The Conqueror from Edom

“Who is this that cometh from Edom, with dyed garments from rah?” — ISAIAH lxiii. 1.

THIS chapter of Isaiah opens in a strain of the loftiest prophetic poetry. A representative of Israel stands looking down one of the long ravines which open from the central mountain region of the country toward the val ley of the Jordan and the Dead Sea. As he watches he sees a stranger approaching him, who has crossed the val ley from the heights beyond, where the enemies and the heathen live, and is climbing up into the hills of Judea. It is an heroic figure. The stature is grand. The head is proud and high. The steps are free and stately. The garments are noble, and here and there upon them, staining and illustrating their brightness, are the marks of blood. The Genius of Israel, for so we may conceive of the first speaker, is filled with amazement and challenges the new-comer with this ringing question: “Who is this that cometh from Edom, with dyed garments from Bozrah? This that is glorious in his apparel, travelling in the greatness of his strength?” Then comes the answer: “I that speak in righteousness, mighty to save.” As he comes nearer the mysterious and awful stains upon his clothing become more clear, and the Genius questions him again: “Wherefore art thou red in thine apparel, and thy garments like him that treadeth in the winefat?” And then the great stranger answers, with the story of a struggle and a victory: “I have trodden the wine press alone, and of the people there was none with me; for I will tread them in mine anger and trample them in my fury, and their blood shall be sprinkled upon my garments, and I will stain all my raiment. For the day of vengeance is in mine heart, and the year of my redeemed is come. And I looked, and there was none to help; and I wondered that there was none to uphold: therefore mine own arm brought salvation unto me, and my fury it upheld me. And I will tread down the people in mine anger and make them drunk in my fury, and I will bring down their strength to the earth.”

What does it mean! — the prophetic Genius waiting, watching, and questioning; the mighty stranger coming fresh from victorious battle, with the robe red as if with the stain of grapes, coming up from Edom, with dyed garments from Bozrah? Edom, remember, was the country where the Israelites’ most inveterate enemies lived. No other nation pressed on them so constantly or gave them such continual trouble as the Edomites. And Bozrah was the capital city of Edom, the centre of its power. When the conqueror comes from Edom, then, and finds Israel anxious and eager upon the mountain, and shows her his stained robe in sign of the struggle which he has gone through, and then tells her that the fictory is complete, that because he saw that she had no defender he has undertaken her defence and trodden Edom under foot for her, we can understand something of the power and comfort of such a poetic vision to the Hebrew’s heart. There may have been some special event which it commemorated. Some special danger may have threatened on the side of the tumultuous Edomites, and some special unexpected deliverer may have appeared who saved the country, and was honored by this song of praise.

But every such special deliverance to the deep religious and patriotic feeling of the Jew had a much wider meaning. Every partial mercy to his nation always pointed to the one great mercy which was to embrace all others, to the coming of the Messiah, whose advent was to be the source of every good, and the cure of every evil. This larger strain sounds under all their Psalms of thankfulness or hope. In their darkest days every little ray of light was a stray gleam of this great sun-rising which was at hand. Every sound of success seemed like His far-off footstep. And so these words of Isaiah mount to a higher strain than any that could have greeted an Israelite warrior who might have made a successful incursion into Edomite soil. The prophet is singing of the victorious Messiah. He, that majestic figure that haunts all Hebrew history and makes it all poetic, — He it is that comes up from Edom, which stands here to represent the sum of all the foes of Israel, with stained garments that show the terribleness of the struggle, and with step and face that manifest the completeness of His victory. It is the triumph of the Messiah that is being sung.

This brings it, as you see, close to us. This Hebrew Messiah has come, and is more than the Hebrew Messiah: He is the Christian’s Christ, He is our Saviour. See how the old vision is elevated once more to a yet larger application. The victory of Christ, the destruction of evil by good, the conquest over the devil by the Son of God, at cost, with pain, so that as He comes forth His robes are red with blood; the redemption of mankind from sin by the divine and human Saviour, — this is the largest and completest meaning of the ancient vision. This is what the old poetry of Isaiah has to say to us. Let us look at this to-night and try to understand it. Let us try to get at some knowledge of the Saviour coming back from His victorious work with the blood-stains on His garments and the blessings of peace in His full hands to give to all His people.

