GIVING THANKS AT THE REMEMBRANCE OF GOD'S A SERMON. BY THE LATE REV. JAMES SMELLIE, UNITED ORIGINAL SECESSION CHURCH, EDINBURGH. 66 Rejoice in the Lord, ye righteous; and give thanks at the remembrance of His holiness."-PSALM xcvii. 12. THIS command is addressed to the "righteous," not because they only ought to obey it, but because they only can obey it, and because, indeed, only they can understand it. The obligation of it rests on every human being as well as on them, but to all others it is impracticable, and deeply mysterious. Those who are unborn of the Spirit can see, in a measure, the propriety of thanking God for His goodness, but they cannot understand what it is to give thanks at the remembrance of His holiness. If there is one perfection of God which they fear and dislike more than another,— which surrounds Him with dread and unapproachable terror,-it it is that holiness of His which cannot tolerate sin, and which must ever lead Him to turn an eye of abhorrence and displeasure upon the wilful and obdurate sinner. They have a very imperfect and unworthy apprehension, as we shall see, of God's holiness; but, in so far as it is apprehended by them, it makes the thought of God intolerable, and leads them to banish Him wholly from their minds, saying,-"Depart from us, for we desire not the knowledge of thy ways." And, if one thing more than another can show the entire and radical change which the Spirit of God, in the hour of regeneration, works upon the hearts of sinners, it is, that after this change has passed upon them they are not merely reconciled to God's holiness-cannot merely bear the thought of it, even when apprehended far more clearly and powerfully than before-but regard it with complacency and delight; so that they are both able and disposed to obey the call of the text, and give thanks at the remembrance of His holiness. The holiness of God, in its more general aspects, is not so much a separate attribute of His nature, as that which accompanies the exercise of all His attributes, and forms the crown and glory of the whole. It is that perfection by which He wills and acts in harmony with His own nature,-approving all that is in harmony with the excellence of this nature, abhorring, and visiting with consuming displeasure, all that is opposed to it. More particularly, it is that perfection by which He must always delight in moral purity and goodness, and abhor and punish all sin. As possessed of holiness, God is said to be Light,-incorruptibly pure and excellent as the light, and as essentially opposed to sin as the insufferable brightness of the sun is opposed to midnight darkness. In respect of it, God is said to be a consuming fire, for it is not more the nature of fire to burn up and destroy everything inflammable with which it comes in contact, than it is the nature of God to consume and destroy all sin. That God is thus essentially, incorruptibly, awfully holy, of purer eyes than to behold evil, and who cannot look upon iniquity, appears in every manifestation of Himself that He has given to His creatures. His holiness shines through all His Word. It is impressed on all His works. There is a witness for it in the conscience of every created being, even in fallen men and devils, who believe and tremble. It pervades His whole moral government of the universe; for He so orders things that, sooner or later, in one form or another, misery follows sin as surely as the shadow follows the substance, while in keeping His commandments there is just as surely great reward. Nor does the existence of sin in our world at all impugn His perfect holiness, seeing that, come how sin may, it exists only as the object of His infinite hatred and displeasure; seeing, too, that He has taken occasion from its existence to give a display of His holiness, in the work of human redemption, inconceivably brighter and more awful than could otherwise have been given. So far from the existence of sin casting discredit on God's holiness, He has only made it the occasion of more gloriously displaying His holiness, and enthroning it in the profounder reverence and adoration of all holy beings for ever. In considering our text, two questions come up before us for meditation, — FIRST, What is implied in giving thanks at the remembrance of God's holiness; and, SECOND, Why God's saints may well give thanks when they remember His holiness; or, more briefly, the duty enjoined in the text, and the reasons for it. I. The duty enjoined. What is implied in this duty of giving thanks at the remembrance of God's holiness? 1. You will at once perceive that one thing presupposed in this duty is our being in a state of reconciliation with God. I have already hinted that the unrenewed sinner, so far as he does apprehend God's holiness at all, regards it with insuperable aversion and fear. And there is reason for this. It cannot, indeed, be otherwise. He feels in His conscience that God's holiness is against him. He feels that it arms God with the sword of consuming displeasure against him for sin. While he continues the sinner he is, God, because He is holy, can have no gracious dealings with him, nor be to him anything other than a consuming fire. How then can the sinner give thanks at the remembrance of Jehovah's holiness? Could the manslayer give thanks for the gleaming knife in the hand of the avenger of blood who was panting close upon his heels? Can the criminal give hearty thanks for the inexorable severity of the judge, who sentences him to life-long imprisonment or to death? Does the evil-doer delight in the strength and majesty of the law which is watching him with a sleepless eye, and is ready to lay hold of him with an unrelenting hand, the moment he incurs its penalty? Far less can the sinner, whose conscience tells him that he has still to do with an unappeased and angry God, delight in the holiness that kindles His displeasure, and renders it the most certain of all certainties, that "the soul that sinneth it shall die." Before we can delight in, and give thanks for the holiness of God, we must be at peace with Him,—we must believe that the flame of consuming wrath which His holiness kindled against us for sin has been quenched by the blood of His own Son poured forth on our behalf, -we must believe that His holiness, which was so awfully against us for sin, is now for us and on our side, because all its demands have been gloriously met by Him who was made "sin for us, who knew no sin, that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him". in short, we must be persuaded that, pacified and propitiated toward us through the atonement of Jesus, God's holy eye no longer rests on us with the unpitying fury of an avenging Judge, but beams on us with the purest kindness and love of a merciful Father. 