The Sure Mercies of
David Part IV
(a sequel to the
Christmas Lesson)
Luke
1:23-38
II Samuel 23:5; Haggai 2:5-9
January 19, 2025
1e, 226
I am spinning this lesson from the last words of David, “....this is all my
salvation, and all my desire,” in II Samuel 23:5 which I began last week,
into “...the desire of all
nations shall come” of Haggai
2:7
Let me read these passages:
David said “........God....hath
made with me an everlasting coventant,
ordered in all things, and sure, for this is all my
salvation and all
my desire.” ( II Samuel
23:5)
5 According to the word that I covenanted with you when ye came
out of
6 For thus saith the LORD of hosts;
Yet once, it is a little while, and
I
will shake the heavens, and the earth, and the sea, and the dry land;
7 And I will shake all nations, and the desire of all nations shall
come: and I will fill this house with glory, saith the LORD of hosts.
8 The
silver is mine, and the gold is mine, saith the LORD
of hosts.
9 The
glory of this latter house shall be greater than of the former, saith the
LORD of hosts: and in this place will I give peace, saith
the LORD of hosts.
(Haggai
2:5-9)
“all my salvation.....all my
desire”
What are you looking for out of life?
“....who
daily loadeth us with benefits”; (Psalm 68:19)
preceded by “Blessed be the Lord” and followed by “even the God of
our salvation”
“...they
have more than heart could wish;” Psalm 73:7
Thou hast put gladness in my heart.....I will both
lay me down in
peace and sleep: for thou Lord, only
makest me dwell in safety.” (Psalm 6:7-8)
The following is excerpted from
Spurgeon Sermon 3442 - The Desire of All Nations -
Thursday evening - August 25, 1870
II. THE GLORY OF THE
INCARNATION OF CHRIST.
“I will shake all nations,” and He who is the desire of
all nations shall come
a rendering which is not incorrect, and is established by a
great mass of
theologians, though, according to some of the ablest
critics, a rendering
scarcely to be sustained by the original. He who is the
desire of all nations
shall come, and that shall be the glory of the second
spiritual temple. Jesus
Christ, then,
is the desire of all nations, if so we read the text,
and this is
doubtless true. All nations have a dark and dim desire
for Him. I say a dark
desire, for without that adjective I could scarcely
speak the truth. Most
interesting chapters have been written by students of the
history of
mankind upon the preparedness of men’s hearts for the
coming of Christ at
His incarnation. It is very certain that almost all nations have
a tradition of
the coming one. The Jews, of course, expected the Messiah.
There were
persons instructed according to the culture of various
nations, which,
though they do not expect the Messiah quite so
clearly as the Jews, had
almost as shrewd a guess as to what He might be and
do as the mere
ritualistic and Pharisaic Jews had. There was a notion all over the world at
that time of Christ’s coming, that some great one
was to descend from
heaven, and to come into this world for this world’s
good. He was in that
respect darkly and dimly the desire of all nations. But
in all nations there
have been some persons more instructed to whom
Christ has really been
the object of desire with much more of intelligence. Job was a
Gentile and
a fearer of God. We have no reason to believe that Job was a solitary
specimen of enlightened persons: we have reason rather to
hope that in all
countries all over the world God has had a chosen people, who
have
known and feared Him, who have not had all the light which
has been given
to us, but who better used what light they had, and
were guided by his
secret Spirit to much more of light, perhaps, than we think
it right, with
our little knowledge, to credit them with. These, then, as representatives of
all the nations, were desiring the coming of the
great Deliverer, the
incarnate God; and in this sense, representatively, the
whole of the world
was desiring Christ in that higher sense, and He
was the desire of all
nations. But, my brethren, does this mean, or does it
not mean, that Christ
is exactly what all the nations need? If they did
but know, if they could but
understand Him, He is just what they would desire and should
desire. Were
their reason taught rightly, and were their minds
instructed by the Spirit to
desire the best in all the world, Christ is just what
they want. All the world
desire a way to God. Hence men set up priests and
anoint them with oil,
and smear them with I know not what, only that they may be
mediators
between them and God. They must have something to come between their
guilt and God’s glorious holiness. Oh; if they
knew it, WHAT THEY WANT
IS CHRIST! You want no
priest, but the great “Apostle and High Priest of
our
profession.” You want
no mediator with God, but the one
Mediator, the
man Christ Jesus, who is also equal with God. Oh! world, why wilt thou go
about to seek this priest and that other deceiver,
when HE WHO THOU
WANTEST IS
APPOINTED BY THE MOST HIGH!
