Seeking for the help of the Lord,
I direct your prayerful attention to Psalm 106 and our text verse
8. Nevertheless, he saved them for
his name's sake, that he might make his mighty power to be known. Psalm 106 and verse 8. It is a blessing to us to read
in the New Testament that that which happened to them aforetime
was written for our learning, that we, through faith and patience,
may have that consolation, have that hope. And we know that in
the book of Hebrews, again and again, We are led back to the
children of Israel, to how they walked, how God walked, how God
dealt with them. And we know the apostle says
that they drank of that spiritual rock that was with them, and
that rock was Christ. And so Israel is a typical people
brought out of Egypt, which is typical of the world, brought
through the wilderness, which is typical of the life that God's
people walk in this world as strangers and pilgrims, and then
brought through Jordan, which is typical of death, into the
promised land, or through death and to heaven. Types are never
perfect and never follow through in every aspect, but in this
time, It is very clear through. Where it loses, of course, is
when they get into Canaan, then they have wars and then they
have fights, which, of course, in heaven will never be so. But nevertheless, we have the
Lord's guidance of the children of Israel and what we have recorded
as summed up here, how the children of Israel were. It is a black picture, often,
that is painted. All their sins, they are not
covered. They are shown, and is shown
how God dealt with them. And though there were those that
perished in the wilderness, Israel as a whole, as a nation, they
were brought, according to promise, safely to Canaan. And so with God's people, There
are those that appear to be church members or appear to be saved
in the church, but they fall away by the way. There are those
that are truly God's people, and through the way they have
many falls, many sins, many things that they go through. And the
Lord chastens them and deals with their inventions and takes
from them their idols. and brings them, though, safely
to heaven at last. We are warned and exhorted that
we be not like Israel, that we're unbelieving, that provoke the
Lord. There are many warnings for God's
people. But what we know for certain
is that where God has chosen a people, where he has brought
them out of this world, where he has released them through
the shed blood of His beloved Son, as typified in the Passover,
then He will most certainly bring them to heaven at last. Our Lord's blood was not shed
in vain, and where that blood is used, we might say, to set
free. If the Son shall make you free,
you shall be free indeed. And where the blood is used to
bring nigh, brought nigh by the blood of Christ. then soul most
certainly will endure unto the end. But thinking of the word,
that that which is written was written for our learning. And
here we have a summary, a very brief summary over of the history
of Israel. It's good for us to remember
the way that we've walked as well. They were exhorted to in
Deuteronomy, as yet remember all the way that the Lord thy
God had led thee these 40 years in the wilderness to try thee,
to prove thee, to know what was in thine heart, whether thou
would serve me or no. And so we also are exhorted to
not forget the Lord's works and what he's done for us. It's often
struck me when you have characters like Jephthah, and he's able
to speak to the nations around and go back 400 years and relate
the history of how they came by their land, how the Lord gave
it to them, and how they were in it by right. And it strikes
me how much that he knew of that history. I wonder how much history
of this land that we know, how much have we retained also of
our own lives or perhaps of our fathers, or grandfathers, what
they walked, how they walked, what they did. Those things,
sometimes we forget them, but we are not to forget. Stephen,
when he was dying, the first Christian martyr, he was able
to rehearse right back the Lord's dealings with Israel. And if
we don't remember the past, we end up repeating the mistakes
of the past as well. and the same errors come out
again and again. Well, here is the inspired, infallible
Word of God, and that which is recorded for us and for our benefit. And our text says, Nevertheless
He saved them for His name's sake, that He might make His
mighty power to be known. So I want to look, with the Lord's
help, firstly, at the nevertheless. That is, the dark background
on which the Lord's work is seen. And then secondly, He saved them
for His name's sake. The reason He gives that He saved
them, not for any good in them, but for His name's sake. And
then lastly, thirdly, the purpose for which he saved them, that
he might make his mighty power to be known. So firstly there
is the dark background. If we were going to paint a picture
using light or bright colours, Then we might see fit to do a
background first that was a dark one. I always remember driving
out from Frankston in Australia and seeing the clouds so very,
very black over the road. And the Lord put in that black
cloud a rainbow. I've never seen one so bright,
so lovely. And it was against the black
