3455. A Message from God

No. 3455-61:181. A Sermon Delivered On Lord’s Day Evening, By C. H. Spurgeon, At The Metropolitan Tabernacle, Newington.

A Sermon Published On Thursday, April 22, 1915.

I have a message from God for you. {Jud 3:20}

1. Can there be a person present here to whom God has never sent a message? Possibly the question may startle you. The very thought of the great invisible God sending such a message seems to you strange and unlikely. To me it is far more surprising that anyone should imagine he has never done so. Is he your Creator? And has he who made you launched you out on the tempestuous sea of life to drift in solitude without a compass or guide? We know that he has made you immortal, and is it possible that during that short life which is a preface to eternity, on which that never-ending period depends—is it possible that he has left you without any kind of communication? Does it seem likely? You call him “Father,” because he is the author of your being; can he be your Father and yet have no concern for your well-being; never have spoken to you; never have sent a message from his great throne to your hearts? How improbable this sounds. Is not the question open to another solution? The truth of the matter, I think, is that you have been deaf to God’s messages; he has often desired to correspond with you; indeed, he has sent some communications to you, but you have resented and rejected them. Is it not likely that he has often spoken when you have not heard, and that he has drawn near to you, and called to you when you would not listen to him? I think, from the analogy of nature, this looks like a correct statement of the case. It cannot be that God has left the world; it must be that the world has left God. It is not possible that God has ceased to speak to the soul. Surely the soul has ceased to listen to God; to acknowledge his messages, or to reply to them.

2. I believe, my dear hearers, and I especially address my remarks this evening to those of you who have not yet received Christ by faith and love into your hearts—I believe that most of you, although still without God and without Christ, have had many messages from him. Let me remind you of some of them. Then, let me admonish you that the gospel itself is a distinct and direct message to you. And finally, let us occupy a few minutes in endeavouring to consider how we ought to treat that message.

3. I. Our first point is:—WE HAVE NOT BEEN WITHOUT MESSAGES FROM GOD.

4. This Bible is in the house of every Englishman. You can scarcely find a cottage so poor that it does not now contain a copy of the Word of God. If your Bible could speak to you—or rather, if you would listen to what it does say to you—you would hear in the room where that Bible lies, the words, “I have a message from God for you.” Only open it; look over its pages; let your eye glance along its sacred verses, and I think it would not be long before it would have communion with your spirit, and this would be its voice, “I have a message from God for you.” I am sure that each one of you would read some verse that is personally applicable to you, perhaps more applicable to you than to any other man. There is at least one special book in Scripture which was prepared especially for you; there is an arrow there that was intended for your heart; some oil and wine prepared to assuage your pain and heal your wounds. Whether your case is that of carelessness or of despondency, that Book says, “I have a message from God for you.” Shall I chide the indifference which neglects the Book? Shall I rebuke the levity which would rather turn to any novel, or to any frivolous magazine, than to this momentous volume, which appeals to you as with the voice of God? I scarcely need to do so. Each man must be conscious that it is the height of guilt to slight the King’s proclamation, and pursue the common and ordinary things of every-day life as if no Royal mandate had been issued. How much more when it is the voice of him who speaks from heaven! Your unread Bibles shall rise up in judgment to condemn you. If you attempt to get out of the railway car while the train is moving, you are liable to a penalty of forty shillings. Do not say you are ignorant of the law. It was posted in the carriage that conveyed you. The angel of Time might surely write with his finger on the dust of your Bibles the sentence of your condemnation. Beware, you who refuse to listen to Moses and the prophets. If you will not hear them, you will not be converted, though one should rise from the dead and warn you of your peril.

