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The sermon teaches that the church is engaged in spiritual conflict, yet its advance and preservation depend on God’s sovereign leadership and protection. God’s eternal covenant purpose precedes creation, orders providence, and ensures that His people will be brought safely home. Christ has gone before believers in suffering and has conquered sin, death, and condemnation through His cross. Therefore Christians should trust God with future trials and past guilt, while sinners are urgently invited to surrender to Christ and receive forgiveness by faith.
Theological center: God’s sovereign covenant providence leads and preserves His church, chiefly through the atoning and victorious work of Christ.
Applications: Trust God’s providence · Do not fear future trials · Entrust past sins to Christ · Ground your arms and surrender to God
Primary texts: Isaiah 52:12 · Isaiah 40:11 · Isaiah 40:3-4
“The LORD will go before you; and the God of Israel will be your rereward.” Isaiah 52:12 THE church of Christ is continually represented under the figure of an army, yet its Captain is the Prince of Peace, its object is the establishment of peace, and its soldiers are men of a peaceful disposition. The spirit of war is at the extremely opposite point to the spirit of the Gospel. Yet nevertheless, the church on earth has, and until the second advent must be, the church militant, the church armed, the church warring, the church conquering. And how is this? It is in the very order of things that it must be so. Truth could not be truth in this world if it were not a warring thing, and we should at once suspect that it were not true if error were friends with it. The spotless purity of the truth must always be at war with the blackness of heresy and lies. I say again, it would cast a suspicion upon its own nature, we should feel at once that it was not true, if it were not at enmity with the false. And so at this present time, the church of Christ, being in herself the only incarnation of truth left upon this world, must be at war with error of every kind of shape, or if she were not, we should at once conclude that she was not herself the church of the living God. It is but a rule of nature that holiness must be at enmity with sin. That would be but a mock purity which could lie side by side with iniquity and claim its kinship. “Shall the throne of iniquity have fellowship with you?” Shall Christ and Belial walk together? Shall the holy be linked with the unholy? If it were so, beloved, we might then not only suspect that the church was not the holy, universal and apostolic church, we might not only suspect it, but we might beyond suspicion pronounce a verdict upon her, “You are no more Christ’s bride, you are an antichrist, an apostate. Reprobate silver shall men call you, because you have not learned to distinguish between the precious and the vile.” Thus, you see, if the church be a true church, and a holy church, she must be armed, there are so many untrue things and unholy things, that she must be perpetually with her sword in her hand, carrying on combat against them. And every child of God proves by experience that this is the land of war. We are not yet come to the time when every man shall sit under his vine and under his fig tree, none daring to make him afraid. The mountains do not bring peace to the people, nor the little hills righteousness. On the contrary, the children of God hear the sound of war, the shrill clarion is constantly sounding in…