"Thou Art My Hiding Place"

upon this proverb that man’s extremity is God’s opportunity. Adam and Eve hiding among the trees of the garden with all mankind hanging at their girdle, that gave God His great opportunity. Noah and his sons also, Abraham and Isaac, Jacob and Joseph, Moses and Aaron and Miriam, David and all the psalmists, Isaiah and all the prophets — it is all written to set forth man’s extremity and to show forth God’s opportunity. And when we come to the Son of Man Himself He is no exception to the universal rule. He is only the highest illustration and the most crowning fulfilment of this all-embracing proverb. For all through His life on earth His Father’s Presence was His one Hiding Place also. But to come down to ourselves. The righteous wages of such a past life as yours and mine is our death; our death and all that ought to follow our death. And yet behold! we are still alive and well and in the House of God to hear what He has to say to us to-night about our extremity and His opportunity. ‘Till we are filled with wonder both at God and at ourselves and till we exclaim with the wondering and enraptured prophet — Who is a God like unto Thee, that pardoneth iniquity like mine, and passeth by the transgression of a remnant like me? We are exactly like Thomas Halyburton also one of our own wondering prophets who writes this at the close of the year 1797: ‘In all my exercises about my great guilt my soul has always counted all things but loss that it might win Christ and more and more win to be found in Christ. When fresh challenges disturbed, when thoughts of a sudden summons to judgment were suggested, whenever I was again in a strait, this was my only sanctuary, to be found in Christ, not having any righteousness of my own, nor seeking any other righteousness but His. For if this is obtained I am safe, and nothing else but my being found in him can ever make me think myself safe.” Now if we obtain, like Halyburton, to be found in Christ, we also, the worst of us, are safe: as safe as Christ Himself is safe. Is not that your mind, my brethren, as well as it was the mind of Paul and Halyburton and Shepard? In putting their believing words into your mouth am I overstating your case? At any rate I am not overstating my own case. And thus it is that if you will not join with me I will make it my own solo, as the music people would say, and will sing alone to my God and Saviour, and will

say:
: Thou art my Hiding Place; Thou shalt
From trouble keep me free;
Thou with songs of deliverance
About shalt compass me!

But before we go any farther let us ask as we have been taught from our earliest years to ask — Have all our transgressions of God’s holy law been equally heinous? No: by no manner of means. For some sins in themselves, and by reason of several aggravations, are far more heinous in the sight of God and man than others. As for instance, your past may be so bad that in addition to the hurt you have done to God and to His holy law there may be people somewhere in your past life to whom you have done a hurt far beyond any possible healing of yours; much as you would give and do to heal and to restore them. ‘There may be a man ora woman or a child somewhere and sometime in your past life of evil-doing to whom you have done a damage beyond all possible reparation or repair of yours. Some of them may be still alive to keep you all your days in holy fear; some of them may be dead and in their own place to fill your days and nights with the terror of the Lord. Oh, man! Of all men the most miserable! What a Cleft Rock you need to hide and to shelter you! Poor self-destroyed sinner how God pities you in your awful extremity! What an opportunity God sees for Himself and for His

Son in you! And that is why He is sparing you and is following you through all your miserable life in such a gracious way. That also is why He has led you up to this House of His to-night. It was when Moses the man of God was in a worse extremity than yours that God took His greatest opportunity in all the Old Testament. For it is written in Exodus and in letters of gold that God descended and came and said to His despairing servant, Behold, I have a Place by Me, and I will put thee in a cleft of the Rock which I have had opened for thee; and I will cover thee with my own hand till all this sad calamity of thine is wholly overpast. And it was so. As often then as those injured and angry ghosts rush in upon you out of your past life do you with them like Moses. You know what Moses did? He did this. He made haste, and he bowed his head down to the earth, and worshipped God who had condescended to come to him in his terrible distress. Be you like Moses in your terrible distress. Make haste and bow your head and worship God. And He who is able to save to the uttermost will take you as His great opportunity to do that. You are the uttermost man in all this house to-night and therefore He is here to save and shelter you. And more than that, where sin has so abounded He will make His grace much more to abound, till He will not seek and save you only, but in answer to your unceasing prayer He will seek and save those also whom you have hurt as only

He and you and they know or would believe. And He will wipe all tears, not only from your eyes, but better than that, from their eyes also whose tears have been kept in His bottle against you all these past impenitent years of yours. ‘And they began to be merry,’ says God’s Son about His Father’s household. And in saying that He means you; you and all who love you; you and all they who have had such good cause to hate you. Even all they whose merriment you had for ever extinguished. Make haste then like Moses; make haste like the prodigal son, and see if the half has been told you about your Father and about His great redemption which He has had prepared for sinners like you.