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
He whom
Jacob saw in
his dream as the ladder which reached from earth to heaven is
the only means —
the Son of Man and yet the Son of God. The world
wants a peacemaker; oh!
how badly it wants it now! I seem as I walk my garden, as I
go to my
pulpit, as I go to my bed, to hear the distant cries and moans
of wounded
and dying men. We are so familiarized each day with
horrible details of
slaughter, that if we give our minds to the thought, I am sure we
must feel
a nausea, a perpetual sickness creeping over us. The reek
and steam of
those murderous fields, the smell of the warm blood of men
flowing out on
the soil, must come to us and vex our spirits Earth wants a
peacemaker,
and it is He,
Jesus of
Gentiles, the
Prince of Peace, who will make war to cease unto the ends of
the earth. Man wants
a purifier. Very many nations feel, somehow or other,
that political affairs do not go as one could wish.
There are great
excellences in personal government, but great
disadvantages. There are
great excellences in republican government, but
remarkable difficulties too.
There are
supreme excellences, as we think, in our own form of
government, but a great many things to be amended, for all
that; and this
world is altogether out of joint; it is a crazy old
concern, and does not
seem as if it could be amended with all the
tinkering of our reformers in the
lapse of years. The fact is, it wants the Maker, who
made it, to come in and
put it to rights. It needs the Hercules that is to turn the
stream right
through the Augean stable; it wants the Christ of God
to turn the stream of
His atoning
sacrifice right through the whole earth, to sweep away
the
whole filth of
ages, and it never
will be done unless HE DOETH IT!
He is
the one, the true Reformer, the true rectifier of all wrong, and in
this respect the desire of all nations. Oh! if the world could gather up all her
right desire; if she could condense in one cry all her wild
wishes; if all true
lovers of mankind could condense their theories and extract
the true wine of
wisdom from them; it would just come to this, WE WANT AN
INCARNATE
GOD, and you have got
the INCARNATE GOD! Oh! nations, but ye know it not!
Ye, in the
dark, are groping after Him, and know not that He is there.
Brethren, I
may add, Christ is certainly the desire of all nations in this
respect, that we desire Him for all nations. Oh! that the world were
encompassed in His gospel! Would God the sacred fire would
run along the
ground, that the little handful of corn on the top of
the mountains would
soon make its fruit to shake like
will it come that all the nations shall know Him?
Let us pray for it: let us
labor for it.
And one
other meaning I may give to this: He is the desirable one of all
nations, bringing back the former translation of this
text. He is the choice
one of all nations. He is the chief among ten thousand,
and the altogether
lovely. He, whom we love, is such an one that He can never be
matched by
another, His rival could not be found amongst the sons of men.
There is
none like Him; there is none like Him amongst the angels of
light; there is
none that can stand in comparison with Him. The desire, the one that ought
to be desired, the most desirable of all the nations, is Jesus
Christ, and it is
the glory of the Christian Church, which is the second temple
that Christ is
in her, her head, her Lord. It is never her glory that she
condescends to
make an iniquitous union with the
State. It is her glory that Christ
is her
sole King, it is her glory that He is her sole
Prophet, and that He is her sole
Priest, and that He then gives to all His
people to be kings and priests with
Him, Himself the center and
source of all their glory and their power.
I cannot
stay longer, though the theme tempts me, but must just give you
the last word, which is this, the visible glory of the true second
temple will
be Christ’s second coming. He,
Himself, is her glory, whether at His first
coming, or at His second coming. The Church will be no
more glorious at
the second coming than now. “What!” say you, “no more
glorious!” No;
but more apparently glorious. Christ is as glorious on the cross as He is on
the throne; it is the appearance only that shall alter. “Then shall the
righteous shine forth as the sun in the kingdom of their
Father, but they
evermore are brightness itself, in the person of Jesus
Christ. Now, brethren,
we are to expect, as long as this world lasts, that all things
will shake that
are to be moved. They will go on shaking. We call the world
sometimes
“terra firma”; it is not this world, surely, that deserves
such a name as that;
there is nothing stable beneath the stars; all things
else will shake, and as
the shaking goes on, Jesus Christ will, to those who
know Him, become
more and more their desire. I suppose, if the world went on, in some
things
mending and improving, and were to go up to a point,
we should not want
Christ to come in a hurry, we would rather
that things should be
perpetuated; but the shaking will make Christ more and
more the desire of
the nations. (Do you not think that the
is a
shaking? CY - 2025) “The whole
creation groaneth,” is groaning up to now,
but it will groan more and more “in pain
together travailing” — the apostle saith
— “even until now.” (Romans
8:22) The travailing pains grow worse and
worse, and worse, and it will be so with this world;
it will travail till at
last it
must come to the consummation of her desire. The Church
will say, “Come,
Lord Jesus.” She will say it with gathering earnestness; she
will continue
still to say it, though there are intervals in which
she will forget her Lord,
but still her heart’s desire will be that He will come; and at
last He will
surely come and bring to this world not only Himself, the desire of all
nations but all that can be desired, for those days of
His, when He
appeareth, shall be to His people as the days of heaven
upon earth, the days
of their honor, the days of their rest — the day in
which the kingdoms shall
belong unto Christ.