5. You have had other messengers. Some of them have come to you in golden type; their words have been sweet as honey. I should call them a bountiful Providence. I do not know what you would call them. Perhaps a vein of luck. Have you been favoured with success in business? A prosperous wind has filled your sails. In your families you have had welcome mercies. Children have been given to you. They have been restored from beds of sickness when your heart has been sick with anxiety. In your own health of body you have not been strangers to God’s choice favours. Moreover, you have had times of gladness and of merry-making. Your hearts have held their festivals; the streets of Mansoul were illuminated, the houses decked with fair colours, and the streets of your mind strewn with flowers. On those days did not these mercies seem to say, as they came trooping along down the streets of your soul, “We have a message from the Lord for you?” Oh! if you would only listen, each one of these parental gifts would have said, “My son, give me your heart.” Surely such mercies should have been like the bonds of love and the cords of a man to have drawn you. Ought not the kindness and compassion extended to you in Providence to have led you to say, “How can I grieve such a God? How can I provoke him to anger? Does he not deal with me generously, and lavish his treasures at my feet? How shall I forget him? I will celebrate his favour with sacrifices of thanksgiving; I will bind my offerings to the horns of the altar.”

6. Other messengers have come to you draped in black; their clothes have been torn, sackcloth has been around their loins, and ashes on their heads. They have spoken in hoarse notes, but solemn tones, and though they have not led you to repentance, their admonitions have stilled your pulse, chilled your blood, and constrained you to pause and think. That sickness—fever, or ague, cholera, or diphtheria—which prostrated your strength, disabled you for your daily labour, or your ordinary business, and summoned you in the quiet of your room to look back on the past and look forward to the future. Can you forget the time when life trembled in the scale, and the physician did not know which way it would turn; that hour, that silent hour, when they paced the room with gentle footsteps, and the nurse did not close her eyes through all the still hours of the night; then the ticking of the watch uttered the only sound that broke the silence of that room. Do you not remember it? Those diseases that laid hold of your vitals said, “We have a message from God for you.” And some of you have escaped from many perils by sea and by land, from shipwreck and from fire; you have been preserved in accidents and catastrophes in which others have died. All these strange, these terrible things, spoke to you in righteousness when you were careless and unconcerned; they had a message from God for you. Oh! deaf ears that will not listen when God speaks to you in such solemn tones, and strikes you while he speaks so that he may compel you to listen!

7. Another dark messenger has come to you. Death has bereaved you of friends and comrades. Those with whom you were most familiar have been suddenly called away. Have you not been startled by the news that a neighbour or acquaintance with whom you chatted a day or two ago is dead? “Dead!” you said. “Why, he was in my shop only a few days ago! Dead! Why, he seemed to be in good health, strong in body, vigorous in mind, full of plans and projects; I should have thought of any man dead sooner than he!” Do you not remember the time when you heard the bell toll for a close relative, and when you stood over the open grave? Ah! then, when the dust fell on the coffin lid, and the words were uttered, “Dust to dust, ashes to ashes,” each of those thundering missives said, “I have a message from God for you.” Walk the cemetery, and, while every grave tells of our common mortality, how some graves speak to us of the precarious tenure by which our frail life is held! In all, what a warning message we may hear! Think over the list of the friends of your youth, the companions of your hale manhood, and you who have grown grey remember the names of those old acquaintances of yours who have passed from this land of shadows to the judgment bar of God; let the ghosts of the departed rise up before you and pass in solemn procession before your eyes; then, let each one say, with all the pathos of their final exit, “I have a message from God for you.” Among them all, is there one who learned anything about vice or scoffing from you, young man? Is there a soul among the lost that you first led astray? Man, you who have blasphemed, are there some now rueing their bitter doom whose ruin you helped to precipitate? Oh! you base deceiver, are there those whom you deluded? Are there those whom you ensnared who have gone their way before you to feel the terrible remorse, and are waiting for the grim time when they shall look at you with eyes of fire, and curse you because you lured them on to their eternal destruction? Those ghosts, of all others, must be the most startling, and their fingers of fire must point the most fearfully, and make one feel that they have, indeed, a message from God for us from the place of torment. Let the memory of them make you pause, and think, and turn from your sins to the living and true God.

