Know That My Redeemer Liveth

‘*For I know that my redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at fha Iatt«r JM apon the earth: and though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flen shall I see God: whom I shall see for myself, and mine eyes shall behold, and not another; though my reins be consumed within me.” — Job xix. 25 — 27.

The hand of God has been upon us heavily this week. An aged deacon, who has been for more than fifty years a member of this Church, has been removed from our midst; and a sister, the beloved wife of another of our Church-officers, a member for nearly the same term of years, has fallen asleep. It is not often that a Church is called to sorrow over the departure of two such venerable members — let not our ears be deaf to such a double admonition to prepare to meet our God. That they were preserved so long, and upheld so mercifully for so many years, was not only a reason of gratitude to them, but to us also, I am, however, 80 averse to the preaching of what are called funeral sermons, that I forbear, lest I appear to eulogise the creature, when my only aim should be to magnify the grace of God.

Our text deserves our profound attention; its preface would hardly have been written had not the matter been of the utmost importance in the judgment of the patriarch who uttered it. Listen to Job’s remarkable desire: “Oh that my words were now written I oh that they were printed in a book! That they were graven with an iron pen and lead in the rock for ever!” Perhaps, hardly aware of the full meaning of the words he was uttering, yet his holy soul was impressed with a sense of some weighty revelation concealed within his words; he therefore desired that it might be recorded in a book; he has had his desire the Book of books embalms the words of Job. He wished to have them graven on a rock; cat deep into it with an iron pen, and then the lines inlaid with lead; or he would have them engraven, according to the custom of the ancients, upon a sheet of metal, so that time might not be able to eat out the inscription. He has not had his desire in that respect, save only that upon many and many a sepulchre those words of Job stand recorded, “I know that my redeemer liveth.” It is the opinion of some commentators that Job, in speaking of the rock here, intended his own rock-hewn sepulchre, and desired that this might be his epitaph; that it might be cut deep, so that ages should not wear it out; that when any asked, “Where does Job sleep?” as soon as they saw the sepulchre of the patriarch of Uz, they might learn that he died in hope of resurrection, resting upon a living Redeemer. Whether such a sentence adorned the portals of Job’s last sleeping-place we know not; but certainly no words could have been more fitly chosen. Should not the man of patience, the mirror of endurance, the pattern of trust, bear as his memorial this golden line, which is as full of all the patience of hope, and hope of patience, as mort.al language can be? Who among us could select a more glorious motto for his last escutcheon? I am sorry to say that a few of those who have written upon this passage cannot see Christ or the resurrection in it at all. Albert Barnes, among the rest, expresses his intense sorrow that he cannot find the resurrection here, and for my part I am son-y for him. If it had been Job’s desire to foretel the advent of Christ and his own sure resurrection, I cannot see what better words he could have used; and if those truths are not here taught, then language must have lost its original object, and must have been employed to mystify and not to explain; to conceal and not to reveal. What I ask, does the patriarch mean, if not that he shall rise again when the Redeemer stands upon the earth? Brethren, no unsophisticated mind can fail to find here what almost all believers have here discovered. I feel safe in keeping to the old sense, and we ahall this morning seek no new interpretation, but adhere to the common one, with or without the consent of our critics.

In discoursing upon them I shall speak upon three things. First, let us, with the patriarch, descend into the grave and behold the ravages of death. Then, with him, let us look up on high for present consolation. And, still in his admirable company, let us, in the third place, anticipate future delights.

I. First of all then, with the patriarch of Uz, let us descend

INTO the sepulchre.

The body has just been divorced from the soul. Friends who loved most tenderly have said — “Bury my dead out of my sight.” The body is borne upon the bier and consigned to the silent earth; it is surrounded by the earthworks of death. Death has a host of troops. If the locusts and the caterpillars be God’s army, the worms are the army of death. These hungry warriors begin to attack the city of man. They commence with the outworks; they storm the munition, and overturn the walls. The skin, the city wall of manhood, is utterly broken down, and the towers of its glory covered with confusion. How speedily the cruel invaders deface all beauty. The face gathers blackness; the countenance is defiled with corruption. Those cheeks once fair with youth, imd ruddy with health, have fallen in, even as a bowing wall and a totteriny fence; those eyes, the windows of the mind whence joy and Borrow looked forth by turns, are now filled up with the dust of death; those lips, the doors of the soul, the gates of Mansoul, are carried away, and the bars thereof are broken. Alas, ye windows o agates and gates of carbuncle, where are ye now? How shall I mourn for thee, 0 thou captive city, for the mighty men have utterly spoiled thee! Thy neck, once like a tower of ivory, has become as a fallen column; thy nose, so lately comparable to “the tower of Lebanon, which looketh toward Damascus,” is as a ruined hovel; and thy head, which towered like Carmel, lies low as the clods of the valley. Where is beauty now? The most lovely cannot be known fi’om the most deformed. The vessel so daintily wrought upon the potter’s wheel, is cast away upon the dunghill with the vilest potsherds. Cruel have ye been, ye warriors of death, for though ye wield no axes and bear no hammers, yet have ye broken down the carved work; and though ye speak not with tongues, yet have ye said in your hearts, “We have swallowed her up, certainly this is the day that we have looked for; we have found, we have seen it.” The skin is gone. The troops have entered into the town of Mansoul. And now they pursue their work of devastation; the pitiless marauders all upon the body itself. There are those noble aqueducts, the veins through which the streams of life were wont to flow, these, instead of being rivers of life, have become blocked up with the soil and wastes of death, and now they must be pulled to pieces; not a single relic of them shall be spared. Mark the muscles and sinews, like great highways that penetrating the metropolis, carry the strength and wealth of manhood along — their curious pavement must be pulled up, and they that do traffic thereon must be consumed; each tunnelled bone, and curious arch, and knotted bond must be snapped and broken. Fair fabrics, glorious storehouses, costly engines, wonderful machines — all, all must be pulled down, and not one stone left upon another. Those nerves, which like telegraphic wires connected all parts of the city together, to carry thought and feeling and intelligence — these are cut. No matter how artistic the work might be, — and certainly we are fearfully and wonderfully made, and the anatomist stands still and marvels to see the skill which the eternal God has manifested in the formation of the body — but these ruthless worms pull everything to pieces, till like a city sacked and spoiled that has been given up for days to pillage and to flame, everything lies in a heap of ruin — ashes to ashes, dust to dust. But these invaders stop not here. Job says that next they consume his reins. We are wont to speak of the heart as the great citadel of life, the inner keep and donjohn, where the captain of the guard holdeth out to the last. The Hebrews do not regard the heart, but the lower viscera, the reins, as the seat of the

passions and of mental power. The worms spare not; they enter the secret places of the tabernacle of life, and the standard is plucked from the tower. Having died, the heart cannot preserve itself, and falls like the rest of the frame — a prey to worms. It is gone, it is all gone! The skin, the body, the vitals, all, all has departed. There is nought left. In a few years ye shall turn up the sod and say, “Here slept so-and-so, and where is he now?”

and ye may search and hunt and dig, but ye shall find no relic. Mother Earth has devoured her own offspring.

Dear friends, why should we wish to have it otherwise? Why should we desire to preserve the body when the soul has gone? What vain attempts men have made with coffins of lead, and wrappings of myrrh and frankincense. The embalming of the Egyptians, those master robbers of the worm, what has it done? It has served to keep some poor shrivelled lumps of mortality above ground to be sold for curiosities, to be dragged away to foreign climes, and stared upon by thoughtless eyes. No, let the dust go, the sooner it dissolves the better. And what matters it how it goes! If it be devoured of beasts, if it be swallowed up in the sea and become food for fishes! What, if plants with their roots suck up the particles! What, if the fabric passes into the animal, and from the animal into the earth, and from the earth into the plants, and from the plant into the animal again! What, if the winds blow it along the highway! What, if the rivera carry it to the waves of ocean! It is ordained that somehow or other it must be all separated — “dust to dust, ashes to ashes.” It is part of the decree that it should all perish. The worms or some other agents of destruction must destroy this body. Do not seek to avoid what God has purposed; do not look upon it as a gloomy thing. Regard it as a necessity; nay more, view it as the platform of a miracle, the lofty stage of resurrection, since Jesus shall surely raise again from the dead the particles of this body, however divided from one another. We have heard of miracles, but what a miracle is the resurrection! All the miracles of Scripture, yea even those wrought by Christ, are small compared with this. The philosopher says, “How is it possible that God shall hunt out every particle of the human frame?” He can do it: he has but to speak the word, and every single atom, though it may have travelled thousands of leagues, though it may have been blown as dust across the desert, and anon have fallen upon the bosom of the sea, and then have descended into the depths thereof to be cast up on a desolate shore, sucked up by plants, fed on again by beasts, or passed into the fabric of another man, — I say that individual atom shall find its fellows, and the whole company of particles at the trump of the archangel shall travel to their appointed place, and the body, the very body which was laid in the ground, shall rise again.

I am afraid I have been somewhat uninteresting while tarrying upon the exposition of the words of Job, but I think very much of the pith of Job’s faith lay in this, that he had a clear view that the worms would after his skin destroy his body, and yet that in his flesh he should see God. You know we might regard it as a small miracle if we could preserve the bodies of the departed. If, by some process, with spices and gums we could preserve the particles, for the Lord to make those dry bones live, and to quicken that skin and flesh, were a miracle certainly, but not palpably and plainly so great a marvel as when the worms have destroyed the body. When the fabric has been absolutely broken up, the tenement all pulled down, ground to pieces, and flung in handfuls to the wind, so that no relic of it is left, and yet when Christ itands in the latter days upon the earth, all the structure shall be brought together, bone to his bone — then shall the might of Omnipotence be seen. This is the doctrine of the resurrection, and happy is h« who finds no difficulty here, who looks at it as being an impossibility with man but a possibility with God, and lays hold upon the omnipotence of the Most High and says, “Thou sayest it, and it shall be done!” I comprehend thee not great God; I marvel at thy purpose to raise my mouldering bones; but I know that thou doest great wonders, and I am not surprised that thou shouldst conclude the great drama of thy creating works here on earth by re-creating the human fiarae by the same power by which thou didst bring from the dead the body of thy Son Jesus Christ, and by that same divine energy which has regenerated human souls in thine own image.

II. Now, having thus descended into the grave, and seen nothing there but what is loathsome, let us look up with the patriarch

AND behold a sun SHINING WITH PRESENT COMFORT.

“I know,” said he, “that my Redeemer liveth.” The word “Redeemer* here used, is in the original “goel” — kinsman. The duty of the kinsman, or goel, was this: suppose an Israelite had alienated his estate, as in the case of Naomi and Ruth; suppose a patrimony which had belonged to a family, had passed away through poverty, it was the god’s business, the redeemer’s business to pay the price as the next of kin, and to buy back the heritage. Boaz stood in that relation to Ruth. Now, the body may be looked upon as the heritage of the soul — the soul’s small farm, that little plot of earth in which the soul has been wont to walk and delight, as a man walketh in his garden or dwelleth in his house. Now, that becomes alienated. Death, like Ahab, takes away the vineyard from us who are as Naboth; we lose our patrimonial estate; Death sends his troops to take our vineyard and to spoil the vines thereof and ruin it. But we turn round to Death and say, “I know that my Goel liveth, and he will redeem this heritage; I have lost it; thou takest it from me lawfully, 0 Death, because my sin hath forfeited my right; I have lost my heritage through my own offence, and through that of my first parent Adam; but there lives one who will buy this back.” Brethren, Job could say this of Christ long before he had descended upon earth, “I know that he liveth;” and now that he has ascended up on high, and led captivity captive, surely we may with double emphasis say, “I know that my Goel, my Kinsman liveth, and that he hath paid the price, that I should have back my patrimony, so that in my flesh I shall see God.” Yes, my hands, ye are redeemed with blood; bought not with corruptible things, as with silver and gold, but with the precious blood of Christ. Yes, heaving lungs and palpitating heart, ye have been redeemed! He that redeemed the soul to be his altar has also redeemed the body, that it may be a temple for the Holy Ghost. Not even the bones of Joseph can remain in the house of bondage. No smell of the fire of death may pass upon the garments which his holy children have worn in the furnace.

