l the multitude in the middle the word of a merciful and faithful
God proclaims, In order to be saved, it is necessary that you should
arise, and turn to the right hand, and join the company there who have
gladly welcomed the Son of God as their Saviour; but, correspondingly,
in order to be lost, it is not necessary that you should arise from your
state of indifference, and join the scoffer's ranks. To be saved you
must flee to the refuge; but to be lost, it is enough that you remain
where you are.

In the Theocracy, the Hebrew nation were the hereditary nobles. It is
said of them in the Scriptures that they are a people near unto God
(Ps. cxlviii. 14). They enjoyed a right of entry into the king's presence.
Having, in virtue of their birth-right, a perennial invitation to the
royal festivals, they needed only a message as a matter of course,
demanding their presence when the feast was prepared. The Gospel of
grace complete in Christ is obviously the feast to which the house of
Israel were in the fulness of time specially summoned. When they refused
to come to the banquet, the Provider was displeased, but not put about:
the Omniscient knows his way. He never permits his purposes to be
thwarted: He makes the wrath of man to praise himself, and the remainder
of that wrath he restrains.

In the beginning of human life and of God's moral government on earth,
the enemy seemed to triumph. Creation was thrown out of joint; the being
made in God's image was defiled by sin. But although the garden of Eden
was emptied, God was not left without a witness in the world: sin
abounded, but grace did much more abound. In like manner, at a later
stage of the divine administration when the favoured vine became barren,
another was brought out of Egypt and planted in its stead. When Israel
rejected Christ, God rejected Israel, and called another people to be
his own. "We have Abraham to our father," said the Jewish leaders to the
Baptist when his lessons began to gall them, "We have Abraham to our
father," meaning thereby to intimate that they alone were the chosen
people, and that failing them God would have no children on the earth.
How did John answer this boast? "Think not to say within yourselves, We
have Abraham to our father; for I say unto you that God is able of these
stones to raise up children unto Abraham" (Matt. iii. 9, 10).

Although those privileged Hebrews rejected him, Christ did not remain a
king without subjects, a she