Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 2441
“The Lord knows how to deliver the godly out of temptations, and to reserve the unjust unto the Day of Judgment to be punished.” 2 Peter 2:9.
THERE are very narrow limits to our knowledge. There is a great breadth to our conceit, but the things that we really know are very few, after all. He who is wisest will be the first to confess his own ignorance. Our faith in the superior knowledge of God is a great source of comfort to us. That He knows everything is a sort of Omnipresent covering to our naked ignorance. Though we know not as yet, we rejoice that He knows, and it is better that He should know than that we should know. Knowledge is safer in the hands of God than it would be in our hands. Only the Infinite God is to be trusted with infinite knowledge!
The first words of our text, “The Lord knows,” often come as a comfort to my own mind. The text says, “The Lord knows how to deliver the godly out of temptations.” This is only one of the many things which the Lord knows. For instance, sometimes we meet with perplexing doctrines—perhaps we endeavor to effect reconciliation between the Predestination of God and the freedom of human action. It is better not to wade too far into those deep waters, lest we lose ourselves in an abyss! “The Lord knows.” There is a reconciling point in His mind as to all the great Truths which He has revealed. One was wishful, the other night, to tell me some great secret which he had discovered, but I was not so wishful to hear it, for I did not think that I should be any holier or any happier if I did hear it! I was just as pleased not to know as I should have been to know the secret. That insatiable craving to know everything draws away the life of men from what ought to be their insatiable craving, namely, to be like God, to know Him, to trust Him, to love Him and to serve
Him.
Sometimes, dear Friends, we come across puzzling prophecies. Some Brothers and Sisters profess to know all about prophecy. I do not, neither am I quite sure that they do. This I know, that you have only to place one set of interpreters of prophecy over against another set and they speedily swallow one another, as Aaron’s rod swallowed the rods of the magicians of Egypt! But I am satisfied to feel that “the Lord knows.” And He knows how every prophecy will be fulfilled and the exact order in which the prophecies will come to be facts. We may make our prophetic charts if we like, but God will follow His own chart. We may think that we have discovered the clue of the maze in the Apocalypse and in Daniel, but whether we have, or have not, is of no very great consequence! John and Daniel spoke by the Holy Spirit and their words will all be fulfilled in due time—and the Lord knows all about the whole matter.
The same is the case in reference to the Lord’s amazing promises. Many of them are so amazingly bright and grand that we sometimes ask ourselves, “How can all these things be fulfilled?” And possibly, like Abraham, we may have a Divine promise, yet there may come a precept or a Providence which seems to murder the promise and render its fulfillment impossible, as when God said to the Patriarch, “In Isaac shall your seed be called,” and then bade him offer up his son in whom the promise was wrapped up! Yet Abraham, although he did not know how the promise would be fulfilled, staggered not because of unbelief, for he felt that God knew. God will keep His promises, Brothers and Sisters. We need not try to help Him as she did who sought to secure the blessing for her favorite son by setting him on an evil and mischievous piece of plotting to deceive his aged father.
It is not your work to fulfill God’s promises—you will have enough to do to obey His precepts—and you will need His help to enable you to do that! He does not need your help in fulfilling His promises, but you may say with regard to the whole of them, “The Lord knows how to fulfill them and He will fulfill them to the dot of every i and the stroke of every t. Not one good thing that He has promised shall ever fail to be bestowed upon those who put their trust in Him.”
The same is the case, also, dear Friends, with regard to afflictive Providences. “I cannot see the wisdom of this trial,” says one. “I cannot understand why this trouble has befallen me,” says another. Why do you wish to understand? Why do you need to see? We walk by faith, not by sight! I have known what it is to feel a thrill of sacred joy within my soul when my Divine Master has given me a task altogether beyond my strength. I have felt, “If this work had been only half as heavy as it is, I might have attempted it, but now I know that I cannot perform this task in my own strength, so I am cast upon Omnipotence.” It is poor work—paddling about on the muddy beach, lifting first one foot and then the other! The grand exercise is to swim—and you must swim when you cannot touch the bottom. Sometimes God puts us into an ocean of afflictions where there seems to be no bottom. Our trials are altogether too heavy for us, they quite overwhelm us. Oh, then, what a mercy it is if we have faith enough to trust in God!