Remember, too, that it was always considered to be the duty of the goel, not merely to redeem by price, but where that failed, to redeem by power. Hence, when Lot was carried away captive by the four kings, Abraham summoned his own hired servants, and the servants of all his friends, and went out against the kings of the East, and brought back Lot and the captives of Sodom. Now, our Lord Jesus Christ, who once has played the kinsman’s part by paying the price for us, lireth, and he will redeem us by power. 0 Death, thou tremblest at this name! Thou knowest the might of our KinsmanI Against his arm thou canst not stand! Thou didst once meet him foot to foot in stem battle, and 0 Death, thou didst indeed tread upon his heel. He voluntarily submitted to this, or else, 0 Death, thou hadst no power against him. But he slew thee. Death, he slew thee! He rifled all thy caskets, took from thee the key of thy castle, burst open the door of thy dungeon; and now, thou knowest. Death, thou hast no power to hold my body; thou mayst set thy slaves to devour it, but thou shalt give it up, and all their spoil must be restored. Insatiable Death, from thy greedy maw ret shall return the multitudes whom thou hast devoured. Thou shalt be compelled by the Saviour to restore thy captives to the light of day. I think I see Jesus coming with his Father’s servants. The chariots of the Lord are twenty thousand, even thousands of angels. Blow ye the trumpet! blow ye the trumpet! Immanuel rides to battle 1 The Most Mighty in majesty girds on his sword. He comes! He comes to snatch by power, his people’s lands from those who have invaded their portion. Oh, how glorious the victory! No battle shall there be. He comes, he sees, he conquers. The sound of the trumpet shall be enough; Death shall fly affrighted; and at once from beds of dust and silent clay, to reialms of everlasting day the righteous shall arise.

To linger here a moment, there was yet, very conspicuously in the Old Testament, we are informed, a third duty of the goel, which was to avenge the death of his friend. If a person had been slain, the Goel was the avenger of blood; snatching up his sword, he at once pursued the person who had been guilty of bloodshed. So now, let us picture ourselves as being smitten by Death. His arrow has just pierced us to the heart, but in the act of expiring, our lips are able to boast of vengeance, and in the face of the monster we cry, “I know that my Goel liveth.” Thou mayst fly, 0 Death, as rapidly as thou wilt, but no city of refuge can hide thee from him; he will overtake thee; he will lay hold upon thee, 0 thou skeleton monarch, and he will avenge my blood on thee. I would that I had powers of eloquence to work out this magnificent thought. Chrysostom, or Christmas Evans could picture the flight of the King of Terrors, the pursuit by the Redeemer, the overtaking of the foe, and the slaying of the destroyer. Christ shall certainly avenge himself on Death for all the injury which Death hath done to his beloved kinsmen. Comfort thyself then, 0 Christian; thou hast ever living, even when thou diest, one who avenges thee, one who has paid the price for thee, and one whose strong arms shall yet set thee free.

Passing on in our text to notice the next word, it seems that Job found consolation not only in the fact that he had a Goel, a Redeemer, but that this Redeemer liveth. He does not say, “I know that my Goel shall live, but that he lives,” — having a clear view of the self-existence of the Lord Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, to-day, and lor ever. And you and I looking back do not say, “I know that he did Itve, but he lives to-day.” This very day you that mourn and sorrow for venerated friends, your prop and pillar in years gone by, you may go to Christ with confidence, because he not only lives, but he is the source of life; and you therefore believe that he can give forth out of himself life to those whom you have committed to the tomb. He is the Lord and giver of life originally, and he shall be specially declared to be the resurrection and the life, when the legions of his redeemed shall be glorified with him. If I saw no fountain from which life could stream to the dead, I would yet believe the promise when God said that the dead shall live; but when I see the fountain provided, and know that it is full to the brim and that it runneth over, I can rejoice without trembling. Since there is one who can say, “I am the resurrection and the life,” it is a blessed thing to see the means already before us in the person of our Lord Jesus Christ. Let us look up to our Goel then who liveth at this very time.

Still the marrow of Job’s comfort it seems to me lay in that little word “My.” “I know that my Redeemer liveth.” Oh, to get hold of Christ! I know that in his offices he is precious. But, dear friends, we must get a property in him before we can really enjoy him. What ig honey in the wood to me, if like the fainting Israelites, I dare not eat. It is honey in my hand, honey on my lip, which enlightens mine eyes like those of Jonathan. What is gold in the mine to me? Men are beggars in Peru, and beg their bread in California. It is gold in my purse which will satisfy my necessities, purchasing the bread I need. So, what is a kinsman if he be not a kinsman to me. A Redeemer that does not redeem me, an avenger who will never stand up for my blood, of what avail were such? But Job’s faith was strong and firm in the conviction that the Redeemer was his. Dear friends, dear friends, can all of you say, “I know that my Redeemer liveth.” The question is simple and simply put; but oh, what solemn thing! hang upon your answer, “Is it my Redeemer?” I charge you rest not, be not content until by faith you can say, “Yes, I cast myself upon him; I am his, and therefore he is mine.” I know that fall many of you, while you look upon all else that you have as not being yours, yet can say, “My Redeemer is mine.” He is the only piece of property which is really ours. We boiTow all else, the house, the children; nay, our very body we must return to the Great Lender. But Jesus, we can never leave, for even when we are absent from the body we are present with the Lord, and I know that even death cannot separate us from him, so that body and soul are with Jesus truly even in the dark hours of death, in the long night of the sepulchre, and in the separate state of spiritual existence. Beloved, have you Christ? It may be you hold him with a feeble hand, you half think it is presumption to say, “He is my Redeemer;” yet remember, if you hare but faith as a grain of mustard seed, that little faith entitles you to say, and say now, “I know that my Redeemer liveth.”

There is another word in this consoling sentence which no doabt served to give a zest to the comfort of Job. It was that he could s, “I know” — “I KNOW that my Redeemer liveth.” To say, “I hope so, I trust so,” is comfortable; and there are thousands in the fold of Jesni who hardly crer get much further. But to reach the marrow of consolation you must say, “I know.” Ifs, buts, and perhapses, are sure murderers of peace and comfort. Doubts are dreary things in times of sorrow. Like wasps they sting the soul! If I have any suspicion that Christ is not mine, then there is vinegar mingled with the gall of death. But if I know that Jesus is mine, then darkness is not dark; even the night is light about me. Out of the lion cometh honey; out of the eater cometh forth sweetness. “I know that my Redeemer liveth.” This is a brightly-burning lamp cheering the damps of the sepulchral vault, but a feeble hope is like a flickering smoking flax, just making darkness visible, but nothing more. I would not like to die with a mere hope mingled with suspicion. I might be safe with this but hardly happy; but oh, to go down into the river knowing that all is well, confident that as a guilty, weak, and helpless worm I have fallen into the arms of Jesus, and believing that he is able to keep that which I have committed to him. I would have you, dear Christian friends, never look upon the full assurance of faith as a thing impossible to you. Say not “It is too high; I cannot attain unto it.” I have known one or two saints of God who have rarely doubted their interest at all. There are many of us who do not often enjoy any ravishing ecstaciea, but on the other hand we generally maintain the even tenour of our way, simply hanging upon Christ, feeling that his promise is true, that hifl merits are sufficient, and that we are safe. Assurance is a jewel for worth but not for rarity. It is the common privilege of all the saints if they have but the grace to attain unto it, and this grace the Holy Spirit gives freely. Surely if Job in Arabia, in those dark misty ages when there was only the morning star and not the sun, when they law but little, when life and immortality had not been brought to light, — if Job before the coming and advent still could say, “/ know yon and I should not speak less positively. God forbid that our positiveness should be presumption. Let us try ourselves, and see that our marks and evidences are right, lest we form an ungrounded hope; for nothing can be more destructive than to say, “Peace, peace, where there is no peace.” But oh, let us build for eternity, and build solidly. Let us not be satisfied with the mere foundation, for it is from the upper rooms that we get the widest prospect. Let us pray the Lord to help us to pile stone on stone, until we are able to say as we look at it, “Yes, I Tcnow, I know that my Redeemer liveth.” This, then, for present comfort to-day in the prospect of departure.

III. And now, in the third and last place, as the anticipation of FDTUEE DELIGHT, let me Call to your remembrance the other part of the text. Job not only knew that the Redeemer lived, but he anticipated the time when he should stand in (he latter day upon the earth.

No doubt Job referred here to our Saviour’s first advent, to the time when Jesus Christ, “the goal,” the kinsman, should stand upon the earth to pay in the blood of his veins the ransom price, which had, indeed, in bond and stipulation been paid before the foundation of the jvorld in promise. But I cannot think that Job’s vision stayed there; ne was looking forward to the second advent of Christ as being the period of the resurrection. We cannot endorse the theory that Job arose from the dead when our Lord died, although certain Jewish believers held this idea very firmly at one time. We are persuaded that “the latter day” refers to the advent of glory rather than to that of shame. Our hope is that the Lord shall come to reign in glory where he once died in agony. The bright and hallowed doctrine of the second advent has been greatly revived in our churches in these latter days, and I look for the best results in consequence. There is always a danger lest it be perverted and turned by fanatical minds, by prophetic speculations, into an abuse; but the doctrine in itself is one of the most consoling, and, at the same time, one of the most practical, tending to keep the Christian awake, because the bridegroom Cometh at such an hour as we think not. Beloved, we believe that the same Jesus who ascended from Olivet shall so come in like manner as he ascended up into heaven. We believe in his personal advent and reign. We believe and expect that when both wise and foolish virgins shall slumber; in the night when sleep is heavy upon the saints; when men shall be eating and drinking as in the days of Noah, that suddenly as the lightning flasheth from heaven, so Christ shall descend with a shout, and the dead in Christ shall rise and reign with him. We are looking forward to the literal, personal, and actual standing of Christ upon earth as the time when creation’s groans shall be silenced for ever, and the earnest expectation of the creature shall be fulfilled.

Mark, that Job describes Christ as standing. Some interpreters have read the passage, “he shall stand in the latter days against the earth;** that as the earth has covered up the slain, as the earth has become the charnel-house of the dead, Jesus shall arise to the contest and say, “Earth, I am against thee; give up thy dead! Ye clods of the valley cease to be custodians of my people’s bodies! Silent deeps, and you, ye cavems of the earth, deliver, once for all, those whom ye have imprisoned!” Macphelah shall give up its precious treasure, cemeteriea and graveyards shall release their captives, and all the deep places of the earth shall resign the bodies of the faithful. Well, whether that be so or no, the posture of Christ, in standing upon the earth, is significant. It shows his triumph. He has triumphed over sin, which which once like a serpent in its coils had bound the earth. He has defeated Satan. On the very spot where Satan gained his power Christ

498 METROPOrJTAN TABERNACLE PULPIT.

has gained the victory. Earth, which was a scene of defeated goodness, whence mercy once was all but driven, where virtue died, where everything heavenly and pure, like flowers blasted by pestilential winds, hung down their heads, withered and blighted — on this very earth everything that is glorious shall blow and blossom in perfection; and Christ himself, once despised and rejected of men, fairest of all the sons of men, shall come in the midst of a crowd of courtiers, while kings and princes shall do him homage, and all the nations shall call him blessed. “He shall stand in the latter day upon the earth.”