I think that very often now this sounds strange and incomprehensible; this absorption of every struggle between the good and the evil that is going on in the world into the one great struggle of the life and death of Jesus Christ; but it follows necessarily from any such full idea as we Christians hold of what^Jesus Christ is and of what brought Him to this world. If He be really the Son of God, bringing in an utterly new way the power of God to bear on human life; if He be the natural creator-king of humanity, come for the salvation of humanity; then it would seem to follow that the work of salvation must be His and His alone: and if we see the process of salvation, the struggle of the good against the evil, going on all over the world, we shall be ready still to feel that it is all under His auspices and guidance; that the effort of any benighted soul in any darkest heathen land to get away from its sins, and cast itself upon an assured mercy of its God, is part of His great work, is to the full intelligent faith of the well-taught Christian believer just what the struggle of a blind plant underground to reach the surface is to the free aspiration of the oak-tree, which in the full glory of the sunlight readies out its eager branches toward the- glorious sun, — a result of the same power, and a contribution to the same victorious success. All forces strive after simplicity and unity. Operations in nature, in mechanics, in chemistry, which men have long treated as going on under a variety of powers, are gradually showing them selves to be the fruits of one great mightier power, which in many various forms of application is able to produce them all. This is the most beautiful development of our modern science. The Christian belief in Christ holds the same thing of the spiritual world, and unites all partial victories everywhere into one great victory which is the triumph of its Lord. Notice, I beg you, that on no other ground can Christianity stand with its exclusive claims, and Christianity is in its very nature exclusive. Some vagrant ship carries you over the waters and sets you down in some most heathen island, where no single ear has ever heard the first word about the incarnation, about the birth at Bethlehem or the death on Calvary. You live there long enough to get into the heart of those savage folk and understand them, you see what their souls are about, and lo, underneath the thick crust of savage life you find the same old eternal struggle of good and evil, of right and wrong, nay more, very blindly, very darkly, you find the same old reaching after God, and the same assurance that He is love and that He may show Himself in forgiveness, which you left behind you in the familiar streets and pews of Boston. What shall you say about it? That what is good in Boston is not good in your island? That good and evil change their characters with changing climates? That confuses your whole moral judgment. Shall you say that this good in the island comes of some local source, distinct from that which made the Christians good and brave and patient whom you used to know at home? That cuts the moral world to bits and leaves no unity and so no certainty or strength. What then? If I believe in Christ at home, I believe in Him off here. Not so strongly because in the dark, but yet strongly because it is His, here is the power of the human Christ at work. Once accept what is the central truth of operative Christianity, the power of an ever-present unseen Spirit, always manifesting Christ and making Him influential, and then it is not hard to see that, men being the same, open to the same influence everywhere, they may be and they are turned to the one same goodness by the power of the one same spirit of Christ.

Indeed here, in the susceptibility of all men to the same influences of the highest sort, there comes out the only valuable proof of the unity of the human race, I think. Demonstrate what you may about the diversity of origin or structure of humanity, so long as the soul capable of the great human struggle and the great human helps is in every man, the human race is one. On the other hand, demonstrate as perfectly as you will the identity of origin and structure of all humanity, yet if you find men so spiritually different in two hemispheres that the same largest obligations do not impress and the same largest loves do not soften them, what does your unity of the human race amount to? Here, it seems to me, Christ, in His broad appeal to all men of all races, is the true assertor of the only valuable human unity.

If this be so, then wherever there is good at work in the world, we Christians may see the progress of the struggle and rejoice already in the victory of Christ. It does us good. It enlarges and simplifies our thought of Christ’s religion. He shall conquer. The eye of faith already sees Him coming up out of Edom with the stains upon His garments and the step of the victor. He shall conquer. But when we say that, we are driven home to Him and Him alone as our religion. He, nothing else. I have no assurance that this Church, this form of worship, nay, even this minute faith which I believe in and which is very dear to me, — I have no assurance that this is to conquer all other churches, all other sects, and occupy the world. I feel very sure that Christ, before He attains His perfect victory, must throw His truth into new and completer forms than any it has yet assumed. I wait for those in perfect patience and without a fear, sure only of this one thing: that Christ will conquer, and in His victory, however it shall come, the old vision of the He brew prophet shall be stretched to cover the results of universal history, and so the whole world shall be saved in Him.

