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The sermon presents trials as an appointed and unavoidable part of the Christian life rather than evidence that God has abandoned His people. Believers may feel fear, depression, weakness, and sorrow, yet they are called to remember God’s commands and promises and continue trusting Him. Perseverance under persecution and affliction is offered as evidence supporting assurance of salvation. In contrast, hardened sinners are warned of everlasting judgment, and all sinners are urged to believe in Jesus Christ for complete pardon and acceptance.
Theological center: Salvation is found in Christ alone, while God preserves His people through trials and uses persevering faith as evidence of genuine Christian identity.
Applications: Persevere under trials · Remember God’s statutes · Believe in Christ · Expect trials in discipleship
Primary texts: Psalm 119:83 · 2 Corinthians 4:17
“For I am become like a bottle in the smoke; yet do I not forget thy statutes.” Psalm 119:83 THE figure of “a bottle in the smoke” is essentially oriental. We must therefore go to the East for its explanation. This we will supply to our hearers and readers in the words of the author of the Pictorial Bible, “This doubtless refers to a leathern bottle of kid or goatskin. The peasantry of Asia keep many articles, both dry and liquid, in such bottles, which, for security, are suspended from the roof, or hung against the walls of their humble dwellings. Here they soon become quite black with smoke, for as in the dwellings of the peasantry, there are seldom any chimneys, and the smoke can only escape through an aperture in the roof, or by the door, the apartment is full of dense smoke whenever a fire is kindled in it. “And in those nights and days when the smokiness of the hovels in which we daily rested during a winter’s journey in Persia, Armenia, and Turkey, seemed to make the cold and weariness of actual travel a relief, we had ample occasion to observe the peculiar blackness of such skin vessels, arising from the manner in which substances offering a surface of this sort, receive the full influence of the smoke and detain the minute particles of soot which rest upon them. “When such vessels do not contain liquids, and are not quite filled by the solids which they hold, they contract a shrunk and shriveled appearance, to which the psalmist may also possibly allude as well as to the blackness. But we presume that the leading idea refers to the latter circumstance, as in the East, blackness has an opposite significance to the felicitous meaning of whiteness. “David had doubtless seen bottles of this description hanging up in his tent when a wanderer, and though he might have had but few in his palace, yet in the cottages of his own poor people he had, no doubt, witnessed them. Hence he says of himself, ‘I am become,’ by trouble and affliction, by trial and persecution, ‘like a bottle in the smoke; yet do I not forget thy statutes.’” First, God’s people have their trials—they get put in the smoke. Secondly, God’s people feel their trials—they “become like a bottle in the smoke.” Thirdly, God’s people do not forget God’s statutes in their trials—“I am become like a bottle in the smoke; yet do I not forget thy statutes.” I. GOD’S PEOPLE HAVE THEIR TRIALS. This is an old truth, as old as the everlasting hills, because trials were in the covenant and certainly the covenant is as old as the eternal mountains. It was never designed by God when He chose His people,…