this germ within me, this beginning, this bud, should blossom into the vast possibilities that lie in my nature. Eternal life says, yes, it shall be so, it shall be so, for they shall look upon me, and when they see Him, they shall be like Him.
And something in my heart says, I want light, light, darkness is everywhere, gross darkness is upon the people, and I’m a child of the light. I’m not a flatworm or a blind fish or a mole. God made me in His image and made me to inhabit the light, but sin has shrouded my soul, and I cry out of my bewilderment and confusion. I cry to the Son of God, oh, I want light, and Jesus Christ says, yes, to my cry after life.
And when I say, O God, I want peace, I’m not a man of war, I’m a man of peace. I want to live in peace, I want to be in peace, I want to be where there is peace. And I want to inhabit a level of life where there are no keys necessary, and nobody needs to swear an oath, we’ll know he isn’t lying and then suspect that he is; where we don’t need policemen and don’t need armies and don’t need navies.
I want to inhabit a world where I can be at peace and fulfill that for which I was created. And Jesus Christ says, it shall be so, life, ye shall have life, and life is the everlasting, yes, and the everlasting union, and death is the everlasting separation, negation, and life is the everlasting affirmation and union. So, life is not a thing either.
We think about life as a thing, and we, the artists, draw pictures of death as a miserable looking old fellow with a sepulchral smile on his teethy face, and he’s dead, and he’s got to scythe, and he’s out getting a crop of men. And over against him is a smiling feminine looking fellow, and he is called life. And they say, which way will you take? I understand they mean well by all that, but it’s certainly reducing spirituality to a woefully physical level. We ought to get loose from those physical images and remember that life is not a thing at all. Life is a person.
He said, I am the life, Jesus Christ is the life, and when He joins the soul of a man, a believing, returning man to God, He closes the gap between man and God, and there is no bridge needed, no gap needed. He has knit them together by one union of life and has bound them up in the bundle of life with God, and all the spirits of just men made perfect.
So, life is a relation to God, as death is a relation to God or the absence of it. Death is the breaking of a relation between soul and body, physical death. Spiritual death is the breaking of a relation between God and the soul.
Life is the maintaining of the relation between the body and soul. As long as your body and soul hang together, we won’t bury you. You will be alive, you will live. But when body and soul separate and rend apart, you will be buried out of sight, for your soul will have fled the body.
And life, then, is the reunion of severed parts. When God in the new birth unites himself back to the soul of a man, the spirit of a man, that is life.
This is eternal life, that they might know thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom Thou hast sent. Know is almost the same word here as, see. He shall never experience death, but he shall experience Thee, the true God in Jesus Christ whom Thou hast sent. So, when it comes to permanence, we want something that will live.
We are builders, we humans. We build. We build bridges. We build battleships. We build pyramids. We build hanging gardens. We build skyscrapers. We build, and we want to leave something behind.
MacArthur went out to the West Coast to see unveiled a statue of himself. MacArthur won’t be around too long, but there will stand out there in the park a statue of that handsome old man who fought so well and nobly for his country. He won’t be here. But something in him says, I want to exist on, and if nothing else, I want to exist in the memory of my countrymen.
And life says, yes, yes, yes, yes. You can exist on. Continuance is the word. It’s yours. It’s yours. Affirmation. Declaration. Annunciation. Yes, yes, you can live on. God says you can live on in Him, live on in Christ. There shall be permanence. And Paul said that the promises of God are yea and amen.
And I, for my part, though I by nature am not a happy man, and by nature I am not even an optimist. By nature, I am a pessimist, and by education a skeptic. But by faith I am a Christian. And instead of pessimism and skepticism, I hear the everlasting, yes, ringing through the universe. The affirmation, it’s true, permanence, continuousness.
I want to do at least one lasting thing before God is through with me down here, want at least one lasting thing, to come into the world with all our powers, to come into the world with this strange, beautiful instrument we call our hand, with its four fingers and opposed to it the thumb. That thing that gave us the tool and the musical instrument and the artist’s brush and the writer’s pen, to come into the world with a set of such, to come into the world with imagination and creativeness and vegetate like a beast and propagate like an animal and go out and leave nothing behind. I say that that is to fail, that is to fail forever.
We ought to remember that we are here to leave something. We are here to do at least one thing that will not die with us, one thing that will not die when heaven and earth is on fire, at least one thing, one soul to be won into the kingdom of God, one mind to be purified by our teaching, one sinner to be won by our testimony, one missionary to go out by our money and prayers, one student in school learning the deep ways of God sent by our money and our prayers. There ought to be at least one thing that we do to come into the world and claim we are Christians and then go out and have nothing to show. I tell you; God never meant it.
And I don’t want you to think that I’m cracking up, and I don’t want you to think that I’ve gotten so mystical, as the man said who reviewed one of my books, he said, he’s so mystical as to be absolutely incomprehensible. I don’t believe that, but anyway, I don’t want to be too mystical on you.
But I want to say this, that I hear the “yes” ringing through the universe. I hear the affirmation; he shall never see death. He shall never experience negation. He shall never hear the “no” that stops everybody and stops everything, that puts a period behind every general, that kills a Mozart and destroys a Beethoven and cuts down a Bismarck and slays a Gladstone and brings an end to a Bryan and will soon lay low a Churchill and an Eisenhower and a MacArthur.
We’re not hearing that. The child of God isn’t hearing that. He might in his weak moments, when the physical takes over for a little while, he may feel his pulse and look at himself and pity what he sees. But if he lets his faith mount and says, I believe in the words of Jesus Christ, if any man who hears My sayings believes Me and keeps My words, he shall never experience death, the negation, the end, the period, there’s always a flow.
As something of an amateur tank-town writer, I know the difference between a period and a semicolon. A period means you’re done, let’s go have dinner. But a semicolon says, hey, go on there, you haven’t finished. Finish your sentence, bring it to an end.
So, this world that I inhabit by the grace of God hasn’t appeared in it, not once. Not a place where God says, this is it, finis. We’re always in flow, always in motion, always moving on, and instead of being surrounded everywhere by an everlasting chorus of no’s, in Russia they say it’s nyet. That sounds still worse. Nyet, nyet, they hear it all the time in the United Nations. Let’s do something decent, nyet, says the Russian. Let’s bless somebody, nyet, says the Russian. No, veto, no.
They remind me of hell and death and hell itself, their everlasting nyets, their nos, their negations. But there isn’t a one in the kingdom of God, not a one anywhere. It’s all yes, yes, yes. Life? Yes. Peace? Yes. Happiness? Yes. Fruit? Yes.
So, Jesus Christ is the everlasting affirmation, no question marks, but affirmations, so that separation has given place to union. Oh, why don’t we preach it anymore? Why don’t we preach salvation to be the union of the soul with God? Instead of that, it’s ten cents’ worth of life Jesus Christ gives you when you put a dime in the slot and pull the lever down, and then you can go play golf. It’s all done, thank the Lord, we say. Pray for me that I may hold out faith alive, and I’ve accepted Him. Oh, what a shoddy, low view of Christianity that all is anyhow.
Brethren, accepting Jesus Christ, if it’s right and done right and really effective, means that I am reunited with God again, that God isn’t angry anymore, that the old enmity has been destroyed by the blood of the everlasting covenant, that I am back in my Father’s house. You can’t see it, but I wear the ring of His forgiveness. And the new robe of His acceptance, and it’s yes, yes, yes, the promises of God are yea and amen.
Now, how could He say this? How could He say this? How can He say this? Why in that same chapter He said, before Abraham was, I am. No Mrs. Eddy could say it, no Father Divine could say it, no Mohammed could say it, no Buddha could say it. They all came up and died like others.
He came to the world and didn’t die like others. He never could have died, but He gave His life. Death had no dominion over Him. Death had no mortgage on His holy body or soul. He was born into the world, and He could have been as immortal as they were if they’d eaten of the tree of life in the garden. He developed, but He never died, until the day came that He knew that He must lay His life down for His sheep, and then of His own free will He went out and paid a debt He didn’t know and gave up a life hell couldn’t claim, and took it back the third day and said, now I share it with My people. I share it with those who hear my sayings and keep them, who follow Me and believe on My name. Before Abraham was, I am, and you can’t kill that kind of life. I saw Satan as lightning fall from heaven, and you can’t kill that kind of life.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. In Him was life, and the life was the light of men, and you can’t kill that kind of life. It can’t die, for it’s the life of God.
So, He could go out and give Himself up His human life, His human soul, and make His soul an offering for sin. And when He died, it’s right in one way to say that God the mighty maker died, but in another we must understand what we mean. For the life of God was not damaged on the cross, it was only the life of the holy man in whom God had united Himself in the Incarnation—the life, the deathless, immortal life of the Triune God was not damaged nor injured on the cross. It was a Lamb that died there, not the Deity, though the Deity certainly was in the Lamb, united forever in a holy bond of mysterious union in the Incarnation.
So, if that seems mysterious and self-contradictory, I do not apologize. It is mysterious, it is self-contradictory, it’s an everlasting dilemma, how He could be God and man, and man and God, and could have the ability of a man to die, and yet the virtue of a God and the merit of a God, all that I can never know.
I can only bow and say, O Lord God, Thou knowest. Make room for mystery, open the door for wonderful mystery, and stand breathless and full of wonderment and cry, my Lord and my God. That’s the best the theologians can do. They can reason and reason and call biology and science and philosophy to their aid, and when it’s all done, there is still a vast, yawning sea of mystery. But I believe it.
In Him was life, and God gave it to Him to have life in Himself, and it says in Hebrews through death that He might destroy him that had the power of death.
So, Jesus Christ offers you life. If you’ve had enough of death, Jesus Christ offers you life, that if a man keep My sayings, he shall not see death.
But you say, doesn’t a Christian see death? He may go through it, but the Lord never lets him look on its dirty face.
And there I am personalizing it just like I told you we did, apostrophizing it, yet it’s not really there. A man can’t see death when there’s no death there. If death is a rending loose of the soul from God, if that’s real death, then the Christian in one sense never dies at all.
But if death is the departing of the soul from the body, then the Christian dies. If the Lord doesn’t come, the Christian will die. But the Lord will never let him see it. He just puts His kind hand over the Christian’s eyes and says, it’ll be over in a minute, son, come on. He leads him across and takes the hand off, and the next thing he sees is the spirits of just men made perfect, an innumerable company of angels, the Church of the Firstborn, and all the saints and God Himself.
So, He’s not even going to let us look upon that ugly beast, because really there won’t be any ugly beast there. It’ll only be a temporary separation of body and soul in death, and then when He comes, they’ll be reunited in a perfect, immortal union that can never again be divided.
Isn’t Christ worth your investigating? Isn’t He worth your believing on? Isn’t the Christian life worth living? Isn’t it worth giving up the foibles of the dying world to believe on Him and take His cross? I think it is. And that is why the Bible calls the man the fool that doesn’t make provision for his soul.
The man who knows all this and does nothing about it is ten thousand times a fool. And how wise is that man who hears His sayings and believes them and identifies himself in faith with that Jesus Christ who was before Abraham was, who was in the beginning with God. And he passes out of the realm of the recurring negation, the everlasting no, into the world of the everlasting, eternal affirmation.
He hears God saying, yes, until it echoes from the stars. And he hears it while he lives and while he sleeps and while he breathes and while he eats and while he labors. He hears it coming down from God, yes, yes, yes, I’m on your side. You’re on my side, all is well. No man shall pluck you out of My hand, nothing shall separate you. And he can live, and he can die.
In the sense we just explained, the separating of the soul from the body, when we end our lives here, he can do all that, and he can do it without any self-pity, and he can do it without a trembling chin, and he can do it without fear, and he can do it without a wide-staring eye. He can do it cheerfully. Arise my soul, arise, shake off thy guilty fears. The bleeding sacrifice in thy behalf appears. Before the throne thy surety stands, my name is written on his hands. Amen? Amen.
Now, in the 53rd of Isaiah, I’ll not read it all, it’s a well-known passage, but I’ll read two verses. Verses 10 and 11. Yet it pleased Jehovah to bruise him. He hath put him to grief. When thou shalt make his soul an offering for sin, he shall see his seed, he shall prolong his days, and the pleasure of the Lord shall prosper in his hand. He shall see of the travail of his soul and shall be satisfied. By his knowledge shall my righteous servant justify many, for he shall bear their iniquities.
Those are two verses out of the 53rd of Isaiah. And I want you to notice here that it says the Lord, that is Jehovah, shall bruise Him, that Him being Jesus, and the incident, of course, being the cross.
Now this is a frank statement here, and there are no qualifying words, and the word bruise here doesn’t mean what you mean when you bump your arm accidentally or slip and fall, and you say it didn’t hurt too much, but I have a bruise. That doesn’t mean that at all. In the original it means a bruising so deep and so terrible to be beat to pieces and to crush are the words used to define the original word.
Now God bruises our Lord Jesus and puts Him to grief, this Suffering One. God does it, and this introduces divine sovereignty into the plan of redemption, and it lifts the crucifixion above mere murder. There are those who say they murdered our Lord, but it was not murder, it was a divine act.
And the sovereignty of God here, makes the cross where Jesus died to be not a gallows, but an altar. And there is a vast difference. The criminal dies on a gallows, but the Lamb dies on the altar. And while the world put what they considered a criminal on the gallows, God, by the miracle and wonder of His eternal purpose, turned that criminal into a lamb and that gallows into an altar.
They who crucified Him didn’t know the nature of their act. Peter later said that they, by wicked hands, had crucified and slain Him, but their hands were wicked because of their evil motives. But they nevertheless fulfilled the purposes of God.
But let us not imagine that they who slew Him, sacrificed Him as a priest sacrifices a lamb, for it was not they that slew Him really. It was God that slew Him for it says that the Lord bruised him and put him to grief.
Now it was so of inescapable necessity. God could not permit man with his blundering ways and his awkward blundering hands to do this sacred act. Men shouted and cursed and drove nails, but the plan was far above them. The plan of God, it was the work of the Trinity, and it was by the collaboration of the Holy Three.
And it says the Lord bruised Him, that is, beat Him to pieces so that He was crushed completely. He was born to be crushed. The king aspect of His life had to follow, and He knew this, and He knew that He could not avoid the crushing. He could not avoid the bruising and be made king, so He turned His back on the devil who offered Him the kingdoms of this world.
He did not say to the devil, you are bluffing. You have not the power to give me the world. He said, get behind me, Satan. That was all. He put Satan behind Him, and the devil fled away, but he would not allow Himself to be made king until He had become a bruised Lamb, and He would not permit Himself to be a judge and a divider over men. His soul shall be made an offering for sin.
Now, the soul of a man, the Bible is not always clear in the difference between soul and spirit. Some people are. I wish I knew as much at any time as a lot of preachers know all the time. I wish I knew as much about anything as some do about everything.
So, I’m not clear about the difference between soul and spirit when it’s used in the Bible. I think that they are sometimes used interchangeably. But I do know that the word “soul” here means the pleasures, the enjoyments, the feelings, the sentient being. It is that in a man which is above his body and even above his intellect. And that had to be made an offering for sin. So, the Lord made it an offering. And all this was the offering that He made.
Now, if you go back to the Old Testament, you will find there what this making an offering meant. I’ll read briefly from the ninth of Leviticus. They brought that which Moses commanded before the tabernacle of the congregation, and all the congregation drew near and stood before the Lord.
And Moses said, this is the thing which the Lord commanded that ye should do, and the glory of the Lord shall appear unto you. And Moses said unto Aaron, go unto the altar, and offer thy sin offering, and thy burnt offering, and make an atonement for thyself and for the people, and offer the offering of the people, and make an atonement for them, as the Lord commanded.
Aaron therefore went unto the altar, and slew the calf of the sin offering, which was for himself. And the sons of Aaron brought the blood unto him, and he dipped his fingers in the blood and put it upon the horns of the altar and poured out the blood at the bottom of the altar. And Aaron lifted up his hand toward the people and blessed them and came down from offering the sin offering and the burnt offering and the peace offering.
And Moses and Aaron went into the tabernacle of the congregation and came out and blessed the people. And the glory of the Lord appeared unto all the people. And there came a fire out from before the Lord and consumed upon the altar the burnt offering and the fat, which when all the people saw, they shouted and fell on their faces. They were caught between a delirium of joy and a great fear. And so, they shouted, and as though to rebuke themselves, they fell on their faces in awe before the mighty fire.
Now it was in fulfillment of this and other such passages that our Lord made his soul an offering for sin. And it says in the text that it pleased the Lord to bruise him. Now it states plainly that it pleased Him. And I went to look it up in its original to see whether maybe our English word might not have been misused. You know, translators are human beings too. But there’s no error here. Pleased is the word. He was pleased to bruise. He was glad to do it. He bruised His son and made His soul an offering for sin.
Did He then, the great God, enjoy the tears and the blood and the agony of His only begotten Son? Is He the great saddest of the universe, reveling in the sight of suffering? No, the whole Bible cries out against that creed of blasphemy.
And that whole Bible sings of the mercy and grace and loving kindness of the Lord. And it declares that God cannot possibly see a man suffer and not suffer with him. He makes all our bed in his sickness and in our grief sees with us. Think not thou can shed a tear, and thy maker is not near. Think not thou can sigh a sigh, and thy maker is not nigh. No, God suffers along with us.
And so why then was He pleased to see His Son suffer? Well, Jesus was God walking among us. And don’t forget this. While our Lord Jesus suffered in His body on the tree, the heart of the Father suffered along with Him. And for every pang that rent the heart of Jesus, an equal pang rent the heart of the Father. Let’s not forget it.
So, while the Father was pleased that the Son was offered as a sacrifice, He was pleased and suffered along in that pleasure. That was the strange wonder of the redemptive act of God, that He should revel in the suffering which He Himself did in order that He might redeem mankind.
Now, why was He pleased? He was pleased because the crushing and the bruising and the bleeding fulfilled a purpose which He had purposed in Christ Jesus before the world began. The pleasure of the Lord shall prosper in His hand.
Now, that word “pleasure” means a delightful matter. And what is this delightful matter that angels desired to look into? What is that delightful matter which a sage and saint and poet sang? What is that delightful matter which made God willing to sacrifice His own Son and take pleasure in having Him die? What is that delightful matter that that dying purchased for us?
Well, it was a delightful matter indeed. It opened a fountain for cleansing in which the unclean might bathe. And the Lord God had wanted this fountain opened in the house of David, and this was the only way to open it.
Now, I say it was the only way to open it. Let us not say God might have thought of ten or a hundred ways. There was only one. There was not two, but one. Not ten, not five, but one. It was the opening of the fountain by the crushing and bruising of the Lamb. And so how wise was the English Cowper who said, there is a fountain filled with blood, drawn from Emmanuel’s veins, and sinners plunge beneath that flood, lose all their guilty stains. That was the delightful matter. To a holy God it was a delightful matter that a cleansing fountain could be opened where unclean persons who wanted to be clean might become clean by bathing. Then He ransomed and redeemed and delivered and set free.
God hates all prisons and all chains and all manacles and shackles. God hates all oppression and all bondage. And for everyone who would be free, who would come out of prison, who would have the chains taken from his hands, and who would lift up his head and sit at the king’s table, this was the delightful matter that provided it. And this provision brought about the delightful matter called deliverance.
And then He wanted to give life. God hates death, and He hates everything that’s death, and He hates half-death, and He hates all that’s dying, and He hates mortality, and He loves immortality and life eternal. In order that He might give to this fallen race in prison and in bondage, this unclean race, that He might give life and immortality, He let His Son die, and He was pleased to let Him die, and in His own great heart suffered with Him when He was dying. And the delightful matter was that He could give life to the dead and immortality to the mortal.
And then He won back a race dear to Him. For there cannot but be an emotional content here. Let nobody, nobody talk to you in legalistic terms when we talk about Calvary or God’s justice or justifying work.
I have read theological works that were correct but cold, and they made the atonement in His blood to be a legal transaction over the counter under the law. And it is all that God knows, but it’s infinitely more than that. It is so highly charged with emotion that when the Lamb would go out to die, He stopped long enough to bleed and sweat on His way to die.
And when He would die, He sang a hymn before He went out to bleed. And when He would die and rise again, He sang among His brethren. So, there’s a high emotional content here in all this. It pleased the Lord. The very word “pleased” is an emotion. To feel pleasure is an emotional thing. And if the church of Christ could only let go, could only let go.
As soon as the benediction is pronounced, the average church member goes out, and on the way home he’s laughing and letting himself go. He goes to a ballgame and lets go. But when he thinks about God, he has been taught by the devil, through the lips of men who should have known better, who were not themselves servants of the devil, but who unknowingly and unwittingly played the devil’s game. He was taught that the only way a Christian should live would be to be sober faced.
And whereas there is a high emotional content here, I stood here and sang or partly mumbled along with you on that song, not all the blood of beasts on Jewish altars slain. And I wondered why I didn’t feel it more. I wondered why it did not have a greater charge of moral sentiency in it for me. And I looked up to God and said, God, you know I believe it, and my will is settled, even if my heart for the moment isn’t feeling it so keenly.
So, I don’t insist that we should always be in a state of high emotion, thus to live. It would be impossible thus to live very long. But the children of God should have those moments, as God had those moments and Christ had them, when he leaped with joy at the thought and at the knowledge that the fountain was open, the delightful matter had been wrought, the ransom had been paid, the redeemed were free, the deliverer had come, and life had been given. So, God was pleased to bruise him. And every ransomed soul is the reason that God was pleased.
Go to the Book of Revelation, if you will. I don’t ask that we should give any exposition here, only that we should just gaze a bit and look and notice:
And I beheld, and, lo, in the midst of the throne and of the four beasts, and in the midst of the elders, stood a Lamb as it had been slain, And he, taking the book, the four beasts and four and twenty elders fell down before the Lamb, having every one of them harps, and golden vials full of odours, which are the prayers of saints. And they said, were ten thousand times ten thousand and thousands of thousands cried, saying with a loud voice, Worthy is the Lamb that was slain to receive power, and riches, and wisdom, and strength, and honour, and glory, and blessing. And every creature which is in heaven, and on the earth, and under the earth, and such as are in the sea, and all that are in them, heard I saying, Blessing, and honour, and glory, and power, be unto him that sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb for ever and ever.
That’s why it pleased God that that chorus, so vast that they didn’t count them, so vast that even an angel or an apostle couldn’t count them, that chorus, rank upon rank and rank upon rank of altos and contraltos and mezzo-sopranos and sopranos and basses and baritones and all the rest, sang together in gorgeous harmony, Worthy is the Lamb that was slain to redeem us. And they fell on their faces and threw their crowns at His feet.
That was why it pleased the Lord. He looked past the suffering and the dying. He looked past the anguish to the time when the redeemed souls should join together in one harmonious song with Baptists and Methodists and Roman Catholics and Greek Orthodox and all the rest and where they have actually found Jesus Christ. Not those great denominations please, but the redeemed out of all denominations back over the centuries, and all living today and those who have nothing to do with denominations. If they’re born anew and redeemed, they’ll join that chorus too.
I don’t know whether I’ll be able to sing then, but I’ll be pleased if God will just let me turn the music. I’ll be happy just to turn the music and to hear the vast oratorio of redemption. The last final hallelujah chorus before eternity displaces time.
Now, my brethren, we have our communion service to keep all this in remembrance. And I wonder if we’re psychologically prepared for it. You’ve driven here and you’ve stopped and gone. Or you have walked here, or you have traveled by bus or some other way you’ve gotten here. Just the act of traveling through Vanity Fair, just the act of going 20 blocks in Sodom, unfits us for thinking thoughts like these.
Oh, may God, may God honor us and bless us by letting us think these thoughts after Him. Holy Ghost with light divine, shine upon this heart of mine and this heart of yours and make us psychologically able and inwardly able to understand what this communion service is about.
We do celebrate the Lord’s death till He comes. We’re in, as I’ve said a thousand times, in direct lineal descent to the apostles and to Christ Himself by the blood of the everlasting covenant. May God make us worthy.
We read the 72nd psalm together, that great psalm that begins, Give the king thy judgment, O God, and thy righteousness unto the king’s son. He shall judge thy people with righteousness and thy poor with judgment. This we read together earlier in the service.
