BY THE LATE REV. JOHN LOVE, D.D.
(Continued from Vol. XIII., page 453.)
FOURTEENTH ADDRESS.
INHABITANTS of Otaheite, we come to you in the name of the Great God. “We are ambassadors for Jesus the anointed Saviour, the Man who is Jehovah, as though God did beseech you by us, we pray you, in Christ’s stead, be ye reconciled unto God. For He hath made Him to be sin for us who knew no sin, that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him.”
You see us men like yourselves, feeble, mortal, sinful beings; but you see not Him who is with us, Him who is within us, Him whose sweet heavenly influence breathes upon our souls. He is almighty: He is able to save and destroy; He sits worshipped in heaven by the numberless armies of angels; and under His iron rod the wicked spirits of hell tremble and howl for anguish. This great King of Glory now comes near to you, ye people of Otaheite; He bows down from His heavenly throne to speak to you; He invites you to be saved; and, which is wonderful indeed, He intreats, He beseeches you, His unworthy creatures, to accept the ransom, the atoning sacrifice, provided by Himself; He intreats you to receive pardon, reconciliation, and life everlasting, as the gift of His sovereign love. But think not, beloved friends, that the almighty Jehovah thus comes to intreat you, as though He needed anything from you, or as though you could do Him any good. He can send His gospel to other places of the earth and ocean: He can elsewhere create a people for Himself, who would rejoice with Him, though you, and all your islands, were sunk in the bottom of the sea. It is for your advantage, for your good, that the message of reconciliation comes to you from Jehovah. And happy shall you be, if, passing through the second birth by the power of Jehovah, you heartily accept His offers of peace and love. Then you will worship Jehovah in the beauty of holiness; you will seek for all His commandments, and obey them with great delight. You listened with pleasure while we told you of some of the ways of Jehovah, in which His people walk. Harken to us again, dear brethren and sisters, we will show you some other parts of His will, and in how pure, heavenly and pleasant a manner you shall live and die, if you become the children of our God, born of His Spirit, and reconciled by the blood of Jesus.
After you experience the new creation, when your eyes are opened to behold the dawning light of the morning, a sweet sensation of Divine goodness and power will enter into your minds, and you will make haste to converse with Jehovah our God, in meditation, prayer and singing. Then it will be sometimes as though another sun were rising to the inward view of your souls: “For the Lord God is a sun and shield; He will give grace and glory.” Tasting the sweetness of familiar, holy intercourse with Jehovah, you will say within yourselves, “How glorious will be that eternity which shall be employed in the perfect praises of this God! In the meanwhile, what shall we render to Him? how shall we please and glorify Him? what good things are within our reach, to be done in the course of this day?”
Then, you that are fathers and mothers will look at your little children. You will say, “Jehovah is the creator of these children: but He hath committed them to our trust. We have been taking care of their bodies, and have cherished them with the best nourishment we could find. But this is not enough. The brute creatures do as much as this for their young. These children are created for eternity: “they are in danger of perishing; they need the salvation of Jehovah. We will try to instruct them; we will bring them to Jesus, who hath saved us; we will shew them the sweetness of His love, and by our example will teach them His holy ways.” And if you, who are created again by the Holy Spirit, have your fathers and mothers near you, a new tenderness of affection, and reverence towards them, will possess your souls. When you look at them you will say, “Behold these venerable persons who, in the hands of the great God, have been the authors of our existence and comfort. They have exhausted their strength in caring for us, and shall we not endeavour to comfort them. They are approaching towards eternity, and shall we not speak to them of the love of Jesus, who saves those who come to him, whether young or old?”
When you walk abroad among your friends, neighbours and acquaintances, a glow of kindness and benevolence will be felt in your breasts. You will consider with yourselves how you may do good to every one you converse with. You will be grieved to think that any of them should perish for ever. You will respect every human being, even an infant lately born, because it bears the image of God, and will be capable of conversing with the great Jehovah, and may by His grace be raised to heaven.
Thus you will spend the day conversing with Jehovah, and doing good to your fellow-mortals, to the utmost of your ability. If at any time you are tempted to commit wickedness, or meet with any uneasiness or distress, the more you are tried and troubled, the more earnestly will you cry to Jehovah, and the more sweet will be your knowledge of His love and power. In the evening you will retire to rest, trusting in your God, and comforting yourselves with the prospect of going forth in your spirits to see the glorious face of Jehovah, when your bodies shall lie silent in death.
Such is the manner in which they live from day to day who have passed through the new birth of the immortal soul. But there is one thing which makes us afraid some of you will not be delivered from the wicked spirits. We are much grieved to observe the behaviour of young men and women who are not joined together in marriage. They dance, and run about among one another, and mingle together like the dogs and swine. They entirely forget that there are immortal spirits in their breasts, made in the image of God, and which must appear before Him as their Judge. They sport and laugh, and seem pleased and happy in doing these things. But while they embrace each other the holy angels of God look at them with disdain and pity, as quite unfit for heaven. And the eyes of Jehovah, which are in every place, are like a flame of fire against them, though they perceive it not.
Dear brethren and sisters, if we should behave in such a manner, immediately Jehovah would frown upon us, our souls within our bodies would become dark and miserable, and the anger of Jehovah would flash within our breasts like the forked lightning. Yea, we dare not entertain a secret desire of such impure pleasures, for Jesus hath said, “Whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her, hath committed adultery with her already in her heart.” We are told in the book of Jehovah of some cities, in a particular part of the earth, which gave themselves up without restraint to this wickedness. One morning, when the sun was just rising, there came down from heaven a flood of fire which in a moment consumed them; and the place where the cities stood was covered with a sulphureous lake, the stench of which was so disgusting that the very birds of the air could not fly over it.
