Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 518
Luke 16:26.
FOR the last few months I have been led to blow the silver trumpet, sounding forth the love and mercy of our God in Christ. Many times in your hearing I have preached a full Christ for empty sinners, and have set forth the freeness and graciousness of the Divine proclamation which in the Gospel is made to the chief of sinners. I have not, concerning that point, shunned to declare unto you the whole counsel of God. But I feel that I must now blow a blast upon the rough ram’s horn—for sometimes our congregations need to be reminded of the Law and terrors of God—and of the judgment to come.
Our experience is that the preaching of judgment is greatly blessed of God. We have remarked that a very large number of conversions have occurred under those sermons in which the declaration of God’s wrath against all iniquity has been the most plain and solemn. A thunderstorm clears the air. There are pestilences which would gather beneath the wings of calm which can only be purged away by the lightning flash. When God sends His servant with heavy tidings, His message of alarm cleanses the spiritual atmosphere and kills the sloth, pride, indifference, and lethargy, which otherwise might fall upon the people.
As the sharp needle prepares the way for the thread, so the piercing Law makes a way for the bright silver thread of Divine Grace. The lancet is quite as needful as the healing balm. The Law is our teacher to bring us to Christ—like the old Greek pedagogue who led the boy to school—so the Law leads us to Christ-who teaches and instructs us and makes us wise unto salvation. Those who preached the Law, as well as the Gospel, in the Puritan times, were the most fruitful soul winners. We find our blessed Lord and Master, whose heart was overflowing with compassion, and whose very Nature was love, often dwelling upon the wrath to come.
And indeed, His utterances are more telling and terrible than the most burning threat from the lips of thundering Seers of old. God grant that this morning the effect which so anxiously desire may follow from that burden of the Lord which now weighs so heavily upon me. May the Master I gather out this day a seed unto Himself, who shall be saved from the wrath to come, and be to all eternity the reward of the Redeemer’s travail. Lift up your hearts to God, you that know Him and have power with Him, and ask that now the Divine Spirit may work mightily, that hearts may be broken and sinners led to Jesus. “Beside all this, between us and you there is a great gulf fixed.”
Human ingenuity has done very much to bridge great gulfs. Scarcely has the world afforded a river so wide that its floods could not be leaped over. Or a torrent so furious that it could not be made to pass under the yoke. High above the foam of Columbia’s glorious waterfall, man has hung aloft his slender, but substantial road of iron—and the shriek of the locomotive is heard above the roar of Niagara. This very week I saw the first chains which span the deep rift through which the Bristol Avon finds its way at Clifton—man has thrown his suspension bridge across the chasm, and men will soon travel where only that which has wings could a little while ago have found a way.
There is, however, one gulf which no human skill or engineering ever shall be able to bridge. There is one chasm which no wing shall ever be able to cross. It is the gulf which divides the world of joy, in which the righteous triumph, from that land of sorrow in which the wicked feel the smart of Jehovah’s sword. Whatever other arguments there may be why the righteous should have no communion with the wicked in a future state, beside all these other things, any one of which is enough and sufficient of itself, there is a great gulf fixed, so that there can be no passage from the one world to the other.
I. In trying solemnly to speak upon this matter, I shall commence with this—THERE IS NO PASSAGE FROM HEAVEN TO HELL. “They which would pass from here to you, cannot.” Glorified saints cannot visit the prison of lost sinners. Long enough were the righteous mingled with the wicked—sufficient was the evil time in which the wheat was choked with the tares. Quite long enough was the period in which the chaff laid upon the same floor, side by side with the wheat. Patience had its perfect work. They did both grow together until the time of the harvest. It is not necessary, now that harvest has come, that they should lie together any longer.
It were inconsistent with the perfect joy and the beatific state of the righteous, with its perfect calm and purity, that sin should be admitted into their midst, or that they should be permitted to find companionships in the abodes of evil. It were not glorious to the Lord Jesus Christ that they should cease from beholding His beauties and adoring His Person, in order to succor His enemies, and comfort His desperate foes. Shall the courtiers of Heaven become traitors to their King, that they may relieve His implacable adversaries? Shall the princes of the blood imperial, who wear eternal coronets, lay aside their robes of honor to become menial servants to the damned in Hell—who would not, when Christ was preached to them—bow the knee and kiss the Son? This must not, and cannot be. Besides, the decree of God, like a great mountain of brass, has forever shut the righteous in with holiness, with happiness, with God. And they cannot, if they would, must not, cross the great gulf which divides them from the world of the wicked.