Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 3012
“The LORD has comforted His people.” Isaiah 49:13.
THE JOY of the Prophet was too great for him to give adequate expression to it with his own solitary tongue and, therefore, he would have even the angels of God and the redeemed from among men in Heaven to praise the Lord for His super-abounding mercy! He would also have the redeemed upon earth and all the works of God’s hands take up the joyful strain of praise to the Most High! And he would have even the great mountainous masses of inanimate Nature find tongues with which to express the greatness of God’s loving kindness and tender mercy in having comforted His people!
And, when we come to think of it rightly, we see at once that it is a theme for wonder, worthy of the consideration of Heaven and of earth that ever the Infinite God should stoop so low as to comfort finite and fallible creatures such as we are. Had He nothing better to do than that? Were there no more worlds to be created? Were there no other deeds of power and glory to be performed that He must come to this poor earth to comfort the sick, the sad and the sorrowing? To speak comfortably even to those who had rebelled against Him and to give them peace and joy when their penitent hearts were breaking in earnest longing for His pardoning mercy? That is a wonderful passage in the 147th Psalm—“He heals the broken in heart, and binds up their wounds. He counts the number of the stars. He calls them all by their names.” He is truly great in the majesty of His power, but He is equally great in the condescending Character of His love and, as “the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy” when Jehovah’s great creative works were worked, let them not be slack in their music when His condescending works are worked—when, from the highest heavens, He stoops to the couch of deepest woe to lift us up from our sins and sorrows by the power of His eternal love!
Taking the text somewhat out of its immediate context and speaking simply upon these six words, “The Lord has comforted His people,” we see that in the first place, the Lord has a people. Secondly, they are a people who need to be comforted. And thirdly, the Lord gives them the comfort that they need.
I. First, then, it is clear, from the very wording of our text, that THE LORD HAS A PEOPLE. Isaiah does not say, in general terms that the Lord has comforted the children of men as a whole, but he says, “the Lord has comforted His people.” Here is, as Dr. Watts says—
“A garden walled around, Chosen and made peculiar ground! A little spot, enclosed by Grace Out of the world’s wide wilderness”— and it is concerning this particular portion of the human race—selected and elected by God—that the Prophet was moved by the Holy Spirit to write, “the Lord has comforted His people.”
Observe, in the first place, that the children of God are “His people” in this sense, that they enjoy His special love. Never let us doubt the universal benevolence of God. Let us hold it as a fundamental Doctrine that “the Lord is good to all; and His tender mercies are over all His works.” And let us firmly believe that if any man shall be consigned to carnal misery, it will be because it is just that he should so suffer and he has brought his terrible doom upon his own head, for, as the Apostle Peter tells us, God is “not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.” Yet, we must never forget that inside this universal love, there is a private, secret, distinguishing, discriminating love which is set only upon those whom God chose, before the foundation of the world, to be His own peculiar people. Paul writes to his
son, Timothy, “We trust in the living God who is the Savior of all men, specially of those that believe.” And Moses, long before, was Inspired to write, “The Lord’s portion is His people.” There is something peculiarly personal in His affection for them. He is kind and generous to all His creatures, but He is lavishly liberal to His own people. And Paul bids us imitate him when he says, “Let us do good unto all men, especially unto them who are of the household of faith.”
The Lord, then, has a people whom He regards with a special love which is not shed abroad in the hearts of others. These people He set apart for Himself from eternity. They are a people who are near and dear unto Him, to whom He says, by the pen of the Apostle Peter, “You are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a peculiar people; that you should show forth the praises of Him who has called you out of darkness into His marvelous light.”
They are not only God’s people because He has thus chosen them unto Himself, but because, having fallen into sin, they are now His by particular and special redemption. Again let me remind you that the Scriptures plainly teach us that the Atonement of our Lord Jesus Christ has a universal bearing and it seems to me that those who limit the value of the Atonement do most seriously err from the faith. I believe the Sacrifice of Jesus Christ was so Infinite that if there had been ten thousand worlds full of sinners to have been redeemed, it was amply sufficient to have redeemed them all! Paul writes to Timothy, “There is one God, and one Mediator between God and man, the Man, Christ Jesus, who gave Himself a ransom for all, to be testified in due time.” And I am not known to put a limit where I see no limit put by God’s Word. Yet, notwithstanding that Truth of God, you cannot diligently read the Scriptures and study them under the guidance of the Holy Spirit without learning that there is a special aim and objective in the redemptive work of the Lord Jesus Christ. He Himself said, “I lay down My life for the sheep.” The singers in Heaven, in their new song, declare that “these were redeemed from among men”—they were bought out of the great mass of mankind, “not with corruptible things, as silver and gold…but with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot.” Paul says that “Christ also loved the Church and gave Himself for it.”