Our personal relation to God.
It is clearly insufficient to know that we are on the same side as that of the majority of the good. The voice of God's people is not always his voice; their way not always his way (Isaiah 8:11). They may call for "a confederacy" when he disapproves of it. They may cry "peace" when he sees only present confusion and future disaster. They may be shaken with fear when they ought to be calm and trustful (Isaiah 8:12). They may be full of complacency when they ought to be overwhelmed with shame. We shall not be to God that which he demands of us, except we come into distinct, direct relation to himself.
I. THAT GOD SOMETIMES ACTS UPON US WITH CONSTRAINING POWER. "The Lord spake with a strong hand" (Isaiah 8:11; see Ezekiel 3:14). The Divine impulse was one that the prophet felt he must not resist. Not that it was absolutely irresistible, but one that a faithful man knew that he must not hesitate to obey. God often acts upon the soul of men with strong and urgent power to constrain or to restrain. He approaches and influences us thus by
II. THAT GOD HIMSELF IS THE TRUE REFUGE OF THE HUMAN SOUL. (Isaiah 8:13, Isaiah 8:14.) Here is:
1. Our duty. We are to fear God, to pay a reverential regard to his will, to shrink from that which grieves him, to "dread" his wrath.
2. Its recompense. "He shall be for a Sanctuary." In him, as in a pavilion, we shall hide. He will either deliver us from trouble by saving US from our enemies or in trouble, by granting us the sustaining grace which makes us "more than conquerors" in the midst of it. If we who are his "saints" will but "fear him" with obedient reverence, we shall then "have nothing else to fear."
"How was it, lovers of your kind,
Though ye were mocked and hated,
That ye, with clear and patient mind,
Truth's holy doctrine stated?
In God as in an ark ye kept;
Around, and not above you, swept
The flood till it abated."
III. THAT TO RESIST GOD IS TO WALK IN THE WAY OF WRONG AND RUIN. God is, to the perverse and the rebellious, "a Stone of stumbling and a Rock of offense" (Isaiah 8:14). God must be everything to us, for life or death. If our relation to him is not to us the fountain of everlasting joy, then it will be to us the source of unspeakable sorrow. The rejection of his truth and of himself will be our sin on earth, our condemnation in judgment, the subject and source of our remorse and retribution in the long hereafter. Our God is One whom it is infinitely worth while to make our Friend, and One whom we must not make our Enemy, if we have any love for ourselves, any interest in our own destiny.—C.