Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 2786
“Eat what is good, and let your soul delight itself in fatness.” Isaiah 55:2.
ALL life here below needs to be sustained from without by food of some kind or other. We know not how the angels live, yet the Psalmist’s expression, “Man did eat angels’ food,” might lead us to imagine that even the/need to be supplied with nourishment from without, but, certainly, all earthly life requires appropriate nutriment. The physical life of man cannot be sustained unless he has bread to eat. His mental life, too, though that is often forgotten, cannot be in a healthy condition without an adequate supply of understanding and knowledge. The poor creatures which have been confined in prison cells, year after year, with nothing to read or to think upon, have come forth to liberty as imbeciles— quite unfit to go into society because the mind has wasted away in starvation. You must feed the mental, as well as the physical man, if it is to be in a right and healthy state.
And this is pre-eminently true of the spiritual nature which God has implanted within His people at the time of their regeneration. That higher nature must be nourished—God has been pleased to give us an ordinance on purpose to remind us of this great fact. Baptism is the symbol of the entrance upon the new life by passing through death in the type of the Savior’s tomb—“buried with Him by baptism into death.” And then, when that life is once obtained, there follows the sacred feast of the Lord’s Supper wherein, under the emblems of the bread and the wine, we are taught that Jesus Christ must be, in a spiritual sense, both meat and drink to our souls. We derive our life from Him and He must sustain it. We receive spiritual life by hearing concerning Him and that life is to be sustained by our still hearing the truth concerning Him. Our spiritual life must have spiritual food—it cannot possibly do without it.
The great mercy is that, according to our text, there is abundant provision for sustaining the life of our souls. The Lord would not have said to us, “Listen diligently unto Me,” if He had not had something good to say to us. He would not have said, “Eat what is good,” in such a connection as this, if He had not provided it! Nor would He have said, “Let your soul delight itself in fatness,” if that “fatness” had not been already prepared by the great Host of the Gospel feast! So we are taught two things on the very threshold of our subject—first, that our soul must be fed and, next, that God has provided the best food for our soul.
When God creates the beasts of the field, “he causes the grass to grow for the cattle.” He does not make a single bird without providing the seeds or the insects upon which that bird shall live. There is not a tiny minnow in the brook but has its own special provision—while the great leviathan, that “makes the deep to boil like a pot,” through his terrific and powerful activity, has all that he needs to feed his vast bulk, for God simply opens His hands and so satisfies the desire of every living thing. As this is so manifestly the case, it would not be conceivable that He should make spiritual life, which is the nearest akin to His own, in that it is the life of God in man, and yet not provide that it should continue to exist, expand, develop and become perfected! So, while the truth of our necessity can never be shaken off from our consciousness, the other great Truth of God of the Divine provision, which is the counterpart of it, must never be forgotten by us.
To stir up your pure minds by way of remembrance, I am going to speak about the soul’s best food. First, let us note the reason for the exhortation of our text Then, secondly, let us note the benefits which will flow from our obedience to that exhortation.
I. First, then, LET US NOTE THE REASON FOR THE EXHORTATION IN OUR TEXT—“Eat what is good, and let your soul delight itself in fatness.”
The first reason which I shall mention is the exceeding bountifulness of God in Christ Jesus. The invitation here given is in accordance with the Character of the God who gives it. He is not stingy—He never stints His guests, or keeps His children on a low diet. He is so good that He delights to give to them of His goodness and to give of it freely. As it is of the very essence of the sun that it should not only be bright, but that it should scatter its beams far and wide, so is it of the very Essence of God that He should not only be Goodness intrinsically, but that He should generously bestow His goodness upon us. He delights to give out of His fullness and, in the Person of the Lord Jesus Christ, that fullness is stored up on purpose that there might be human receivers of it. Blessed be His holy name, “of His fullness have all we received, and Grace for Grace.” The invitation in our text seems to me to come naturally from the very Nature of our Covenant God. He delights not in starving His creatures, nor in seeing them pining in need—but He rejoices in their being filled to the utmost fullness of satisfaction and, therefore, He says to us, “Eat what is good, and let your soul delight itself in fatness.”