“Who have fled for refuge.” HEB.
vi: 18.
Paul is here speaking of the consolations
of Christians. He styles them these “who
have fled for refuge.”
Moses established six cities of refuge three
on the east side of the river Jordan, and three on
the west. When a man had killed any one accidentally
he fled to one of these cities. The roads leading
to them were kept perfectly good, so that when a man
started for the refuge nothing might impede him.
Along the cross-roads, and wherever there might be
any mistake about the way, there were signs put up
pointing in the right way, with the word “Refuge.”
Having gained the limits of one of these cities the
man was safe, and the mothers of the priests provided
for him.
Some of us have seen our peril, and
have fled to Christ, and feel that we shall never
be captured. We are among those “who have
fled for refuge.” Christ is represented
in the Bible as a Tower, a High Rock, a Fortress,
and a Shelter. If you have seen any of the ancient
castles of Europe, you know that they are surrounded
by trenches, across which there is a draw-bridge.
If an enemy approach, the people, for defense, would
get into the castle, have the trenches filled with
water, and lift up the draw-bridge. Whether to
a city of safety, or a tower, Paul refers, I know
not, and care not, for in any case he means Christ,
the safety of the soul.
But why talk of refuge? Who needs
it, if the refuge spoken of be a city or a castle,
into which men fly for safety? It is all sunlight
here. No sound of war in our streets. We
do not hear the rush of armed men against the doors
of our dwellings. We do not come with weapons
to church. Our lives are not at the mercy of
an assassin. Why, then, talk of refuge?
Alas! I stand before a company
of imperiled men. No flock of sheep was ever
so threatened or endangered of a pack of wolves; no
ship was ever so beaten of a storm; no company of
men were ever so environed of a band of savages.
A refuge you must have, or fall before an all-devouring
destruction. There are not so many serpents in
Africa; there are not so many hyenas in Asia; there
are not so many panthers in the forest, as there are
transgressions attacking my soul. I will take
the best unregenerated man anywhere, and say to him,
You are utterly corrupt. If all the sins of your
past life were marshaled in single file, they would
reach from here to hell. If you have escaped
all other sins, the fact that you have rejected the
mission of the Son of God is enough to condemn you
forever, pushing you off into bottomless darkness,
struck by ten thousand hissing thunder-bolts of Omnipotent
wrath.
You are a sinner. The Bible says
it, and your conscience affirms it. Not a small
sinner, or a moderate sinner, or a tolerable sinner,
but a great sinner, a protracted sinner, a vile sinner,
an outrageous sinner, a condemned sinner. As
God, with His all-scrutinizing gaze, looks upon you
to-day, He can not find one sound spot in your soul.
Sin has put scales on your eyes, and deadened your
ear with an awful deafness, and palsied your right
arm, and stunned your sensibilities, and blasted you
with an infinite blasting. The Bible, which you
admit to be true, affirms that you are diseased from
the crown of your head to the sole of your foot.
You are unclean; you are a leper. Believe not
me, but believe God’s Word, that over and over
again announces, in language that a fool might understand,
the total and complete depravity of the unchanged
heart: “The heart is deceitful above all
things, and desperately wicked.”
In addition to the sins of your life
there are uncounted troubles in pursuit of you.
Bereavements, losses, disappointments are a flock of
vultures ever on the wing. Did you get your house
built, and furnished, and made comfortable any sooner
than misfortune came in without knocking, and sat
beside you a skeleton apparition? Have
not pains shot their poisoned arrows, and fevers kindled
their fire in your brain? Many of you, for years,
have walked on burning marl. You stepped out
of one disaster into another. You may, like Job,
have cursed the day in which you were born. This
world boils over with trouble for you, and you are
wondering where the next grave will gape, and where
the next storm will burst. Oh, ye pursued, sinning,
dying, troubled, exhausted souls, are you not ready
now to hear me while I tell you of Christ, the Refuge?
A soldier, during the war, heard of
the sickness of his wife and asked for a furlough.
It was denied him, and he ran away. He was caught,
brought back, and sentenced to be shot as a deserter.
