THE SERMON
Back to Zion's Pilgrim
"I will make an everlasting covenant with you—even the sure mercies of David." Isaiah 55:3
It was a very sweet note which God the Holy Spirit put into the mouth of his servant the prophet, when commanding him to proclaim salvation in the mountain of Israel, when He called it "an everlasting covenant, even the sure mercies of David." In nothing did the Lord more consult the needs and happiness of His people, than in folding the Gospel up under such a cover, and marking it by such distinguishing characters.
Tell me, my brother, do you not feel a very high gratification in the consciousness that salvation is not a work of yesterday—but founded on that "everlasting love with which the Lord has loved his people?"
Besides, an everlasting covenant naturally connects with itself all those properties which are necessary to its completion and design. There must be included in it everlasting wisdom to guide, everlasting counsel to direct, everlasting strength to secure, and everlasting faithfulness to make good all its promises.
Every attribute stands engaged in its establishment, and it is the consolation of the true believer in Christ, that all the perfections of Jehovah are pledged for the accomplishment of that purpose "which was purposed in Christ Jesus before the world began."
The "sure mercies of David" imply as much, to make them sure. Nothing new to God can ever arise to counteract the divine purposes concerning them. Neither can anyone circumstance occur for which provision is not already made. In the everlasting covenant, God himself is the only contracting party. Jehovah answers both for himself and for his people, 'I will—and they shall.' Such is the language of it.
Tell me once more, my brother, does not this consideration also very highly gratify you? You see that, as nothing of merit on your part could have given birth to a covenant which is from everlasting to everlasting; so nothing now of demerit shall arise to defeat its operation—which can owe nothing to you.
The subject opened to our meditation in these words of the Prophet, leads to the most delightful view with which the human mind is capable of being exercised in the present unripe state of our faculties. The text indeed contains but five words—but it would furnish a sufficient subject for as many volumes. It is a text in which, as we say, every word is pregnant with truth. I consider it a perfectly unnecessary service to lose time by way of pointing to His person, who is here called David. No one for a moment can imagine that it means David the son of Jesse; or, as an Apostle has observed, this David, "after he had served his generation by the will of God, fell asleep, and was gathered to his fathers, and saw corruption." But he of whom the prophet speaks in the text, who is David's Lord, "saw no corruption:" but when God the Father raised Him from the dead, as if in confirmation of this very subject, and to show its personal application to him, He expressed himself in these very words, "I will give you the sure mercies of David." (Acts 13:33, 34.)
In the farther prosecution of this subject, the arrangement I propose shall be as follows—my text, in allusion to this everlasting covenant, calls it "the sure mercies of David." I shall first, therefore, follow up this idea, in showing that the redemption by the Lord Jesus Christ is a system of grace and mercy from the beginning to end. I shall then, secondly, go on to prove that these mercies are "the sure mercies of David;" being founded on that everlasting covenant, by which "grace reigns through righteousness unto eternal life by Jesus Christ our Lord." May God the Holy Spirit, who first commissioned the prophet to proclaim, now enable the preacher to explain those mercies of David; that "our Gospel may not come in word only—but in power, and in much assurance of faith!"
My first intention is to show, that the redemption by the Lord Jesus Christ is a system of grace and mercy from beginning to end; and nothing can more decidedly manifest the truth of the observation than the character in which the prophet was commissioned to promulgate it; for when it is distinguished by the property of an everlasting covenant, the very term carries with it a most positive testimony that it must be founded in grace, unconnected with any human power, not depending upon any human merit; for what first originated in the free and unmerited mercy of God, confirmed as it was by covenant-engagements between the Father and the Son, before man was created, and is promised to be carried on in all its purposes and effects, by the same divine power, independently of man's agency after his being brought into being—can come under no other description surely than that of grace. Whatever God has done, or is doing, in the accomplishment of his designs concerning it, must all be referred back into the eternal counsel of his own mind, by virtue of its everlasting nature. To this, most evidently, it is that believers owe their being chosen, called and regenerated; and their establishment in grace, their dependence upon the promises, and their hopes of eternal glory, all are founded on that everlasting love with which God had loved his people before the foundations of the world were laid. "I have said," the language of God is "mercy shall be set up forever;" and the reason follows—"I have made a covenant with my chosen."
