WE always find in the deliverances of God's people that God is also going to punish the world. He bears testimony against it, a universal testimony, and the Holy Spirit convicts it of sin, because they have not believed on Him Whom God has sent. Hence the gospel begins with treating the world as already condemned. God has made trial in every way of the human heart. The gospel supposes that this probation is closed, and declares all the world lost. Souls often desire to prove their own strength, and even converted souls sometimes try to commend themselves thus to God, but it is to dishonor the Lord Jesus and to deny their own condition as judged of God.
In Egypt God was content with the firstborn of each house as a manifestation of His judgment. Pharaoh would not let the people of God go. When God demanded as a right that they should serve Him, the world through Pharaoh its prince would not yield. Signs and plagues were then wrought to arrest their attention and enforce the rights of God; but Egypt would not listen. Pharaoh was hard, then hardened, and at last becomes a monument of judgment for the instruction of all men. So it was in the days of Noah, and so it is now that the world once more is warned of the approaching judgments of God.
The Lord Jesus shall be revealed from heaven in flaming fire taking vengeance on them that know not God and on them that obey not the gospel.
Meanwhile God demands a complete submission to His revealed will. He demands that the world should submit to the Lord Jesus; all those who will not shall be forced to do so when judgment comes, and then to their own confusion and endless sorrow. God presents His Son in humiliation in order to save the world; but without submission to Him all is useless, because this is what God requires and values. To believe in the Son is eternal life, is salvation; to reject the Son of God is judgment. God will have a surrender of the heart to Him as Saviour and Lord, a surrender to His own grace in Him. Thus is the heart and everything else changed, and all question as to good works is set aside. All here turns on receiving or rejecting the Lord Jesus. Zacchæus may speak of what he has been in the habit of doing, but that is not the point now; "This day is salvation come to this house." If the Lord Jesus is welcomed there is life; if He is refused, there must be vengeance by-and-by for those who do not submit. How happy for the poor convicted sinner that he has not to search in himself for something to present to God! If the heart is open, Christ is the grace and glory and perfection that is needed, and the moral effects soon and surely follow.
Still, the word of God presents the certainty of judgment. Satan has possession practically of the world, but God retains His rights. The unconverted are deceived by the enemy and are in his power. Satan does all he can to make the world believe that they are free and happy; that they are, or may be, righteous and good enough. But God has His rights.
The world will not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, and yet hopes to escape judgment. Satan, too, takes advantage of all that God would employ to awaken and bless the soul. Thus, with the unconverted in Christendom, natural conscience is ashamed of that which the heathen do even in their religion. But this is used of Satan to persuade men that they can present themselves before God and worship Him, because there is nothing in these lands so gross as among pagans: But God holds to His rights, and nothing is well if the Lord Jesus be not received in faith.
In Him all that is perfect in God and man is presented to the conscience. The holiness of God is there, not condemning, but in perfect grace; but God will have an entire submission to Him. Nobody that comes is cast out. He is God in all His goodness to attract hearts, He is Man in all His lowliness to exercise no will, no choice, but to receive every one that comes to Him, for such is the will of Him that sent Him; but God desires submission to Him. If He, the Lord Jesus, is rejected, this is the conclusive proof that the heart will not have God in any way that He takes in presenting Himself to man. It is the evidence of man's heart, of his pride, his hardness and his levity. Nothing like these can stand in the presence of God, and the Lord Jesus manifested His presence in love.
Pride is ashamed of the cross. Vanity cannot go on before the Lord Jesus, despised and rejected of man. God searches the heart in this way, and man does not like it. He is bound to own himself a sinner, to submit his conscience and give up his will; but he won't do so. It is the joy of the Lord Jesus to seek the wanderer; but for man to return in his rags and show his wretchedness is most distasteful to his nature: grace alone can make him do so. His pride therefore makes him hate grace even more than law. The heart cannot endure to be laid completely bare; but if man is to be blessed, God, whose object it is to save the soul forever, must search the heart. God acts according to what He is, and not according to our thoughts. If man will not believe in the Lord Jesus and will not submit to Him, God will manifest what He is by judgment. J.N.D.