From the MLJ Archive

Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones: I would like to call your attention this evening to the words found in Paul's Epistle to the Romans in chapter 11 from verse 7 to verse 10. "What then? Israel hath not obtained that which he seeketh for; but the election hath obtained it, and the rest were blinded (according as it is written, God hath given them the spirit of slumber, eyes that they should not see, and ears that they should not hear) unto this day. And David saith, Let their table be made a snare, and a trap, and a stumblingblock, and a recompence unto them: Let their eyes be darkened, that they may not see, and bow down their back alway."

Now we spent last Friday evening in giving an exposition of those words, of those four verses. And we found that here the Apostle is really summing up the position as he has described it in the first section of this 11th chapter of the Epistle to the Romans. Here he is concerned to show that the defection (or if you like, the casting away) of Israel was not total. And having argued it out, he now makes his statement in verse 7 and then supports it, as is his custom, with quotations from the scriptures.

Well, now we've gone through the exposition of the actual statements. We've seen how in verse 8 he quotes several passages from the book of the prophet Isaiah and, as it were, conflates them into one statement, one kind of quotation. And then in verses 9 and 10 he quotes from Psalm 69, verses 22 to 28—at least the essence of that portion of scripture.

Then having done that, I suggested at the end that there were certain points of doctrine here (or if you like, certain great lessons for us) which we are bound to face. It's important that we should do so, of course, because it is in the scripture. And it is important for us also in order that we may understand God's dealing with mankind throughout the long course of history. Indeed, God's dealings with mankind today and, as we shall see eventually, God's dealing with mankind in the future.

Now so many people have regarded this 11th chapter of the Epistle to the Romans as something purely doctrinal, something theoretical. "Oh," they say, "it's got its importance, no doubt, from the standpoint of doctrine, but it has no practical value for us." Well, we began drawing these lessons last Friday night, and we drew that first lesson which was concerning the terrible danger of wrong seeking. Israel hath not obtained that which he seeketh for. And the reason for that is that he didn't seek it in the right way. That's the whole tragedy of Israel. And we saw how that's got a great deal to say to us at the present time.

This is the terrifying thought which we must always keep in our minds as Christian people, at least those who profess to be Christians. We must make quite certain that we don't fall into this error into which the Jews felt at the time of our Lord and the Apostle Paul. They assumed that all was well with them, but they of all people were in the wrong position.

And the big lesson we drew was this: There is only one position for the Christian, not only at the beginning but even at the end of his life. He's nothing but a sinner saved only by the grace of God. It doesn't matter what he's done, doesn't matter how useful he's been in the kingdom. When he comes to die and to face God, he is nothing but a sinner saved by the grace of God in Jesus Christ. The moment we begin to rely on anything else in ourselves, our upbringing, our background, or anything, we've already departed from the true position. There is only one way of salvation, there is only one savior, there is only one way to know God, and that is through Jesus Christ and him crucified.

And the Jews as a nation are a perpetual lesson to us in this respect. It is clear that God has kept them in this position and has held them there partly for that reason, that they might be a warning to everybody throughout the centuries. Now there is our first great lesson. We can never afford to slide over that. We need to be reminded of it constantly.

But now having looked at that, let's move on to our second lesson, which I suggested is that which we may describe as "judicial blindness." This is the second of our four lessons. Judicial blindness. Where is it? Well, it begins there at the end of the seventh verse. "The rest were blinded." Israel hath not obtained that which he seeketh for, but the election hath obtained it. Now we've dealt with that: "the election hath obtained it." And they've obtained it because they are the elect of God. That's why he says "election" rather than "elect." But now we come to look at the other side: "the rest." And this is the bulk, the majority, the nation looked at as a whole, were blinded.

And then he goes on to elaborate this in the remaining verses of this portion. "According as it is written, God hath given them the spirit of slumber, eyes that they should not see, and ears that they should not hear, unto this day." Now that's the main statement that we have to consider tonight under this particular heading, of course. And the phrases that we must pick out in particular are "the rest were blinded" and "God hath given them the spirit of slumber"—the spirit of torpor, which we saw it meant last Friday night. But the thing I'm concerned about above all this evening is that "the rest were blinded," and "God hath given them"—God has given them—"the spirit of slumber" or of torpor.