Then, at that auspicious hour, says Job, “In my flesh I shall see God.” Oh, blessed anticipation — “I shall see God.” He does not say, “I shall see the saints “— dou^tless we shall see them all in heaven — but,” I shall see Godr Note he does not say, “I shall see the pearly gates, I shall see the walls of jasper, I shall see the crowns of gold and the harps of harmony,” but “I shall see God;” as if that were the sum and substance of heaven. “In my flesh shall I see God.” The pire in heart shall see God. It was their delight to see him in the ordinances by faith. They delighted to behold him in communion and in prayer. There in heaven they shall have a vision of another sort. We shall see God in heaven, and be made completely like him; the divine character shall be stamped upon us; and being made like to him we shall be perfectly satisfied and content. Likeness to God, what can we wish for more? And a sight of God, what can we desire better? We shall see God, and so there shall be perfect contentment to the soul and a satisfaction of all the faculties. Some read the passage, “Yet, I shall see God in my flesh,” and hence think that there is here an allusion to Christ, our Lord Jesus Christ, as the word made flesh. Well, be it so, or be it not so, it is certain that we shall see Christ, and He, as the divine Redeemer, shall be the subject of our eternal vision. Nor shall we ever want any joy beyond simply that of seeing him. Think not, dear friend, that this will be a narrow sphere for your mind to dwell in. It is but one source of delight, “I shall see God,” but that source is infinite. His wisdom, his love, his power, all his attributes shall be subjects for your eternal contemplation, and as he is infinite under each aspect, there is no fear of exhaustion. His works, his purposes, his gifts, his love to you, and his glory in all his purposes, and in all his deeds of love — why, these shall make a theme that never can be exhausted. You may with divine delight anticipate the time when in your flesh you shall see God.

But I must have you observe how Job has expressly made us note that it is in the same body. “Yet, in my flesh shall I see God;” and then he says again, “whom I shall see for myself, and mine eye shall behold and not another.” Yes, it is true that I, the very man standing here, though I must go down to die, yet I shall as the same man mos certainly arise and shall behold my God. Not part of myself, thoug the soul alone shall have some ^iew of God, but the whole of myself my flesh, my soul, my body, my spirit shall gaze on God. We shall not enter heaven, dear friends, as a dismasted vessel is tugged into harbour; we shall not get to glory some on ooards, and some on broken pieces of the ship, but the whole ship shall be floated safely into the haven, body and soul both being safe. Christ shall be able to say, “A II that the father giveth to me shall come to me,” not only all the persons, but all of the persons — each man in his perfection. There shall not be found in heaven one imperfect saint. There shall not be a saint without an eye, much less a saint without a body. No member of the body shall have perished; nor shall the body have lost any of its natural beauty. All the saints shall be all there, and all uf all; the same persons precisely, only that they shall have risen from a state of grace to a state of glory. They shall be ripened; they shall be no more the green blades, but the full corn in the ear; no more buds but flowers; not babes but men.

Please to notice, and then I shall conclude, how the patriarch puts it as being a real personal enjoyment. “Whom mine eye shall behold, and not another.” They shall not bring me a report as they did the Queen of Sheba, but I shall see Solomon the King for myself. I shall be able to say, as they did who spake to the woman of Samaria, “Now I believe, not because of thy word who did bring me a report, but I have seen him for myself.” There shall be personal intercourse with God; not through the Book, which is but as a glass; not through the ordinances; but directly, in the person of our Lord Jesus Christ, we shall be able to commune with the Deity as a man talketh with his friend. “Not another.” If I could be a changeling and could be altered, that would mar my comfort. Or if my heaven must be enjoyed by proxy, if draughts of bliss must be drunk for me, where were the hope? Oh, no; for myself, and not through another, shall I see God. Have we not told you a hundred times that nothing but personal religion will do, and is not this another argument for it, because resurrection and glory are personal things? “Not another.” If you could have sponsors to repent for you, then, depend upon it, you would have sponsors to be glorified for you. But as there is not another to see God for you, so you must yourself see and yourself find an interest in the Lord Jesus Christ.

In closing let me observe how foolish have you and I been when we have looked forward to death with shudders, with doubts, with loathings. After all, what is it? Worms! Do ye tremble at those base crawling things? Scattered particles! Shall we be alarmed at these? To meet the worms we hare the angels; and to gather the scattered particles we have the voice of God. I am sure the gloom of death is altogether gone now that the lamp of resm’rection burns. Disrobing is nothing now that better garments await us. We may long for evening to undress, that we may rise with God. I am sure my venerable friends now present, in coming so near as they do now to the time of the departure, must have some visions of the glory on the other side the stream. Bunyan was not wrong, my dear brethren, when he put the land Beulah at the close of the pilgrimage. Is not my text a telescope which will enable you to see across the Jordan; may it not be as hands of angels to bring you bundles of myrrh and fi’ankincense? You can say, “I know that my Redeemer liveth.” You cannot want more; you were not satisfied with less in your youth, you will not be content with less now. Those of us who are young, are comforted by the thought that we may soon depart. I say comforted, not alarmed by it; and we almost envy those whose race is nearly run, because we fear — and yet we must not speak thus, for the Lord’s will be done — I was about to say, we fear that our battle may last long, and that mayhap our feet may slip; only he that keepeth Israel does not slumber nor sleep. So since we know that our Redeemer liveth, this shall be our comfort in life, that though we fall we shall not be utterly cast down; and since our Redeemer liveth, this shall be our comfort in death, that though worms destroy this body, yet in our flesh we shall see God.

May the Lord add his blessing on the feeble words of this morning, and to him be glory for ever. Amen.

“Gravp, fhe e-nardian of our dust.!

Grave, the treasury of the skiea!
Every atom of thy trust

Rests in hope ag:ain to rise.
Hark! the judgment trumpet calls;

Soul, rebuild thy house of clay,
Immortality thy walls.

And Eternity thy day.”

“LO, I COME”: EXPOSITION.

Delivered on Lord’s-day Morning, April 26th, 1891, by
AT THE METROPOLITAN TABERNACLE, NEWINGTON.

“Sacrifice and offering thou didst not desire; mine ears hast thou opened: burnt offering and sin offering hast thou not required. Then said I, Lo, I come: in the volume of the book it is written of me, I delight to do thy will, O my God: yea, thy law is within my heart.” — Psalm xl. 6 — 8.

Explained to us by the apostle Paul in Hebrews x. 5 — 7:

“Wherefore when he cometh into the world, he saith, Sacrifice and offering thou wouldest not, but a body hast thou prepared me: in burnt offerings and sacrifices for sin thou hast had no pleasure. Then said I, Lo, I come (in the volume of the book it is written of me,) to do thy will, O God.”

We have, in the use made of the passage by the inspired apostle sufficient authority for appldng the quotation from the fortieth psalm to our divine Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. With such a commentary, we are sure of our way and our whereabouts. We might have been perplexed as to its meaning had it not have been for this; although, I think, even without the guidance of the New Testament passage, those who are familiar with Holy Writ woidd have felt that the words could not be fulfilled in David, but must belong to a greater than he, even to the divine Messiah, who in the fulness of time would come into the world. We rejoice that the Lord Jesus himself here speaks of himself. Who but he can declare his own generation? Here he is both the subject of the words and the speaker also. The word is from himself and of himseif, and so we have double reason for devout attention. He tells us what he said long ago. He declares, “Then I said, Lo, I come.” Because he has come to us, we gladly come to him; and now we reverently wait upon him to hear what our Lord shall speak; for, doubtless, he will speak peace to us, and will cause us to learn, through his Spirit, the meaning of his words. 0 Saviour, say to each of our hearts, “Lo, I come “!

I. Without further preface, I call upon you to notice, first, the sweeping away of THE SHADOW. “Sacrifice and offering thou didst not desire...: burnt offering and sin offering hast thou not required.”

When the Soti of God is born i?ito the world, there is an end of all types by which he was formerly prefigured. The symbols end when the No. 2,202. 3 truth itself is made fully manifest. The sacrifices of the law had their times and place, their teaching and their influence. Blessed were those in Israel whose spiritual minds saw beneath the outward sign, and discerned the inward truth! To them the sacrifices of the holy place were a standing means of fellowship with Q-od. Day after day they saw the Grreat Propitiation as they beheld the morning and the evening lamb: so often as they looked upon a sacrifice, they beheld the Lamb of Grod which taketh away the sin of the world. In the Paschal supper they were instructed by the slaying of the unblemished victim, the roasting with fire, the sprinkling of the blood upon the door without, and the feasting upon the sacrifice within. Spiritual men could have found in the rites and ceremonies of the old law a very library of gospel literature; but, alas! the people were carnal, sensual, and unbelieving, and therefore they often forgot even to celebrate the appointed sacrifices: the Passover itself ceased for long periods, and when the festivals were maintained, there was no life or reality in them. After they had been chastened for their neglect, and made to wander in exile because of the wandering of their hearts after their idols, they were restored from captivity, and were led to keep the ceremonial law; but they did it as a heartless, meaningless formality, and thus missed all spiritual benefit: with the unlighted candle in their hand they bhndly groped in the dark. They slew the sacrifices, and presented their peace-offerings; but the soul had gone out of the service, and at last their God grew weary of their formal worship, and said,” Bring no more vain oblations; incense is an abomination unto me.” We read, “To what purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices unto me? saith the Lord: I am full of the burnt offerings of rams, and the fat of fed beasts; and I delight not in the blood of bullocks, or of lambs, or of he goats. When ye come to appear before me, who hath required this at your hand, to tread my courts?” When once the life is gone out of the best symbolism, the Lord abhors the carcase; and even a divinely ordained ritual becomes a species of idolatry. When the heart is gone out of the externals of worship, they are as shells without the kernel. Habitations without living tenants soon become desolations, and so do forms and ceremonies without their spiritual meaning. Toward the time of our Lord’s coming, the outward worship of Judaism became more and more dead: it was time that it was buried. It had decayed and waxed old, and was ready to vanish away, and vanish away it did; for our Lord set aside the first, or old, that he might establish the second, or new. The stars were no longer seen with their twinklings, for the sun had arisen.

Thii removal of these things was wholesale. We have four sorts of sacrifice mentioned here, but I need not go into details. Sacrifices in which blood was shed were aboHshed when the Son of God offered himself without spot unto God. Bloodless offerings, such as fine flour, and wine, and oil, a,nd sweet cane bought with money, and precious incense — which were tokens of gratitude and consecration — these also were no longer laid upon the altar. Sacrifice and offering both were not desired; and burnt-offerings, which signified the delight of God in the great Sacrifice, were ended by the Lord’s actual accejjtance of that Sacrifice itself. Even the sin-offering, which was burned without the camp as a thing accursed, altogether ceased. It represented sin laid upon the victim, and the victim’s being made a curse on that account. It might have seemed always useful as a reminder, for they were always sinning, and always needing a sin-offering; but even this was not required. Nothing of the old ceremonial law was spared. Now we have no ark of the covenant, with its shekinah light between the wings of the cherubim. Now we have no brazen laver, no table of shewbread, no brazen altar, and no sacred veil: the holy of holies itself is gone. Tabernacle and temple are both removed. “Neither in this mountain, nor yet at Jerusalem, shall men worship the Father”; but the time is come when “they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth.” A clean sweep has been made of all the ancient rites, from circumcision up to the garment with its fringe of blue. These were for the childhood of the church, the pictures of her first school-books; but we are no longer minors, and we have grace given us to read with opened eyes that everlasting classic of “the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.” Now hath the brightness of the former dispensation been quite eclipsed by the glory which excelleth.