This psalm was written to celebrate the accession of Solomon to the throne after the death of David. It may have been written by David before he got too old and tired to write, looking forward to the installation, coronation of his son. It may have been written by Solomon himself or more likely it was written by one of the prophets or seers that gathered round David’s throne and waited in his sanctuary, God’s sanctuary.
This psalm embodies a high prophetic expectation. Noble ideals are here, ideals of what a king must be or what a king should be. But as in many of the psalms that we call messianic psalms, the immediate serves as a prefigurement of the more remote.
There are of course two ways to look at any passage such as this, three ways to look at it, two of them wrong and one of them right. The wrong way is, as some of the commentators do, to find its historic meaning and rest at that. David was dying or had died, and Solomon was now becoming king and somebody was writing a coronation psalm. That was that and that’s it. That’s one way and that’s the wrong way.
Then there is another way and that is to see nothing here but Christ, to see a prophetic truth let down like a vacuum out of heaven above without any historic background at all and that’s a wrong way to look at.
But if we see it, as we must see much of the Bible, as having both an immediate and a remote application, the immediate being its historic meaning and the remote being its prophetic meaning, I think that is the right way to look at it because here we have Solomon being brought into the throne and making his accession to the throne but we also see here most surely another and a Greater than Solomon and a greater and nobler kingdom than Solomon’s.
We must not in any wise undersell the man Solomon because Jesus referred to him as being great and said Solomon in all his glory. That was Christ’s description of Solomon. He brought Israel to the zenith of its power, and he made stones in the street to be as gold. He built cities and he gathered to himself riches from all parts of the world. Undoubtedly Israel at under the reign of Solomon was one of the great little kingdoms of the world.
But you cannot read this 72nd Psalm for any length of time with anything like careful meditation until you find language that could not apply to Solomon. Let me read it to you.
For instance, just some for instances, passage here, verses 5 and 8 and to say no more.
They shall fear thee as long as the sun and moon endure throughout all generations. That could not possibly apply to Solomon because Solomon of course has long, long been dead and his bones have long ago turned to dust.
Then there’s this passage. He shall have dominion also from sea to sea and from the river unto the ends of the earth. That also could not describe Solomon’s kingdom because the kingdom of Solomon could be drawn, its boundaries could be drawn very, very easily.
And then that passage which says in verse 17, his name shall endure forever, his name shall be continued as long as the sun and men shall be blessed in him and all nations shall call him blessed. That I say again is stretching it too far. It could not be Solomon. Language is used here which has not yet been fulfilled.
Though this psalm had its origin I repeat at the nation of Solomon, there is language here which has not yet been fulfilled. Verses 4 and 7 for instance. He shall judge the poor of the people. He shall save the children of the needy and he shall break in pieces the oppressor. Or if fulfilled it could only have been on a very local scale. Verse 7, in his days shall the righteous flourish and the abundance of peace so long as the moon endureth. That could not possibly have been fulfilled by the man Solomon.
Then there is verse 11, yea all kings shall fall down before him and all nations shall serve him and he shall deliver the needy when he crieth and the poor also in him that hath no helper. This is asking too much to believe that even Solomon in all his glory could ever have seen anything like this.
Now there is only one way to look at this psalm. That is there is only one final way and that is to realize that it has a historic background. It was written at the coronation of Solomon and a great deal of it applied to Solomon. The other is that it is prophecy and much of it could not apply to Solomon but must apply to some other King that is coming.
Now that other King that is coming and verse 6 tells us the direction from whence he shall come. He shall come down like rain upon the mown grass as showers that water the earth. There is this other King. This could not possibly apply to the man Solomon. He shall come down like rain upon the mown grass and as showers that water the earth.
He might come and he might have come and brought prosperity to the nation and so by a stretch of poetic fancy we might have said that he makes the everything to prosper like grass but that doesn’t say it here. It says he shall come down like rain upon the mown grass and as showers that water the earth. The grass is mown not growing in its green lush beauty but mown and he comes down, not the descendant of David, but he comes down like rain.
Now what King has ever done this? Would you tell me? David did not, Solomon did not and could not, none of the others ever did. All down the years and no King has ever come down and no King has ever come and found his kingdom mown lying, lying flat like a field that has been mown and has been to it such as rain might be upon such a field.
Now things are said of this King of which we have read together tonight which could only apply to the Eternal Son. And the New Testament boldly shows that this King who is to come down is none other than Jesus Christ our Lord. If you are a believer in the New Testament, if you believed even a modicum, even a trifling trace of that which we were so frantically celebrating over the last week, then you will have to admit that this man called Jesus who was born in a manger had, was in direct lineal descent from David. Not from Solomon but from David.
I heard a man say on the radio and he couldn’t have been any more wrong if he had said two times two make nine. He said that Jesus Christ was a descendant of Solomon and therefore that being a descendant of Solomon, Joseph was his supposed father and by a kind of twist of circumstance there, Jesus could be a king through the line of Joseph. My brother, I can’t understand why a man should step to a microphone and declare something until he had checked it and when he hadn’t yet checked it.
The truth is that Jesus was not a descendant of Solomon at all but a descendant of Nathan. Solomon had in his line a man by the name of Coniah and that man Coniah was such a wretched make-believe of a king, and he had so sinned against God that God said hear earth, hear the word of the Lord. No descendant of this man shall ever sit upon the throne of David.
And so, he ruled out Coniah and thus he ruled out Solomon because Solomon was the ancestor of Coniah. So, the descendant jumped from the line of Solomon to the line of Nathan, and Mary was a direct descendant from Nathan. David, Nathan and on down to Mary.
So, Jesus being a son of Mary, but not a son of Joseph, could sit upon the throne of David. But if Jesus had been a son of Joseph even by adoption he could not have sat upon the throne of David because God had thrice cursed the line of Coniah and has said no descendant of this man can ever sit on the throne and Joseph was a descendant of Coniah.
Now Christ’s spiritual kingdom, some will say yes, that psalm, that 72nd Psalm is the description of the beautiful church, the work of righteousness, the work of hospitals and all the church has done, the reign of Christ over the earth.
You know friends, it seems to me that we ought to be a bit wiser than we are. We sing what is called a Christmas song. We sing Jesus shall reign where e’er the sun. Do you know that that is not a Christmas song at all? That is a song based upon the 72nd Psalm and it has to do with the coming back of the King Jesus and not with the coming of Jesus in the first place. Nothing in that song has anything to do with Jesus’ first coming but it has to do with His second coming. It’s not a missionary song either, it is a song having to do with Christ when He comes back to the earth again.
Now, the New Testament, I say, boldly declares that Jesus is this One and that it could not be the spiritual kingdom because there are things written into this psalm, acts and deeds are attributed to this King which he must be personally present to perform. Let me just read over here just almost at random. And he shall judge the poor of the people, and he shall save the children of the needy, and shall break in pieces the oppressor. And he shall have dominion from sea to sea, and the kings of Tarshish and the Isles shall bring presents, and the kings of Sheba and Seba shall offer gifts. Yea, and all kings shall fall down before him, and all nations shall serve him. And he shall deliver the needy when he crieth, and the poor also, and him that hath no helper. And he shall redeem their soul from deceit and violence, and he shall live, and all the rest.
Now there has to be a King present for this to be fulfilled, and that King must be Jesus Christ our Lord. So since he has not yet come, then it’s reasonable to conclude that he must yet be coming. If he has not yet come, and there are predictions here that were not fulfilled in Solomon, and they were not fulfilled when the suffering Savior came to die, and they are not fulfilled in the spiritual kingdom we call the Church. And they must be and can be fulfilled only by the coming of a person to the world. Then, we must conclude that that person has not yet come.
And the Jew is right when he’s waiting for his Messiah, looking forward to the coming of another King. He’s wrong in believing that his Messiah did not come to die, but he is right in believing that the Messiah is coming to reign.
Now notice the conditions when he comes, conditions that did not prevail when Solomon was crowned as King over Israel; conditions that did not prevail when Jesus came to the world the first time, turmoil and war and threats of war, verse 3, and poverty and need abounded everywhere, and a cruel oppressor grinding the faces of men, verses 4, 12, and 13. Notice it. He shall judge the poor of the people. He shall save the children of the needy, and shall break in pieces the oppressor, and verse 12, he shall deliver the needy when he crieth on the poor also, and him that hath no helper. And he shall redeem their soul, and he shall live, and there shall be a handful of corn.
All of this did not exist at the time Christ came the first time. It has not been brought to pass during the time of the Church. This cruel oppressor, oh, there have been oppressors all right. We’ve had them all down the centuries. They have reigned a little while over a small part of the world, then they have gone like the Hitlers and the Stalins and the rest of them.
But there is pictured here a ruler or some oppressor who grinds the faces of men and rules by violence and deceit and pogroms and blood and intimidation. You find that in 4, 12, 13, and 14. And he will, by the time this new king comes, he will have reduced the world to mown grass and civilization as we know it will have passed away. My friends, we had better become realistic now about this and stop listening to the commentators and the politicians and the well-intentioned statesmen.
They are hoping to keep this country of ours from the terror of war. They’re hoping to keep it safe. There’s only been one real war ever fought on its shores and the last great wars never touched our land at all. And they’re hoping to keep it that way.
And I don’t mind telling you, selfish as it may be, that I’d like to have it kept that way while I’m around. And I’d like to have it kept that way while my family, my children are around. But it can’t be that way forever because this cruel oppressor will have reduced the world to mown grass.
Did you ever see a field standing green and lush and beautiful as a field of Timothy hay? My father used to grow it and we used to cut it. There it stands, deep, so deep and green that the rabbits can hardly get through. It’s so thick standing, so thick the rabbits can hardly get through. And then when the heads begin to bend over, full of seed, but not yet ripe enough to spoil it for food for the horses, they would come and cut it.
And when they cut that down, they would take it away and leave the field. You saw it on Monday, and it stood there deep and green and lush and thick and juicy and beautiful. You saw it on Thursday, and they had cut it and winnowed it and taken it clear away. And now there’s nothing left but stubble, stubble. And the scars where the field used to be.
And so that which we call civilization that stands today rests down upon science and investigation and research, rests upon a long tradition of learning, rests upon invention and discovery that goes back to the wheel. With this great civilization that we know, here it is, and it’s beautiful and green.
If you don’t believe it, get into an airplane and fly over our land and look down, even in the wintertime, and see the riches there. Or get into a train and start down, start toward the east and go down through East Chicago and Hammond and Gary and see those great machines there and those great tanks.
Why, we’re rich, rich beyond the dream of Midas. Civilization is rich, I tell you. And the poorest fellow that exists today has more than our fathers had. In America, we’re rich and lush like a field. But we’re told here that when He comes down, He’ll find the world like a moon field. And that civilization as we know it, now it doesn’t use the word civilization, but civilization as we know it will have passed away.
But you say, how can it be? How can that be? Listen, one man can do it, one man can do it. Wasn’t there a day when Germany was rich and way ahead in her science and strong and in her literature and art and music and all the rest? Didn’t one man come along and in ten years he had reduced Germany to rubble? And East Germany, they tell me, is yet rubble.
Did it not happen? Could it not happen? It could happen. It can happen. One man, one man, if he gets in the right place at the wrong time, can reduce a nation to rubble. And He shall come down, and when He comes, He’ll find civilization as we know it now having passed away.
You’ll have to shake your head hard to believe this, because you’re not likely to believe it. Because the optimists are everywhere abroad telling us that we’re going to soon conquer space, and that we are going to set up lines of communication with the far-off galaxies and all the rest.
My radio went out on me last night, and I didn’t hear my favorite professor talking about space. It’s kind of a verbal comic strip to me, I like to hear it. But he talks about space, the space age. And we ignore the fact that time and space and distance and stars and planets and satellites don’t count. What counts is people. What counts is people.
And if you if you had all the beautiful satellites, handmade and man-made satellites in the world circling the earth, or if you had the ability to get into a scooter and scoot to Venus or Mars or beyond that to Saturn and ride around on Saturn’s rings. If you had a population of the earth that had been reduced by an oppressor, reduced to nothing, and civilization destroyed, and all of our fine halls of learning destroyed, and our books burnt, and our art galleries destroyed, and our medicine and scientific knowledge of how to cure diseases and hold back diseases.
If that’s all destroyed, and all goes down under the impact of that great oppressor. I haven’t named him yet, that great oppressor, but you know who he’s going to be. He’s going to be that one that may yet now at this moment be living in the world.
I don’t know that he’s been born, but he could be living in this world now. He could be, I wouldn’t know where to look for him, I’m not that learned in the Scriptures, and I don’t think anybody else is, I’ll whisper that to you.
But I don’t know where to look for him, but I know that that’s the oppressor that can destroy civilization and can tear it back down. But you say if we have civilization destroyed, we couldn’t live. You say if I didn’t have my electric blanket I’d die. Yeah, you’d die. If you didn’t have your electric blanket, you’d live like your parents lived, your great-grandparents. Oh, if I didn’t have my refrigerator how could I live?
My mother used to put milk under running water and keep it that way. Used to have a spring and she’d put milk there and have it so that it was sunk just almost to the level of the lip of the crocks, they call it, and the water kept it. Why, we got along without all these things.
If I didn’t have my car, I don’t know what I’d do. Well, I’m grateful for other people’s cars. I’ll admit that. But you can get along without them, sure you can live without them. We can be reduced and everything now that we know as civilization can be destroyed.
Remember, there have been at least seven civilizations, and some of them have been perhaps not mechanically as great as ours, but you’d be surprised to know how far advanced some of them have been.
So we’re going to be reduced, my brother, and the book of Revelation pictures this mown world briefly by means of wars and plagues and massacres and natural disasters. The world will be, more than half of the earth’s population will probably be destroyed, and the cities of the world will be reduced until they’re not cities anymore but rubble, and all industry and commerce among men will be ended, and we’ll be back to bartering again, and all rule by law will have temporarily ended, and every man will do what’s right in his own eyes, and ended will be all order and system on earth, and all that’s left will be displaced persons.
You say, I don’t believe it, I don’t believe it. Well, you have less faith then than some of the politicians have, you have less faith than some of the thinkers have. H.G. Well believed it, and George Bernard Shaw believed it, and thinking men who dare to think are ready to say that the human race can’t continue the way we are, we’re going to destroy ourselves.
Will you explain to me how two nations like the United States and Russia, will you explain to me how two nations which if they were to become friendly with each other, and Russia were to lay down the idea of world conquest, America could be her best customer, and she could be a customer of ours, and we could both prosper, and by interchange of ideas.
Why, can you tell me why two nations must walk around with guns on their hips ready to draw, each one waiting to see who’s going to draw first? I tell you; how do you explain people? How do you explain men? How do you explain what’s in man? All the Russian people I know are nice people, I don’t know a mean Russian, I don’t know one Russian that isn’t decent. But something’s gone wrong over there, and certain God dishonoring, God dishonoring atheistic men turn themselves over like Judas to the, for the devil to come in.
And so, they are now busy making right to be wrong and wrong to be right, hating, and out to conquer the world. Naturally, we’ve got to be ready for them. When a man writes a book and tells you that he’s going to rob your house at 12 o’clock Thursday night, you’re not going to go to bed, you’re going to stay up with a ball bat and a gun or have a cop around the corner.
And that’s why in the United States we have to keep going as a nation, as a Gentile nation, as a nation under the Noahic covenant. We’ve got to keep our army and our navy and our rockets and all the rest up, because they’ve written books saying what they’re going to do. Old Skinhead over there, every once in a while, reminds us he’s going to bury us. You know old man Skinhead. Every once in a while, he smiles that vodka smile of his and says we’re going to bury you.
Boy, oh boy, I’ve known folks after they’ve been buried to get up and walk around again. I have a conviction that he can’t bury us, but that’s something else again. I don’t want to get into that. I’m talking about the future over there, that future that lies out ahead of us there somewhere.
Before it’s all over, we will have torn at each other’s vitals and let blood until we’re drenched in blood. And by means of bombs and various other methods of destruction, we’ll have destroyed the cities of the world, destroyed civilization, and all that’s left will be displaced persons.
Then the Scripture says He shall come down. He shall come down to the mown world. He shall come down to rejuvenate the world. That wasn’t Solomon. That wasn’t baby Jesus born of the Virgin Mary. That is the Jesus who was grown to manhood, was crucified, dead, and buried, and was raised again from the dead. And He’ll take over completely.
God will give His judgments unto the Son. For Jesus says God Himself judges no man but has given all judgment unto the Son. And He will take over completely. And He will not play along with political parties. All political parties are crooked. They lie, they deceive, they’re scurrilous. It’s scurrilous the way they lie about each other, and then shake hands when it’s over as though it didn’t matter.
He will not play along with any front, any Christian front, or any other front. He will not play along with any ideology, for ideologies are born out of the fallen brains of men. He will sweep them all aside as a woman sweeps the floor with a broom. He’ll sweep them away as selfish and bad. And He will rule. He Himself, He will rule by force, but He will rule in justice and mercy. And the strong robbers He will put down, and the humble poor He will deliver.
You see, the population of the earth won’t be destroyed. So don’t let anybody tell you that it will. I did not say that it will. I said that the cities of the world, maybe all of them, certainly many of them, probably most of them, will be destroyed. And civilization will be destroyed, as we know it now. But you can live without civilization, and believe it or not, you can live without cities. There will still be people.
Did you ever try to destroy an anthill? Did you ever take a shovel and throw it in all directions? Well, you had destroyed the anthill, but the ants were still going everywhere. And if you don’t look, you’re in trouble. They’re still there. You didn’t kill them when you destroyed their anthill.
And so, you can destroy cities and make cities impossible, untenable. We can fix it so we can’t live together housed in cities anymore because of danger. We’ll have to separate and dissipate and scatter in order to exist. The people will still exist, that is what’s left of them, and it will be a good percentage of them, maybe half of them. The people of the world will still live.
And so, He’ll find them, and He’ll rejuvenate them. And that’s strong robber that brought the world down, He will destroy, and the humble poor He will deliver.
I ask you, why does He not come now? Why does this Lord Jesus not come now? Why does the father of the house wait till the house is burning before he comes to rescue his family? Why does the general wait till the city is filled with blood before he comes to deliver it? Well, He only comes where He’s wanted, my friends. And as long as there is human hope, men do not want Him to come down.
Stand up in either house of Congress when it opens next month and say, Mr. Speaker, I’d like to say a word. Special privilege as an American, I don’t know where they’d allow that. I would get up and say, all of your laws can’t save us. The only hope is for Jesus to come back.
You know what? The sergeant at arms would lead me quietly out. He’d lead me tenderly and kindly, because he figured he had somebody on his hands, and he would signal a policeman. The policeman put his arm around my shoulder and said, come on Pop, I know he’s coming, sure, I know he’s coming. And I’d tell them the truth and they wouldn’t believe it.
Go to Buckingham Palace, go where you will, go down to Springfield, go down to City Hall and tell them. Nobody will believe it, because we don’t want Him. He would embarrass us. Jesus Christ would embarrass us.
You know, they tell that old story about the Kaiser, and I think it’s true, that the Kaiser was a Lutheran Christian, you know, something, some kind of a Christian. He’s a church man, and he used to have a great preacher come and preach to him. The preacher came and preached on the second coming of Christ, and the Kaiser said, let’s have no more of it. His coming would ruin my plans.
We ruined His plans for him, if you want to know who did it. I had the uniform on a while, too. No, it wasn’t the Civil War, it was the First World War, and it didn’t amount to much. I never got any near the front lines in Virginia.
Well, that was the Kaiser. He said, he’ll ruin my plans, and there isn’t a politician but one who would say the same thing. And if you called the great big leaders of the Democratic Party together and said, Jesus Christ will come before November 4th, 1960. Senator Kennedy would feel terrible, because he wants to run. So would this egghead brother up here, a neighbor of ours, a nice chap incidentally, brilliant. But he wants to run, and they all want to run. The coming of Jesus to the world would embarrass us.
And if you’d go to the United Nations and say, gentlemen, you’ve been at it here now for nearly twelve years, and you’ve done nothing but fight. And the language that’s come off of your debating floor, your parliamentary floor, has been more vicious and abusive and scurrilous than you could hear in a bar room. Give it up. Give it up. Jesus is coming. They’d lead you out. Nobody would believe it.
So, my friends, as long as we think we can get along, the Lord will let us get along. Just as long as the Church thinks she can get along, He’ll let her get along. That’s why I’m afraid of the churches that have so much money, and I’m afraid of the churches whose ministry is so well educated.
And I’m afraid of all these new mule barns that we’re putting up and calling them modern buildings. I’m afraid of all our crammed schools and our packed seminaries and our boys trained in psychiatry and other witchcraft. I’m afraid of all this because it means we’re a rich church, and a rich church doesn’t send for God. Methodology–we’re learning how to do things.
Grandmother used to go out and whip up something, bake it, and now it’s called methodology. Will you tell us how you do this? What is the motivation back of it? Well, she said, my family is hungry. But you can’t talk like that now. It’s all in the language of silly psychology.
So as long as the world can get along, and as long as the Church can get along, just as long as we think we’re going someplace. I’ve been running around telling people now for 20 years that evangelical Christianity is rotten from the ground up.
We’ve lost the power to worship. We’ve lost our separation. We’ve lost our sense of the presence of God. We’ve lost our yearning after holiness. We have lost our humility. We’ve lost our meekness. We’ve lost our saintliness. All we have is methods and big buildings and personalities.
I’ve been trying to tell people that, but they don’t want to listen. They send for me to come and tell them, and then they shake my hand, pat my shoulder, and say, that was wonderful, and then go back into conference and vote against everything I told them.
You know that, Bill? They do that. I could make money. I could really make money. I could make money going around conferences, preaching to preachers, constantly writing letters saying, I can’t come. They want me to come and tell them what they don’t believe and won’t accept. The evangelical Church can get along without God a while longer, and God’s just going to let her get along. But when the terror comes and the cruel oppressor reduces the world to rubble, then He’ll come down.
But you say, where is the Church in the meantime? Well, when I was growing up as a young man and preaching, we had what we called pre-tribulation theory of the coming of Christ. That meant this. It meant that there was going to be a seven-year period of tribulation which would be this reducing that I’m talking about. All prophetic believers teach this, only I’m calling it by another name. You didn’t recognize it. But that’s the tribulation.
But that just before that tribulation begins, Christ is coming and taking away all of his redeemed ones away from him. And only the unredeemed are going to be here to go through the tribulation. I’ve always believed that, and I hope it’s true, and I want to believe it still, and I’m not teaching the contrary.
But it’s a significant thing that in recent times there have been some very serious re-thinkings of this. The first time that anybody said anything to me about it was Dr. Torrey’s daughter. We were sitting together at a breakfast. I was preaching and she was there for some reason or other, I don’t remember what. Didn’t she used to teach at Wheaton? I think she was teaching at Wheaton at the time.
And we just dropped into the, she’s old and retired now, but we sat down at the breakfast table together and we began to talk, and she began to ask me questions. And she said, what do I think about it?
Well, it never occurred to me. I had been taught, you know, all my life that I didn’t have to worry about the tribulation. The Antichrist would never appear until Jesus was taking His people away. And she said, I wonder if we can prove that in Scripture.
And she went to the Word of God and jarred me terribly. I don’t know what she believes now, but I do know this, that among the fundamentalists and evangelicals everywhere, there is a strong rising of the belief that the church is going to see some of the tribulation. That’s called the post-tribulation theory. You know, if they don’t want people to know what they mean, they put words on it like pre-tribulation and post-tribulation.
Well, pre-tribulation means that you don’t have to worry. Go ahead, make your money, have your fun, fool around, live as you please, stay home as much as you want to, you’re born again, it’s all right, you got eternal life, you can’t lose it. Everything’s okay, and when the Lord will see to it that you never get into the tribulation, He’ll zip you away like a flash of light, and only the poor modernists will be down here to go through the tribulation, and the Jews.
Brothers and sisters, maybe that’s true, but you know I have a passage of Scripture that bothers me an awful lot. Take heed to yourselves, lest at any time your hearts be overcharged with surfeiting, and drunkenness, and the cares of this life, and so that day come upon you unawares. For as a snare shall it come on all them that dwell on the face of the whole earth, watch ye therefore and pray always that ye may be accounted worthy to escape all these things that shall come to pass, and to stand before the Son of Man. Pray earnestly that you might be counted worthy to escape these things and to stand before the Son of Man.