2. Another thing supposed in this duty is, that we have a new and holy nature; for otherwise, we can neither understand nor appreciate the holiness of God. I say, without a new and holy nature, we cannot even understand the holiness of God. You cannot fail to have observed how ready men are to judge their neighbours by themselves, and how difficult it seems to them to recognise in others a goodness higher than their own. The deceitful person is constantly suspecting others of a disposition to deceive. The basely selfish person cannot understand a truly generous action, but is ever ready to account for it by the supposition of some base and selfish motive. As the jaundiced eye makes everything appear unlovely, so there is a tendency in the depraved heart to throw over every character-even the purest and noblest-the discolouring and loathsome hue of its own depravity. This blinding and perverting influence of depravity appears especially in the apprehension which sinners naturally have of the character of God. Utterly depraved themselves, they can no more form right conceptions of an absolutely holy God, than a man born blind can form an idea of the glory of the noonday sun. They think of God, but it is not the awfully holy God of the Bible; it is a God imagined very much according to the wishes of their own carnal hearts; such a God as they would like the Supreme Being to be,-weak, unstable, and imperfect like themselves,-easily imposed on by appearances, and very lenient toward their shortcomings and sins. Thus Paul tells how, when men knew God, they glorified Him not as God, but "became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened,"-" and changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and four-footed beasts, and creeping things" (Rom. I. 21, 23). And though you, my unregenerate hearers, have been delivered by the light of revelation from the folly and wickedness of heathen idolatry, I venture to say that the God of your habitual imagination is hardly less like the dread Being whom the Scriptures reveal, than the idols of the heathen. If your God were He before whom the seraphim cover their faces and their feet, could you, a sinful creature, rush into His presence in the most solemn acts of His worship with more thoughtlessness and unconcern than you would come before a titled or a sceptred fellowworm? If your God were He who charges His angels with folly, and loathes all righteousness of man as filthy rags, could you feel so satisfied before Him, when you think you have prayed very E well, or have been very serious, or done some unusually good action, as though now He would be certain to be pleased with you? If your God were He who looketh on the heart, and judgeth the thought of foolishness to be sin, could you give up your heart without restraint to ungodliness, and pride, and vain and unholy feelings all the day and every day, and hope to cover all from God's sight by a few acts of outward worship on Sabbath? If your God were He whose wrath is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, could you venture to excuse this or that sin before Him, as not so bad as what is done by others,-as the result of your circumstances and the peculiar temptations that surround you,-or as what He may well spare, because it is a little one? Or, if your God were He who out of Christ is a consuming fire, could you venture to come near Him out of Christ,-could you rest out of Christ a single day? Be assured that your irreverence, and pride, and unbelief, and security, are the results of your having imagined a God who is an imperfect being like yourself, and not the unapproachable, holy God of the Bible. God is saying to you, "These things hast thou done, and I kept silence; thou thoughtest that I was altogether such an one as thyself." You are alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in you, because of the blindness of your heart. You need a new nature wrought within you, before you can even know the holiness of God as His Word reveals it, far less give thanks at the remembrance of it. And you must have this new nature, as I have said, before you can appreciate or delight in God's holiness. Though you did apprehend the holiness of Him with whom you have to do, yet, in your present state the more clearly and powerfully you apprehended it, it would only be the more intolerable to you. No sinner, while his heart is unchanged, while the love of the world and of sin is strong within him, can bear the thought of an allholy God, searching him through by night and day,—marking his every act, and word, and thought, with the abhorrence and the displeasure which He must bear toward sin. To live in the presence of such a God would be an unbearable terror and restraint; and so, to get peace to pursue his worldliness and sin unchecked, the sinner shuts his eyes to the true knowledge of God,-imagines a God, as we have said, very much after the wishes of his own carnal heart, and even thinks of Him as little as possible. No! before you can take pleasure in the society |