But you wonder at this, and say to us, “Why is your God so very angry at gratifications of this sort? Are they not harmless and natural pleasures?” The great God Jehovah is a spirit. And He hath put a spirit in man. The inspiration of the Almighty giveth him understanding. He hath distinguished us from the beasts of the field, and He will maintain that distinction. He will not suffer the immortal spirit, which bears the image of His own spiritual nature, and which is capable of bearing the image of His holiness, to be degraded, and put under the feet of a body made of dust. But in these criminal gratifications there is still greater wickedness. There is in them rebellion against the authority of Jehovah; there is contempt of His infinite majesty. Animal pleasures are preferred to the immense excellencies of deity, and to those heavenly lights which are found in the presence of the glorious God. A corruptible body is esteemed as a god and set up, in the sinner’s heart, above Him in whom the angels of heaven delight and rejoice. Shall He not therefore be displeased? Shall He not punish such iniquity as this? Ah! ye people of Otaheite, if you once saw the excellency and beauty of Jehovah, you would be ashamed of comparing such sordid enjoyments with the pleasures of His holy fellowship.
But you now say, why are we formed, and why is there in our nature such a propensity to these gratifications? Observe attentively, we beseech you, what we are now going to say, and you will perceive that wickedness of this sort is peculiarly perverse and abominable. God, infinitely wise and good, designed to unite men together in family relations. He designed to form a friendship and union of the most tender, pleasant, and permanent kind, between the man and the woman. It was the will of Jehovah that, in the marriage union, the spirits as well as the bodies of the man and woman should mingle together, and that their intercourse should thus be dignified, and exalted above that of the beasts of the field. But men and women degrade themselves from this dignity, pollute the purity and honour of this union, and choose to range at large, like the irrational animals. But the peculiar hatefulness and poison of this wickedness is disclosed when you consider the increase of human beings—the birth of children. Who is the Creator of the child formed in the womb? The great God, Jehovah, the Almighty. What is the child that is formed? Is it a brute animal? No; it is an immortal spirit, created for eternity. Shall not man reverence and stand in awe of the Almighty Creator, in the formation of immortal creatures? Shall he be instrumental in this work of the Almighty with the stupor of a brute, with the rebellious insolence of a devil? Would not this be to attempt to spit in the face of the great Creator of the universe? It is so. Such wickedness is abominable.
This is the voice of your consciences within your breasts. Dear brethren and sisters, you must not defend such evils; you must repent of them. It is because you have forgotten God who formed you, that He hath permitted the vile spirits of hell so to degrade you and to prevail over you. Still you say, How can we part with such alluring delights? We know, dear friends, it is painful. But these are the words of Jesus: “If thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out and cast it from thee; if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell.” We have felt the power of such enticements, and, till we passed through the second birth, we knew not how to resist them. But now the dying love of Jesus is sweet to our souls; and we find it easy, and pleasant, to reject and undervalue such gratifications. And we declare to you the love and power of Jesus. He can deliver you from this bondage. And when He hath purified you, the lawful intercourse of marriage will be unspeakably more pleasant and joyful to you than all the madness and unhallowed liberty of the unclean. Instead of eagerly seeking to indulge our bodies, it is now our desire to overcome them; to learn to suffer affliction and bodily pain with patience; to prepare for death; and to be ready to sacrifice our lives to the honour of Jesus, as many thousands of the friends of Jesus have joyfully done. The unclean, as well as we, must die in a little time, and how miserable shall they be when the body is gone? But when we leave these bodies our spirits shall be joyful, like the angels, in the presence of Jehovah.
And now, dear brethren and sisters, having declared to you the holy will of Jehovah concerning these things, we trust in His almighty arm to deliver you from the mire of degrading lusts, and to persuade you to walk in the pleasant paths of wisdom and purity. And though you should be, at first, unwilling to yield to the word of Jehovah—yea, though some of you should rise up in rebellious fury against the counsel of the Most High—still we will not be discouraged. For, as we told you before, respecting your unwillingness to renounce pride and confidence in your own goodness, so now we tell you, in opposition to the enchantments of sensual affection, that it is the sovereign love of Jehovah towards unworthy sinners before the creation of the world that encourages us to hope for their recovery. And in the Book of our God many examples are recorded of sinners, once vile and rebellious, who were drawn to Jesus by almighty power. We will mention two of these examples. The one example is that of a woman who lived in the country where Jesus, the great Saviour, appeared. She had been much given to wickedness, and was become, on that account, vile and despicable, so that no person of decency would come near her. But she saw Jesus, the Saviour, and was inwardly enlightened to behold His excellency. Her heart was bowed down with a sense of her wickedness. She longed to come near Him, and coming to the house where He was among a number of people, she stood behind them, weeping, and began to wash His feet with tears, and did wipe them with the hairs of her head. He looked at her with compassion, and said, “Her sins, which are many, are forgiven, for she loved much.” The other instance of the conquering power of Jesus is that of a young man who was not given to wickedness, like the woman now mentioned, but admired by all around him for his seeming sanctity and goodness. But his heart was proud, and he trusted in his own goodness. He therefore hated Jesus and persecuted His humble followers. One day when he was rushing forward, filled with bloody fury against the friends of Jesus, the power of Jesus took hold of him. Then he saw his secret wickedness; he cried to Jesus for mercy, and becoming one of His chief friends, was afterwards employed to write a part of the Book of Jehovah. He is now in heaven with Jesus; and if the laws of the invisible world permitted it, he would now, we doubt not, come down from the skies, shining in glory, and would cry aloud thus, “O, ye people of Otaheite, hearken to the precious words of Jesus! Trust not in your own goodness; forsake your evil lusts; cast yourselves into the arms of the Son of God, who died for guilty rebels. He alone can save you. This is a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I was the chief!”
(To be Continued.)