But the doctrine that I can live like the devil, and yet I’ll be taken away from the tribulation, I cannot accept.
One man said, Won’t it be a great day when the saloon, the roofs of the saloons will have holes in them, where the Saints of God went zipping through? Yeah, one man preached that. He actually did. I could tell you his name, but I’m nice. I wouldn’t do it.
He went further than that. He said some things about halfway houses and harlotry and how the Saints of God would suddenly disappear from those places. I consider that as great a heresy as Jehovah’s Witnesses.
Oh Brethren, I hope that God’s dear Church will be saved from the mowing. I hope she’ll be saved from the tribulation, and she can be if she will. For he says, pray always that ye may escape these things and stand before the Son of Man.
But I ask you now, do you actually think that the Church of Christ deserves to escape the tribulation days, or do we deserve a good trimming? Personally, I think we deserve at least a little bit of fire. I think we have it coming.
We’ve fought and we’ve been evil and we’ve lived without God. And Fundamentalism has said goodbye to the Holy Ghost and denied that he can fill men and tried to prove that he can’t. We’ve linked up with Hollywood and Broadway and big business and we’ve imitated the world, and we’ve been making ourselves over in the image of Adam all we can, and then comforting ourselves by saying, why, it’s all right. We’ll be taken away before the tribulation.
I think that’s carnality on the loose, my brother. I can only say to you, let us pray that we may be right. We may not go down under surfeiting and drunkenness and the cares of this life, so that the coming of Jesus may come upon us unawares.
But you know, I want to press this thought yet and close, that our help is coming down. After all, our hope must come down.
People say, let’s raise something. There’s hardly a church anywhere but raising something. Have you noticed that? They’re raising something. You know, the Bible says help will come down. There’s hardly a church anywhere but building something or organizing something. And you’ve got it to do, I suppose, a certain amount of it.
But I’ve got a conviction that if we knew more about God and we would put away some of our ancient, worldly traditions and would try to live like Bakht Singh and his crowd and pray through on things instead of trying to organize them, I believe we’d get further.
But God will send help down to a distraught, blood-drenched, grieving world. When Israel had been for four hundred years in bondage and now, she was at the peak of her suffering, God said to Moses, I have seen and I have heard and I am come down and I will deliver. They cried unto Him in their pain, and He heard, and they cried unto Him in their sorrow and He saw. And He sent Moses to deliver them.
If we would call unto Jesus, if the Church would call unto Jesus instead of organizing something or trying to raise something, if we would pray even so, come Lord Jesus, come, come quickly, I believe we’d get further and do more toward bringing to pass and fulfilling the Scriptures than we will by trying man’s methods.
I want you to meet me Wednesday night in that old building. We’re going to go over there where we can be close to each other and spend an hour and a half in prayer, asking God that He might do an unusual thing for us in these coming days.
Well, we needn’t run the hazard. Don’t go out now and give me a black mark and say, Tozer doesn’t believe in the pre-tribulation theory of prophecy. Yes, I think I do. Maybe it’s just downright cowardice that makes me want to believe it, because I don’t want to face up to the Antichrist.
But I think that if you would press me, I’d have to tell you this. I don’t think the Church will go through the tribulation, but I think she’ll enter into it. She won’t go through the final sorrows, but she will suffer the beginning of sorrows. The Church of the living God will know something of the anguish of the beginning of sorrows, the first terrible pains of the rebirth of a world. But the Lord will come and take her away, so she won’t have to go through it all.
So, there’s a compromise, if you please, between the post and the pre. Maybe they’re both wrong. Maybe God will have to do something to us we don’t yet know about, to prepare us for the hour when He comes again for His people.
But anyway, the King has come, and the King will settle all this problem of some having too much and others not having enough. He’ll settle this problem of trouble between unions and men who own factories, labor and capital. He’ll settle the problems, He’ll settle them all, and He’ll settle them not by sitting around the table and discussing it. He’ll settle it by sweeping the whole mess out and establishing His own kingdom and shall rule from the river to the ends of the earth. And His name shall endure forever, and His name shall be continued as long as the sun and men shall bless Him, be blessed in Him, and all nations shall call Him blessed, blessed be the Lord God of Israel, who only doeth wonders things. Amen and Amen. Let us stand.
Again, I want to talk about something that I would much rather avoid. One of these times, maybe over into January, I expect to finish, God willing, a series of sermons I began about eight years ago on the attributes of God. I preached 14 sermons, and I said I had six more left. And I want to pick that up and preach again a series, and you will hear about it because I want to announce it. And that I’m going to enjoy preaching.
This tonight I’m not, but tonight I’m to speak on the law of moral gravitation. And in Acts 1, the 15th verse and on, in those days Peter stood up and he said, Men and brethren, this Scripture must needs have been fulfilled which the Holy Ghost by the mouth of David spake concerning Judas, which was guide to them that took Jesus. For he was numbered with us and had obtained part of His ministry.
Now this man purchased a field with a reward of iniquity. And falling headlong, he burst asunder in the midst, and all his bowels gushed out. And it was known unto all the dwellers of Jerusalem, insomuch as that field is called in the proper tongue, Aceldama, this to say, the field of blood. For it is written in the book of Psalms, let his habitation be desolate, and let no man dwell therein, and his office let another take.
Wherefore, of these men which have accompanied with us all the time that the Lord Jesus went in and out among us, beginning from the baptism of John unto the same day that He was taken up from us, must one be ordained to be a witness with us of His resurrection.
And they appointed two, Joseph, called Barsabbas, and Matthias. And they prayed and said, Thou, Lord, which knowest the hearts of all men, show which of these two thou hast chosen, that he may take part of this ministry in apostleship, from which Judas by transgression fell, that he might go to his own place. And they gave forth their lots, and it fell upon Matthias. He was numbered with the eleven.
Now, verse 25 is the verse that I want particularly to point to tonight. The apostleship, from which Judas by transgression fell, that he might go to his own place.
Now, that’s the text. And I want to talk about the operation of the law of moral gravitation. For the teaching in this verse, uttered by the Apostle in prayer, is undoubtedly that Judas went where he went because he belonged there. Now, that’s very plain. It doesn’t take a profound mind to see that. He fell away from the apostleship, that he might go to his own place.
Now, he was called elsewhere a son of perdition. And therefore, without being angry or abusive or even careless about it, we have a right to conclude that since he was a son of perdition, when he died and went to his own place, he went to perdition.
Now, this isn’t pleasant, and I don’t like to talk about such things, and I wish I didn’t need to. But this is the conclusion we arrive at from the Scriptures, that this man went where he went because he belonged where he went. No one got angry with Judas and in a fit of temper threw him into perdition.
Justice and righteousness and nature and moral intelligence and the cosmic fitness of things put him where he went as naturally as it’s possible to think. His nature had fitted him for that place, and he went where he was fitted to go. Just as a bird is fitted for the air and therefore spends a good deal of its time in the air, just as a fish is fitted for the water, and when a fish goes to the water, it goes to its own place, and when a bird goes to the air, it goes to its own place, and an earthworm, when it burrows in the earth, is burrowing in its own place.
And that’s no reflection on the bird. God made the bird to go there, and by law of natural gravitation it goes where it belongs. And no reflection on the fish nor the earthworm; God made them. They were fitted, one to burrow blind in the earth and the other to swim in the water.
Now there is a law of God that runs through all his universe, that everyone and everything will finally go to his own place. I want you to hear this, and you know that my method of Bible teaching and preaching is not to quote everlasting verses of Scripture and say Peter said this and John said that but read some verses and then try to find out what they meant.
And this is what the Holy Ghost meant when He said that Judas fell from his apostleship that he might go to his own place. What a horrible incongruity it would have been if Judas could have continued in his apostleship belonging in perdition.
Now about Daniel it says almost the same thing. The last verse of the book of Daniel says, Daniel rest and stand in thy lot at the end of the days. And another version says stand in thy allotted place at the end of the days. Daniel when the end of the days come will find himself automatically in his own place. And Judas will find himself automatically in his own place. And so will every one of us find ourselves in our own place.
Now the problem is where is your place and where is mine? I think that I have said this many times, but I doubt whether it gets a hold of people that the judgment will not decide the destiny of Daniel or Judas. We’re looking forward to a judgment that shall decide the destiny of man.
No, the judgment will simply confirm that which the moral operation of things already has declared. It may come as a surprise to men. It may come as a surprise to a lost man to find at the judgment day that he’s lost in that he thought he was saved, he was a church member, or thought he was good enough.
But as far as God’s concerned there will be no weighing of evidence at the judgment bar. Don’t think of the judgment of God as being a court trial where there’ll be lawyers for the defense and lawyers for the prosecution and witnesses on both side and a jury or a judge.
No, there will be a just and gentle monarch who will be Judge without a doubt. But all He will do will be to declare that which all the moral evidence has shown down the years and during the lives of the person who is affected. The judgment will not decide the destiny of Daniel. Thou shalt arise, said God, O Daniel, and shall stand in thy allotted place.
Look at another passage of Scripture in the Bible and notice what it teaches there. Almost the same thing. There’s the rich man and there’s Lazarus. Now we know that the rich man died and in hell he lifted up his eyes and we know that Lazarus died and went to Abraham’s bosom.
And we assume that because Lazarus died and went to Abraham’s bosom, therefore, and he was a very poor man and a beggar, that the poor men and beggars go to Abraham’s bosom and the rich man died and went to hell. Rich men go to hell. Now our Lord never taught this here. This has been introduced there. It’s not there. The rich man went to hell not because he was rich, but because he belonged there. He went to his own place, that’s all.
Abraham was also rich, and the Bible declares that he was. The Bible says Abraham was rich in camels and asses and sheep and goods and servants born in his own house, and he had much goods. Abraham was a rich man, but Abraham also was a man that got delivered from his riches and held them as if they weren’t his and got saved from them and lived a rich man in the earth, but a man completely free from the foul pollution of riches.
And then there was Job. Job also was a rich man and God stripped him, but God gave it all back to him sevenfold, so he’s richer at the end than he was in the beginning. And yet Job was a man after God’s own heart and a man that God called attention to in the very heaven itself and said, have you seen My servant, Job?
Now, this rich man who went to hell, went there, I say, by natural gravitation, by a moral magnetic attraction. He went there just as a bird goes to the air, a fish to the water and an earthworm to a burrowing in the ground. Then there was Lazarus, and it came to pass that Lazarus also died and went to Abraham’s bosom.
Now, why did Lazarus go to Abraham’s bosom? Because he was poor? No, because if that were the case, then a man’s financial status would determine his place, and it doesn’t. It may determine his place in the world, I grant you that. The man’s rich enough, why, he’ll be able to make a place for himself among men.
But you know the song they used to sing in the Billy’s Sunday meetings, the rich man was there, but his riches when death came had melted and faded away. A poor man, he stood in the judgment, his debt was too heavy to pay. That was an old bass solo they used to sing in Sunday’s day, and it was perfectly sound theology and good sound philosophy.
Lazarus did not go to Abraham’s tender bosom because he was poor, for the very man whose bosom he went to had been rich while he was on earth. The very Abraham who opened his bosom to Lazarus had been a rich man and the poor man he took into his bosom was way down, way down on the financial scale below him. And then think of the blind beggars. Now I say blind in quotation marks who aren’t blind at all.
Think of them, they put a tag on their chest to help the blind, but as soon as they get around the corner, they take it off and go look at the movie. They’re not blind, they’re just beggars, they’re poor. And think of the people who come where it’s permitted to the doors and bang on the door and say that they haven’t had anything to eat. They’re poor, but they’re liars. So, you can be a liar and a voluptuous and vicious pervert and still be as poor as a church mouse.
So, poverty didn’t put Lazarus in Abraham’s bosom, and riches didn’t put the rich man in hell. They both went where they belonged.
Now I’m glad to be able to say that to you tonight, my dear friends, that when you die you will go where you belong. You will not have an angry God grab you by the scurf of the neck and hurl you in a fit of temper into hell. You will not have a God in a burst of sentimentality pick you up and sweep you into heaven dramatically like an actress making an entree into a nightclub. You will go where you belong, ladies and gentlemen. There is a place which is called, your place.
Judas went to his own place and God never allowed the creature to come into the world that He didn’t have a place for him. And He never allowed a creature to live or die that didn’t have a natural place. And in the moral world there is a place where we gravitate to naturally. Heaven has for Lazarus’ soul a magnetic attraction.
Now a part of that song we sang tonight, a different verse, different stanza of it, this celestial country which we sing is, “Jerusalem, the Golden,” talks about the sheep flock from the goat herd shall part on either hand. And then he says this beautiful thing. He says, these, that is, the sheep, the goats, these shall pass to torment. And those, that is the sheep, shall triumph then. The new peculiar nation blessed number of blessed men; Jerusalem demands them. They paid the price on earth and now shall reap the harvest in blissfulness and mirth. The glorious holy people, whoever more relied upon their Chief and Savior, the King, the Crucified.
Jerusalem, that’s heaven, demands them. It was the poetic way of saying heaven. Heaven demands them. The man Lazarus couldn’t have gone to hell any more than an English sparrow could have swum ten feet down across the Atlantic Ocean, because that’s not the sparrow’s place. He doesn’t belong there. He doesn’t gravitate there by the law of nature. He belongs up on the telephone wire, on the eve of a house, chirping and quarreling and flying around. That’s where he belongs. Whales and fish belong in the water, but sparrows belong in the air.
And Jerusalem demanded. Abraham’s bosom had a moral attraction for the man Lazarus, and he went there by a demand. Jerusalem demands him. And I believe there are people walking around on this earth, I think there are people listening to me tonight, that heaven demands you.
When you know your heart no longer beats and you’re finished with this earthly pilgrimage, there’ll be no question of where you’ll go. Heaven demands you. You’ll belong there by the law of moral gravitation. You’ll go there as a steel filing will leap to a magnet. You will go to your own company. You will go to your own place.
And thou shalt sleep and thou shalt rise and stand in thine allotted place at the end of the days. I believe there are people maybe here tonight, I hope not, but I believe there are people here that hell demands. Hell demands them, I say, as the carrion demands the buzzard and as the darkness demands the sinner. So, hell demands some people.
Now I hate to do this, and I want you to forgive me, but I want to ask, where are you demanded? What’s demanding you? Where’s the attraction so strong that as soon as you stop breathing, you’ll zip there instantly? Where do you belong? Does hell demand you or does heaven?
Well, now some people say, well, Mr. Tozer, hell doesn’t demand me because in hell there will be murderers, and I never could feel at home there. And in hell there will be drunkards, and I couldn’t feel at home there. And there will be sex perverts there and I couldn’t feel at home there. And there will be assassins and whoremongers and the malicious and the hateful and I couldn’t feel at home with them. No, your heart revolts against them and so does mine. Your heart revolts and you wouldn’t feel at home there.
But let’s remember that in perdition the majority of people are not murderers. The majority of people are not drunkards and perverts. The majority of people who are demanded by perdition, demanded by a law of moral gravitation, they’ve got to go there and nothing can save them from it when they go.
Most of them are not whoremongers. They stayed clean from all that. Most of them are not assassins. Most of them are not malicious. They forgave people before they died. Most of them are not drunkards. If they drank, they controlled it. They were not wallowers in the streets. And would you feel at home among those who tell white lies and then shrug and laugh? Well, they’ll be there.
All the white liars will be there. Those who say, well, it’s a white lie. The secretary who lies for her boss and says he’s in conference when he’s at a ball game or he’s not in when he actually is in. The secretary who lies for her boss. She’s telling a white lie. She’ll be there. For all liars shall have their part.
All liars, all colored liars shall have their part. The black lie of a Judas or the white lie of a secretary. The merchant who says these goods are fresh when he knows he’s had them on his hands until he’s begun to wonder if he can get rid of them, that kind of white lying. The man who cheats on his income tax and tells a little lie about this. Goes out and spends $15 loosely and says it was to pay for a lunch for customers.
Well, they’re white lies, but white liars shall have their part in the lake of fire. You see, heaven has no magnetic attraction for them. Heaven does not demand a liar because there’s an incompatibility there. They couldn’t go there because heaven wouldn’t have them.
And then there’s the cheater and the lustful fellow and the fellow who’s got soiled speech and who can’t talk at a party even, who can’t talk with a group in the car without borderline dirty jokes. Now that fellow will be there and the lustful fellow will be there and the worldling will be there and the godless will be there and the prayerless and the irreverent, they’ll all be there and you’ll get along with them now. And some of you even seek their company.
And you’re here tonight, somebody brought you, but tomorrow you will seek the company of the white liars and the soiled people with soiled speech and the worldlings who know more about Elvis Presley than they do about David with his harp. And you seek their company because you belong there, you see.
Now I’d think this over, my brethren, and I wouldn’t take anything for granted. I want to ask you, would you feel at home in heaven? I hope you can all stand and say yes. I’m not going to vote you. I wouldn’t embarrass you.
I’m going to preach two weeks, one week from tomorrow at Moody Bible Institute to the faculty and students on, courtesy in the life of a minister. Somebody told me I knew nothing about it, but they’ve asked me to speak on the subject and I’m going to do it.
So, I wouldn’t be so discourteous as to vote you. But I do want to ask you the question, would you feel at home in heaven? For after all, the heart goes to its home. Being let go, they went to their own company.
The sailor who leaves the ship goes to his home. The sailor boy, the soldier boy in Germany or the Far East, wires home or cables home, he wants to come home. I know the awful homesickness of the military service. I was in for a short while in one of the wars. And I know the horrible homesickness. I know it. And my brethren, your heart is sick to be home. Your home demands you. It creates a vacuum. It sucks you back to where you belong.
And when the boy’s released, he immediately hits out for home, hits out for the old familiar place. That furniture he thought was a little tacky when he left looks like it, but it was made of gold when he comes back. Things he used to complain about when he went, before he went, now he thinks that it’s a gorgeous palace when he comes back. Your home demands you, because your heart is there.
And I want to ask you, would you feel at home in heaven? Would you feel at home in an atmosphere of perpetual worship? For that’s what heaven is going to be, an atmosphere of perpetual worship.
When I think how much drum beating and bell ringing and chime playing and tender organ playing we have to do to get people in the mood even to sing a worshipful song in this world of ours. When I think how many sermons it takes to get a fellow in the mood to even think spiritual thoughts.
Well, I wonder about some people when they get to heaven where they live in an atmosphere of perpetual worship. I don’t think that heaven is going to be a place where God’s on a throne and every other creature on their knees. I don’t think that at all. We’ll have too much to do. There’ll be a lot to do. Oh, we’ll have real saints to paint from, Magdalene, Peter, and Paul, and we’ll paint for an age at a sitting and we’ll never get weary at all. As the poet said, we’ll have lots to do there, but it’ll be done in an atmosphere of pure worship. It’ll be done in an atmosphere of doxology.
And some of you are bored to death with worship. There are people that have been going to this church for years and years and yet haven’t learned to like the type of songs we sing. They want something else. They want a rock and roll Elvis Pelvis type of song that they have in some places. They don’t want this other thing.
Oh, couldn’t we have some of the dear old numbers like, thank you, Lord, for saving my soul. Well, now that’s worship, brother. And the other thing is, it’s just a cheap imitation and there’ll be none of that in heaven, but I don’t think it’d even be any of that in hell. I’ll take that back. No, I don’t think so.
But some people are bored to death with a prayer meeting. Check on yourself, man. When have you been in your last prayer meeting? It bores you. Some of you say, well, I don’t like the way Tozer conducts them. Well, he only conducts them about half of the time. McAfee conducts them, Moore conducts them, Chase conducts them, visitors conduct, other people conduct them.
You simply don’t feel at home in a prayer meeting. And so when you die, do you think that that perpetual prayer meeting up there is going to demand you? It didn’t demand you down here. If it did, you were so far, you didn’t feel the magnetic attraction and you never showed up once. You showed up at every banquet, but you never showed up at any prayer meeting. And then you want me to believe that you’re going to die and go right sailing off to heaven like a Nike guided missile, straight to the throne of God. The throne of God will have an atmosphere of glorious worship around it.
And if you’re not at home here in an atmosphere of worship, how would you be at home then? There are some people to whom heaven would be an insufferable bore and they’ll never get there. Never, never, never. For there’s a law of moral gravitation that will put every one of us where we belong.
And then I wonder whether you would be at home in a place where God is enough. For most people, God isn’t enough. They have to have God and something else, but God is enough in heaven. The beatific vision, the sight of his face will be enough.
I wonder if you would be at home where all the conversation was about the Lamb, all the conversation up there is about the Lamb. And we redeemed sinners will be telling the unredeemed, that is, those who didn’t have to be redeemed, the holy ones, we’ll be telling them about our experiences and how we fell and were brought back again. And the angels that desire to look into these holy things, their eyes will shine as a Jerry McCauley and a John Newton and a John Bunyan and a Billy Sunday, or you or me, tell the story of redeeming love.
And the song that Brother McAfee sings sometimes says that the angels cannot sing because they never knew what it was to fall. But we knew and we can tell them. And the conversation will be about the Lamb. And you’re embarrassed when anybody talks about Jesus in the company where you are, and yet you’re a Christian. Well, do you think that you’re going to feel at home where everybody talks about Jesus, where nobody will mention the Yankees, nobody will mention politics, nobody will mention cards, nobody will mention the latest TV fad, nobody will mention anything. Everybody will talk about Jesus. You’re not at home in a company like that now. How could you be at home in a company like that then?
I ask you, what demands you? What is it that pulls your heart by moral magnetism? And I want you to think over now these two places. Which is your place?
But somebody says, Mr. Tozer, you’re presenting an either-or and it isn’t fair. You are making a block of black and a block of white and setting them together and say, take your choice. But the fact is different.
I believe that I expect to change. I know that heaven doesn’t demand me now because there’s nothing in me that’s like heaven. I know it, but I expect to change and be fitted for heaven.
Well, then I want to ask you a question. When will that change take place? It didn’t take place last year, did it? We’re coming to the end of 1956, and it didn’t take place. It didn’t take place last month or this month and we’re nearly the end of November. It didn’t take place last week and it didn’t take place yesterday and it’s not taking place tonight. When’s that change going to take place? You successfully resisted that change up to now and you found your pleasures and your interests elsewhere. How can you hope then that that change will ever take place?
But you say, Mr. Tozer, it’ll take place in death. I suppose that it’s hard to conceive of anything sillier than that. Is death going to do what the blood of the Lamb couldn’t do?
If I die of polio, is polio going to sanctify me? Is a heart attack that knocks me over on the sidewalk going to make me fit for heaven? Is there anything in leprosy that’s going to make me a pure man if I’m not a pure man now? Going to change my attitudes from earth to heaven and from here to there and from man to God and from sin to righteousness? No, it’s foolish to think that death will sanctify anybody, or death will purify anybody.
But our friends, the Catholics say that purgatory is the place, and they frankly admit up to now they could have gone along with me. Any Catholic theologian would have gone along with me up to here and he’d have said you’re perfectly right sir, you’re perfectly right.
By a law of gravitation, we’ll go where we belong but if you’re not quite ready for heaven why there’s a place called purgatory where you can get ready? Well now I wish that were so and I’d like to believe it. It would be to take a lot of pressure off of a lot of people.
But tell me, I hold a Bible in my hand, I hold a Bible in my hand. Not only do I hold a Bible in my hand but up in my study I have Catholic Bibles, whole Catholic Bibles. Not one line anywhere, not one line, but you say there’s a Scripture that you Protestants throw out, and in that Scripture, it teaches that. That’s not so.
I know the books and I’ve read the books that the Catholics put in. They’re called the apocryphal books and there’s not one line in the apocryphal Scriptures that says there is a cooling off place or a heating up place or a purgation, a place where you can make a fellow ready for heaven who isn’t ready now, not a place.
And on the other hand, I don’t want to be humorous about this, but it does have a strain of facetiousness in it because you see in order to get out the purgatory you have to have masses said and in order to have masses said you have to have money.