8. But though these messages have too often been unheard, the Lord, who does not desire the death of a sinner, has sent to us by other and equally useful messengers. Oh! in what kind ways has he been pleased to select the people who should bring the news to us. The first messenger who some of us had was that fond woman, on whose breast in infancy we nursed. We should never breathe the word “mother” without grateful emotions. How can we forget that tearful eye when she warned us to escape from the wrath to come? We thought her lips were very eloquent; others might not think so, but they certainly were eloquent to us. How can we ever forget when she bowed her knee, and with her arms around our neck, prayed for us, “Oh! that my son might live before you”? Nor can her frown be erased from our memory, that solemn, loving frown when she rebuked our budding iniquities; and her smiles have never faded from our memory, the beaming of her countenance when she rejoiced to see some good thing in us towards the Lord God of Israel. Mothers often become potent messengers from God, and I think each Christian mother should ask herself in secret whether the Lord does not have a message to give through her to her sons and to her daughters. And did you despise that messenger? Had you the audacity to reject God when he spoke in this way, when he selected one so near and so dear, who could speak so well, and could talk to that tender instinct, which respects and hallows a mother’s love? Could it be? Ah! so it has been up until now with some of you.

9. God has spoken with other messengers to you. Was it your sister? Did she not write a note to you, because her timidity would scarcely let her speak? Or, perhaps, it was a friend. It may have been that young man you ridiculed and called fanatical; but you know how soon you shook off the impressions which those pointed remarks of his seemed to make on you at the time. Or, possibly, it was a tract that you read; or a book like Doddridge’s Rise and Progress, or Baxter’s Call to the Unconverted, or Alleine’s Alarm to the Unconverted. Through these printed appeals God spoke to you. Yet, again, it might have been through some preacher of the gospel. God’s ministers have been God’s messengers to many thousands of immortal souls. Within this house of prayer, sometimes, there are many who hardly know how to keep their seats when we try to ply the conscience with all the arguments of the truth, and seek to move torpid souls by some of the thunderbolts of the Almighty. Oh! how many men here have been rebuked and rebuked, times without number, but still they go on in their old sins! Take heed, take heed, men, for if you refuse God when he speaks by his servants, and by his Providence and by your friends, he will one day speak to you by a bony preacher, who will deliver his message so that you must hear him. You know where my text comes. Ehud said, “I have a message from God for you.” It was a dagger which found its way to Eglon’s heart, and he fell dead. So shall death deliver his message to you. “I have a message from God for you,” he will say, and before you shall have time to answer, you shall find that this was the message, “‘Because I the Lord will do this, prepare to meet your God, oh Israel’; thus says the Lord, ‘cut it down; why does it encumber the ground? Set your house in order, for you shall die and not live.’” Oh! may you hear the other messengers of God before he sends this last most potent one, from which you cannot turn away.

10. So I have sought to refresh your memory, by reminding you of the many warnings you have received. The intent of them all has been to arouse your conscience.

11. II. But now, in the second place, we admonish you that:—THE GOSPEL OF THE GRACE OF GOD IS IN ITSELF A MESSAGE FROM GOD FOR YOU.

12. Oh! how incredibly strange are the reasons, the extraordinary reasons why many people attend our churches and chapels! Some people go merely because everyone else goes. Others go because—well, perhaps it helps their business a bit! Some go when they happen to have fashionable clothes, in which they like to make an appearance. Ask the large majority of men and women why they go. Even the best of people, were they to be candid, would tell you that they suppose it is the right thing to do; it is their duty. But how few go with the idea that God will speak to them there, and that the gospel preached there will be a message from God to their souls!

13. And, I am afraid, there are some ministers who hardly think that the gospel is intended to come personally home to the people. They talk, as I read of one the other day, who said that when he preached to sinners he did not like to look the congregation in the face, for fear they should think he meant to be personal; so he looked up at the ventilator, because there was no fear then of any individual catching his eye. Oh! that fear of man has been the ruin of many ministers. They never dared to preach right at the people. We have heard of sermons being preached before this and that honourable company; but preaching sermons before people is not God’s way; we must preach sermons at the people, directly to them, to show that it is not the waving of a sword in the air like a juggler’s sport, but it is the getting of the sword right into the conscience and the heart. This, I take it, is the true mission of every minister of Christ. It is said of Whitfield, that if you were the farthest away from him in a throng, where you could only hear the sound of his voice, you felt persuaded that he meant to speak to you; and of Rowland Hill it is said, that if you got into Surrey Chapel, you could not hide in a corner there; if you did manage to get into a back seat, or were squeezed tight into the windows, you would still feel persuaded that Mr. Hill was addressing you, and that he had singled you out for his expostulations, as though no one else was present. Surely this is the perfection of preaching. Should it not be our aim to seek men out, and make them feel that at the present moment they are themselves addressed; that there is a message from God for the soul?

