Spurgeon: Sermons on Proverbs (89 page)
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Authors: Charles Spurgeon
There are two features of covering I should like to recall to your recollection. The one was the mercy-seat or propitiatory over the golden ark, wherein were the tables of stone. Those tables of stone seemed, as it were, to reflect the sins of Israel. As in a mirror they reflected the transgression of God's people. God was above, as it were, looking down between the cherubic wings. Was he to look down upon the law defied and defiled by Israel? Ah! no; there was put over the top of the ark, as a lid which covered it all, a golden lid called the
mercy-seat, and when the Lord looked down he looked upon that lid which covered sin. Beloved, such is Jesus Christ the covering for all our sins. God sees no sin in those who are hidden beneath Jesus Christ.
There was another covering at the Red Sea. On that joyous day when the Egyptians went down into the midst of the sea pursuing the Israelites, at the motion of Moses' rod the waters that stood upright like a wall leapt back into their natural bed and swallowed up the Egyptians. Great was the victory when Miriam sang, "The depths have covered them. There is not one of them left." It is even so that Jesus Christ's atonement has covered up our sins. They are sunk in his sepulchre; they are buried in his tomb. His blood, like the Red Sea, has drowned them. "The depths have covered them. There is not one of them left." Against the believer there is not a sin in God's Book recorded. He that believeth in him is perfectly absolved. "Thou hast covered all their sin." I shall not have time to dwell upon the sweetness of this fact, but I invite you that believe to consider its preciousness; and I hope you who have not believed will feel your mouth watering after it; to know that every sin one has ever committed, known and unknown, is gone
--covered by Christ. To be assured that when Jesus died he did not die for some of our sins, but for all the sins of his people; not for their sins up till now, but for all the sins they ever will commit! Well does Kent put it:-
The atonement was made before the sin was committed. The righteousness was presented even before we had lived. "Thou hast covered all their sin." It seems to me as if the Lamb of God, slain from before the foundation of the world, had in the purpose of God, from the foundation of the world, covered all his people's sins. Therefore, we are accepted the Beloved, and dear to the Father's heart. Oh! what a joy it is to get a hold of something like this truth, especially when the truth gets a hold of you--when you can feel by the inwrought power and witness of the Holy Ghost that your sins are covered--that you dare stand up before a rein-trying, heartsearching God, and give thanks that every transgression you ever committed is hid from the view of those piercing eyes through Jesus Christ your Lord.
Some people think we ought not to talk thus, that it is presumptuous. But really there is more presumption in doubting than there is in believing. For a child to believe his father's word is never
presumption. I like to credit my Father's word. "He that believeth in him is not condemned." Condemned I am not, for I know I do believe in him. "Who is he that condemneth? It is Christ that died, yea, rather, that is risen again, who is even at the right hand of God, who also maketh intercession for us."
Beloved, the covering is as broad as the sin. The covering completely covers and for ever covers; for as God sees to-day no sin in those who are washed in Jesus' blood, so will he never see any. You are accepted with an acceptance that nothing can change. Whom once he loves he never leaves, but loves them to the end. The reason of his love to them does not lie in their merits nor their charms; the cause of love is in
himself. The ground of his acceptance of them is in the person and work of Christ. Whatever they may be, whatever their condition of heart may be, they are accepted because Christ lived and died. It is not a precarious or a conditional, but an eternal acceptance.
Would you enjoy the blessedness of this complete covering? Cowering down beneath the tempest of Jehovah's wrath which you feel in your conscience, would you obtain this full remission? Behold the gates of the City of Refuge which stand wide open. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ is proclaimed! to the thirsty, needy, labouring, weary soul. Not merely open are the gates, but the invitation to enter is given. "Come unto me all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest." You are bidden to lay hold upon eternal life. The way of doing so is simple. No works of yours, no merits, no tears, no preparations are required, but trust--trust-- that is all. Believe in Jesus. Rely upon him; depend upon him; depend upon him. I have heard of Homer's Iliad being enclosed in a nutshell, so small was it written; but here is the Plain Man's Guide to Heaven in a nutshell. Here is the essence of the whole gospel in one short sentence. "Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved." Trust him; trust him. That is the meaning of that word believe. Depend upon him, and as surely as thou doest it, nor death, nor hell, nor sin shall ever separate thee from
the love of him whom thou hast embraced, from the protection of him in whose power thou hast taken shelter. The Lord lead you to cower beneath his covering wings, and grant you to be found in Christ, accepted in
the Beloved. So shall your present peace be the foretaste of your
eternal felicity. Amen.
