Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 2425
“O Israel, you have destroyed yourself; but in Me is your help.” Hosea 13:9.
IT would be a very important subject for our meditation if we kept to the text and thought upon its great Truth of God—that the ruin of man is altogether of himself and the salvation of man is altogether of God. These two statements, I believe, comprehend the main points of a sound theology. There have been divisions in the Church over these points where there ought not to have been any. The Calvinist has said and said right bravely, that salvation is of Grace alone. And the Arminian has said and said most truthfully, that damnation is of man’s will, alone, and as the result of man’s sin, and of that only. Then they have fallen out with one another. The fact is, they had, each one, laid hold of a Truth of God, and if they could have put their heads together and accepted both Truths, it might have been greatly for the advantage of the Church of Christ! These two doctrines are like tram lines that you can travel on with safety and comfort, these parallel lines—ruin, of man; restoration, of God. Sin, of man’s will; salvation, of God’s will. Reprobation, of man’s demerit; election, of God’s free and Sovereign Grace. The sinner lost in Hell through himself, alone, the saint lifted up to Heaven wholly and alone by the power and Grace of God!
Get those two Truths of God thoroughly engraved upon your heart and you will then hold comprehensively the great Truths of Scripture. You will not need to crowd them into one narrow system of theology, but you will have a sort of duplicate system which will contain, as far as the mind of man, being finite, can contain—the great Truths revealed by the Infinite God. I am not, however, at this time going so much into the doctrinal point as to try and make use of my text for practical soul-saving purposes.
You notice in this text, “O Israel, you have destroyed yourself,” how God comes to close terms with men. He speaks, calling the persons addressed by name, “O Israel,” and then He uses a singular pronoun, “you have destroyed yourself.” It is something like Nelson’s way of fighting. When he came alongside the enemy, he brought his ship as close as he could, and then sent in a devastating broadside from stem to stern! So does this text—it seems to get alongside of the man, puts its guns right close up to him, and then discharges its volley—“O Israel, you have destroyed yourself.”
There is nothing said here that is at all flattering—“you have destroyed yourself.” God bids a man look at himself as a blighted, blasted, ruined thing when He tells him that he is a self-destroyer! He has done it all! He has no need to ask, as Jesus did, “Who slew all these?” Your own red right hand has done it! O you guilty sinner, you have ruined yourself! See how plainly God speaks, how He lays judgment to the line and righteousness to the plummet, and with His storm of hail sweeps away all refuges of lies—“O Israel, you have destroyed yourself.”
But though He does not flatter, observe that the Lord does not conclude His address to the sinner by leaving him in despair, for the second part of the text is, “In Me is your help.” We should never so preach the Law as to show only the naked sword of Divine Justice—the sweet invitations and promises of the Gospel must come in after the dreadful verdict of judgement! Let the thunders roll, let the lightning set the heavens on fire, but conclude not till some silver drops have fallen and a shower of mercy has refreshed the thirsty earth! No, God will not have us preach only the Law and its terrors, but the Gospel must also be brought into our message—“You have destroyed yourself, O Israel: there is no concealing from you that grim and terrible fact. But in Me is your help: there is no keeping back from you that cheering and blessed information!” When these two things work together, breeding self-despair and hope in God, this is the way by which eternal life is worked in the souls of men!
I am going to speak, then, of those two themes and first, here is a sad fact—“O Israel, you have destroyed yourself.” Secondly, here is a hopeful assurance—“In Me is your help.” And, before I finish, I wish to notice, in the third place, an instructive warning which is given by this text as you read it in the Revised Version—“It is your destruction, O Israel, that you are against Me, against your Help.” It is a warning to men not to fight against their own salvation, or contend against the only Helper who can aid them to any purpose!
I. First, then, here is A SAD FACT—“O Israel, you have destroyed yourself.”
Now, dear Friends, I believe that there is a message here to every one of us. The text speaks in tones of thunder to each unconverted person and says, “O Israel, you have destroyed yourself.” But if any child of God has lost his first love, his joy, his comfort—if he has become a backslider—if he has fallen into a sad, melancholy condition, he has done it himself and the text tells him so! “O Israel, you have destroyed yourself.” If there is about any of us that which we have to mourn over by reason of an evil heart of unbelief in departing from the living God, the text puts its finger on the sore, and says, “you have destroyed yourself! You have, yourself, done all this mischief.”