So I could visualize a man dying just before the stock market blew up and he expected his rich friends to bail him out and just after 20 minutes after he died the stock market blew up and the depression came and his friends would lose everything and wouldn’t have money to pay for masses.
How do you expect to get out, brother, if you’re in purgatory and you think that if you had no moral attraction for heaven now you’re attracted the other way but you’re still a Christian you’ve been sprinkled and worked over and massaged and had things done to you and you expect to go to heaven but you say I’m not fit to go but they’ll get they’ll get me out of purgatory by the masses.
And suppose that there’s a law passed suddenly that no masses dare be said and there will be when the antichrist reigns or suppose that I say again your folks who pay for your masses suddenly get so poor they can’t pay for steak and I’m telling you this if it comes to a difference between eating or saying a mass to get you out they’ll eat, they’ll eat. Don’t be too starry-eyed about all this, they’ll eat. Not only they’ll eat but they’ll buy automobiles too and cars and coats and they’ll just let you roast there.
Now my brothers and sisters I say this only to show how utterly foolish it is to think that if I have a nature that doesn’t fit me for heaven now and there’s no moral tug in my heart toward that place but that an honest examination proves that the moral tugs in the other direction and yet I hope to make it by that halfway house we call purgatory we’d better watch that.
The simple fact is there’s not a word of truth in it and there’s nowhere in the Bible. It was made up by men who stood up and said Latin masses were drunk the choir boys had to hold them up to keep them from tumbling down. It was made up by men who had nothing else to do and there’s not a line in the Bible, not a line. After death is the judgment.
And Lazarus died and went to the bosom of Abraham, and the rich man died and in hell he lifted up his eyes, no halfway house there. Each went to his own place. Where is yours?
But somebody says, Mr Tozer, again you’re wrong. I have accepted Christ. I have accepted Christ and by accepting Christ, I have a mantle, a cloak, I have His righteousness attributed to me. I know that I feel at home among white liars and cheats. I know that I chuckle at dirty jokes. I know that I’m a bit worldly. I know that I’m somewhat prayerless. I know that I’m a bit bored in a prayer meeting. I know that I don’t feel at home in an atmosphere of worship, and I get embarrassed a little when they talk about Jesus in a group. I admit all that, but I’ve accepted Jesus and that’s all I need.
Listen, where does your heart belong? You accept Jesus you say, and it didn’t change your heart. You accepted Jesus and it didn’t change the inner life of you. Why Paul didn’t talk that way about it. Paul said, if any man be in Christ, he’s a new creature. Old things have passed away and lo, everything’s become new. And the old gravitational tug that used to pull him that way, he accepts Christ, and now it pulls him toward this way now.
Isn’t it possible that this accepting Christ fools a lot of people; they think merely that going through that is all we need. Well, that’s all we need provided a change takes place. But if the change doesn’t take place, then we only think we’ve accepted Christ. We only think we’re converted. Paul said if any man be in Christ, he’s a new creation and those old things will pass away now. I don’t expect young Christians to be as rich and wonderful as old Christians.
Oh, I got a letter from brother Rimel who used to be among us here. He helped us put this building up and one of our fine men, and a physical condition made him move to Arizona where the climate was hot and dry and he’s all right there. But I got a letter from him and you that knew him, and he wouldn’t mind a bit and he may even hear me say this because it’s taking on tape and he gets the tapes. I didn’t think about that but I’m going to go on. And this good brother Rimel.
Why, I remember him when he was pretty sharp spoken fellow, pretty tactless and he’ll grin when he hears this, if he does, pretty tactless fellow. He could walk up to you looking in the eye and tell you your pedigree about as nicely as anybody.
I got a letter from him the other the other day. Oh, what a tender, beautiful letter it was; how rich and kind and friendly and cordial and warm it was. And he says, I don’t in no matter, where I go or who I hear, nobody will ever take your place in my heart, Brother Tozer. And your sermons and your preaching, and the dear people back home.
Why he’s down there in Arizona but his heart’s back here. All you’d have to do would be to cut his shoelaces and he’d fly back here by moral gravitation. God has given that fellow a new rich thing. He’s getting to be a middle-aged man now, and that’s the way it ought to work. That’s the way it ought to be.
Some of you accepted Christ 10 years ago, but you’re still, still if you were suddenly to die, all you’d have would be the hope the personal worker gave you. You’re not a new creature. Nothing has changed in you. You’re not different.
Ah, my brother, true salvation fits us for heaven and heaven demands us. And the man who’s been renewed by the operation of the Holy Ghost in true conversion, heaven demands that man. And he could not go to hell, he could not go to hell. Heaven demands him. Heaven is a vacuum into which his soul will rush when he dies, because morally that’s where he belongs; spiritually that’s where he belongs.
But you say, what shall I do then? I say repent. That was what the prophets all said. That was the first thing John the Baptist said. That was the first thing Jesus said. That was the first thing Peter said at Pentecost; the first thing Paul said when he was filled with the Holy Ghost later on in Acts. And that’s what they preached all down the years. That was the first thing Finney said, and the first thing the great revivalists have said, repent, repent!
If your heart is still unfitted for heaven, then you need to repent because when you repent, really repent and change and believe and seek and ask and knock and find, you’ll find there will be a wonderful gravitational tug.
Judas fell from his apostleship that he might go to his own place. I’m so sorry his own place was not purgatory, but that worse state. What do they call, limbo, I think that’s the time. Well, anyhow, you don’t get out of there. They throw the key away.
But purgatory, there’s a chance. There was no purgatory for Judas—perdition, perdition. I’m so sorry. I wish it were otherwise, but I can’t change God’s Word. And the Scripture tells me that I’m to be a good servant of Jesus Christ and a good minister and tell the whole truth and I’d like to preach on the goodness of God and the 53rd of Isaiah and the book of John for the rest of my life, but I can’t do it. I’ve got to tell people there is a law that permeates the universe from the far star to the soul of man and it is that everything finds its own place.
And right now, we’re all mixed up because sin has come into our human world, and for the time being, we’re all mixed up. But as soon as we’re dead or as soon as judgment comes, everybody will find his own place. Where is your place?
Brother McAfee told me he heard a song on the radio. I’m sorry I didn’t hear it in, but second hand, and I can’t tell it as well as he could. He was so horrified he was physically sick. He said he heard a group sing about the great production in the sky, the great show that was being put on in the glory land. Who all was there? Al Jolson was there, the follies girls that used to kick so high that they kicked the moon down, and Jean Harlow, yes, and all the rest. They were all there. And it said the greatest production of all and why shouldn’t it be when God was the director putting it on.
You see, brethren, a lot of those people have accepted Christ they said, but that didn’t change them not a bit. What did Jean Harlow belong up there? What does Al Jolson belong up there. What is Earl Carol doing up there? What is Al Capone doing up there? What are they doing up there? They would be out of their place.
There’s Peter, oh yes, Peter belongs there. Sure, Peter, old clumsy, tumbling Peter, he belongs there because God did what Peter said, gave him the nature of God. And Paul, old fiery-eyed Paul that breathed out threatening and slaughtering, that Paul there, he belongs there. Why? Because he said, I am the least of the apostle and unworthy to live and I ought to die, but God in his mercy saved me. He belongs there.
There they are, that grand parade. You want me to tell you something, friends, tonight and close. I had this in my notes and took it out, but I want to say this to you. If justice without mercy were done, and there were no cross and no Christ and no Redeemer, it would be the inevitable operation of the law of God that I should go to hell. I, A.W. Tozer, I, in my natural life, in my nature, I belonged there and belong there as certainly as the earthworm in the earth.
And if only justice were done, kind justice, but justice, without a Redeemer and without a cross and without a Savior, I wouldn’t belong in heaven any more than I belong not a thousand times as near as I belong eating beside the Pope in Rome or the Queen in England. I’m not a member of that outfit and I’d be out of place there. I wouldn’t belong there.
But O grace, sweet grace, supernal, has all my sins washed away. And by that infinite grace of God, I feel the upward tug. Not by nature, not by education, not by character, not by merit, not by virtue, not by faithfulness, not by prayer, not by any of those things, but by the infinite mercy of God that changed me.
I wanted you to know that’s I felt about that. I wanted you to hear me say, for if I died without an advocate above, I’d plunge instantly by the law of moral gravitation to hell. But there’s another nature that stirs within me. Every Christian is spiritually pregnant with a life that stirs and moves and kicks within him. It’s another life from another world and he can’t go to hell. He goes to God’s heaven as a bird rushes to the air or as air rushes into a vacuum. The seed of God is in him.
Oh, my friend, is that your condition? Can you say it’s true of you? If you can’t, I say, repent, believe, quit your sins, throw yourself out on the mercy of God, and God will renew you within and put within you his own nature and the root of the matter will lie in you. And though you won’t be a perfect Saint, there will be a magnet.
I have on my desk, a horseshoe magnet somebody gave me as a paperweight, a very heavy thing for as little as it is, very heavy and powerful. And when I set it down on a little thing I get kidded about up there, it has everything, paper clips and rubber bands and thumbtacks and bobby pins that I pick up here and there over the church as I walk through and all sorts of things. I put that magnet down there. Some of those things jump to it at once. Others lie there unconcerned. They go where they belong. Steel leaps to steel. But the buttons and the pennies and other things that aren’t steel, they just lie there unaffected.
So, heaven is a magnet that some people feel its pull and leap to it. Heaven demands them. What demands you? Let’s pray.
I’m going to pray and we’re going to close. But before we do pray, in order that we might pray intelligently, are there those who would say pray for me, Mr. Tozer? Now whatever the need may be, whatever it may be, God bless you, sir, I see your hand. And yours back there, sir, I see yours, and yours, sir. And yours, sir. And yours, lady. And yours, sir. Six men and one woman have asked us to pray. Who else? Let us unite. Yes, I see you, ma’am. Six men and two women. Let us pray.
God, our Father, God, our Father, Thou hast made us and we’re glad. Were glad we were ever born. Glad our tired mothers ever brought us into the world. Glad that we ever saw the sunrise. Glad that we learned to speak and see and hear. Glad, O God, we’re glad we’re alive. Glad we’re human beings, and not earthworms or bugs. Glad thou didst make us in thine image. Oh, we’re glad tonight.
Father, we’ve sinned, we’ve suffered, we’ve disappointed Thee and disappointed our friends, disappointed ourselves, tumbled around and we can look far down the mountain where we wandered many years, often troubled in our journey by the ghosts of doubt and fears, and it’s all true of us.
But we thank Thee for redemption in His blood. We thank Thee for the best and dearest Father who loved us and who loves, and who in pollution saved us and from our pollution lathed and delivered us. We thank Thee, thank Thee, Lord, tonight for redemption. Thank Thee for redemption.
Now, Father, for these eight persons who’ve asked us to pray, Father, wilt Thou search them as with a candle. Wilt Thou search them as with a candle, and grant our Father, we pray Thee, that before they close their eyes in sleep tonight, that any doubt they have will be swept away as the billows of the sea sweep things from rocks, as the wind in its fury sweeps away the leaves.
Sweep away from their hearts; cleanse, we pray Thee, by a mighty purgation, whatever hinders them. Take away, we pray Thee, those heavy weights that load them down, and put within them, we pray Thee, by the new birth, the magnet that feels the tug of Jerusalem above.
Great God, it’s a clear case of which, and we pray for all these friends. We pray that this week they won’t let their work and eating and sleeping and drinking and bathing and talking and reading the newspaper, they’ll not let those things hinder them from seeking Thy face with an urgency and fervor they’ve never known before.
We pray Thou deliver from habits. That Thou will go through, O Lord, and purge, and let the fiery purgation of the Holy Ghost cleanse their hearts. And let the blood roll over their souls, and deliver them so that whatever comes, life or death, they’ll know that they belong up there, and that there’s a vacuum up there waiting for them, into which they’ll rush sweetly, beautifully when they die.
God, if there be those here tonight, and any of those who raised their hand might be, and know in their deep, honest hearts tonight, that the magnetic pulls downward. We pray Thee, God, make a change this night. No later, Lord, we can’t afford to wait. We commit them to thee.
And now, Father, we join to pray for this boy who is ill, who is brought here from Lombard. We pray for his physical deliverance. It is written that they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover. And, Lord, we’ve been afraid of that, and we’ve shied away from it and all, but it’s there. And we’re Thy believers, and we’re Christians. And so, we have a right to believe, Lord, that when Thou dost offer us something, that we’re supposed to take it.
And so, wilt Thou bless us. And as we later gather a little group to pray, O come on us with the gift of faith, and of prayer that we might pray the prayer of faith. Amen.
Formerly released as “God’s Omnipresence and Immanence”
I want to read again some verses. There’s so many of them but I’ll just read these. But will God indeed dwell on the earth? Behold, the Heaven of Heavens cannot contain Thee, how much less this house that I have builded. Then Acts 17, that was 1 Kings, Acts 17, that they should seek the Lord if happily they might feel after Him and find Him, though He be not far from every one of them. For in Him, we live and move and have our being.
And then of course, that Psalm 139, whither shall I go from thy Spirit or whither shall I flee from Thy presence. If I ascend up into heaven, Thou art there. If I make my bed in hell, behold, Thou art there. If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there shall Thy hand laid me and thy right hand shall hold me. I read these, I just copied them out on a card there to save turning, flipping pages. There are here and are many, many more like them.
And I begin tonight with the restatement of two tenets of the Christian belief. This is not my idea. And if you haven’t heard it emphasized before, it’s because we preachers are falling down in the preaching of the Word. These two tenets are simply these, that God is omnipresent. That is, that God is everywhere. That God is immanent. That is, that God penetrates everything. They’re standard Christian doctrines and they have been believed back until to the days, even of the Jew.
Now by this all, we mean that God is omnipresent and immanent and is penetrating everything even while He contains all things as I explained last week. The bucket that is sunk in the depths of the ocean, it is full of the ocean and the ocean is in the bucket. But also, the bucket is in the ocean surrounded by it. And this is the best illustration I can think of how God dwells in His universe, and yet the universe dwells in God.
Now, I’ve dealt with the fact of remoteness, that distance is unlikeness. And I pointed out that hell is for those unlike God. The moral dissimilarity creates hell, moral dissimilarity. Those moral beings that are morally dissimilar to God, hell is their final place. And those creatures, those beings, moral beings that are morally similar to God, this likeness to God, heaven is their place because they have a nature that belongs there.
I have shown that reconciliation with God is secured, or affected by three divine acts. They’re all divine acts: atonement, justification and regeneration. Atonement of course, is the objective work of Christ. It is the thing that He did on a cross. It is the thing He did before any of us now living we’re living. It is something that He did alone in the dark. It’s objective, that is, it’s outside of us. It did not take place inside of anybody. It took place objectively, externally out there on a cross. He did it. The spear went into His side alone, and He suffered. The nails were in His hands and feet. That’s atonement. And that is objective and external to us. And it could have been done without affecting anybody. And it was done, and still there are millions that have died unaffected by it. Because it’s an external act. It’s something that was done outside, an objective act, something done beyond, outside of and not inside of us.
But here is the beauty of it, that this act which He did in the darkness there, makes justification possible. And justification is the second act which God does to bring reconciliation, men and God together, to reconcile man to God. Justification is that which declares the sinner righteous, and that also is external to the man. That is, it doesn’t reach the man.
The justified man may be no better off for his justification if that’s all that happened to him. Because justification is a judicial thing. It’s legal, just as a man may stand before a court and be declared innocent of a crime, not guilty of a crime, and yet it doesn’t change the man any. He weighs exactly the same as he weighed before. He is the same height as he was before, the same color of hair and eyes. He has the same relationships.
He’s in every way the same man that he was before, but he’s judicially free. He’s declared not guilty before the law. It might have a subjective effect in that when he found it out, he’d rejoice to know that he was declared not guilty. But the work is not done in him, the work is done in the minds of the jurors and before the law, it’s a judicial thing.
So, justification is the second act that God performs to get us reconciled with Him. He first gives atonement to make justification possible, then He gives justification.
And then the third act, regeneration. Regeneration of course takes place at the same time justification takes place. When God justifies a man, I said that a man could be justified and not be any better off. That is technically possible to be so, but not actually so. Because, when God justifies a man, He also regenerates the man. So that, nobody ever was justified and not regenerated. But you can think them apart, though actually of course, you cannot separate them. Justification and regeneration are not the same.
And again, I’m only giving you the most ordinary, basic Christian theology that everybody ought to know, that justification is not a subjective thing. It’s a judicial thing. But that regeneration takes place within the life of the man, within the heart of the man, it’s a subjective thing. It deals with the man’s nature. It gets inside the man, because Jesus died in the darkness and because God accepted that as atonement for that man’s sin. If that man believes in Christ, God can justify him and declare him righteous, and then regenerate him by imparting to him the nature of God. For it tells us that it is through this, through these promises, that we are partakers of the divine nature.
A regenerated man is a man who has partaken of the divine nature, who has a new relation to God which gives him eternal life.
Now, this reunites God and man and it restores some degree of moral likeness to the man. The newest convert, the newest convert that was born again; today, for born again and regenerate are the same expression. The newest convert has a degree of moral likeness to God which gives a measure of compatibility. You see, heaven is a place of complete compatibility. And sin introduces incompatibilities between God and the sinner. There cannot be any compatibility. There cannot be any communion, because sin introduces that quality which throws man and God out of accord with each other. There’s no accord there, no congruity.
But when that sinner believes in the blood of atonement, puts his trust in Christ, and is justified in heaven and regenerated on earth, for that’s the only place you get regenerated. Don’t wait until you die. There’s no place to regenerate after you’re dead. But you’re regenerated, you’re given a measure of the character of God, so that, there is enough of the image restored to the man in regeneration that there can be quite a full measure of compatibility. And that compatibility allows God to draw feelingly near to the man and it makes communion morally consistent.
You see, as I explained at great length last Sunday night, you can’t have communion where there is complete unlikeness. You can’t have it. You go to a creature that has a nature other than yours and you can’t have communion there. You may pet the head of a dog, but you can’t commune with the dog. The dog can’t commune with you, because there’s too great a dissimilarity of nature. So, God cannot commune with a sinner, because there is a violent unlikeness, a dissimilarity making communion impossible.
But it says here in Colossians 3, that ye have put on the new man which is renewed in knowledge after the image of Him who created him. That new man within you is the regenerated man, the new man, if you started on your way toward God-likeness. And there was enough of it there even in the new convert, that God, I repeat, can commune without incongruity because He finds some of His image in the man. God can only commune with His own image, remember that.
God, being the God He is, can never commune with anything except His own likeness. And where there is no likeness, there can be no fellowship between God and that unlike thing. But where there is restored to that person, a similarity, something of the nature of God, a compatibility, then God begins a communion. And of course, He can commune depending upon the fullness and completeness of that, of that compatibility.
Now, it says, ye have put on the new man, you Christians at Colossi. You have put on the new man, you have, you Christians. These Colossian Christians were not perfect by a long way, but they had put on the new man. The seed was in them. The root of the matter was in their hearts. They were regenerated. So, God could commune with His own image in them and see a little bit of His own face there and hold communion with His people. That’s why we can say, Abba, Father.
If I might use a rather grotesque illustration, I might say that the young father who goes to the hospital to see his newborn heir, looks into the glass and there never was a father yet who wasn’t excited, and frightened and bewildered. But there never was a father yet who wasn’t disappointed, because when he looks at that little fellow, his eyes are on over all twenty-five or thirty or fifty in there, and he picks on a pretty one and hopes that’s his. Then when they turn the thing around and he sees that it isn’t, he’s disappointed.
I think little Becky was about the only one who didn’t disappoint; well Stanley was pretty too. But mostly, you know, they’re a mess. And, but there is enough. And when you say, he’s just the image of you, and you’ll never be dead as long as he lives. A father beams you know, but actually it isn’t much of a compliment, the little blob of squirm and suck and giggle and red skin and hair that isn’t there.
Well, yet there is a little bit of likeness there. There’s something, there’s a similarity now in a deeper way. A new convert, that fellow that just been born again there, he certainly may not be much like God, but he has something of the resemblance to the Deity. And so God can own him as His and the angels can recognize a family resemblance. Now that’s all settled.
Now my brother, why then, and this is really the reason the sermon is being preached. Why then, this serious problem among real Christians. This feeling that God is far away, or vice versa, that we are far away from God. It’s hard to rejoice, you know, no matter what, you know, it’s hard to rejoice if you don’t feel, for feeling is rejoicing. And it’s hard to rejoice when you’re suffering from that sense of remoteness.
And I’d like to say to you that I believe that most Christians do suffer from a sense of divine remoteness. They know God is with them and they’re sure they’re God’s children, and they can take you to their marked New Testament and prove to you seriously and soberly that they’re justified and regenerated and they belong to God and heaven is going to be their home and Christ is their advocate above. They’ve got the theology they know in their head, but they’re mostly suffering from a sense of remoteness.
To know a thing in your head is one thing, to feel it in your heart is another. And I think that most Christians are trying to be happy without having a sense of the Presence. It’s like having a bright, trying to have a bright day without having the sun. You could say, well now it is 12:15 noon, therefore, the sun is up. Let us rejoice in the sun. Isn’t it beautiful and bright? Let us take it by faith and rejoice that the sun is up, that all is well. The sun is up according to the calendar, the sun should be about there. You can point upward and say the sun is up, but brother, that’s kidding yourself. As long as it’s gloomy and rainy and wet, soggy leaves keep dribbling down and it’s dark, you’re not having a bright day. But when the sun comes out, then you can you can rejoice in the presence of the sun.
Now, most Christians are theological Christians, they know they’re saved, somebody is given them a marked New Testament and it’s proper. We should so they get their theology straight, but they’re trying to be happy without a sense of the Presence. The sense of the Presence is absent, and so that yearning, that yearning, you see is a desire, that yearning to be nearer to God, to have God near to us. It’s found everywhere among God’s people. You will find it in two places; prayers and songs and hymns; you will find it there. If you think that I’m merely spinning this like a spider spins a web out of his stomach.
If you think that I am merely spinning this out of my head, go to the next prayer meeting and kneel down with the brethren and listen to them pray. They all pray alike. It’s, O Lord come, O Lord drawn near. O Lord show thyself. Be near to me Lord. And then, if that isn’t enough, sing along with us. And hear us sing come, Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing and other such songs. Draw Me Nearer, nearer blessed Lord. Near the Cross my heart can say I am coming near. The yearning to be nearer to God and have God come nearer to us is universal among born-again Christians.
And yet we think of God as coming from across distance to us, when my text declares and Christian theology back to David declares that God is already here now. That God doesn’t dwell in space, and therefore God doesn’t have to do like a rocket or like a ray of light, come from some remote place or start toward some remote place. There is no remote place in God. God contains all remoteness and all distances in His own great Heart. And why then do we feel Him in distance? It’s this dissimilarity in our natures. It’s the unlikeness.
We’ve got enough likeness that God can commune with us and call us His children and we can say Abba, Father, but in practical working out of it, the average one of us senses our dissimilarity. And that is why God seems remote.
Now, what I am trying to get across is simply this, that nearness to God is not a geographical or an astronomical thing. It is not a spatial thing having to do with space. It is a spiritual thing having to do with nature.
And so, when we pray, God draw me nearer or when we pray, come near. When we pray, come Thou Fount of every blessing. We’re not praying if we’re good theologians for God to come down from some remote distance. We know God’s here now. Jesus said, lo, I am with you alway. And they said, surely God’s in this place. The Lord is here. Jacob said, God’s in this place and I didn’t know it. He didn’t say God came to this place; God is in this place.
Well then you say, then what are we praying for? What we’re praying for is a manifestation of the presence of God, not the Presence, but the manifestation of the Presence. Why don’t we have the manifestation? Because we, we allow, unlikenesses. We allow moral dissimilarity and that sense of absence.
Please notice I say, sense of absence is the result of the remaining unlikeness within us. This desire, this yearning to be nearer to God is in fact a yearning to be like Him. It’s the yearning of the ransomed heart to be like God. So there can be perfect communion; so the heart and God can come together in a fellowship that is Divine.
