ALL OF GRACE
‘I do not this for your sakes, O house of Israel, but for Mine holy name’s sake.’
There was an ineffaceable distinction between the mountains of Israel and Mount Seir, because the chosen people were in living covenant with Jehovah. He was for them, and would multiply men over the waste lands. He would even do better for them than at the beginnings. This is God’s way with His own. If it is needful to chastise them, He does not permanently reject, and He is particularly careful to bring them up out of their graves into a royal and wealthy place.
I. God’s reason of mercy is in Himself.—You cannot find the reason of God’s perpetual restoring mercy in anything that is in your heart. He loves us, because He will love us: He restores us, because His honour is implicated; He will at last bring us to glory, because it must never be said by His foes and detractors that He undertook more than He could complete. It would be to His eternal dishonour, if it could be said that evil was too strong for Him to cope with it; and the creature whom He had made, too weak and helpless for Him to redeem.
II. The return of Israel to Canaan was a small thing compared with the gracious work of inward renewal.—They had been commanded to make a new heart and spirit (Ezekiel 18:31). Here God promises to do what He had enjoined. He will do this for us all, sprinkling our heart from an evil conscience, cleansing us by the indwelling fire of the Holy Spirit from all filthiness and idols, replacing the stony, unimpressible heart with a humble, teachable, and tender one. His grace can turn stones into living flesh, and the result shall be floods of penitential tears. Let us pray for these blessings to be ours, that those around us may acknowledge His hand.
Illustration
‘I have climbed, let me suppose, through a narrow mountain-pass. It was “glad, confident morning” when I started, and with every step I took the scene became more enchanting, and my spirits rose. But the prospect contracted. The hills closed in on me. The sun was hidden. A cold wind swept through the defile. My spirits drooped, and I could only doggedly plod along. But, by and by, the mountains opened out again; the pass was over; and under my feet stretched a fairer landscape than that which thrilled me at the first.
To-day I may be in the gloomy chasm. My spiritual youth lies behind, and I am walking through an unlovely land. But my God is able and willing to conduct me forth from the pass into a region of fertility and beauty. Let me pray Him to do it. It will delight His own heart to respond to my cry.’