As these outward things vanish, they go away with Grod’s mark of non-esteem upon them: they are such things as he did not desire. “Sacrifice and offering thou didst not desire.” The Lord God had no desire for matters so trivial and unsatisfactory. They were good for the people, to instruct them, if they had been willing to learn; but they fulfilled no desire of the heart of God. He says, “Will I eat the flesh of bulls, or drink the blood of goats?” By the prophet Micah he asks, “Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, or with ten thousands of rivers of oil?” These furnish no delight for the great Spirit, and give no pleasure to the thrice holy Jehovah. The formal Worshipper supposed that his offerings were, in and of themselves, pleasing to Gud, and therefore brought his “burnt offerings, with calves of a year old.” So far as they believingly understood the meaning of a sacrifice, and presented it in faith, their offerings were acceptable; but in themselves considered these were far from being what the Lord desired. He that filleth heaven and earth saith, “I will not reprove thee for thy sacrifices or thy burnt offerings, to have been continually before me. I will take no bullock out of thy house, nor he goats ou.t of thy folds. For every beast of the forest is mine, and the cattle upon a thousand hills. I know all the fowls of the mountains: and the wild beasts of the field are mine. If I were hungry, I would not tell thee: for the world is mine, and the fulness thereof.” The spiritual, the infinite, the almighty Jehovah could not -desire merely outward ritual, however it might appear glorious to men. The sweetest music is not for his ear, nor the most splendid robes of priests for his eye. He desired something infinitely more precious than these, and he puts them away with this note of dissatisfaction.

And more, these sacrifices passed away with the mark upon them that they loere not what God required. “Burnt offering and sin offering hast thou not required.” What did God require of man? Obedience. He said by Samuel, “To obey is better than sacrifice, and to hearken than the fat of rams.” He saith in another place, “He hath shewed thee, 0 man, what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?” The requirement of the law was love to God and love to men. This has always been God’s great requirement. He seeks spiritual worship, obedient thought, holy living, grateful praise, devout prayer — these are the requirements of the Creator and Benefactor of men. Ritualistic matters were so far required as they might minister to the good of the people, and while they stood they could not neglect them without loss; but they were not the grand requirement of a just and holy God, and therefore men might fulfil these without stint or omission, and yet God would not have of them what he required. Yea, he asks, “Who hath required this at your hand, to tread my courts?” To see his law magnified, his justice vindicated, his sovereignty acknowledged, and his holiness imitated, is more to his mind. Absolute conformity to the standard of moral and spiritual rectitude which he has set up is his demand, and he can be content with nothing less. These things are not found in sacrifice and offering, neither do they always go therewith, and therefore the outward sacrifice was not what God required.

They were so to be put away as never to he followed by the same Idnd of things. Shadows are not replaced by other shadows. The ceremonials of Aaron are not to be followed by another set of carnal ordinances. There are some who seem to think that they are so to be. Instead of Aaron, whom God ordained, we have a so-called priesthood among us at this day, claiming an apostolical succession, which is impossible if they are priests, since no apostle was a priest. Instead of rites which God has ordained we have rites of man’s invention. The blessed ordinances of our Lord Jesus Christ, such as baptism and the Lord’s Supper, have been prostituted from their instructive and memorial intent into a kind of witchcraft; so that by what is called baptism children are said to be born again, and made members of Christ and children of God, while in the second, or what they call Holy Communion, the sacrifice of Christ is profanely said to be repeated or continued, even in the unbloody sacrifice of the mass. Ah, friends! our Lord did not put away that grand, magnificent system of Mosaic rites to introduce the masquerade in which Rome delights, which certain Anglicans would set up among us. No, no; we have done with the symbolic sj’stem, and have now but the two outward ordinances of baptism and the Lord’s Supper, which are meant only for believers who know what it is to be buried with Christ, and to feed on him. You have no right to bring in your own forms and ceremonies, and place them in the church of Christ. Beyond what God has ordained we may not dare to go; and even in those things we may not rest as though there were anything in them of their own operation, apart from their sacred teaching. These are instructive to you if you have a mind to be instructed, and if you know the truths whicu they set forth; but do not imagine that men have come under another kind of ceremonialism, another system of ritual and rubric, for it is not so. The rites appropriate to priests are abolished with the Aaronic priesthood, and can never be restored: “He taketh away the first, that he may establish the second.” When he cometh into the world these carnal ordinances must go out of the world. Sacrifice and offering, burnt offering and sin offering, and all other patterns of heavenly things, are swept away when the heavenly things themselves appear.

II. Thus much upon the shadows being swept away; and now, secondly, let us view the revelation of the substance. We find the Son of God himself appearing. We read here, and we hear him say — “Mine ears hast thou opened.” The Lord himself comes, even he who is all that these things foreshadowed.

JVTien he comes he has a prepared ear. The margin hath it, “Mine ears hast thou digged.” Our ears often need digging; for they are blocked up by sin. The passage to the heart seems to be sealed in the case of fallen man. But when the Saviour came, his ear was not as ours, but was attentive to the divine voice. He says, “He wakeneth mine ear to hear as they that are taught. The Lord Grod hath opened mine ear, and I was not rebellious.” Our Lord was quick of understanding in the fear of the Lord: he knew what the will of the Lord was, and he could say, “I do always the thing that pleases him.” As man, he had a divine instinct of holiness, which made him to know and love the Father’s will, and caused him always to translate that will into his own life. You see he came with an opened ear, and some think that here we have an allusion to the boring of the ear in the case of the servant who had a right to liberty, but refused to quit his servitude, because he loved his master, and wished to remain with him for ever. It is not certain that there is any such reference; but it is certain that our Lord was bound for ever to the service which he had undertaken for his Father, and that he would not go back from it. He pledged himself to redeem us, and he set his face like a flint to do it. He loved his Father, and he loved his chosen so much that he vowed to execute the Father’s work, even to what I might call “the bitter end,” if I did not know that it was a sweet and blessed end to him. His ear was prepared for his service.

But our Lord came also with a prepared lodtj: hence, the apostle Paul, when he quoted this passage, probably taking the words from the Septuagint translation, writes, “A body hast thou prepared me.” You will wonder how, in one passage, it should speak of the ear, and the next should speak of the body; and yet there is small difference in the sense. We do not think of an ear without a body — that would be a sorry business. The reading in the Hebrews is involved in the text as it stands in the Psalm. If the ear is there, a body is there; you cannot even dream of an ear hearing if separate from the rest of the body. The apostle gives us the sense of the text rather than the words; and, at the same time, dealing as he was with Jews by whom the Septuagint was prized, he quoted from the version which they would be sure to acknowledge — and very properly and wisely so — because that version was perfectly accurate as to the meaning of the Hebrew. Any way, he was inspired to read it — “A body hast thou prepared me.” There was fashioned by the Holy Q-host, in the womb of the blessed Virgin, a body fitted to embody the Son of God. Wrought mysteriously, by means into which we must not inquire — for what God hath veiled must remain covered — that body was suited to set forth the great mystery, “God manifest in the flesh.”

.■506 METROPOLITAN TABERNACLE PITLPIT.

The whole body of Christ was prepared for him and for his great “work. To begin with, it was a sinless body, without taint of original sin, else God could not have dwelt therein. It was a body made highly vital and sensitive, probably far beyond what ours are; for sin has a blunting and hardening effect even upon flesh, and his flesh, though it was in the “likeness of sinful flesh,” was not sinful flesh, but flesh -which yielded prompt obedience to his spirit, even as his whole human nature was obedient unto death, even the death of the cross. His body was capable of great endurance, so as to know the griefs and agonies and unspeakable sorrows of a delicate, holy, and tender kind which it was necessary for him to bear. “A body hast thou prepared me.” In the fulness of time he came into that body, which was admirably adapted to enshrine the Godhead. Wondrous mystery, that the infant of Bethlehem should be linked with the Infinite; and that the weary man by the shores of Galilee should be very God of very God, revealed in a body prepared for him! “A body hast thou prepared me “: he had a prepared ear and a prepared body.

He who assumed that hody was existent before that body was prepared. He says, “A body hast thou prepared me. Lo, I come.” He from old eternity dwelt with God: the Word was in the beginning with •God, and the Word was God. We could not any one of us have said that a body was prepared for us, and therefore we would come to it; for we had had no existence before our bodies were fashioned. From everlasting to everlasting our Lord is God, and he comes out of eternity into time — the Father bringing him into the world. He was before all worlds, and was before he came into the world to dwell in his prepared body.

Beloved, the human nature of Christ was taken on him in order that he miyht he able to do for us that which God desired and required. God desired to see an obedient man, a man who would keep his law to the full; and he sees him in Christ. God desired to see one who would vindicate the eternal justice, and show that sin is no trifle; and behold our Lord, the eternal Son of God, entering into that prepared body, was ready to do all this mighty work, by rendering to the law a full recompense for our dishonour of it! An absolutely perfect righteousness he renders unto God: as the second Adam, he presents it for all whom he represents. He bows his head a victim beneath Jehovah’s sword, that the truth, and justice, and honour of God might suffer no detriment. His body was prepared to this end. Incarnation is a means to atonement. Only a man could vindicate the law, and therefore the Son of God became a man. This is a wonderful being, this God in our nature. “Emmanuel” is a glorious word. Surely for the incarnation and the atonement the world was made from the first. Was this the reason why the morning stars sang together when they saw the corner-stone of the world, because they had an inkling that here God would bo manifest as nowhere else beside, and the Creator would be wedded to the creature? That God might be manifested in the Christ, it may even bo that sin was permitted. Assuredly, there could have been no sacrifice on Calvary if there had not first of all been sin in Eden. The whole scheme, the whole of God’s decrees and acts, worked up to an atoning Saviour. Of the pyramid of creation and of providence

Christ is the apex: he is the flower of all that Grod hath made. His divine nature in strange union with humanity constitutes a peerless personage, such as never was before, and can never be again. Grod in our nature one Being, and yet wearing two natures, is altogether imique. He saith, “A body hast thou prepared me. Lo, I come.” Think of this: it is a truth fitter for meditation than for sermonizing. The Lord give us to know it well by faith!

III. But now, thirdly, I call your attention to the declaration’ of THE Christ, made in the text: “Sacrifice and offering thou didst not desire. Then said I, Lo, I come.” Observe when he says this. It is in the time of failure. All the sacrifices had failed. The candle flickered, and was dying out, and then the great light arose, even the eternal light, and like a trumpet the words rung out, “Lo, I come.” All this has been of no avail; now I come. It is in the time of failure that Christ always does appear. The last of man is the first of God; and when we have come to the end of all our power and ho]3e, then the eternal power and Godhead ajDpears with its “Lo, I come.”

