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‘All souls are Mine.’
Eze_18:4
‘All souls are Mine’—what must He be Who claims such a sovereignty? No possession of islands and continents, no dominion of stars and planets, no empire of systems and universes, can compare with it for one moment. The manipulation of matter, its subjugation to mind and will, its adaptation to all manner of uses and all manner of services—of this, on a small scale, men have experience: to extend this experience till it takes in infinities, is but to rise, step by step, in the region which is our dwelling-place, which is our home. From matter to spirit how vast the transition! No earthly potentate, no tyrant of fable, ever claimed the sovereignty of one soul—the chain was never forged that could bind it, the ‘handwriting’ was never written that professed to transfer. ‘One soul is mine’—it never entered into the heart of man to say it.
II. But, if ‘all souls are Mine’—and God is the speaker—the next thought must be that of the sacredness, the sanctity, of the thing claimed.—It would be an advance, for many of us, in the spiritual life, if we could read the saying in the singular, ‘My soul is God’s’; if we could recognise and remember the single ownership, and carry it into the daily round of thought, speech, and action.
‘Not my own—bought with a price’; not my own, to starve or to pamper; not my own, to humour or to defile; not my own, to give it this colour or that, this stamp or that, at the bidding of vanity, sloth, or lust; not my own, to say to it, Such shall be thy employment, such thy relaxation, such thy glory, or such thy idol, regardless what God has spoken concerning each one—yes, to feel the revelation ‘All souls are Mine,’ all, and therefore each; each, and therefore this one. What seriousness would it give, and what dignity, and what holiness, to the life of time, making each day and each night take the impress of that other saying, ‘And the spirit shall return to God Who gave it.’
III. The word of Holy Scripture is light as well as shade—and so is it with the text.—For these not least, might they but listen to it, the lesson of the text was written. ‘All souls are Mine’; the son shall not die for the iniquity of the father, only by its own choice of evil shall any soul perish; out of the very pestilence of corruption grace can rescue, yea, in the very pestilence of corruption grace can save.
Is not this, brethren, when we think of it, the true ground of all hope for ourselves and for the world?
If my soul is God’s—His already, without prayer and without act of mine—can there be anything presumptuous, can there be anything even tentative, in the appeal to Him to keep and to save His own? Can it be the will of God that one soul should perish? Can either long neglect, or distant wandering, or obdurate hardness, have rendered the case desperate, so long as there remains the possible petition, ‘I am Thine: O save me!’
IV. Finally, it seems to me that the words of this text have in them a sufficient answer to all the cavillings and all the doubtings which beset our faith in the Incarnation, the Atonement, and the New Birth.—‘All souls are Mine’—then will He lightly abandon, Who has thought it worth while to possess? We could not indeed know, without revelation, what processes would be necessary, or what would be sufficient, to redeem a soul; it is idle to speak as though it were obvious that ‘without shedding of blood there is no remission,’ or as though it were intelligible (some would even say, self-evident) that the sacrifice of the Eternal Son could connect itself with the pardon and with the salvation of a fallen and guilty race. These are mysteries still, and it is but playing with words to represent them as explained to us even in the Bible.
But what we say is, that the Divine ownership of imperilled and ruined souls accounts for any steps, however intricate or however marvellous, by which infinite wisdom may have passed towards their rescue and towards their salvation. What those steps should be, God alone could determine—He might never have told us of them, He does nowhere explain them—but ‘all souls are Mine’ prepares us for His taking them, and leaves nothing improbable, whatever else it may leave mysterious, in the bare fact that at any price and at any sacrifice He should have interposed to redeem.
Illustration
‘All souls belong to God by right of creation, and because Jesus made propitiation for the sins of the whole world.
What a wonderful conception! We think of the vast multitudes of the human family that have covered our globe, back to the early dawn of history, the myriads that built the Pyramids, the successive cities on the site of Nineveh and Babylon, the teeming masses of human beings of China and India; but not one of them, not the most wretched and degraded, not the smallest and shortest-lived, that is not included in the circumference of these mighty words.
And as we lay emphasis on that present tense and read, “All souls are Mine,” and couple with it the Saviour’s words, “God is not God of the dead, but of the living,” we are compelled to remember that all the generations which have stormed across this earth of ours are living yet. To use the words of another: Somewhere, at this very instant, they now verily are. Men say, they were, they have been, but there are no have beens. To be is eternal being.’