The officer took from his pocket a document that announced
his death on the following morning. As the document
was read, the man flinched not and showed no sorrow
or anxiety. But the officer then took from his
pocket another document that contained the prisoner’s
pardon. Then he broke down with deep emotion
at the thought of the leniency that had been extended.
Though you may not appear moved while I tell you of
the law that thundered its condemnation, while I tell
you of the pardon and the peace of the Gospel I wonder
if they will not overcome you.
Jesus is a safe refuge. Fort
Hudson, Fort Pulaski, Fort Moultrie, Fort Sumter,
Gibraltar, Sebastopol were taken. But Jesus is
a castle into which the righteous runneth and is safe.
No battering-ram can demolish its wall. No sappers
or miners can explode its ramparts, no storm-bolt
of perdition leap upon its towers. The weapons
that guard this fort are omnipotent. Hell shall
unlimber its great guns as death only to have them
dismantled. In Christ our sins are pardoned, discomforted,
blotted out, forgiven. An ocean can not so easily
drown a fly as the ocean of God’s forgiveness
swallow up, utterly and forever, our transgressions.
He is able to save unto the uttermost.
You who have been so often overcome
in a hand-to-hand fight with the world, the flesh,
and devil, try this fortress. Once here, you are
safe forever. Satan may charge up the steep, and
shout amid the uproar of the fight, Forward, to his
battalions of darkness; but you will stand in the
might of the great God, your Redeemer, safe in the
refuge. The troubles of life, that once overwhelmed
you, may come on with their long wagon-trains laden
with care and worryment; and you may hear in their
tramp the bereavements that once broke your heart;
but Christ is your friend, Christ your sympathizer,
Christ your reward. Safe in the refuge!
Death at last may lay the siege to
your spirit, and the shadows of the sepulcher may
shake their horrors in the breeze, and the hoarse howl
of the night wind may be mingled with the cry of despair,
yet you will shout in triumph from the ramparts, and
the pale horse shall be hurled back on his haunches.
Safe in the refuge! To this castle I fly.
This last fire shall but illumine its towers; and
the rolling thunders of the judgment will be the salvo
of its victory.
Just after Queen Victoria had been
crowned she being only nineteen or twenty
years of age Wellington handed her a death-warrant
for her signature. It was to take the life of
a soldier in the army. She said to Wellington:
“Can there nothing good be said of this man?”
He said: “No; he is a bad soldier, and
deserves to die.” She took up the death-warrant,
and it trembled in her hand as she again asked:
“Does no one know anything good of this man?”
Wellington said: “I have heard that at
his trial a man said that he had been a good son to
his old mother.” “Then let his life
be spared,” said the queen, and she ordered
his sentence commuted.
Christ is on a throne of grace.
Our case is brought before him. The question
is asked: “Is there any good about this
man?” The law says: “None.”
Justice says: “None.” Our own
conscience says: “None.” Nevertheless,
Christ hands over our pardon, and asks us to take it.
Oh, the height and depth, the length and breadth of
his mercy!
Again, Christ is a near refuge.
When we are attacked, what advantage is there in having
a fortress on the other side of the mountain?
Many an army has had an intrenchment, but could not
get to it before the battle opened. Blessed be
God, it is no long march to our castle. We may
get off, with all our troops, from the worst earthly
defeat in this stronghold. In a moment we may
step from the battle into the tower. I sing of
a Saviour near.
During the late war the forts of the
North were named after the Northern generals, and
the forts of the South were named after the Southern
generals. This fortress of our soul I shall call
Castle Jesus. I have seen men pursued of sins
that chased them with feet of lightning, and yet with
one glad leap they bounded into the tower. I
have seen troubles, with more than the speed and terror
of a cavalry troop, dash after a retreating soul,
yet were hurled back in defeat from the bulwarks.
Jesus near! A child’s cry, a prisoner’s
prayer, a sailor’s death-shriek, a pauper’s
moan reaches him. No pilgrimages on spikes.
No journeying with a huge pack on your back. No
kneeling in penance in cold vestibule of mercy.
But an open door! A compassionate Saviour!
A present salvation! A near refuge! Castle
Jesus!
Oh, why do you not put out your arm
and reach it? Why do you not fly to it?
Why be riddled, and shelled, and consumed under the
rattling bombardment of perdition, when one moment’s
faith would plant you in the glorious refuge?