Now, I want to point out some of the points of dissimilarity between God and the Christian. There I have said there is a similarity which makes it compatible for God and proper for God to commune with His children, even the poorest, weakest of His born children, these bairns as the Scots say. But there are dissimilarities and those dissimilarities are such that there isn’t a degree of fellowship that there ought to be. There isn’t that perfection of the sense of God’s presence that we want and yearn for, and pray for, and sing about.
How are we going to know what God is like so that we may know whether we’re like God? The answer is, God is like Christ, for Christ is God. Christ is God manifest to mankind. And so let us look at Jesus. And by looking at our Lord Jesus, we will know what God is like, and then we will know what we have to be like if we’re going to experience the unbroken and continuous Presence of God, a sense of the Presence.
Now, the Presence is here. I can’t say it too often. But it’s the sense of the Presence that’s absent. Just as the man knows the sun is there, even though the clouds are hanging so low you can reach up and touch them. And even though it’s so dark they have to put the lights on. I’ve seen that and you’ve seen that. Even when we know the sun was there in midheaven, they had turned their automobile lights on for safety. I’ve seen that happen and you have because there are, were clouds between. They know the sun’s there, but they don’t feel it nor see it.
And so, we Christians know God is here. But there is a sense of His absence. As the man feels the sun is gone, never to return and he knows better, and yet he can’t be happy because he can’t see the sun. So, we feel that God is away even when we know that He’s present, and He can’t manifest Himself as He wants to for certain reasons.
Now let’s notice some of the qualities of Jesus. The first one of course is holiness. Our God is holy and our Lord is holy, and we call the Spirit, the Holy Spirit. Now, notice how stained and how spotted and how carnal the average Christian is. We allow stains. Months go by without repentance. Years go by without asking for cleansing or taking it. Spots on our garments, and carnality, and unlikenesses within our heart. Then we pray, draw me nearer, nearer blessed Lord. Or we sing, or we pray, come Lord, come to this meeting. Well, the Lord is there. What we’re praying is, O Lord, show thyself, but the Lord cannot, a Holy Lord cannot show Himself in full communion to an unholy Christian. Do you say is it possible to be a Christian and be unholy. It’s possible to be a carnal Christian, to have the seed of God in you, to be regenerated and justified and still be unholy in some of your inner, inner feelings and desires and willingness.
The second is unselfishness. Do you notice that Jesus Christ was completely unselfish and gave Himself, but how self-centered and self-indulgent most Christians are? Even when they’re reading books on revival, they’re still self-centered. Even when they’re praying for revival, they’re still self-indulgent. A revival is, among other things, a sudden manifestation; it’s the breaking of the Son through the clouds. It’s not the coming of the Son. It’s the breaking of the Son through the clouds, and so our selfishness. How much selfishness there is.
I am sick in my own heart, sick about myself and sick about my friends and sick about the preachers in the ministry. How utterly self-centered we can become; live for self, talk loudly about glorifying God, and boast and say this is the glory of God, and yet be self-centered. And how you know you’re self-centered is, if anybody crosses you, your hackles go up. Now, don’t smile about it. It is not funny. It’s serious. That as soon as you’re crossed your hackles go up because you’re self-centered and self-indulgent. How much self-indulgence there is.
Do you know something friends, there is enough money potentially in this audience tonight, not only to keep this church going hilariously, but to double the missionary offering that we make. There’s enough, potentially, if we weren’t so self-indulgent, but we’re self-indulgent. And of course, a perfectly selfless Christ who gave Himself and poured Himself out and had no selfishness, can’t warm up for the Christian heart who’s self-indulgent and self-centered. He loves us. He’s our Shepherd. He’s our advocate above. He pleads our cause there. We are His bethren in Christ and His God, His Father is our Father. But I’m talking about the fellowship, the sweetness that changes some people into saints while they walk on earth in more than a technical sense, then love.
Now, He so loved that He gave all, but how calculating so many of us are, how calculating. I can say, now I can go to this meeting, but I can’t go to this one because the doctor has told me that I’m to do thus and thus, and I must obey doctor’s orders. And we let doctors push us around and tell us what to do. And we’re calculating. We figure it out. We put our spiritual life on a budget and we won’t spend anything for God unless we can justify it in the columns of our budget. What a cheap, carnal way of living. And yet it’s true. We do it. How narrow God’s people are.
The love of the Lord Jesus Christ was a great, passionate, outpoured thing, among other things that caused Him to give Himself completely. It said He please not Himself. Do you remember that beautiful passage? Jesus, even our Lord, pleased not Himself. But, do you know what’s wrong with us. We’re self-pleasers. We live for ourselves. There are people that would have a new car if this church went to pot and we had to close the doors. There are women that would dress in style and with the very best if the mission cause died and every missionary had to be sent home. Yet, we’re saints, we’re born again. We’re believers. We have our marked New Testament, but and maybe we are Christians, but the love we have is a calculating love and narrow love, a love that doesn’t give itself. And so how can He who gave Himself; how can He ever fellowship with us?
Do you want a Bible illustration of this? Let me give it to you. Back in the Song of Solomon, that delicate, gentle, wondrous, beautiful book that Dr. Schofield said, sin has almost deprived us of the ability to kneel before that burning bush. Well, back there you remember, that the Bridegroom who represents Jesus, had given gifts to the Bride, the bride to be. And he was out gathering lilies, taking care of his sheep, out among the lilies, and the dew was falling. And his locks were wet with the dews of the night. He was out there doing what his interest required him to do; what his heart wanted to do. And he came and knocked on her door as much as to say, won’t you come and join me? And she said, How can I? How can I come? I am not dressed for it. I’m dressed for the couch and the home, and even my hand drip with the ointments you’ve given me. I can’t come.
And so, he disappeared. He was still her lover. And he was still wanting and going to marry her. And he did finally, thank God. And it came out all right, but he was out there pouring himself out, and she was in her house admiring herself. And taking long whiffs of the fragrance of the perfumes that he had given her; standing before the mirror and admiring the robes and the jewelry that he had given her. He wanted her and she wanted his jewelry and his perfume.
Then finally, she got under conviction about it. And she quickly, hastily dressed, not really for street dress, but she got some clothes on and threw a robe about her and started out looking for her beloved. And she says, where is he? Where is he? And I asked the watchman, where is he? And the watchman beat me He said, “A harlot out on the street on a night like this, go on home,” and he slapped her down. She went on staggering under the blows and couldn’t find him and said, where is he? Where is he? And while she was hunting him, her friend said, what is thy beloved more than another beloved? What’s the matter? Why don’t you go home? What is thy beloved more than another beloved? And then, she burst out into a beautiful song saying my beloved is white and ruddy. Do you remember that passage? She described him from head to foot. He is fairer than 10,000.
Well, you see, he wanted her fellowship. And she was too selfish and self-centered and she stayed in while he was out. And of course, there could be no fellowship while he’s out there doing one thing and she’s selfishly staying in house doing another.
And then there’s kindness. Think how utterly kind our Lord Jesus is. For the love of God is kinder than the measure of man’s mind. The kindness of Jesus and the harshness of us, and the severity and the sharpness, the acerbity, the bitterness, the acidity in so many people’s lives. How can a kind Savior feel perfectly at home with a harsh Christian?
Then there’s forgiveness. He was a forgiving Lord. He is a forgiving Lord and He forgave them while they beat Him. He forgave them while they put Him on a cross. But how hard and vengeful so many of the Lord’s children, how vengeful. You remember things that happened twenty years ago, some of you and you just can’t get over. You can’t. Oh, I have forgiven it all right, but you haven’t. You’re vengeful and He was forgiving. And He proved He was forgiving by dying in blood. You prove that you’re vengeful and hard by many, many proofs, many demonstrations.
Then, think of the zeal of Jesus. The zeal for thine house has eaten me up. Think of the zeal of God. The zeal of the Lord of Hosts will perform this. Zeal is a burning fire. Do you know, the most zealous thing I know is fire, O brother. Wherever fire burns, it burns with hot zeal. And the heart of Jesus was like that. But think of the lukewarm Christian, Christians that haven’t been to a prayer meeting for years. And the careless Christian, and the torpid Christian. The torpor that lies over the church of God.
Then the humility of Jesus. Though He was the highest, He came down and acted like the lowest. And though we are the lowest, we are sometimes like the proudest and the most arrogant. How completely unlike Jesus; how unlike God.
Now, you say then, am I justified by being like God? I hope I’ve made it clear. You’re justified by being declared righteous by Almighty God basing His sentence upon the cross of Jesus and the dying of the Savior in the darkness there on the hill. Then, because He made atonement, God justifies. And when He justifies, He regenerates. And you’re saved by justification and regeneration, but regeneration does not perfect the image of God in you. The image of God must continue to grow and come forth and come out. As an artist works on his pictures, at first it’s only an outline and the general confuse, but he knows what’s there and slowly it comes out.
And so, God seems far from us because we’re so unlike God. It isn’t distance. And Horace Bushnell and his friend went out on the hill to pray, talked first and went out and sat and talked about God until slowly, sunset and the stars came out in the darkness settled around while they sat on the grass and talked about God. Then before they left, Bushnell said, Brother, Let us pray before we go. So there in the darkness Bushnell lifted up his heart to God and his friend said afterwards, I pulled my arms in tight around me. I was afraid to reach them out lest I touch God.
I once knelt under an apple tree in a field, several other preachers and a Salvation Army man, Captain Ireland of the Salvation Army. Captain Ireland, we all prayed and then Captain Ireland began to pray. And as he prayed, I suddenly sensed a nearness. There was another One there that hadn’t come out. He’d been there all the time. Am I a God far off? Am I a God at hand, saith the LORD?
So, this sense of the Presence, how can He continually manifest His presence to the proud and arrogant when He was so humble and low? To the lukewarm and the careless when He was so zealous? To the hard and the vengeful when He is so forgiving? To the harsh and the severe, when He is so kind? To the calculating, when His love led Him to die? To the Holy, when we are so stained? How can we have fellowship?
And then the heavenly mindedness of Jesus. Oh, think of that. He was with the Father in the bosom of the Father while He was on earth. He said, the Son of Man who is, not was, in the bosom of the Father. He never left the bosom of the Father while He was on Earth. The only time He left it was in that awful, wrenching agony when God turned away from Him on a cross that He might die for mankind, but never at any other time He was in the bosom of the Father, the other world. He talked about, I came from above, I came down from above, I am from above. I tell you things from above. He lived in the heart of God.
And the other world and the world above was the world in which He inhabited, the world in which inhabited. And think how earthly His people are, and how worldly: furniture, TV sets, baseball, football, automobiles, picture windows, split level houses, politics, anything but Heaven and God. And then we want, draw me nearer, nearer. You’re as near as you can get as far as distance is concerned, but He can’t manifest Himself because there’s a dissimilarity of nature. You’ll have enough of His nature that you’re justified and regenerated, but you haven’t enough to perfect the fellowship. Do you see what I mean? The perfection of the fellowship. Oh, brethren, this is what we need so desperately bad.
Well, there was a man once who followed the Lord afar off. But you know he couldn’t live with it. Some of you have learned to live with it. You’ve gotten older and you’ve learned to live in the twilight and not mind it. You’ve learned to live in the chill and not mind. What can I do for you? How can I help you? I know no way. Peter followed a far off, but he couldn’t stand it. When the Lord turned and looked at him, he went outside and wept bitterly. He wept bitterly.
Have you any tears for your unlikeness? Have you any tears for that distance between you and God that you know isn’t there and yet feel is there? You’re not, you’re not in any wise diminishing anything God has already done. You’re grateful and thankful for every blessing and for the goodness, for justification, for the good grace of God on your life, but you can’t escape that sense of remoteness.
And many a day is a heavy day because God seems far from him. You know He isn’t, but you feel He is. The reason you feel He is, is that He can’t show His face. You’ve allowed self-indulgence, harshness, vengeful spirit, lukewarmness, pride, worldliness, earthliness to put a cloud over the Face of God.
What are you going to do about it? Would you be willing to do something about it tonight? Maybe I haven’t preached to anybody. I don’t know. Maybe nobody’s heard me tonight. Because I know it’s one thing to talk and it’s quite another thing to be heard, even in the same room. Only the Holy Ghost can give you the illumination that will make the words heard by you. You know the English, you know the grammar, you know the logic, that’s one thing, but it’s another thing to hear in your heart. Then opened He their hearts. Has He opened anybody’s heart here? If He’s opened anybody’s heart, I think that you ought to do something about it. Let us stand please. Let us stand.
Do you know what I think? I think that repentance is called for. Repentance of what? A deed done? No. Repentance of the unlikeness? Repentance of the unholiness in the presence of the Holy? Of the self-indulgence in the presence of the selfless Christ? Of the presence of harshness in the presence of the kind Christ? Of hardness in the presence of the Forgiving Christ? Lukewarmness in the presence of the zealous Christ burning like a fiery flame? The worldliness and earthliness in the presence of the heavenly Christ. I think we ought to repent.
Now I don’t know I say whether I’ve reached you or not. I only know this, there’s a prayer room in here. And while we sing very softly, some number, our brother, would you start. Don’t announce it, just sing something very gently and we’ll join. Just come in here and we’ll have a little prayer meeting. If your heart, has God spoken to your heart? Come on into the place of prayer.
I want to talk on a subject very important to the Lord’s people. I want to give a talk on why God seems so far away; why when we pray sometimes God seems so far away, and why generally to Christians there’s a sense of remoteness. I want to talk about it tonight, and I think it will be worth your hearing.
This morning, in the 18th of Genesis, the Lord appeared unto Abraham in the plains of Mamre as he sat in the tent door in the heat of the day. And he lifted up his eyes and looked, and, lo, three men stood by him. When he saw them, he ran to meet them from the tent door and bowed himself to the ground. He said, My Lord, if now I have found favor in thy sight, pass not away, I pray thee, from thy servant. And they said unto him, where is Sarah thy wife? There were three of them, and now it’s become one. He said, I will certainly return unto thee according to the time of life, and, lo, Sarah thy wife shall have a son. And Sarah heard it in the tent door. She was supposed to be inside, but she was listening. They’re all alike. And Sarah heard it in the tent door which was behind him.
Now Abraham and Sarah were old and well stricken in age, and it ceased to be with Sarah after the manner of women. Therefore, Sarah laughed within herself, saying, After I am waxed old, shall I have pleasure, my Lord, also being old? And the Lord said unto Abraham, wherefore did Sarah laugh, saying, shall I of a surety bear a child, I which am old? Is anything too hard for the Lord? The time appointed I will return unto thee according to the time of life, and Sarah shall have a son. Then Sarah denied, saying, I laughed not, for she was afraid. And he said, nay, but you did laugh.
I want to take a question from verse 14. Is anything too hard for the Lord? This is what is called, of course, a rhetorical question, which means simply that it contains its answer in itself. And of course, there is only one answer.
Now, God asked this question as a rebuke and a promise, and His deed supported His words. We might as well be realistic enough to admit that much religious talk is fanciful and unrelated to reality. The Christian message carries its own power in it, and where there is faith and obedience, that power emerges into practical deeds, as we’ll see here.
Now, God asked the question, Is anything too hard for the Lord? And I have examined into this very closely, so I’m not uttering mere shreds of opinion. I guessed when I read this that the word hard there in the original Hebrew was a bit different from our word hard when we say, for instance, that it’s hard to lift something. I figured that wouldn’t be the word used, and I looked it up and found that it is not the word used. There are two meanings to this word, hard and difficult, and they’re not quite the same.
Hard means tough and severe, as when it says, Pharaoh made their lives bitter with hard bondage. The hard bondage was the bondage where they labored as slaves, hard labors, the word we use. He was sentenced to hard labor. It means that he had, it wasn’t necessarily to do any skillful work, but he had to do work that required bone labor, hard muscle.
Then the word hard means great, difficult, and wonderful, and that’s the word that is used here. Is anything too great for God? Is anything too difficult for God? Is anything too wonderful for God to do? That’s the word here.
Now, you’ll notice that this question here wasn’t one of physical energy. It didn’t take muscle and power. It was a difficult thing. Sarah herself knew and chuckled over the idea, as it was proper that she might have. You see the difference, don’t you, between a thing being hard and a thing being difficult.
Let me illustrate it from the world of sport. Take a weightlifter, a great muscular fellow with a huge chest and bulging biceps. He lifts weights. I don’t know enough about it to know how many hundred pounds, but I understand that one fellow lifted over three hundred, perhaps much more than that, but I do know at least that much. He lifted straight up over his head.
Well, now, that wasn’t difficult. Anybody could do that that could do it. All you had to do was reach down, pick it up, push it up in the air. If provided, of course, you had the physical muscle, you were tough enough to do it. That’s what you call hard, meaning that it takes great energy.
But let’s look at another man. Let’s look at a man, why it bothers him, God knows, that never bothered me and will bother me now, but there is a man, a businessman, a hardworking man, he might even be a president. And there he is out on a beautiful little green, almost as beautiful as a green carpet, about the size of this platform. And right in the middle of that, or maybe off a little to one side, there’s a hole, a cup. And there lies a little white ball there. And his job is to get that little white ball to fall into that little cup.
Now, it isn’t going to take the muscle of a weightlifter. There’s nothing hard about that, but it’s difficult. It’s so difficult that you don’t even dare sneeze, nor make any noise while he gets down on his knees like a devotee burning incense to a rubber ball, and sights along to see just where that falls. And then, with great difficulty, taps it toward the cup.
And the last time I played golf was 20 years ago, I think. And I got that ball all over the green, every place but in the cup. I threw my golf clubs down and said to Mr. Lessard, with whom I was then playing, this is the last, and brother, it was. It wasn’t, it didn’t take muscle, but it took a coordination and skill that not only I didn’t have, but never could develop. There’s a difference, you see, between hard and difficult. It’s difficult to sink a shot, but it’s hard to lift a heavy weight.
Now, nothing is hard for God by either definition. God having all of the energy there is in the universe can, of course, naturally do the hardest thing there is to do. And God having all the wisdom there is naturally has all the skill there is to do it.
Now let’s look at why some things are hard for us. There are four or five reasons why they’re hard for us, difficult or hard. Some are hard because they require energy that we just don’t have, it’s beyond us, either physical energy, mental energy, and it’s beyond us. We just don’t have it, so it’s hard and we can’t do it.
But is anything too hard for God, or it requires a knowledge beyond our store? For instance, could you have sent up that rocket, that ill-fated rocket that went up a few hundred miles and then came back? I couldn’t have. I wouldn’t have the remotest idea what to do. The nearest I could get to it would be a slingshot or throwing a rock in the air. I don’t know how they do that. I don’t know. And I don’t feel any sense of inferiority. It isn’t my field; I’m not interested in it. I know some things they don’t know.
So you’ve got to have knowledge to do some things, and if you don’t have that knowledge you can’t do it. But is it possible to conceive of anything that requires a knowledge that God doesn’t have, when God knows all there is to know instantly and effortlessly?
And then third, it may require a wisdom beyond us, for you see, there’s a difference between knowledge and wisdom. Man may be very wise and not very knowledgeable, or he may be knowledgeable and not very wise.
Alexander Pope, in the oft-quoted little jingle, talked about the learned man whose head was full of knowledge, but he didn’t know what to do with it. He said, he’s a bookish blockhead, ignorantly read, with loads of learned lumber in his head. And that means he has lots of knowledge but no wisdom and doesn’t know what to do with what he knows.
Well, it may be that you have knowledge about how to do a thing, but the wisdom escapes you. But God possesses infinite wisdom.
And then maybe there are so many enemies, for instance, running to make a touchdown. Now it wouldn’t be hard or difficult either, but it’s both because of the enemies that are pitted against you. You grab it and you take two jumps and somebody’s on you. Well the enemies are there, that’s the game. I don’t care much for football, really, but then that’s the game, I understand. One fellow wants to get the pigskin across, and two or three or ten other fellows determined he can’t. So they block him.
And the devil is a great player, he blocks constantly, only he’s dead serious about it. And when you try to do something, he blocks it, he hinders you. And he pits himself against you and often brings you down, so you can’t do it.
But is it conceivable that the great God Almighty, the great God who telleth the stars and calleth them all by name and knoweth the number thereof, is it possible that God can be stopped? No, God doeth as He pleases and the armies of the heaven and the armies of the earth, and there’s nobody that can stop Him or say, what are you doing? He has His way in the whirlwind and the storm and the clouds and the dust of His feet.
He’s the sovereign God, and all the devils in hell could deploy themselves in whatever formation they chose, like players on a football field, and God Almighty can walk through triumphantly toward His goal, because He is God.
Jesus Christ walked straight toward the cross without hindrance, and rose from the cross without hindrance, and went to the right hand of God without hindrance, though they were trying to hinder Him all the way. You see, God demonstrates His power and His wisdom.
He said, is there anything too hard for me, and then proceeded to do something so difficult that nobody in the world could do it, cause a ninety-year-old woman to have a child.
And later on, there was Pharaoh. I’ve just been going through the book of Exodus on my knees. I’ve been reading it in my room down on my knees. And then God talked to me about Moses and Pharaoh and Aaron and the ten plagues and the power of God. Wonderful what God did.
No wonder Israel talks about it down to this day. No wonder it’s woven itself into history and into literature and into music. No wonder we sing about it. God opened the Red Sea and took Israel through and cast up the enemy dead upon the shore. God showed what he could do.
Later on there was Sennacherib. There he was with all of his mass people. It was like, say, it was as if England, yonder, England or the United States, were to decide they were going to have war with little Israel over there, tiny little Israel. There’s no parallel, certainly, between the Israel of Sennacherib’s day and the Israel that we know today over there.
But let us imagine that if a country the size of ours, with our unlimited potential, should decide to make war on little Israel, well, how are you going to stop them? How are you going to stop Sennacherib? How are you going to stop it?
Hezekiah the king got a nasty, blasphemous, obscene letter from one of the underlings of Sennacherib, and he read it out loud to the embarrassment of the women and to the horror of the king and those around him. And Hezekiah took that letter, turned it around and said, O God, read this. And God read it, and God sent Isaiah to say, don’t you worry about that, I’ll handle it.
And so, the angel of death spread his wings on the blast and breathed in the face of the foe as he passed. And the eyes of the sleeper waxed deadly and chilled, and his chest deep at once and forever grew still. And the might of the Gentile, unsmoked by the Lord, melted like snow at the breath of the Lord. God Almighty can handle it. So he proved that He can do it, and He’s done it all down the years, He’s proved it.
Now, why do we see so little of this? Why do we see so little of God’s ability to do the hard thing and His ability to do the difficult thing? Why do we see so little of it?
I want to read you a passage here. It was Jesus talking, and He said, I tell you a truth. Many widows were in Israel in the days of Elias, when the heaven was shut up three years and six months, when great famine was throughout all the land. But unto none of them was Elias sent, save unto Sarepta, a city of Sidon, unto a woman that was a widow.
And if that isn’t bad enough, many lepers were in Israel in the days of Elisha the prophet. But none of them was cleansed, saving Naaman the Syrian. And all lay in the synagogue when they heard that these things were filled with wrath. Notice later why they were filled with wrath.
But notice why when Jesus came to Israel with wonder at His fingertips, wonders, ability to do the hard thing, the difficult thing, at His fingertips, why was it that Israel saw so little of it?
Well, Jesus said the reason may be noticed, may be gotten, is hinted at, and may be gathered from the way God worked back in Israel. He said in the time of Elijah there were lots of widows in Israel. And yet those Israelitish widows had gotten accustomed to satisfying their religious yearnings with stories of other days. They looked back at other and grander times. They talked about Pharaoh and the Red Sea and Aaron and all the others. They no doubt were well versed in the history of Israel and the power of God for Israel, but they had gotten accustomed to satisfying their religious yearnings by talking of something that had happened and was now history.
And so there was a closed heaven. God never spoke to them. And when He had a prophet that He wanted to get, have entertained and wanted to feed, there were widows in Israel by the hundreds, maybe thousands in Israel, but there wasn’t one of them God could go to. They were God’s chosen people, and they were religious above all on the face of the earth, those Jews were. But God had to leave all the widows in Israel to sit.
And He went to Zarephath of Sidon and picked a pagan woman who was not of the seed of Israel and sent Elijah there because that pagan woman brought a fresh mind to the contemplation of divine things. She brought a fresh mind and when the man of God came to her, he said, give me to eat. And she fed him. After his experience by the brook here, she fed him and God fed her.