14. Now, my friend, the gospel is a distinct message directed to you. I know it speaks to your neighbour and tells him that he is fallen. That is for him, not for you, to think about. Your portion is what singles you out and tells you that you were in Adam when he sinned; that you fell in him, and that as the result your nature is corrupt, you are born in sin, and prone to commit sin; there is no good thing in your natural disposition; whatever seems good in your own eyes, or the eyes of others, is so tainted by the inherent vice of your own depravity, that it cannot be acceptable in the sight of God. When we preach to sinners, never think that we mean the riff-raff in the streets. The gospel, which saves a sinner, is a message from God for you. Think of your own sins and the naughtiness of your own heart.

15. I have heard of a woman who pretended to believed that she was a sinner, and her minister, convinced that she did not know what she meant, so exposed her folly. He said to her, “Well, if you are a sinner, of course, you have broken God’s law; let us read the ten commandments, and see which ones you have broken.” So turning to the decalogue, he began to read, “You shall have no other God before me”; “Did you ever break that?” “Oh! no; not that she knew of.” He proceeded, “You shall not make for yourself any carved image, and so on;” “Did you ever break that?” “Never, sir,” said she. Then “You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain.” “Oh! dear no; she had been very particular on that point; she did not know that she had ever offended in that respect in her life.” “Remember the seventh day to keep it holy.” “Oh!” she said, “I never do any work on a Sabbath; everyone knows how particular I am about that.” “Honour your father and your mother.” “Yes,” she replied, “she had been quite perfect in this matter; you might ask her friends if she had not been.” “You shall not kill.” “Kill anyone! She wondered how the minister could ask her that.” Of course, “You shall not commit adultery,” must be passed without a question. “You shall not bear false witness.” Much of a gossip though she was, she protested she never did backbite anyone in all her life. And as for the idea of coveting, well, she might sometimes have wished that she was a little better off, but she never wanted any of anyone else’s goods; she only wanted a little more of her own. So it turned out as the minister suspected, that she really was not a sinner at all in her own estimation.

16. It is marvellous how people who indulge in general confessions of sin attempt to exculpate {exonerate} themselves of each and every particular offence. Whatever the indictment is, they plead “Not guilty.” But the condemnation which the gospel pronounces on all who have transgressed the law is a message from God for you. Oh! I would have those of you who have not fled to Christ feel and experience the terrors of the law. How stern its precepts! How dreadful its penalties! How divine its sanctity! And remember it is a message from God for you. Where is the possibility of escape from the justice it metes out, the judgment it pronounces? I think I hear the cry of spirits lost without hope; see the worm that never dies, and witness the agonies of conscience never appeased, while the memory of opportunities haunts them, and the wrath of God stirs the fire of remorse that never shall be quenched. Of that appalling spectacle I might speak at length to you, but I will not. Oh! my dear hearers, I would have you remember that this is a message from God for you. As sure as you live, unless you repent, the everlasting burning must be your portion for ever. You must make your bed in hell, if you continue in unbelief. Please, forget your neighbour for a while. Do not think of anything that is applicable to the person sitting next to you. To you, to yourself, is the thunder of God’s threatening sent. “If you do not repent, you shall all likewise perish.” If you do not turn from the error of your ways, God will not turn from his righteous indignation. Your destruction does not slumber, though you are ever so drowsy. His wrath will burn like coals of juniper, for ever and for ever it will rest on you.

17. But the gospel tells of a Substitute. It informs you that Jesus came and suffered in the place of the sinner. It says that he died for those who trust him. It assures you that whoever believes in him shall not perish, but have everlasting life. Have you no anxiety that the gospel should be a message from God for you? It will be of no use to you that Jesus died, unless he died for you. If he took your sin and carried your sorrow, it is all well and good; but though he should have died for all mankind, except for you, by that omission you would perish. We know that he died for believers. “Whoever believes in him shall not perish, but have everlasting life.” The vital question is, “Do I believe in Jesus? Have I sincerely trusted in him? Do I depend now on his finished work? Having no other refuge, do I trust in Jesus, sink or swim? Do I commit myself to the tide, relying on his merits, expecting to be borne on by it safe to the haven of his glory?” If so, then there is evidence that he died for me. I am free from condemnation, he paid my debts; I am clear from the charges of the law, for he bore my punishment; I am acquitted by his mediation; therefore, being justified freely, I may go on my way rejoicing.

