"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 Pyrenees; 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."