Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 865
Delivered on Lord’s-day Morning, APRIL 11, 1869, by, the Metropolitan Tabernacle, Newington.
“Deep calls unto deep.”- Psalm 42:7.
IN the grandeur of Nature there are awful harmonies. When the storm agitates the ocean below, the heavens above hear the tumult and answer to the clamor. Down comes a deluge of sonorous hail or swift-descending rain, attended with peals of thunder and flashes of flame. Frequently the waterspout, of which David speaks in the next sentence, evidences the sympathy of the two great waters above and beneath the firmament—the great deep above stretches out its hands to the great deep below and in voice of thunder their old relationship is recognized. It is almost as if the twin seas remembered how once they lay together in the same cradle of confusion till the decree of the Eternal appointed each his bounds and place.
“Deep calls unto deep”—one splendor of creation holds fellowship with another. Amazed and overwhelmed by the spectacle of some tremendous tempest upon land, you have yet been able to observe how the clouds appear to be emptying themselves each into each and the successive volleys of Heaven’s artillery are answered by rival clamors, the whole chorus of sublimities lifting up their voices. It has seemed to me that a strange wild joy was moving all the elements and that the angels of wind and tempest were clapping their awful hands in glorious glee. Among the Alps, in the day of tempest, the solemnly silent peaks break through their sacred quiet and speak to each other in that dread language which is echoing the voice of God—
“Far along,
From peak to peak the rattling crags among,
Leaps the live thunder!
Not from one lone cloud,
But every mountain now has found a tongue,
And Jura answers, through her misty shroud,
Back to the joyous Alps, who call to her aloud.” Height calls unto height even as “deep calls unto deep.” David, perceiving these solemn harmonies, uses the metaphor to describe his own unhappy experience. I suppose that when he wrote this Psalm he was an exile from his throne and country, driven out by the rebellion of his favorite son. He crossed the brook Jabbok in fear and hastened by night over Jordan and withdrew to a dry and thirsty land where there was no water. He was saddened, most of all, at the remembrance of the sacred shrine to which he had so often gone with the multitude that kept holy day, because he was now unable to join with that hallowed throng in worship so refreshing to his soul.
Everything around the Psalmist was like an ocean tossed with tempest—his outlook was unmingled trouble. His sorrows were like Job’s messengers followed on one another’s heels. His griefs came wave upon wave. There was no intermission to his woe. At the same time his heart sank within him. The deep outside called to the deep within. Conscience, as with a lightning flash, lit up the abyss of the sufferer’s inward depravity and made him see the darkness of the sin into which he had fallen with the wife of Uriah in days gone by and filled him with despondency and sad forebodings.
While outside everything was comfortless, within him there was nothing to cheer him. Bitterly did he enquire, “Why are you cast down, O my Soul? Why are you disquieted within me?” Externally and internally, rest was removed far from him. Outside were fights, within were fears. Deep called unto deep at the noise of God’s waterspouts—all the waves and billows of God’s Providence had gone over him.
But now, no longer confining so grand a thought to the mere manner in which David employed it, namely, to the double trouble of many of God’s saints when two seas meet and when internal and external sorrows combine, I purpose to use the general principle in other directions and to show that everywhere where there is one deep it calls to another and that especially in the moral and spiritual world every vast and sublime truth has its correspondent, which, like another deep, calls to it responsively.
I. First, we shall consider this fact in connection with THE ETERNAL PURPOSES OF GOD AND THEIR FULFILMENT IN FACT. The eternal purpose—what a deep! He who pretends to understand predestination, misunderstands himself! We have no unit for measurement when we strive to fathom the decrees of God. We are like the astronomers in attempting to measure the distances of those stars which are as remote from the ordinary fixed stars as the fixed stars are from us—they fail from lack of a measuring-line which may serve as a unit—scarcely does the diameter of the earth’s orbit suffice for a basis of numeration. They have no unit by which to estimate.
What do you and I know of infinity, Omnipresence, and self-existence? We are far beyond our depth when we come to the ocean of Divine purposes. We may gaze into the mystery with awe, but to profess to comprehend it is vanity itself. What a depth! What an inscrutable mystery, that the infinitely pure and holy God should have determined to allow the intrusion of sin into His universe! That He should allow evil to drag down an angel and debase him into a devil! That the adoring hosts of Heaven should be thinned by sinful desertion from a loyalty so well deserved! How came it that moral evil was suffered to come into this fair world, to spoil Eden, to pollute mankind, to fill the grave and populate Hell?