Revelation 11:15 tells us the time is coming when “....the
kingdoms of this world
are become the kingdoms of our Lord, and of His
Christ; and He shall reign for ever and ever.” CY - 2025) Oh! brethren,
it is not for me to go into details on a subject which would require many discourses,
and which could not be brought out
in the few last words of a discourse. But here
is the great hope of that
splendid building, the Church, which is desired. Her glory
essentially lies in the Incarnate God, who has come into her
midst. Her
glory manifestly will lie in the second coming of that
Incarnate God, when
He shall
be revealed from heaven to those that look and are waiting for and
hasting unto the coming of the Son of God — looking for Him
with
gladsome expectation. And this is the joy of the
Church. He has gone, but
He has left
word, “I will come again, and will receive you unto
myself, that
where I am, ye may
be also.” Remember the words that were spoken of the
angels to the Church, “Ye men of
into heaven? This
same Jesus who is gone up from you into heaven shall so
come in like manner
as ye have seen Him go up into heaven.” In propria
persona — in very deed and truth, He shall come: —
“These eyes shall see Him in that
day,
The God that died for me;
And all my rising bones shall say,
Lord,
who is like to thee?”
Then shall
come the adoption, the raising of the body, the reception of a
glory to that body reunited to the soul, such as we
have not dreamed of,
for eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither hath it entered
into the heart of
man to conceive what God hath prepared for them that love Him.
Though
He hath
revealed them unto us by His Holy Spirit, for the Spirit searcheth
all
things, yea, the deep things of God, yet have our ears
heard but little
thereof, and we have not
received the full discovery of the things that shall
be hereafter. The Lord bless you! May you all be parts of His Church, have
a share in His glory, and a share in the manifestation
of that glory at theH
last.
Dear
hearer, I would send thee away with this one query in thine
ear — Is
Christ thy
desire, Couldest thou say, with David, “He is all my salvation
and all my
desire”? Could you gather up your feet in the bed, with dying
Jacob, and say, “I have waited for thy will,
O God”? By your desire shall
you be known. The desire of the righteous shall be granted. Delight thyself
also in the Lord,
and He shall give thee the desire of thine heart.
But the
desire of many is a groveling desire: it is a sinful desire: it is a
disgraceful desire — a desire which, if it be attained, the
attainment of it
will afford very brief pleasure. Oh! sinner, let thy
desires go after Christ.
Remember if thou wouldest
have Him, thou hast not to earn Him — fight
for Him — win Him — but HE IS TO BE HAD FOR THE
ASKING!
“Lay
hold,” says he apostle, “on eternal life.” As if it
were ours, if we did but
grip it. God give us grace to lay hold on eternal life, for
Jesus from the cross is
saying, “Look unto me, and be ye
saved, all ye ends of the earth,” and from His
throne of glory He still is saying, “Come unto me,” exalted on high, “to give
repentance and remission
of sin,” and He will give them both to those who
seek Him. Seek
Him, then, this night. God grant
it for His Son’s sake.
"Excerpted text Copyright
AGES Library, LLC. All rights reserved.
Materials are reproduced by permission."
This
material can be found at:
http://www.adultbibleclass.com
If
this exposition is helpful, please share with others.
Psalm 6:6-7
“There be many who say, Who will show us any good?
.......Thou hast put gladness
in my heart.....I will both
lay me down in peace and sleep:
for thou Lord, only
makest me dwell in safety.”
I. HERE IS AN
INQUIRY PUT. “Who will show us good?” By which
is meant,
not so much What is good in itself? as
— What will make us happy, and bring
us a sense of
satisfaction?
Over and above our intellectual (faculties),
we
have emotional faculties. The emotions are to the spiritual part
of us what
the (physical)
sensations are to the bodily part.
Among the various fallacies of
some wise men of this world, one of the wildest is
that emotion has no place in
the search after, and in the ascertainment of, truth. It would
be quite safe
to reverse that, and to say that unless the emotions have their rightful play,
few truths can be rightly sought or found. An equilibrium of absolute
indifference concerning truth or error would be a guilty carelessness. Our
craving after happiness is God’s lesson to us through the
emotions, that we
are dependent for satisfaction on something outside us;
and when such
satisfaction is actually reached, it is so far the sign that the
higher life is
being healthfully sustained. Our nature is too complex to be satisfied with
supply in any one department. Our intellectual nature craves the true. Our
moral nature
craves the right. Our sympathetic nature
calls for love. (thus the
basic emotional needs love/security/recognition contrasted with our known
physical needs of food/clothing/shelter!
Our conscious weakness and
dependence call for
strength from another. Our
powers of action demand a sphere of service which
shall neither corrupt
nor exhaust. Our spiritual nature cries
out for God, life, and immortality.
Who can show
us “good” that will meet all these wants? Such is
the inquiry.
How to separate sin from
sinners — the sinner
from his sins?
Matthew 13:49-50
winnow the chaff from the wheat