background. that you could see it so clearly. And so it is that God works in
this way as well. And we are to remember this because
when we think of right at the very beginning of the word of
God, we have a black background. We have our first parents, they
fell, they sinned, they incurred the wrath of God, the judgment
of God upon them and upon all their future race. You could
not find a more black background. We know the promises that immediately
followed. We know what went on from there. But at that point, man is under
the sentence of death. Sin entered into the world, and
death by sin. At that point, you might say
that all are under condemnation, as it is now. The law was given
that sin might abound. that all the world might become
guilty before God. Before ever God starts to work
in a personal way in salvation, the background is painted first. The law says Paul is our schoolmaster
unto Christ. It is that there must be cut
away a help in self. When Paul wrote to the Romans
in chapter 10, He sees the people that had not that black background. They thought that like he, when
he was a Pharisee, that they were having a zeal for God, but
not according to knowledge. They were going about to establish
their own righteousness. They hadn't had that taken away
first. And this is the work of God to
take away in the eyes of his people their own righteousness,
their own goodness. We are born under the covenant
of works and we lean always to works. Always we want to earn
our way to heaven. We want it to be for our sake. We want it to be something of
which we gain the praise. But God will make that black
first in the Song of Solomon. We have the testimony of the
spouse, I am blank, but come thee. It will always follow on
that wherever the Lord shows a malady, he will show the remedy. But there is needing first of
that which is a dark background. And he doesn't just follow at
the beginning, in the conversion of God's people. It is at the
beginning, in lesser or greater measure, enough so that a person
has need of Christ and has no trust in themselves. It's one
thing just to read about sin, and another thing to actually
feel it, to have sentiments about it, but to feel it working within,
and its power within, so that you could say with the Apostle
Paul, I would do good, but evil is present with me. The good
that I would, I do not. The evil that I would not, that
I do. A wretched man that I am. Who
shall deliver me from this body of death? And to feel the strength
and power of sin, that it has the mastery over, it is more
than we can deal with, we cannot push it down, we cannot overcome
it, no resolutions, no efforts of our own, always we're brought
in guilty. Whoso offendeth in one point
is guilty in all. Imagine if we were able to fulfill
the law and we fulfilled it and thought we'd completely done
everything and then the Lord showed, One thing that we'd failed
in, and that brought everything else undone, was a young man
came to the Lord on his days on earth, and he had that very
same experience. Our Lord answered him when he
wanted to know what good thing he should do to inherit eternal
life. And he pointed him to the commandments,
and he said, all these I've kept from my youth on. But then the
Lord pointed him to another thing. He said, go, sell all that thou
hast, give to the poor, and come, follow me, and thou shalt have
treasure in heaven. And he went away sorrowful, for
he had great riches. And our Lord's answer was, how
hardly shall they that have riches or trust in riches inherit eternal
life. And so it is a vital thing That
sin, as the hymn writer says, sins, filth and guilt, perceived
and felt, make known God's great salvation. We might have two
people and they both say we've been healed of some illness. And one of them, if you but knew
it, never really had it in the first place. They're nice and
healthy now. The other one really did have
it. And the Lord worked a wonderful cure, and they're healthy and
strong. One was really a miracle. The
other one, well, it was just in word, but nothing really had
been done. And so with what God does for
a sinner, he makes them truly so that What he does, especially
to that person, is really known as his work. But very often it
is seen by others as well. With the children of Israel,
all what God did with them was in the full light of Egypt, of
the Canaanites, all the other nations, they could see all what
God was doing with them. Sometimes it was that the other
nations were able to clearly say that what is happening to
you is because you have forsaken the true and living God. God
is chastising and dealing with you. But the children of Israel,
they were to know. They were to know the Lord's
dealings with them. And you cannot but marvel when
we read a psalm like this, how long-suffering the Lord was. have ye forebear with them. The
children of Israel is a picture of us, of our departings, of
our evil heart. Even those who have been called,
have quickened, have been brought out of the Egypt of this world.
The Hemrider says we cannot promise future good to bring. And that
evil heart is there and it just needs the right A situation like
it was with David, staying at home, not going to war, and then
left to adultery and murder to bring these things to light.
