Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 397
Delivered on Sunday Morning, June 23rd, 1861, the Metropolitan Tabernacle, Newington.
“When thou walkest through the fire, thou shalt not be burned; neither shall the flame kindle upon thee.”—Isaiah 43:2.
BEFORE we explain the metaphor of the text, it may be well for us to remark that we are not sufficiently grateful, I fear, for the preservation which God affords to us from fire. To be startled at the dead of night with the alarming cry, and to find one’s self and children and goods in danger of being immediately consumed, must be no small trial. I have felt myself extreme gratitude to God that while both on the right hand and on the left the flames have raged, he has been pleased to spare to us this temple of our solemnities, this place where we delight to worship. And is it not meet that we should each and all render to him our hearty thanks for sparing our habitations preserving the roof under which we rest, enabling us to go out and to come in in perfect safety? Or, probably, I may be addressing some this morning who have had escaped from the very midst of the fires. Let such not only bless God for preservation in the past, but let them celebrate his goodness in plucking them as brands out of the burning. Let them be extremely grateful to God that while others this day are dying as a black heap of ashes who but yesterday were living men, we are still in the land of the dying unburned and unsinged. It was at least the trap of many of you, during the past week, and again last night, to witness a conflagration of awful grandeur, in which tongues of flame, mountains of fire, and pillars of smoke, made a spectacle to be gazed at with interest while it produced terrors and apprehensions that could awe the wildest mob into silence. With you and me it is a common mercy to be preserved day by day, and night by night from the devouring element. Yet when the dreadful catastrophe is within view—when those we know personally or by repute are sufferers—and when at the same time we look on with a sense of our own present security—then surely we ought to give more than a common expression of gratitude to God for mercies that at other times we are too apt to paste over unheeded as but the effects of a common Providence. Never was a truer sentence uttered than when one said, “These mercies are not valued until they are lost, and these preservations are not esteemed until they are withdrawn.” Let us thank God while we have the mercies, lest he be provoked by our ingratitude and take forth his rod and scourge us. Then, indeed, might we cry out under the smart, and wish and desire that we had our mercies back again. Thus much I could not in my conscience withhold at a time when there are judgments around us enough to make us tremble, and mercies enough in the little circles of home to make us exceedingly grateful. Let us now take the text in its real signification. Of course the walking through the fire here is put for the severest form of trouble: You have, in the commencement of the verse, trouble described as passing through the water. This represents the overwhelming influence of trial in which the soul is sometimes so covered that it becomes like a man sinking in the waves. “When thou goest through the rivers,”—those mountain torrents which with terrific force are often sufficient to carry a man away. This expresses the force of trouble, the power with which it sometimes lifts a man from the foothold of his stability, and carries him before it. “When thou passest through the rivers they shall not overflow thee.” But going through the fire expresses not so much the overwhelming character and the upsetting power of trouble as the actual consuming and destructive power of trouble and temptation. The metaphor is more vivid, not to, say more terrific, than that which is employed in the first sentence, and yet vivid and awful though it be, it is certainly not too strong a figure to be used as the emblem of the tribulations, temptations and afflictions, through which the Church and people of God have been called to pass. We may apprise the richness of the promise in proportion to the astonishing character of the metaphor, and we ought to value the privilege which it confers in the precise ratio of the dreadful character of the danger against which it preserves us. “When thou walkest through the fire, thou shalt not be burned, neither shall the flame kindle upon thee.”
We shall talk of three things, this morning, as the Holy Ghost may enable us; first of all, a terrible pathway,—walking around the fire; secondly, an awful danger,—the danger of being burned and utterly consumed; and thirdly, a double insurance,—“Thou shalt not be burned, neither shall the fire kindle upon thee.”