And now let us go on and look as far as we may into the method of this salvation; first for the world at large and then for the single soul, which of course is the point of infinitely the most importance to each of us. And in both let us follow the story of the old Jewish vision.

“Who is this that cometh from Edom?” Sin hanga on the borders of goodness everywhere, as just across the narrow Jordan valley Edom always lay threateningly upon the skirts of Palestine. How terribly constant it was. How it kept the people on a strain all the while. The moment that a Jew stepped across the border, the Edoraites were on him. The moment a flock or beast of his wandered too far, the enemy had seized him. If in the carelessness of a festival the Israelites left the border unguarded, the hated Edomites found it out and came swooping down just when the mirth ran highest and the sentinels were least careful. If a Jew’s field of wheat was specially rich, the Edomite saw the green signal from his hill-top, and in the morning the field was bare. There was no rest, no safety. They had met the chosen people on their way into the promised land, and tried to keep them out; and now that they were safely in, there they always hovered, wild, implacable, and watchful. There could be no terms of compromise with them. They never «lept. They saw the weak point in a moment; they struck it quick as lightning strikes. The constant dread, the nightmare, of Jewish history is this Edom lying there upon the border, like a lion cKouched to spring. There cannot be one great fight, or one great war, and then the thing done forever. It is an endless fight with an undying enemy!

Edom upon the borders of Judah. We open any page of human history and what do we see? There is a higher life in man. Imperfect, full of mixture, just like that mottled history of Hebrewdom; yet still it is in human history what Judea was in the old world, — the spiritual, the upward, the religious element; something that believes in God and struggles after Him. Not a page can you open but its mark is there. Sometimes it is an aspiration after civilization, sometimes it is a doctrinal movement, sometimes it is a mystical piety that is developed; sometimes it is social; sometimes it is ascetic and purely individual; sometimes it is a Socrates, sometimes it is a St. Francis, sometimes it is a Luther, sometimes it is a Florence Nightingale. It is there in some shape always: this good among the evil, this power of God among the forces of men, this Judah in the midst of Asia. But always right on its border lies the hostile Edom, watchful, indefatigable, inexorable as the redoubtable old foe of the Jews. If progress falters a moment, the whole mass of obstructive ignorance is rolled upon it. If faith leaves a loop-hole undefended, the quick eye of Atheism sees it from its watch-tower and hurls its quick strength there. If goodness goes to sleep upon its arms, sleepless wickedness is across the valley, and the fields which it has taken months of toil to sow and ripen are swept off in a night. Tell me, is not this the impression of the world, of human life, that you get, whether you open the history of any century or unfold your morning newspaper? The record of a struggling charity is crowded by the story of the prison and the court. The world waits at the church door* to catch the worshipper as he comes out. The good work of one centuiy relaxes a moment for a breathing spell, and the next century comes in with its licentiousness or its superstition. Always it is the higher life pressed, watched, haunted by the lower; always it is Judah with Edom at its gates. No one great battle comes to settle it forever: it is an endless fight with an undying enemy.

So in the great world. How is it in these little worlds, these hearts which we are carrying about? You have your good, your spirituality, your better life; something that bears witness of God. In every man’s heart there is a holy city, a Jerusalem, where, loud or muffled, in some voice from the altar or some light above the mercy-seat, the Heavenly Father bears testimony of His goodness and tempts us to Himself. It may be very dim, but there it is in all of us. There it is in you. Hence in all men the struggle of that good with a surrounding evil; the parable 01 the old Asiatic geography forever wrought out into hot, terrible life. Do you not know it, my friend, this Edom of the lower life hanging upon the borders of the Judea which is the better life in you? You mean to be pure; you want to be pure; but some day you venture a mile across the border of impurity by some low jest or foul indulgence, and who is the foe that seizes you and bears you off captive into the heart of his detestable dominion, where he keeps you prisoner, whence you come out, at last, only with a tottering body and a corrupted soul? You mean to be true; but once your truth sleeps on its guard, and the Edomite is ovetv the valley, and the lie is right in the very midst of your wsl-guarded truthfulness. You love humility; but some day your humility keeps a careless feast of self-confidence, and before you know it the shout of the- invader pride is in your ears. How evil crowds you. You cannot fight it out at once and have it done. You go on quietly for days and think the enemy is dead. Just when you are safest there he is again, more alive than ever. I am trying to tell the story of each ordinary life. I am trying to make you think of that bad that lurks sleeplessly by the side of every good. When did you ever do a good thing with that pure, sweet, clear, strong, and open confidence with which they must do holy things who do them in angelic freedom on the open plains of heaven, where from bright horizon to horizon there is nothing but safety and God? We live a spiritual life like the life that our fathers used to live here in New England, who always took their guns to church with them and smoothed down the graves of their beloved dead in the church-yard that the hostile and watchful Indians might not know how weak they were. It is the Saviour’s word, “Behold, I send you forth as sheep among wolves;” only the sheep and the wolf are both within us: Judah, with Edorn forever at its gate.