And we are to learn from this. We are to be warned from it,
concerning our sin, our propensity to evil. We are no better, we
cannot keep ourselves, but we are exhorted to pay heed to the
word of God, and to consider our ways, and to not trust our
own heart, but trust in the Lord. But when we are overtaken by
sin, then we are not to despair, we are to remember the Lord. Not to say like Israel at one
time, there is no hope, but to say there is hope. And if the
devil says there is no hope, you tell him, well, look at the
black background, of, in the word of God, how the Lord blessed
his people. We think of individual people
and how the Lord blessed them. You think of the woman at the
well of St Mary, her five husbands, and he whom she had was not her
husband. The Lord blessed her. We think
of Zacchaeus, the tax collector, and how the Lord blessed him
and must needs come to his house. We think of Mary Magdalene, out
of whom he cast seven devils. We think of Rahab, who was a
harlot. We think of those strange characters
like Samson, who it is said was a man of faith. And how the Lord
blessed these people in spite of themselves. Jacob, the supplanter,
the one who deceived his father and stole the blessing, that
Jacob, he was blessed, he was favoured. And each of them we
can find those things of which there is a black background first,
before then the Lord's work is shown. And so right at the beginning
of the Word of God, we have sin at its root cause, and the need
for the Lord to deliver and save from sin. And so we have the
nevertheless, the dark background on which the Lord's work is seen.
And may this verse point raise up a who can tell, a hope for
us, and a basis of not despairing, but looking for the Lord to work. When we fall down, like in Psalm
107, the next Psalm, and there's none to help, and then to cry
unto the Lord, and the Lord delivers, and at the end of that Psalm,
We are told this, who so is wise and will observe these things,
even they shall understand the loving kindness of the Lord. How much in the lives of God's
people, the dark black backgrounds, Saul of Tarsus persecuting the
people of God, putting them into prison. John Newton, we sung
his hymn just now in our middle hymn, slave trader. hating the things of God, running
away from God. Many of the Lord's dear people
have been brought back from very much open sin and waste. And this is then the Lord's doing,
the Lord's sovereignty. The Lord laying a foundation
that no flesh might glory in His presence. That it's not man,
but God that gets the glory. So why does the Lord save? In our second point, we read
in our text, He saved them for His name's sake. The Lord has a vested interest,
you might say, in saving His people. is undertaken to save them who
go back beyond, before the foundation of the world. Thine they were,
thou gavest them thee, chosen in him before the foundation
of the world, the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world. If there is not a people saved,
then that means the people given by the Father to the Son have
perished. That means that the blood that
was shed as the lamb slain from the foundation of the world was
to have no avail. That means that the prepared
place, I go to prepare a place for you in John 14, 1, shall
be empty. And even if one soul is left
behind, that then does rob God of His glory. It has pulled his
name down, as instead of being a name which is above every name,
that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, it's a name
that cannot be trusted. But the blessing is for his name's
sake, because God's people are his inheritance. He is their
inheritance. The Levites were not allowed
any land, allotted them in Canaan, because God was their portion. And we have the Lord as his people's
portion. And so he has a vested interest. We have in Ephesians, the Lord
set forth as the bridegroom, and his church is the bride.
And he is sanctifying her, washing her, cleansing her, making her
ready for himself. So then it is for his benefit
and his blessing that she is being prepared for himself. This people have I formed for
myself, they shall show forth my praise. The greater the work,
the greater the glory. If someone was to say to two
men, Here you build a house and one is given a whole lot of beautiful
timber and bricks and the other one is given a whole lot of rubble
and broken timbers and rubbish from the rubbish heap. And afterwards
you looked at both those houses and they both looked nice houses. The one that had done the most
wonderful work was to have made a house out of such inferior
materials, not the one that made it out of the beautiful materials.
But God takes those that are lost and ruined in the fall.
He takes those that have no hope in themselves. O Israel, thou
hast destroyed thyself, but in me is thy help found. And he
does this for his name's sake, that he might have the honour
and the glory for it. We have a beautiful chapter in
Ezekiel 36, where the Lord gives promise of what he would do for
his people. And throughout that chapter,
we have several times where the Lord is stating why he is doing
this for his people. He says, I will sprinkle clean
water upon you. You shall be clean from all your
filthiness. From all your idols will I cleanse
you. A new heart also will I give
you, and a new spirit will I put within you, and I will take away
the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you a heart of
flesh, and I will put my spirit within you and cause you to walk
in my statutes, and you shall keep my judgments and do them."
