Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 3413
“The God of my mercy shall prevent [go before] me.” Psalm 59:10.
IF you read this Psalm, you will find that David was in a very grievous plight. He was surrounded by the most cruel and the most false of men. They were ravening like wolves over carrion and endeavoring to destroy his character—and even to take his life. David knew where his resort was. As the conies make their dwellings in the rocks, and as the swallows have built a nest for themselves at God’s altar, so David resorted to his God, and to his God alone.
All the skin bottles may be dry, but there is water in the well. And all creature comforts may fail but there is an all-sufficiency in an unfailing God. If all is false to you, God will be true! And if all hate you, God is Love—and if you are in Him, He cannot be angry with you, nor rebuke you—love towards you, and love only, shall rule the day!
Let me persuade every child of God here in the hour of his trouble to resort to the comfort which David found so availing. Away, as a bird to the mountain—away, away to your God! If you have Rabshekeh’s letter about you, go and spread it before the Lord. If you have, today, an inward sorrow that you cannot tell into any other ear, go, like Hannah, and stand before God, and there let your soul pour out its bitterness. You shall find that in consulting human sympathy, there is some gain—often very little—but in seeking the sympathy of your great High Priest above, there is much gain and there never can be failure. When David returned to Ziklag, he found it burned and his wives carried away captive. He and his men had lost all their property and all their families. His men spoke of stoning him, but it is written, “David encouraged himself in his God.”
Now, if you have come to something like the same plight. If your affairs are at the lowest ebb and there is the sharpest winter passing over all your prospects, now turn to the stronghold, you prisoners of hope! Trust in the Lord, and wait patiently for Him. Be of good courage, for He shall strengthen your heart. If we learn only that lesson—and do but put it into practice throughout our life—we shall have a good reward for coming up to the assembly of God’s people tonight.
But now, a few words upon this text of David’s. He declares that the God of his mercy would go before him, or forestall him. The word “prevent,” when it was used by our translators, did not mean at all what it does now. It means here that God would provide, would forestall, would be beforehand in loving kindness with him—and the two points we will speak of tonight are these—it has been so. It shall be so. First—
I. It Has Been So
The God of our mercy has gone before us and outrun us. It has been so in the salvation of all His people. Long before time had begun, God had foreknown His chosen, and foreordained them unto eternal life. They had not chosen Him, for they were not in existence! He chose them as He saw them in the glass of His decrees. It must always be that God goes before or outruns His people, since from before the foundation of the world He had loved them—loved them with an everlasting love. There can be nothing before this. We know of nothing that can stand side by side with it, so far as we are concerned, for we had no being, except in the purpose of God. But even then He loved us. He loved us when we were dead in sins, when we had not a heart with which to love Him, when we were rejecting Him altogether and did evil even as we could—yet He loved us notwithstanding all. It must always be true if we think of the Doctrine of Election that He went before us with His mercy!
It was so also, with redemption. Where were we when Christ redeemed us? My Brothers and Sisters, our sins were laid on Christ, but they were not then committed. Our transgressions were then taken by Him, but we had not even perpetrated them then! We were not yet living and yet a Savior was provided for us before we were, by any actual sin, personally lost. A fountain filled with blood was provided for us before we had, by any actual guilt, become defiled. Oh, here was Divine forethought—here was a precious going before, of God’s goodness! How He must have loved us, that knowing what our needs would be, foreseeing the abundance of our sins, He laid by in store the Divine Atonement, the sacred Propitiation by which all our sins should be put away. This was another going before of His mercy!
Indeed, Brothers and Sisters, if you think of it, the whole Gospelis a going before of us. There was that Book written exactly to meet your case and mine, when as yet our case was not in existence. Here was a Covenant “ordered in all things and sure” and made for us in the Person of Christ. We were not parties to it, for as yet had not any being. Here was mercy laid by in the Covenant, everything that our necessities could require! Grace for Grace supplies for all the needs of our nature, treasured up for the poor mendicants before we ever became beggars, or knew that we were in need!