July 19

He that is our God is the God of salvation; and unto God the Lord belong the issues from death. - Psalms 68:20.

IT is thus the church makes her boast in the Lord, and calls him the God of salvation; and so he is in every sense of the word; for every kind of deliverance is from him. If we have been raised from a bed of sickness and suffering, if we have been delivered from wicked and unreasonable men, if we have escaped fires and floods, it is to be ascribed alone to him to whom belong the issues from death. He is the “preserver of men,” and “in him we live, move, and have our being.” And none of these deliverances should be overlooked by us.

There is a deliverance emphatically in the Scriptures called “salvation,” “a great salvation;” “so great a salvation;” “an everlasting salvation;” a “deliverance from the wrath to come,” from the power of darkness, from the tyranny of the world, from the slavery of sin, from all its remains and consequences; “salvation with eternal glory.” And of this salvation the purpose, the plan, the execution, the application, and the consummation are of God and of grace, according to the language of the Apostle, “for by grace are ye saved through faith.”

The church also exults in God’s relation to them. “He that is our God.” This every Christian can join in expressing. A child of God may be poor, but, “having nothing,” may yet possess all things; he may have no portion in this world, but he has a portion in God. Yea, and God is his portion. He can therefore say, with Jeremiah, “The Lord is my portion, saith my soul, therefore will I hope in him.” And every Christian has a much greater proprietary in God than he has in anything else. Indeed, there is nothing else that is his own; neither his substance, nor his time, nor his children, nor his body, nor his soul is his own, but God is his own. And he may say, “God, even our own God, shall bless us. “As he is his really, so is he eternally and unchangeably his, and surviving all other dissolutions. “This God,” says the church, “is our God for ever and ever; he will be our guide even unto death.”

The relation between God and his people is such as to authorize us to call him ours, and results from two things: donation on his side, by which in the covenant of grace he makes himself known to his people, saying, “I am thine, and all that I have is thine; and by dedication on our side, giving ourselves and submitting ourselves unto God, saying, “Lord, I am thine, save me; and fully surrendering ourselves up unto him to be at his disposal, inquiring, “What wilt thou have me to do?” Thus, in the prophecy of Zechariah, God says, “I will bring the third parts through the fire, and will refine them as silver is refined, and will try them as gold is tried. They shall call on my name and I will hear them. I will say, It is my people, and they shall say, The Lord is my God.”

God chooses them and they choose him. God loves them and they love him. God takes pleasure in them, and they rejoice and glory in him. The latter indeed is the effect of the former, and therefore it becomes the evidence, and we are to judge of the one by the other.