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SERMON VII.

PREACHED AT DONNINGTON, 1839.

ISAIAH XXXviii. 18, 19.

The grave cannot praise Thee, death cannot celebrate Thee: they that go down into the pit cannot hope for Thy truth.

The living, the living, he shall praise Thee, as I do this day: the father to the children shall make known Thy truth.

THESE are the words of a good man under the law, the very man of whom it is written that he trusted in the Lord God of Israel; so that after him was none like him among all the kings of Judah, nor any that were before him. While yet in his full strength, he was struck with a sickness that brought him near to the grave, and we have read how God was pleased to heal him, and to shew that the cure was His own special work by giving him a sign. These words are taken from his song, in which he speaks of what a 1 Kings xviii. 5.

he felt in sickness, and of his joy and thankfulness on his recovery.

Perhaps you may have wondered why so good a man felt such sorrow and fear, and if we can learn the reason, it may throw some light on the Old Testament, so that we may read it with more understanding, and may also teach us some good lessons respecting the life of man.

Not that we can fully understand the difference between the state of pious Jews under the law and our own. The heart knoweth his own bitterness, and a stranger doth not intermeddle with his joy. Yet it is always most instructive to consider the condition of God's people in the various states in which He has been pleased from time to time to place them.

We must observe, then, that in the Old Testament most of that which is said of the life to come is said under a figure. I mean that God speaks there as if He were speaking of this life, even very often when He means us to understand the life to come. For instance, when He speaks of Jerusalem, we know that very often it means the blessed company of Saints living together in the Church universal in Heaven and earth, now or when b Prov. xiv. 10.

perfected the everlasting City of God. But the Jews of old could only guess at that, which we have been told plainly. They would think first of the earthly Jerusalem, which they saw and lived in. So when the Holy Land is spoken of, it makes us think of Heaven, but they thought most naturally of the country of Palestine, which God had given them. And when God spoke of delivering them, and keeping them, and never forsaking them, they thought of His keeping them safe from enemies that might come and take away their goods, and distress and kill them, and of His never allowing them to be quite cut off as a nation from the earth. But we know that He means by these promises that He will be with His people to all eternity, in this world and in the next, and will give them at the resurrection an inheritance better than any thing they can now enjoy or conceive.

Now the Jews were not mistaken, they were not wrong in expecting blessings in this world, for God had promised such blessings to those who should obey Him, and He kept His word. But those things were only signs of His favour, as any little thing we give a child to please him is a sign of our love. We may not do any such thing,

and yet love our child-we may forbear to please him, that we may do him more good some other way; so God sometimes did not give worldly good to those who loved Him, because He meant to do something better for them instead, and to bring it about by means of what they suffered in this life.

Besides, they had some faults which needed correcting, and He chose rather to correct them by worldly troubles, than to let their sin grow upon them, and stand over till the last day unrepented. Just as we bring a child to repent of his fault by shewing him our displeasure in some little matter, that does not touch his health or his life, but only his present pleasure and comfort. Just in this way God brought His people to repentance many times, by sending them some affliction to remind them of their duty, that He might not have to cast them off altogether: as we read in the eighty-ninth Psalm, But if his children forsake My law, and walk not in My judgments; if they break My statutes, and keep not My commandments; I will visit their offences with the rod, and their sin with scourges. Nevertheless My lovingkindness will I not utterly take from him, nor suffer My truth to fail. My covenant will I not break, nor alter the thing that is gone out

of My lips: I have sworn once by My holiness that I will not fail David.

But the minds of children are often more taken up with the pleasure of the day than with thinking of the weightier matters of life, yet they really love and fear their parents. They are really sorry when they find they have displeased them. They really mind what is said to them, nay, good children fear their father's being displeased much more than they fear his punishing them. They would gladly suffer the punishment, whatever it was, provided they were sure of being quite forgiven afterwards.

So, I say, it was with good men amongst the Jews. They knew there was to be another life, and they guessed at it, and thought of it as a child may think of what is many years to come. But it was like a dream to them, something a long way off, that they had no clear notion of.

Meanwhile they knew what it was to live, and to come into the courts of the Lord, and to rejoice before Him, as a child knows what it is to run about, and play, and look up in his father's face, and eat bread at his table.

Now death, we know, is a punishment of

c Psalm lxxxix. 30—35.

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