Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 1462
“They shall know that I am the Lord when I ha ve broken the bars of their yoke.” Ezekiel 34:27.
BUT do not all men know that God is the Lord? They should know it, for He is clearly to be seen in the works of Nature. Even where no Revelation has come, yet Heaven and earth and sea and the rain which brings with it fruitful seasons—filling men’s hearts with food and gladness—all proclaim the Most High! But man, by wisdom, knows not God. He shuts his eyes to evidences brighter than the sun and in his willful blindness he sets up an image of wood or stone or gold or silver—bows before it and calls that his God! This is the sin of the nations, that they changed the Glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man and to birds and four-footed beasts and creeping things.
But do not all know God in this land—this land where there is so much Gospel teaching—where we boast of our open Bible and of our Protestant pulpit? Alas, no! There are multitudes who have heard of God and who say that they believe in Him, but who have no personal acquaintance with Him and do not, in the sense of the text, know that He is the Lord. Ah, dear Friends, there is no knowing God except by personal acquaintance with Him! And there is no personal acquaintance with Him except by His own revealing of Himself to our spirit! You may read as much as ever you will and hear as long as ever you please, but until your own spirit comes into contact with the Spirit of God, you do not and cannot know the Lord! You know the report of Him which you have heard with the hearing of the ear, but that is a small matter unless it leads to something higher.
There are, I fear, a great many “Christian” people whom we must not judge, for they keep up outwardly all that is to be expected in the Christian character according to the common run of profession, nowadays, who, nevertheless, do not truly know God by spiritual fellowship with Him. Their faith stands upon reason—it is based upon argument and appeals to the intellect—but it has never led to personal knowledge and acquaintance. The Lord is, to them, a logical abstraction, not a beloved Person. Or, perhaps, which is somewhat worse, their faith as to God rests upon excitement, upon association, upon the eloquence of a favorite preacher, or something of that sort.
Now, in such cases as this, God is not so known as He should be and, after a while, if another god is preached, a different god from the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, they leave the true God for the false. In these days of worldly wisdom men set up a fresh deity who is more effeminate and pliable than the glorious God of Moses and of Aaron, the God of the fathers and the Prophets! And, straightway, those who know not the only living and true God, for there is but one, run after this new god, newly set up by these modern Divines who have manufactured him in their studies as certainly as ever the Hindu manufactures mud gods by the river Ganges! They bow before this new god and cry out against the Jehovah of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, as if He were to be judged by them and to be no more accounted Lord!
It is amazing to hear them speak of the, “stern Deity of the Old Testament,” and of, “the semi-enlightened views of Moses and Isaiah.” As for us, we heartily love Him who made known His ways unto Moses and His acts unto the children of Israel—and we desire no other God. Those who know the Lord know that He is still the I AM THAT I AM, unchangeable in all respects! And we know that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of Glory, is the same God who revealed Himself at Paran and came with sound of thunder at Sinai! The God who manifests Himself in Jesus Christ is He who spoke to our fathers and the Prophets, for He is the one glorious Lord God!
Now, my Brothers and Sisters, there is no fear of your running after the new gods if you have once known the true God! If, by experience you have been brought into fellowship with the Most High and felt His power and seen His Glory, you will be confirmed in those things which He has taught you and which His Spirit has engraved upon your soul as with an iron pen and written with the point of a diamond.
It appears from the text that there is a process by which God’s own people are brought to know the Lord. This process takes place when He breaks the bars of their yoke. Then they know that the Lord is God! It is clear, therefore,
that He must first of all permit His own chosen, for a wise purpose, to come into bondage. They must be in bondage, or else they would not wear the yoke and there would be no opportunity for the Lord to break that yoke. I do not commend the bondage—it is a thing to be deplored—but, as Augustine once cried out, “Beata culpa!” “Happy fault!” when he saw how sin had made space for the wonderful display of Divine Grace. So I venture to say, “Blessed bondage, which gives an opportunity for our God to come in and set His children free! And by thus breaking the bars of their yoke to teach them that He, Himself is the Lord.”