Look, my brother, into yourself, and into your own experience, for a confirmation of this doctrine. A covenant founded in grace can derive no aid from works. You can have nothing to give but what you have first received; and what you have first received is not in fact yours—but the great Giver's; and what he has given, may, without any impeachment of his justice, be again recalled. Neither can you have anything to offer but what God has a right, as his own, to demand.
Even all those sweet effusions of the soul, which appear in the worship of the faithful, when drawing near the mercy-seat; as these are wholly the result of the blessed Spirit's work, who brings them forth into exercise, as the sun by his warm beams draws forth a fragrant smell from the flower, and have their origin in God's grace, and not in man's merit—so there can be no merit in them before God. The language of such a creature as man, even in his highest attainment, and among the first order of the glorified spirits of "just men made perfect," must still be the same—"By the grace of God, I am what I am." Everything that has a reference to salvation centres in Jesus Christ; and may be clearly traced up to its origin in that everlasting covenant which God made with him before this world had being.
I will advance yet one step farther in the argument; and in ascribing the "sure mercies of David" wholly to grace, observe that it was most unmerited grace which admitted the Lord Jesus to be man's surety and sponsor, to fulfil in our stead the law which we had broken, and in his sacred person to endure the penalty due to the breach of it. There would have been no impeachment of the divine justice, if God had insisted on the sinner's suffering it himself. "The soul that sins shall die;" and was it not then an act of free, spontaneous mercy and grace in our God to admit the substitute?
In speaking, therefore, of our subject in general terms, as applicable to the church of the Lord Jesus at large, it must be confessed that the everlasting covenant is very properly called the sure mercies of David; for it is nothing else but a system of grace and mercy from beginning to end! And I am very confident, that every humble soul in particular who is the happy subject of such bounty by a personal interest therein, will be ready to join with the apostle, and say—"But God, who is rich in mercy, of his great love with which he has loved ME, even when I was dead in sins, has quickened me together with Christ, for by grace am I saved."
And as the original cause in conversion sprung from grace, so the preserving and carrying on the great work in the soul since, is wholly owing to the same great principle. When you call to mind, my brother, the coldness and deadness of your best affections, your wanderings and backslidings from God, the provocations and sins with which your life has been marked, (Oh, to grace how great a debtor!) will not you, with the utmost humility, exclaim with the apostle, "Unto him who does exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that works in us, unto him be glory in the church by Christ Jesus, throughout all ages, world without end!"
But while it thus becomes delightful to the soul, under divine teachings, to be able to see that redemption's work from beginning to end is wholly a system of grace, it becomes doubly sweet at the same time, to have a clear apprehension, that this grace works and "reigns through righteousness;" that these mercies of David become sure mercies, being made so by virtue of that everlasting covenant of righteousness in Christ Jesus; by which "God can be just, and the justifier of him that believes in Jesus," and the sinner, though in himself nothing but sin and iniquity, can look up and plead the righteousness of Christ as the foundation of his acceptance before God, because in that covenant "God made him to be sin for us who knew no sin, that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him."
This was the second point of doctrine, I proposed to prove, and which I now proceed to illustrate and explain, under a few leading particulars.
The mercies of David become sure mercies to the Lord's people, by virtue of that everlasting covenant which occupied the divine counsel in the ages of eternity before the creation of the world, in which there were mutual promises made by the high contracting parties. Jesus on his part undertook to answer all the demands of his Father's righteous law, for the objects of his and his Father's eternal love; who it was foreseen, would subject themselves to everlasting ruin by the breach of it; and God the Father promised, on his part to remit that punishment to the person of the sinner, by inflicting it on the person of the Lord Jesus, as the sinner's surety; and then to entitle the sinner, by virtue of the Redeemer's righteousness, to everlasting life. These were the terms by which each party guaranteed to the other the sure fulfilment of the covenant. Jesus therefore was to assume at a certain period, called "The fullness of time," our nature, and in that nature to repair God's broken law, and sustain the penalty due to the breach of it.
