New Park Street Pulpit · Sermon No. 344
Delivered on Sabbath Morning, November 4, 1860, by the Rev. C. H. Spurgeon, at Exeter Hall, Strand
Psalm 9:17.
MANY of God’s ministers have been accused of taking pleasure in preaching upon this terrible subject of “the wrath to come.” We were, indeed, strange beings, if so doleful a subject could afford us any comfort! I would count myself to be infinitely less than a man if it did not cause me more pain in delivering myself of the impending sentence of condemnation, than it can possibly cause my Hearers in the listening to it. God’s ministers, I can assure you, if they feel it to be often their solemn duty, feel it always to be a heavy burden to speak of the terrors of the Law! To preach Christ is our delight! To uplift His Cross is the joy of our heart; our Master is our witness—we love to blow the silver trumpet, and we have blown it with all our might! But knowing the terror of the Lord, these solemn things lie upon our conscience; and while it is hard to preach of them, it were still harder to bear the doom which must rest upon the silent minister; the unfaithful watchman who did not warn the sinner! He must, therefore, eternally bear the sinner’s blood upon his head, because he warned him not! Think not, this morning, that I am about to speak upon the terrors of the world to come. I shall not do so. I shall but open the subject by making one or two remarks which may, in some measure, shield us from the enmity of those who accuse us of harshness of spirit when we lay bare these predicted woes. You must confess, my dear Hearers, that Jesus Christ was the most tender-hearted of men. Never was there one of so sympathetic a disposition; but not all the Prophets put together—though some of them as stern as Elijah, though many of them seemed commissioned expressly to dwell upon terrible things in righteousness—not all of them put together can equal in thunderclaps the sound of that still voice of Him, who albeit He did not cry nor lift up His voice in the street, spoke more of Hell and the wrath to come than any that preceded Him! The loving lips of Jesus have furnished us with the greatest revelations of God’s vengeance against iniquity! None ever spoke with such terrible emphasis! No preacher ever used figures of such glaring horror, as did Jesus Christ, the Son of Man, the Friend of publicans and sinners! Let me remind you that the wrath of God, and the judgment of the Day of the Lord cannot be trifling matters. How emphatically are we told in Scripture, that it is “a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.” Upon such a subject we cannot afford to trifle! Besides, the mystery of Calvary indicates to us that sin must deserve at God’s hand a terrible penalty.
Did Jesus suffer so bitterly to save men, and will not the unsaved endure bitterness, indeed? Must the eternal and holy Son of God, upon whom sin was only an imputed thing—must He bleed and die and offer up His life, with His soul exceedingly heavy even unto death—and is the world to come a thing about which men can afford to sport or idly dream? Foreshadows have fallen on our path, from which we dismally recoil. You know that sin, even in this world, is a tormentor of unequalled cruelty. How miserable are some men when they are chased by conscience, when the furies of sin have been let loose upon them even in this world! Some of you may know, if you are not given up to hardness of heart, what it is to be conscious of guilt, and to be hunted about in every place, whether you sleep or whether you wake, with a consciousness of your transgression. Many a man has hurried himself to a premature grave, has sought to end his misery by the knife or by the halter, not because he was enduring Hell, but only of the present penalty of sin. What, then, must be “the wrath to come”?
Again, I say, it cannot be a theme at which any but fools would presume to jest, nor can it be such that we can, any of us, afford to disregard its trumpet-tongued warning! That dread sentence in our text ought to ring like a death knell in your ears, if you are among the wicked. “The wicked shall be cast into Hell”—the drunkard, the swearer, the fornicator, and such like shall receive their well-deserved portion in the bottomless pit of Hell! God will not treat them with leniency; He will not wink at their follies; He will not pass over their sins, as though they were but mistakes, or little errors. He will mete out punishment for such serious offenses! But observe the companions of the wicked, those who are to be the sharers with these profane ones in their eternal punishment. They are such as forget God. If I mistake not, I am addressing a very large number of those who forget God. It may be I have a few here of the outwardly wicked. Let them hear the text in all its fullness! But, doubtless, I have many hundreds who come under the second description—they forget God. Oh, let them feel the full force of such a text as this! They must be companions hereafter with those whom they would not associate with now; they must have the destiny of men, whom perhaps they now look down upon with contempt—they must be cast into Hell with the wicked—with those who are infidels in the sight of God, and demoralized among men.