ONE outstanding characteristic of the natural man is his craving for greatness, and his admiration for that which he calls “great." It matters little to him whether this greatness be good or bad. How men will follow the course even of a criminal, if only he is guilty of "great" crimes!
This has always been a desire of man's heart.
We find a very early expression of it in the plain of Shinar (Gen. 11). There men said, “Let us make us a name," and to that end they commenced building the Tower of Babel. Alas! their great project but showed forth their exceeding littleness: God's hand wrote "confusion" on their work. They were reckoning without Him.
We come on a little in the history of mankind, and see the Pharaohs engaged on their Pyramids: What are these? Nothing but tombs! Man's greatness ends but in death.
Nebuchadnezzar was a "great" monarch. At the summit of his glory he said, "Is not this great Babylon which I have built... by the might of my power, and for the honor of my majesty?" In the same hour God's hand degraded him to the level of the beasts of the field (Dan. 4).
And so we shall see everywhere; the greatness of one century is well-nigh forgotten by the next. If we want true, enduring greatness we must turn to God. In Him alone do we find that which is worthy of honor, praise, and worship; and all eternity cannot exhaust the songs of praise due to Him: There are five scriptures which bring before us five things that God calls "great," which we might with profit examine a little.
1. "But God, who is rich in mercy, for His GREAT LOVE wherewith he loved us, even when we were dead in sins, hath quickened us together with Christ (by grace ye are saved).”
This is the first and greatest of the five. It is the root, the spring of all; God's great love; the free unbounded love that flows out from Him towards a sin-stricken, lost world, unhindered, unchecked by all our guilt and distance from Himself. What can we say to love like this? It is above all our comprehension.
Man loves that which he thinks to be lovely.
God's love flows out to you and me “even when we were dead in sins," without one thought Godwards in our hearts, and nothing but hatred for Him in us. It is a trait in human character to hate those we have wronged, and whom have we wronged like God Himself? for all sin is against Him. “Against Thee, Thee only, have I sinned," says David (Psa. 51). Yet such is His love toward us that none of these things can hinder its outflow. He hates our sin, but He loves the poor sinner, though so unlovely and unloving. What "great love"!
“God is its blessed source;
Death ne'er can stop its course;
Nothing can stay its force;
Matchless it is.”
But the question arises, How can God's love be shown to us, if we are sinners, and He cannot have sin in His presence? For we must ever bear in mind that, though God is love, He is holy and righteous, and His love cannot be exercised at the expense of His holiness. But thanks be to Him, His love has solved the question.
2. This brings us to our second scripture in Heb. 2:13: "How shall we escape if we neglect so GREAT salvation?”
Here we have brought before us a “GREAT SALVATION." This is worthy of God, worthy of His greatness and His love. And, friend, it is a "great salvation," consider it how you will.
If we consider who planned it, how great it is! for God Himself planned it.
If we think of the Person of the Saviour, how great! for it was no less a Person than God's beloved Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, who accomplished, salvation’s work.
If we consider how He performed it, how great it is! Oh! unsaved reader, the story of the cross is probably as familiar in your ears as anything you have heard; but how little do you enter into what it means! Do you realize that the One on that shameful cross, in the center of the three (as though man would make Him out to be the worst) was there enduring what you should have endured? That He, to whom the thought of sin was abhorrent was there made sin for us? That He was bearing God’s righteous and holy wrath against sin? Do you realize that your sins helped to nail Him there, and that you have added to the awful load that was laid upon Him, when that bitter, bitter cry was wrung from His soul, "My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?"? Do you realize that it was for you that that blessed Saviour was in such agony of soul?
Man did his very worst at the cross of Jesus. They put Him to the most shameful, agonizing death ever devised by the perverted ingenuity of man; and while He was there enduring that torment they were not ashamed to use the cruelest taunts and insults against Him who all His life had done nothing but good.
That side of the cross, beloved reader, brings out your heart and mine; shows us of what we are by nature capable; but it could never save your soul. No! It was what the Lord Jesus endured during those three hours of darkness from His God, when He was alone, forsaken, Who was ever the delight of the Father; it was in that awful moment when He was brought into the 'dust of death that salvation's work was done (Psa. 22:15). He could say, " All Thy waves and Thy billows are gone over Me "; and, “Behold, and see if there be any sorrow like unto My sorrow, which is done unto Me, wherewith the Lord hath afflicted me in the day of His fierce anger " (Psa. 42:7; Lam. 1:12).
Jesus knew, and fully appreciated, God's thoughts of sin, that sin which men think so lightly of. His holy head was bowed in death to meet the fierce anger of Jehovah against sin.
Friend, isn't it a great salvation, and will you still neglect or 'despise it? "Oh" you say, “I do not despise it." Pardon me, but plainly, if you are not saved, you are despising God's gift of His Son, the Son of His love. “What think ye of Christ?" is the question to each one to-day.
We have seen that if we consider the person of the Saviour it is indeed a "great salvation.”
Then if we consider how it was wrought it is so indeed. Now we go to another point and see its exceeding greatness manifested in what it does. There is virtue enough in the atoning work of Christ to save every man, woman, and child that ever lived. If any are lost it is not because there was not provision for their salvation.
