Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 651
Delivered on Sunday Morning, September 24, 1865, by C. H. Spurgeon, at the Metropolitan Tabernacle, Newington
Job 8:11-13.
ISAAC walked in the fields at eventide to meditate. I commend him for his occupation. Meditation is exceedingly profitable to the mind. If we talked less, read less, and meditated more we should be wiser men. I commend him for the season which he chose for that occupation—at eventide—when the business of the day was over and the general stillness of nature was in harmony with the quiet of his soul. I also commend him for the place which he selected—the wide expanse of nature—the field.
Wise men can readily find a thousand subjects for contemplation abroad in the open country. Our four-square room is not very suggestive. But when a man walks in the fields, having the Lord in his heart and his whole mental faculties directed towards heavenly things, all things aid him in his pleasing occupation. If we look above to the sun, moon and stars, all these remind us of the grandeur of God and make us ask ourselves, “What is man, that the Lord should be mindful of him, or the son of man, that Jehovah should visit him?”
If we look below, the green meadows, or golden cornfields all proclaim Divine care and bounty. There is not a bird that sings, nor a grasshopper that chirps in the grass which does not urge us to praise and magnify the name of the Most High—while the plants, from the hyssop on the wall to the cedar which spreads its boughs so gloriously on Lebanon— exhibit to observant eyes the wisdom of the great Creator of all things. The murmuring brook talks to the listening ear in hallowed whispers of Him whose cloudy Throne supplies its stream. And the air, as it sighs amid the trees, tells in mysterious accents of the great unseen but ever-active Spirit of the living God.
The great book of Nature only needs to be turned over by a reverent hand and to be read by an attentive eye to be found to be only second in teaching to the Book of Revelation. He who would have us forget to study the fair creation of God is foolish. He would have us neglect one book by a great Author in order that we may the better comprehend another from the same hand. The pages of Inspiration reveal God far more clearly than the fields of creation—but having once obtained the light of God, the Holy Spirit, we can then enter the world of nature which has become consecrated to our best devotions and find that “in His temple does everyone speak of His Glory.”
Down by the river’s bank let us go, like Pharaoh’s daughter, and perhaps among the rushes we shall find a subject for thought of which we may say, as she did of Moses, “I drew it out of the water.” The reed, as it waves in yonder marsh, has a word of warning and whoever has ears to hear, let him hear. I claim your attention for a preacher who is not often heard—lend him your ears and when any shall ask you, “What did you go out to see?” you need not blush to answer, “A reed shaken by the wind.”
The rush shall, this morning, by God’s Grace, teach us a lesson of self-examination. Bildad, the Shuhite, points it out to us as the picture of a hypocrite—so, going to our work at once we shall have three things to talk about this morning. The hypocrite’s religion—first, what is it like? Secondly, what it lives on. And thirdly, what will become of it?
I. First, then, THE HYPOCRITE’S PROFESSION—WHAT IS IT LIKE? It is here compared to a rush growing in the mire and a reed flourishing in the water. This comparison has several points in it.
1. In the first place, hypocritical religion may be compared to the rush for the rapidity with which it grows. True conversions are often very sudden—as, for example, the conversion of Saul on the road to Damascus and the conversion of the Philippian jailer when suddenly startled out of his sleep and made to cry, “What must I do to be saved?” But the after-growth of Christians is not quite so rapid and uninterrupted—seasons of deep depression chill their joy. Hours of furious temptation make a dreadful onslaught upon their quiet.
They cannot always rejoice. Their life is checkered. They are emptied from vessel to vessel and are acquainted with grief. True Christians are very much like oaks which take years to reach their maturity—many March winds blow through them before they are well rooted. And oftentimes tempest and flood and drought and hurricane exercise their tremendous powers upon them.
Not so the hypocrite—once having made a profession of being converted, things generally go very smoothly with him. “Because they have no changes, therefore they fear not God.” They are strangers to lamentations over inbred corruption. When Believers talk of a warfare within, they are astonished! If we groan out, “O wretched man that I am— who shall deliver me from the body of this death?” these gentlemen say, “What bad people these Christians must be, to talk in that way! What black hearts they must have! And how inconsistent for them to claim to be children of God!”