A Sermon (No. 2971) published on Thursday, January 18th, 1906, delivered by C.H. Spurgeon at the Metropolitan Tabernacle, Newington on Thursday evening, September 2nd, 1876.
But did not John say that "fear hath torment?" Then how can he be happy who hath fear, and especially he who hath it always. Did not John also say that "perfect love casteth out fear?" How is it then that he is happy in whom love is not made perfect, if so be that the fear which John mentions must be left in it? Dear friends, the explanation is that the word "fear" is used in different senses, and both Solomon and John are right; neither is there any conflict between their two statements. There is a fear which perfect love casts out because it hath torment. That is the slavish fear which trembles before God as a criminal trembles before the judge, --the fear which mistrusts, suspects, and has no confidence in God,--the fear which, therefore, keeps us away from God, causes us to dread the thought of drawing near to him, and makes us say like the fool to whom the psalmist refers, "No God." Many of you know what this kind of fear is, for you once suffered from it; though I trust you are now delivered from it by faith in Christ Jesus and by the love which the Spirit of God has wrought in your hearts. There is also another sort of fear which springs out of this slavish fear, and which is to be equally shunned, namely, a fear which leads to the apprehension that something evil is about to happen. There are many persons who have so little faith in God, that they fear that the trials which will sooner or later overtake them, will also overthrow them. They are afraid of a certain form of suffering that threatens them; they fear that they will not have patience enough to bear up under it, they feel sure that their spirit will sink in their sickness. Above all, they are dreadfully afraid to die. They have not yet believed that God will be with them when they pass through the valley of deathshade; and because they cannot trust him they are all their lifetime subject to bondage. They cannot say that all things work together for good to them, but they often say as poor old Jacob mistakenly said, "All these things are against me." And so they go on, fearing this and fearing that and fearing the other, and their life is spent, to a great extent, in sorrow and sighing. May the Lord graciously deliver any of you who are in that condition!
That is a kind of fear from which the true believer is free. He knows that whatever happens, God will overrule it for the good of his chosen. "He shall not be afraid of evil tidings: his heart is fixed, trusting in the Lord." Resignation to the divine will has made him feel that whatever the Lord wills is right; he does not seek to have his own will, but he is glad to make God's will his will, and so he is perfectly satisfied with all that comes. God save you, my brethren and sisters in Christ, from all fear of a slavish sort! Above all, no Christian ought to have any fear which would bring dishonor upon the truthfulness, the goodness, the immutability, or the power of God. To doubt his promise,--to suppose that he will not make it good,--this is indeed a fear which hath torment. To doubt God's faithfulness,--to suppose that he can ever forget his children, that his mercy can be withdrawn from them, or that he will be favorable to them no more,--this also is wrong. To doubt the perseverance of the saints when God's Word has so plainly declared that he will keep their foes, and will perfect the work which he hath begun in them,--indeed, to doubt anything that has the inspired Scriptures to support it, and to tremble in any way when your trembling arises out of a suspicion that God may change or cease to be faithful to his promises, and faithful to his Son, all that kind of fearing is to be cast far from us.
But, dear friends, there is another fear that ought to be
cultivated,--the reverential fear which the holy angels, feel when they worship God, and behold his glory;--that gracious fear which makes them veil their faces with their wings as they adore the Majesty on high. There is also the loving fear which every true, right-hearted child has towards its father,-a fear of grieving so tender a parent,--a proper feeling of dread which makes it watch its every footstep, lest, in the slightest degree, it should deviate from the path of absolute obedience. May God graciously grant to us much of this kind of fear!
