A CELEBRATED preacher asked Garrick, the actor, “How is it the people weep under your words of fiction, when they are indifferent undermine, which are true?” His reply was, “I play fiction as if it were fact, and you preach fact as if it were fiction.”
Let me ask, Is the prospect of coming judgment a fiction? Has God, or has He not, predicted it? Oh! there is a time coming when He will take “vengeance on them that know not God, and that obey not the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ.”
The solemn predictions on the past human world were predictions at which men mocked. Did not God predict judgment on ‘the antediluvian world?
Did He not predict judgment on Sodom and Gomorrah?
Did He not foretell the judgments that befell Jericho?
But how can men be infidels? God never, in the past human world, gave notice of judgments without their having transpired; at the same time He showed a way of escape.
He told Noah, “Make thee an ark of gopher-wood.” That ark was Christ.
For Lot there was Zoar, or “Escape to the mountain.” Nothing between the two was salvation. Though Lot’s wife was out of Sodom, she was not saved. She was not in Zoar. If Lot were scarcely saved, “where shall the ungodly and the sinner appear?” For Rahab there was the “scarlet line.” That line again was Christ; it was atonement through a crucified Christ.
Moreover, God gave opportunity to their houses that they also might be saved. Said God to Noah, “Come thou and all thy house into the ark.” And his house was saved.
Ere the lurid flames broke over doomed Sodom, God said to Lot, “Hast thou here any besides?” God gave them the opportunity of salvation; but his wife looked back, and was turned into a pillar of salt. His sons-in-law were burned to ashes—ashes which will rise in the resurrection of the damned, when God shall judge the world in righteousness.
“Thou shalt bring thy father,” He said to Rahab, “and thy mother, and thy brethren, and all thy father’s household, home unto thee.” Foreshadowing’s of what God said to the jailer― “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved, AND THY HOUSE.”
How righteously, in the midst of judgment, can God save. How read we? Damnation surely; but also salvation. But on what principle? On what principle did He save Rahab?
First in grace. Rahab was a sinner—she was “Rahab the harlot.” She had no merit, no works, to shelter her in the day of doom; but God saved her through grace alone, by faith.
Secondly, in love. She was “a lost sinner,” but God loved her, sent the spies to her, as He sends this written message to you.
Thirdly, in righteousness. The “scarlet line” showed death. Rahab deserved death; death had transpired; the scarlet line had been, as it were, dipped in the blood of the slain Lamb.
What a salvation!
Sins gone! Jesus only! The blood in all its solitary efficacy! The ark, Zoar, the scarlet line, each in its solitary security! Not Noah, but the ark! Not Lot, but Zoar! Not Rahab, but the line! Not sin, but the blood Not me, but Christ! Reader, do you regard Christ as being enough? Are you saved?
ANON.