I preach a Jesus here; a Jesus now; a fountain close
to your feet; a fiery pillar right over your head;
bread already broken for your hunger; a crown already
gleaming for your brow. Hark to the castle gates
rattling back for your entrance! Hear you not
the welcome of those who have fled for refuge to lay
hold upon the hope set before us?
Again, it is a universal refuge.
A fortress is seldom large enough to hold a whole
army. I look out upon fourteen hundred millions
of the race; and then I look at this fortress, and
I say that there is room enough for all. If it
had been possible, this salvation would have been
monopolized. Men would have said: “Let
us have all this to ourselves no publicans,
no plebeians, no lazzaroni, no converted pickpockets.
We will ride toward heaven on fierce chargers, our
feet in golden stirrups. Grace for lords, and
dukes, and duchesses, and counts. Let Napoleon
and his marshals come in, but not the common soldier
that fought under him. Let the Girards and the
Barings come in, but not the stevedores that unloaded
their cargoes, or the men who kept their books.”
Heaven would have been a glorified Windsor Castle,
or Tuileries, or Vatican; and exclusive aristocrats
would have strutted through the golden streets to
all eternity.
Thank God, there is mercy for the
poor! The great Doctor John Mason preached over
a hundred times the same sermon; and the text was:
“To the poor the Gospel is preached.”
Lazarus went up, while Dives went down; and there
are candidates for Imperial splendors in the back
alley, and by the peat-fire of the Irish shanty.
King Jesus set up His throne in a manger, and made
a resurrection day for the poor widow of Nain, and
sprung the gate of heaven wide open, so that all the
beggars, and thieves, and scoundrels of the universe
may come in if they will only repent. I can snatch
the knife from the murderer’s hand while it
is yet dripping with the blood of his victim, and tell
him of the grace that is sufficient to pardon his
soul. Do you say that I swing open the gate of
heaven too far? I swing it open no wider than
Christ, when He says: “Whosoever will, let
him come.” Don’t you want to go in
with such a rabble? Then you can stay out.
The whole world will yet come into
this refuge. The windows of heaven will be opened;
God’s trumpet of salvation will sound, and China
will come from its tea-fields and rice-harvests, and
lift itself up into the light. India will come
forth, the chariots of salvation jostling to pieces
her Juggernauts. Freezing Greenland, and sweltering
Abyssinia, will, side by side, press into the kingdom;
and transformed Bornesian cannibal preach of the resurrection
of the missionary he has slain. The glory of
Calvary will tinge the tip of the Pyrénées; and Lebanon
cedars shall clap their hands; and by one swing of
the sickle Christ shall harvest nations for the skies.
I sing a world redeemed. In the
rush of the winds that set the forest in motion, like
giants wrestling on the hills, I see the tossing up
of the triumphal branches that shall wave all along
the line of our King as He comes to take empire.
In the stormy diapason of the ocean’s organ,
and the more gentle strains that in the calm come sounding
up from the crystal and jasper keys at the beach,
I hear the prophecy: “The earth shall be
filled with the knowledge of God as the waters fill
the sea.”
The gospel morning will come like
the natural morning. At first it seems only like
another hue of the night. Then a pallor strikes
through the sky, as though a company of ministering
spirits, pale with tedious watching through the night,
had turned in their flight upward to look back upon
the earth. Then a faint glow of fire, as though
on a barren beach a wrecked mariner was kindling a
flickering flame. Then chariots and horses of
fire racing up and down the heavens; then perfect
day: “Who is she that cometh forth as the
morning?”
Come in, black Hottentot and snow-white
Caucasian, come in, mitered official and diseased
beggar; let all the world come in. Room in Castle
Jesus! Sound it through all lands; sound it by
all tongues. Let sermons preach it, and bells
chime it, and pencils sketch it, and processions celebrate
it, and bells ring it: Room in Castle Jesus!
Again, Christ is the only refuge.