Now this is, of course, where we come to the most difficult doctrine. I was saying last Friday night that we must approach this whole statement, this entire portion of scripture, with fear and trembling, in a spirit of humility, in a spirit which realizes at the outset that we are handling themes that are beyond the mind and the comprehension of men, even beyond his understanding. We are dealing with a matter here that we'd never deal with were it not that it is in the scriptures. Very well, then. I say let us take off the shoes from off our feet; we are standing on holy ground. Let us be careful that we don't allow any human wisdom and understanding to intrude itself in any shape or form.

There are those who dislike this doctrine and who reject it. And then there are others who react against them and are almost proud of it. But both are equally wrong. It's a doctrine that ought to fill us all with a sense of amazement and astonishment. Any partisan spirit that comes in on any side with regard to a matter like this is just indicative at once that people are not realizing that they're dealing with the inscrutable mind and will and purpose of the everlasting God.

Very well, now then. What is this doctrine? Well, in a sense, of course, we've already been dealing with it when we were in chapter 9. The same problem exactly is raised in chapter 9, particularly from verses 15 onwards. "For he saith to Moses, I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion. So then it is not of him that willeth, nor of him that runneth, but of God that showeth mercy. For the scripture saith unto Pharaoh, Even for this same purpose have I raised thee up, that I might show my power in thee, and that my name might be declared throughout all the earth. Therefore hath he mercy on whom he will have mercy, and whom he will he hardeneth."

That's it. Whom he will, he hardeneth. Well, then you remember the objection. Let me read it to you in order that it may put us all into the right frame of mind and of spirit. "Thou wilt say then unto me, Why doth he yet find fault? If he hardens, why does he yet find fault? For who hath resisted his will?" Well, there's only one answer. Here it is. "Nay but, O man, who art thou that repliest against God?"

Never forget that, my friends. Don't reply against God. Don't argue with God. Remember God is in heaven and you are on earth, and you'll soon not even be on earth. The daring of men in replying against God, venturing to put up his criticisms. "Shall the thing formed say to him that formed it, Why hast thou made me thus? Hath not the potter power over the clay of the same lump to make one vessel unto honor and another unto dishonor? What if God, willing to show his wrath and to make his power known, endured with much longsuffering the vessels of wrath fitted to destruction? And that he might make known the riches of his glory on the vessels of mercy, which he had afore prepared unto glory, even us, whom he hath called, not of the Jews only, but also of the Gentiles?"

Now there is really the same argument. But the Apostle, you see, he comes back to it. And he does so because he wants to help these people. There is this great mystery, this problem of why the Jews of all people are not in the kingdom. So he has to go on repeating this great argument, this great statement.

Now this is something that is taught not only by the Apostle Paul. It's almost terrible that one has to say such a thing. But I know that we are living in a world and indeed surrounded by people in the Christian church who are never tired of contrasting the teaching of our Lord and the teaching of the Apostle Paul. This has been so popular now for over a hundred years. It's the main fruit of this so-called higher critical treatment of the scriptures, this liberal view of truth. And it's so pathetic. They try to put the Apostle against his Lord. They say, "Oh, they like the teaching of Jesus, but this man Paul," they say, "was a legalist, this ex-Pharisee who hadn't shed his legalistic notions and ideas." The tragedy, they say, is that he came along and foisted all these legalistic ideas onto this gloriously simple gospel of Jesus Christ.

Now I say I almost apologize for having to put this before you once more, but I read only last night an article again in which this very thing was done, in which the man was arguing that the whole of doctrine we need to know is in the Lord's Prayer—"that's the whole of Christianity," he said—and all the rest is something that's been foisted onto it. All this about justification and sanctification, oh, that's all just rabbinical teaching of the Apostle Paul. Now and that, of course, is still a very common teaching.

Therefore it is essential that I should demonstrate to you that it's not only wrong in general, but it is also wrong in detail. So I would take you back again to that portion we read at the beginning to show you how our blessed Lord and Savior himself taught exactly the same thing. Matthew 13 beginning again at verse 13. "Therefore speak I to them in parables because they seeing, see not; because they seeing, see not. And hearing they hear not, neither do they understand. And in them is fulfilled the prophecy of Esaias which saith, By hearing ye shall hear and shall not understand, and seeing ye shall see and shall not perceive. For this people's heart is waxed gross, and their ears are dull of hearing, and their eyes have they closed, lest at any time they should see with their eyes and hear with their ears and should understand with their heart and should be converted and I should heal them."