And Jesus said, don’t you see, you’ll read your Bible, can’t you interpret it? Don’t you know that all the power there is lie in these 10 fingers of mine, all the power I have it. Why is there so little of it manifest? Why was there so little manifest in the days of Elijah? There were lots of widows in Israel, but not one of them got any help because they were women of closed minds and non-expectation.
Then He went on and rubbed it in further still and said there were many lepers in Israel in the days of Elijah, but they went uncleansed because they had become accustomed to living with their sores. This is the tragedy of an old church or the tragedy of an old denomination.
We get used to living with our sores. The sophists come along, and the casuists and they spin a philosophy, a rationalizing. They rationalize a philosophy of explanation about why things aren’t better than they are. And the result is that we get accustomed to living with our leprosy.
They were orthodox, those lepers, but they were lepers. They were orthodox and they believed all they should have believed creedally, but their minds were closed. But a Syrian general brought an open mind, a Syrian general that was accustomed to kneeling in the house of a false god, went to the prophet Elisha and Elisha told him to go bathe in the river.
At first he was angry. At least he had enough gumption to get mad. He was angry about it and then when he saw that he was wrong, he humbled himself and went and bathed and lo, came with his flesh as the flesh of a little child.
God healed Naaman the pagan, the Syrian, and left the lepers in Israel uncleansed, though nothing was too hard for God to do. God could have spoken the word, and a wave of healing would have run throughout Israel like the light at the rising of the sun. And every leper would have been instantaneously healed, but they couldn’t take it because their minds were closed. They were religious people, and they had gotten used to their sores. And today that’s our trouble.
Is anything too hard for the Lord? No, impossible that it should be, but we bring God closed minds. And the customary becomes the normal in religious churches. The customary, all you have to do is to make a statement that sounds a little bit away from the customary and they challenge you immediately.
All you have to do is to suggest something that’s a little bit off the beam and that is a little bit off the regular path of things, the custom thing, and they’re raising their eyebrows and zut-zut-zutting and chuck-chuck-clucking and saying, what’s the matter with our pastor?
The lepers in Israel went uncleansed and the widows in Israel went unblessed, while the woman in Sidon and Naaman the Syrian were blessed of Jehovah God.
And today, we have whatever is customary, that’s normal, and we get a psychology of the customary. We can change our body model in the automobile. Women can change their body models very rapidly if somebody in Paris says they’re to do it.
And we make all sorts of changes, but when it comes to God, we expect God to behave Himself and to act according to the way He’s been acting and forgetting that He’s been acting like that because we haven’t had an open mind to allow God to assert His power. Today we’ve got the closed minds, and yet we’re orthodox, and yet we’re unbelievers.
You know, there are two kinds of unbelief. There is the bold, arrogant unbelief of the sinner who comes out and says, I don’t believe your Bible, I don’t believe your God. If there’s any God, why is there leprosy and polio and war and all that kind of thing? No, thank you, I’ve had enough, come, let’s have a beer. I don’t want any more of your religion, I’ve had enough, I don’t believe in it. That’s the man Jesus said, I wouldest thou wert hot or cold. There’s your cold man. He doesn’t believe in it at all and says so outright.
Then there is the unbelief of the religious man. He wouldn’t say, I don’t believe the Bible; he does believe the Bible. He buys them and gives them as presents and reads them assiduously. He doesn’t say, I don’t believe in your God. He does believe in God.
But he just can’t believe for anything new. He can’t believe that God means us now, that he means him. He can’t believe that this is the hour, this is the day.
God to him is always historic, and the Bible a historic book. He can’t bring himself to believe in the God of the present, the living God, the God of today and tomorrow. He’s perfectly willing to believe in the God of yesterday.
Believing in the God of yesterday makes us orthodox. Believing in the God of today releases God’s power into the midst. We bring God a closed mind and we have developed a chronic non-expectation.
I think that’s generally what could be said, we have a chronic non-expectation. We have a psychology of continuing defeat. We don’t expect anything else, and so we begin to make terms with our defeat, make terms with our captors.
We begin to learn to live in Babylon, the Church is learning to live in Babylon, slowly learning the language of the Babylonians. Blessed gorgeous old Hebrew, we still use it at home, but out in the marketplaces we use the language of Babylon. Because we don’t have God Almighty’s power released, why, we have to think our way through and confer our way through.
You want to see a pastor; he says he’s in conference. We’re conferring our way through. And we’re acting as if Christ was still dead, instead of having risen from the dead. You know what I think? I think that we ought to begin to magnify the resurrected Christ more than we do.
Dr. Walter Wilson has a brother, Dyke Wilson, he’s been writing me lately and sending me things. He’s quite a character, really, and there’s one thing that he insists upon, and that is that the cross is past, and that he did his work there, and that’s over with. But that one point where we should place our interest is the throne, that the Jesus of the throne, the Christ of the throne, the resurrected, glorified Savior, should be the object of our interest now. Not back to the cross, but up to the throne.
I believe he’s perfectly right. And I think that we are wrong in this. I don’t mean to say that I stand here to give sight-unseen approval to everything that Mr. Dyke Wilson believes. I merely quote him as saying that this is where his emphasis falls.
And incidentally, that’s where the emphasis fell in the early days of the Alliance. And that’s where it fell even when I got into the Alliance 40 years ago. They were then talking about, Jesus can do everything, Jesus is risen from the dead, the Lord is on the throne, he can do anything, is anything too hard for Jehovah?
That’s the way they were talking then. But we soon got over that, and now we’re acting as if Christ was still dead. Why do the children of the King go mourning all the day? Because they think the King’s oldest son is still in the grave.
He is not in the grave, but He is long ago risen from the dead, and all power is given unto Him in heaven and in earth, and that Power is waiting for you and me to dare to put away our psychology of non-expectation, put away the mental attitude of being satisfied with defeat.
What’s the result of this Christ that’s still dead? What is the result of this psychology of defeat? Well, the devil is satisfied, that’s sure enough, quite satisfied. And I believe also, and this is terrible, that the Spirit is grieved. I believe the Holy Ghost is grieved.
Did you notice that when Jesus charged Israel with unbelief, their wrath burned against Him, and they took Him out to throw him over a cliff and kill Him. They said, We’re orthodox, what do you mean? And believing to them means accepting a creed.
Believing to Jesus means accepting a creed and expecting something from the God of the creed. They could go halfway, but they couldn’t go the rest of the way. And it was this charge that caused them to snarl and grind their teeth at Jesus.
And there was the animosity that grew in intensity until they killed Him at last on a cross. But the God that finds nothing hard raised Him from the dead easily the third day. But the Spirit is grieved, my friends.
The Spirit is grieved because of our unbelief. We look to each other for help instead of to God. And our altar fires burn very, very low, and we are forced to look to the flesh and misplace our confidence.
Israel was always running to Egypt for help, looking somewhere and sending to this heathen king and saying, come over and help us. And they were always defeated when they did. God said, you’re My people and I’ll look after you, and He says the same to us today. So, we’re driven to the methods of the world.
This may shock some of you and make some of you downright mad. And if it does, don’t let it bother you, I don’t mind at all. But I am going to studiously stay away from all discussions on methodology. I’m going studiously to stay away from it altogether.
Maybe it has a modicum of good in it, but it seems to me that when we accept without knowing it the belief that Jesus is still dead, and we accept the customary as the normal, and we get a psychology of non-expectation and don’t expect heaven to open, then we develop methods. If God were to open heaven, we might have to get some methods to hold things together, you know.
The Methodists were called Methodists because they had methods. But they had methods to take care of a glowing, wondrous power that had come. But we don’t have the power, but we’re trying to generate it by methods. And it won’t work, my brethren, it’ll never work.
If a young couple marries and gets into a tiny little house and babies begin to come, and one every year, they’re going to have to have a bigger house. And they’re going to have to have methods of looking after them. They’re going to have to have budget, watch their money, and change some things, and live a little bit more according to the book. But it’s to take care of expanding life.
But suppose two silly young people were to marry and say, now we’d like a house full of children, let’s get a budget. And also let’s build two nurseries and three extra bedrooms. You can’t have life by a budget, and you can’t have life by a method.
And yet the Church of Christ has turned to methodology, and we act as if Jesus Christ was dead. If Christ is not risen, why monkey with the whole business anyhow? If Christ is not risen, why try to keep a church going at all? If Christ is not risen, we’re of all men most miserable. Let us eat, drink, and be merry, and have as good a time as we can before we die.
But now is Christ risen from the dead and become the first fruits of them that slept. He is risen, and if He’s risen, we don’t need these other things. They got our confidence misplaced; you see.
Whole magazines have gone over to methodology in recent times. The Alliance Witness is one of the few that’s still holding on to the editorial position that we ought to feed the souls of men. You can learn how to pet and how to make dates and how to build buildings and how to heat the parsonage. You can learn anything from the magazines now. They’ve gone over to methodology. Methodology without the Holy Ghost is a sepulcher, a whited sepulcher full of bones.
But where there’s faith, there’s God. And we ought to take this seriously and do some real repenting, my brethren. We ought to do some real repenting. We ought to call a moratorium on requests and do some real repenting, for the Spirit is waiting, hovering over chaos, ready to say, let there be light when we’ll believe Him. Let’s repent.
Let’s repent of our mentality that takes things as they are, as things as they should be, and accept the customary as the normal, forgetting that God says, talk not about the old things, lo, I will do a new thing, now shall it spring forth.
I will even make a way in the wilderness and streams and the desert, and I will plant the chitaw tree at the top of the mountains, and I will do the impossible things, for I am God.
That’s our God, my brethren. That’s the God we have. That’s the Christ we have. Let’s have an afternoon of repentance. Let’s go to God and ask him to forgive us.
Israel got mad when Jesus talked like this to them. Are you going to do it that way, or are you going to humble yourself and ask God to give you a refreshed mind.
A psychology of non-expectation, chronic defeatism, with Christ at the right hand of God, looking down eagerly, ready to help us in the power of the Holy Ghost right here in our midst? Why can’t we believe?
Let’s repent, and let’s ask God to blow away the fog that shrouds us and take the dust off our souls and remove this miserable business and dare to believe again, dare to believe again.
Then when we are believing and the grace of God is flowing, we may have to look around for channels to let it flow into. That’s normal and right. Paul did that, so he had his methods. But he didn’t try to substitute methods for the Holy Ghost. Let’s not do that, either. Let’s look to Jesus Christ, risen and glorified, and expect him to do the impossible for us. Amen
Brother McAfee, I’m going to close differently this morning.
Dear friends, you’ve heard me, some of you, 30 years, which means, I suppose that I have to preach twice as hard to get half as much impression. When we get used to things, we’re used to them. Are there those here who will say, I feel that in the measure you have described me, I feel that there is that sense of acceptance of conditions instead of daring to believe God boldly for my own life, for my home, for my business, for the Church.
I want God to release power into my life and into my home and church and business and life. And I admit that I’ve got this psychology of unbelief, and I want to be delivered from it. I want to bring to Jesus Christ these days just ahead an open mind and a sharp expectation. I want you to pray for me.
Are there those who will say, pray for me, Pastor, will you stand where you are, please? Is it clear? It’s a confession that this dull unbelief has spread over your mind to some degree. It’s not a confession of outbroken sins, but of this that Israel had, non-expectation, chronic defeatism. Don’t expect God to do anything, and consequently He doesn’t.
And you want to be delivered from it. You want to ask God somehow to throw you out into a crisis where He has to help you. And you’re ready to be daring and bold enough to pray that He will.
O God, God our Father, thou knowest we’re followers of thy Son. We know we are, and we’re not backing out, and we’re not allowing the devil to tell us we aren’t. We know we are. We’re known of him because we know him, and we bless Thee.
But O thou knowest, Father, the chronic non-expectation. Dear Lord, we are as Israel was in some measure anyhow. We don’t expect anything from Thee. We pray and pray and pray and pray the same words, Wednesday after Wednesday, and expect nothing. Forgive us, Lord, forgive us.
For all these who now stand saying, saying, pray for me, I do lift up my heart to Thee, and pray for myself too, O God. O thou knowest, Father, how easy it is to get into a mental rut, so easy to let yesterday dictate tomorrow, and let things that were, decide things that will be.
But Thou hast said, Thou art a God who maketh all things new, and we pray that Thou will touch the hearts of all these friends and give them a faith that will rise and dare to begin to believe Thee to do the unexpected and even the impossible. For Thou art the God of the impossible.
O God, break out, even over the next days upon us here, in such measure, in such fullness, that there will be, that Satan will begin to feel ajar, that he’ll know that he’s not running things. He’ll know that Thou hast risen. Bear Thy mighty arm, O God, and give us faith to trust Thee, that we may not grieve Thee by our chronic unbelief.
Everybody stand, please.
Now, Father, we ask that Thou will bring us to the house of God tonight, after an afternoon of penitence and waiting on Thee. Bring us to the house of God tonight. Bring in others and give us a wonderful, refreshing, glorious time together.
And now may grace and mercy and peace from the Triune God, the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost be with us forever.
Please turn to Revelation 9, and we’ll read it together, that is, we’ll read it responsibly, all taking part in it. We’ll go over this chapter, chapter 9 of the book of Revelation, reading responsibly.
And the fifth angel sounded, and I saw a star fall from heaven unto the earth: and to him was given the key of the bottomless pit. And he opened the bottomless pit; and there arose a smoke out of the pit, as the smoke of a great furnace; and the sun and the air were darkened by reason of the smoke of the pit. And there came out of the smoke locusts upon the earth: and unto them was given power, as the scorpions of the earth have power.
And it was commanded them that they should not hurt the grass of the earth, neither any green thing, neither any tree; but only those men which have not the seal of God in their foreheads. And to them it was given that they should not kill them, but that they should be tormented five months: and their torment was as the torment of a scorpion, when he striketh a man.
And in those days shall men seek death, and shall not find it; and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them. And the shapes of the locusts were like unto horses prepared unto battle; and on their heads were as it were crowns like gold, and their faces were as the faces of men. And they had hair as the hair of women, and their teeth were as the teeth of lions. And they had breastplates, as it were breastplates of iron; and the sound of their wings was as the sound of chariots of many horses running to battle. And they had tails like unto scorpions, and there were stings in their tails: and their power was to hurt men five months.
And they had a king over them, which is the angel of the bottomless pit, whose name in the Hebrew tongue is Abaddon, but in the Greek tongue hath his name Apollyon.
12 One woe is past; and, behold, there come two woes more hereafter. And the sixth angel sounded, and I heard a voice from the four horns of the golden altar which is before God, Saying to the sixth angel which had the trumpet, Loose the four angels which are bound in the great river Euphrates.
And the four angels were loosed, which were prepared for an hour, and a day, and a month, and a year, for to slay the third part of men. And the number of the army of the horsemen were two hundred thousand thousand: and I heard the number of them. And thus I saw the horses in the vision, and them that sat on them, having breastplates of fire, and of jacinth, and brimstone: and the heads of the horses were as the heads of lions; and out of their mouths issued fire and smoke and brimstone.
By these three was the third part of men killed, by the fire, and by the smoke, and by the brimstone, which issued out of their mouths. For their power is in their mouth, and in their tails: for their tails were like unto serpents, and had heads, and with them they do hurt. And the rest of the men which were not killed by these plagues yet repented not of the works of their hands, that they should not worship devils, and idols of gold, and silver, and brass, and stone, and of wood: which neither can see, nor hear, nor walk: Neither repented they of their murders, nor of their sorceries, nor of their fornication, nor of their thefts.
Now, you have heard, of course, on the radio today that the great Secretary of State, former Secretary of State, has died. And you may have also heard that there will be coming from Geneva, the foreign secretaries of England, France, and Russia, along with our own Herter, back for the funeral which will take place on Wednesday.
These are important things. That Geneva conference, which will be resumed, I presume, after the funeral. But we have read tonight, within the compass of twenty-one verses, truth so vastly much more important that the day will be when we, looking back with the wisdom of hindsight, as they say, looking back upon ourselves, this May, so that we may be able to remember this Sunday of 1959, we will say how foolish we were to be interested in anything else but the revelation of God, which is a light shining in a dark place.
Now, in this ninth chapter of the book of Revelation, we will touch some high spots in it. But you will know, if you have been listening to me over the last few Sunday nights, that my method in this series, and in fact I should say that my method generally, has not been to attempt to interpret all the symbols.
The Bible is a book of symbols. It has a great many as it weres and like untos. Do you notice that? The Bible rarely leaves you stuck with a symbol. It smooths it and softens it and takes the sharp edge off and says it is like unto and it is as it were.
The reason for all this is that the intensity and immensity of spiritual things is so great, the two being one, it is so great that human language will scarcely avail, it will not avail, to express it. So we fall back upon these symbols and the as it weres and like untos and after the appearance of as you find in the Bible so much.
Now, I say that it is not my intention to try to interpret these symbols nor force every passage to fit a pattern. I rather pity the man who starts out with a foregone conclusion and then trims every passage to fit it. When I first began to study the Bible, I of course was indoctrinated immediately into prophecy as a young man, and I still have an old Bible with a wide margin. I went over that Bible when I was too young to know any better, and I explained everything in the margin.
And all the passage I said, now this fits into verse 4 over here, and then further on it says, and that belongs to over here, and there never was a Daniel that knew more about where everything belonged than I did. But you see, that’s when I was a young man and didn’t know any better. But now I would not attempt to force every passage to fit a pattern.
It is far better to come to God and say, O God, thou knowest all things, and I do not. Thou art in heaven and I am on earth, and then expect God to give you a direct truth, the direct revelation to your heart of what things mean, than to try to take truth and bend it and shave it and fashion it to fit preconceived ideas.
You know, there was a Greek man once. He was an old rounder, a kind of a gangster, we would say now, and he had a very nice house. He kept an inn and had a nice house. His name was Procrustes, and he had a bed there, and as a sort of a lark, a sadistic prank, he would force everybody that stopped by for a glass of water and a bite to eat before they left, he would take them in and make them lie on his bed. And if they were too short, he called in his servants and stretched them to fit it. And if they were too long, he chopped them off. And that has been known ever since as the bed of Procrustes.
Well, Bible teaching can be like that if we don’t watch. We can start out with the bed already decided upon. We know how long it ought to be. We don’t make any allowance for some people being a little shorties and other people being tall. We say this is how tall people ought to be. And whether it’s more painful to be stretched to fit or cut off to fit, I leave it to those who underwent that terrible agony.
But I wonder if the Word of God breathes and bleeds and lives and suffers and feels, if sometimes when we in our attempt to show that our Procrustes’ bed is the only length that we can pull the verses of God’s word to fit them and cut others off. I have found places where it said in the margin that there were seven points there and I counted eight. I’ve done that over and over. And I found only six at times. But we’ll pass by that. And I’ll point out that we will attempt tonight to see what this is saying to me now.
Suppose that I could tell you that I could give this to you in detail and tell you exactly who the star fallen from heaven was, and what the bottomless pit is, the pit of the abyss, and exactly what the key of the bottomless pit is, and what the smoke is that comes out of the pit, and what happens when the sun is darkened and the air by reason of the smoke. And if I could tell you exactly who these creatures were that came up in verse 7 as the shapes of locusts, like under horses prepared under battle, with hair, the hair of women.
Now what locusts would be doing looking like horses and having women’s hair? If I could tell you all these details, I don’t mean to make light, I only mean to say that I cannot stretch all these on that bed of Procrustes because I do not quite know what they all mean. Now I don’t. But if I could tell you what about those breastplates and the sound of the chariot running to battle, and who Abaddon is, and Apollyon, if I knew all these, and the angels of the Euphrates, the four angels that had been bound in the great river Euphrates, if I could tell you all that, still there is something that would be missing. And that that would be missing is what I want to try to find here tonight.
In other words, certain great underlying spiritual truths that are here and that are discoverable and that stick up like mountain peaks above the clouds to see, they’re here. So tonight, instead of trying to explain all this, if you wanted it explained, there are hundreds of preachers who will be glad to do it for you. But let me, instead of making careful explanations of all this, let me say to you what this terrible, awful, wonderful ninth chapter said to me.
Living as we live now in this 1959 coming into summer, some of us old, some of us young, some of us middle-aged, some women, some men, some married, some single, and some well-off and some having to scrape the bottom of the barrel, a general cross-section of a city like ours, what does this say to me? What can I get out of it?
Now, with your patience, I want to give you five truths here that I find sticking right up at me, saying, here, here, if you don’t know every detail here, you know this.
First one, I’d like to have you take them down. First one is that the world is essentially spiritual. You will notice here that we see things happening on the earth. There are strange and terrible things happening on the earth. There were locusts upon the earth and given power like scorpions. They were commanded not to hurt the grass. In those days, men seek death and not find it. There were locusts unlike unto horses.
There was one-third of the population of the earth that was slain and had fire and smoke and brimstone were issuing out of the mouths of certain mysterious creatures walking about on the earth.
Now, that’s what we see on the earth. But do you notice here in this chapter that all of this issued out of another world altogether? In the book of Hebrews, it says that the things that are seen do not originate with the things that are seen. That the visible comes out of the invisible. The material comes out of the spiritual. The earthly comes out of the divine.
And here we see it illustrated again. Now, this is something, brethren, that the great leaders don’t know. They don’t know it. We’re trying to discover how we can fight Russia. And I have wondered whether I ought not personally, myself, to study more carefully on this terrible plague that has come upon the earth we call communism. And I have wondered whether I ought not, myself, to throw myself into the battle to save the free, Christian world from this terrible plague of bubonic locusts that is moving over the earth and eating and killing and destroying everything as they move.
Yet I say unto you that this bubonic plague, this plague of rabid locusts did not originate on the earth. That is, they were born and lived down here. But the reason they are what they are and are as they are is a spiritual thing.
Adolf Hitler cannot be explained by psychology and the shape of his bone and his skull structure. He’s got to be explained by realizing that everything in this world is spiritual in essence and comes out of a spiritual world.
All of this terrible, frightful, fearful thing that we find here in the ninth chapter of Revelation as taking place on the earth got its start in that place, they call the pit of the abyss, the bottomless pit. It got its start by a fallen angel, not a falling one, but a fallen one, a star, a star that had come down, that had fallen, perhaps that star that once shone on the throne of God. It was a spiritual thing.
When they came to Jesus and began to talk about what they’d seen on earth, he said, I saw Satan as lightning fall from heaven. He knew that the origin of evil was a spiritual origin, and He also taught that the origin of righteousness is a spiritual thing. He taught that goodness that God accepts is not the goodness of mechanical acts, but it originates in the spirit. He also taught that evil was not the unwashed hands or the breaking of one or another day, but it was a wrong spirit.
This is a spiritual world, my brethren, and the visible world is a manifestation of spirit. We only see the external things, and we desperately try to understand them, but we can’t understand them because we have decided that the things which are can be explained by the things which are, that the things which are visible can be explained by the things which are visible. And all this is wrong.
The things that are seen can only be explained by the things that are not seen. And all of our psychological and nervous and physical and social and political problems are spiritual in their essence. This is what the world has forgotten, and this is what I see in this chapter. I see this terrible, this terrible, these armies moving upon the earth. Where did they come from? They got their start in the pit of the abyss. I see Apollyon and Abaddon, the call of the destroyer, and I see men die.
I see one man out of every three die on the face of the earth. I see corpses piled pyramid high. And then I try to explain it. I explain it by saying, well, it was a wrong choice made back there at Versailles. It was a wrong choice made at Potsdam. It was a wrong choice when we elected so-and-so and didn’t elect the other man.
Those are not the explanations, my brethren. The explanations lie back of all that and behind all that. They talk now about so much; we hear it everywhere. Every program on the radio is interrupted to tell us that we’ve got to give to the folks with mental trouble. How is it? What is the percentage? I’ve forgotten for the moment, but one out of every four people in every hospital bed in America are there for mental troubles? And we’re trying to understand it.
I talked to a good brother who used to be, well, he is still, used to be a psychiatrist. He was another denomination, a very learned fellow, a practicing psychiatrist, but he’s going to be an Alliance missionary now. I wanted him to know that I wanted him to get away from the psychiatry, so I called him a head shrinker. He took it good-naturedly, but I said, Doctor, this head shrinking now, are you through with it?
