Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 2555
“The LORD is good, a stronghold in the day of trouble, and He knows them that trust in Him.” Nahum 1:7.
HAVE you read this chapter through? It is a very terrible one—it is like the rushing of a mighty river when it is nearing a waterfall. It boils, seethes and flows with overwhelming force, bearing everything before it, yet, right in the middle of the surging flood, there stands out, like a green island, this most cheering, comforting and delightful text! Listen a minute to the Prophet’s words of terror. “The Lord is slow to anger, and great in power, and will not at all acquit the wicked: the Lord has His way in the whirlwind and in the storm, and the clouds are the dust of His feet. He rebukes the sea, and makes it dry, and dries up all the rivers: Bashan languishes, and Carmel, and the flower of Lebanon languishes. The mountains quake at Him, and the hills melt, and the earth is burned at His Presence, yes, the world, and all that dwell therein. Who can stand before His indignation? And who can abide in the fierceness of His anger? His fury is poured out like fire, and the rocks are thrown down by Him.”
Then, just as there has sometimes been a break and a delightful silence in the very midst of some tremendous chorus of sacred song, so here the thunder pauses, the hurricane is stopped and we hear the sweet music of this still small voice— “Jehovah is good, a stronghold in the day of trouble, and He knows them that trust in Him”—from which we may gather that there is always a hiding place for His people—His eyes of love are fixed on them even when they flash fire upon His adversaries! Nothing shall harm them, though the earth is removed and the mountains are cast into the midst of the sea! They may rejoice in the goodness of the Lord in the day of His fierce anger.
I invite you, dear Friends, to consider this text, and may the Holy Spirit make the meditation which will follow to be useful! There are three things, here, to be thought about. First let us think of God Himself—The Lord is good.” Then let our minds ponder a little upon what God is to us—“a stronghold in the day of trouble.” And then we will change the theme a little and speak of God with us—“He knows them that trust in Him.”
I. First, then, let us think of GOD HIMSELF—“Jehovah is good.” It is well for us to be able to say so when the day of trouble is really upon us. It is one thing to sit under your vine and fig tree and sing, “The Lord is good.” It is quite another thing when the vine and fig tree have both been cut down and all your comfort is gone, to still say, “The Lord is good.” Do you not think that if we fail to say it the second time, it will look as if, after all, it was the vine and fig tree that were good, and not God? Or, at least, that our view of God’s goodness was very much derived from the fact of our being in so much comfort? It was an accusation which Satan brought against Job that he loved God for what he got out of him—“Have not You made a hedge about him, and about his house, and about all that he has on every side?” The devil is very apt to charge God’s people with having a cupboard love, but it is well for us to refute that accusation by loving, praising and adoring God when comforts fail, when the hedge is broken and when the things that we received with gratitude are, at length, in wisdom, taken away. Oh, what a rebuff the archfiend had when Job, on his dunghill scraping his sores and with his children dead and his property gone, yet said, “The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.”
That is the spirit of our text. Here is a man of God, in the midst of the overwhelming flood, standing up and saying—“The Lord is good. The Lord is good.” There are some persons who, even in their theology, do not believe God to be good. “It cannot be,” they say, “that the wicked will be cast into Hell if God is good.” And they argue, therefore, the ungodly will not be punished. But the child of God says that though they will certainly be cast into Hell, God is good for all that. It is true that He will punish sin and punish it everlastingly, but God is good for all that. “No,” say others, “but if He is good, He cannot do so.” You may make unto yourselves another god and call him God, but the Christian says, ” TheLordi s good, Jehovah is good. He is good as I find Him—good as an angry God—good when I read such words as these, ‘With an overrunning flood He will make an utter end of the place, thereof, and darkness shall pursue His enemies.’” God is good, even then—He is always good! Let Him reveal Himself as He pleases, let Him do what He pleases— whatever I find He reveals about Himself, or whatever I see in Providence about Him, my heart is bowed down! Even when my understanding cannot understand, this firm piece of good sound doctrine is still true—“The Lord is and must be good.”