Now then, there's exactly the same quotation, you see, as the Apostle Paul gives us here. But I hear somebody saying, "But wait a minute, isn't there a difference between the two quotations?" As our Lord puts it, it's this: "This people's heart is waxed gross, and their ears are dull of hearing, and their eyes *they* have closed." But the Apostle says, "God hath given them a spirit of torpor." They *have been* blinded. Isn't that the difference between our Lord and the Apostle Paul?

Wait a minute, don't jump to conclusions. Let's listen again to what we find in the 12th chapter of the Gospel according to St. John. And beginning to read at verse 37. John 12:37 and following. "But though he had done so many miracles before them, yet they believed not on him, that the saying of Esaias the prophet might be fulfilled which he spake: Lord, who hath believed our report? and to whom hath the arm of the Lord been revealed? Therefore they could not believe." Notice: "They *could not* believe because that Esaias said again, *He* hath blinded their eyes and hardened their heart, that they should not see with their eyes nor understand with their heart and be converted and I should heal them. These things said Esaias when he saw his glory and spake of him."

Well, there it is, you see, in the same way as the Apostle puts it. And you've got again the same quotation in the last chapter of the book of the Acts of the Apostles, Acts 28:25: "And when they agreed not among themselves, they departed, after that Paul had spoken one word: Well spake the Holy Ghost by Esaias the prophet unto our fathers saying, Go unto this people and say, Hearing ye shall hear and shall not understand, and seeing ye shall see and not perceive. For the heart of this people is waxed gross, and their ears are dull of hearing; their eyes have they closed, lest they should see with their eyes and hear with their ears and understand with their heart and should be converted and I should heal them."

Now then. So you see this is not something peculiar to the Apostle Paul. Very well, how do we reconcile these different statements? Well, the reconciliation, it seems to me, is quite simple. There are two elements in all this: there is the human and the divine. And that is what we must now consider together. The statement is that God hath given them a spirit of slumber. Eyes that they should not see and ears that they should not hear. God has given them. They *were* blinded.

Now let's approach it like this. How does God do this? Well, the first way in which he does it quite clearly is that he ceases to strive. You remember that statement which was made before the flood? It's in Genesis 6. "My spirit," said God, "shall not always strive with men." There is a point at which God, through the Holy Spirit, ceases to strive with people. There he is warning that generation before the flood, but the point arrives at which God ceases as it were to speak and to strive. He stops doing that; he withdraws this element of striving. That's one.

Then another way in which this happens is what we've already seen in the first chapter of this great Epistle to the Romans, from verse 19 to the end. There is that thrice-repeated statement to the effect that God has given them up, God has abandoned them, handed them over as it were to uncleanness. "Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts. For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections. And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind to do those things which are not convenient."

So there is the second way in which God deals with a people like this who are resisting the truth and rejecting it and refusing to submit to it. He ceases to strive with them. Not only that, he does as it were abandon them. In other words, he withdraws all the restraining influences.

Now this is a terrifying theme, but it is the great theme, of course, of that second half of the first chapter of this great Epistle to the Romans. It's the only way, says the Apostle, to understand this age in which we live. God has withdrawn the restraints. Now the teaching in other words is this: When men fell and became the slave of Satan and of sin, God didn't abandon men. The devil became the god of this world, but that doesn't mean that God abandoned the world. God introduced what has been called the principle of "common grace" worked through the Holy Spirit, this restraining influence.

Sin being kept within bounds, if you like, and the results and the effects of evil being kept within bounds. That is why the scriptures teach us that it is God who has ordained magistrates, it's God who has ordained governments. It is God who has brought into being art and culture—you'll find all this in the early chapters of Genesis—music and things like that, and even civilization and the culture of cities, and all forms of government. All this has been introduced by God: the family and so on. And the main object of all this is to restrain the effects of evil.

Now the world doesn't know anything about this; the world doesn't realize this. But the Bible teaches this very prominently. In other words, it's quite clear that if God hadn't done this, that the world would long since have destroyed itself completely. If men in sin had been allowed just to live as he wanted to without God imposing any restraint upon him, it would have been hell. It would have been terrible; he would have destroyed himself beyond any question, and the whole of his world and the whole of humanity. But God has always kept a restraint.