He said he felt that a man with a Bible, or at least he agreed with me, that a wise, prayerful man with a New Testament could do more than all the head shrinkers in the world, because the head shrinker is looking for natural causes, whereas the man with the book in his hand knows that everything has a spiritual cause. And if you want to solve your problem, go to God and get a spiritual solution. You and I are not men with souls, we are souls with bodies. And it’s not the body that matters, it’s the soul, it’s the spirit of the man.
Now, the springs of human conduct Jesus taught are spiritual, and that even fleshly sins, however gross they may be, even fleshly sins, are the outflow of the poisoned spiritual springs lower down. Out of the heart are the issues of life, that’s an Old Testament quotation, and Jesus said, Out of the heart proceedeth adulteries and fornications, and He named a whole list of sins and said they proceeded out of the heart.
It was this that set Jesus off above and apart from and placed Him beyond the other religious teachers. He knew that you could only explain politics if you knew about heaven and the bottomless pit. He knew you could only account for a Hitler or a Khrushchev if you knew about the bottomless pit or heaven.
He knew that you could only explain a Lincoln by heaven or hell, not by his body structure or his skull shape. He knew it. Jesus knew all this and He taught it. And of course, He was kicked out and finally crucified. He was rejected and crucified because He did teach this very thing.
Well, that’s point number one. We learn that the woes of the world are not the result of the, cannot be explained by any chains of cause and effect here, but that they are the result of something that lies deeper. That should have really been the sermon tonight. I shouldn’t have attempted to go any further than that because there’s so much more to be said and I don’t want to stop there.
There’s so much more to be said about this. You can argue and talk until we’re red in the face or black in the face, and when it’s all over, what a church is spiritual is what a church is finally. What a man is in his spirit is what the man is finally, and there’s nothing else that can be said about it.
And when this earth gives up her bones and her blood and her woes and her wars, it’ll be because there’s one who will come down like rain upon the mown grass from another world and will introduce new spiritual things into the world. And when men are no longer tempted, it’ll be because one is taken out of this world and put in the bottomless pit and chained there.
Now the second point is, right now in this world, this moment in history, the world hasn’t seen anything yet. That’s your second point. We’re trying to work it out. I want to be patient. I want to be a patient man. I’ve never been a patient man, but I would like to be patient, and I would like to understand, and I would like to be patient with men who go and try to confer with gangsters. I’d like to be patient, but I can’t be, because I do not believe that there’s going to be peace on this earth. I do not believe that. I wish I could believe it.
I saw our latest acquisition, no hair, red face, mouth that you could put this in easily, today, our latest, 16th. And I think of those little fellows and their children after that. And I’d like to believe that this would be a good world. I think of Becky and my family, and it’ll be living on. And I wish that I could say, oh, well, cheer up. I believe in the essential goodness of mankind. I don’t believe in anything of the sort.
I believe the world hasn’t seen anything yet. You can take all your gas chambers and all your concentration camps and all your decimation of populations and all your sinking of ships and all the rest and add them all together for the last fifty years, and when it’s all over, you’ll have to say the world hasn’t seen anything yet. This has always been a harsh, a violent world, a bloody, a sinful world, a tear-stained, a terror-filled world. It’s always been because of the price of the monstrous inversion.
What is that monstrous inversion is what I’ve been trying to tell you in point number one, that the roots and sources and springs of the world are spiritual, and men insist upon declaring that they’re natural and that they are material, and we try to explain ourselves by the laws of nature and forget that we were made at once in the image of God and that we’re fallen angels, so to speak, although of course we were never angels, we were human beings.
And we’re fallen, and this monstrous inversion is accepting the natural man as the right man and forgetting that the source and the springs of our existence are spiritual, and going down to the level of the beasts that perish in the vain hope that somebody somewhere will find a way.
Somebody will find a way, we say. Only one more conference, one more. And they say so plaintively that you could cry, we’ll keep the door open, we won’t close the door to any possible hope of peace, and I’m for them, and I hope for the best, but I haven’t any hope because it’s a vain hope that somebody will find a way; that peace shall come to the earth and men shall brothers be for all that and all that, and they shall beat their swords into pruning hooks and their spears into plowshares and sit under their own vine and fig tree.
It will never be till He comes, whose right it is to reign. When He who is the Lord of Peace, the Prince of Peace, when He comes, He will introduce a new spiritual principle into the world. Then it will come. But because the conduct and doings of the world spring out of spiritual fountains, it’ll never be until that time. Never, never, never.
So, I can’t hope, for the hope is vain, and the voice of prophecy cries out against our hope, cries out against the hope that we shall be able to get along with Russia. Cries out against the hope that if we all learn the English language or some other language and all intermarry and integrate and get together and love each other and put our arms around each other, all will be well.
It’ll never be so, because the voice of the prophets cried down the centuries, and the echo of their voices continue to cry, no, no, that there will be wars and rumors of wars and nations shall rise against nation and kingdom against kingdom, and it shall continue to be so till he comes who is the Prince of Peace. The world has seen nothing yet, but I wish I could say otherwise. I wish, I wish that I could say otherwise.
I get invited to the weirdest places, you know, I really do. I get invited to the oddest places. I don’t know why, because what I write and what I say I think is plain enough, people know where I stand.
But they want me to join this, there’s a psychic, a psychic, what do they call it, I don’t remember, but they’re psychic, and they want me to join them, you know. And I don’t believe in that psychic stuff, a woman down in a rented basement room with a weird babushka on her head looking into a bowl of blood and telling the future of mankind, I’d run like the devil to get away from that, wouldn’t you? I would. I remember.
I remember Saul went to the witch of Endor and he came limping back to die the next day in battle after he’d had his round with the witch of Endor. I want nothing to do with it. I believe there’s such a thing as being psychic. Psychic just means of the soul.
McAfee tells of the American businessman that went to Europe to do Europe, and when he came back, they asked him what it was in Europe that impressed him the most, and he said he thought that it was in an art gallery in Rome, the statue of Persuchus. Well, psyche, psyche is what he, I guess, meant to say.
But anyhow, this psyche, the soul, it’s possible to be of the soul, but if you trust your soul, brother, you’ll be worshipping Persuchus, because it’s spirit that matters. It’s a man’s spirit, and the root of our conduct is a spiritual thing. And the world hasn’t seen anything yet. God help us. God help these little fellows.
I saw a little girl. And she was so tiny that she hadn’t learned to walk straight, and she’s kind of wobbling while she ran. She was running down the sidewalk here, and I stopped her and said, hi. And she stopped and looked up at me, and I said, where are you going? She said, toe, which meant store.
And I looked in her two little black hands and there wasn’t a penny, so I stuck a nickel in. And she left me in a whirl of dust, starting for the store out here. I think of them, little black ones and little yellow ones and little white ones, little blonde ones and little brunette ones, all around the world.
And the world hasn’t seen anything yet. It has seen wars that last 30 years. It has seen pogroms and persecutions and assassinations and massacres, but it hasn’t seen anything yet.
Third point is that death isn’t the worst thing that can happen to you. For I read in this chapter that situations in those days of the tribulation are such that men seek death and desire to die, but death flees from them, and they cannot find it. Death isn’t the worst thing that can happen to you.
If the devil can make you believe that the most desirable thing in the world is to live and the most awful thing is to die, the devil has succeeded in cheating you pretty well. My friend, death is not the worst thing that can happen to you, for just out ahead of us in this very world where we live, there will be a situation that will pinch the spirits and bodies of men until they want to die and can’t and would look to death as a relief but can’t find it.
Now for the Christian, death is a journey into the eternal world. Death is a quick space flight to the celestial country. Death is what Paul wanted. It’s a triumph and a victory and a rest and an eternal delight.
Our brother here tonight used a phrase that I’m going to pick it up, a rediscovery of the old hymns. I think also there ought to be a rediscovery of a place where good people go when they die. You know, there was a day of the Methodists and the Episcopalians and the Presbyterians and others in other Protestant countries when they looked forward to heaven with a shine on their faces.
And then along came the prophecy teachers, and I’m one of them, and we changed heaven into an eschatology. And now it’s eschatology and future events, and what Daniel saw. And I think of the ignorant preacher one time, Jerry Zimmerzill heard, he said, what did Daniel saw? I’ll tell you what he seen. And Daniel seen all right, and we are more concerned with what Daniel saw than we are with Jerusalem, the golden, with milk and honey, blessed.
At council, a committee on memorials, you know what the committee on memorials is? They get up and they say in the nicest language they know and in a solemn tone of voice, on August the 14th, there are left these earthly shores, the reverend, so and so, our brother. And on September the 3rd, there went to be with his Savior, sister, her savior sister, so and so, the wife of thus and thus.
And there’s a long list of them now. The Alliance is growing and we have a long list. And while they were reading that, I said to somebody beside me, well, there’s one committee you can be glad you’re not on yet. There’s one list you’re glad you’re not on.
But after all, it’s not so bad. And I am not at all sure that these brethren whose names were read weren’t better off than we were, whose names weren’t read. I’m not sure. I said it the other way, but I’m not sure. And when it was all over, they had read the list, they stood to pray. I don’t remember what the man who prayed said, but what I was saying was, Jerusalem the golden, with milk and honey blessed, beneath thy contemplation, sink heart and voice oppressed.
I know not, oh, I know not what joys await me there, what radiancy of glory, what peace beyond compare. They stand those halls of Zion, all radiant with song and bright with many an angel and all the martyrs throng. The prince is ever in them, the daylight is serene, the pastures of the blessed are decked with glorious sheen.
If we’re Christians indeed, and we’re not too bogged down in our overstuffed car seats and too fond of our TV sets and our fine homes. If we’re cut loose and are free, we’ll feel a little nearer to Jerusalem the golden than we do Chicago the dirty. But there are too many people that are all bogged down in Chicago, the sinful, instead of Jerusalem the golden. So, this tells us in this nineth chapter that there’s such a thing as a situation where death would be welcome.
One of the French novelists, I’ve forgotten which, there’s no confession, it’s just I guess I haven’t had any reason to say it before, but when I was a young fellow I was a great reader of the French writers, and I forget whether this was de Maupassant or Balzac who wrote this, but it was a story built around the idea that a situation could occur where the best and most desirable thing a man could do would be to die.
And he built this situation up, I think it was taken from the French Revolution, and the character in the story had reached a place, his people had been killed and his heart was broken and he expected and was looking forward with real anticipation to be the next one shot.
But instead of that they called him out and he stood at attention before the court and they sentenced him to live. And he went out with his broken heart and his tears to live when he had hoped to die. We’re too scared, that’s our trouble. We’re too scared because we haven’t known the prince who went to prepare a place for us well enough to want to go see Him.
Suppose, young lady, that you were just married, or suppose you older women who still love your husbands, suppose your husband went to Florida or California or Arizona or wherever you like to prepare a place and said, I’ll wire you, and when you get the wire, fly down, I’ll meet you at the airport.
First, I’ll get it ready. You know where your mind would be, you know the last thing you’d think of at night. You know that every time the phone rang, you’d hope it was a telegram read over the phone to you. You know that every time the gong rang you hoped it was a boy at the door. You know where your hope would be and your expectation. You wouldn’t look forward with fear and apprehension, but with keen, bouncing anticipation to rejoining your husband again in the land, the new land, the new country, the new place, in the new home among the palm trees.
And our Lord went and said, I go to prepare a place for you, and I will come again. And if we get the tiny little, tiny bit sick, the elders have to come wearing their shoes and soles off, rushing to pray for us lest we go to be with the Lord.
We are worldly minded, we’re earthly minded, we’re made of the clay, we belong to the frog pond and the swamp and the clay pit and the dust. God Almighty made us in His image and remade us in Christ into the newness of life. And heaven is our home, and the face of God is our landscape and our vision forever.
And if we get a little bit sick, we’re scared stiff. And it’s a proof of our carnality and our worldliness and our lack of spirituality. There’s a lot of worse things than you can do than die. And for the unsaved, of course, the terrible, terrible deception out of this world into a worse one for the lost.
Now, the fourth thing is that God holds our lives in His hand and says, and they shall not find it. Men shall seek death and not find it. They shall desire to die and death shall flee from them. Men have a certain amount of freedom, but God withholds His permission. When He withholds His permission, the murderer can’t kill and the suicide can’t die. They sought death and couldn’t find it.
We’re not as free as we thought we were. Do you know it? Listen, now some of you Methodists and with a strong Salvation Army and Methodist background, you will want to shag me home cleared down the avenue tonight for saying this.
But there’s more than a little bit of truth in the old Calvinistic idea that God runs His world still and that you and I are not as free as we think we are. Here were people that tried to die and they couldn’t die. They searched for death with all the scientific knowledge of the civilized world and couldn’t die. If God doesn’t give you permission to die, you can’t die.
Well, I don’t know how important that is, but I think it would help us to humble ourselves a little bit if we knew that God still held the world in His hands. That God isn’t the Santy Claus the modern gospelers have made Him. That God isn’t the kind man upstairs. God is the great and terrible God who holds the life of the world in His hand. He speaks and it’s done. He commands and it stands forth. Myriads of angels rush to do his will.
Last of all, the fifth point is, and I’ll learn it from this chapter if I didn’t know it from any other, that rebellious men can’t be forced to repent. You can’t force a man to repent by punishing him. Here we have it in the verses, their power. The rest of the men who which were not killed by these plagues yet repented not of the works of their hands that they should not worship devils and idols of gold and silver and brass and stone and wood.
Neither repented they of their murders, nor of their sorceries, nor of their fornication, nor of their thefts. Now here, invisible to the eye and audible to the ear and present to the touch, was the most terrible hell that the world had ever seen. With these strange creatures that had come out of the smoke that had issued from the abyss, and these strange creatures with breastplates of iron and the sound of their wings as the sound of chariots, and these that came out of the river Euphrates, Apollyon and Abaddon and all the rest. Here was hell turned loose on the earth, and one-third of the earth’s population died. And yet there were two-thirds of the population of the earth left grinding their teeth in angry rebellion and saying to God, You and who else?
Brethren, sin is an awful thing, and an impenitent heart is harder than the lower millstone. I’ve always heard, and evangelists always use it, we preachers always use it, and we think it’s so, but it bears a little bit of looking into that if you don’t repent, God will punish you and make you repent. Brother, if God doesn’t put repentance in your heart, all the punishment in the world can’t make you repent, for the Bible tells us here that they repented not.
The rebellious heart of man is altogether too hard to be frightened into repentance. It doesn’t say the fear of hell leadeth thee to repentance, it says the goodness of God leadeth thee to repentance. And if the goodness of God in a vision of a cross with a man dying for His enemies in blood and sorrow, if that doesn’t melt you and bring you down to repentance, earthquakes and fire out of heaven won’t do it.
They repented not, it says, even though one out of every three men on earth was lying dead. The other two that still remained were too hard to repent. The simple fact is that all men are morally obliged to repent, and if they do not repent, they will perish. And yet they will not unless the goodness of God leads them to repentance.
We’re pretty much in the hands of God, brethren. If you’ve hardened yourself and been stubborn and stuck your jaw out and said, that fellow will never, never succeed in winning me, I’ll never listen to him.
Well, I don’t mind, because I’m just working for God. But if you’re so hard that nothing will melt you, I don’t know what in the great heaven above or hell below could ever melt a man. If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they repent, if one go to them from the dead.
Our psychic friends are trying to bring back the dead, you know. Trying to some old fellow that died, and they set up a situation and they bring him back, and he always comes back and talks like a fool. They never manage to sound it. They’re always half-witted, I guess, but they sound half-witted, even though they might have written great books, painted pictures, you know, and done wonderful things while they’re on earth. But when they come back, they sound like idiots. I’m all well and happy and feel good to hope you’re the same, you know. Sounds like a hasty letter. And they’re trying to get a message back from the other world.
But listen to me, if your husband or father or relative or friend who died some years back could come back and stand by your bed and speak to you and warn you, it wouldn’t help you, because if they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they repent, though one came to them from the dead.
There’s something terrible about the impenitent human heart, something violent and stubborn, too much to describe. Only the goodness of God can soften a man’s heart. But oh, how thankful we ought to be if there’s a tear, if you’ve got it in your heart to be sorry, if there’s something inside of you that grieves, if there’s something in you that’s sorry you did it.
If you look on His cross and bow your head that you put Him there, how thankful you ought to be, for there are millions that don’t care. Electric chair facing a young man, he’ll set his jaw and go. Sometimes they repent. But if they got pardoned, I wonder what they will do. I’ve had more funerals in my time, and the sorrowing relatives promised me they’d come to church. And some of them came once, but I never remember any of them that ever came twice, with one exception.
I have in my mind now a family, and I could talk about it, but I won’t. But outside of that, I can’t recall. Mostly they don’t show up at all, or if they show up, they don’t show up twice. If the human heart loves its sin, it will love its sin, even though locusts and fiery horsemen are everywhere about it. The sun is clothed in darkness, and the moon turned into blood. The human heart will still love its sin.
They repented not of their fornications and of their evils, even though the world around them was dark and men were dying on every hand. Dear friend, if you want to know God, if you want to know God, you’re so much better off than most people, for they don’t. And if you feel in your heart a longing to become a Christian, you’re so much better off than most, because most people don’t. And if you’ve got a sorrow unto repentance within your heart, you ought to thank God and nurture it, nurture it.
The story I read of the two men who were lost in what they call Norther, out in the far west in Montana. Incidentally, those Indians were from Montana that were here this morning and not from South Dakota, as I erroneously mentioned. But out in Montana and the Dakotas, where the terrible Northerners come down, they were caught, these two men. And they knew as night came down that it was a little fire or terrible death by freezing, and they searched their pockets all through. Matches had all been used up, no lighters, nothing.
And finally one fellow, getting way down into the seam of an old leather jacket, got hold of half a match and held it up, half a match. And they looked at it in the waning light, and they said, our life is between my finger and thumb. If this thing works and we can get a little fire here on the lee side of the hill, we can live.
If the wind blows it out or the wood doesn’t catch, we might as well shake hands, but we’re done. No searching party would find them for days and days, and then would find their cold, stiff bodies in stark death. Then they took their coats, held them tight, stood as close together as possible, and got some rough material and prayed and struck the match. Flew up and then dimmed down, and then leaped out and caught a little chip and then a piece of wood, and then they got it down on the ground and began to pour it on. Pretty soon they had a roaring fire. Managed to live it out and stay alive until the searching parties came.
But at one moment they held in their hand, between thumb and finger, a half-match. You know what that half-match is, man? That’s your desire to repent. You got it there. God gave it to you, or you wouldn’t have had it.
Oh, how you should nurture it. How you should ask God for help, that it might catch and flame up and lighten your soul.
Shall we pray? Now we’re going to have a moment of prayer. And before we do, I’d like to know if you’d like to be prayed for. Is there anybody here who would say, Mr. Tozer, would you please pray for me that that little… Yes, God bless you, sir. I see your hand. Go up back there. Who else? Yes, sir. I see your hand. Who else? Yes, I see you. Who else? Yes, I see you, too. Yes. Who else?
Holy Father, there are three men and one woman. They have asked us to pray. O Father, they hold in their hand tonight a little truth, which if it lives and flares up, it could be life to them. But if they let it die and go out, it could be death to them. For Jesus’ sake, Father, grant that these may have help now from Thee. We pray it in Christ’s name.
Brother McAfee kind of left me dangling here. He said there would be selections by the choir, the pastor would speak also. He put me in a footnote there, he didn’t mean to do it, but I want to mention that I shall give tonight the second of three sermons on loving our Lord Jesus Christ.
Last week I talked about whether you could know or not that you loved Him. This week, tonight, the benefits of loving Christ, and next Sunday night, Christmas Sunday night, the assurance that we love him. Now, Christmas Sunday morning, I shall bring a Christmas message, though Christmas messages with me don’t differ greatly from any other message, because I build all of my messages upon the fact that He has come.
Then also I want to emphasize what Brother McAfee has emphasized, that Sunday night, or Wednesday night at 7.30, there will be studies in Christian doctrine. We will be beginning our studies on the Trinity. I hope that you can come in spite of the fact the night it is, in the middle, just before Christmas. I hope you can be here because this is most important teaching for Christians. We ought to know what we believe about the Trinity. We’ll begin, we can’t close, we can’t finish it next Wednesday, but we’ll begin.
Then the New Year’s Eve meeting begins at 10 o’clock and continues two hours, and the latter half hour will be taken over with the Lord’s Supper. I hope everybody will plan to be here instead of somewhere else. We are Christians, and we ought to celebrate like Christians, not like the world, minus the liquor. But be here, if you can at all. 10 o’clock, New Year’s Eve.
Now, this morning, in the book of Isaiah, the 8th chapter, verses 5 to 8, the Lord spake also again unto me, saying, forasmuch as this people refuseth the waters of Shiloah that go softly, and rejoice in and rejoice in Rezin and Remaliah’s son. Now therefore, behold, the Lord bringeth up upon them the waters of the river, strong in many, even the king of Assyria, and all his glory. And he shall come up over all his channels and go over all his banks. And he shall pass through Judah, he shall overflow, and go over, he shall reach even to the neck, and the stretching out of his wings shall fill the breadth of thy land, O Immanuel.
Verse 6 is the one that I have particularly in mind. This people refuseth the waters of Shiloah that go softly and rejoice in Rezin and Remaliah’s son. I want to talk a little about the waters of Shiloah that go softly. This stream, Shiloah, sometimes called Siloam, is said to be the only perennial one in the city of Jerusalem. That is, it is the only one that didn’t go dry. And it seemed to me that it’s exquisitely named as if God Himself must have named it, because this Shiloah means tranquility, rest, and peace. The waters of Shiloah are the waters of tranquility, the peaceful waters that go softly.
Now, this that I shall say for the next five minutes will be very familiar to everyone, because we preachers have to repeat it often, for the reason that the Bible repeats it often. You’ll find it all through the Bible, and what you find all through the Bible, it is only common sense that we preachers should keep repeating all the time, even though we may be accused of being repetitious, and that is the value of water.
It’s old familiar truth that three-fourths of the earth’s surface is covered with water, and that 70% of the human body is water, and that there is a large water content in our food, and that without water there could be no birth, no growth, no digestion, no cleansing, no plants, no animals, no life, no atmosphere. And that if we were to take away water from the face of the earth, this globe now that we call our familiar earth would be little more than a parched and ghastly death’s head flying endlessly and meaninglessly through space.
But not only are the scientists interested in this, but the plain man, the farmer. Every farmer knows that water is necessary. I used to see my father when a great heavy snow would fall, a great heavy, thick snow, and fall on the wheat and rye fields and snow them under with several inches and lie there through long weeks.
My father would shrug his shoulders, and every once in a while, express his thanks to nobody in particular, but how glad he was for this great heavy snow. Being a boy, I thought that that wheat and rye there under the heavy blanket of snow would probably freeze to death and that would be the end of it. My father knew better. He knew that if you’re going to have a good spring crop, you’re going to have to have heavy snow, because the snow not only keep the ground warm, believe it or not, but their slow melting in the spring give exactly the moisture needed.
And every farmer knows how precious water is. Go into the south land down in what they call the valley down around McAllen, Texas, and other parts of the south, certain other parts, and you will find those waterless plains irrigated. They have the great pipes there and the great pumps and the deep ditches, and they will pour, at given intervals, water in. And our oranges are brought that way, brought to fruition that way, and much, much other fruit and many other vegetables.
The farmer knows that without water he can only have futility and emptiness, that nothing will ever come to fruition. And the herdsman knows it, knows that unless he has a place for his cattle to water, that he cannot possibly use the grazing grounds.
And the traveler who travels must have water, and to go into the desert without a supply of water and without a guide means to invite death, would be the simplest, not the most painless, but the simplest possible way to commit suicide, would be to start out across the Sahara or any other of the great deserts of the world without a guide and without sufficient water.
Now, thus water becomes precious, as precious as our blood of which it is a large part. And either it’s water as a fatal necessity or it’s a quick and speechless death. Strange thing, nobody dies crying for water, because by the time the poor victim has arrived at that place where death is within minutes, he can’t cry for water. His swollen tongue and cracked lips and dry mouth will not form the word. So without water, it is not only death, but it’s a speechless death, a death that can’t even cry.