It is no wonder that just as Edom to the Jews became a great, terrible person, a giant lingering forever with hungry mouth .and watchful eyes to seize them and devour them at every exposure, so to men getting this idea of the vigilance and malignity of sin, sin too should have appeared a terrible person, and the human mind should have most readily adopted the scripture image of the Satan, the personal Devil, always waiting, watching, hating. It is no wonder that sin, just like Edom, should have stood out as one undying foe. The change of generations never broke its power. It was the same enemy with which their fathers and their grandfathers and their great-grandfathers fought. The dreadful conflict between Judah and Edom lasted on from age to age, always the same. It was an immortal enemy, an eternal war.

And so when we look back over life, how dreary some times it seems. What are men doing in the fifth century, or the tenth, or the fifteenth? The old familiar strife and hatred and crime which we know so well, how they burst out upon us with their hoarse fury the moment that we force open those old rusty doors. The Barbarians are massacring and pillaging in Italy. The Roman Emperors are slaughtering their subjects and dying them selves by poison. The Inquisition is doing its horrible work in Spain. This in public life; and then if any where you lift a little corner of the merciful cover of oblivion that has fallen upon private life, the same old tumult of distress and wickedness is there: poverty, temptation, jealousy, hatred, deceit, making the little tragedies of those old homes, just as they turn the decent houses along our decent streets to-day into nests of un clean birds. All the while, bright, open, sights of goodness, generosity, truth, self-devotion, godliness; these are the Judahs; but all the while the Edoms close beside them, just as we see them now.

And if you turn back and look at the history of your own life, which sometimes seems to you as if it had lasted as long as all the history of all the ages put together, what was it that began to break on you as a boy of ten, when you first began to realize yourself? Was it not a wonder whether you were meant toVbe good or bad, so terribly, and so equally, as it seeniedp the two powers were matched against each other in your life? How did your life look to you when you were a young man of twenty? If you had found that verse of St. Paul’s, did it not tell the whole story when you heard him cry, “When I would do good, evil is present with me “? And when you were the full-grown strong man of forty, what then? Had not the strength of the enemy grown with your strength? Had not many a power of evil, which you used to make little of and think your life would shed, fastened itself close upon you and showed that it meant to stay, so that in some moods there still was no word but Paul’s, “O wretched man that I am; who shall deliver me from the body of this death?” So all along your life. The enemy shifts his point of attack, but he is always there. It gets to seem hopeless as the man gets old, and feeble compromises with this terrible insatiate neighbor take the place of the young man’s manly struggles to drive him out.

Here is where the hopelessness comes in, out of mere long experience. I think there is in every man’s heart, down at the bottom, a conviction that the good is stronger than the bad; that the right is mightier than the wrong. I think that any being of pure human nature looking from outside at this strange mixture, this unnatural civil war that is going on forever, would say cheerfully, “Oh, it cannot last long, the good is so powerful that no evil can stand against it. Wait a few moments longer and you will see it cast the intruder out.” I think every young man starts with some such cheerful, courageous confidence as this. It is only experience that undeceives us and discourages us. The intruder is not cast out. There he is, just as strong as he was yesterday, just as strong as he was ten years ago; nay, just as strong as when Abraham fought with him on the field of Mamre, or when the hermits struggled in vain to get the better of him in the caves on the banks of the Nile. There seems to be no reason why, unless some new force comes in, the struggle should not go on forever as inconclusively, as hopelessly as it has gone on so long; no reason why the two forces should not live together and fight together till death comes to separate them; nay, no reason why death should separate them; no reason why the two should not go down together striving into the dark river, and come out striving still upon the other side, and go on in eternal strife, perpetuating this human tragedy forever. This is the great discouraging burden of our experience of sin. “We look and there is none to help. We wonder that there is none to uphold.” No power of salvation comes out of the good half of the heart to conquei and to kill the bad. We grow not to expect to see the bad half conquered. Every morning we lift up our eyes, and there are the low black hill-tops across the narrow valley, with the black tents upon their sides, where Edom lies in wait. Who shall deliver us from the bad world and our bad selves?