It's a wonderful thing to trace this in the Bible, especially in the Old Testament. How God allows dictators and others to rise and to go so far, but they were never allowed to go beyond a given point. God always stopped them. And the biblical teaching is that God has continued to do this. But it is equally plain that there is this teaching: that at certain times God has withdrawn the restraints up to a point, and he has done so in order to teach the people a lesson.

Whenever he did it with the children of Israel, it was always to teach them a lesson. God had protected them and shielded them and God had given them rulers. But when they kept on rebelling and refusing, well then God withdraws his protection. He allows an enemy to conquer them. They get carried away to captivity. They were in Egypt, then later they were in Babylon. And there they suffered terrible things. That was simply because God had withdrawn his protection.

Well, now in exactly the same way, there are times when God has withdrawn the restraining influence of the Holy Spirit upon sin and evil. So that you've had some terrifying epochs and periods in the history of the world. You had it at Sodom and Gomorrah. You had it, as I've already shown you, at the time of the flood before that. And there have been other periods when the same thing has happened. Now the Apostle Paul here in the second half of the first chapter of this Epistle to the Romans is summing up this whole doctrine. He's taking a view of the whole of history. There are times when God has handed them over, given them up, abandoned them to the consequences of their own outlook, their own mentality, their own evil way of living.

Now that's been another way in which God has dealt then with those who are not ready to receive the truth. He doesn't stop at ceasing to strive with them. He goes beyond that; he stops this restraining influence. But there's even a step beyond that. And that is this process of hardening, actual hardening. Now that's the sort of thing that the Apostle you see was teaching in chapter 9 that God did with Pharaoh.

When Pharaoh persisted in his refusal, well then God did this something to Pharaoh that is called "hardening." He, as it were, makes Pharaoh worse than he is. Now don't misunderstand that; I'm going to explain that in a moment to you. But it is clear that this is the term that is used. "God hath given them the spirit of slumber, eyes that they should not see, and ears that they should not hear." This is what we mean by a judicial blindness or a judicial hardening.

At this point, Pharaoh was incapable of doing anything but what he did. And God, of the Apostle argues, has raised him up for this purpose. He's raised him up in order that he could give a great lesson to the whole world through Pharaoh in this particular way. Now then, there then are the methods, the ways in which God brings about this condition of judicial blindness, which means this: that a people in this condition is totally incapable of believing. That's what Paul is really saying.

What then? What's the position? Well, it's this. Israel hath not obtained that which he seeketh for. The election hath obtained it. The rest, why didn't they believe? They were blinded. God hath given them a spirit of slumber. God hath given them eyes that they should not see and ears that they should not hear. Now our Lord, you see, says exactly the same thing about the Pharisees. He says, "That's why I speak in parables. I am speaking in parables in order that these people may not understand what I am saying."

That's what he says in Matthew 13. "Unto you," he says, "it is given to know and to understand, not to them. I'm speaking in parables and they don't see the meaning, they're not meant to know the meaning. This is a judicial blindness that is imposed upon them." Now here is the question: what is this, what is this? Is it something punitive only? Is this an action which God takes with certain people when he sees this recalcitrance and obduracy and obstinacy—is it only a form of punishment?

Well, the answer I feel to that is that it is mainly punitive. It is chiefly a form of punishment. In other words, it works like this: that light rejected in and of itself produces hardening and hardness. This is a great characteristic of sin. Sin always tends to produce hardening. You may hesitate a long time to do a thing the first time. Once you've done it, it's not so difficult the second time. That's a part of the process of hardening, looked at from the reverse side.

And so it is with resistance to the work of the Spirit, with resistance to the light and the knowledge of the truth as it is in Christ Jesus. Or if you like it in terms of the heart, the same thing happens. If we don't allow ourselves to respond and to yield to the truth, well, the more we hear the truth, the harder shall we become. "Take heed," says the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, "lest there be in any of you an evil heart of unbelief in departing from the living God. But exhort one another daily while it is called today, lest any of you be hardened through the deceitfulness of sin."

This is something that is taught very plainly and clearly in the scriptures in many places. And of course, you see it so perfectly in the story of Pharaoh. How he gets worse and worse, harder and harder, more and more furious, and reaches a stage in which he is virtually mad in his unbelief and in his resistance to God. Now then the teaching is that that is chiefly punitive. It is a part of his punishment.

