New Park Street Pulpit · Sermon No. 322
Delivered on Sabbath Evening, April 22, 1860, by the Rev. C. H. Spurgeon, at New Park Street Chapel, Southwark
“Thus says the Lord, let My people go, that they may serve Me.” Exodus 8:1.
ON two or three former occasions I have endeavored to insist upon the fact that God always puts a distinction between Israel and Egypt. He constantly speaks of the Israelites as “My people”—of the Egyptians, he speaks to Pharaoh as being “your people.” There is a continual and eternal distinction observed in the Word of God between the chosen seed of promise and the world—the children of the Wicked One. The great objective of God’s interference with Egypt was not the blessing of Egypt at large, but the gathering out of His Israel from the midst of the Egyptians. Beloved, I have the conviction that this is just what God is doing with the world now. Perhaps, for many a year to come, God will gather out His elect from the nations of the earth as He gathered His Israel from the midst of the Egyptians. You and I may not live to see that universal reign, of which we so joyously sang this morning; but the wheat will be gathered into the garner, sheaf by sheaf, if not ear by ear. The tares will be left to ripen here, perhaps, until the great and terrible day the Lord comes. At any rate, looking at the signs of the times, we do not see any considerable progress made in the evangelization of the world. Egypt is still Egypt—the world is still the world—and as worldly as it ever was, and God’s purpose seems to be, through the ministry which He now exercises, to bring His chosen ones out. In fact, the Word which Jehovah is now speaking to the entire world with the solemn authority of an imperial mandate is this—“Thus says the Lord, let My people go, that they may serve Me.”
It will be necessary in addressing you this evening, to recall to your minds the position which the Israelites held in Egypt. It is a type of the position of all the Lord’s people before the Most High God, who with a high hand and an outstretched arm brings them out of their bondage. The people of the Lord are slaves. Though their names are in His book, yet they are slaves, engaged like Israel of old in labors that savor more of earthly than of heavenly things—brick-makers, building houses not for themselves, for they find no city to dwell in. They are toiling and laboring here as unwilling servants, thinking, perhaps, they shall receive goodly wages, but they receive no wages, except the whip upon their shoulders. Every man in his unrenewed state is a slave. Even God’s people are slaves as well as others, till they hear the trumpet of jubilee and at the Word and by the power of God are brought forth out of the place of their slavery. We are slaves—slaves to a power which we can never overcome by our own unassisted strength. If all the inhabitants of Goshen—the Israelites, I mean—had concerted measures to rebel against Pharaoh and had said, “We will be free”—in but a few hours, the tremendous power of that great monarch of Egypt would have crushed out the last spark of hope. With his terrible army, his horses and his chariots, the rabble of Israel would soon have been given to the dogs! They had no hope in the world of ever delivering themselves by their own power. Nor more have we, Beloved. By nature we are slaves to him who is infinitely our superior, namely, to Satan and all his hosts of sin. We may sometimes seek to snap the fetter when a hectic flush of health comes over the cheeks, but oh, we may make the fetters grind into our flesh; we cannot snap them! We may even sometimes think that we are free and talk of liberty—but our walk is a walk within a prison and our apparent liberty is but a deeper delusion of slavery! Men may bid us be free, but they cannot make us so; they may use the best means they can by education, by training, by persuasion, but these fetters are not to be filed by any instruments so weak.
God’s ministers may continually exhort us to snap our fetters; but alas, it is not in our power to do what, nevertheless, is their duty to command us to do! We are such slaves, that unless a mightier than ourselves and a mightier than Satan shall come out to our assistance, we must continue in the land of bondage—in the house of our sin and of our trouble. Nor, again, can we ever hope to redeem ourselves with money. If the children of Israel had given up all they had, they were so poor they could not have ransomed their own bodies. The poor brick makers could not buy themselves from their masters; the least thought of such a thing would have brought down the whip with ten-fold fury upon their poor bleeding shoulders. And so you and I may think we can buy our freedom by our good works, but the result of all our offers of purchase-money will be to make us feel the whip the more. You may go and toil and think you have gathered together something that can be acceptable in the sight of your taskmaster—but when you have done all, he will tell you that you are an unprofitable servant, command you to yet sterner labors, make you feel yet viler durance in your prison—for you cannot by such means escape! Really, apart from God, the view of humanity which is given in the Scriptures is the most deplorable picture that even despondency, itself, could paint! Ah, men talk about some remnants of good that are left in humanity, some sparkling of Divine fire and the like, but the Bible does not say so. It expresses, in its solemn words, the meaning of that hymn, which begins—