Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 1097
“Now because we have maintenance from the king’s palace, and it was not meet for us to see the King dishonored, therefore have we sent and informed the king.” Ezra 4:14.
THE facts of the case were these. Under Zerubbabel, the Jews, who had returned from Babylon, commenced to rebuild Jerusalem. There were in the land certain half-and-half persons, somewhat like the Samaritans, who were neither Jews nor Gentiles and they asked, at first, that they might join in the building of Jerusalem. This was refused, the Jews determining to keep themselves pure from all association with the heathen or semi-heathen. So indignant were these people at this that they wrote Artaxerxes, the king, to tell him that he was very little aware of what was going on in Judea, for the Jews had always been, from time immemorial, a troublesome people, and now they were beginning to build their city again. And as soon as it was built they would, in all probability, revolt against King Artaxerxes and give him much trouble, as their fathers had done to kings before him.
Now, in writing that letter they showed themselves wise in their generation, for they told the king in the words of our text that they were moved by gratitude to write to him. It was false—but hypocrites often use the best of words and employ the best of sense to cover their deceit. They said that they, themselves, were sustained from the king’s palace and, therefore, they could not bear that the king should be dishonored—for this reason they had written to tell his majesty that the Jews were building this wall and they trusted that, for his own honor’s sake, and for his subjects’ sake, he would stop them.
Now let me take these words right out of those evil mouths and put them into my own and into yours. They will suit us well if we turn them to the great King of kings. We may truly say, “Now because we have maintenance from the King’s palace, and it was not meet for us to see the King dishonored, therefore have we sent and informed the King.” The text will enable me to speak on three points. First, here is a fact acknowledged—“we have maintenance from the King’s palace.” Here is, secondly, a duty recognized—“it was not meet for us to see the King dishonored.” And, thirdly, here is a course of action prescribed—“therefore have we sent and informed the King.”
I. Now, beloved fellow Believers, the words of our text may be used by us while we acknowledge a very gracious fact—WE HAVE MAINTENANCE FROM THE KING’S PALACE. How true this is of all God’s people, in all respects, you will be abundantly ready to acknowledge. Both the upper and the nether springs from which we drink are fed by the eternal bounty of the great King. Up to now we have been supplied with food and raiment. Sometimes we may have been reduced to a pinch, no doubt, and the question has arisen, through the infirmity of our nature and fermented with the irritability of our unbelief, “What shall we eat, what shall we drink, and with what shall we be clothed?”
But we have dwelt in the land and verily we have been fed and I have no doubt that to many of you it has been peculiarly gratifying to receive the loaf, as it were, immediately from your Father’s hands. You have known what poverty has meant and then there has been to you a peculiar sweetness in the daily bread which, in answer to prayer, has been sent to you. Although we do not drink of the water from the Rock, or find the manna lying at our tent door every morning, yet the Providence of God produces for us quite the same results. We have been fed and satisfied and, at any rate, many of us, in looking back, can say, “my cup runs over. Surely goodness and mercy have followed me all the days of my life.”
Therefore we have to now, even in temporal things, been made to feel that we have been maintained from the King’s palace. But it has been in spiritual things, Beloved, that our continual experience of the King’s bounty has been most notable. We have a new life and therefore we have new needs and new hunger and a new thirst—and God has maintained us out of His own palace as to this new life of ours. O Beloved, we have had great hunger at times, after heavenly things,
and He has “satisfied our mouth with good things,” and our youth has been “renewed like the eagle’s.” We have had huge needs—bottomless deeps of need we have had. And yet, great God, the treasures of Your Grace have been everlasting mines, deep as our helpless miseries were, and boundless as our sins.
Why, sometimes we have been drawn aside from our steadfastness and we have needed mighty Grace to set us on our feet again—and to make us once more, “strong in the Lord and in the power of His might”—and we have had it, have we not? We have sought it and we have found it! Our shoes have been iron and brass and as our days so has our strength been. Up till this moment we have found that underneath us are the everlasting arms. In looking back upon all the way wherein the Lord our God has led us, we can sing of the beginning of it, we can sing of the middle of it and we believe we shall sing of the end of it—for all through we have been maintained out of the King’s palace. This is matter of fact both as to things temporal and things spiritual.