Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 3177
“My eyes have seen Your Salivation.” Luke 2:30.
[Other Sermons by Mr. Spurgeon upon the same text are #1417, Volume 24—“YOUR SALVATION” and #2293, Volume 39— SIMEON’S SWAN SONG]
THOUSANDS of times that song of Simeon has been sung by careless, thoughtless persons, but surely it is one of those songs that ought never to come except from believing lips. To make it merely a part of a liturgy and for shamelessly living men to say, “My eyes have seen Your Salvation,” must be an atrocious sin before God! Let all who have ventured to use such words as these without having thought of their meaning, confess their sin before God and ask that He would make those words to be true which have up to now been so frivolously uttered and that before they close their eyes in death, they maysee God’s Salvation!
I. I shall, first of all, TAKE THE TEXT AS IT DROPS FROM SIMEON’S LIPS and follow his leading.
We will start with Simeon’s main idea. He came into the Temple. He saw there a little Babe and he recognized, in that newly-born Child, Jesus the promised Savior! And as he took up that Savior into his arms, he said, “Mine eyes have seen”—what? “Your Salvation,” God’s Salvation—not only the Worker of the Salvation, but the Salvation itself! From which I gather that wherever we see Jesus, we see God’s Salvation, Wherever our eyes spiritually light upon the Christ of God, there we see God’s Salvation! Whether in Bethlehem’s manger, or on Calvary’s Cross, or on yonder Throne of Glory from which He shall judge the quick and the dead—wherever we see Him, we see the Salvation of God!
Let me then take your thoughts along the history of our Savior for a few moments. Far back into the ages, when as yet this world and sun and moon were not created—when God dwelt alone—then, in the foreknowledge of God, it was apparent that man would sin—that elect men, beloved of God, would fall in the common ruin. Then came the grand debate, the mighty question to be only solved by the supreme Intellect of Heaven, “How can sinners be reconciled to God?” And the Covenant was made, that ancient Covenant of which David sang, “ordered in all things and sure.” Jesus, the Second Person of the blessed Godhead, entered into Covenant with His Father, that in the fullness of time, He would stand in the sinner’s place and pay the sinner’s debt—that He would head up in Himself as many as the Father gave Him and become the second and restoring Adam to them, though, through the first and falling Adam, they, with others, had been destroyed. Then, when the Covenant was signed and the Divine parties to that grand transaction struck hands and ratified the bond, my eyes, as they look into that vast eternity and, with holy curiosity, desire to scan that council cham-ber—my eyes perceive God’s Salvation in the Person of Jesus Christ!
This was all that could have been seen by faith, even after the world had been created and man had fallen, until that day when the fullness of time was come—when Jesus Christ, who had covenanted to save His people, came to perform the work. Oh, the grandeur of that day when angels came in haste to sing that the Babe was born in Bethlehem! Ah, Simeon! What you see there is not merely a Babe—a little Child hanging upon a woman’s breast—it is the Word Incarnate, the Logos, without whom was not anything made that is made! He that spoke and it was done, lies there! He that said, “Light be,” and light was—the Word that was with God when He balanced the clouds and when He fixed the sockets of the universe, even He is there in the Person of that Child! The Son of Mary is also the Son of God! And whenever you, Beloved, look to God Incarnate and understand that wondrous mystery, “The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us,” and men chosen of Him beheld His Glory, “the Glory as of the only-begotten of the Father, full of Grace and Truth”—then when you see God in human flesh, you see God’s Salvation!
Follow with the eyes of your love that Babe when He had become a Man. See Him, in the obedience of 30 years to His reputed father, handling the saw and the hammer in the carpenter’s shop of Joseph. “Being found in fashion as a Man, He humbled Himself.” See Him in the three years of His most blessed ministry! What work was crowded into those years! How did the zeal of God’s house eat Him up! The dews fell upon Him in the night when He kept the sheep of God in the wilderness and on the mountain’s brow shepherded them in His midnight prayers. Oftentimes the sweat fell from Him in that daily service which, as the Servant of servants, He rendered to all His brethren. None toiled as He did—none so arduously, none so perfectly, none so willingly, none with so complete a bending of His whole faculties to His all-absorbing work! Behold the righteousness of the saints—this work of Christ is making a robe in which the saints shall be arrayed. His active obedience renders unto God a recompense for our breaches of His holy Law. In Christ, the actively-obedient, you see God’s Salvation!