“He that taketh warning shall deliver his soul.” — Ezekiel 33 C.
THIRTEEN young men sat down to supper one evening not long ago, and their feasting and merriment went to such lengths that even death became a subject of joke. “One of us will die tonight, we are thirteen;” and pointing to the youngest in their midst, a youth of eighteen, they said, “It will be you.”
The party broke up, and three of them, including this youth, who were waiters in an hotel, turned their steps towards the lake, and got into a boat which was only intended to carry one person. It was near midnight, and no one was at hand to warn them of the risk they were running. Did they remember their joke? We cannot tell. When morning dawned they were missing from their posts; and the boat, bottom upwards, told its own tale, with one body which was washed ashore. Those of the two others were recovered later in the day, — but where were their souls?
“There shall be a resurrection of the dead, both of the just and of the unjust;” and that is what makes death such a solemn thing, and not one to be spoken of carelessly. Would it not have solemnized you, had you been staying in that hotel, to awake in the morning and find that three of its inmates had passed into eternity?
Perhaps you say, “We are tired of being told of sudden deaths;” but remember that your turn may come to be called into the presence of “God the Judge of all.” The Apostle Paul says, “Knowing therefore the terror of the Lord, we persuade men” (2 Cor. 5:11); and can you wonder that we, who live eighteen hundred years later, seek to use every means we can to persuade you! A young man, who was an unbeliever, once said to me, “If I believed what you believe, I would speak to everyone I came in contact with, and even walk up and down the streets with a placard on my back to warn people of their danger.”
Noah warned the people during one hundred and twenty years that the Flood was coming. They did not believe him, and then it came, and “destroyed them all.” God can destroy you in one moment, if it please Him; and it is folly, nay madness, to set up your own thoughts against His. “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.”
But, dear reader, it is a blessed thing to be sheltered, come what may, in the arms of Christ — those arms that were stretched out on the cross for us, when He died, “the Just for the unjust.”
“In the refuge God provided —
Though the world’s destruction lowers —
We are safe, — to Christ confided,
Everlasting life is ours.”
C. A. W.