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SERMON XIII.

CHRIST'S WORDS SHALL NOT PASS AWAY.

LUKE XXI. 33.

"Heaven and earth shall pass away: but My words shall not pass away."

IN these words, my brethren, we have God our Saviour speaking to us. It is the voice of God. He could have been no mere man who could thus stand up amongst His fellows and say with truth that heaven and earth should sooner dissolve, and become as if they had never been, than that one of His words should fail. No, He who could say such a thing must be either God or a deceiver. He was no deceiver. There is truth stamped upon everything that He said. If ever words can commend themselves to our souls as true words, they are His words; we feel when we read them that He is "the Truth." There is a something about Him and His words that tells us that there is no deception in Him. I believe that none of us can read the words of Christ, or hear them, without a secret belief that they are true. We may put the words from us, we may refuse

to entertain them, but we have all the time a misgiving that we are doing so at our peril; and we have a secret hope that Christ will some day or other compel us to accept and obey His words.

Yes, my brethren, Christ is true, and says the truth, and there is no change in Him; and so these words are the words of One Who had authority to say them, and power to make them good to the world, and to the Church, and to you, and to me.

Let us, in humble dependence upon His assisting grace, consider how certain words that He has spoken respecting Himself, and His enemies, and His Church, have not passed away, but have been fulfilled; and then apply all this to other words of His which we require faith to lay hold of, to appropriate to ourselves, and to receive in their fulness.

Now, first of all, certain words that He said respecting Himself did not pass away, but were fulfilled in their season. He told His disciples what appeared to them a most unlikely thing. He told them that, though He was the long-expected Messiah, the God-sent prophet for whose coming they and their countrymen were all looking, yet that He should be put to the most shameful of deaths and after that rise from the dead. I shall not dwell upon the fulfilment of these

words, as it is an Easter Sunday rather than a Lent subject; you know, however, that, blessed be God, these words of His did not pass away. We are here this day in this place worshipping God through Him because His words came true. It was because Christ was as He had foretold-crucified and raised again—that we are here on a Sunday, the first day of the week, in a Christian church, praising and glorifying God for His love.

I will pass on to other words of His. Let us consider what our Lord was saying and doing when He said "Heaven and earth shall pass away, but My words shall not pass away." He was sitting with His disciples on the Mount of Olives, looking over Jerusalem, and its magnificent temple towering far above the rest of the city. The disciples had been saying to Him, "Master, look what stones and what great buildings are here!" And He had told them, "As for these things which ye behold, the days will come when there shall not be left one stone upon another which shall not be thrown down." He told them, too, that this city-the home of their religion, the place where their tribes went up to worship God at their solemn feasts should be "compassed with armies," and that "Jerusalem should be trodden down of the Gentiles, till the times of the Gentiles be fulfilled."

How unlikely was all this to come to pass ! no

thing more unlikely at the time could be imagined. First of all, let us take His words respecting the stones of the temple, that "one stone should not be left upon another." Think of the enormous size that some of these stones are said to have been by those who had seen them. There are, I have read somewhere, one or two yet remaining in the foundations that strike beholders with wonder as to how a people not very advanced in mechanical arts should have been able to put them into their places.

Many of those before me have, at some time or other, seen the cathedral church of this diocese, or some other one of our huge cathedrals. Conceive a man rising up and saying that, in about twenty years' time, that building which looks as if it were some hill that had been hewn out into a church, should be levelled with the ground! Christ said this very thing of the Temple of Jerusalem, and it came to pass. After the legions of Rome had subdued the devoted city and put its inhabitants to the sword, they were employed in destroying that goodly Temple so that no vestige of it might remain, and this by the express order of the Emperor, in order that the Jews should have no tie left to bind them to the spot where their fathers worshipped.

But this is not all that we have to say respecting this matter. If ever there was a building

which we should have said was more unlikely than another to be thus destroyed, it was this temple; for if ever there was a place that God had taken under His special protection it was this. It was the place where He had "set His name." It was the one only temple on the face of the earth where it was lawful to worship the One True God in the sacrificial way He had Himself appointed. If ever place was guarded by angel hands, it must have been this. But the worshippers had rejected Him to whom all its types and shadows bare witness, and so God a second time cast off His dwelling-place. You have heard of the supernatural signs and portents that heralded the destruction of this temple-there can be little doubt of their truth; they are related to us by those who did not believe in Our Lord and who had every reason for concealing them-how that just before the temple was taken there was heard through its courts the rustling of wings, and unearthly voices said one to another, "Let us depart hence," as if God was summoning away for ever the angelguards that had kept watch and ward in His earthly dwelling-place.

And then, too, as regards the Jewish people, who could have conjectured that they would again be scattered? They had kept themselves for many hundred years from the particular sin of idolatry, which had brought