Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 658
Delivered on Sunday Morning, November 5, 1865
“He raises up the poor out of the dust and lifts the needy out of the dunghill, that He may set him with princes, even with the princes of His people.” Psalm 113:7,8.
THE greatness and majesty of the Most High God are utterly inconceivable. The most masterly minds, when in the most spiritual state, have felt it impossible for the utmost stretch of their imagination to reach to the grandeur of God. Our loftiest conceptions of the universe probably fall very far short of what it really is—although the researches of astronomy have revealed facts surpassing all the powers of the human mind in the attempt to grasp them. Thought, reason, understanding, and even imagination are bewildered in the vast and illimitable fields of space amidst the marvels of God’s handiwork.
Yet all the wonders which the human eye has seen, or mortal spirit guessed at, are but parts of His ways. We have heard no more than one stanza of creation’s never-ending Psalm. We have viewed but one stone in the vast mosaic of the Maker’s works. An infusorial atom of life in a drop of water may know as much of the great sea as we do of the universe as a whole. An ant creeping over a sand heap by the seaside must not boast of having counted the grains which bound the ocean—nor must the most learned mortal dream that he has a full idea of the vast creation of God!
Above all this, however, is the fact that all these wondrous works bear no more proportion to the unseen, all-powerful God, than one line written by the pen of Milton would bear to His masterly mind. When God has made all that He ordains to create and when we have seen all that He has made, yet there remains in Himself infinite possibilities of creation. The potter is far greater than the vessel which he fashions and the Lord is infinitely greater than all His works. He fills all things, but all things cannot fill Him. He contains immensity! He grasps eternity! But neither immensity nor eternity can encompass Him—
“Great God, how infinite You are! What worthless worms are we!”
Very fittingly does the Psalmist sing of Him as God humbling Himself to behold the things which are in Heaven. Those majestic beings—cherubim and seraphim—who flash with wings of fire to obey the behests of the Eternal are not to be observed of Him unless, speaking after the manner of men, in condescension He stoops Himself to view them. We sing of the Heaven, even the Heaven of heavens, as the Lord’s and speak of those glorious places as being His peculiar abode, and so they are. And yet the Heaven of heavens cannot contain Him and celestial spirits are as nothing when compared with Him.
Consider, then, the condescension of the Lord in visiting the sons of men! What a stoop is here, my Brethren! From the Throne of the Infinite to the clay tenements of man! Surely in a moment you will perceive that all gradations of rank among our race of worms must be less than nothing and even contemptible with Him! He does not consort with kings when He descends to earth, for what is their mimic pomp to Him? He does not seek out for Himself regal society as being more worthy of His dignity than association with poverty, for what is the child’s play of courtly grandeur to Him? A king! What is he but a crowned worm? A king! What is he but dust and ashes raised a very little higher on the ash heap than the rest of the dust?
The Lord, therefore, makes but small account of the honor which comes from man whose breath is in His nostrils—
“With scorn Divine, He turns His eyes From towers of haughty kings.”
When His awful chariot rolls downward from the skies He makes men mark the fact of His condescension by visiting men of low estate. He would have to stoop to a palace—it is no more if He stoops to a dunghill. When He is engaged on Mercy’s errands, having bowed so low as to enter a cabinet-council chamber, it is scarcely a step further to the haunt of poverty and the den of vice. Courage, you most humble of the sons of men—He who reigns in Heaven despises none. “He raises up the poor out of the dust and lifts the needy out of the dunghill.”
This has frequently occurred in Providence. God in His arrangements singularly alters the position of men. History is not without many instances in which the uppermost have become lowest and the lowest have been highest. Verily, “There are first that shall be last and there are last that shall be first.” Solomon said, “I have seen servants upon horses and princes walking in the dust.” And the same thing has been seen even in these modern times, when kings have fled their thrones and men who were prowling about in poverty have mounted to imperial power.
God in Providence often laughs at pedigree and ancestry and stains the honor and dignity of everything in which human nature boasts itself. From the kennel to the palace is an easy ascent when Heaven favors. It is not upon Providence that I intend to dilate this morning. My text has a special bearing upon God’s acts of Grace. Here it is above all others that we see the condescending sovereignty of His dealings. He takes the base things of the world and the things that are not, to bring to nothing the things that are.