I. First, then, let us speak a little upon this TERRIBLE PATHWAY.
The sacramental host of God’s elect has never had an easy road along which to journey. I see the fields on fire, the prairie is in a blaze, the very heavens are like a furnace, and the clouds seem rather to be made of fire than water. Across that prairie lies the pathway to heaven, beneath that blazing sky the whole Church of God must make its perpetual journey. It started at the first in fire, and its very glory at the last shall take place in the midst of the fiery passing away of all things. When first there was a Church of God on earth, in the person of Abel it was persecuted, Cain lifted up his cruel club to slay his brother; and when the children of Seth were the representatives of God’s chosen, they were without doubt the subject of the jeer and gibe of the descendants of Cain. Noah, the preacher of righteousness endured during his one hundred and twenty years, the hardness of heart and carelessness of an unthinking world; he and his family, who were the remnant of the Church in the latter part of those days, were constantly exposed to the laughter and persecution of men. When God had destroyed the earth with water, and the whole race of man was contained within the ark, you would think that then, certainly, the Church within the ark would be secure from molestation. But no, we find him ready to detect the failings of his parents, and no doubt a ringleader of everything that was vile and vicious, just as we have reason to hope that some of his brethren adhered to the most true God. From that day forward, whether you read through the life of Abraham, or Isaac, or Jacob, it still standeth true, “He that is born after the flesh persecuteth him that is born after the Spirit.” Whether we refer you to the history of Israel by the side of the brick-kilns of Egypt, or to the host of God constantly beset by the marauders of the Amalekites, you find it still to be true that through much tribulation the people of God must wade their way to Canaan. And if you look further on in history, between David and Saul, between Hezekiah and Sennacherib, between the faithful followers of God after the captivity who would rebuild the temple, and Sanballat the Horonite; between the Maccabees and Antiochus Epiphanes, there must always be preserved a deadly feud, to let it be seen that the world must hate God’s people, and must harass them and seek to hunt them out, while they, on the other hand, must steadily pursue their onward march through the midst of billows of fire till they come at last to their eternal rest. Find me the abode of the Church of God and I can smell the furnace not far off. Show me the follower of the God of Abraham and I shall soon find the host of enemies ready for the attack. Up till the days of the Saviour the kingdom of heaven suffered violence, not only from its friends who would take it, but from those enemies who world assault it. From the blood of Abel down to the blood of Zecharias the son of Barachias, the pathway of the Church hath been a blood-besprinkled time. Since that day, what tongue can tell the sufferings of the people of God? Since Christ became martyr as well as Redeemer, has there been a season in which God’s people have not somewhere or other been made to feel that they are not of the world, and that the world does not love them because they are not of the world? In apostolic times, Stephen expires beneath a shower of stones, James is killed with a sword, certain others of the saints are vexed; believers are scattered abroad. The Roman lion takes up the fight, Herod delights in the gore of the Christians, and smears the confessors of that holy faith with pitch and sets them in his gardens that they might be literally, as they were spiritually, the lights of the world. Let the catacombs of Rome witness to their sorrowful lives and let the Capitol witness to their terrible deaths. Let the old dungeons, some of which still remain, testify to the places where they wore out their dreary lives, and let the blood-stained Campus Martius still show where they cheerfully surrendered those lives for Christ. Oh! if the lands could speak, if the Earth could vomit forth her blood what stories could still be told of the way they were slain. Some of them were tortured, others sawn asunder, some stoned, and others burnt to death; though of them the world was not worthy. All the Roman Emperors, with but few exceptions, were persecutors; and the Christian emperors were as bad as the Pagan, for the Christian emperors were not Christians, nor were they members, as I believe, of a Christian Church. The Christian Church, and especially that Church of which we are still members, which has never defiled its garments, but which, never having had any alliance with the Church of Rome, has never needed to be reformed,—that Church under its different names, Paulitians, Novations, Albigenses, Lollards, Wyckliffites, Anabaptists, Baptists, has always suffered. It matters not what state, what Church, may have been dominant, whether it has been Christian or anti-Christian, the pure Church of Christ has always been the victim of persecution, and though she has persecuted never, but has always maintained inviolate, disunion from the state, and an utter hatred of all laws which would bind the conscience of man, yet has she been especially destitute, afflicted, tormented, and if she hath to-day a little breathing time, perhaps it is rather owing to the timidity which has made us keep back our sentiments, than to any charity towards ourselves. Find the Church of Christ wherever you will, and you shall find her scorned and despised of man. Find her in Scotland, and her Covenanters have to hide themselves in the midst of the mountain, and read the Word of God by the lightning flash, to escape from the dragoons of Claverhouse. Find her in England and where was she? Not in the cathedrals of her cities, but in the dungeons of her rural towns like Bedford with John Bunyan; not among the great and noble who were the persecutors, but among the poor and conscientious who were the persecuted. “If you want to find the drunkards and sinners of the worst dye,” said one of our preachers at or before Cromwell’s time, “you can find them in Church and state, but if you wish to find the men who are holy and who serve God, you must look into the felon’s dungeons for them, for that is where they have been cast by the powers that be.” Everywhere from the first day until now, it is not respectable to be a follower of Christ. If we follow Christ fully and faithfully before God, it is not equitable and praiseworthy before men. To take up his cross and to perform the ceremonies which he ordains, man hates. To adhere to truths which never were and never can be palatable to the carnal mind of man, is, and ever has been to excite animosity. The pathway of the Church, then, has been one of fire and flame. As it has been so with the Church, we may suspect there is some reason for it, and that reason has to be found in the great fact that the Church is in an enemy’s country. She is not among her friends, she is a pilgrim and a stranger upon the earth. She is a bird that has lost her place, and all the birds round about her are against her, because she is a speckled one and belongs not to the common flock. If we were of the world, the world would love its own, but “because,” said Christ, “ye are not of the world but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hateth you.” “We know,” said he, “it hated me before it hated you.” True Christians are aliens, foreigners, men that speak another speech, men who are actuated by different motives, men who live for different ends, who are governed by different maxima from the rest of the men of this world, therefore it is that their pathway must be one of trial and opposition. All things the Christian teaches are so dead against the pleasures of the worldling and his gain, that it is no wonder he opposes us. Men hate the gospel because the gospel does not like them. That Church is never true to her Christ, nor true to herself which does not draw upon herself the hatred of ungodly men, by a faithful testimony against their sins.