Moved with unbounded love to our fallen race, all this the Lord Jesus actually performed when, leaving "that glory which He had with the Father before all worlds," he came into this world, and accomplished all those great events which we read of in the history of his life; and when, by doing and dying, he had wrought out and brought in an everlasting righteousness, he returned to the bosom of the Father, to make efficient the whole process of his redemption, by sending down his Holy Spirit to apply his merits to his people's necessities, while he himself is exercised in the high character of our Intercessor to plead the efficacy of his death, and continually to appear "in the presence of God for us."
These are the great outlines of the everlasting covenant, as referring to the engagement of God the Son; and the promises, on the part of God the Father, were, that he would anoint Christ to the work, and accept of him in lieu of the sinner; and that when the Redeemer had made his soul an offering for sin, "he should see his seed, he should prolong his days, and the pleasure of the Lord should prosper in his hand." "My righteous servant," says God, "shall justify many, for he shall bear their iniquities. As for me, this is my covenant with him, says Jehovah, my Spirit that is upon you, and my words which I have put in your mouth, shall not depart out of your mouth, nor out of the mouth of your seed, nor out of the mouth of your seed's seed, says Jehovah, from henceforth and forever." Such then being the stipulated terms between the high contracting parties, and having been fulfilled on the part of the Lord Jesus, the mercies promised on the part of God become sure mercies to all the Lord's people. "Grace reigns through righteousness;" and the positive assurance of pardon and salvation is brought home to the heart by a conviction founded on the veracity of that God "who cannot lie."
Let any man now review the ground we have hastily trodden over, in quest of the testimonies with which these mercies of David are made sure. Let him behold an everlasting covenant, founded in grace, accomplished by the great Representative of his people in grace, and in all ages accomplishing in his people by grace; let him observe how each principle harmonizes to secure God's glory, while it tenderly secures man's welfare; let him carefully remark how grace reigns through righteousness; and I venture to hope, if God the Holy Spirit be the teacher, that the result will be the most absolute conviction that our text very properly characterizes this great salvation, by calling it "the sure Mercies of David."
The application of this doctrine, though of all other considerations the most interesting, may be brought within the narrowest compass—the whole terminating as it respects every individual, in this single question—'Am I, or am I not, the highly-favoured object of these sure mercies of David?'
If it be said, How shall this point be ascertained; and by what marks or characters is it to be known?—the answer is direct—God has not left himself without the witness of his Holy Spirit in the hearts and minds of his people; and although it is with the children of God in grace as it is with the children of men by nature—in the infancy of life, while the faculties of the mind remain unopened, the child is unconscious of the inheritance to which he is born—so they to whom "he has given power to become sons of God," will frequently remain a long time unassured of the incorruptible inheritance to which they are begotten by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead; but as the spiritual apprehension is unfolded by the heavenly Teacher, they are brought, by little and little as children under education, to see their interest in "the sure mercies of David," from the characters in which they find themselves distinguished in the everlasting covenant.
See, my brother, see whether you do not possess what Jehovah promised, by virtue of this covenant, to give to Jesus' people. Have you not the new heart and the new mind, which God, by his covenant, is engaged to bestow? Do you not feel those covenant impressions, which are common to his people? Is not the "Messenger of this covenant" whom God has chosen, become the object of your choice also? If God the Spirit is promised to certify your interest in this covenant, "have you received the Holy Spirit since you believed?" In a word, if these, and these only, are the sure mercies of David, are you seeking salvation in no other way?—and do you say as David did, "This is all my salvation and all my desire?" These are precious tokens of being interested in the sure mercies of David, when pardon, mercy, grace, righteousness, sanctification, and strength, equal to our day, are sought for in nothing else but God's everlasting covenant.
My unwakened brother, what do you know of these sure mercies of David? I cannot, I dare not, be silent, while endeavouring to comfort the people of God with a view of their privileges, without calling upon you to examine and look diligently, lest you fail of this grace. O that the Lord may incline your heart that you may come! O that you may hear the joyful sound and live!—that God may give you also these sure mercies of David!
How shall I conclude my sermon better than by desiring the afflicted, mournful, exercised believer of every description and character, to fold up the sweet text of the Prophet in his bosom, as a motto of consolation for every occasion? And may God the Holy Spirit write upon every heart "I will make an everlasting covenant with you—even in the sure mercies of David!"
Back to Zion's Pilgrim