Why does He keep you alive? Surely because He expects something of you. And what does He expect of you? What does any good father expect of his children? Why does he help and protect them? Not from mere brute instinct, as beasts take care of their young when they are little, and then as soon as they are grown up cast them off and forget them. No. He takes care of his children because he wishes them to grow up like himself, to be a comfort and a help and a pride to him.
And God takes care of you and keeps you from death, for the very same reason. God desires that you should grow up like Himself, godly and pure, leading lives like His Son Jesus Christ. God desires that you should grow up to the stature of perfect men and women, which is the likeness of Jesus Christ your Lord.
But if you turn God’s grace in keeping you alive into a cloak for licentiousness and an excuse for sinning—if, when God keeps you alive that you may lead good lives, you take advantage of His fatherly love to lead bad lives—if you go on returning God evil for good, and ungratefully and basely presume on His patience and love to do the things which He hates, what must you expect? God loves you, and you make that an excuse for not loving Him; God does everything for you, and you make that an excuse for doing nothing for God; God gives you health and strength, and you make that an excuse for using your health and strength just in the way He has forbidden. What can be more ungrateful? What can
be more foolish? Oh, my friends, if one of our children behaved to us in return for our care and love a hundredth part as shamefully as most of us behave to God our Father, what should we think of them? What should we say of them?
Oh, beware, beware! God is a righteous God, strong and patient, and God is provoked every day, and bears it according to His boundless love and patience. But “if a man will not turn,” says the same text, “He will whet His sword.” And then—woe to the careless and ungrateful sinner. God will cut him down and bring him low. God will take from him his health, or his money, or his blind peace of mind; and by affliction after affliction, and shame after shame, and disappointment after disappointment, teach him that his youth, and his health, and his money, and all that he has, are his Father’s gifts and not his own property—and that His Father will take them away from him, till he feels his own weakness, till he sees that he is really not his own but God’s property, body and soul, and goes back to his heavenly Father and cries, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before Thee, and am no more worthy to be called Thy son. I have taken Thy gifts and gone away with them from Thy house unto the far country of sin, and wasted them in riotous living, till I have had to fill my belly with the husks which the swine did eat. I have had no profit out of all my sins, of which I am now ashamed. I have robbed Thee and abused Thy gifts and Thy love. Father, take me back, for I have sinned, and am not worthy to be called Thy child.”
XVIII. EARTHLY AND HEAVENLY WISDOM; OR, STOOP TO CONQUER.
“The Lord by wisdom hath founded the earth; by understanding hath he established the heavens.”—Prov. iii. 19.
Did it ever strike you as a very remarkable and important thing, that after saying in Proverbs iii. that Wisdom is this precious treasure, and bidding his son seek for her because (verse 16) “Length of days is in her right hand, and in her left hand riches and honour: Her ways are ways of pleasantness, and all her paths are peace,”—Solomon goes on immediately to say (verses 19, 20), “The Lord by Wisdom hath founded the earth, and established the heavens?”
By Wisdom: by the very same Wisdom, Solomon says, which is to give men length of days, and riches, and honour. Is not this curious at least? That there is but one wisdom for God and man? That man’s true wisdom is a pattern of God’s wisdom? That a man to prosper in the world must get the very same wisdom by which God made and rules the world? Curious. But most blessed news, my friends, if we will think over what it means. I will try to explain it to you: first, as to this world which we see; next, as to the heavenly world of spirits which we do not see.
You have, many of you, heard the word “Science.”