Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 366
Isaiah 1:18.
THE chiefs of sinners are objects of the choicest mercy. Christ is a great Savior to meet the great transgressions of great rebels. The vast machinery of Redemption was never undertaken for a mean or little purpose. There must be a great end in so great a plan, carried out at so great an expense, guaranteed with such great promises, and intended to bring such great Glory to God! The plan of salvation has in it all the wisdom of God; the purchase of salvation has in it the fullness of the Grace of God; the application of salvation is an exhibition of the exceeding greatness of the power of God; and all these three attributes in their greatness could not have conspired together for any but a great and marvelous purpose! At the very outset of our discourse this morning, I think we might draw a safe conclusion that Christ contemplated saving great sinners with a great salvation. To make the whole affair great there must be a great sinner—to be, as it were, the raw material upon whom the great wisdom, the great Grace, and the great power may be exerted to make him into a great saint! I think both saints and sinners have a very confined and limited idea of the goodness of God. We measure Him by our own standing. Oh that we knew the meaning of that text, where God says, “I will not execute the fierceness of My anger; I will not return to destroy Ephraim; for I am God and not man” (Hosea 11:9.) He acts in everything, not as a king gives to a king, or as some right royal heart acts towards the needy, but as a God! There is none who can come near to Him; as He is surpassing in His Glory so that mortal eyes cannot behold it, so He is excelling in His love and Grace, so that mortal comprehension can never grasp, comprehend, or fathom the infinity of His mercy! Keeping mercy with thousands, showing pity to multitudes—who is a God like He, passing by transgression, iniquity and sin?
My text shall at once introduce itself. It is a great text, indeed—specially meant for sinners of the deepest dye. I pray that the energy and power of the Spirit may now open the door of all our hearts, that God’s mercy may enter in. Four things we will attempt to do this morning. First, we will remark that the text is addressed to sinners of the deepest dye. Secondly, it contains in it an invitation to reason of the most prevailing power. Thirdly, it promises pardons of the fullest force. And, fourthly, it presents to us a time of the most solemn significance.
I. First, then, our text is addressed to SINNERS OF THE DEEPEST DYE. Some of my Brothers are greatly scandalized by the general invitations which I am in the habit of giving to sinners, as sinners. Some of them go the length of asserting that there are no universal invitations in the Word of God. Their assertion, however, its not so forcible an argument as a fact, and we have one here. Here is most plainly an invitation addressed to sinners who had not even the qualification of sensibility! They did not feel their need of a Savior; they had been scourged and flogged till the whole body was a mass of sores, and yet they would not turn to the hand that smote them, but went on sinning! A more accurate description of careless, worthless, ungodly, abandoned souls never was given anywhere! We have in the context, one of the most graphic descriptions of human nature in its utterly lost and godless estate. There is not a single gleam of light in the midst of the thick darkness. The man is bad—bad—bad from the beginning to the end! No, he is all worst, and the worst is come to its worst. There is not a ray of promise in their nature, not a glimmer of anything good in the description of the persons to whom this text is addressed.
I call your attention, again, to the Chapter which I have read. In the first verse you will perceive that the text was addressed to senseless sinners—so senseless that God Himself would not address them in expostulation, but called upon the heavens and the earth to hear His complaint. He spoke to the firmament, to the stars, to the sun and to the moon, and He bade them hear. Men had grown so deaf to God’s admonitions, so utterly dead to His appeals, that He refuses to address them any more in notes of warning. “Hear, O heavens, and give ear, O earth!” What a fine poetical setting forth of the thought—that God appealed to dead, inanimate creatures, for man had become more brutish than the stones of the field; and yet to such is the invitation given, “Come now, let us reason together, says the Lord.”
You will readily see in the next place, that the text is given to ungrateful sinners. “I have nourished and brought up children, and they have rebelled against Me.” Oh, how many of us come under this description! God was good to us in our early childhood; we were dandled on the knees of piety; we were laid to sleep on the couch of holiness. God provided for our needs; we were not born slaves, or in a tottering shed, but the dawn of our days was the rising of His merciful care. But how we have sinned in childhood, and since we have come to manhood, how have we violated all the admonitions of His love, done despite even to the blood of Christ, and to the Spirit of God! We have forgotten His mercies; we have kicked against the pricks; we have made the blessings of His Providence the assistants to our sin, and the gifts of His Grace the excuses for our iniquities! Oh, we may, many of us, stand here coldly and plead that we have been ungrateful to a good, a patient, and a bountiful God! And yet to such is the text addressed, “Come now, let us reason together.”