Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 2609
“How precious also aire Your thoughts unto me, O God! How great is the sum of them!If I should count them, they are more in number than the sand: when I awake, I am still with You.” Psalm 139:17,18.
This Psalm dilates upon the Omniscience of God. In the most forcible manner, it shows that God’s eyes have always rested upon us and are resting upon us now. We are here made to see that God knew all about us before we were born, that He now reads our most secret thoughts and that our unspoken words are all known to Him. And I want you to notice that the Psalm is not at all in that mournful strain in which we sometimes speak of the Omniscience of God. It is a very solemn thing that God should be everywhere. “You God see me,” is a note of the most serious kind when sounded in the sinner’s ear, but, to those who are the people of God, there is nothing dreadful in the thought that God sees us. There is nothing to cause us to despond or to make us feel gloomy in the fact that God compasses our path and our lying down. In fact, in proportion as we are fully reconciled to God, love Him and rejoice in Him, it will become a cause ofjoy to reflect that our best Friend is never away from us—that our Protector’s hand is never removed, that the great observant eyes of Divine Love are never closed!
Oh, dear Friends, could we ever go to any place where God is not to be found, that would be the Hell of hells to His people! And if there could be a period in which the Lord did not look upon us, we might say, “Let that day be blotted out from the calendar.” It is a joy, a bliss, a foretaste of Heaven to know that—
“Wherever we seek Him, He is found” and even when we are not seeking Him, yet still He is above, beneath and all around us! He is never far from any of us. May we all have the Grace that will enable us to rejoice in a present God! We may judge as to our position before God by this test—is the thought of His constant observation of us a subject ofjoy or of dread? If we dread it, surely we have the old spirit of bondage still upon us! But if we rejoice in it, then we may know that we have received the Spirit of adoption whereby we cry, “Abba, Father.”
I am going to try to speak, as God shall help me, first, upon God’s thoughts of us. “How precious also are Your thoughts unto me, O God! How great is the sum of them!” Then, secondly, I want to say a little upon our thoughts about God’s thoughts. His thoughts become precious to us as we think about them. Then, thirdly, I wish to speak at somewhat greater length concerning our thoughts upon God Himself. “When I awake, I am still with You.”
I. First, then, let us meditate for a little while upon GOD’S THOUGHTS OF US.
That the infinite Jehovah thinks of us is absolutely certain. He thinks about all the inhabitants of the whole world. There is a general Providence which has a superintendence over all that happens in all parts of the earth. I know that the notion of some men is that the world is like a watch and that God has done with it as we do with our watches—that is, wound it up, put it under His pillow and gone to sleep. But it is not so, for in this great world-watch—to keep up the figure—God is present with every wheel and every cog of every wheel—there is no action in it apart from His present putting forth of power to make it move. There is nothing that happens merely as the result of, “law,” as some people seem to dream, for a law is nothing without a forceat the back of it! When we speak of certain things as being governed by law, we simply mean that as far as we have discerned, that is the general way in which this particular thing moves, or is acted upon, or acts upon some other thing. But, then, where is the force that enables it to act so, or that makes it to be so acted upon? “That is gravitation,” says one. Yes, that is your name for that force, but it is really God who is everywhere at work! Though the law of gravitation may be said to be abiding, yet the force of gravity is but the force which proceeds from God. It is God still putting forth His power and operating after His own manner upon material substances.
God, therefore, thinks upon the whole world—and I am glad that it is so! I do not like the idea of being put out to nurse, as it were, and left without my Heavenly Father’s personal supervision. I like to be in a world that is really God’s garden, a part of His own homestead in which He dwells and where I am always directly under the glance of His eyes. Rivers unknown to song, far distant from civilization, are nevertheless homely places to one who has learned to be at home with God.
Now, as God thinks and must think of the whole material universe which He has created, much more does He think of men and most of all of us who are His own chosen people, to whom He stands in a very peculiar relationship as our Father, who has “begotten us again unto a lively hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.” God must think of us—the blood would not flow in our veins, nor would the breath make our lungs to heave, nor would our various bodily processes go on without the perpetual exercise of His power. God must think of us especially in all the higher departments of our being, for they would speedily come to nothing apart from His constant care. There would be none of the spirit of prayer if He did not work it in us. There would be no spirit of sonship if the Holy Spirit did not teach us continually to cry, “Abba, Father.” Faith and hope and love are plants that only live in the sunlight of God. And if the great Father of Lights withdrew, all these would die. “Without Me you can do nothing,” is as certainly true of us who are His people, as of those who are far from Him by wicked worlds. We must be united to God, or else we shall perish and, therefore, as we know that we shall never perish, we are quite sure that our Heavenly Father thinks of us. Think of all the gracious influences that meet in your person to perpetuate your life—I mean, your spirituallife—your holiness, your comfort, your joy. Think of all the purposes of God that center in you in order that, by them, you may be made perfect and so be fit to be a partaker of the inheritance of the saints in light. Think of these things, I say, and you will at once see that for the grand design which God has concerning you, it is absolutely essential that He should think of you—and He does think of you!