When our Lord comes, it is with the. view of filling up the vacuum which had now been sorrowfully seen. God does not desire these things; God does not require these things; but he does desire and he does require something better: and lo, the Christ has come to bring that something. That awful gap which was seen in human hope when Moses had passed away, and the Aaronic priesthood, and all the ordinances of it were gone, Christ was born to fiU. It looked as if the light of ages had been quenched, and God’s glorious revelation had been for ever withdrawn; and then, in the dark hour, Jesus cries, ‘’ Lo, I come!” He fills the blank abyss: he gives to man in reality what he had lost in the shadow.

When he appears, it is as the personal Lord. Lay the stress upon the pronoun, “Lo, /come.” The infinite -£’yo appears. “Lo, /come,” No mere man could talk thus, and be sane. No servant or prophet of God would ever say, “Lo, I come.” Saintly men talk not so. God’s prophets and apostles have a modest sense of their true position: they never magnify themselves, though they magnify their ofiice. It is for God to say, “Lo, I come.” He who says it takes the body prepared for him, and comes in his own proper personality as the I AM. “In him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily.” He comes forth from the ivory palaces to inhabit the tents of manhood. He takes upon himself the body prepared for him of the Lord God, and he stands forth in his matchless personality ready to do the will of God. “It pleased the Father that in him should all fulness dwell.” Everything is stored up in his blessed person, and we are complete in him.

Observe the joyful avowal that he makes — “Lo, I come.” This is no dirge: I think I hear a silver trumpet ring out — “Lo, I come.” Here is a joyful alacrity and intense eagerness. The coming of the Saviour was to him a thing of exceeding willingness. “For the joy that was set before him he endured the cross, despising the shame,”

He comes with a icord calling attention to it; for he is not ashamed to be made partaker of our flesh. “Lo,” saith he, “I come. Behold, behold, I come.” This is no clandestine union; he bids heaven behold him come into our nature. Earth is bidden to gaze upon it. 0 ye sinners, listen to this inviting “Lo!” Others have cried to you, “Lo, here! and Lo, there “; but Jesus looks on you, and cries, “Lo, I come.” Look hither: turn all your thoughts this way, and behold your Grod in your nature ready to save you. Verily, the incarnate Grod is a subject meet for the loftiest thoughts of sages, and for the lowliest thoughts of children. Blessed are the children of grace who can sit at the feet of the incarnate Grod and look up, forgetting all the wisdom of the Greeks, and all the sign-seeking of the Jews in the satisfaction which they find in Jesus.

I think, too, I hear in this declaration of the coming One a note of finality. He takes away the sacrifice from Aaron’s altar; but he says, “Lo, I come.” There is an end of it. “Lo, I come.” Is there anything after this? Can anything supersede this — “Lo, I come.” “Lo, I come” has been the perpetual music of the ages. Read it, “Lo, I am come “; for it is in the present tense, and how sweet the sound! Christ is come, and joy with him. Read it as well in the future, if you will, “Lo, I come,” for he comes “the second time without Bin unto salvation”; here is our chief hope! “Lo, I come.” He himself is the last word of God. “In the beginning was the Word “; and so he was God’s first word. But he is the end as well as the beginning: God’s last word to man; Christ is God’s ultimatum. Look for no new revelation — “Lo, I am come,” shines on for ever. Do not ask, “Aj.’t thou he that should come, or do we look for another?” He has come; look for no other. Behold, he came to give what God desires, what God requires; what would you more? Let him be all your salvation and all your desire. Let him be “the desire of all nations.” He is the fulfilment of all the requirements of the human race, as well as the full amount of what God requires.

IV. Next, I beg you to note the reference to preceding writings. He says, “Lo, I come: in the volume of the book it is written of me.” If I preached from the passage in the Epistle to the Hebrews, I might fairly declare that in the whole volume of Holy Scripture much is written of our Lord and prescribed for him as Messiah. The page of inspiration is fragrant with the name of Jesus. He is the top line of the entire volume, and in the Greek word I see a half allusion to this. He is the head-line of contents to every chapter of Scripture. He is of all Scripture the sum. “In the beginning was the word.” Everything speaks of him. The Pentateuch, and the books of the prophets, and the Psalms, and the gospels, and the epistles all speak of him. “In the volume of the book it is wi’itten of me.”

Preaching as I am from the Psalms, I cannot take so long a range. I must look back and find what was written in David’s day, and within the Pentateuch certainly; and where do I find it written concerning his coming? The Pentateuch drips with prophecies of Christ as a honeycomb overflowing with its honey. Chiefly is he to be found in the head and front of the book: so early as the opening chapters of the Book of Genesis, when Adam and Eve had sinned, and we were lost, behold he is spoken of in the volume of the book in these terms: “The seed of the woman shall bruise the serpent’s head.” So early was it written that the Redeemer would be born in our nature to vanquish our foe.

But I confess I do not feel shut out from another interpretation. I conceive that our Lord here refers to another book, the book of the divine purposes, the volume of the eternal covenant. There was a time before all time, when there was no day but the Ancient of Days, when all that existed was the Lord, who is all in all: then the sacred Three entered into covenant, in mutual agreement, for a sublime end. Man sinning, the Sou of God shall be the surety. Christ shall bear the result of man’s offence; he shall vindicate the law of God, and make Jehovah’s name more glorious than ever it has been. The second person of the divine Unity was pledged to come, and take up the nature of men, and so become the firstborn among many brethren to lift up a fallen race, and to save a number that no man can number, elect of God the Father, and given to the Son to be his heritage, his portion, his bride. Then did the Well-beloved strike hands with the eternal God, and enter into covenant engagements on our behalf: “In the volume of the book it is written.” That sealed book, upon whose secrets no angel’s eye has looked, a book written by the finger of God long before he wrote the book of the law upon tables of stone, that book of God may be spoken of in the Psalm, “And in thy book all my members were written, which in continuance were fashioned, when as yet there was none of them.” Our Lord came to carry out all his suretyship engagements: his work is the exact fulfilment of his engagements recorded in the eternal covenant, “ordered in all things and sure.” He acts out every mysterious line and syllable, even to the full. Then he said, “A body hast thou prepared me. Lo, I come: in the volume of the book it is written of me.” It is ever a pleasing study to see our Lord, both in the written Word, and in the eternal covenant of grace.

V. I must close with the fiith point, the delight of him that COMETH. He said, “Lo, I come.” As I have already told you, there is wonderful delight in that exclamation — “Lo, I come “; but lest we should mistake our Lord, he adds, “I deliy-ht to do thy will, 0 my God: yea, thy law is within my heart.” There can be no denial of his joy in his service.

Note well, that he came in complete subserviency to his Father, God. “I delight to do” — what? “Thy will.” His own will was absorbed in the divine will. His pleasure it was to say, “Not as I will, but as thou wilt.” It was his meat and his drink to do the will of him that sent him, and to finish his work. Though he was Lord and God, he became a lowly servant for our sakes. Though high as the highest, he stooped low as the lowest. The Bling of kings was the servant of servants, that he might save his people. He took upon him the form of a servant, and girded himself, and stood obediently at his Father’s call.

He had a prospective delight as to his work. Before he came, he delighted in the thought of his incarnation. The Supreme Wisdom saith, “My delights were with the sons of men.” Happy in his Father’s courts, he yet looked forward to an access of happiness in becoming man. “Can that be?” saith one. Could the Son of God be happier than he was? As God, he was infinitely blessed; but he knew nothing by experience of the life of man, and into that sphere he desired to enter. To the Godhead there can be no enlargement, for it is infinite; but still there can be an addition; our Lord was to add the Bitture of man to that of God. He would live as man, suffer as man, and triumph as man, and yet remain God: and to this he looked forward with a strange delight, inexplicable except upon the knowledge of the great love he bore to us. He had given his heart so entirely to his dear bride, whom he saw in the glass of predestination, that for her he would endure all things.

“Yea, saith the Lord, for her I’ll go

Through all the depths of care and woe,
And on the cross will even dare
The bitter pangs of death to bear.”

It was wondrous love. Our Lord’s love surpasses all language and even thought. I am talking prodigies and miracles at every word I utter. It was delightful to our Lord to come hither.

” What did he delight in? “saith one. Evidently he delighted in God’s law. “Thy law is within my heart.” He resolved that the beauties of the law of the Lord should be displayed by being embodied in his own life, and that its claims should be vindicated by his own death. To achieve this, he delighted to come and keep it and honour it by an obedience both active and passive. He delighted in God’s will also, and that is somewhat more; for law is the expression of will, and this may be altered; but the will of the great King never changes. Our Lord delighted to carry out all the purposes and desires of the Most High God. He so delighted in the will of God that he came to do it, and to bear it, “by the which will we are sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.”

He delighted also in God. He took an intense delight in glorifying the Father. He came to reveal the Father, and make him to be be loved of men. He did all things to please God. Moreover, he took a delight in lis; and here, though the object of his love is less, the love itself is heightened by the conspicuous condescension. The Lord Jesus took a deep delight in his people, whose names were written on his heart, and graven on the palms of his hands. His heart was fixed on their redemption, and therefore he would present himself as a sacrifice on their behalf. The people whom the Father gave him from before the foundation of the world lay on his very soul; for them he had a baptism to be baptized with, and he was straitened till it was accomplished. He gave himseK no rest till he had left both joy and rest to ransom his own.

May I go a step fui’ther and say that he had an actual delight in his coming among men ‘^ “I delight to do thy will, 0 my God” — not merely to think of doing it. When our Lord was here, he was the most blessed of men. Do you start? Do you remind me that he was “a man of sorrows “? I grant you that none was more afflicted; but I still stand to it, that within him dwelt a joy of the highest order. To him it was joy to be in sorrow, and honour to be put to shame. Do you think that lightens our estimate of his self-denial and disinterestedness? Nay, it adds weight to it. Some people fancy that there is no credit in. doing a thing unless you are miserable in doing it. Nay, brethren that is the very reverse. Obedience which is unwillingly offered and causes no joy in the soul, is not acceptable. We must serve God with our heart, or we do not serve him. Obedience rendered without delight in rendering it is only half obedience. You shall say what you will about the greatness of my Lord’s agonies. You shall never go too far in your estimate of his unfathomable griefs; but going with you to the full in it all, I shall take liberty still to say that he had within himself a fountain of joy, which enabled him to endure the cross, and even to despise the shame. Blessed among men was he, even when he was made a curse for us! AVith delight he gave himself for us, and made a cheerful surrender of himself, that he might be the ransom for many. The text is express upon that fact.

And all this because our Lord came xvith such intense heartiness. He says, “Yea, thy law is within my heart.” Our Lord is most thorough in all that he does. His work is never slovenly, nor in a half-hearted way. He does not even sit on the well and talk to a poor woman, but what his heart is there. He does not go into a fisherman’s hut, but what his heart is there, and he heals the sick one. He does not sit down to supper with his followers, but what his heart is there, and he reveals his love. I wish we were always at home when the Lord calls for us! Sometimes we are all abroad, and our heart is away from the service of our Eather; but he loved the Lord with all his heart, and mind, and strength. For us he gave his whole being, rejoicing to redeem us. He was always intense. Whether he preached or practised, Jesus was all there and always there. Hence his delight; for what a man does with his heart he delights to do. These two senteucesare melodious of joy to my ear. “I delight to do thy will, 0 my God: yea, thy law is within my heart.”

