The Lord has power at this or any moment to fulfill His sentence. What power have you to resist it? Who is there that can help you to withstand Him? You are utterly in His hands, you cannot escape from His prison. If you climbed up to Heaven He is there. If you dove to Hell He is there. The whole universe is but one great prison for an enemy of God. You cannot escape Him—neither can you resist Him. If your bones were granite and your heart were steel, His fires would melt down your spirit. Against Him you can no more stand than the chaff against the fire or the dust against the whirlwind. O that you would feel this and desist from your insane rebellion! Remember, there is no promise given to you that He will not execute the sentence of His wrath this very day. You have no warrant either from His Word or from His angels to assure you that God has suspended the sentence even for the next hour. You are living by His forbearance, spared by the Divine Sovereignty. Some rave against Sovereignty, but in this case it is not Justice that spares you, it is the mere will of God that for awhile keeps you out of Hell. You tell me that nothing endangers your life at this moment—how do you know that? The arrows of death often fly imperceptibly. I have stood in congregations preaching on two occasions when the unseen darts of death struck one of my hearers, so that one died on each occasion while listening to the Word of the Gospel. God needs no miracle to put His sentence into execution at this moment. He need not disturb the natural order of affairs for you to die instantly. And if He so willed it, your soul’s destruction would, without the slightest effort on His part, take place at this very moment, even where you are. Remember with deep concern that God is angry with you right now. This statement is no invention of mine—it is written by the pen of Inspiration that, “God is angry with the wicked every day. If he turns not He will whet His sword. He has bent His bow, and made it ready.” God is more angry with some of you than He is with some in Hell. Are you startled by the assertion? “It shall be more tolerable for Sodom and Gomorrah in the Day of Judgment than for you.” The sins you have already committed are greater than those of Sodom and Gomorrah, and the anger is in proportion to the guilt. An angry God holds you over the gulf of Hell. Justice demands that you fall into it—and it is nothing but His merciful will that keeps you out of it. He has but to will it and you who are condemned already would be forever where the worm dies not and the fire is not quenched, before next time the clock shall tick. Up to this time, let me remind you, you have done nothing to appease the Divine wrath. You have gone on sinning. Or if you tell me you have reformed, that you have thought of these things, that you have prayed—do you think that such things will remove the Divine wrath? The Lord has told you that the only way of salvation is to believe in Jesus, but you try to find another. Do you think that such conduct will please Him, that such a procedure will make Him less angry with you? You insult His Son when you suppose that you can save yourself by your tears and prayers—will this turn away the Lord’s anger? When you imagine that your Church attendance and Chapel attendance will save you, you set a low estimate upon what Jesus did. You do despite to the Cross as long as you remain Unbelievers. You say, “We are doing what we can.” You are doing nothing, I tell you, that can appease the anger of God! You are rather, by these very actions of yours, which you think to be good, setting up in opposition to Him an Antichrist upon which He will look with abhorrence. He says He will save by Christ, and no way else.
And so long as you seek another way, you, as it were, spit into the very face of the Only Begotten by the insolence of your self-righteousness. Meanwhile, let me remind you that God’s wrath, though it comes not on you yet, is like a stream that is dammed up. Every moment it gathers force—if it bursts not the dyke—yet every hour is swelling. Each day and each moment of each day in which you remain an Unbeliever, you are treasuring up wrath against the Day of Wrath when the measure of your iniquity is full. How earnestly would I persuade you to escape from condemnation! If you dream that to be condemned of God is a trifle, undeceive your souls, for those who have passed where the sentence is executed, could they come back to you, need not tell the tale of woe, the very sight of them would convince you that to be lost is an awful thing! On their heads must fall the wrath of God, who, by softening down the punishment, become the means of hardening sinners in their sins. It is not within the power of thought to conceive what God’s wrath is. No language, even though it should make both ears tingle, can ever fully express it. I am not one of those who would so delude your poor souls, O Unbelievers, as to make you think it a light thing to fall into the hands of the living God. O turn, turn, turn! Why will you die? Why will you reject Him whom you have such reasons to receive? Concerning whom His very Person is the best argument for love? The Christ of God must be worthy of our hearts’ affections—His very errand on earth, as it seems to me, would, if we were not mad, ensure our confidence. For He came to SAVE, to PARDON, to pass by the sin of the past! Oh, why do you stand out against Him, and in this way pull down upon your heads the wrath of an angry God?
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