Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 3059
“The poor commits himself unto You.” Psalm 10:14.
GOD is the poor man’s Friend. The poor man, in his helplessness and despair, leaves his case in the hands of God and God undertakes to care for him. In the days of David—and I suppose, in this respect, the world has but little improved—the poor man was the victim of almost everybody’s cruelty and sometimes he was very shamefully oppressed. If he sought redress for his wrongs, he generally only increased them, for he was regarded as a rebel against the existing order of things. And when he asked for even a part of what was his by right, the very magistrates and rulers of the land became the instruments of his oppressors and made the yoke of his bondage to be yet heavier than it was before. Tens of thousands of eyes, full of tears, have been turned to Jehovah and He has been invoked to interpose between the oppressor and the oppressed, for God is the ultimate resort of the helpless. The Lord executes righteousness and judgment for all that are oppressed—He undertakes the cause of all those that are downtrodden.
If the history of the world is rightly read, it will be found that no case of oppression has been allowed to go long unpunished. The Assyrian empire was a very cruel one, but what is now left of Nineveh and Babylon? Go to the heaps of ruins by the banks of the Tigris and the Euphrates and see what will become of an empire which is made to be only an instrument of oppression in the hands of an emperor and the great men under him. It has ceased to be more than a name—its power has vanished and its palaces have been destroyed. In later times there sprang up the mighty empire of Rome and even now, wherever we wander, we see traces of its greatness and splendor. How came it to fall? Many reasons have been assigned, but you may rest assured that at the bottom of them all was the cruelty practiced towards the slaves and other poor people who were absolutely in the power of the aristocracy and oligarchy who formed the dominant party in the empire. There is a fatal flaw in the foundations of any throne that does not execute justice—and it matters not though the empire seems to stand high as Heaven and to raise its pinnacles to the skies—down it must come if it is not founded upon right. When ten thousand slaves have cried to God, apparently in vain, it has not really been in vain, for He has registered their cries and in due season has avenged their wrongs! And when the poor toilers who have reaped the rich man’s fields have been deprived of their harshly-earned wages and have cast their complaints into the court of Heaven, they have been registered there and God has, at the right time, taken up their cause and punished their oppressors!
For many years the Negro slaves cried to God to deliver them and, at last, deliverance came to the joy of the emancipated multitudes, yet not without suffering to all the nations that had been concerned in that great wrong. And here, too, if the employers of labor refuse to give to the agricultural laborer his just wage, God will surely visit them in His wrath. At this very day we have serfs in England who, with sternest toil, cannot earn enough to keep body and soul together and to maintain their families as they ought to be maintained. And where masters are thus refusing to their laborers a fair remuneration for their work, let them know that whoever may excuse them and whatever may be said of the laws of political economy, God does not judge the world by political economy! He judges the world by this rule, that men are bound to do that which is just and right to their fellow men—and it can never be right that a man should work like a slave, be housed worse than a horse and have food scarcely fit for a dog! But if the poor commit their case to God, He will undertake it and I, as one of God’s ministers, will never cease to speak on behalf of the rights of the poor. The whole question has two sides—the rights of the employers and the rights of the men. Let not the men do as some
workmen do, ask more than they ought—yet, on the other hand, let not the employers domineer over their men, but remember that God is the Master of us all and He will see that right is done to all. Let us all act rightly towards one another, or we shall feel the weight of His hand and the force of His anger.
Now, having thus given the literal meaning of my text, I am going to spiritualize it, which I should have no right to do if I had not first explained the primary reference of David’s words, “The poor commits himself unto You.”
I. THERE ARE SPIRITUALLY POOR MEN and these do what other poor men have done in temporal things—
they commit their case into the hands of God.
Let me try to define the spiritually poor. They are, first, those who have no merits of their own. There are some people in the world who are, according to their own estimate, very rich in good works. They think that they began well and that they have gone on well—they hope to continue to do well right to the end of their lives. They do confess, sometimes, that they are miserable sinners, but that is merely because that expression is in the Prayer Book. They are half sorry it is there, but they suppose that it must have been meant for other people, not for themselves. So far as they know, they have kept all the Commandments from their youth up. They have been just in their dealings with their fellow men and they do not feel that they are under any very serious obligations even to God, Himself. I have nothing to say to such people except to remind them that the Lord Jesus Christ said, “They that are whole have no need of the physician, but they that are sick: I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.” Christ came to bring healing to those who are spiritually sick—you say that you are perfectly well, so you must go your own way and Christ will go in another direction—towards sinners.