Hear this one other word. It is all done now. Jesus has fulfilled, the Father’s will in the salvation in the midst of his ransomed ones. And shall I tell you, need I tell you, what must be the delight, thi- heavenly joy of our Lord., now that the tvork is finished? He is now thefocus, the centre, the source of bliss. What must be his own delight! We often say of the angels that they rejoice over one sinner that repenteth. I doubt not that they do, but the Bible does not say so. The Bible saj’s, “There is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner that repenteth.” What means the presence of the angels? Why, that the angels see the joy of Christ when sinners repent. Hear them say to one another, “Behold the Father’s face! How he rejoices! Gaze on the countenance of the Son! What a heaven of delight shines in those eyes of his! Jesus wept for these sinners, but now he rejoices over them. How resplendent are the nail-prints to-day, for the redeemed of the Lord’s death are believing and repenting! That blessed countenance which is always as a sun, shineth in the fulness of its strength, now that he sees of the travail, of his soul.” He who suffered feels a joy unsearchable, v

*’ The first-bom sons of light

Desire in vain its depths to see:
They cannot read the mystery —

The length, the breadth, the height.”

Oh, the joy of triumphant love! The joy of the crucified, whose prepared body is the body of his glory as once it was the body of hishumiliation! In that mauhood he still rejoices, and delights to do the will of the Father.

My time has fled, and yet I am expected to say something about missions. What shall I say? My brothers, sisters, all of you, do you know anything about the truths I have spoken? Then go and tell the heathen that the Lord is come. Here is a message worth the telling. Mary Magdalene, and the other Maries, haste to tell the disciples that the Lord had risen; will you not go and tell them that he has come down to save? “Lo, I come,” saith he. Will you not take up his words, and go to the people who have never heard of him, and say, “Lo, he has come.” Tell the Ethiopians, the Chinese, the Hindoos, and all the islands of the sea that God has come hither to save men, and has taken a prepared body, that he might give to Grod all he required, and all that he desired, that sinful men might be accepted in the Beloved, with whom God the Father is well pleased. Go, and take to the heathen this sacred Book. “In the volume of the book it is written of him.” Do not begin to doubt the Book yourself. Why should you send missionaries to teach them about a book in which 3’-ou do not yourself believe? Tell the nations that “In the volume of the book it is written of him.” Believe this Book, and spread it. Help Bible societies, and all such efforts; and aid missionary societies, which carrj’ the Book and proclaim the Saviour. The men of the Book of God are the men of God, such as the world needs. Bid such men go and open the Book of God, and teach the nations its blessed news. Go, dear friends, and assure the heathen that there is happiness in obedience to God. So the Saviour found it. He delighted in God’s will, even to the death, and they will also know delight as in their measures they bow before the authority of the Word and the will of the one living and true God, the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob. Jehovah, the I AM, must be worshipped, for beside him there is none else. Give glory unto God, whom our Lord Jesus has come to glorify. Amen.

Portion of Scripture read before Sermon — Psalm xl.

Hymns from “Our Own Hymn Book” — 383, 271, 229.

“LO, I COME”: APPLICATION.

Delivered on Lord’s-day Morning, May 3rd, 1891, by
AT THE METROPOLITAN TABERNACLE, NEWINOTON.

‘•Then said I, Lo, I come.” — Psalm xl. 7.

To my great sorrow, last Sunday night I was unable to preach. I had prepared a sermon upon this text, with much hope of its usefulness; for I intended it to be a supplement to the morning sermon, which was a doctrinal exposition. The evening sermon was intended to be practical, and to commend the whole subject to the attention of enquiring sinners. I came here feeling quite fit to preach, when aa overpowering nervousness oppressed me, and I lost all self-control, and left the pulpit in anguish. I come hither this morning with the same subject. I have been turning it over, and wondering why it was so. Peradventure, this sermon was not to be preached on that occasion, because God would teach the preacher more of his own feebleness, and cast him more fully upon the divine strength. That has certainlj’ been the effect upon my own heart. Perhaps, also, there are some here this morning who were not here last Lord’s-day evening, whom God intends to bless by the sermon. The people were not here, peradventure, for whom the eternal decree of God had designed the message, and they may be here now. You that are fresh to this place, should consider the strange circumstance, which never happened to me before in the forty years of my ministry; and you may be led ta enquire whether my bow was then unstrung that the arrow might find its ordained target in your heart. The two sermons will now go forth together from the press; and perhaps, going together, they may prove like two hands of love wherewith to embrace lost souls, and draw them to the Saviour, who herein saith, “Lo, I come.” God grant it may be so!

The times when our Lord says, “Lo, I come,” have all a family likeness. There are certain crystals which assume a regular shape, and if you break them, each fragment will show the same conformation; if you were to dash them to shivers, every particle of the crystal would be still of the same form. Now the goings forth of Christ which were of old, and his coming at Calvary, and that great advent when he

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shall come a second time to judge the earth in righteousness, all these have a likeness the one to the other. But there is a coming of what I may call a lesser sort, when Jesus cries “Lo, I come” to each individual sinner, and brings a revelation of pardon and salvation; and this has about it much which is similar to the great ones. My one desire this morning is to set forth the Lord Jesus as saying to you, as once he did to me, “Lo, I come.” Still he cries to the weak, destitute, forlorn, hopeless sinner, “Lo, I come.” I shall talk about that coming, and hope that you will experience it now, and thus be able to follow me in what I say. I speak to the unconverted mainly; but while I do so I shall hope to be refreshing the grateful memories of those already saved; but this will all depend upon the working of the Spirit of God. To him, then, lift up your hearts in prayer.

I. I will commence with this observation: the Lord Christ has TIMES OF HIS FIRST COMINGS TO MEN; “Then Said I, Lo, I come.”

What are these times? Mayhap some here present have reached this season, and this very day is the time of blessing when the text shall be f idfilled: “Then said I, Lo, I come.” Gro with me to the first record in the volume of the Book, when it was said that he should come. You will find it in the early chapters of Grenesis.

Jesus said, “Lo, I come “when tnati’s prohation icas a failure. Man in the Garden of Eden had every advantage for obedience and life. He had a perfect nature, created without bias towards evil, and he was surrounded with every inducement to continue loyal to his Maker. He was placed under no burdensome law. The precept was simple and plain: “Of every tree of the garden thou may est freely eat: but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.” Only one tree was reserved: all the rest were given up to be freely enjoyed. In a very short time — some think it was on the first day, but that we do not know — our mother Eve ate of the fruit, and father Adam followed her, and thus human probation ended in total failure. They were weighed in the balances, and found wanting: “Adam being in honour continued not.” At that point we read in the volume of the Book that the Seed of the woman should bruise the serpent’s head. Then our Redeemer said, “Lo, I come.” Hearken to me, my friend: you also have had your probation, as you have thought it to be. You quitted your father’s roof with every hoj)e, your mother judged you to be of a most amiable character, and your friends expected to see in you one whose life would honour the family. You thought so yourself. Yomprobation has reversed that hope: you have turned out far other than you should have been; and looking back upon the whole of your life to this moment, you ought to be ashamed. It has been a terrible breaking down for you, and for all who know you; and you are sitting in this place feeling, “Yes, it is so; the tests have proved me to be as a broken reed. I am under condemnation by reason of my transgressions against God.” How rejoiced I am to tell you that, at such a time when you are conscious that you are a dead failure, Jesus says, “Lo, I come!” If you had not been a failure you would not have wanted him, and he never comes as a superfluity; but now in your complete break-down you must have him or perish, and in infinite pity bib

he cries, “Lo, I come.” Is not this good news for you? Believe it and live.

That also was a time when man’s clever dealings with the devil had turned out a great failure. The serpent came and said, “God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.” How craftily he put it! How cunningly he insinuated that God was jealous of what man might become, and was keeping him back from a nobler destiny! He even dared to say, “Ye shall not surely die,” thus giving the Lord the lie direct. He seemed to say — His threat is a mere bugbear, a thing to scare you from a great advance in knowledge and position. “Ye shall not surely die.” Eve, in her supposed wisdom, was not able to cope with the serpent’s subtlety. ‘’And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat.” The devil had played his cards so well that man was left bankruj)t of virtue, bankrupt of happiness, bankrupt of hope. Then, in the volume of the Book, it was written, “I said, Lo, I come.” Yes, in the hour when hellish falsehood had robbed man of everything. No man hath yet dealt with the devil without being a loser. The arch-deceiver promises very fairly; but he lies from beginning to end. I know he yromised you pleasure unbounded, and liberty unrestrained. Now, the pleasure is burnt out, and the ashes of that which once blazed and crackled, are terrible to look upon. As for liberty, where is it? You have become the bond-slave of sin. You were to enjoy life, and lo, 3’ou are plunged in death! It may be, there are in this house jDersons who bear in their bodies the marks, not of the Lord Jesus, but of the devil’s temptations. He has made you so to sin that your bones are filled with the sins of your youth; and you know it. He needs a long spoon who eats out of the same dish as the devil, and your spoon has not been long enough. Sin has overreached and betrayed you; and you stand trembling before God as the result of having listened to the falsehoods of hell, and having rejected the commands of heaven. Supposing such a person to be present — and I feel sure he is — I pray that he may hear my text as from the Lord Jesus himself. “Then said I, Lo, I come.” The devil has trodden you down, but Jesus comes to raise you up. Your paradise is lost, and by him it is to be restored. Jesus has come to give repentance and remission of sins. That crafty head which deceived you, the Lord Jesus has broken; he came for this purpose. If you had not been betrayed, you would not have needed a deliverer; but your misery has made room for his mercy. Not while Adam is perfect in paradise is there any news of the Seed of the woman bruising the serpent’s head; but after the serpent has done his deceitful work, and has ruined the race, then we hear that ancient gospel of God, and see the sole hope of fallen man. Here is good cheer for you who look with shame upon your foolish yielding to Satan’s deceits. You are caught as silly birds in a snare; you have been as foolish as the fish of the sea which are taken in a net; but when you are captives, Christ comes to be your Liberator, and God commends his love towards you in that while you are yet sinners Christ died for the ungodly.

Further than this, when we find the first promise of our Lord’s coming, ‘’ in the volume of the Book,” we find that mans covering teas a failure. The guilty pair had gathered the leaves of the fig-tree, and had made themselves aprons, for they knew that they were naked. This was the first fruit of that boasted tree of knowledge, and it is the principal one to this day. Their scant coverlet contested them. for a little while; but when the voice of the Lord God was heard in the garden they confessed that their aprons were good for nothing; for Adam owned that he was afraid because he was naked, and that therefore he had hidden himself in the thick groves of the garden. It is easy to make a covering which pleases us for a season; but self-righteousness, presumption, pretended infideKty, and fancied natural excellence — all these things are like green fig-leaves, which shrivel up before long, lose their freshness, and are rather an exposure than a covering. It may be that my hearer has found his imaginary virtues failing him. It was when our first parents knew that they were naked that the Saviour said, “Lo, I come.” My downcast hearer, if you are no longer in your own esteem as good as you used to be; if you can no longer hide the fact that you have broken God’s law, and deserve his wrath; if you no longer believe the devil’s lie that you shall suffer no penalty, but may even be the better for sin, then the Lord the Saviour says to you, “Lo, I come.” To you, 0 naked sinner, shivering in your own shame, blushing scai-let with conviction — to you he comes. When you have nothing left of your own, he comes to be your robe of righteousness, wherein you may stand accepted with God.