And what then? It is time for the sunrise when the night gets as dark as this. It is time for the Saviour when the world and the soul have learnt their helplessness and sin. “Who is this that cometh from Edom, with dyed garments from Bozrah? this that is glorious in His apparel, travelling in the greatness of His strength?” Do you not see the parable now? Is it possible that this one that we see coming, this one, on whose step, as He moves through history, the eyes oflall the ages are fastened, — is it possible that He is the conqueror of the enemy and the Deliverer of the Soul? He comes out of the enemy’s direction. The whole work of the Saviour has relation to and issues from the fact of sin. If there had been no sin there would have been no Saviour. “He came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.” He comes from the right direction, and He has an attractive majesty of movement as He first appears. This, as to the watcher on the hill-tops of Judea, so to the soul that longs for some solution of the spiritual problem, some release from the spiritual bondage, is the first aspect of the approaching Christ. He conies from the right way, and He seems strong. I suppose this is what draws the souls of men, long before they know the whole deep secret of the Christhood, to gather round Him and gaze on Him with a vague, wistful interest, - — this sort of sense that oecause He has taken on Himself to deal with their most hopeless difficulty, which is sin, and because He is so strong in His divinity, therefore, even although they cannot see just what He will do or how He will do it, still in Him, if there be hope at all, in Him their hope must be. And so they gather round Him as tha crowds used to gather in the lanes of Palestine; so they come to church; so they look up into His face; so they turn over the pages of His Bible. Oh, if He could help us! Oh, if this could be the deliverer that we need!

Now let us look at what He says to His anxious questioner; what account of Himself He gives; what He has done to Edom; and especially what mean these blood stains on His robes.

1. We ask Him, “Who is this?” and He replies. Hear His answer: “I that come in righteousness, mighty to save.” That reassures us, and is good at the very outset. The Saviour comes in the strength of righteousness. Righteousness is at the bottom of all things. Righteousness is thorough. It is the very spirit of unsparing truth. Any reform or salvation of which the power is righteousness must go down to the very root of the trouble; must extenuate and cover over nothing; must expose and convict completely, in order that it may completely heal. And this is the power of the salvation of Christ. It makes no compromise between the good and the evil, between Judah and Edom. Edom must be destroyed, not parleyed with; sin must be beaten down and not conciliated; good must thrive by the defeat and not merely by the tolerance of evil. We cannot tell in some of those old wars what Edomitish feeling there may have been among the Jews; how many Jews there may have been who had some connection with Edom, who rather liked the Edomites, and only asked of them that the two nations should live in peace together and not fight. I cannot know — perhaps you do not know yourself — how much there may be in your heart which is so bound up with old sin that you do not want it destroyed completely, that you would have the sin and the goodness live on side by side if only they would not fight. It is the fighting and not the very presence of sin that troubles you. But this Saviour of ours is too thorough for that. He cannot help you unless you want Him to beat the old enemy down and kill him utterly. He will be the negotiator of no low compromise. He wants to set up the standard of absolute holiness in the midst of a nature all conquered and totally possessed lby Him. Tell me, is there any difficulty here? Are yoX clinging to any sin that is so dear to you that you cannot give it up? Let the clear, inexorable claims of this Saviour of ours cut down deep and disclose your own heart to yourself, for He cannot save you unless He saves you in perfect righteousness.

2. But hear the next question. The questioner wonders, as the Saviour comes nearer, at the strange signs of battle and agony upon His robes. “Wherefore art Thou red in Thine apparel, and Thy garments like him that treadeth in the winefat?” And the answer is, “I have trodden the wine-press;” “I will tread them in mine anger and trample them in my fury, and their blood shall be sprinkled upon my garments, and I will stain all my raiment.” Behold, it is no holiday monarch coming with a bloodless triumph. It has been no pageant of a day, this strife with sin. The robes have trailed in the blood.