18. But of what use is the gospel, unless it becomes a message from God for me? Oh! the delight, dear friends, of those who recognise the promise of God as a message of love for them! I heard the gospel preached hundreds of times; I heard of pardon, full and free; I heard of a righteousness complete, that wrapped the sinner from head to foot; I heard of full deliverance from the penal sentence of the law; I heard of adoption, of communion with Christ, of the sanctification which the Spirit gives, but what were all these privileges to me when I had no interest in them? It was as though one should take up the title-deed of an estate and begin reading it in a social party by way of interesting them. What more dull—what more heavy reading? How the words are multiplied! How those lawyers do seek to say the same thing over twenty times, until no flesh living can endure them.

19. Ah! but, my friend, if that title-deed refers to an estate which has been bequeathed to you, all those words delight you; their repetition seems to clench your title. You like to have the thing made out in proper legal form. Your eyes sparkle over that little sketch in the corner. You take notice of the stamps, and you are especially taken up with the signatures. Matters that would be of no interest at all under any other circumstances seem to be extremely precious to you viewed in the light of your heirship. It is just so with regard to the Word of God. When we come to read the Book and know that it confers blessings on us, our joy is full to overflowing. To us the message is sent. By us the message is received. The complete salvation it announces is ours. We are totally saved from every peril, through Jesus’ blood. We are delivered from sin. We are endowed with a righteousness, not of our own performing, but of his imputing. By it we are adorned:—

   With the Saviour’s garment on,

   Holy as the Holy One.

With what ineffable joy does this message from God make glad our spirit!

20. Be sure of this, my friends, let our case be what it may, the gospel preached is a message from God for our souls. The hypocrite cannot attend on the means of grace for long without finding that its doctrines are very heart-searching. They pierce his thoughts; they hold a candle up to him, and if he would only look, they would expose his desperate condition. The formalists, the men who delight in ceremonies, cannot frequent God’s hallowed courts for long, where his true ministers proclaim his name, without perceiving that there is a message from God for them. The most careless spirit will find in the word a mirror held up to his face, in which he can see a reflection of himself. There have been various messages like circulars from God to us, but the gospel, faithfully preached, is a private and personal communication.

21. A minister once sent his deacon to attend a certain anniversary service. The discourse was based on Diotrephes, who loved the pre-eminence. That deacon’s character was aptly described. He did not, however, agree with the preacher. He was himself a Diotrephes, though he failed to detect his own portrait; or at least, with apparent indifference, he asked a friend of his if he supposed there were such people existing as those who had been described in the discourse? “I cannot think,” he said, “who the preacher could have been aiming at.” So his friend said. “Well, I think he must have been intending you and me.” No better answer could have been given. I like each hearer to make the application to himself.

22. But Mrs. Jones thinks sometimes that Mrs. Brown must have felt very uneasy in one part of the sermon; and Mrs. Brown thinks that, if Mrs. Smith had looked at home, she must have known that what was said was meant for her, whereas the real truth was that it suited all three of them, and there was something meant for each, as well as for all. Take heed to yourselves, my beloved. Be like the young lad, who, when he was asked why he attended so earnestly, said, “Because I am in hopes that one of these days the truth I hear will be blessed to my own salvation.”