Then there is a holy fear of ourselves, which makes us shun the very thought of self-reliance,--which weans us, equally from
selfrighteousness and self-confidence,--and which makes us feel that we shall surely fall unless the Lord shall continually hold us up, and that we shall certainly die, unless he shall sustain our spiritual life. This fear of our own selves - the fear of sinning against God
--is a fear which we ought always to cherish, and concerning which the text saith, "Happy is the man that feareth alway."
I have taken this topic for a special reason. You know that we have recently had a great deal of preaching of "Believe! Believe! Believe!" and I have very heartily joined in the evangelistic services which have been held. We have also had a great deal of singing about
full-assurance, and we have had a little chattering about perfection, or something wonderfully like it, as far as I can make it out and as I put all these things together, I cannot help being afraid that there will be a great growth of the mushrooms of presumption. With warm days and damp days and with everything tending to make vegetation luxurious, we may expect to see an abundant crop of poisonous fungi growing up,--noxious agarics, toadstools, and I know not what besides. They will come up in a night but they may not be destroyed in a night; and they will be a great nuisance, and possibly worse than that. So I want to speak in such a way that we may all be led to do some sincere heartsearching, and to commend to you the cherishing of an anxious fear, lest peradventure all that glitters should not prove to be gold, and lest much of that which looks like wheat should, at the last, turn out to be tares.
There is cause for fear, dear brethren and sisters who love the Lord, because corruption still remaineth in us. In the best man or woman here there is still the old flesh that lusts against the spirit, that flesh which is in constant enmity to the spirit and never will be reconciled to it. If that flesh keeps quiet for a time, it is there all the while, just as a lion is still a lion even when he is lying hidden in his den. He only needs some dark hour to come, and he will rush forth from his den; so is it with the flesh which still lurks within us. When a man imagines that all his corruptions are gone, that is no proof that he is clean rid of them, but only that he does not really know his true condition; for if God were but to lift the veil that covers his eyes and to let him see the great deeps of sin that are in his nature, he would soon discover that he has grave cause for fear, and he would be driven to cry out to God, "Oh, keep me, I beseech thee, or else I shall commit spiritual suicide! I must and shall become like the vilest of apostates unless thy sovereign grace shall hold me on my way."
There is also cause for fear, my brethren, if you look around at the world in which we live. This vile world has not changed its character; it is no more a friend to grace than it was in the days of the early Christians. It was a difficult thing to be a Christian in the days of Diocletian and the other persecuting Roman emperors, but I sometimes think that it is an even more difficult thing to be a Christian now. To be a soldier under Hannibal and to fight bravely when crossing the Alps must have been a difficult task, but it was far more trying for the soldiers when they reached sunny Italy, and their holiday amusements destroyed the discipline of the army. The Christian camp at the present time seems to be pitched in a sunny plain where all the surrounding influences bend to relax the sinews of the warriors, and to take away from them their strength. It is hard to keep to the narrow way when the broad road runs so near to it that sometimes they seem to be one. The time was when the broad road was so distinct from the narrow one that we could easily discern who was travelling to heaven and who was going to hell; but now the devil has engineered the broad road so very close up to the side of the narrow way that there are many people who manage to walk on both of them; they never were so pleased as when they can first take a little turn on the narrow road, and then afterwards take another turn on the broad one. Let us never imitate Mr.
Facing-both-ways; but let us walk only in the narrow way that leadeth unto life, whatever it may cost us to do so. You must be in a very singular position if you never have any temptations; indeed, I should not be surprised to learn, if you live where you have no temptations, that you are undergoing a worse trial than temptation itself would be. In such a place as that you are very likely to get indigant. The very pleasantness of the situation may put you off your guard and you will not live so near to God as you would have done if your surroundings had seemed to be more opposed to your growth in grace. There is cause for fear then, when all around us there is an enemy behind every bush, a temptation lurking in every joy, and a devil hiding himself under every table,--when, as old Francis Quarles used to say-