Think where we were as revealed in God's word:
“Dead in trespasses and sins"; " All have sinned and come short of the glory of God"; and so on, all through the third chapter of the Epistle to the Romans, and in many other passages we get our woeful state revealed. “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked” (Jer. 17:9), and so on, everywhere we see how great a distance was between us and God, and what impassable barriers (to us) there were in the way. But we had no desire to be saved. This is because we had no sense of our condition. But when through God's mercy we are aroused to a sense of dire need, a sense of ruin in God's sight, what a blessing to be able to turn to Jesus, "He who met the claims of glory And the need of ruined man,” and avail ourselves of this wonderful, this “great salvation." We are thus saved from eternal perdition, and banishment from God's presence, and given eternal life in the light of God's favor and with Himself, with Him who loved us and gave Himself for us (Rev. 1:5).
When through infinite grace and mercy we are saved, and brought into such a position, are we now to keep ourselves in it? Ah! by the time we are in such a position, we have learned a little of our depraved hearts, and we know, and the more we go on the more we know, how vain would be the endeavor. Blessed be His name, He knows it, too, and has not laid upon us this that we could not sustain. What He asks us for is our trust and our love. He will keep us. Look at a child holding his father's hand, and say who does the holding. Is it the father or the child? The father, of course. And so it is with the believer. We cannot "hold on" (as it is often put), we should be lost eternally if, one jot or tittle of our salvation was to be our own work.
3. This brings us to our third scripture " Now the God of peace, that brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus, that GREAT Shepherd of the sheep, through the blood of the everlasting covenant, make you perfect in every good work to do His will" (Heb. 13:20).
Here we have brought before us the “Great Shepherd." What a beautiful picture of the Lord in His work now for those who are His!
He keeps, He guards, He leads, He feeds His own. There is not a step on our pathway home to Himself that He does not know. He has passed through this world before us, and knows just what we have to encounter. “When He putteth forth His own sheep He goeth before them" (John 10:1). He has gone before, and now He leads. “He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for His name's sake" and further down in this same twenty-third Psalm is brought out the comfort of this shepherding: “Thy rod and Thy staff they comfort me." Then He knows, too, how much we have need of spiritual food while traveling here. He Himself is “the bread of life." He nourishes us. In short, as it is so beautifully expressed in the well-known fifteenth chapter of Luke, "When He hath found it [his lost sheep] He layeth it on His shoulders rejoicing," and He carries it right home. There is not a care, not a trial, not a sorrow, which Jesus will not enter into, and bring us triumphantly through.
4. Now there is a word to those who are His own. "Go home to thy friends," said Jesus, “and tell them how GREAT things the Lord hath done for thee" (Mark 5:19). What a privilege is here given to us by the Lord Himself. If He had done great things for that poor lunatic, surely He has for us. He has brought us up out of a horrible pit and out of the miry clay, set our feet upon a rock, and established our goings (Psa. 40). Everything we have, and everything we are, we owe to Him, and now He bids us go and tell others: “Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature" (Mark 16:15). He would have His people proclaiming to every creature everywhere His "great love,” His "great salvation.”
But, my yet unconverted friend, what do you think of these things? God Himself, in the passage we have just read, has called them “great things; and His estimate is right. Do you consider them small things, of little account, and not worth your attention? Is it nothing to you what Jesus endured on the cross? Does that “great love" of God remain unheeded by you?
If so, my friend, yours is a most perilous condition. That "great love" of God, manifested at such infinite cost, is toward you; that “great salvation " is offered to you freely at this moment.
That "Great Shepherd" is yearning with an infinite tenderness over you, to impart all these great things to you. Then, oh! why turn away? Can you turn a deaf ear to such love, to such pleadings of grace? God has not only provided this salvation, but actually beseeches you to accept it; and is your heart so hard, so filled with this world and its vain pleasures, that such " great love " as this cannot touch you? (2 Cor. 5: 20).
Then, dear friend, those great things of which we have been reading can never be yours. One object looms ahead of you at the end of your career of rejection of God's infinite mercy, an object of such greatness, such majesty and such awfulness as this world has never yet seen.
Listen!
5. " And I saw a GREAT WHITE THRONE, and Him that sat on it, from whose face the earth and the heaven fled away, and there was found no place for them. And I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God.... And whosoever was not found written in the book of life was cast into the lake of fire." (Rev. 20:11, 12.)
God has decreed that every knee shall bow to Jesus, and every tongue confess Him as Lord (Phil. 2:10, 11). Will you wait till that blessed Saviour sits on that throne revealed as a Judge? For there is no mercy at the "Great White Throne." It is a throne of righteousness, and what is wanted to meet your need and mine is mercy. Dear friend, it is offered now without money and without price. How awful to have to contemplate throughout a never—ending eternity the opportunities neglected, the warnings unheeded, the tender pleadings of grace that fell on deaf ears, when the cry of your soul can only be forever, "The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and I am not saved"! (Jer. 8:20). Oh, what would you give then for one more chance! With what eagerness you would snatch at the least hope of rescue from that awful place! Vain hope! There hope NEVER comes.
Oh! turn not from the offer of salvation; accept before God His estimate of His beloved Son and His work on the cross; and at that very moment, on the authority of His own Word, this salvation, this love, this Shepherd is yours, and the "Great White Throne" has no terrors for you. The believer in Jesus is passed from death unto life (John 5:24). "If thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised Him from the dead, THOU SHALT BE SAVED" (ROM. 10:9)