If you were very sick, and there was only one medicine
that would cure you, how anxious you would be to get
that medicine. If you were in a storm at sea,
and you found that the ship could not weather it,
and there was only one harbor, how anxious you would
be to get into that harbor. Oh, sin-sick soul,
Christ is the only medicine; oh, storm-tossed soul,
Christ is the only harbor. Need I tell a cultured
audience like this that there is no other name given
among men by which ye can be saved? That if you
want the handcuffs knocked from your wrists, and the
hopples from your feet, and the icy bands from your
heart, there is just one Almighty arm in all the universe
to do everything? There are other fortresses to
which you might fly, and other ramparts behind which
you might hide, but God will cut to pieces, with the
hail of His vengeance, all these refuges of lies.
Some of you are foundering in terrible
Euroclydon. Hark to the howling of the gale,
and the splintering of the spars, and the starting
of the timbers, and the breaking of the billow, clear
across the hurricane deck. Down she goes!
Into the life-boat! Quick! One boat!
One shore! One oarsman! One salvation!
You are polluted; there is but one well at which you
can wash clean. You are enslaved; there is but
one proclamation that can emancipate. You are
blind; there is but one salve that can kindle your
vision. You are dead; there is but one trumpet
that can burst the grave.
I have seen men come near the refuge
but not make entrance. They came up, and fronted
the gate, and looked in, but passed on, and passed
down; and they will curse their folly through all eternity,
that they despised the only refuge. Oh! forget
everything else I have said, if you will but remember
that there is but one atonement, one sacrifice, one
justification, one faith, one hope, one Jesus, one
refuge. There is that old Christian. Many
a scar on his face tells where trouble lacerated him.
He has fought with wild beasts at Ephesus. He
has had enough misfortune to shadow his countenance
with perpetual despair. Yet he is full of hope.
Has he found any new elixir? “No,”
he says; “I have found Jesus the refuge.”
Christ is our only defense at the
last. John Holland, in his concluding moment,
swept his hand over the Bible, and said: “Come,
let us gather a few flowers from this garden.”
As it was even-time he said to his wife: “Have
you lighted the candles?” “No,” she
said; “we have not lighted the candles.”
“Then,” said he, “it must be the
brightness of the face of Jesus that I see.”
Ask that dying Christian woman the
source of her comfort. Why that supernatural
glow on the curtains of the death-chamber; and the
tossing out of one hand, as if to wave the triumph,
and the reaching up of the other, as if to take a
crown? Hosanna on the tongue. Glory beaming
from the forehead. Heaven in the eyes. Spirit
departing. Wings to bear it. Anthems to
charm it. Open the gates to receive it.
Hallelujah! Speak, dying Christian what
light do you see? What sounds do you hear?
The thin lips part. The pale hand is lifted.
She says: “Jesus the refuge!” Let
all in the death-chamber stop weeping now. Celebrate
the triumph. Take up a song. Clap your hands.
Shout it. Hallelujah! Hallelujah!
But this refuge will be of no worth
to you unless you lay hold of it. The time will
come when you will wish that you had done so.
It will come soon. At an unexpected moment it
will come. The castle bridge will be drawn up
and the fortress closed. When you see this discomfiture,
and look back, and look up at the storm gathering,
and the billowy darkness of death has rolled upon
the sheeted flash of the storm, you will discover
the utter desolation of those who are outside of the
refuge.
What you propose to do in this matter
you had better do right away. A mistake this
morning may never be corrected. Jesus, the Great
Captain of salvation, puts forth his wounded hand
to-day to cheer you on the race to heaven. If
you despise it, the ghastliest vision that will haunt
the eternal darkness of your soul will be the gaping,
bleeding wounds of the dying Redeemer.
Jesus is to be crucified to-day.
Think not of it as a day that is past. He comes
before you to-day weary and worn. Here is the
cross, and here is the victim. But there are
no nails, and there are no thorns, and there are no
hammers. Who will furnish these? A man out
yonder says: “I will furnish with my sins
the nails!” Now we have the cross, and the victim,
and the nails. But we have no thorns. Who
will furnish the thorns? A man in the audience
says: “With my sins I will furnish the
thorns!” Now we have the cross, the victim, the
nails, and the thorns. But we have no hammers.
Who will furnish the hammers? A voice in the
audience says: “My hard heart shall be the
hammer!” Everything is ready now. The crucifixion
goes out! See Jesus dying! “Behold
the Lamb of God, that taketh away the sins of the world.”