Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 1314
“You have a mighty arm: strong is Your hand, and high is Your right hand.” Psalm 89:13.
WHEN the soul is perfectly reconciled to God and comes to delight in Him, it rejoices in all His attributes. At the first, perhaps, it dwells almost exclusively upon His love and His mercy, but it afterwards proceeds to find joy in the sterner attributes and especially delights itself in His holiness and in His power. It is a mark of the growth of Christian knowledge when we begin to distinguish the attributes and to rejoice in God in each one of them. It betokens meditation and thought when we are able to discern the things of God and to give to the Lord a Psalm of praise for each one of His glories. And it also indicates a growingly intimate communion with the great Father when we begin to perceive His adorable Character and to rejoice so much in all that He is, that we can take the attributes in detail and bless, praise and magnify Him on account of each one of them.
Under the Jewish Law there were forms of the sacrifices which were of the simplest kind, such as the offering of turtle doves or young pigeons, which were simply torn asunder and burned upon the altar. But there were other and more elaborate rules for the sacrifices which were taken from the flock and the herd. These were rightly divided and the parts laid in their places—the head, the fat, the inwards, the legs and so on—as if to show that although some Believers only know the atoning sacrifice as a whole and after a superficial manner, there are others still further instructed who look deeper into Divine mystery and see the various forms which the great Truths of God assume.
It is a saving thing to know the Lord God with all your heart, but I would, Beloved, that you knew all the varied rays of His pure light. That you beheld the many glories of His crown and could rejoice in each distinct excellence of His infinite perfection. The subject of this morning is the power of God as the subject of adoration. Here, dear Brothers and Sisters, we have large scope for thought, for the power of God is manifested in connection with all His other attributes. It is the cause of all His works and the basis and working force by which His kingdom is maintained and Himself revealed.
How clearly is His power beheld in creation. There, indeed, O Lord, “You have a mighty arm.” We injure ourselves and dishonor our Creator when we pass over His works as if they were beneath the notice of spiritual minds. It is perverse on our part to forget the exhortation, “What God has created, call not you common.” The Psalmist sang concerning the creating might of God in verses 11 and 12 of the Psalm before us—“The heavens are Yours, the earth also is Yours: as for the world and the fullness thereof, You have founded them. The north and the south, You have created them: Tabor and Hermon shall rejoice in Your name.”
David did not divide between Revelation and Nature. He loved the Word of God and meditated therein day and night, but at the same time he triumphed in the works of God’s hands. In the 104th Psalm he found music in rocks and rills, in fowls and fir trees, and rejoiced that the Glory of the Lord shall endure forever, the Lord shall rejoice in His works. In the 8th Psalm he considered the heavens and burst forth with the exclamation, “O Lord our Lord, how excellent is Your name in all the earth! “With the same feeling I led you to sing this morning that child’s hymn in which the power of God is reverenced—
“I sing the almighty power of God, Which made the mountains rise, Which spreads the flowing seas abroad, And built the lofty skies.”
The Lord made Job and his friends remember his power as seen in creation. Indeed, it was by revealing that one attribute that Job’s friends were silenced and the Patriarch, himself, was led to cry, “Behold, I am vile; what shall I answer
You?” We ought not to overlook that which had so salutary an influence upon others. It is a pity when people become so spiritual that they have no eyes whatever for the Lord’s power in rivers and mountains, in seas and storms—for God has made them all and as in a glass He is darkly to be seen in them. “The works of the Lord are great, sought out of all them that have pleasure therein.”
I can understand the feeling of some who say, “I prefer spiritual preaching and I delight most to read the spiritual parts of the Word of God rather than the historical records, and to think of His Grace rather than of His wisdom in Nature.” But there is a fault about such a preference, excellent as it is in one way. It is as though you had a friend who was a great artist, and a master in statuary, able to make the marble almost live and speak with his magic chisel. You are accustomed to call upon this eminent sculptor and it gives you great pleasure to talk with him and to associate with his children. But you have never gone into his studio, for his masterpieces do not interest you.