'The Lord's portion is His people; Jacob is the lot of His
inheritance.'--DEUT, xxxii.9.
'Jesus Christ (Who) gave Himself for us, that He might redeem us from
all iniquity, and purify unto Himself a peculiar people.'--TITUS ii. 14.
I choose these two texts because they together present us with the
other side of the thought to that which I have elsewhere considered,
that man's true treasure is in God. That great axiom of the religious
consciousness, which pervades the whole of Scripture, is rapturously
expressed in many a psalm, and never more assuredly than in that one
which struggles up from the miry clay in which the Psalmist's 'steps
had well-nigh slipped' and soars and sings thus: 'The Lord is the
portion of my inheritance and of my cup; Thou maintainest my lot,' 'The
lines are fallen unto me in pleasant places; yea, I have a goodly
heritage.'
You observe the correspondence between these words and those of my
first text: 'The Lord's portion is His people; Jacob is the lot of His
inheritance.' The correspondence in the original is not quite so marked
as it is in our Authorised Version, but still the idea in the two
passages is the same. Now it is plain that persons can possess persons
only by love, sympathy, and communion. From that it follows that the
possession must be mutual; or, in other words, that only he can say
'Thou art mine' who can say 'I am Thine.' And so to possess God, and to
be possessed by God, are but two ways of putting the same fact. 'The
Lord is the portion of His people, and the Lord's portion is His
people,' are only two ways of stating the same truth.
Then my second text clearly quotes the well-known utterance that lies
at the foundation of the national life of Israel: 'Ye shall be unto Me
a peculiar treasure above all people,' and claims that privilege, like
all Israel's privileges, for the Christian Church. In like manner Peter
(1 Pet. ii. 9) quotes the same words, 'a peculiar people,' as properly
applying to Christians. I need scarcely remind you that 'peculiar' here
is used in its proper original sense of belonging to, or, as the
Revised Version gives it, 'a people for God's own possession' and has
no trace of the modern signification of 'singular.' Similarly we find
Paul in his Epistle to the Ephesians giving both sides of the idea of
the inheritance in intentional juxtaposition, when he speaks (i. 14) of
the 'earnest of our inheritance ... unto the redemption of God's own
possession.' In the words before us we have the same idea; and this
text besides tells us how Christ, the Revealer of God, wins men for
Himself, and what manner of men they must be whom He counts as His.
Therefore there are, as I take it, three things to be spoken about now.
First, God has a special ownership in some people. Second, God owns
these people because He has given Himself to them. Third, God
possesses, and is possessed by, His inheritance, that He may give and
receive services of love. Or, in briefer words, I have to speak about
this wonderful thought of a special divine ownership, what it rests
upon, and what it involves.