But there is a suggestion in the scriptures that there is something more than that, something in addition to that. And it is at this point that I freely confess that we're in a realm where we have to walk unusually careful. And where had not these two statements I'm about to read to you—well, nobody would ever dream of saying such a thing. But let me read to you: 1 Peter 2:7.

"Unto you therefore which believe, he is precious: but unto them which be disobedient, the stone which the builders disallowed, the same is made the head of the corner, and a stone of stumbling, and a rock of offence, even to them which stumble at the word, being disobedient: whereunto also they were appointed." That's it. "Whereunto also they were appointed." What were they appointed unto? Well, they were appointed unto this, that the Lord Jesus Christ should be to them a stone of stumbling and a rock of offence, even to them which stumble at the word, being disobedient. Whereunto also they were appointed, they were ordained.

All right, bear that in your mind. Now go on to the Epistle to Jude. The Epistle to Jude, which comes you remember just before the book of Revelation begins. Now let me read to you the fourth verse in the Epistle to Jude. "For there are certain men crept in unawares, who were before of old ordained to this condemnation, ungodly men, turning the grace of our God into lasciviousness, and denying the only Lord God, and our Lord Jesus Christ." Now this actually is not as difficult as the last one because this should be translated like this: "Certain men crept in unawares, who were before of old written down unto this condemnation." "Written down." That's the word used by the Apostle. Written down.

So that you might say that it just means this: that the fact that they were going to do this was already known and was as it were recorded. But it really doesn't explain the difficulty; it doesn't get you right out. Because how can a thing be written down unless it is not only known but unless it is certain? Now those two statements suggest, putting it at its very least and lowest, this extraordinary thing: that there were people who were appointed to this, to stumble at the word, being disobedient, whereunto also they were appointed.

Now then. What do we say? Well, let me put it to you as I tried to put it when we were doing the ninth chapter. God did not create sin. It is impossible that he should do so. God is light and in him is no darkness at all. God didn't create sin. God never made any man a sinner. God has never made anybody sin. That is impossible; it is inconceivable. As James reminds us, God neither tempteth, neither can be tempted. There is a fundamental postulate. Evil and sin do not enter into God at all. It's impossible; God would not be God if he were capable of producing anything that is sinful. That is an utter impossibility.

Very well then, what is the resolution of the problem? The resolution of the problem is this: That God—as we have seen so abundantly in these chapters 9, 10, and 11 of the Epistle to the Romans—it is God alone who saves anybody. Nobody is saved apart from the election of God. Nobody at all. No man saves himself. If you take credit for the fact that you are a believer in Jesus Christ, I almost suggest to you that you're not saved. I mustn't say that; you can be a very ignorant Christian and a very unscriptural Christian. But the teaching of the scripture is that no man contributes anything to his own salvation. It is all according to the election of God.

So that we see this: that as God has elected some to salvation, he has not elected others to salvation. And that seems to me to be the explanation of these statements. They are ordained unto this condemnation only in the sense that they have not been elected to salvation. So you see it works like this: Pharaoh is not amongst the elect. Pharaoh therefore refuses, he disobeys, and he rejects. But it's possible for a man to do that in a very quiet and in a very almost inoffensive manner, looked at from the human standpoint.

Very well. Now God knows that about Pharaoh. So he raises up Pharaoh to give an illustration and to show an example: the horrible nature of unbelief. So he increases by his action the natural unbelief and disobedience of Pharaoh. He doesn't create it; he simply draws it out. He simply makes it more manifest. As I say, the more the truth is given to such a man, the more violent will be his resistance. And Pharaoh is the example of this violent resistance. And what the Apostle is saying is that God has produced this violence in the resistance.

Now he did exactly the same, says Paul, with the children of Israel. God has given them a spirit of slumber. They'd been recalcitrant, disobedient; they'd been murdering God's prophets as he sent them to them one after another. And even when he sends his son, they do the same thing. Very well. God is there, as it were, showing this terrible thing called unbelief. He has given them a spirit of slumber. In other words, you may say that they were appointed unto this. The sin is already there; the sin is produced entirely by man, entirely by man.

