Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 1117
“And this is the Father’s will which has sent Me, that of all which He has given Me I should lose nothing, but should raise it up again at the last day. And this is the will of Him thatsentMe, that everyone which sees the Son, and believes on Him, may have everlasting life; and I will raise him up at the last day.” John 6:39,40.
SUCH is our impertinent curiosity that we would gladly peer between the folded leaves of the Divine purposes. The eager thirst of man to discover secrets, to solve mysteries, to draw aside the folded curtains and to ascertain that which is past finding out, tempts him full often to the wildest conjecture and the most adventurous speculation. How many would rush to any part of the earth were it possible to light upon a spot from which they could reconnoiter the times and the seasons to get a sight of the future? To know that which God conceals seems to be one of the depraved desires of the human heart. This presumptuous enquiry is both foolish and sinful. What have you to do, O man, with God’s councils? To obey Him is your work, not to attempt to know what He does not please to reveal.
But let us understand that the Gospel is an extract from the will of God and such an extract that it contains the very essence thereof. Certainly there is nothing in the will of God contrary to the Gospel. Among the unrevealed things there cannot be anything in conflict with the revealed things. None of the secrets can possibly contradict those Truths of God which He has seen fit to unfold. O then, you that want to know the will of God, here is something of it for you closely to observe and diligently to study! If you want to read that will, here it is given to you in two forms—“This is the Father’s will, (the will of Him which has sent Jesus, His only-begotten Son, to be our Savior), that of all which He has given Me I should lose nothing, but should raise it up again at the last day.”
And here is that same will, again, opened up before you, if you have but hearts to receive it—“This is the will of Him that sent Me, that everyone which sees the Son, and believes on Him, may have everlasting life: and I will raise him up at the last day.” The will of God is our salvation. It was from the will of God that the very thought of salvation first arose. Had we been left to our own wills, we should have been willing to wander further and further from God. No man originated the idea of restoration for our race—God Himself willed it and it is from the purpose of His Grace that all our hopes begin—and the will which originated salvation shaped and formed it. It was God’s will that ordained salvation by faith, salvation through an atoning Sacrifice, salvation by the way of the new birth, salvation by the way of perseverance up to perfection.
God cast in His own mold the way and modus of salvation and it has been His will that has shaped it. Like a vessel revolving upon the wheel before Him, His fingers have made the form and fashion of it. According to His own will He begat us that we might be a kind of first fruits of His creatures. It is His will that has brought those of us who are saved into the knowledge of the Truth, by which will, also, we are sanctified and upon which will we rely as the motive force which shall bear us onward throughout the entire of our lives. It will bear us over the regions of death and bear us into the land of the perfect where we shall see the face of God without sin.
Now, it is about this will of God that we are going to speak, taking the two phrases as setting forth the Divine side of salvation and the human side of salvation. You know, beloved Friends, that the general custom is, with the various denominations of Christians, to take up one part of the Bible and preach that part. And then it is the duty of all divines on that side of the question not to preach anything but that. Or if they find a text that looks in rather a different direction, these gentlemen are expected to twist it round to suit their creed—it being supposed that only one set of truths can possibly be worth defending. It never having entered into the heads of some people that there can be two apparently irreconcilable Truths which, nevertheless, are equally valuable.
Think not that I come here to defend the human side of salvation at the expense of the Divine! Nor am I desirous to magnify the Divine side of it at the expense of the human. Rather would I beseech you to look at the two texts which are together before us and to be prepared to receive both sets of Truths as Truths of God. I think it a very dangerous thing to say that the Truth lies between the two extremes. It does not—the Truth lies in the two, in the comprehension of both— not in taking a part from this and a part from that. Not in toning down one and modulating the other, as is too much the custom of today, but in believing and giving full expression to everything that God reveals whether we can reconcile the things or not.