In that day our sinfulness shall sink us into the dust, and cover us with shame and confusion even more than our vanities. Shall any one of us hope then to be exalted, when the memories of us all shall retrace so many sterile and unproductive intensions, so many good impressions never fostered and ripened into fruits of righteousness, so many talents misused by our iniquity, or buried by our idleness? Then there shall be no more concealments, no more deceits, no more false excuses, no more of those pretences, equivocations, subterfuges, and sophisms which our reason is now so fatally ingenious in playing off upon itself (P. D. 661, 2106). Oh, think of these things, and let not your sins be dearer to you than your salvation. Think of them ere the night cometh, and the sun of your probation has quite gone down.

“The Lord alone shall be exalted in that day.” Will He then confound the righteous with the wicked? As compared with God there shall be no distinctions between men. All men on that great day at the bar of the Omniscient and the All Holy shall have upon them a universal sense of imperfection, unworthiness, insufficiency, nothingness. But as compared with each other there will be immense differences between them. It is one purpose of the great day to make manifest to all orders of being the infinite value and superiority of moral goodness, the infinite preciousness of a holy obedience above and beyond all else; then God, who sees it in secret, will reward it openly. When the wicked shall be turned into hell, with all the people that forget God, the righteous shall shine forth as the stars of heaven. Therefore estimate all things now as you will estimate them then. Lean less upon earth and man and the things present, set your affections more upon the things to come, upon heaven, and upon the Ruler of heaven. Cultivate diligently those dispositions which are pleasing in His sight. For then, when all social forms shall have vanished away, when all material substances shall have been obliterated, as the shapes in a cloud, and dissipated as the morning dew, your moral temper will abide with you, and your spiritual state, as discerned by the unerring Judge, will decide, and will attend, your immortal destiny (H. E. I. 720).—James Shergold Boone, M.A.: Sermons, pp. 359–399.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] During the fifth century Chrysostom expressed himself in language which sounds almost like an anticipation of much that we hear at the present day. “No long time now remains until the consummation; but the world is hastening to its end. This the wars declare, this the afflictions, this the love which hath waxed cold. For as the body, when in its last gasp and near to death, draws to itself ten thousand sufferings; and as when a house is about to fall, many portions are wont to fall beforehand from the roofs and walls; so is the end of the world nigh and at the very doors, and, therefore, ten thousand woes are everywhere scattered abroad” (Homily xxxiv.) Towards the close of the tenth century, Bernhard, a hermit of Thuringia, and other persons, spread or encouraged the belief, that after the end of the thousandth year, the fetters of Satan were to be broken; and that, after the reign of Antichrist should be terminated, the world would be consumed by sudden conflagration. This wild and extraordinary delusion pervaded and possessed every rank of society. It seized on nobles, princes, and even bishops, as well as on the common people. Many renounced their pursuits and professions; abandoned their friends and families; gave themselves up to superstitious prayer and terrifying expectations, and made over all their substance to some adjacent church or monastery. Almost all the donations which were made to the Church in this century proceeded from this avowed motive, that the end of the world was drawing near. The form ran, “Appropinquante jam mundi termino,” &c. Others permitted their lands to lie waste, and their homes to decay; or betook themselves in hasty flight to the shelter of rocks and caverns, as if the temples of nature were destined to preservation amidst the wreck of man and his works.—Boone.

[2] I forbear to expatiate on the phenomena or the tokens which shall be the premonitory of the Millennium or of the day of judgment. God has not seen fit, even in Scripture, to withdraw the curtain of obscurity from between us and that supreme future. We may well be content that our apprehensions should be vague, when the language of the Bible is not definite, and when we find rather the sublime and half-luminous gloom with which poetry or painting can invest its delineations, than the sharp and precise outline which the chisel can carve.—Boone.

[3] What shall they all be, the strong rivalries and contentions, which shall have been hushed in the grave; the towering structures of vanity and earthly hope, which shall have been crushed before the moth; the schemes and plottings, the contrivances and expectations, the struggles and triumphs, which shall have been dropped into the burial-place where the worm is feeding on them! Oh, the thrones and dominions of mortality, the crowns and sceptres, the regal splendours and the imperial sway, how shall they then be reduced to their real and intrinsic insignificance! The victories of the warrior who conquered in a hundred fights, and the projects of the politician, whose statesmanship could grasp the globe; the famous men and heroes of the earth, with the poets who celebrated them, and the historians who recounted their exploits, what shall they be before the word of Omnipotence! The learning and science of the philosophers who framed their system of the universe for the admiration of posterity, what shall they be, before the blaze of illumination which shall be poured upon us in another world! The pageantries of courts and palaces; the banquets and the wine-cups, the spectacles and the entertainments, the mirrors and the lamps, the golden furniture of pomp, and the flowing robe of luxury; the great and the affluent, whose patronage was requested for busy undertakings, who were besieged with flattery and obsequiousness from morning to night; the noble and the beautiful, who gathered homage as they moved; the writers and the orators, whose popularity was unbounded, and who lived amidst the incense of human applause; they, and all that appertained to them, where and what shall they be, as we stand poor, and naked, and miserable before Him with whom we have to do! They, the heedless and the selfish, swimming in pleasure, who thought that the whole voyage of life was to be like Cleopatra’s passage along the Cydnus, one scene of mirth and gorgeousness; of prodigal dissipation and fatal revelry, with soft music and delicate odours floating in the air; what shall become of them! How black and cold shall be the cinders of their joy!

All human dynasties will then have crumbled to pieces, and all the gradations in the scale of human rank will then have been blotted out; for all must be dwarfed and prostrated before the ineffable majesty of the Most High God. All other differences must fade when the Divine summits are placed in contrast with them; as from the top of an exceeding high mountain the whole ground beneath is as a level plain, because from that vast altitude all smaller elevations are lost, all minuter inequalities of surface vanish. Human celebrity will then be as a sound, the very echoes of which will have departed. The pompous titles with which the vanity of man was pampered; the distinctions which kings could confer, or heraldry emblazon; privileges of caste, nobility of blood, the pride of ancestry, the blaze of reputation, the splendour of talents, shall then be confounded, one and all, as frivolous toys and trifling baubles. The mighty ones of the earth shall be no more than they who were of the poorest condition; the great shall stand abashed with the mean, the learned with the ignorant, monarchs with their subjects, senators and princes, commanders of fleets and armies, the loftiest and most renowned by the side of the husbandman and the labourer; for what shall they all be in contrast with Him, the Universal Creator, whose dwelling-place is eternity, and to whom belong, throughout all ages, all glory and dominion, sovereignty and praise!—Boone.

The Inexcusability and Hopelessness of Unbelief.

v. 4. What could have been done more to my vineyard that I have not done in it?

In a subsequent verse God condescends to explain what is here meant by His “vineyard,” so that there might be no doubt as to the scope and import of the passage (ver. 7). God has done everything which could be done for the spiritual culture of His ancient Church (vers. 3, 4). This assertion that “as much had been done as could be done” is very affecting and startling. And if this could be said of the Jewish vineyard, what shall be said of the Christian?