So said Solomon—and God knows, my dear friends, God knows, he said truly. Ay, and I know it to be true; and I entreat you this day, in God’s name, to hear the conclusion of the whole matter. All this you will find out by eating of the tree of knowledge, and “seeing life,” and going your own way, and falling into sin, and smarting for it, for weary years, in anxiety and perplexity, and shame, and sorrow of heart.
All that you will find out thereby—all that Solomon found out thereby—is just what you know already, and nothing more—just what you have been taught ever since you could speak. “Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man.” Why buy your own experience dear, when you can get it gratis, for nothing already?
Yes; a simple, godly, industrious life, doing the duty which lies nearest you, avoiding sin as you would an adder, because it is sure sooner or later to sting you, if you touch it, is the straight road, and the only road, to happiness, either in this life, or in the life to come. Pleasure and amusement, drinking and jollity, will not make you happy. Money will not make you happy. Cleverness, and cunning, and knowledge of the world will not make you happy. Scholarship and learning will not. But plain, simple righteousness, simply doing right, will.
Do right then and be happy. Obey God’s commandments, and you will find that His commandments are Life, and in the pathway thereof there is no death.
Make up your minds to do right, to be right, to keep right by the help of God’s Right and Holy Spirit, in the right road. Make up your minds whether you will go through the world in God’s way, or your own way—whether you will taste what God has forbidden, and so destroy yourselves, or obey Him and live with Him in bliss. The longer you delay, the more difficult you will find it. Make up your minds now, and ask God to teach you His own heavenly wisdom which is a Tree of Life to all that lay hold on it.
V. I AM.
“I AM hath sent me into you.”—Exodus iii. 10.
Every day I find it more and more true, that the Bible is full of good news from beginning to end. The Gospel—that is good news—and the best of all good news, is to be found in every book of it; perhaps if we knew how to search the Scriptures, in every chapter and verse of it, from beginning to end. For from beginning to end, from Genesis to Malachi—from the Gospel of St. Matthew to the end of the Revelation—what our Lord said of the Bible stands true: “They (the Scriptures) are they which testify of ME” (John v. 39). The whole Bible testifies, bears witness of Him, the One Unchangeable Christ, who said to Moses, “Say unto the people, I AM hath sent me unto you.”
Now let us think a while what that text means; for it has not to do with Moses only, but with all God’s prophets, evangelists, preachers. David might have said the same to the Jews in his time, “I AM hath sent me unto you.” Elijah, Isaiah, St. Matthew, St. John, St. Paul, might have said the same. And so may God’s ministers now. And I, however sinful, or ignorant, or unfaithful to my duty I may be, have still a right to say, as I do now say solemnly and earnestly to you, “I AM hath sent me unto you” this day.
But what do I mean by that? That ought to depend on what Moses meant by it. Moses meant what God meant, and unless I mean the same thing I must mean something wrong. And this is what I think it does mean:
First. I AM—the Lord Jesus Christ told Moses that his name was I AM. Now you perhaps think that this is but a very common place name, for every one can say of himself—I am—and it may seem strange that God should have chosen for His own especial name, words which you and I might have chosen for ourselves just as well. I daresay you think that you may fairly say “you are,” and that I can say fairly that “I am.”
And yet it is not so. If I say “I am,” I say what is not true of me. I must say “I am something—I am a man, I am bad, or I am good, or I am an Englishman, I am a soldier, I am a sailor, I am a clergyman”—and then I shall say what is true of me. But God alone can say “I AM” without saying anything more.
And why? Because God alone is. Everybody and everything else in the world becomes: but God is. We are all becoming something from our birth to our death—changing continually and becoming something different from what we were a minute before; first of all we were created and made, and so became men; and since that we have been every moment changing, becoming older, becoming wiser, or alas! foolisher; becoming stronger or weaker; becoming better or worse. Even our bodies are changing and becoming different day by day.
But God never changes or becomes anything different from what He is now. What He is, that He was, and ever will be. God does not even become older. This may seem very strange, but it is true: for God made Time, God made the years; and once there were no years to count by, no years at all. Remember how long had God Himself been, before He made Time, when there was no Time to pass over? Remember always that God must have created Time. If God did not create Time, no one else did; for there is, as the Athanasian Creed says, “One uncreated and One eternal,” even God who made Time as well as all things else.
Am I puzzling you? What I want to do is to make you understand that God’s life is quite utterly different from our life, or any way of living and being which we can fancy or think of; lest you make to yourselves the likeness of anything in heaven above or of the earth beneath, and think that God is like that and so worship it, and have other gods beside the true God, and so break the first and second commandments, as thousands do who fancy themselves good Protestants, and hate Popery and idolatry, and yet worship a very different sort of god from the “I AM,” who sent Moses to the children of Israel. Remember then this at least, that God was before all things, and all worlds, and all Time; so that there was a time when there were no worlds, and a time when there was no Time—nothing but God alone, absolute, eternal, neither made nor created, the same that He is now and will be for ever.
When I say “God is,” that is a very different thing from God Himself saying, “I AM.” A different thing? Oh! my friends, here is the root of the whole Gospel, the root of all our hope for this world and for the world to come—for ourselves, for our own future, and the future of all the world. Do you not see how? Then I will try to explain.
Many heathen men have known that there was one eternal God, and that God is. But they did not know that God Himself had said so; and that made them anxious, puzzled, almost desperate, so that the wiser they were, the unhappier they were. For what use is it merely knowing that “God is”? The question for poor human creatures is, “But what sort of a being is God? Is He far off? Millions of miles from this earth? Does He care nothing about us? Does He let the world go its own way right or wrong? Is He proud and careless? A self-glorifying Deity whose mercy is not over all His works, or even over any of them? Or does He care for us? Does He see us? Will He speak to us? Has He ever spoken to any one? Has He ever told any one about Himself?” There is the question—the question of all questions. And if a man once begins thinking about his own soul, and this world, and God—till he gets that question answered, he can have no comfort about himself or the world, or anything—till in fact he knows whether God has ever spoken to men or not.
And the glory of the Bible, the power of God revealed in the Bible, is, that it answers the question, and says, “God does care for men, God does see men, God is not far off from any one of us.” Ay, God speaks to men—God spoke to Moses and said, not “God is” but “I AM.” God in sundry times and in divers manners spoke to our fathers by the Prophets and said “I AM.”
But more—Moses said, “I AM hath sent me.” God does not merely love us, and yet leave us to ourselves. He sends after us. He sends to us. In old times He sent prophets and wise men one after the other to preach repentance and righteousness, and to teach men all that was good for them; and when men would not listen to them, but shut their ears to them and drove them out, killing some and beating some, God was so determined to send to men, so unwearied, so patient,