And he says all of these things. Before he rehearses that, he
says, I had pity for mine holy name, which the house of Israel
had profaned among the heathen whither they went. Therefore
say unto the house of Israel, thus saith the Lord God, I do
not this for your sakes, O house of Israel, but for mine holy
name's sake. which ye have profaned among
the heathen, whither ye went. And then later on, we have further
in verse 32, Not for your sakes do I this, saith the Lord God,
be it known unto you, be ashamed and confounded for your own ways,
O house of Israel. And so each time it was for the
Lord's sake. When they made a golden calf
in the wilderness, then God said that he would destroy them and
make of Moses another nation. But Moses pleaded and said, within
the other nations, they will say that because he could not
bring them into Canaan, therefore he destroyed them in the wilderness. And what shalt thou do for thy
great name's sake? And several times, that that
plea was very effectual and the Lord chastened them but didn't
cast them away. Because it is for the faithfulness
of God, it is for his honour and glory that is at stake to
save his people. Where it is stated, he which
hath begun a good work in you will perform it unto the day
of Jesus Christ. He will not forsake the work
of his own hands. This is for His namesake. Sometimes
you might not realise, perhaps you children don't, when your
parents pray, when you pray, and when you finish your prayers,
you say, for Christ's sake, or for His namesake. And it's based
upon this truth. We are not saying and asking
things for our namesake, or for because we deserve them, or we've
been good today, therefore do this. It is for the Lord's sake,
for His namesake, for His honour and glory that we're basing our
pleas and our askings. But that also is a great encouragement
for us when we have these portions to know that our sin is not going
to be a reason when we use that plea for the Lord to take away
His mercies from us. Remember, the Lord came to save
his people from their sins. God's people have sins. They
are sinners, and he has come to save them, deliver them from
the power and dominion of sin here, and to save them eternally. The more what he does, it puts
the crown on his head. It glorifies his name. We are
not to sin that grace might abound, deliberately doing evil, We've
only got to look at what God's children have gone through when
they have done evil, when the Lord chastened them. Jacob deceived
his father once. Laban deceived Jacob ten times,
and then Jacob's children deceived him concerning Joseph, making
out he'd been killed by a wild beast, and he thought Joseph
was dead for 22 years. And so you wouldn't think, well,
we're going to imitate Jacob. It doesn't matter if we deceive
our father. Well, Jacob would say, no, no,
no, don't do that. Don't do that. Look at what I
reap from that. That which we sow, we also reap. And you can think of David. You
say, well, David got away with adultery and murder. And David
would say, yes, but don't follow me, because the sword did not
depart from my house. I had absolute power. Rise up,
I had my son Amnon killed. I had trouble all my days. Don't imitate me. Don't follow
my way. Yes, the Lord saved his people,
but he chastened them and he corrected them. And we have to
remember this, that sin is a bitter and an evil thing. But if we
confess our sins, he's faithful and just to forgive us our sins
and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. 1 John 1 verse 9. The Lord is faithful to his name's
sake. His name shall be called Jesus,
for he shall save his people from their sins. And so dear
friends, may we, in looking for salvation, asking the Lord for
salvation, May we not have our sins rise up as something to
keep us from the Lord, but drive us to Him. Not bring us to despair,
but to bring us to hope. Bring us to confession and bring
us to Him. And remembering that how the
Lord saves is not for our duties or deserts, but of His own abounding
grace. He works salvation in our hearts,
and forms a people for his praise. This people have I formed for
myself, they shall show forth my praise. Well onto then, lastly,
the purpose for which he saved. He told in our text that he might
make his mighty power to be known. We read concerning Pharaoh, for
this purpose have I raised the arm, to show my power, my might
in thee. And that is why the Lord said
to Moses that he would harden Pharaoh's heart and would not
let them go, so that he multiplied his signs and his wonders in
Egypt. He also showed that all of those
signs, without the shedding of blood, did not release the children
of Israel from Egypt. Without the shedding of blood,
there is no remission. And we ought to remember that
in the wonderful signs in Egypt, God's mighty power, it needed
the blood. When the blood was shed, then
they were brought out of Egypt. Nothing, and we are to learn
this as poor sinners, nothing. judgments nor mercies, air can
sway, the roving heart to wisdom's way. A heart's a heart is only
the precious blood of Christ that can soften hard hearts.
It's only the blood that will release, that will set free.
That is God's decree. When I see the blood, I will
pass over you. It is Christ that died. The Lord's
dealings with his people centre in what he has done at Calvary,
and their deliverances, their saving, right through their life,
always is a way of redemption. In Psalm 25, at the end of Psalm
25, redeem Israel, O God, out of all his troubles. Set them
free by payment of a price. We might be looking at our troubles,
our sins, and think, well, there's some other way we can get out
of these. If the Lord shows mercy to us,
it's always through blood. There's always a cost. The Lord
is the saviour of all men, especially of them that believe. If there
hadn't have been promise of a saviour, the world would have ended with
Adam. But with the promise of the saviour, those countless
millions that say these Christians, we hate them, we don't want them
around, they annoy us, we could get along better without them.
