O the Hope of Israel, the Saviour thereof in time of trouble.
God and troubled humanity
I. What God always is to troubled humanity.
1. The Hope.
(1) The Inspirer of all true hope.
(2) The Sustainer.
(3) The Realiser.
2. The Saviour.
(1) The redemption system He has given to the world attests this.
(2) The experience of all who had attended to His directions testifies this. Every man that has adopted God’s remedial scheme has been saved.
II. What God sometimes seems to troubled humanity. “A stranger,” etc.
1. When Christlike enterprises are frustrated.
2. When the most useful men are cut down in the very zenith of their life.
3. when prosperity attends the wicked, and adversity the good.
4. When enormous outrages are rampant in society. (Homilist.)
Why shouldest Thou be as a stranger in the land.--
God’s withdrawings from His people, and their exercise under them
I.When it may be said God withdraws and behaves as a stranger to His people.
1. When He withholds His wonted acts of kindness to them.
2. When He threatens to remove from them the signs and symbols of His presence.
3. When, though continuing the ordinances and sacraments, He renders them profitless.
4. When the Divine providences are adverse.
5. When He denies them access to Himself.
II. Why the Lord deals thus with his people.
1. When they fall into gross sin and bring reproach on religion.
2. When they become earthly minded.
3. When they become slothful and formal in duty.
4. When they neglect or slight the Mediator, by whom we have access to God.
5. When they sin under or after great affliction.
6. When they do not cherish and entertain the influences of the Holy Spirit.
7. When they grow hardened and impenitent under provocation.
III. When it may be said we are properly exercised under such a painful dispensation.
1. When we are truly sensible of our loss, and that our sin is the cause of it.
2. When we place all our happiness in God’s favour and presence.
3. When we engage all the powers of our souls to seek after God.
4. When we diligently embrace every opportunity for finding an absent God, and use every appointed means.
5. When we wrestle with Him in prayer to return.
6. When we are not satisfied with the best means, unless we find God in them.
IV. Whence it is that the Lord, being as a stranger to His people, occasions them so much concern.
1. Because of the incomparable happiness arising from the enjoyment of His presence.
2. Because of the sad effects attending the loss of His presence.
Infer:
1. There are but few true seekers of God among us.
2. The misery of these who are far from God now, and may be deprived of His presence forever.
3. The sad case of those whom God forsakes, never to return again. (T. Hannam.)
A welcome for the stranger
When the messenger of Mercy was travelling through the world, he asked himself at what inn he should alight and spend the night. Lions and eagles were not to his mind, and he passed by houses wearing such warlike names; so too he passed by places known by the sign of “The Waving Plume,” and the “Conquering Hero,” for he knew that there was no room for him in these inns. He hastened by many a hostelry and tarried not, till at last he came to a little inn which bore the sign of “The Broken Heart.” Here,” said Mercy’s messenger, “I would fain tarry, for I know by experience that I shall be welcome here”
The Messiah-A stranger among His own people
The greatest marvel of all creation is that the Son of God should come to redeem; and next to that is this, that having come, He should be neglected and rejected by those who had so long looked for Him. Here is the greatest wonder in all history: a nation neglecting the realisation of its own dream. Search your histories and see if you can find a parallel case. The old Jewish theocracy aspired to pretensions that Rome, Greece, Persia, and Egypt never dared to dream, to bestow to the world one universal king. And what is that land of Palestine, and what are these Jews who aspire to such pretensions as this?. . .It has no deep thought like India; no genius of stability like China; no sense of beauty like Greece, no high culture like Egypt, no powerful arms like Rome, and yet there is the fact; they speak concerning the kingdom their king should establish. “The Gentiles shall come to Thy light, and kings to the brightness of Thy rising.” Yet, marvellous to relate, when she had given her King to the world she refused to crown Him. He came unto His own, and His own received Him not (the hope of Israel--a stranger in the land). George Mac Donald tells in one of his stories of a born-blind lamplighter who illuminated the city at night, but had no sense of what he was doing. Thus the Jews closed their eyes to the great light which they gave to the world. (Geo. Matheson, D. D.)