Those of you who sing the psalms with any spiritual understanding and with any personal application must often have been arrested with the way that all the prophets and all the psalmists pray and importune about their shame. And that not only about such shameful matters as the matter of Uriah the Hittite, but about a multitude of matters concerning which nothing else is told us but the resulting shame of them. ‘ My confusion is continually before me, and the shame of my face hath covered me, sobs one of the sons of Korah. ‘O God, cries David, ‘ Thou knowest my foolishness, and my sins are not hid from Thee. And we understand and sympathise with his extremity when he prays so importunately and says: ‘ Let not them that wait on Thee be put to shame for my sake. Let not them that seek Thee be confounded for my sake, O God of Israel.” And again: ‘Thou hast known all my shame and all my dishonour. Reproach hath broken my heart, and for comforters I found none.” And again, and this time in great assurance of faith: ‘ Thou shalt hide me in the secret of Thy presence from the pride of men; Thou shalt keep me secretly in a pavilion from the strife of tongues.’

And then from all that the thing works itself out in this way. When a man is brought to all that then after that he not only hides himself from all his past sin and shame, but he begins now to hide himself from all his opportunities and all his occasions of future sin. He watches -and prays now and henceforth against all the times and against all the places and against all the people that at one time he waited for and welcomed. His constant prayer now is that his feet and his eyes may be kept from viewing vanity, and that God would guide him and uphold him in His holy way. Aye, and better than even that, his eyes are now opened to see something of what a temptation and what a snare he himself is in many ways to many other men. And he hides himself, as much as may be, from all men’s eyes, and walks as softly and as inoffensively as may be before all the weak and evil-minded men about him. You understand? all you that have received from God any such humility of heart and any such spirituality of mind.

I am afraid some of you will think that the whole life of a godly man is all hiding together. Yes, you are quite right; so it is. For there is this also. Every day the man of God and the disciple of Christ hides his daily cross in his great Hiding Place. And as he grows in this grace when he is again laid under his heaviest cross I will tell you what he does. He straightway washes his face from all his tears, and anoints his head from all the dust that he had heaped upon it, and he eats and drinks with you, and enters into all your merriment, till he completely deceives you about all his secret crosses; that is to say, unless you are yourself like him and thus see through him and all his hypocritical pretences. When our Lord was eating and drinking, and was conveying all kinds of comfort to His sorrowful disciples, all the time His broken heart was almost being torn out of His body, till He was compelled to leave His three most confidential disciples and seek a momentary hiding place with His Father among the olive trees of Gethsemane. Be like Him in that all of you who are numbered among His disciples. Go a good stone’s cast away from your most intimate friends when your daily cross is being laid upon you heavier than ever. You understand? Yes, I am sure you do, all you who are taught of God and who are under His great sanctification.

And then to sum up for the present, far more close to you, and far more home-coming to you, and far more ever-present with you, than all your other crosses and shames and temptations is the cross and the shame and the temptation of yourself. Oh, what a life that miserable man lives to whom he is his own constant cross! I cannot attempt to describe to you his life, it is indescribable. It hath not entered into any other man’s heart to conceive it or believe it. No wonder that God pities that man with all His pity. No wonder that God saves that man with all His salvation. No wonder that God comes down His very self to be that man’s inward comforter. For God doth know, nay, there is nothing in all God’s knowledge that He knows so well as that chosen man’s inward agony. His inward sin, his inward shame, his inward temptation, his inward cross. No mortal man will ever know what some of their fellow-men are passing through in their inward Gethsemane and their inward Calvary. No mortal man but that both mortal and immortal Man the Man Christ Jesus. He alone knows us and we alone know Him. And we openly avow it and openly acknowledge it before God and before all men and all angels, that we count it up as well worth a thousand years of such indwelling sin to come thereby to know somewhat of the God-Man Christ Jesus. Yes; ten thousand years of Paul’s inward sin and Luther’s inward sin and Shepard’s inward sin, if only it ends in our increasing knowledge of Jesus Christ, in the power of His resurrection, and in the fellowship of His sufferings, and in our conformity to His death. Let us go on then in the only way to know Him. Let us go on into this new year more and more to know Him, whom to know is eternal life already. Let us enter on this new year, as Paul entered on his Gospel preaching at Corinth, determined to know nothing all this year compared with Jesus Christ, and Him crucified, and ourselves crucified in Him and with Him. Let us go to Him in our weakest hours, in our loneliest hours, in our most tempted hours, in our most sin-dominioned hours, and in our most sinpolluted hours. For to whom at such times can we go but to Him; to Him who will never and in no wise cast us out. And then from that let us all this year go on like David our forerunner to compass Christ about with songs of deliverance; ourselves and Him. With such songs of deliverance as David’s thirty-second Psalm, and his fifty-first Psalm, and his hundred and third Psalm, and his hundred and thirtieth Psalm. And with such new songs of deliverance as ‘°Twas on that night, and ‘Hark the glad sound,’ and ‘ Jesus! how glorious is Thy grace,’ and ‘ Let troubles rise and terrors frown,’ and ‘Worthy the Lamb that died, they cry,’ and ‘Lo! these are they from sufferings great.’ And to crown it all and to make it all our own:

Rock of Ages, cleft for me,

Let me hide myself in Thee;

When I soar through tracts unknown,
See Thee on Thy judgment throne,
Rock of Ages, cleft for me,

Let me hide myself in Thee.’