23. Brethren, if you were thirsty, you would not stand by the rippling brook and think how it flowed on to the river, and the river onward to the sea. You would not let your meditations be wandering to the meadows which it made verdant, or the mills which it turned, or the cities which employed it in mercantile industry. No; you would just stoop down and drink, and then meditate on those grand uses it served afterwards. When there is a cry for bread in the streets, it is of no use telling the people that there is a large supply of grain in the Baltic, and that there has been a fine crop of wheat in the United States. Each man wants bread in his own hands, and bread in his own mouth. It is amazing how personal people become when the thing has anything to do with money. I never knew a man short of cash who was relieved by the news that there were millions of bullion in the bank. A little in his pocket cheered him more than the much that had accumulated at the fountain-head. How is it that people are not personal with religion? Why is not every man looking to get a full share in the capital it represents? How is it they do not turn everything that comes in their way to good account when the gospel is preached? Why, when the gospel is proclaimed, do they not say, “Lord, is this a message from God for me?”

24. III. Now to close, my last point is this:—IF THERE IS SUCH A MESSAGE AS THIS FROM GOD FOR US, HOW SHOULD WE TREAT IT?

25. Let the minister entertain this question. He ought to deliver it very earnestly. God’s message is not to be preached with marble lips; it must not drop from an icy tongue. It ought to be spoken very affectionately. God’s message is not to be announced unkindly. The kindling of human passion should never stir us. Rather let the divine flame of Godlike affection burn within our souls. It should be proclaimed very boldly. It is not for the minister of God to smooth the stones, or pare down any of the angles of the gospel. He should be tender as a lamb, but yet bold as a lion. It is as much as his soul is worth to keep back a single word. He may have to answer for the blood of souls if he trims in the slightest particular. The withholding of any part of a discourse which should have been delivered, should he refrain himself lest he offends anyone, may bring down on him a condemnation that he does not know how to escape, and he may have throughout eternity to bewail that he had God’s message and did not deliver it.

26. I always feel quite easy in my own conscience if I have preached what I believe to be the truth. If you send a servant to the door, you give him a message. If the person at the door should be angry, the servant would say, “It is of no use being angry with me; you must be angry with my master, for I have given you the message just as he gave it to me.” And if they should be angry with him, he would say, “I would much rather that the stranger at the door should be angry with me for telling the message, than that my master should be angry with me for keeping it back, for to my own master I stand or fall.” I think the minister of God, if he has preached faithfully, may say, “Well, I have delivered only what my Master told me; if you are angry with me, you must remember that you ought to be angry with my Master, for it was my Master’s message, and it is better for you to be angry with me than for my Master to be angry with me.” Baxter said, “I never rebuke myself for not having used fine flowery language when I am preaching, but I have rebuked myself very often for lack of earnestness in what I have delivered.” So each of us must humble ourselves before the Lord on account of our coldness in this matter. Yet we must not handle the Lord’s message deceitfully, but go on boldly to deliver the message which God has given us, remembering that we only have to give an account to him. There does not live a man under the canopy of heaven that should be so free from the fear of his fellow creatures as God’s minister. To him, prince or peasant, peer or beggar must be the same. To him, kings have no crowns, and queens no thrones. He speaks to men as men, going into all the world and preaching the gospel to every creature, and being God’s ambassador to men, he must go right on and speak as he gets utterances from his Lord.

27. Yes, but if this is God’s message, the minister has not only to think how he should treat it, but you have to think how you should treat it, and I have to ask those who are unconverted what they intend to do with it. What do you intend to do with God’s message? Of all the bad things to do, do not do this one—do not say, “Go your way for this time; when I have a more convenient time I will send for you.” Do not say that. Better to say, “I despise the message, and I will not obey it.” Do not talk like the procrastinators, for procrastinators are the most hardened of men. To promise they will do it quiets men’s consciences, whereas, if they deliberately said, “I will not,” perhaps conscience might be aroused, and they might be led to do it. No, say either the one thing or the other. If it were possible for you to meet an angel on your way home—the thing will not occur—but if you could meet an angel, and he should stop you, and should say, “Now, man, not a step farther until you have given me an answer; God commands you to believe in Jesus Christ; he tells you to trust him with your soul; will you or not?” Suppose you were placed in the came position as King Antiochus. When the Roman ambassador {a} met him and asked him whether it was to be peace or war, he said he must have time to consider. The ambassador, with his staff, drew a circle in the sand. “Give an answer,” he said, “before you move out of that circle, or if you step out of it your answer is war.”