So, when God would give us a true and adequate figure to express salvation, He said, I will give you water. You’ll find it throughout all the Bible. You will find it in figures of speech. You will find it in invitations. You will find it in poetry. You will find it throughout the whole Bible, closing with that last chapter where the Spirit and the Bride say, Come and whosoever will, let him come and take of the water of life freely. So, this teaches us that water is as necessary to our inner man as it is to our outer man. There are those who are very much concerned with the outer man.
We have a lot of evangelists now traveling up and down the country known as healing evangelists, and they capitalize on the preoccupation that people have in their outer man. Of course, I don’t mean they don’t preach salvation too, but I mean that the emphasis falls upon the body. You can get evidence that somebody’s body has been helped, why God’s really been working.
Brethren, that body of yours is one of the least important things you have, now believe it or not. That body of yours is the outer tabernacle, but there’s an inner man. And Paul was willing to let the outer man die a little at a time in order that the inner man might be renewed.
You and I ought to throw the emphasis where God throws it. All through the Bible, God looks after the inner man. That is not to say that He’s not concerned with the outer man, for He is. It even says in one place, the Lord is for the body. You remember that? As well as the body for the Lord.
So, there is Scripture, and a lot of it, that teaches that God is concerned with our body. This is not in any wise to say that we should not pray for our healing when we’re sick. It is only to say that if we become too physical in our outlook and too body-minded, we put the emphasis in the wrong place. God is not so much concerned with the outer man as He is with the inner man. So, He gives us water, the sweet waters, the soft flowing water of Shiloah, the water of tranquility and peace, and He gives it to the inner man.
Have you ever stopped to consider your inner man? I suppose there never was a time, and I want to be cautious here, because I know preachers have a certain ministerial immunity, and they can make statements there’s not a word of truth in, exaggerate, and nobody dares call their hand because everybody respects the pulpit. I don’t want to take advantage of that.
If I exaggerate, I want you to come up and tell me so, because I want to be a realist and stick by facts. But I suppose there never was a in the history of the world when there was more interest being taken in the human body. If you don’t believe me, go home if you have one, and I’m sure you’ll do a magazine and flip it open. And there’s not one thing in there about your soul, not one thing about your spirit, but everything about your body; everything, how you can fix your body up.
And there are those in the beauty of their youth, say from 15, well we won’t put a ceiling on it because everybody around that would feel bad, but there’s a period in there when the human body’s quite something. The pains and troubles are at a minimum, the strength and energy and beauty are maximum both for men and women, and it’s quite something.
Well, the world is waxing fat and rich on our great love for our bodies. I think when I see how they groom the human body, I think of these stock shows where they bring in Julius the first, an Angus bull, and brush his teeth, actually brush his teeth. Every day they brush his teeth. They curl his forehead carefully just like a young fellow curling himself up to go to see his girl. And they brush them and groom them, I mean and take such care of them and watch their weight in order to exhibit them.
Is that all there is to it, brothers and sisters? Is that it? Is that what we’re here for in the world, to look after that outer man? Why, you couldn’t sell yourself for as much as Julius was sold for. Fifteen, was it sixteen thousand, some hundred dollars? Couldn’t do it.
And yet here we are preoccupied with our outer man, and the world is busy with the outer man. Whereas one of the least important things, I repeat, that you have is your outer man. It is the inner man that matters, for the outer man must perish and go back to the elements from which it was taken. But the inner man lives on when the outer man can’t move.
We laid away last week, Wednesday, an outer man, the shell of a woman that had walked among us for twenty some years, Mary Hoffman. But nobody that looked at that little cold body there ever dreamed that was Mary Hoffman. She’s gone. There’s an inner man. You’ll find that in the Scriptures all the way through.
Jacob said, I go down on this sheol mourning for my son, and yet Jacob was buried naked, you can tell where his body was. What did he mean? I go down. Jacob didn’t say I and mean his body, Jacob said I and he meant his inner man.
And Jesus said, Father, into Thy hand I commit my spirit. And they laid His body in the grave, and it was there three days. But His spirit, His inner man, was committed unto the Father.
And Judas, it is said, went unto his own place. Yet we know what happened to his body. It was buried somewhere, but he went to his own place. There was a Judas apart from his body. There was a Jesus apart from His body. There was a Jacob apart from his body.
And there was Dives, the rich man, who lifted up his eyes. He couldn’t have lifted up his eyes in hell if he’d meant his body, because his body was buried over there. It said the rich man died and was buried. He had a big funeral commensurate with his widow’s ability to pay.
But yet he lifted up his eyes, and his body was up on the surface of the earth somewhere buried in the grave. What was it? His eyes. Ah, it was the eyes of the inner man. And Lazarus rested in Abraham’s bosom. Was it Lazarus’s poor body whose sores the dogs had licked? No. Lazarus’s body was lying someplace in a potter’s field, for he was a pauper, and of course they buried him in a potter’s field.
But Lazarus was leaning back in the arms of old Father Abraham. Was it Abraham’s body that was there in paradise? No, for Abraham’s body was lying in the cave of Machpelah, and the mold and the dust of centuries were resting upon that body. But the real Abraham was there in paradise, and the real Lazarus went to the real Abraham.
Brothers and sisters, there is a sense in which you and I will never know each other until we shuck off this old temple of deception. There is a sense in which you and I will never know each other, I say, because there’s a sense in which our body veil us from each other. We don’t quite know. We shake a hand, look at a face, and we’re more or less influenced by the face or the hand. But that influence is a physical thing, and the real you, the inner man, is beyond all that and deeper than all that and past all that.
And when Jesus Christ came into the world, let’s not think for a minute that He merely came to bring peace so there would be not war in the world, nor that He came merely to give prosperity to people’s bodies so we could eat more and sleep in softer beds and live in finer homes. No, Jesus came in order that our spirits might prosper, that our inner man, the eternal part of us, might prosper.
And so precious was that water that Jesus Christ died to open that fountain. Not only the fountain to cleanse us, that was the fountain of His own blood. But the water and the blood ran out of His side, and we need the water as much as we need the blood. And when the Spirit of God came down on Pentecost to come into the world to fill the hearts of men, it came as a stream of water on men. Many, many figures show forth the Spirit, and the dove was the one chosen in that holy moment. But elsewhere He’s talked about as rain and water and streams and so on.
Now, what is this water? God offers us the waters of Shiloah, the waters of peace, tranquility, and rest. And let’s ask what it is. Either we know or we don’t. Either this is simply poetry that I’m regaling you with this morning to earn my living, or else there’s reality back of this.
Can you put aside all of the poetry and figure and metaphor and get through to anything you can bite into and say, this is it, and I have it. Yes, thank God. There’s mercy. There is mercy for the guilty conscience. I heard the voice of Jesus say, behold, I freely give the living waters; thirsty one, stoop down and drink and live.
I came to Jesus, and I drank of that life-giving stream. My thirst was quenched, and my what? Soul revived, that’s it, and now I live in Him. Well, there it is. There is the mercy of God. You see, our difficulty now is that we have religion without guilt. And religion without guilt makes a big pal out of God.
But a religion without guilt is a religion that’ll go to hell and plunge everyone there and deceive and destroy at last, everyone. Religion without a consciousness of guilt, my brother, to start with, is a false religion. If I come to Jesus Christ without a consciousness of guilt simply to gain a benefit, woe is me, for so did the Pharisees before me.
But if my guilt drives me to Jesus, then I have my guilt taken from me, and I have mercy. Oh, the mercy of God. We sing about the mercy of God, and I hope we know what we’re singing about.
O Depths of Mercy, can it be that gate was left ajar for me? The good mercy of God. And that’s the water to a thirsty man, the man whose conscious guilt and whose sins are causing him the same anguish that lack of water causes to a traveler. That man can come to the Lord Jesus and drink of the waters of Shiloah, the waters of mercy. My brother, you will never have inward peace until you’ve got rid of your guilt.
Now we might as well get it straight there, because you have a conscience, and your conscience will never let you rest until you get rid of the guilt. Your conscience, if there’s a guilty conscience, it will never let you rest until you get rid of the guilt. It must be taken away, taken away. Oh, you can be smoothed over and given a little theological massage and patted on the head and told that it’s all right, but it won’t work.
I used to know a man by the name of Brother Love. I always thought he had an awfully nice name, Brother Love. He was a converted Catholic, and he had a little sense of humor, though he was basically a very serious man. But he rose in testimony meeting one time and told us this rather terrible but rather humorous thing.
He said, I used to go and make my confession and be granted absolution and told that my sins were pardoned, and I would go out from the church feeling very good that my sins were pardoned. But he said when I began to hear the gospel preached and I met Jesus Christ face to face, I found that every one of those sins came back to haunt me. He said they weren’t forgiven at all. I was only told they were forgiven. Absolution doesn’t forgive, but Jesus Christ forgives.
And then the sin that He’s forgiven never comes back to haunt you, never, never while the world stands, because He beats it back out of being, so it doesn’t exist anymore. Why is it that it says, I will not remember thy guilt? God must remember everything that is, and the only way to figure it is that God must beat it back out of being, so it doesn’t exist. The sin that God pardons and cleanses doesn’t exist anymore. It’s not any longer an entity. It’s gone.
We talk about the covering of our sins, and I know it’s a phrase we use. I suppose I’ll use it myself, but it’s a figure of speech. Sin is not covered. Sin is cleansed. There’s a difference, brethren, between covered sins and cleansed sins. In the Old Testament, they covered them and waited for the Lamb to die on a cross. But in the New Testament, they looked back on a finished job, a work already done, blood already spilt, and they’re not covered now, but they’re cleansed.
And so, there’s the waters of Shiloah. A Christian can have peace. And there’s the water of grace, for it’s all the same water of grace to the poverty-stricken and the bankrupt, spiritually. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ flows like the waters of Shiloah, not the turbulent waters of the Jordan, not the wild overflowing waters of the Mississippi, but the quiet waters that you can get to.
Did you know that a sheep can’t drink running water? Did you know that. A sheep, his nostrils are too close to his mouth, too on a level here. And so, if a sheep starts to drink and the water is moving, he chokes. He’ll drown in the thing. So, they have to dam it up so it stops running. And when it’s no longer moving, it’s still water. Then he can drink it and put his muzzle in and drink away because he doesn’t choke, doesn’t gasp for air.
And when our Lord, or when David wrote about our Lord being our Shepherd, he said, He leadeth me beside the still water. Now, why did he lead them beside the still water? Because running water had bubbles in it and a sheep can’t drink water with bubbles in it. It can only drink the still water, like the water of Shiloah, the water that goes softly. If it moves, it moves so softly that it seems to be still to the sheep.
And so grace is like that. Grace flows out, the grace of God. O Grace of God, how you’ve been wounded in the house of your friends. Grace of God, how you’ve been made into a fetish before which modern men worship. The sweet grace of God, how it’s been used to hide people and cover them. How the grace of God has been preached so that it has damned men instead of saving them. And yet it is here, the grace of God.
Amazing grace, how sweet the sound. That grace that amazed our forefathers. They were amazed by that grace of God, that sweet, still, smooth water that flowed with a still motion.
You can understand that. So that the poorest, most, the weakest and most helpless sheep can reach his muzzle in and drink and drink and drink. I came to Jesus, and I drank of that life-giving stream, the grace of God.
If God treated you as you deserve, I don’t care how good you are, there’d only be one possible thing for you to do. God would turn an angry face to you in life and turn his back to you in death. And that’s the best person that ever lived and they don’t care who he is. But oh, the grace of God, that God will go beyond our merits, beyond our desserts. That no matter if our sins have been like the mountains, the grace of God like the clouds,
Then there’s forgiveness. I’ve already mentioned it. To the sin conscious, there’s cleansing for the defiled to be cleansed.
When we come in of a summer’s day and we’ve been at work and we’re traveling and we’re just plain dirty with all of the travel of the day, and our pores are stopped up and we just feel bad. A good bath and clean clothes makes you feel like as if you had an education, doesn’t it? It really does. It makes you feel good. Just cleansing is good. It’s good, a garment that is trampled into the dirt and then washed and out in the sun to bleach and then ironed.
Cleansing is a beautiful thing, to be able to cleanse. It’s good that there is a cleansing element in Christianity, a cleansing element. There’s an element of purgation there, that old word purgation. That’s where they get the word purgatory. I believe in the first, but don’t believe in the second. I believe in purgation. There’s a water that cleanses and a blood that cleanses from defilement.
I picked up a magazine somewhere. I don’t remember where now. Yes, it came to the office here Saturday. And on that magazine, it showed four men. One of them was a young preacher preaching his first sermon, 26 years old, and the pastor of that Baptist church in whose pulpit he was preaching, a judge who had sentenced this young preacher to prison and the prosecutor who had prosecuted the case.
So here they had the prosecutor who had shown that this young fellow ought to be in prison and the judge who had sentenced him to prison and the young fellow who was sentenced to prison. There’s one man that wasn’t there. He had a sentence of 199 years, and he won’t be around for a while, obviously.
But while he was in prison, he became converted. And then this young fellow came to prison. And this fellow who was in for as long as he could last, he won this young fellow to Jesus. And the young fellow became a Christian, decided that he wanted to preach the gospel, and as soon as he got out, got ready, and now he’s preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ.
Now, I think that’s a beautiful thing. And here stands the judge that sent him to prison and the prosecutor that argued in favor of sending him to prison, and they’re both having to admit there is a purgation in the blood of the Lamb. There is a power to cleanse and change a man from defilement and make him over.
Why should this thief, this car thief, stand here with a big grin on his face and an open Bible ready to preach the gospel? Because the blood of Jesus Christ cleanseth from all sin, because there is a fiery purgation in the Christian message that takes a car thief and makes him into a saint. And the man who would not come to hear that ex-thief preach may be guiltier than he and may die under his guilt.
For the wicked fellow who was wicked and admitted it, he’s delivered from it all, and what God has cleansed, call not thou unclean. And I’d rather be preached to by a converted car thief than to be lullabied to death by these educated gentlemen who make Christianity nothing more than a psychology of comfort. Come to church and be comforted. Come to church and be comforted.
I’ve had two people come to me within the last 10 days and tell me that my preaching had cut them to pieces and made them miserable, and in one instance for a long period of time, miserable. I think that’s a beautiful thing, and I thank God I’m unworthy of that.
You people don’t come here to get consolation. If you want consolation, there are lots of preachers that’ll rock you to sleep and say, bye-bye now, and here’s your bottle. You don’t want consolation, brothers and sisters.
You want to know the facts. Where do I stand now before God Almighty? And if I should have a sudden heart attack and go out, where would I go, and where would it be with my soul? That’s what you want to know. You want to know how you can go on to be holy and live holy and go right with God and get rid of sin and live in the Spirit.
That’s what you want to know. You don’t want somebody to give you a Swedish massage and relax you. You want to know the facts. The facts are the blood of Jesus cleanses, and there’s a purgation element in Christianity.
Then there’s the Holy Spirit. The waters of Shiloah, the peaceful waters of Shiloh, they come and they’re peaceful, and they come to the heart. The blessed Spirit of God is the stream that brings us to communion.
Now in the next few minutes, God invites us all this morning, and He invites us to this water. He invites us to the stream, the only perennial stream there is in the world, the only stream that doesn’t run dry, the only stream that never overflows and destroys anybody, the only stream.
And yet the prophet said, oh, I don’t understand. There was a note of incredulity in the text. They refuse the waters of Shiloah. Why, said the prophet, beguiled with amazement. How can it be? Israel refuses the soft waters of Shiloah that God sends out, the healing, tranquilizing stream that brings peace to the heart and conscience. They refuse it, and they turn to reason.
All right, said he in the text, if you choose to turn away from the soft waters of Shiloah, therefore, behold, the Lord bringeth upon you the waters of the river strong and many, and they shall come over all these channels and go over all these banks. If you don’t want the waters of God, then you may have the overflowing torrent of judgement.
There it is, and we must make our choice. But the prophet couldn’t understand. It seems to me that I feel a sense of incredulity, of unbelief. What possessed Israel thus to forsake her own mercy? Why did she turn somewhere else?
Oh, I’ve had people say, I can’t take you. You’re too strict. I can’t take that kind of a strict message. My only apology for preaching a strict message is that I’m not as strict yet as the Bible is. I’m still not up to the Scriptures. I’m trying, but I’m still not as strict.
We had a young man come here some years ago to our place, and he got among our young people, and he was a nice fellow, and everybody liked him, and then he disappeared. And I thought, what’s become of so-and-so? And I asked around.
Well, somebody said he gave his testimony and left. And his testimony was this, I can’t take it at the Alliance Church. You’re just too strict for me. I want to go among young people where I can dance and have a good time, and I can’t take this strict Alliance business.
Well, now could I apologize for that? No. I don’t make it as tough as the Bible makes it. I don’t tell people, you can’t join this church unless you’re ready to turn on father and mother and everything in your life also, but Jesus says it. He says it. He says unless you’re ready to turn from everything and follow Him, you’re not ready to follow Him. And unless you’re ready to die for Him, you’re not ready to live for Him. That’s what the Bible says. I won’t be around. I’m going to face the judgment.
The whistle will blow one of these times, and I’ll have to appear and tell God how I carried on my work. So therefore, I can’t afford to let down. And in order to hold a young fellow who wants to go to hell and still be in a church A young fellow like that, carnal, young, fleshly, buck-loving himself, he’ll come in and play with any young people’s group, because carnality as big as a hunk of mutton sticking out all around him. But he wants to go where he can dance and raise hell like other folks and still be in the church.
What I’d like to know is why do people like that go to church? Boy, I know what I’d do. Oh, if I said to myself, eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we’d die, I know where I’d never show up. I’d never show up at 70th and Union. Never. I’d never show up. And if I ever did, I’d go to the furnace room and stay till it was over. I’d never show up because I wouldn’t go to church at all.
There are only two kinds of preachers, brother, the preachers that preach the truth, and thank God there are lots of them, and the ones that don’t preach the truth. And the ones that preach the truth will tell you you’ve got to be separated to be a Christian, and the ones that don’t preach the truth I wouldn’t respect not to listen to.
So, I wouldn’t listen to either kind. If I want to imagine an old boy like me saying, eat, drink, and be merry, tomorrow I’d die, I’m going to go out and get drunk, or have myself a time, I wouldn’t go to a gospel church where a man preached the truth because he would cut me to pieces, and I wouldn’t go and be comforted by some traitor because I wouldn’t respect him.
So I’d just duck the church and be out of it. I’d do like our old dog did. He had an old brown dog named Mack. He got old, and he was a great fighter, greatest fighter in all around Clearfield County thereabout. But he got old, and he was licked one time soundly, chewed to pieces, and almost killed by a young dog named Jack, Jack and Mack. Jack came out on top.
Well, old Mack was pretty smart, and he knew that his fighting days were over. So when he’d walk down the road near where Jack lived, he’d slip off into the woods and make a little circle and then come back onto the road about a quarter of a mile down. He wasn’t afraid, but there was just no use getting chewed up again.
And that’s exactly what I would do in the church of Jesus. If I was going to look for the devil, I would give it a right berth, as they say, and when I saw a church coming up, I’d cross the street and hurry by. And yet they’re doing it, they’re doing it, the waters of Siloah, the blood of Jesus Christ, the cleansing power of God, the sweet inflowing of the Holy Ghost, and yet people don’t want it. They don’t want that; they want something else altogether.
And there was a day when you had to take your choice, either take the world or take the church. But amazing wonder in these last days, we have now succeeded so with our selfishness and our casuistry, we have now succeeded in fundamental circles of enabling people to take both, telling them they’re saved because they’ve accepted Jesus. So, we can now have the world and the church both. We think that you can. It’s either the waters of Shiloah or it’s the torrential overflowing stream of judgment.
And which will it be, how odd, how strange, how wonderful, how terrible, that men should refuse the waters that go softly from the throne of God, that brings peace and inner tranquility, that gives water to the inner man and satisfy themselves with the dirty, brackish streams of the world. But one of these times they are going to pile up like the angry Jordan and overflow all its banks, and we’re going to be swept away.
Floods are terrible things, brethren, floods are terrible things. Out in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, those three states were hit by those floods, you remember? Addie Anderson, one of the writers, now retired, at that time retired, the treasurer of our Alliance Church in Brooklyn and his wife, were at some summer convention. And those three perished. The waters suddenly overflowed. There they found themselves surrounded, and before they could get to high ground, the roaring, crashing waters swept down and carried them away to death. They found their bodies buried in silt.
Later on, they reverently took them out and washed them and dressed them as being erstwhile temples of the Holy Ghost and laid aside the treasurer of our Brooklyn Alliance Church with his wife and by their side Miss Anderson, the aged Sunday school writer who’d worked for the Alliance for so many years. That’s what a flood will do. Not only those three, but many, many others as you know perished too.
Floods will destroy cities, and the Lord says, I give you the water that goes softly. I give you the peaceful waters of forgiveness and cleansing and deliverance. I give you those waters, stoop down little sheep and drink. But if you won’t, if you won’t, if you turn away and refuse, then I’ll release the watersheds, and down will flow the roaring brackish waters and sweep you away, and it’s coming. God knows it’s coming.
And men are afraid. They come back flying back from Europe or from Asia, and they come back and go in and secretly talk to the president about the terrible dangers that lie ahead. You can’t flip your radio to any responsible commentator anywhere, but saying about the same as the other, there’s danger ahead. They can’t even, little old Israel can’t even go back and inhabit the Holy Land without getting a chip on her shoulder and getting her hackles up and threatening to fight. War and rumors of war and dangers everywhere.
One of these days, God Almighty will snap a button and turn his back. I think he can’t bear to watch and let the waters of judgment sweep over the world. In the meantime, all those who have first previously accepted his peaceful waters by the blood of Jesus, they’ll be safe, and they’ll be all right.
Are you among them? You don’t have to be good; you only have to be willing to be good, and the blood of Jesus Christ will make you clean, and the Spirit will come and make you good. You don’t have to have had a pure and perfect life; you only have to have a willingness to know Jesus Christ and He’ll take care of that. He’ll make you clean. He’ll wash you.
How about it this morning? It’s getting near to the end of 1955, and you promised your member last year at the beginning what you’d do and how you’d live and you haven’t done it. How about it now? Why don’t we get straightened out? This people refuseth the waters of Shiloah that go softly and they’ve chosen Rezin and Remaliah’s son, they’ve chosen the world and the pleasures of the world.
Oh, the Jordan, the waters shall overflow their banks. Don’t risk it, don’t risk it. Come while it’s possible. The invitation is still up. The Spirit and the bride say come. And whosoever will, let him come. And let him take of the waters of life freely. Now we have some adverbs and adjectives in there. Take of the water of life, that’s the kind of water it is. Now how do you get it? Freely. Take of the water of life freely.
So, while we bow our heads in a moment of prayer, you just turn your thoughts up to God and say, Father, I’ve been a fool and I’ve been selfish and I’ve been carnal and I’ve been stubborn, but I’m not going to make the final strategic mistake of refusing the waters of Shiloah. I’m going to take the water that Jesus gives now.
I pray thee, Lord Jesus, to bless these friends. The time is rolling on unceasingly, it never stops. The power is never turned off. Never is there a turning backward. Never is there the reliving of one day twice, nor one hour twice.
We’re moving on, Lord. Nature and time are beating us out. Our bodies are soon to perish like the grass and be cut off. But our inner man, our inner man, our “I” is waiting there.
O Lord, we pray we may take care of our inner man. We pray that that which we variously call our spirit, our soul, our inner man, may come to know the cleansing and purifying waters, that we may be clean and right and good and ready for life or death.
Bless these who’ve listened this morning. Turn their thoughts toward Thee. Make us spiritual people who worship God in spirit and in truth. Save us, Father, from outward things.
Save us from the inartistic, bizarre, crass spirit of Christmas. We see all around about us great glaring chunks of green and red. O God, and hoarse, out of focus, horn bellowing out, silent night, holy night. All this is exceedingly offensive to the child of God who has an inner life.
We pray Thee, save us from getting caught in the world and feed our inner lives. For Jesus’ sake, amen.
