IT is always a serious word, that word “never”; but when God is pleased to make use of it, how infinitely its importance is increased! Think of it, for example, in the text above quoted. It is the door that shuts the cheer of hope outside the heart forever, and shuts the blackness of despair within. When God says “NEVER,” it is a divine hand that both turns the bolt and keeps the key; and who can revoke His sentence?
NEVER. Is it not, then, a word well worth our serious thought? Pause, then, my reader, and consider its import. Just take your stand on the narrow dividing-line that separates this world from the next, that marks off time from a vast eternity, and con the word carefully. Never, NEVER!
You are, perhaps, aware that in this country there is one asylum under special Government control. It is known as the Breadmoor Asylum, and is devoted entirely to the detention of criminals who, as far as can be judged, have committed offenses while in an unsound state of mind.
A few years since one of the unhappy inmates of this asylum not only got restoration for his mind, but found for his soul a safe refuge in the Saviour’s love, a, sure resting-place in His precious finished work.
What a change all this wrought in him the reader may readily imagine. Still, there was one thing more his heart craved for. But, alas! he had, years before, taken life in a fit of madness, and this longed-for boon was denied him. It was liberty he craved—liberty from the grip of the law. “Oh, for liberty! oh, for liberty! The flowers in the garden are pretty enough, and I am allowed sometimes to see them; but, oh, they are prison flowers. The grass, too, is green enough, but it is prison grass.” “If I only knew,” he would sometimes say to his warder, himself also a converted man, “if I only knew that there would ever be a chance of liberty for me to stand once more under a free sky, I could patiently wait. But―” and here the inevitable would thrust itself before him. Who could not pity such a case?
But if his lot was pitiable because, though with the fairest flowers and brightest sunshine, he had no liberty, what must be the portion of the lost in hell? In chains of darkness, bound hand and foot forever; no light, no liberty, no love, no hope; never, NEVER!
But for you, my reader, it has not come to this yet. For you there is still the opportunity of repentance. “The true light now shineth.” The light of the gospel, revealing all that God is, is still within your reach, and from that light, thank God, you have no need to shrink. It just suits you, for in that light we read God’s love. Think of that sinful woman at Sychar’s well (John 4). The Saviour’s holiness did not repel her; her sinfulness curt not repel Him. No doubt she knew something of her own badness, but she knew nothing of God’s love. The Saviour who conversed with her knew both perfectly, and He had come, by His precious death on the cross, to remove the one and reveal the other.
“He took the guilty culprit’s place,
And suffered in his stead;
For man, O miracle of grace!
For man the Saviour bled.”
Here, my reader, you will find both light and liberty. In the light of what God is you will have liberty to look calmly at all that you are, and this without a fear. You will see that it was the depth of your need as a ruined sinner that brought out the deeper depths of God’s love as a Saviour. For “God commendeth His love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (Rom. 5:88But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. (Romans 5:8)).
But to the careless reader we would cry aloud, “Yet a little while is the light with you.” “Repent and believe the gospel”; own your sinfulness; cast yourself on the merits of His precious blood. So shall you be made a happy “partaker of the inheritance of the saints in light” (Col. 1:1212Giving thanks unto the Father, which hath made us meet to be partakers of the inheritance of the saints in light: (Colossians 1:12)), and instead of looking up from the depth of eternal woe to the place of eternal rest, and sadly saying, Never you shall be able, even now to look down to the pit to which your sin once righteously exposed you, and say triumphantly, By the grace of God, by the blood of Christ, NEVER, NEVER!