Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 843
Delivered on Lord’s-Day Morning, November 29, 1868, by C. H. SPURGEON, at the Metropolitan Tabernacle, Newington..
“They went forth to go into the land of Canaan; and into the land of Canaan they came.’” Genesis 12:5.
IF you desire to know the character or a child, you will probably learn much about it from observing the father. The young bird flies and sings as its father did before it. If we would know the life of the child of faith, we should study the history of the “father of the faithful.” Abraham, the man of faith, is a type of all believing men, and the narrative of his life, if rightly considered, is the mirror of the history of all the saints of God. The commencement of his career of faith, when he first became separated from his own country and went into the land of Canaan, is a most instructive representation of our effectual calling—when we are, by a work of Omnipotent Grace, separated from the world, and made to obey the great precept, “Come you out from among them, be you separate, and touch not the unclean thing; and I will receive you, and will be a Father unto you, and you shall be My sons and daughters.”
The life of the Believer is as Abram’s was, a separated life, a life regulated by other affections than those which arise from the relationships of flesh and blood. It is a life of walking in the unseen, in which God’s command, Presence and approval are paramount considerations. It is a life in which faith guides the soul, sitting like a pilot at the helm of the vessel. Abram denied the flesh, took up the cross, went outside the camp, became sanctified unto the Lord, and lived and died the friend of God and a stranger among men. The commencement of his separated life is a lively picture of the commencement of the same life in ourselves. The calling of Abram is a representation of our calling, and to that matter I shall ask your earnest attention this morning.
I. First, EFFECTUAL CALLING IS ILLUSTRATED IN THE CALL OF ABRAM. We have been reading the whole of the story and therefore I shall only need to refresh your memories with it. Read carefully the last verses of chapter 11, and the whole of chapter 12 and get the thread of the story. Abram’s call was, in the first place, the result of the Sovereign Grace of God. The world, as a whole, was lying in heathenism. Men had gradually gone astray from the one God to the worship of engraved images. Here and there there might be an exception, as in the case of a Job or a Melchisedec, but thick darkness covered the people.
God had determined that He would select one family which should afterwards grow into a distinct nation, to be the conservators of the true faith. Why He selected Abram, He Himself only knows, for we know that Terah, the father of Abram, had declined into the worship of false gods. “Your fathers,” Joshua tells us in his 24th chapter, and second verse, “dwelt on the other side of the flood in old times, even Terah, the father of Abram, and the father of Nachor: and they served other gods.”
That family, if not quite so corrupt as the rest of mankind, had, at any rate, become corrupted. And we find the idols in the house of Laban, their descendant. Yet the Sovereign Grace of God pitched upon the household of Terah, and out of that favored family the Lord of Hosts made a Divine selection of the person of Abram. Why, I say again, why, remains in the inscrutable purposes of God, a thing unrevealed to us, though doubtless the choice was made by the Lord for the wisest and most God-like reasons. Abram was a man with faults. “A man, also, with many virtues,” you reply. Yes, but those virtues given to him by God’s Spirit, and not the cause of his election, but the result. He is an instance of the Sovereignty of God carrying out the Divine declaration, “I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion.”
The Prophets often spoke of Abraham as though the Lord’s mercy to him was a matter to be admired, and they by no means ascribed his favored position to any personal merit in the Patriarch. “Look,” says Isaiah, “unto the rock from where you are hewn, and to the hole of the pit from where you were dug. Look unto Abraham, your father, and unto Sarah that bore you: for I called him alone, and blessed him, and increased him.” Here he is compared, as it were, to a quarry, or to a pit out of which the nation was dug, and to this pit they are bid to look as to a sight that will humble them—consequently, I gather—not to the merit of their fathers, but to the Grace of God.
And again, “A Syrian ready to perish, was your father.” Called a Syrian, as if to show that by nature he was as others—and as the Syrians were idolaters, even was he. “A Syrian ready to perish,” by which I understand not perishing with physical hunger or disease, but through spiritual darkness and declension from the true God. “Ready to perish,” and yet the Eternal Mercy looked on him and saved him! Yes, whether men will accept it or not, that Truth of God stands fast, forever, that “whom He did foreknow, He also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of His Son, that He might be the first-born among many brethren. Moreover, whom He did predestinate, them He also called.” Effectual calling in all cases, follows the eternal purpose. Predestination, according to the Divine good pleasure, is the wellhead of all the Covenant blessings which the Believer enjoys—