God has declared, "I am a great King" (Mal. 1:14). He demands on this ground to be honoured, and to have the first place in the heart, and the best of all we have to offer. All the ceremonial appointments of the law were intended to teach this lesson. No one was allowed to approach the sanctuary except those appointed, and those only in the appointed way, on pain of death. No offering was accepted with a blemish, or hurt, or imperfection. All uncleanness required purgation by sacrifice. Holiness and majesty were continually impressed on Israel as appertaining to Him in the highest degree. The lesson in its individual application is unmistakable. Jesus brings it home in the words "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and all thy strength and all thy mind." His own demand is "My son, give me thine heart." He demands the highest place in all our affairs, which is His reasonable place. Let us render the service He requires. His word is in our houses. Don't let us insult Him by giving our feeblest moments to the reading of it. Don't let us wait till all our energies are worn out, and our faculties impaired in attending upon the affairs of the natural man. Don't let us sit down to the Bible when nature is exhausted, and sleep hovers on the eyelids. Let us give the best time of the day. It is a matter of contrivance. There are difficulties, but difficulties can be overcome. Where there is a will, there is a way. Besides, who knows but our difficulties are God's tests. He may want to prove us--to see and let us see whether we will honour Him or not. It is no new thing for God to leave a man that he may see all that is in his heart. Therefore, our increasing business--our growing affairs--may be a part of the machinery by which our probation is accomplished. If we resist the clamours of the flesh--if notwithstanding the pressure of worldly affairs, we turn aside daily in reading, prayer and meditation, we overcome; but if on the contrary, we are carried before the stream, and leave God behind, we are overcome, and will awake sooner or later to a sense of our great folly.
If we do our duty in this matter, we shall be assisted. This is a matter of promise. If we are attentive to God, He will be attentive to us. "Draw nigh to God, and He will draw nigh to you." The converse is true. Neglect God and He will allow you to fall. There have been many illustrations of this in history. One of them is mentioned in the chapter read this morning.--(Rom. 1:28.) "Even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind." All nations were related, in the first instance, to the fountain of divine knowledge through Noah, but they slighted God, honouring themselves each other, and their own affairs, like the multitudes of our own day, and God departed from them, and gave them over to the reprobateness of mind which is manifest in all the sculptures of antiquity and the state of man universally. The Jews were favoured as no nation ever was. Yahweh says, "as a girdle cleaveth to the loins of a man, so have I caused to cleave unto Me the whole house of Israel and the whole house of Judah, saith the Lord, that they might be unto me for a people, and for a name, and for a praise, and for a glory, but they would not hear." What was the consequence? "Behold, I will fill all the inhabitants of this land, even the kings that sit upon David's throne, and the priests and the prophets, and all the inhabitants of Jerusalem with drunkenness (that is mental confusion; the result of the wine of His wrath). And I will dash one against another, even the father and the sons together, saith the Lord; I will not pity nor spare nor have mercy, but destroy them."--(Jer. 13:13.) "Make the heart of this people fat and make their ears heavy and shut their eyes."--(Isa. 6:10.) This was Israel's punishment for neglecting God. When Christ came, he cloaked his wisdom in parables, that they might remain in their ignorance, and become subject to the judgment of God. Yet even then, his teaching was plain enough to be understood by those who gave close attention, and gave that respect to God which is His due. And he gave them to understand that the principle exemplified in the national blindness would operate in individual cases. He said (Mark 4:24): "To you that hear shall more be given, and he that hath not, from him shall be taken even that which he hath." So that any one earnestly attending to what Christ taught, would be helped to understand; while those who stood contemptuously and self-sufficiently apart, doing dishonour to God, would be deprived of what wisdom they had, in being left to their evil ways. The lesson is, that those who neglect or hold loosely what they have, are in danger of being deserted by God, and led into ways that shall be for hurt. The principle was again exemplified in the first generation of gospel believers. These were greatly privileged in having the teaching of the Spirit visibly in their midst; but like the Israelites who came out of Egypt under Moses, they grew accustomed to marvel, and conceived the idea that these things were in some way their right; that the apostles were only fellow-partakers of a common benefit, and had no more superiority among men than themselves. Hence arose false apostles. Many false brethren crept in, to whom the others listened. Many followed their pernicious ways. They dabbled in doctrines and disputed greatly about them, but it was the perverse disputing of men of corrupt minds. They received not the love of the truth. What was the consequence? Jesus hinted at this, in his message to the seven ecclesias, that he would remove the candlestick out of its place. Paul's forcible declaration is: "for this cause, God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie." As He had done with Israel, so He would do with the highly privileged communities founded by the apostles; because they departed from the reverential heedfulness that God demands, and began to honour and please themselves, He would fill them with drunkenness, that is, with the mental confusion resulting from imbibing the false principles that He caused to be diffused through the instrumentality of evil men and seducers. And so it has come to pass, and the Christendom of today is the standing monument of the faithlessness of the first century, and the living illustration of the fact, that if men disregard Him, He will leave them to ways of folly and death; even to ways that they may imagine right; for as Solomon says, "There is a way that seemeth right unto a man; but the end thereof are the ways of death."
Now we stand related to the same principle, for God is the same for evermore. Do not let us imagine that when the nations of antiquity, and the Jewish race, and the first generation of believers were given over to reprobation because they dishonoured God by a lukewarm and half-hearted attendance upon His word, that we shall fare any better if we offer Him a like insult. God is great and we are small. God is eternal and we are of yesterday: God upholdeth all things, and we uphold nothing, but are ourselves upholden by Him every moment. Most reasonable therefore it is that we choose His honour and His fear as the mainspring of our life. And most profitable shall we find it for ourselves. If we commit our way to Him, magnifying His word as He has magnified it, giving it first place in the economy of our lives, He will guide our steps to a greater enlargement of spiritual attainments, strengthening us with all might in the inner man, and filling us with the knowledge of His will. But if we hold the treasure of His wisdom with a loose hand, He will forsake us and leave us exposed to influences and circumstances that will be to our destruction. We are not without illustration of this in our day. We have seen many who though they knew the truth, were not walking in the love of it, but in the love of themselves and the things connected with the present life--we have seen them swept from their moorings by a wind of doctrine which has been permitted to blow upon them to their destruction. "Who is wise and he shall understand these things? prudent, and he shall know them? For the ways of the Lord are right, and the just shall walk in them, but the transgressors shall fall therein."
(By Robert Roberts)