MATTHEW X. 32, 33. Whosoever, therefore, shall confess me before men, him will I confess before my Father which is in 2 Cor. iv. 17, 18. For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory; while we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen, for the things SERMONS. SERMON I. THE MUTABILITY OF MAN, THE IMMUTABILITY OF GOD. Your fathers, where are they? and the prophets, do they live for ever? but my words and my statutes, which I commanded my servants the prophets, did they not take hold of your fathers? and they returned and said, like as the Lord of hosts thought to do unto us, according to our ways, and according to our doings, so hath he dealt with us. THE mutability of man, and the immutability of God! How awful a subject, how solemnly impressed upon us by every revolving year, yet how little inclined are we to dwell upon it, how much indisposed to suffer the consideration of it to interfere with any of our plans of worldly enjoyment, or to quicken us, as it ought to do, in the immediate, the earnest, anxious pursuit of spiritual good. May our God, even Jehovah, who spake these words in time past unto his people by the prophets, in this latter day speak them unto our hearts by the Spirit of his Son; that if they have never yet, in the language of the text, "taken hold" of us, they may this day so take 11 hold of our attention, of our memory, and of our hearts, as to sanctify to us this first sabbath of the opening year, and to fix upon our souls the warning, the precepts, the promises and the threatenings of our God, that they may not merely influence us for a passing hour, but abide with us for ever. We shall commence by stating briefly the original intention of the passage, as it occurs in the prophecy from which it is taken. The Almighty had sent his prophet Zechariah, as we find by the beginning of the chapter, to call his people to repentance, with the promise that their repentance should be accepted. To urge them the more strongly to this, the Lord reminds them that he had "been sore displeased with their fathers," and cautions them very expressly not to imitate their obduracy and sin, but to turn at the voice of the Lord. He then condescends to reason with them in the words of the text, upon the obvious wisdom and advantage of so doing, grounding this appeal upon the following affecting considerations; that their fathers, who in old time had been warned, as they were now, and had rejected the warning, had been cut off by the predicted judgments which they despised, and were, as the Psalmist expresses it, "clean gone for ever;" that the prophets who had carried these warnings, and urged them upon the attention of their fathers, could no longer benefit them, for that they also were removed; that the teachers and the taught, the disciples and the masters, in fact the whole generation, had been swept away; thus reminding them, in a very convincing manner, of the mutability of man. The Almighty then proceeds to remind them as strikingly of the immutability of God. He says, in effect, Did the Almighty change because your fathers would not hear and would not turn? Did God alter his message be ;ause they refused to receive it? Is not the warning which you hear at this hour, the identical warning which your fathers heard and scoffed at, and were destroyed; and though generation after generation has passed away, has one jot or one tittle of God's Word ever passed away? So far from it that I leave you to pronounce whether one syllable was changed, whether one syllable ever fell to the ground of all that the Lord had spoken. Did not the judgments which he long had threatened, at the last overtake your fathers? Were they not themselves compelled to declare that God never thought to bring one judgment upon them, and brought it not? How convincing an argument, how striking a conclusion to the present message of the Almighty, thus to refer to the neglect and to the fulfilment of all that had preceded it. My intention then, brethren, this morning, is to endeavour to impress upon you the importance and the necessity of your laying earnestly to heart all those messages from God, all the warnings, all the precepts, all the promises, which you have heard from this place during the last twelvemonth, by the same considerations, the immutability of God, and the mutability of his people, the unchangeableness of God and of his Word, and the transitoriness of you who hear, and of us who proclaim it. First, from the immutability of God, and the unchangeableness of his Word. If we who are the ministers of the Most High, were commissioned to bring you message after message from the great God of heaven and earth, and if these messages all were different the one from the other; if the warning of to-day were less solemn and less awakening than the warning of yesterday, or the promises of to-morrow more abundant than those of to-day, we can easily imagine you waiting in suspense, Sabbath |