The sword is dented with conflict. The power of God has struggled with the enemy and subdued him only in the agony of strife. My friends, far be it from me to undertake to read all the deep mystery that is in this picture. Only this I know is the burden and soul of it all, this truth, — that sin is a horrible, strong, positive thing, and that not even divinity grapples with him and subdues him except in strife and pain. What pain may mean to the Infinite and Divine, what difficulty may mean to Omnipotence, I cannot tell. Only I know that all that they could mean they meant here. This symbol of the blood, — and by and by, when we turn from the Old Testament to the New, from the prophecy to the fulfilment, we find that it was not only the enemy’s blood, but His own blood too, that stained the victorious deliverer’s robes, — this symbol of the blood bears this great truth, which has been the power of salvation to millions of hearts, and which must make this conqueror the Saviour of your heart too, the truth that only in self-sacrifice and suffering could even God conquer sin. Sin is never so dreadful as when we see the Saviour with that blood upon His garments. And the Saviour Him self, surely He is never so dear, never wins so utter and so tender a love, as when we see what it has cost Him to save us. Out of that love born of His suffering comes the new impulse after a holy life; and so when we stand ,it last purified by the power of grateful obedience, it shall be said of us, binding our holiness and escape from our sin close to our Lord’s struggle with sin for us, that we have “washed our robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.”

3 But He says something more. Not merely He has conquered completely and conquered in suffering; He has conquered alone. As any one reads through the Gospels he feels how hopeless the attempt would be to tell of the loneliness of that life which Jesus lived. “I have trodden the wine-press alone, and of the people there was none with me. I looked and there was none to help. Therefore mine own arm brought salvation.” He had friends, but we always feel how far off they stood from the deepest centre of His heart. He had disciples, but they never came into the inner circles of His self-knowledge. He had fellow-workers, but they only handed round the broken bread and fishes in the mira cle, or ordered the guest chamber on the Passover night. They never came into the deepest work of His life. With the mysterious suffering that saved the world they had nothing to do. It was not only their cowardice, it was the necessary solitariness of the task to which He went, which caused that when the hands of sin were laid on Him to drag Him to the cross, “all His disciples forsook Him and fled.” It was a work that He alone could do, that He ‘must do alone. And is it not so always? Our brothers may help the work that Christ does in our souls in some of its details. They may bring the encouragement of their sympathetic Christian lives. They may lift up the hand and point with the finger to where the Saviour comes, saying,” Behold the Lamb of God. But in all the deep work of salvation itself, in all that impulse made up of perception of the perfect holiness and gratitude for forgiven sin which draws the soul straight and close to the divine heart, — in all that, no one has any part but the Lord Himself. He conquers sin He brings out victory in His open hand. From His hand we take it by the power of prayer, and to Him alone we render thanks here and forever.

4. And yet once more. What was the fruit of this victory over Edom which the Seer of Israel discovered from his mountain-top? It set Israel free from continual harassing and fear, and gave her a chance to develop along the way that God had marked out for her. Freedom! That is the word. It built no cities; it sowed no fields; it only broke off the burden of that hostile presence and bade the chosen nation go free into its destiny. And so what is the fruit of the salvation that the divine Saviour brings to the souls of men? It does not finish them at once; it does not fill and stock their lives with heavenly richness in a moment. But it does just this. It sets them free; it takes off the load of sin; it gives us a new chance; it secures forgiveness, and says to the poor soul, that has been thinking there was no use of trying to stagger on with such a load, Go on; your burden is removed. Go on, go up to the home that you were made for, and the life in God.

And notice that this conqueror who comes, comes strong, — “travelling in the greatness of His strength.” He has not left His might behind Him in the struggle. He is all ready, with the same strength with which He conquered, to enter in and rule and educate the nation He has saved. And so the Saviour has not done all when He has forgiven you. By the same strength of love and patience which saved you upon Calvary, He will come in, if you will let Him, and train your saved life into perfectness of grace and glory.

So, my dear friend, if you are in earnest I stand and point to you the way of life. There is the Saviour, victorious for you. He has conquered sin, so that you need not be its servant any longer. Now let Him conquer you by His great love, and so let His victory be complete. For His first victory is all in vain for you and me, unless we thank Him for it, and take Him for our King, and dedicate our obedient lives to Him, and let Him lead us into all the holiness and happiness of His salvation here, and yet more hereafter.