Isaiah 45:3 And I will give you the treasures of darkness, and hidden riches of secret places, that you may know that I, the LORD… There is a whole library of sacred philosophy in the words of the Psalmist on the relation subsisting between God and His creatures. "That Thou givest them, they gather. Thou openest Thine hand, they are filled with good." Perhaps one is hardly ever reminded more strongly of this fellowship of Providence and industry than when passing through a district seamed and bored and blackened by the mining operations in search of the metals which yield the wealth of a country, or of the hardly less precious coal, by the aid of which the iron, the copper, or the silver is smelted into useful forms. The ore, it is beyond the miner s province to fashion; God makes it to him a free present; but the digging, and the hoisting, and the smelting, and the moulding, and the chasing, and the carving, and the coining into currency, these things God no more does for man than man, in the beginning, created the heavens and the earth. Let us learn to be grateful without being indolent. Let us equally take care to be diligent without being proud. There is a high moral and spiritual mineralogy, wherein we may become rich, "not with corruptible things, such as silver and gold." There are caverns of unimaginable wealth, every grain of which comes from God's free bounty, but not one grain of which man can touch, except he do it "in the sweat of his brow." Bring to the text not only faith in God's promise, but strong hands and swift feet to do according to God's commandment. We are now ready to follow on into the figure we have borrowed, and show how frequently God blesses His people, as He provides for the workers or the owners of mineral quarries, fetching "treasures" out of "darkness," and "hidden riches" out of "secret places." I. St. Paul represents THE CHRISTIAN FAITH as a secret which is now for the first time discovered and made known, and the implication of the apostle, whenever he employs the term, is that the great blessing which prophecies and types had contained, but, containing, had concealed, was now in Christ Jesus brought out as into open daylight for all men to behold and possess. It has never been questioned that this truth was the real meaning of the rending of the veil in the Temple at the moment of our Lord's giving up of the ghost. For three hours there had been suspended over Mount Calvary a thick curtain of darkness; but at the ninth hour that veil, like the other close by, was "rent" also "in twain, from the top to the bottom." I find in that darkness the awful symbol of the misery, and the ignorance, and the confusion whereof the world itself had been the victim all through the ages preceding the Advent. But the very same fact which tore down the rich drapery in the building dispelled the dense blackness on the mountain, and declared the very same doctrine that "Christ Jesus was the Saviour of all men, and specially of them that believe." Learn to ascribe your redemption to the clouds of-misery behind which your Surety laid down His life. II. Somewhat in this way it would not, perhaps, be extravagant to represent any one of ourselves, at the crisis of his CONVERSION, as looking towards the Saviour much as one of those spectators literally did when the darkness was beginning to clear off from the crucifixion. When the veil is rent, and the power of faith scatters the clouds, and the soul peering through catches the first glimpse of a Saviour, the rapture of being forgiven has, so to speak, been quarried and hewn out of the black deep pit of conviction and remorse. III. It will be far less difficult to show that all along the journey of the Christian he digs his BEST AND BRIGHTEST MERCIES out of thick, and often terrible, gloom. I find some of you shut up in the deep pit of constant bodily pain, or infirmity. I find others of you wandering through the pitch dark avenues of a recent family funeral. There is a time for the digging of the gold. That is yours now. And there is a time for the burnishing and the chasing, and the putting on of the gold. That is not yet come. There is a place, says Solomon, for the sapphires in the stones of the earth; but the men who take the sapphires first out of the stones need all their skill and practice to tell which is which, and you would not thank the miner for the jewellery just left as he gets it. You must allow a fair time for the lapidary or the goldsmith to take up the business where the rough black denizens of the pit leave off — and "no affliction for the present seemeth to be joyous, but grievous. Nevertheless, afterwards it yieldeth the peaceable fruits of righteousness to them who are exercised thereby." (H. Christopherson.) Parallel Verses KJV: And I will give thee the treasures of darkness, and hidden riches of secret places, that thou mayest know that I, the LORD, which call thee by thy name, am the God of Israel. |
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