Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 2670
“Should it be according to your mind? He will recompense it whether you refuse, or whether you choose; and not I: therefore speak what you know.” Job 34:33.
DEAR FRIENDS, it is never wise to dispute with God. Let a man strive with his fellow, but not with his Maker. If we must discuss any point, let it be with imperfect beings like ourselves, but not with the Infallible and Infinitely wise God, for, in most of our discussions, these questions will come back to us, “Should it be according to your mind? Are you master? Is everyone to be subordinate to you?”
I am going to speak, this evening, to those who have a quarrel with God concerning the way of salvation. They are very unwise not to take salvation just as God brings it to them, but they do not. They have some difficulty or other, so they raise a dispute and they have been, perhaps for years, quibbling at the Savior whose Infinite goodness has provided a way of salvation exactly adapted to their needs. I am going to use Elihu’s words and apply them to their case.
I. To begin at the beginning, here is, first, A QUESTION—“Should it be according to your mind?” You say that you are willing to find mercy, and that you are very teachable; but you object to the plan of salvation as it is revealed in the Scriptures.
First, then, what is it to which you object? Do you object to the very basis of the plan, namely, that God will forgive sin through the atoning Sacrifice of Jesus Christ, His Son? I know that some do object to this—they cannot bear to hear about Atonement by blood, or justification by imputed righteousness. Others, who will not say that they object to Atonement, spirit away the very meaning of it! They cannot endure that glorious Doctrine of Substitution which is such a joy to us. Christ standing in the sinner’s place and the sinner then standing in the place of Christ—Christ taking the sinner’s sin and the sinner wearing Christ’s righteousness—all this they absolutely reject! “No doubt Christ did something for sinners,” they say, but they cannot define what He did and, as for the sin of any man being actually put away by Christ being punished in the place of the ungodly sinner, they will not believe it!
Yet, that is God’s plan of salvation, and some of us know, in our inmost hearts, that we never had peace until we accepted that plan of salvation, and that now, if it should be taken away from us, we would lose all the joy of existence and go back to the despair which, at one time, was so heavy upon us that we could sympathize with Job when be said, “My soul chooses strangling and death rather than my life.” We could better afford that the sun should be quenched, that the moon should be darkened, that all springs should be dried, that the very air itself should disappear—we could better afford to die and rot in our graves than that we should lose our Savior and His atoning blood and justifying righteousness! Whatever you, Mr. Objector, may say about it, we say to you, “Should it be according to yourmind?” Would you have Christ to die and yet not really secure salvation by His death? Could you invent a better plan, or even one half as good—
“So just to God, so safe for man”—
so consolatory to a wounded conscience, so constraining to gratitude when that conscience has been pacified? Would you, could you, propose anything one thousandth as good as God’s plan of salvation? Even if you could, “should it be according to your mind?” Who are you, a guilty sinner, to despise the Savior’s blood? If you had your just deserts, you
would years ago have been in the lowest pit of Hell! Will you set aside the Cross of Christ and seek to put something else in the place of the crucified Redeemer?
But, possibly, you do not object to the Doctrine of Substitution, but your objection is to the way of salvation by faith “I don’t like that Doctrine of Justification by Faith,” says one, “for I am sure that when it is preached, people will begin to think that there is no virtue in good works and that they may live as they like.” I have often heard such a remark as yours, my Friend, but experience is dead against you! Whenever justification by faith has been uppermost in the preaching, the morals of the people have been purest and their spirituality has been brightest! But whenever the preachers have extolled the works and ceremonies of the Law, or the Arminianism which brings in something of trust in works, or human power, it is most certain that there has been a declension in point of morals, while religion itself has seemed almost ready to expire! You may go to those who preach up salvation by works to hear them talk, but you had better not go to see how they live—whereas those who preach justification by faith can boldly point to the multitudes who have accepted this Truth of God and whose godly lives prove the sanctifying power of the Doctrine!