That first news of the coming Champion came at a time when all man’s pleas were failures. Adam had thrown the blame on Eve — “The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat.” Eve had also thrown the blame on the serpent; but the Lord God had silenced all such excuses, and driven them from their refuges. He had made them feel their guilt, and had pronounced upon them the inevitable sentence; and then it was that he spake of the “Seed of the woman.” Here was man’s first, and last, and best hope. So too, my friend, when you dare no longer plead your innocence, nor mention extenuations and excuses, then Jesus comes in. If conscience oppresses you so sorely that you cannot escape from it; if it be so that all you can say is “Guilty, Wilfully Guilty,” then Jesus comes. If you neither blame your surroundings, nor your companions, nor the providence of God, nor your physical weakness, nor anything else, but just take all the blame to yourself because you cannot help doing so, then Jesus comes in. Verily you have sinned against God, against your parents, against your fellow-men, against light, against knowledge, against conscience, and against the Holy Ghost; no wonder, therefore, that you stand speechless, unable to offer any plea by way of self-justification. It is in that moment of shame and confusion that the Saviour says, “Lo, I come.” For such as you are he is an Advocate. When a sinner cannot plead for himself, Christ pleads for him; when his excuses have come to an end, then will the Lord put away his sin, through his own great eacrifice. Is not this a precious gospel word?

When our Lord did actually arrive, fulfilling the text by being born of a woman, it was tohen man’s religion had proved a failure. Sacrifices and offerings had ceased to be of wtxy value: God had put them away as a weariness to him. The scribes and the Pharisees, with all their phylacteries and wide-bordered garments, were a mere sham. There seemed to be no true religion left upon the earth. Then said Christ, “Lo, I come.” There was never a darker thirty years than when Herod slew the innocents, and the chief priests and scribes pursued the Son of God, and at last nailed him to the tree. It was then that Jesus came to us to redeem us by his death. Do I speak to any man here whose religion has broken down? You have observed a host of rites and ceremonies: you were christened in your infancy, you were duly confirmed, you have taken what you call “the blessed sacrament”; or it may be you have sat always in the most plain of meeting-houses, and listened to the most orthodox of preachers, and you have been amongst the most religious of religious people; but now, at length, the Spirit of God has shown you that all these performances and attendances are worthless cobwebs which avail you nothing. You see now that —

*’ Not all the outward forms on earth,

Nor rites that God has given,
Nor will of man, nor blood, nor birth,

Can raise a soul to heaven.”

You are just now driven to despair, because the palace of your imaginary excellence has vanished like the baseless fabric of a vision. If I had told you that your religiousness was of no value, j’ou would have been very angry with me, and perhaps you would have said, “That is a bigoted remark, and you ought to be ashamed of making it.” But now the Spirit of God has told it you, and you feel its force: he is great at convincing of sin. When the Spirit of truth comes to deal with the religiousness of the flesh, he withers it in a moment. All religion which is not spiritual is worthless. All religion which is not the supernatural product of the Holy Ghost is a fiction. One breath from the Spirit of God withers all the beauty of our pride, and destroys the comeliness of our conceit; and then, when our own religion is dashed to shivers, the Lord Jesus comes in, saying, “Lo, I come.” He delights to come in his glorious personality, when the Pharisee can no longer say, “God, I thank thee, that I am not as other men “; and when the once bold fisherman is crying, “Lord, save, or I perish.” If you feel that you need something infinitely better than Churchianity, or Dissenterism, or Methodism — in fact, that you need Christ himself to be formed in you — then to you, even to you, Jesus says, “Lo, I come.” When man is at his worst, Christ is seen at his best. The Lord walks to us on the sea in the middle watch of the night. He draws nigh to those souls which draw nigh to death. When you part with self you meet with Christ. When no shred of hope remains, then Jesus says, “Lo, I come.”

Once more. The Lord Jesus is to come a second time; and when will he come? He will come whe7i mans hope is a failure. He will come when iniquity abounds, and the love of many hath waxed cold. He will come when dreams of a golden age shall be turned into the di-ead reality of abounding evil. Do not dream that the world will go on improvi-.Tg’ and improving, and that the improvement “will naturally culminate in the millennium. No such thing. It may grow better for a while, better under certain aspects; but, afterwards the power of the better element will ebb out like the sea, even though each wave should look like an advance. That day shall not come except there be a falling away first. Even the wise virgins will sleep, and the men of the world will be, as in the days of Noah, eating and drinking, marrying and being given in marriage. On a sudden, the Lord will come as a thief in the night. The deluge of fire will find men as unprepared as did the deluge of water. He will come taking vengeance on his adversaries. When things wax worse and worse we see the tokens of his speedy coming. He will shortly appear, for the sky is darkening. When every hojpe will seem blotted out, and nothing but grim ages of anarchy and ungodliness are to be expected, then our Deliverer will come. When the tale of bricks was doubled in Egypt, Moses came; and when the world attains to its utmost unbelief and iniquity, Jesus will come. So at this moment my hearer may be saying, “I cannot be worse than I am; if I am not actually in hell already, yet I feel a fire within which tortures my soul. The sword of vengeance hangs over my head suspended by a single hair. I tremble to live, and I fear to die. Ijost! Lost! Lost! I am past hope!” This is the time for my text: “Then said I, Lo, I come.” He who is able to save to the uttermost appears to the soul when every other hope disappears. In your deep distress I see a token for good. You are now reduced to spiritual death, and now I trust the eternal life will visit you.

Now all this I put before you in simple language, believing what I say, and trusting that if I describe your case, you will know that I mean it for you. I have heard of a preacher who was so fearful lest he should be thought personal, that he said to his congregation, “Lest any of you should think that what I have said was meant for you, I would observe that the sermon I am preaching was prepared for a congregation in Massachusetts.” I can plead nothing of the sort. I refer to you, my hearer, in the most pointed manner. I will attend to Massachusetts, if ever the Lord sends me there; but just now / mean you. Oh, that you may have grace to take home these thoughts to yourselves; for if you do so, they will by the Spirit’s power bring the light of hope into your souls!

II. Secondly I would remark that Christ coirES to sinners in the GLORY OF HIS PERSON: “Then said I, Lo, I come.” Note that glorious I! Have you not seen people engaged in urgent work who did not understand their business? Apprentices, and other unskilful people, are muddling time away. They are making bad worse, and running great risk. Perhaps a great calamity will occur if the work is not done well and quickly, A first-rate worker is sent for. See, the man has come who understands the business. He cries, “Let me come 1 Stand out of my way! You are on the wrong tack: let me do it myself!” You have not blamed him for egotism, for the thing needed to be done, and he could do it, and the others could not. Everybody recognized the master workman, and gave place to him. The announcement of his coming was the end of the muddle, and the signal of hope.

“liO, 1 come”: application. 519

Even so Jesus comes to you sinners, and his presence is your salvation. He says, “Lo, I come.” Yv’hat does he mean ‘?

He means, the setting of all else on one side. There is the priest — he has not helped you much; he may go, for Jesus says, “Lo, I come.” There are your own efforts and doings; there are your feelings and thinkings; there are your ceremonies and austerities; there are 3’our prayers and tears; there are your hearings and readings — all these must be laid aside as grounds of confidence, and Jesus alone must be your trust. He can do for you what none of these can. You are trying to work yourself up to repentance and faith, and you cannot succeed. Let im come, and he will bring every good thing with him. It is glorious to see our Lord throwing down all our bowing walls and tottering fences, and to hear him cry, “Behold, I lay in Zion for a foundation.” Everything else vanishes before his perfect salvation.

Before him there is a setting of self aside. You have been your own confidence. What you could feel, or do, or think, or resolve, had become the ground of your confidence; but now Jesus puts seK down, and he is himself exalted. By working yourself to death, you cannot effect your own salvation. Lo, Jesus comes to save you. You cannot weave yourseK a garment. Lo, he comes to clothe you from head to foot with his own seamless rolae of righteousness. He annihilates self that he may fiU all things.

Here is a glorious setting of himself at our side and in our place. Mr. ][oody tells a story, which I would fain hope may be true; for one would like to hear something good about a Czar of Russia, and especially about our once enemy, the Emperor Nicholas. The story concerns a soldier in the barracks who was much distressed by his heavy debts. He was in despair, for he owed a great deal of money, and could not tell where to get it. He took a piece of paper, and made a list of his debts, and underneath the list he wrote, “Who will pay these debts? “He then lay down on the barrack bed, and fell asleep, with the paper before him. The Emperor of Russia passed by, and, taking up the paper, read it, and being in a gracious mood signed at the bottom, ‘• Nicholas.” Was not that a splendid answer to the question? When the soldier woke up and read it, he could scarcely believe his own eyes. “Who will pay these debts?” was the despairing question. “Nicholas” was the all-suf&cient answer. So are we answered, Who will bear our sins? The grand reply is “Jesus.” He puts his own name to our liabiKties, and in effect, that he may meet them, he says, “Lo, I come.” Your debt of sin is discharged when you believe in Christ Jesus. “Without shedding of blood is no remission;” but the blood of Jesus Christ, God’s dear Son, cleanseth us from all sin. You are not now to bear your own sins. Behold the scape-goat, who carries them away into the wilderness! Yea, Jesus says, “Lo, I come!” He takes our sins upon himself, he bears their penalty, and we go free. Blessed word — “Lo, I come “: I come to take your weight of sin, your burden of punishment. I come to be made a curse for you, that you may be made the righteousness of God in me. Sinner, stand out of the way, and let Jesus appear for you, and fill your place! He sets you on one side, and then he sets himself where you have been. Jesus is now the one pillar on which to lean, the one foundation on which to build, the one and only rest of our weary souls.

He sets himself where we can see him; for he cries, “Zo, I come “; that is to say, “See me come.” He comes openly, that we may see him clearly. How I wish the Lord would reveal himself at this moment to each one of those who are weary of earth, of self, of sin, and possibly even weary of life itself! Oh, if you could but see Jesus standing in your room and stead, you would have faith to stand in his place, and so become “accepted in the Beloved “! 0 Lord, hear my prayer, and cause poor hearts to see thee descending from the skies, to uplift sinners from the dark abyss! Holy Spirit, touch that young man’s eyes with heavenly salve, that he may see where salvation lies. Deal with that poor woman’s dim eyes also, that she may perceive the Lord Christ, and find peace in him. Jesus cries, “Lo, I come! Look unto me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth.”

“There is life for a look at the Crucified One;
There is life at this moment for thee.
Then look, sinner — look unto him, and be saved — Unto him who was nail’d to the tree.’’

Should 3’ou even lie in all the despair and desolation which I described, 1 would persuade you to believe in Jesus. Trust him, and you shall find him all that you want.

Our Lord sets himself to he permanently our all in all. When he came on earth, he did not leave his work till he had finished it. Even when he rose to glorj’, he continued his service for his chosen, living to intercede for them. Jesus was a Saviour nineteen hundred years ago, and he is a Saviour still; and he will be a Saviour until all the chosen race shall have been gathered home. He tells us, “I said, Lo, I come “; but he does not say,” I said, I will go away, and quit the work.” Our Lord’s ear is bored, and he goes out no more from the service of salvation. It is not written of any penitent souls, “Ye shall seek me, but shall not find me “; but it is written,” If thou seek him, he will be found of thee.” 0 my hearer, you are now in the place where the gospel is preached to you — yes, to you, for we are sent to preach the gospel to every creature; and though you should be the worst, and most benighted, and most guilty of all the creatures out of hell, yet you are a creature, and we preach Christ to you. 0 poor heart, may the Lord Jesus say to you “Lo, I come! “for he comes to stay, — to stay until he has worked salvation in you as he has worked out salvation for you. He will not leave a believer till he has presented him spotless before the throne of God with exceeding joy. I wish I could make all this most clear and plain. You are altogether ruined by your own fault, and you cannot undo the evil. You have done all you can, and it has come to nothing. You are steeped in sin up to your throat; yea the filth has gone over your head: you are as one drowned in black waters. Despairing one, cast not your eyes around to seek for a friend, for you will look in vain to men. No arm can rescue you, save one; and that is the arm of Jesus, who now cries” Lo, I come.’* Set everji;hing else on one side, and trust yourself with the Saviour, Christ the Lord.