28. I think there is such a phase in a man’s life, when he must give an answer. I know what that answer will be, unless God the Holy Spirit makes you give the right one, but you must give it one way or the other, and if the man says, “No, I will give no answer,” yet if he goes beyond that appointed hour, it is war between him and God for ever, and the sword shall never be sheathed, nor go back into its scabbard. He has thrown down the gauntlet, by refusing to give a decisive pledge of obedience. The Lord has declared eternal war against him; peace shall not be made for ever. Before you go any farther, which shall it be? Do you say, “I love my sins; I love the world; I love its pleasures, I love my own righteousness; I will not trust Christ?” That shows your depravity; look at the consequences and tremble! But if, from the depths of your soul, you say, “God be merciful to me a sinner; I would be saved!” then trust Christ, and you are saved now. Believe in him; believe in him now, and you are forgiven now. Oh! may the Saviour by his own grace give us your salvation as a seal to our ministry, and to him shall be glory for ever and ever. Amen.

{a} Gaius Popillius Laenas (alt. “Popilius”) was sent as an envoy in 168 BC to prevent a war between Antiochus IV Epiphanes of the Seleucid Empire and Ptolemaic Egypt. On being confronted with the Roman demands that he abort his attack on Alexandria, Antiochus played for time; Popillius Laenas is supposed to have drawn a circle around the king in the sand with his cane, and ordered him not to move out of it until a firm answer had been given. See Explorer "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaius_Popillius_Laenas"

Exposition By C. H. Spurgeon {Ps 119:119-126}

119-121. You put away all the wicked of the earth like dross: therefore I love your testimonies. My flesh trembles for fear of you; and I am afraid of your judgments. I have done judgment and justice: do not leave me to my oppressors.

Eastern kings cannot often say as much as this, but David had been a just king. This was for his comfort when he himself came under unjust treatment. “I have done judgment and justice: do not leave me to my oppressors.” It is of the same tenor as another prayer: “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.” God often deals with men as they deal with others: “With the froward, he will show himself froward”; “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.” May our conduct be such that, though we plead no merit, yet we may dare to mention it in prayer.

122. Be surety for your servant for good: do not let the proud oppress me.

As nearly as I remember, this is the only verse which does not mention the law or the Word of God. Here you have a “surety,” and that is something even better. If the law fails us, the surety stands us in good stead. How I like to think of God the surety of his people! When there is a trial against them, and the oppressor is heavy on them, they can come to God to be a surety for them in the great action of life. “Be surety for your servant for good: do not let the proud oppress me.” My Master is surety for his servants; his servant is sure enough.

123. My eyes fail for your salvation, and for the word of your righteousness.

I have looked until I have looked my eyes out: I am weary with waiting, with watching, with weeping: “My eyes fail for your salvation.” Some do not even look for him. Here is a man who looked until his very eyes gave out.

124. Deal with your servant according to your mercy, and teach me your statutes.

He is a just man; he can plead that he has done justly; but he does not ask to be dealt with according to justice: “Deal with your servant according to your mercy”—is as far as any one of us can get. If you have been greatly sanctified, have walked very near to God, I would not advise you still to go beyond this prayer: “Deal with your servant according to your mercy.” The next sentence is exceptional: “And teach me your statutes.” It is a great mercy to be taught the ways of God, to understand his way, to understand the practical part of it, the statutes. To be made holy is a high honour, a great privilege. When you are seeking great favours from God, ask for great holiness.

125. I am your servant:

He called himself “servant” many times before; and in this wonderful passage this is the third time. He is delighted to be the “servant of God.” He says little about being a king; he says a great deal about being a servant: “I am your servant.”

125. Give me understanding, so that I may know your testimonies.

You know, generally a teacher finds the teaching; the pupil has to find understanding. But here is a prayer: “Give me understanding.” In the last verse he asked to be taught; here he asks to have an understanding given to him. What a God we have to deal with! And when we are taught by the Lord, how effectively we are taught: he not only gives the facts, but gives the understanding with which to get at their meaning.

126. It is time for you, Lord, to work: for they have made void your law.

When men begin to exercise a destructive criticism on the Word of God, it is time for God to work. When God’s law is held in little esteem, when men go their own way, call vice by the name of pleasure, “It is time for you, Lord, to work: for they have made void your law.”