When the Lord gathers his people, when the last one is called by
grace, there's no more need to this world. The Lord will draw
it to a close. The only reason why the world
exists is for the people of God. And all what he does with the
nations is doing it for the good of his people. His people are
not just bystanders. They're the central part of God's
creation. They're what God is doing. All
he is doing is for them. He's moving, he uses Nebuchadnezzar
as his servant for his people to chasten them. And he used
Pharaoh, and it was to show forth his mighty power. You've often
used this illustration. In this chapel, we've got power,
we've got electricity. But it's only when we use the
lights, when we use the heaters, when we use the amplifiers, when
something is connected to that power, that that power is seen. Otherwise there's no evidence
of it whatsoever. And so with our God, and we say
it reverently, if He had remained in eternity with no creation,
there's nothing to show forth God's mighty power. But He creates
the worlds, He creates the sun, the moon, and the stars, and
we see the power, and we see the power of the sun, we feel
its rays, We see God's creation, and then there's the work of
his redemption in sinners. And to see that power, to see
a soul changed into a Paul, to see those that are transformed,
whose lives are changed. When Paul wrote to the Ephesians,
he wanted to tell them what power had been wrought in them to make
them a believer. And he said it is the same power
that God used in raising Christ from the dead as to raise them
from spiritual death to spiritual life. The same almighty power. We can easily overlook that grace
is a miracle of grace. My mother, when she was dying,
when she was blessed, that is what she testified, I'm a miracle
of grace. That was her dying testimony. And she sought and begged and
pleaded for the Lord's blessing, and he came and he blessed her.
But that was her assessment of it, God's power, God's work for
his name's sake, working those miracles. And so the purpose
for which he saved and saves for his name's sake is to make
his mighty power known, to actually see it. We think of the children
of Israel, how soon they saw as they left Egypt, you see the
Red Sea divided and they go through the Red Sea. They had demonstrations
of it at Mount Sinai, where the whole mountain was shaking and
quaking and smoking. They saw it again with the River
Jordan stopped up and passing over They saw it again with Jericho,
brought down into ruins. God's mighty power. We're told
at the end of the world that the Lord shall come with glory,
with great power in the clouds of heaven. There shall be signs
in the sun and the moon, men's hearts failing them for fear
of those things coming upon the earth. The power of the Lord,
a mighty power. When our Lord died, when He yielded
up His breath, the rocks rent, the centurion said, truly this
was the Son of God. There had been the three hours
of darkness upon the earth. The Lord makes known His power,
and the reason why He saves His people is to make known this
power, that which the law could not do. in that it was weak through
the flesh. God sending his own son in the
likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, condemned sin in the
flesh. It is the power of God wrought
through the Lord Jesus Christ. It was said of Mary when she
said, how can this thing be? How can I have this son born? The power of God shall overshadow
thee. May we know something of the
power of God, the strength of God's covenant, and what he does
for his name's sake, and what he is able to do, exceeding far
abundantly above all that we can ask or think. Abraham had
to know it, childless, old, a hundred years age. Is there anything
too hard for the Lord? The Lord will work what he does
and bring it to pass, so it was with Hannah and Elizabeth, so
it is with his people, again and again brought down to the
end of their own strength and ability, and then God brings
forth his power. The better thing, if we can see
in our own lives, that we, like the Ephesians, have made subject
to the almighty power of God, and that we might not despair
when we still see the power of sin. God is greater than our
heart. He's greater than sin. We have
one mightier than all the waves of the sea and temptation and
storms. In a moment, like on the sea,
the Lord can rise up and still the winds and the waves with
the word. And he's able to do that. When
we think of the springtime and all of the trees they bring forth,
their life and their spring forth, well, such power, yet no noise,
no commotion. But you try and stop it. The
amount of times I've tried weeding this path outside the chapel,
the weeds, they come through the tarmac. They push the tarmac
up. And no noise, no commotion. at God's creation and what He
is doing. And so that still small voice,
that which Elijah heard, that word the Lord commands His word,
is still the same. His power is still the same,
the reason why He saves is still the same, for His name's saying,
and the purpose that He saves, to show forth His mighty power,
that is still the same. May this be an encouragement
to us, a strength to us in the way. Nevertheless, he saved them
for his name's sake, that he might make his mighty power to
be known. What are we in and the place
that we're going through? And the Lord intends to do this
very same thing, to make his mighty power to be known. May the Lord add his blessing.
Amen.