When people say to themselves, ‘I must get land, I must get money, by any means; honestly if I can, if not, dishonestly; for have it I must;’ what are they doing then but denying that the kingdom, the power, and the glory of this earth belong to the Righteous God, and that He, and not the lying Devil, gives them to whomsoever He will?
When people say to themselves (as who does not at moments?) ‘To be rich is to be safe; a man’s life does consist in the abundance of what he possesses;’ what are they doing but saying that man does not live by every word which proceeds out of the mouth of God, but by what he can get for himself and keep for himself? When they are fretful and anxious about their crops, when they even repine and complain of Providence, as I have known men do because they do not prosper as they wish, what are they doing but saying in their hearts, ‘The weather and the seasons are the lords and masters of my good fortune, or bad fortune. I depend on them, and not on God, for comfort and for wealth, and my Heavenly Father does not know what I have need of?’ When parents send their girls out to field-work, without any care about whom they talk with, to have their minds corrupted by hearing filthiness and seeing immodest behaviour, what are they doing but offering their daughters in sacrifice, not even to Moloch, but to Mammon; saying to themselves, ‘My daughter’s modesty, my daughter’s virtue, is not of as much value as the paltry money which I can earn by leaving her alone to learn wickedness, instead of keeping watch over her, if she does work, that she may be none the worse for her day’s labour.’
I might go on and give you a thousand instances more, but they all come alike to this; that whensoever you fancy that you cannot earn your daily bread without doing wrong yourself, or leaving your children to learn wrong, then you do not believe that the kingdom, the power, and the glory of this earth on which you work is your Heavenly Father’s. For if you did, you would be certain that gains, large or small, got by breaking the least of His commandments, could never prosper you, but must bring a curse and a punishment with them; and you would be sure also, that because God is your Father, and this earth and all herein is His, that He would feed you with food sufficient for you, if you do but seek first His kingdom—that is, try to learn His laws; and seek first His righteousness—that is, strive and pray day by day to become righteous even as He is righteous.
Yes, my friends, this is one meaning, though only one, of St. John’s words, ‘This is the victory which overcometh the world, even our faith.’ We all see the world full of pleasant things, for which we long; of necessary things, too, without which we should starve and die. And then the temptation comes to us to snatch at these things for ourselves by any means in our power, right or wrong; like the dumb animals who break out of their owners’ field into the next, if they do but see better pasturage there, or fight and quarrel between themselves for food, each trying to get the most for himself and rob his neighbour. So live the beasts, and so you and I, and every human being shall be tempted to live, if we follow our natures, if we forget that we are God’s children, in God’s kingdom, under the laws of a Heavenly Father, who has shown forth His own love and justice, His own kingdom, and power, and glory, in the person of the Lord Jesus Christ. But if we remember that, if we remember daily that the kingdom, and power, and glory is our Father’s, then we shall neither fear storms and blights, bad crops, or anything else which is of the earth earthly. We shall fear nothing of that kind, which can only kill the body, but only fear the evil Devil, lest, by making us distrust and disobey our Heavenly Father, he should, after he has killed, destroy both body and soul in hell. And as long as we fear him, as long as we renounce him, as long as we trust utterly in our Heavenly Father’s love and justice, and in the love and justice of His dear Son, the Man Christ Jesus, to whom all power is given in heaven and earth—then out of the youngest child among us will God’s praise be perfected; for the youngest child among us, by faith in God his Father, may look upon all heaven and earth, and say, ‘Great, and wonderful, and awful as this earth and skies may be, I am more precious in the sight of God than sun, and moon, and stars; for they are things: but I am a person, a spirit, an immortal soul, made in the likeness of God, redeemed into the likeness of God, sanctified into the likeness of God. This great earth was here thousands and thousands of years before I was born, and it will be here perhaps millions and millions of years after I am dead; but it cannot harm me; it cannot kill me. When earth, and sun, and stars are past away, I shall live for ever; for I am the immortal child of an Immortal Father, the child of the everlasting God. These things He only made: but me He begot unto everlasting life, in Jesus Christ my Lord. I seem to depend on this earth for food, for clothing, for comfort, for life itself: and yet I do not do so in reality; for man doth not live by bread alone, but by every word which proceeds out of the mouth of God my Father. In Him I have eternal life: a life which this earth did not give, and cannot take away; a life which, by the mercy of my Father in heaven, I trust and hope to be living when sun and earth, stars and comets, are returned again to their dust, and blotted from the face of heaven. For the kingdom, the glory, and the power of this world, and all other worlds, past, present, and to come, belong to Him who spared not His only-begotten Son, but freely gave Him for us, and will with Him freely give us all things.’
And thus, my friends, may God’s praise be perfected out of the mouth of any Christian child, when He declares that God put man a little lower than the angels only to crown him with the glory and worship of having the only-begotten Son of God take man’s nature upon Him, and walk this earth as a man, and live, and die, and rise again as a man, that so He might raise fallen man again to the glory and honour which God appointed for men from the beginning, when He said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and the fowl of the air, and the beast of the earth; and be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth and subdue it.
SERMON XI. AHAB AND NABOTH
1 Kings xxi. 2, 3. And Ahab spake unto Naboth, saying, Give me thy vineyard, that I may have it for a garden of herbs, because it is near unto my house: and I will give thee for it a better vineyard than it; or, if it seem good to thee, I will give thee the worth of it in money. And Naboth said unto Ahab, The Lord forbid it me, that I should give the inheritance of my fathers unto thee.
You heard to-day read for the first lesson, the story of Naboth and King Ahab. Most of you know it well. Naboth’s vineyard has passed into a proverb for something which we covet.
It is good that it should be so. We cannot know our Bible too well; we cannot have Bible words and Bible thoughts too much worked into our ways of talking and thinking about everyday matters. As far as I can see, the best days of England, the best days of every Christian country of which I ever read, have been days when men were not ashamed of their Bibles; when they were ready to live by their Bibles; to ask advice of their Bibles about buying and selling, about making war and peace, about all the business of life; and were not ashamed to quote texts of Scripture in the parliament, and in the market, and in the battle-field, as God’s law, God’s rule, God’s word about the matter in hand, which was, therefore, sure to be the right word and the right rule. People are grown ashamed of doing so now-a-days; but that does not alter the matter one jot. We may deny God, but He cannot deny Himself. His laws are everlasting, and He is ruling and judging us by them now, all day long, just as much as He ruled and judged those Jews by them of old. The God of Abraham is our God; the God of Moses is our God; the God of Ahab and Naboth is our God; neither He nor His government are altered in the least since their time, and they never will alter for ever, and ever, and ever; and if we do not choose to believe that now in this life, we shall be made to believe it by some very ugly and painful schooling in the life to come.
What laws of God, now, can we learn from this story?