Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 3308
“Behold, I will bring them from the north country, and gather them from the coasts of the earth, and with them the blind and the lame, the woman with child and her that travails with child together; a great company shall return there. They shall come with weeping, and with supplications I will lead them: I will cause them to walk by the rivers of waters in a straight way, wherein they shall not stumble: for I am a Father to Israel, and Ephraim is My first-born.” Jeremiah 31:8,9.
THERE IS a wonderful variety in the acts of God and yet there is a most singular uniformity. So complete is this uniformity that any one deliverance which God works for His people will be found to be, in its main features, just like any other of His deliverances.
Starting—for it is a convenient starting-point—with the deliverance of God’s people out of Egypt, there are many points of similarity between that marvel of mercy and the bringing back of the banished tribes from Babylon to their own land. There was a manifestation of the same gracious consideration, of the same Omnipotent power, of the some efficient purpose worked out in all points according to God’s Eternal Covenant. Then, taking another great leap, that return from Babylon is, no doubt, a very fair picture and a very excellent type of the gathering together in their own land of the Jews in the days that are yet to come when they shall say to one another, “Let us go up to the house of our God.” Everybody will admit that it will be as great a wonder to see the Jews, who are now a nation scattered abroad throughout the whole world, once more dwelling together in Palestine, as it was for them to have been brought out of Egypt or delivered out of Babylon in days long past! But taking a still greater leap, this again is a type of the greatest of all deliverances—the deliverance neither of the Jews alone nor of the Gentiles alone, but of the whole chosen company who shall be brought out from all the lands of sin and error into which they have been driven by their first parents’ fall and their own actual transgressions! They shall be brought out by the same almighty power, only on a far greater scale, and they shall meet, as in a common focus, in that Jerusalem above which is the home of all the chosen! I want to turn your thoughts toward that glorious future when the vast assembly of the redeemed will “sing the Song of Moses, the servant of God, and the Song of the Lamb, saying, Great and marvelous are Your works, Lord God Almighty! Just and true are Your ways, You King of saints.”
I. And, first, I am going to show you that we have, in the text, DEITY MANIFESTED.
There is a Divine ring about the text as there was in that ancient fiat which startled the darkness and caused it to flee away. “Let there be light, and there was light.” So here the Lord says, “I will bring them and gather them.. .and they shall come.. .I will lead them. I will cause them to walk; they shall not stumble.” It is, “I will,” and, “they shall” all the way through! There is no admission of doubt or of the possibility of failure. Jehovah speaks in the Sovereignty of His power and says, “I will do this, and I will do that,” and there is not an, “if,” or a, “perhaps,” or a “maybe” to mar the certainty of the Divine Declarations—“I will” and “they shall.”
Remember, Beloved, that it was so in Egypt. ” Moses and Aaron went in and told Pharaoh, “Thus says the Lord God of Israel, Let My people go, that they may hold a feast unto Me in the wilderness. And Pharaoh said, Who is the Lord, that I should obey His voice to let Israel go? I know not the Lord, neither will I let Israel go.” Yet, when the Lord smote his first-born with all the first-born throughout the land of Egypt, “he called for Moses and Aaron by night, and said, Rise up and get you forth from among my people, both you and the children of Israel; and go, serve the Lord as you
have said.” And when the time came for captive Israel to return from Babylon, God had but to speak and the iron bars snapped in sunder and the gates of brass flew open! So also shall it be in the latter days when the Jews are restored to their own land. By some mysterious influence which probably many of them will not be able to understand, they will be irresistibly drawn from all parts of the earth to Emmanuel’s land and, meanwhile, that same Divine Energy is gathering together the chosen unto the great Shiloh, for “unto Him shall the gathering of the people be.” Invisible bands of love are continually drawing to Christ those for whom He died. The mighty magnet of His atoning Sacrifice is constantly attracting to Him the members of His redeemed family—more in one age than in another, yet always according to the eternal purpose and decree of God—for although He acts mysteriously and silently, yet He always “works all things after the counsel of His own will.”