III. Oh, that many may be comforted while I dwell on a third head! Christ ik his coming is his own introduction.

Rere our Lord is his own herald, “Lo, I come.” He does not wait for an eloquent preacher to act as master of the ceremonies to him: he introduces himself. Therefore even I, the simplest talker on earth, may prove quite sufficient for my Lord’s purpose if he will graciously condescend to bless these plain words of mine. It is not I that say that Jesus comes, but in the text our Lord himself declares, “Then said I, Lo, I come.” You need not do anything to draw Christ’s attention to you; it is Christ who draws your attention to himself. Do you see this? You are the blind bat; and he is all eye towards you, and bids you look on him. I hear you cry, “Lord, remember me,” and I hear him answer, ‘* Soul, remember me.” He bids you look on him when you beseech him to look on you.

Se comes when quite unsought, or sought for in a wrong way. To many men and women Christ has come though they had not even desired him. Yea, he has come even to those who hated him. Saul of Tarsus was on his way to worry the saints at Damascus, but Jesus said, “Lo, I come “; and when he looked out of heaven he turned Saul, the persecutor, into Paul, the apostle. The promise is fulfilled, “I was found of them that sought me not I was made manifest unto them that asked not after me.” Herein is the glorious sovereignty of his love fully exercised, and grace reigns supreme. “Lo, I come,” is the announcement of majestic grace which waiteth not for man, neither tarrieth for the sons of men.

Our Lord Jesus is the way to himselj. Did you ever notice that? He comes himself to us, and so he is the way by which we meet him. He is our rest, and the way to our rest; he says, “I am the way.” You want to know how to get to Christ? You have not to get to Christ, for he has come to you. It is well for you to come to Christ; but that is only possible because Christ has come to you. Jesus is near you: near you now. Backslider, he comes to you! Wandering soul, roving to the very brink of perdition, the good Shepherd cries, “Lo, I come.” He is the way to himseK.

Remember, also, that he is the blessing which he brings. Jesus not only gives life and resurrection, but he says, “I am the resurrection and the life,” Christ is salvation, and everything needful to salvation is in him. If he comes, all good comes loith him, or rather in him. An enquirer once said to a minister, “The next step for me is to get a deeper conviction of sin.” The minister said, “No such thing, my friend: the next step is to trust in Jesus, for he says, Come unto me.” To come to Jesus, or rather to receive Jesus who has come to us, is the one essential step into eternal salvation. Though our Lord does say, “Come unto me,” he has preceded it with this other word, “Lo, I come.” Poor cripple, if you cannot come to Jesus, ask him to come to you; and he will. Here you lie, and you have been for years in this case; you have no man to put you into the pool, and it would do you no good if he did; but Jesus can make you whole, and V e is here. You cannot stir hand or foot because of spiritual paralysis; but your case is not hopeless. Listen to my Lord in the text, “Then said I, Lo, I come.” He has no paralysis. He can come, leaping over the mountains of division. I know my Lord came to me, or I should never have come to him: why should he not come to you? I came to him because he came to me.

“He drew me, and I followed on.
Charmed to confess the voice divine.”

“Why should he not draw us also? Is he not doing so? Yield to the pressure of his love.

“Then said I, Lo, I come.” You see our Lord is his own spokesman. He says to me, “Gro and tell those peoyle about my coming ‘’; and I gladly do so; but you will forget my words, and refuse to accept the Coming One. Your consciences will be unawakened, your hearts unmoved: I fear it will be so. But if this text be fulfilled concerning our Lord this day — “Then said I, Lo, I come” — you will hear him. If he speaks he is himself the Almighty Word, and his voice will reach your hearts, and accomplish his purpose. Dear Christian people, join with me in this prayer: Lord, speak to thy chosen ones that lie here in their death-like despair, far oil from thee, and say to each one of them, “Lo, I come.” 0 downcast soul, this is jomv morning: this is the set time to favour you: this day is salvation come to your house and to your heart. Make haste and come down from the tree of your frivolity or your self-righteousness. Receive the Lord Jesus, for to-day he must abide in your house and in your heart: the hour for the imperial “must” of the eternal jDurpose has arrived. Grod grant it may be so! May this be an hour of which Jesus shall declare, — “Then said I, Lo, I come!”

IV. Our next point is this — Christ, to cheer us, reveals his reasons FOR coming. Only a few words on this. Note the rest of the verse: “Lo, I come: in the volume of the book it is written of me.” When “we were yet without strength, in due time Christ died for the ungodly, because it was the due time according to covenant purposes. Christ comes to a guilty sinner, just as he once came to a manger and a stable, because so it was appointed. There is nothing for him to get, but everything for him to give; but he comes because so it ia written in the volume of the divine decrees —

“Thus the eternal counsel ran, — Almighty grace, arrest that man!”

Therefore in love the Saviour appears to the sinner, and by grace arrests him in his mad career.

It is his Father’’ s will. Christ’s coming to save a soul is with his Father’s full consent and aid. The Father wills that you who believe in him, lost though you be, should now be saved, and Jesus comes to do the will of the Father.

He comes because his heart is set on you. He loves you, and so he hastens to your rescue. Your salvation is his delight. Though your soul is sunk in a sea of need, and you are in despair because of that need, Jesus loves you, and comes to meet your case. The best of all is that Jesus loves you. One asked an old man of ninety, “Do you love Jesus?” and the old man answered with a smile, “I do, indeed; but I can tell you something better than that.” His friend said, “Something better than loving Jesus! What is that?” The old “lo, I come”: application. 52S’

disciple replied, “He loves we.” 0 soul, I wish you could see this fact, which is indeed better than your love to Jesus, namely, his love to you! Because he loved his redeemed from before the foundation of the world, therefore in due time he says, “Lo, I come.”

The fact is, you have need, and he has love, and so he comes. There is no hope for you unless he does come, and that is why he comes. If you had a penny of your own, he would not give you his purse; if you had a rag of your own, he would not give you his robe; if you had a breath of your own, he would not give you his life. But now you are naked, and poor, and miserable, and lost, and dead, Jesus reveala himself, and you read concerning him, “Then said I, Lo, I come.” He gives you his reasons — reasons not in yourself, but all in his grace. There is no good in you; there is no reason in you why the Lord should save you; but because of his free, spontaneous, rich, sovereign, almighty grace, he leaps out of heaven, he descends to earth, he plunges into the grave to pluck his beloved from destruction.

Y. Here is my last word: Christ’s cojiing is the best plea fob OUH EEOEiviNG HIM, and receiving him now. 0 sirs, remember you have not to raise the question whether he will come or not. He is come. You have not to say, How can I come to him? He comes to you. You do want a Mediator between your soul and God; but you do not want any mediator between yourself and Jesus; for he says, “Lo, I come.” To you in all your filthiness, in all your condemnation, in all your hopelessness, he comes. “Wait not for anybody to introduce you to him, or him to you; he has introduced himself, and here is his card — “Then said I, Lo, I come.” No pleas are needed to persuade him to come to you, for he says, “Lo, I come.” Though 3’ou cannot think of a single argument why he should appear to you in mercy, he does so appear. It is written, “I will have mercy upon her that had not obtained mercy; and I will say to them which were not my people, Thou art my people; and they shall say. Thou art my God.” 0 words of wondrous grace! Our gracious Lord does not wait for our entreaties; but of his own accord he says, “Lo, I come.” Without asking you, and without your asking him, he puts in an appearance in the sovereignty of his grace.

No search is needed to find the Lord, for he comes in manifested grace, and calls upon us to see him. “I have long been searching for Christ” murmiir.i one. What! seeking for the sun at noonday? Jesus is not lost. It IS you that are lost, and he is searching for you. He says, “Lo, I couie “: it is you that will not come. Still one declares, that he has been seeking the Lord Jesus for many a day. This is sadly strange, for Jesus is near. “Say not in thine heart, AVlio shall ascend into heaven? or. Who shall descend into the deep? The word is nigh thee, even in thy mouth, and in thy heart, that if thou wilt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thy heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved.” If thou believest in the Lord Jesus Christ, thou shalt be saved. Searching after Christ? Nay, verily he saith, “Lo, I come.”

Moreover, no waiting is needed, and no preparation is to be made by you. Why do j’ou wait? HE does not wait, but cries, “Lo, I come!” “I will get ready for Christ”, say you; but it is too late to talk so,,

when he cries, “Lo, I am come.” Receive him! If you are in yourself Badly unready, yet he himself will make everything ready for himself. Only open wide the door, and let him in. Do you say, “But I am ashamed ‘’? Be ashamed. He bids you be ashamed, and be confounded, while he declares, “I do not this for your sakes.” Yet be not so ashamed as to commit another shameful deed by shutting the door in your Redeemer’s face. Shut not out your own mercy. A pastor in Edinburgh, in going round his district, knocked at the door of a poor woman, for whom he had brought some needed help; but he received no answer. When next he met her, he said to her, “I called on Tuesday at your house.” She asked, “At what time?” “About eleven o’clock; I knocked, and you did not answer. I was disappointed, for I called to give you help.” “Ah, sir!” said she, “I am very sorry. I thought it was the man coming for the rent, and I could not pay it, and therefore I did not dare to go to the door.” Many a troubled soul thinks that Jesus is one who comes to ask of us what we cannot give; but indeed he comes to give us all things. His errand is not to condemn, but to forgive. Miss not the charity of Grod through unbelief. Run to the door, and say to your loving Redeemer, “Lord, I am not worthy that thou shouldest come under my roof; but as thou hast come to me, I welcome thee with all my heart.”

No assistance is wanted by Christ on your part. He does not come with half a salvation, and look to you to complete it. He does not come to bring you a robe half woven, which you are to finish. How could you finish it? Could the best saint in the world add anything to Christ’s righteousness? No good man would even dream of adding his home-spun to that raiment which is of wrought gold. What! are ■gou to make up the deficient ransom price? Is it deficient? Would you bring your clods of mud into the royal treasury, and lay them down side by side with sapphires? Would you help Christ? Go, yoke a mouse with an elephant! Go harness a fly side by side with an archangel. But dream not of yoking yourself with Christ.

He says, “Lo, I come”, and I trust you will reply, “My Lord, if thou art come, all is come, and I am complete in thee.”

“Thou, O Christ, art all I want,
More than all in thee I find.”

Receive him: receive him at once. Dear children of God, and sinners that have begun to feel after him, say with one accord, “Even so, come quickly. Lord Jesus.” If he says, “Lo, I come,” and the Spirit and the bride say, Come; and he that heareth says. Come, and he that is athirst comes, and whosoever will is bidden to come and take the water of life freely; then let us join the chorus of comes, and come to Christ ourselves. “Behold, the Bridegroom cometh; go ye out to meet him!” Ye who most of all need him, be among the first and gladdest, as you hear him say, “Lo, I come.”

All that I have said will be good for nothing as to saving results unless the Holy Ghost shall apply it with power to your hearts. Join with me in prayer that many may see Jesus just now, and may at once behold and accept the present salvation which is in him.