that is good. God, it is said, appeared unto Abraham. God was at the beginning-the root of things, in the salvation of Abraham. And if there be any here who have never known salvation, may our blessed God, as He always does, take the initiative; for God is, as I have said, the genesis, the beginning of everything that is good! Ere the world was created-when as yet chaos spread itself around-it was God who said, "Let there be light," and there was light. And ere the existence of those golden lustres that bespangle the heavenly firmament when as yet the whole of that firmament was without a particle of that lustre-it was God, in the beginning, who said, "Let there be the starry heavens; the sun by day, and the moon and stars by night;" and all these natural glories sprang into exis tence. And when the world shall be new-created, God will be the beginning of it. And in heaven, the saints are now rehearsing their redemption to be all of God. It was by Him that the Seed of the woman was promised; and by Him Enoch was translated; and the redeemed spirit of Abel, the first from this sin-stricken world, had its glorious conveyance to heaven, and not to hell. Could we summon every redeemed one, from Abel down to the present, we should find that in redemption and salvation it was God who had taken the initiative-who had made the first move in the conversion of the sinner. And here let me say to every anxious one present, that when God comes and appears to a soul-not in visible form and glory, as He did to the patriarch, but simply through some truth, in some scene, perhaps like the present, He brings Himself into the scene-puts Himself before the sinner, gives conviction of sin, and along therewith a sight of the Saviour, so as to lead the sinner to peace and rest in Him by believing. But observe how it was that God appeared to Abraham. For remember, when God appears for salvation, He does not come to condemn, or simply as a judge, though God is a judge; or even as a Saviour; but as a God of glory." It was as the God of glory that He appeared to Abraham-when He said, "Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and come into the land which I shall show thee." It was for no slight unsubstantial thing the Syrian was called; it was that he might have a heavenly country,-a jasper city, that he might say, "Heaven is my fatherland, a golden city is my home." He, poor Syrian, needed for such a call the God of glory. It was not easy for him to solve the question, "Am I to leave my home and my kindred? Am I to leave those I love? Am I to go from the place of my fathers' sepulture? And to go for what? For a country I have never seen? for a land never trodden? for there were no paths in the desert, no finger-posts in the wilderness! Am I to give up all I value and go out? Am I to leave all for one I have never seen or known before ?" No, not SO God came not to him as a mere naked truth. God came to him with golden city, and in form most inviting and attractive, even as the God of glory, else Abraham, methinks, would never have left his father's house. Thus it is with the hope of our own calling! When God calls a sinner, it is from darkness into marvellous light, it is from the power of Satan to the kingdom of His dear Son,-it is from an earthly to a heavenly state, it is from being a vessel of Satan to share with Christ His throne, that we may sit down with Him on His throne, even as He is now on His Father's throne; it is that when He shall occupy, and on His head shall be many crowns, we may appear with Him, and dwell in the light and lustre of those crowns. For what we were, in our standing before God, He became; we had sinned-He took our sin; "He who knew no sin was made sin;" not sin in Him, but on Him. And as the Aaronic hand gathered together the sins of sinning Israel, and placed them down on the head of the victim, so "the Lord made to meet on Him the iniquity of us all;" "He was wounded for our transgressions, bruised for our iniquities." God laid on Him our sin: "All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all." Says Jesus, "I came from the peerless glory, down to the stripes, the furrowed back, the bloody sweat, the contumely, the gall and shame, the cross; I bore it all that I might have thee, sinner, as joint-heir of my heritage, as partner of my throne, as joint-possessor with me of the Father's love." Thus God, in His Gospel, not only saves the sinner, but lifts him from his depths in sin to the heights of glory, from the deepest death to the highest life; not Eden life, not angelic life, but divine life, eternal life.” "This is life eternal, that they might know thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent." Oh! for a pulpit planted, as it were, on some alpine centre of the globe! Oh! for a tongue borrowed from the loftiest eloquence that ever spoke amid the hosts of heaven! Oh! for a love wide as the universe, and a concourse of hearers vast as the family of man, that one might preach to the whole of this fallen planet the unsearchable and the untraceable riches of both the grace and the glory of God. But there is a further thing in the words I have read -how that Abraham fell short in his conduct. It is said"THE GOD OF GLORY appeared unto our father Abraham, when he was in Mesopotamia, before he dwelt in Charran, and said unto him, Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and come into the land which I shall shew thee." But instead of coming into the land God showed him, he actually stopped in Charran! And what made him stop in Charran? It is said when his father was dead he removed him into this land. Nature hindered him: things around him hindered him. He came only a little way. He had left the country of the Chaldeans, but he had not come into Canaan. He had done much, but not enough. Alas for Abraham! alas for some of you! For some of you have come a little way; your eyes have been only a little opened; the world has yet power over you; you are worldly, and religious! and your relations and companions hardly know what to make of you. You say you are for Heaven, but your life shows you to be on easy terms with the world. Poor pilgrim! there is something more wanted-more to be known of death to things here-more seen of the hope of glory, to allure the eye and to overcome nature. How did God deal with this obstacle-how did He meet it? By death. It was met by death. Abraham's father died, and his pilgrim son was liberated. I can speak personally here; many things which once held me with a tight hand, and which hindered, are now as dead to me. Blessed be God! so we sing "Rise, my soul, thy God directs thee, Ah! those stranger hands! the hands of the world, of nature, of the flesh, and sin. How they "impede!" I can say that I am dead to things I once loved. No one loved the things of the world more than I did. Many people think Christians have no taste; they think they could not hold the pen of a poet, or the pencil of an artist; that they have no eye for a star or rolling billow; that the flowers were not made for them, and that the sweet birds have no carol for them. Morbid, miserable-they say-are we Christians ! E Ah, no! not morbid, not miserable, but natural, are we in our change towards the world, and nature, and things of mere taste. I The world, and man, and the earth itself, wear a new aspect now. Let me illustrate what I mean. will suppose, for example, that I once had a magnificent set of rooms. I will suppose that one room exceeded every other in beauty. It was decorated with arras and tapestry, interspersed with purple and gold, with every sort of adornment from our own and other lands. I delighted in that room. But one morning I unexpectedly find lying dead on a sofa-oh! what do I find? I had but one child, a lovely child. During the night a burglar had entered, and there dead, lying in a pool of her blood, on the sofa, is that child. Alas for my child! She is laid in her coffin-she is buried; but what of that room? I say I do not care for it; I do not want it; I cannot go into it. Death has been there. Not that death makes the sofa one whit less valuable, or lessens one's admiration of the artisan who made it. This is a faint comparison; it is not my thought, it is God's thought. God says the heavens in themselves are beautiful, and the earth is beautiful. But because the world has rejected his only Son, and because the world is stained with the blood of His only Son, the heavens are not clean, and the earth is polluted in His sight. And the heavens have to flee away, and the earth has to be purged of its taint-to be burned up! And then free from the least taint will be the new earth and the new heavens. Meanwhile "When I survey the wondrous cross On which the Prince of Glory died, "His dying crimson, like a robe, Spreads o'er His body on the tree; |