GOD saw His ancient people Israel languishing in Egypt, the land of bondage, and He pitied their misery and distress, and sent His messenger to them, promising them deliverance from their bonds, and rest in a land flowing with milk and honey. After a season, the time came when Israel was delivered from Egyptian slavery, even as the Lord had promised, and they became pilgrims journeying to a better land. They had left behind their Egyptian toil—slaves to Pharaoh again they never were—but their pilgrimage became a test to them, and the wilderness through which they journeyed proved to them a path as difficult to tread as they had found the toil of Egypt difficult to endure.
In Israel thus journeying to the promised land we have a picture of such as bear the name of Christians, who have set out to the heavenly country, and who are, in a spiritual sense, pilgrims through the wilderness of this world. In our land alone there are more than six hundred thousand of such—the number of the men of Israel who left Egypt—for churches, and chapels, and places of worship, possess in them a large host of professors of Christianity who avow themselves as on the way to heaven. The Scripture does not overlook this host, as the third and fourth chapters of the Epistle to the Hebrews indicate. But how will the wilderness of this world test them? What shall be the end?
A man may be delivered from heathenism or gross wickedness, and become a professing Christian, and yet never be saved in the end. A child may be brought up in the Christian faith, grow up to maturity, live a moral life, and die at an old age, respected in his religious circle, without finding Christ for himself. What will the end of the professors of Christianity be? Will it be heaven? In plain words, a man may have so much of the Christian religion as shall make him a respectable and honorable member of a Christian community, and yet fail altogether of having Christ in his heart.
“Unto the end” ―do we read twice in Heb. 3. How many make a fair start, how few labor on “unto the end.” How many begin with deep impressions, in how few are the impressions daily deepened. How many begin with their faces to the better country, how few have their faces brighter with the love of God and the joys at His right hand, as year by year of their wilderness course rolls by. “Unto the end” ― “if we hold fast the confidence and the rejoicing of the hope firm unto the end.”
We remember well the time when, in years gone by, readers of this magazine, being then children, told us of their desires for Jesus and for God. Those children are now grown up to be men and women. Have they forgotten the early days of their lives? Alas, too many of them are now heart and soul in the world-professing Christians though they be. They cannot say, “We hold the beginning of our confidence steadfast unto the end.”
“Today, if ye will hear His voice, harden not your hearts.” Let not the pleasures of the world, or the deceitfulness of sin, so affect your heart that His word shall not be heard. Sin is so deceitful, that when we read the Bible, hear sermons, or are addressed by our own consciences, we have the way of hearing so much or so little as pleases ourselves, and not of hearing just what God says. “None are so deaf as those who won’t hear.” It is the wish not to hear that keeps so many insensible to God’s call. If ye will hear His voice, harden not your heart―for a heart subject to God is the best ability for hearing His word.
Professing Christian, inquire of yourself what will be the end of your present course. Be in earnest with yourself, for to profess and yet not to possess Christ, is but trifling with His Name.
The word preached to Israel, telling then of a land of milk and honey, did not profit those who reached not Canaan; and the reason is, that word was not mixed with faith in those who heard it. Thus is it with the gospel today, which is a sound familiar to thousands, but avails for none who hear it and yet believe not. Sad beyond expression will be the lot of those who, having heard of the good things to come, yet fail of them, and receive them not. What will the bitterness of those be who have been told of God’s love and of Christ’s sacrifice, of free salvation and everlasting peace, and who yet have mixed faith with none of these things?
Most earnestly, beloved readers, who are professors of Christ’s Name, do we plead with you to make sure of the reality. “Today, if ye will hear His voice, harden not your hearts.”