Sermons by the late Rev. Richard de Courcy

by Richard De Courcy

THE PREPARATION REQUISITE FOR THE DAY OF JUDGMENT.

“Prepare to meet thy GOD, O Israel.” Amos, iv. 12.

This concise but comprehensive address contains one of the most solemn warnings, that can possibly sound in the ears of sinful mortals. Prepare to meet thy God! Awful sentence! Every word in it is fraught with meaning, is big with importance; and rings an alarm, louder than the voice of ten thousand thunders. Who can read it with inattention? Who can hear it with irreverence? Who can preach upon it, without deeply feeling, himself, the weighty truths he enforceth? And yet the most nervous language must be inexpressive, and the warmest sentiment flat, when compared with a subject, which, for majesty and importance, rises infinitely above all the powers of description or the utmost stretch of conception itself. To whose heart is it not sufficient to carry, at least, a transient impression of seriousness? Methinks when the solemn sentence, Prepare to meet thy God, is repeated, the votary of pleasure, even in the giddy whirl of dissipation, is made to think, and levity itself, for a moment, looks solid; an irresistible awe seizes the mind of the licentiate, that imbitters his gratifications, and disturbs his sensual repose; that extorts a sigh from the unrelenting breast of impenitence, draws a tear from the eye of the prodigal, and forces a blush into the hardened cheek of immodesty itself:—even the daring infidel himself cannot stand the shock of the solemn warning; he starts—turns pale—looks aghast—and all the guilt of his conscience, all the misgivings of his heart, and all the horrors of his mind, fly into his pallid countenance, as so many witnesses against his atheistical principles, as so many vouchers for the truth of revelation; so that, methinks, even infidelity itself for a moment believes, and trembles.

In the context, (i.e. the passage immediately connected with the text,) we shall behold an additional evidence to the solemnity and importance of the warning before us. There the prophet is reciting the various judgments with which God had visited Israel; the end he had in these severe visitations; and the strange incorrigibleness of the people under them, and after their removal. The judgments were, famine, drought, blasting, and mildew, the pestilence, the sword, and an overthrow of some of their cities, judicial and final, like that of Sodom and Gomorrah. Dreadful and numerous as those public, those national calamities were; yet Israel was not humbled, did not repent. Yet have not ye returned unto me, saith the Lord, is the complaint of God himself, as annexed by the prophet to every verse, that recites their visitations. Jehovah spoke to them repeatedly, and awfully, by the rod; but they would not hear it, nor did they regard Him who had appointed it. He met them in his judgments. All of them were his messengers; each had a voice, that spake loudly for God and vehemently against sin; and all, in accents thundering through their land, solicited the dutiful attention of the inhabitants. But in vain. Though they were obliged to give those dreadful visitants the meeting, yet they would not give them an humble audience. They were too busy to hear; too proud to submit; too stubborn to obey. Well, since the embassadors are despised, the king will resent the affront: since they would not regard the harbingers, all the Majesty of God shall summon them to an interview. One meeting more is therefore determined upon; in which the holy and eternal God himself shall be one of the parties, and an incorrigible and rebellious people, the other. Prepare to meet thy God.

From the words thus stated, I propose, with a view to our personal improvement, considering,

I. That there will be a certain, an awful, a swiftly-approaching, and an inevitable interview between God and sinners.

II. What kind of preparation it is incumbent upon sinners to make in the prospect of that interview.

III. After which, I shall, in an applicatory way, consider, to whom the warning is directed.

I. The interview;—1. at death; 2. in the day of judgment.

1. It is appointed unto all men once to die, agreeably to the original sentence delivered to our first parents, Dust thou art, and unto dust shall thou return. For, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned. Rom. v. 12. The wages of sin is death. Rom. vi. 23. That we might be impressed with a due sense of the cause of that awful change which passeth upon man at his dissolution; the scriptures uniformly ascribe it to the first man’s disobedience, in which was involved the sin of his posterity, and death, as one portion of the entailed penalty. The scriptural account of the origin of death, as very precisely and satisfactorily traced in the 5th chapter of the epistle to the Romans, is, that Adam sinned; that in him, as a public person, ἐφ’ ᾦ, all sinned; and that, because all sinned in him as their representative, therefore all die through him, or are obnoxious to death, the very moment they are born, and are by nature the children of wrath. Ephes. ii. 3.