Our common moral sense of God will tell us that holiness and righteousness must be precious with Him. “Holiness becomes his house forever.” Purity and truth, and the maintenance of all the cares of order and integrity, must be infinitely according to Him. The conscience will bear this witness.
Faith knows that His grace is precious with Him. Faith knows that well. He delighteth in mercy. The Gospel provides joy for the Divine mind. Faith understands this about God beyond the thoughts of the conscience or the moral sense that is in us.
The Gospel is the Gospel of the blessed, or happy God (1 Tim. 1:22Unto Timothy, my own son in the faith: Grace, mercy, and peace, from God our Father and Jesus Christ our Lord. (1 Timothy 1:2)). In the eyes of the Lord the feet of the preachers of it on the mountains are beautiful; and in the eyes of the Lord the garments, the mystic garments of the priests, the ministers of it, in the Temple are beautiful “Glory and beauty” (Rom. 10:1515And how shall they preach, except they be sent? as it is written, How beautiful are the feet of them that preach the gospel of peace, and bring glad tidings of good things! (Romans 10:15); Ex. 28:22And thou shalt make holy garments for Aaron thy brother for glory and for beauty. (Exodus 28:2).; Heb. 2:77Thou madest him a little lower than the angels; thou crownedst him with glory and honor, and didst set him over the works of thy hands: (Hebrews 2:7)).
The Divine mind is thus disclosed to us. We apprehend it, thus far, with certainty. A meek and quiet spirit is, with the Lord, of great price: and there is richest joy before Him in heaven in the grace that welcomes a lost and returned sinner.
But, I ask, are not His counsels dear to Him? Are not the events of His bosom dear to Him? The maintenance of righteousness and of godly order is of price to Him. The exercise of grace is joy to Him. Is not the purpose of His wisdom and the secret of His bosom alike dear to Him? Must it not be so? It cannot but be so. In the zeal of enforcing what is right, and in the publishing what is gracious, we may overlook this. Is it so that the Church was the peculiar bosom secret of God before the world was—a mystery kept secret from ages and generations but “hid in God”? And can we not give such a thing a place among the things that are precious with Him?
Let us ask the Spirit that so fervently moves the apostle in such a chapter as Eph. 1, whether the “hope” and the “calling,” which he there prays that the saints may discover and know, be of great price with God. Would He have the knowledge of it, so important with the saints, were it not high and dear in the thoughts of the mind of Christ
The Church, as one has observed, opens and clears the volume. We have it shadowed in the man and the woman of the Garden of Eden. We have it signalized in the Holy Jerusalem at the very close of the Apocalypse.
It is when the Spirit of Christ in David had for a moment rapidly touched or awakened the mystery, that the worshipper exclaims, “How precious also are thy thoughts unto me, O God!” (See Psa. 139)
It cannot but be so, though our moral judgment or our conscience, and again our common evangelic faith, does not have quickly reach it. We know, as we have said, that godliness is precious with Him. But again, I ask, are not His own eternal counsels, the secrets of His bosom, precious with Him?
Known unto Him are all His works from the foundation of the world. Redemption was no after-thought with Him. He planned it all. All passed in bright review before Him when as yet there was none of them. And all was precious. And the mystery of the Church that has given a body to Christ, and a partner in glory to the Son of His love, lay there the deepest, because the dearest, in the bosom of sovereign and eternal counsels.