Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 3428
“The secret of the Lord is with them that fear Him, and He will show them His Covenant.” Psalm 25:14.
THIS text is a great deep, but at the outset we must say that we have neither the time nor the skill at this time to attempt to fathom it. Our business just now is not so much to dive into its profound mystery, as to skim over its sparkling surface, to touch it with our wing as the swallow sometimes does the brook, leaving its soundings still unexplored. The current of thought here is too deep and too broad for the short meditation of a weekday evening. But where the very surface is rich, as it were, with “dust of gold,” we cannot fail, if God the Holy Spirit blesses us, to be enriched by even the superficial reflections we may gather up from it.
“The secret of the Lord is with them that fear Him.” Mark the word used—“THE LORD”—Jehovah in the original—the I AM THAT I AM. The very name is associated in the thought of every right-minded person with awe. Is it not the name of the one only living and true God, and none who take it in vain shall be held guiltless? The gods of the heathen are no gods, but our God made the heavens! It is by Him that the heavens were stretched out as a curtain and as a tent to dwell in. He is the Preserver of all things. In Him “we live, and move, and have our being.” As we find Him manifested, both in the book of Nature and in the Book of Revelation, He is a God “glorious in holiness, fearful in praises, doing wonders.” The Lord is a good God, and we cannot think of Him without awe. If you have ever heard His voice in pealing thunder or the rolling avalanche, or if you have seen the flashes of His spear in the lightning of the tempest, or if you have marked His going upon the mighty waves at the tempestuous sea, you must have felt within yourselves that He is high and mighty—in truth, a terrible God! Yet it seems from our text that there are some persons in the world in whom all emotions of dread in connection with God are suppressed by feelings of quite another kind. Though clouds and darkness are round about Him, they have evidently passed through the clouds and have come to the other side of the darkness, for “the secret of the Lord is with them.” Before Him goes the pestilence. And hot burning coals are cast forth at His feet, but these persons must evidently have been preserved from the devouring pestilence by some mysterious power—and have escaped those burning coals by some gracious deliverance! They have come into familiarity with God! They know His secret and He shows to them what He does not make known to other men—His Covenant—the counsel of His will! There are such persons in the world, now, to whom the Eternal Majesty is so tempered by Infinite Mercy that they can devoutly sing—
“The God who rules on high,
And thunders when He pleases,
Who rides upon the stormy skies,
And manages the seas.
This awful God is ours,
Our Father and our Love.
He shall send down His heavenly powers,
To carry us above.”
Think of “the Lord,” then, according to this grand revelation of His name—Jehovah. Oh, that your thoughts of Him might bow you down with the lowly worship of the bright cherubim, and make you veil your faces as they do! Oh, that you might be led to feel how great God is and how little you are! Oh, that Grace were now given you to draw near to God and that the passage on which we have alighted might become a place of communion with Him!
Observe, then, first of all, a glorious privilege which may be possessed. Secondly, a favored class of people who do possess it. And thirdly, a choice and peculiar manifestation which God makes to them. I. THERE IS A GLORIOUS PRIVILEGE WHICH MAY BE POSSESSED.
The word, “secret,” here might, with greater propriety, be translated, “friendship.” “The friendship of the Lord is with them that fear Him,” but it also signifies in its root, that conversation which familiar friends hold with each other. Conversation in its most cherished exercise, that homely conversation which springs from mutual confidence and is, on the part of one man, the unbosoming of himself to another, is thus implied. If I may open it up in a phrase, it means, “The amity of true friendship.” Such is the favor vouchsafed to those who fear God. But taking the word as it stands, (for I dare say the translators weighed all these variations well before they chose the one before us), we will endeavor to give amplitude to the sense, while we keep to the word, “secret.”
Beyond a doubt, then, those who fear God have the secret of His Presence revealed to them. If a man rambles amidst the wonders of Nature with an atheistic heart, he may look up to the snowy peaks and down again upon the sweet grassy slopes. He may listen to the music of the waterfall. He may stand and admire the eagle as it soars aloft, or watch the wild goat as it leaps from crag to crag—and all these things may be to him but so much animated Nature—matter in so many various shapes and nothing more! I suppose it is possible for men to be familiar with all that is beautiful and sublime in the world of Nature, that “living visible garment of God,” and yet never catch the secret of His Presence, the traces of His handiwork, or the whisper of His voice. How different it is with the man who fears God, who has bowed before God’s Justice and seen it satisfied through the atoning Sacrifice of Calvary! Such a man, as he looks upon the things that are made, those silent witnesses of the eternal power and Godhead, says, “My Father made them all!”