All that God does in this process of judicial blindness is that he exaggerates it, as it were. It's like putting a microscope, a high-powered microscope, upon it so that the thing that doesn't appear plain and clear to mankind normally is exaggerated and magnified so that everybody can see it. In other words, we all look at Pharaoh and we say, "What a terrible attitude towards God." We look at the children of Israel at the time of our Lord and at the time of Paul and even until this day, and we say, "What a terrible thing unbelief is." It can lead this very nation of God, the chosen people, not to recognize their own Messiah and even to cry, "Away with him, crucify him."

There it is magnified and exaggerated. God has produced that in order to make this condition of sin and unbelief patent and clear and obvious to the whole human race. That is what the Apostle is really saying. That seems to me to be the only explanation of the passages quoted from the book of the prophet Isaiah, and also the use of them made by our Lord and Luke in the book of the Acts and the Apostle here and also the passages I've quoted from the first Epistle of Peter and the Epistle of Jude.

God is always righteous. It is man incited by the devil, the first rebel, who has introduced sin into the cosmos. And God for his own great purpose has from time to time dealt with the sinner, whether it be an individual or a nation, in this process of judicial hardening and blindness in order to show us what sin really is. He hasn't made these people sinners. He has not saved them; he has not chosen to save them. And at the same time he has demonstrated in them and through them the enormity of sin, its terrible character, how it renders a man finally incapable of worshipping God, of serving him, and receiving his blessing.

Now what does all this got to do with us today? Well, there are just a few practical lessons that I want to put to you at this point before I close this evening. The first lesson that I would draw is this: Isn't something like this happening today? Isn't this the real explanation of the state of affairs today? Look at the attitude of this country, speaking generally, to the gospel.

Why are you and I doing something very unusual here tonight? What's the matter with the bulk of our fellow countrymen and women? Why should we be such a small remnant? We are nothing but a remnant. I'm never tired of quoting these statistics. Only 10% of people claim to be Christian in this country, and only half those take it at all seriously and attend a place of worship regularly. 5% of the nation. Why is this? 95% not only doesn't believe but ridicules it—the arrogance in with which it does it. We're all familiar with all this. How do you explain it? What is it? We've got open Bibles; we've got endless translations, all sorts of instructions, television, wireless. Every effort that can be made, nothing seems to make any difference at all. How do you explain it?

Well, I think part of the explanation, you know, is this very thing that the Apostle's telling us here. And even adding the thing that he goes on to quote from David. David saith, "Let their table be made a snare." I think the religious situation in this country is mainly to be explained by affluence. The table. "Never had it so good," you see. The table is full, plenty of money in our pockets, plenty of drink, motorcars, all. "Let their table be made a snare."

So off they go in their cars on a Sunday to the seaside or the mountaintop or to play golf or to do this or that. Let the table be made—the table is being made a snare. The very blessing of God is becoming a curse. Poverty's a terrible thing, but you know, affluence is a more dangerous thing in a spiritual sense. The table has so often been the snare. And I believe that we are seeing something of this at this present time, that this country and other countries are under this process of judicial blindness.

You and I, we see the gospel so clearly. Don't you sometimes say, "What can be the matter with people? How is it that they cannot see it?" And you've got to explain that. And there is no other explanation but this. There's one lesson. But then let me follow to a second, a still more practical one. I say this with considerable hesitation and fear, but I'm quite sure that it's right.

There is a point at which it is well for us to stop presenting the truth of the gospel to certain people. If you find that somebody whom you're trying to bring to a knowledge of the truth begins to blaspheme, I say stop doing it. Stop doing it. Just tell them that you're not going to talk to them about it anymore. You're only driving them to a kind of insane and insensate opposition to the truth. A point comes, I say, when if you see that you're dealing with such obduracy and resistance that it only seems to infuriate them and inflame, a point comes when you cease talking to them. You go on praying still, but I think at that point you stop talking.

Let me give you a third lesson, which again I think you will find to be very profitable if you consider it. I believe we've got here the ultimate answer to the teaching of a man like Charles G. Finney on the question of revivals. Now you remember how what Finney teaches in his lectures on revival. Finney, Charles G. Finney, was a man who had a most amazing conversion, a man who received the baptism of the Spirit the day after he was converted. An astonishing case, and a brilliant, able man.

