Ezekiel 36:36 Then the heathen that are left round about you shall know that I the LORD build the ruined places, and plant that that was desolate… I. THE TEXT ANNOUNCES A MOST IMPORTANT TRUTH. When we look at our text, we feel, in reference to the sad event of Eden, much as Martha did when she fixed her weeping eyes on Jesus. Would His presence have preserved the life of Lazarus? No less certainly, these words, had they been present in their power to Eve, would have protected her innocence, and saved the world. Not Lazarus only, but no man had died; there had been neither sin, nor sorrow, nor griefs, nor graves, in a happy world, had our mother, when she stood by the fatal tree, but remembered, but believed, but felt this sentence, "I have spoken, and I will do it." But when the deed has been done, and it is now too late, my object is not to show how man might have been saved. There is little kindness in telling me of a medicine that would have cured my dead. Glory to the grace of God, I tell not that my text would have saved man, but, if believed in, still shall save him. What would have saved us from the grave, can raise us out of it. Let my text lay hold of the redemption of Christ, and it has all, more than all, the power it ever possessed. The cross, the crown, peace, pardon, grace in life, hope in death, heaven throughout all eternity — these are all wrapped up in a deep, solemn, heartfelt, Divine conviction of the truth. "I the Lord have spoken, and I will do it." II. THE COMFORTS THIS TRUTH IMPARTS TO A TRUE CHRISTIAN. 1. Through his confidence in this truth he commits all his earthly cares to God. By faith in a superintending providence and an unfailing word, Child of God, thou mayest shield thy heart from cares that torture others, and from temptations that often prove their ruin! Between a man, torn with anxieties, haunted by fears, fretting with cares, and the good man, who calmly trusts in the Lord, there is as great a difference as between a brawling, roaring, mountain brook, that with mad haste leaps from crag to crag, and is ground into boiling foam, and that placid river, which with beauty on its banks, and heaven on its bosom, spreads blessings wherever it flows, and pursues the noiseless tenor of its way back to the great ocean, from which its waters came. 2. Through his confidence in this truth the believer is sustained amid the trials of life. Winter, no doubt, is not the pleasant season that summer brings with her merry songs and wreaths of flowers, and long, bright, sunny days; nor are bitter medicines savoury meat. Yet he who believes that all things shall work together for good, will thank God for physic as well as food; for the winter frost that kills the weeds, and breaks up the clods, as for these dewy nights and sunny days that ripen the fields of corn. May God give us such a faith! 3. Through his confidence in this truth the believer cheerfully hopes, and patiently waits for heaven. Home! to be home is the wish of the seaman on his lonely watch and on the stormy deep. Home is the wish of the soldier; and tender visions of it mingle with the troubled dreams of trench and tented field. And in his best hours, home, his own sinless home, a home with his Father above that sky, will be the devout wish of every true Christian man. The holier the child of God becomes, the more he pants after the perfect image and blissful presence of Jesus; and dark though the passage, and deep though the waters be, the more holy he is, the more ready is he to say, It is better to depart and be with Jesus. III. BOTH NATURE AND PROVIDENCE ILLUSTRATE THE TRUTH OF MY TEXT. 1. Nature assures us that what God hath said He will do. No man looks for sunrise in the west. No soldier stands beneath the hissing shell expecting to see it arrested in its descent, and hang like a star in empty space. We build our houses in confidence that the edifice will gravitate to the centre; nor ever doubt, when we set our mill wheel in the running stream, that as sure as man is on his way to the grave, the waters shall ever wend their way onward to the sea. We consult the Nautical Almanack, and, finding that it shall be high water tomorrow at such an hour, we make our arrangements for being then on board, certain that we shall find our ship afloat, and the seamen shaking out their sails to go away on the bosom of the flowing tide. If fire burned the one day, and water the next; if wood became at one time heavy as iron, and iron at another as buoyant as wood; if here the rivers hasted to the embraces of the sea, and there, as in fear, retreated from them, what a scene of confusion this world would become! In truth, its whole business rests on faith; on our belief that God will carry into unfailing effect every law which His finger has written in the great volumes of Nature and Providence. This is the pillow on which a sleeping world rests its weary head. This is the pivot on which the wheels of business turn. And now let us remember, that there are not two Gods; a consistent Divinity who presides over nature, and a capricious Divinity who presides in the kingdom of grace. Hear, O Israel, the Lord thy God is one Lord. In regard, therefore, to all the promises and also all the solemn warnings of the Bible, Nature lifts up her voice and cries in the words of the prophet, O Earth, Earth, Earth, hear the word of the Lord. 2. Providence assures us that what God hath said, He will do. The voice of every storm that, like an angry child, weeps and wails itself asleep, the voice of every shower that has cleared up into sunshine, the hoarse voice of ocean breaking in impotent rage against its ancient bounds, the voice of the seasons as they have marched to the music of the spheres in unbroken succession over the earth, the scream of the satyr in Babylon's empty halls, the song of the fisherman, who spreads his net on the rocks, and shoots it through the waters where Tyre once sat in the pride of an ocean queen, the fierce shout of the Bedouin as he hurls his spear and careers in freedom over his desert sands, the wail and weeping of the wandering Jew over the ruins of Zion — in all these I hear the echo of this voice of God, "I the Lord have spoken, and I will do it." ( T. Guthrie, D. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: Then the heathen that are left round about you shall know that I the LORD build the ruined places, and plant that that was desolate: I the LORD have spoken it, and I will do it. |
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