Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 2380
“I am the LORD your God, which brought you out of the land of Egypt: open your mouth wide, and I will fill it.” Psalm 81:10.
The preceding verse bids us turn away from any strange God—“There shall no strange god be in you; neither shall you worship any strange god.” Idolatry is the natural sin of man. It covers a very large surface of the realm of sin and it is always cropping up in some form or other. Idolatry is not merely the bowing before graven images—the essence of it lies in putting trust in any other than the great invisible God. We can easily make to ourselves gods of our experience, of our wealth, of our talents. We can make idols of our children, of our wives, of our husbands, of our friends. We can make a god of anything by valuing it more than we do our Savior, or by trusting in it beyond our God, or by refusing to trust in Him apart from it. You can make a god of the means of Grace—when you think more of the means of Grace than of God and the Grace of the means! You can make a god of your Bible when you think that the reading of it, apart from the illumination of the Holy Spirit, will be all that you require! So you see that it is very easy for man to fall into idolatry.
The cure for this evil lies in our having a living God always before us. If you forget the living God, you will make to yourself an idol god. It is a necessity of your nature that you should have a god of some sort and, to prevent your having a strange god, you must trust, cling to and love Jehovah, the one only living and true God.
The man who has Christ before him does not need a crucifix. The man who comes to God through Jesus Christ does not need the intercession of the Virgin Mary or of saints and angels. The man who has set the Lord always before him does not desire symbols of Jehovah’s Presence—in fact, he remembers the words of Moses to the children of Israel— “Take you therefore good heed unto yourselves; for you saw no manner of similitude on the day that the Lord spoke unto you in Horeb out of the midst of the fire: lest you corrupt yourselves, and make you a graven image, the similitude of any figure, the likeness of male or female, the likeness of any beast that is on the earth, the likeness of any winged fowl that flies in the air, the likeness of anything that creeps on the ground, the likeness of any fish that is in the waters beneath the earth: and lest you lift up your eyes unto Heaven, and when you see the sun, and the moon, and the stars, even all the host of Heaven, should be driven to worship them, and serve them, which the Lord, your God, has divided unto all nations under the whole Heaven.”
Such a man is afraid, sometimes, if there is anything like a similitude about his prayers, lest his mind should be taken away from worshipping God, who is a Spirit, in spirit and in truth. He, therefore, generally seeks after great simplicity of worship, for an ornate ritual is a stumbling block to him, although there are some who think that it is a help to them. It only hinders him and, therefore, he rejects it. Oh, that God might always keep us clear of all idolatry by His good Spirit enabling us to worship Him in spirit and in truth! Then would these words be fulfilled in our experience—“There shall no strange god be in you; neither shall you worship any strange god.” He who has learned to trust the Creator will not want to trust the creature! He who has stayed himself upon the Rock of Ages will not be tempted to support himself upon the broken reed of human strength! Who will lean on a cloud when his defense may be the munitions of stupendous rocks? Who will wish to feed on the mist when he has eaten the true Bread which comes down from Heaven? God, the true God, casts out all strange gods!
In our text we have God coming very near to His people, and coming near them to encourage them to come nearer to Him. We have the Lord speaking to them, that they may speak to Him. He opens His mouth to them, that they may open
their mouths to Him. The text contains one encouragement and two arguments for it—they will be our two divisions. First, God encouraging His people. And, secondly, God using two great arguments. You see, the exhortation is sandwiched in between two arguments. The first is, “I am the Lord—I am Jehovah—your God, which brought you out of the land of Egypt.” Then comes the exhortation, “Open your mouth wide.” And that is followed by the other argument, “I will fill it.” There is a good reason, indeed, for opening the mouth wide, when God has promised to fill it!
I. To begin, then, the exhortation of the sermon will be that which we find in the text, in which we hear GOD ENCOURAGING HIS PEOPLE by saying, “Open your mouth wide.”
I suppose that the Lord means by this exhortation, first of all, to help us to get rid of the paralyzing influence of fear. A man, in the presence of one whom he dreads, cannot speak boldly. And if he has been guilty of some great crime and stands before one whom he regards as his judge, he is like the man in our Lord’s parable—“speechless.” A man on his knees, conscious of his sin, fearing the justice of God, would very naturally be unable to speak. And to encourage him, God says, “Open your mouth; be not afraid. Open your mouth wide; confess your sin; acknowledge your wanderings from your God; go into the particulars of your iniquity; ask for My mercy; plead My promises; set forth the arguments that can be drawn from the Cross of Christ. Open your mouth wide; be not afraid to speak.”