But as I've often suggested from this pulpit, it is possible for a man who has a most amazing experience to go wrong in his teaching. And I believe that Charles G. Finney is wrong in his teaching on revivals because this is what he teaches. He says in his lectures on revivals that you can really have a revival almost whenever you like. There are certain things which you've got to do. If you do those things, you will get a revival. So in his lectures he tells ministers what to do. You get people to make confession of their sins and this and that. "You do these things," he says, "and revival is bound to happen."

To which there is only one answer: it not only is not bound to happen, but it doesn't happen. You see Finney was in the midst of a revival; he didn't seem to realize that. He thought it was his technique that did it. It wasn't. There was a revival, there was an outpouring of the Spirit of God. And in those conditions, certain things were done. He then draws this false deduction: "Do these things, you'll get revival." Now I do not know how many ministers I know who, having believed Finney, have done their utmost many times over and in more than one church to get a revival, but they've never got it.

Why not? Well, you see the answer is: it comes from God. There are some of us who've been praying for revival for many years and preaching and talking about it and urging people to pray for it. "Why doesn't revival come?" say people. Well, you know, this may be a part of the answer. It may be that we are at the moment passing through a phase of judicial hardening. I say "we"—I don't mean those who are truly evangelical—but after all, we're attached to the body of the Christian church. And it may be that in the present circumstances, what God sees we need, speaking generally, is punishment, restraint, withdrawal of his blessing. Thank God he gives us individual blessing; he can bless and does bless individual churches. But as for a general revival, we haven't seen it.

And it's not happening at the present time. And it seems to me that this is the explanation. So it is very wrong to say, "You do this and you must get revival." The answer to that is: it may not be God's will to give revival at certain points, but quite the opposite—to withdraw the influences of the Spirit. I'm not saying this to comfort you. I'm not saying this that you may sit back and say, "Well, there's no point in praying for revival then, if this is God's determination." You don't know, my friend. You can't be sure about it. And in any case, you don't know when the period's going to stop and revival's going to come.

You read the history of the past and the history of revivals, and you'll find that they've often come at the end of a period of judicial blinding and hardening. So it is our business always to pray for revival. This is something entirely in the hands of God. We don't understand it, but I must confess that I'm comforted by this doctrine. If I thought that revival depended upon us, well I wouldn't feel justified in trying to sleep at night. I should feel that I should be active the whole time and exhorting everybody else too, day and night. But you know, you can work day and night—that won't produce revival. It is God who gives revival.

God hardens, God softens. God exerts the pressure of the Spirit, God withdraws the Spirit. So we're always subject to this. This is our comfort, you see: that God is always in control. And whether we understand or not, our business is to go on preaching the gospel, is to go on pleading with him to have mercy upon us. It is always our position. Not to say, "Do this and that happens." No, no. We can but cry for mercy; we can but plead with God in the name of his dear son to have compassion and to have pity upon us.

Well, my friends, we've got to leave it at that for tonight. I'd hoped we could have gone a bit further, but this is such a tremendously important matter. That is what has been called and is called "judicial blinding," "judicial hardening." There it is in that eighth verse of the 11th chapter of the Epistle of Paul to the Romans. God willing, we'll go on next Friday to look at this question of the imprecatory psalms which arises of necessity in verses 9 and 10.

O Lord, our God, we come to thee again and we can but humble ourselves in thy holy presence. We remember the words of thy servant the psalmist of old: "These things are too high for me." And they're too high for us, O Lord. But we thank thee that we do find a sense of rest and of peace even in these high matters, knowing that all things are under thy control, knowing that all things are in thy hand, knowing that we are in thy hand. Knowing we bless thy name that thy ways are ever perfect. We say with thy servant Abraham of old, "Shall not the God of all the earth do right?"

O Lord, we know that thy ways are ever perfect, ever true. Give us all grace, we humbly pray thee, to bow before the mystery. We do indeed, O Lord, and we marvel more than ever that we are found amongst thy people, that thou hast ever looked upon us and called us by thy grace. O Lord, receive our unworthy praise. Have mercy upon those who still are fighting against and resisting and objecting to the truth and disobeying it. God, have mercy upon them. And oh, hear us as we continue to plead for revival and reawakening. God, for the sake of thy dear son and his shed blood, hear our humble cry and come again and show forth the glory of thy power in our midst. Hear us, O Lord.

And now may the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship and the communion of the Holy Spirit abide and continue with us now this night throughout the remainder of this our short uncertain earthly life and pilgrimage and evermore. Amen.