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The sermon presents salvation as entirely God’s work because sinners are naturally incapable of making themselves spiritually alive or completing their own rescue. God provides salvation through His sovereign plan and sustaining grace, and He alone brings about genuine, enduring conversion. This doctrine is intended to destroy pride and despair rather than eliminate human responsibility: those who are saved must come through God’s mercy, while those who reject Him remain accountable. Spurgeon therefore calls hearers to cry to God for mercy, fly to Christ, and proclaim the gospel courageously.
Theological center: Salvation is sovereignly and completely accomplished by the triune God—from its provision and effectual application to its daily preservation and final glorification.
Applications: Proclaim the Gospel Boldly · Turn to God for Mercy · Fly to Christ · Recognize Salvation’s Source
Primary texts: Jonah 2:9 · Matthew 7:7
“Salvation is of the LORD.” Jonah 2:9 JONAH learned this sentence of good theology in a strange college. He learned it in the whale’s belly, at the bottom of the mountains, with the weeds wrapped about his head, when he supposed that the earth with her bars was about him forever. Most of the grand truths of God have to be learned by trouble. They must be burned into us with the hot iron of affliction, otherwise we shall not truly receive them. No man is competent to judge in matters of the kingdom, until first he has been tried—since there are many things to be learned in the depths which we can never know in the heights. We discover many secrets in the caverns of the ocean, which, though we had soared to heaven, we never could have known. He shall best meet the wants of God’s people as a preacher who has had those wants himself. He shall best comfort God’s Israel who has needed comfort. And he shall best preach salvation who has felt his own need of it. Jonah, when he was delivered from his great danger, when by the command of God the fish had obediently left its great deeps and delivered its cargo upon dry land, was then capable of judging. And this was the result of his experience under his trouble—“Salvation is of the LORD.” By salvation here we do not merely understand the special salvation which Jonah received from death. For according to Dr. Gill, there is something so special in the original, in the word salvation having one more letter than it usually has, when it only refers to some temporary deliverance, that we can only understand it here as relating to the great work of the salvation of the soul which endures forever. That “Salvation is of the LORD,” I shall this morning try to show as best I can. First, I shall endeavor to explain the doctrine. Then I shall try to show you how God has guarded us from making any mistakes and has hedged us up to make us believe the Gospel. Then I shall dwell upon the influence of this truth upon men. And shall close up by showing you the counterpart of the doctrine. Seeing every truth has its obverse, so has this. I. First, then, to begin by explanation, let us EXPOUND THIS DOCTRINE—the doctrine that salvation is of the LORD, or of JEHOVAH. We are to understand by this, that the whole of the work whereby men are saved from their natural estate of sin and ruin, and are translated into the kingdom of God, and made heirs of eternal happiness, is of God and of Him only. “Salvation is of the LORD.” To begin, then, at the beginning, the plan of salvation is entirely of God. No human intellect and no created intell…