Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 823
Delivered on thursday evening, march 5, 1868, by C. H. SPURGEON, at the Metropolitan Ttabernacle, Newington..
“The flood came and took them all away.” Matthew 24:39.
WE commonly say that “there is no rule without an exception,” and certainly the rule that there is no rule without an exception has an exception to itself, for the rules of God are without exception. The rule that God will punish the ungodly is without an exception. The rule that all who are out of Christ shall perish is a rule without an exception. And the rule that all who are in Christ shall be saved is also without an exception.
I. I shall have to call your attention, tonight, to three rules that are without exception, and the first is the one before us—“THE FLOOD CAME AND TOOK THEM ALL AWAY.” The destruction caused by the deluge was universal. It did not merely sweep away some who were out of the ark, but it swept them all away. There were, doubtless, distinctions in those days, as there are now, for never has there been one dead level of equality among the sons of Adam since men multiplied on the face of the earth.
Many in that time were wealthy. They had accumulated stores of gold and silver. They were rich in merchandise, invention, or plunder. They were rich in the produce of the field. They owned broad acres of land. They had multiplied to themselves the conveniences and the luxuries of life, but the Flood came and swept them all away. Not one rich man could escape with all his hoards, neither could he purchase life if he had given all his wealth, for the Flood came and swept them all away. There were no rafts of costly cedar, or towers of expensive masonry which could stand above the devouring deluge—death laughed at miser and merchant, millionaire and monarch—all, all were swallowed up in the angry Flood.
There were some in those days who were extremely poor. They worked hard to gain enough to keep body and soul together, and they were scarcely able to do that. They had to suffer every day—
“The oppressor’s wrongs, the proud man’s contumely,” but I do not find that as a reward for their sufferings they were spared. No, when the Flood came it swept them all away. The pauper out of the ark perished as well as the prince. The poor and miserable peasant died, washed away from the filth of his mud hovel, as monarchs were from their palaces. The beggar without shoes for his feet died—the Flood had no pity on his rags. He who swept the street-crossing and stood waiting for a casual alms was taken away with the aristocrats who had pitied him.
The Flood came and swept them all away. The unrelenting billows meted out an equal fate to all who were outside the one ark of safety. And so will it be at the last. As the great man will not purchase an escape by all that which he has stored up, so neither will a man be delivered because of his poverty. There was a rich man in Hell, we read—poor men have been there, and are there now. As riches cannot save from Hell, so neither can poverty raise to Heaven. The Grace and Justice of God are independent of society, and rank, and state, and condition. What matters it to the Lord how much or how little of yellow metal you have about you? He measures no man by his purse, but by his soul—and he whose soul is unpardoned, is lost, be he rolling in plenty or pining in need. You must be born-again. You must believe in Jesus. You must, in one word, get into the Ark, or when the flood comes it will sweep you all away, be you rich as Dives, or poor as Lazarus.
There were, in those days, learned men in the world—men who searched the stars at night. There were men who had deciphered the constellations, who had pried into the secrets of matter. There were men who had ransacked science, and, so far as men had gone (and we do not know but what they went a very long way), had pierced into the innermost recesses of knowledge. But when the Flood came it swept them all away. There goes the philosopher—you can hear his dying gurgle. There, floating on the stream, is the head of an antediluvian Solomon. The Flood has swept away masters of arts, doctors of law, and rabbis in divinity. No man was able to escape the deluge by all that he had ever learned. Knowledge is no life-buoy. Logic is no swimming-belt. Rhetoric no life-boat. Down, down they go, and all their science with them, beneath the shoreless waves.
And as for the illiterate who were, no doubt, numerous then as now—who could only count as many as the number of their fingers, who knew none of the niceties of learning or of eloquence—when the Flood came it swept them all away. So that knowledge, except it be of one particular kind, namely, the heart-knowledge of Christ Jesus, will not deliver us from final destruction. And, on the other hand, although ignorance, if it is not willful, is some palliation for sin, yet it is never such an excuse as to suffer sin to go unpunished. There is a Hell for those who knew their Master’s will and did it not—and there is also a Hell for those who would not know, but who lived and died willfully ignorant of the things of God.