any sin. Come into the presence of God, oh sinner, and you might as well march into a consuming fire. As Nebuchadnezzar’s furnace burned the men who came to throw in the three holy children, so must God, the consuming fire, burn and destroy us, even if we approach him with our prayers and thanksgivings, if it were not for the interposition of Jesus Christ the Mediator. I say, this is a necessity of his nature. God is necessarily just, and justice cannot endure a sin. God is necessarily pure and holy: he might sooner cease to be God than cease to be pure. Now, he must repel the approach of impurity to him. Though no laws can bind him, yet the law of his nature never can be broken. His nature is, “I will by no means clear the guilty.” He is slow to anger, he is great in power, and he is ready to forgive, but as long as guilt lies unforgiven he is also ready to punish, no, he must punish or else cease to be. Consequently, no man can come to God as a sinner, unless he comes to him to be utterly destroyed, and that without remedy. You do not want to come to God as a sinner. It is a good news that we are enabled to tell to all our fellow creatures of a way by which we can come with joy and gladness to the Father, through Jesus Christ.
4. Now, this morning I shall have to divide my subject into three or four points, and notice. —
5. I. Some men have a desire to come to God in worship, but there are many who desire to come to him the wrong way. You will sometimes meet with men who say, “Well, I do not go up to a church or chapel; it is all ridiculous. I do not read the Bible; I have no faith in Christ; but I spend my Sunday in the open air — in that glorious temple which God has built. How divinely can I worship him there, while ‘the lark, singing, up to heaven’s gate ascends’; while every flower tells me of him whose breath perfumes it, and whose pencil paints; while all the cattle on a thousand hills are lowing forth his praise, I feel that in his temple everyone speaks of his glory. What need is there for me to go and hear what you call the gospel, to join in the united song of praise, or bend my knee in prayer? I worship the god of nature,” says such a man, “not the God of revelation, but the god of nature.” To this man we reply using the words of our text. Your thanksgiving and your praise are unacceptable to the God you worship, for that God has declared that no man comes to him except through his Son, Jesus Christ. If then, you reject the way of access, and persist in bringing your prayers and your thanksgivings to him in a way which he does not acknowledge, remember, you shall have this answer to your prayers and your thanksgivings; you shall lie down in sorrow when God shall come to judge you at the last great day. The true Christian can “go from nature up to nature’s God,” because he has come from nature’s God down to nature. No man can climb the steeps, and “go from nature up to nature’s God,” unless he has first descended. God must take you up into the mount where he dwells, first; and then you can come down, as Moses did from the top of Sinai; but, until he has taken you up there, your weary feet shall be exhausted, and your strength decay, before you can reach the God of nature through his works. No! my friend, you may be very sincere, as you imagine, in all your prayers and thanksgivings offered to the unpropitiated God of nature, in your garden, or in the fields, but, sincere as they are, they miss the mark; they are not shot from a bow which is strong enough to carry them to their desired target. They miss the mark, I say, and they shall fall back on your own head to your injury, but they shall not reach the throne of God.
6. But I observe here, that those men who talk about natural religion, as far as I know them, have no religion at all. I have noticed that the people who say, “I can worship God without attending any religious service, or believing in Jesus,” do not really do so. I have sometimes had an opportunity on a Sunday of seeing many worshippers of the god of nature come down the lane where I reside. They consist, for the most part, of men who carry cages with them in which to catch birds on the common. There is another very respectable fraternity of men, who go to a boxing place somewhere around there, where they spend their day in the bowling alley, and various pugilistic encounters. These might adopt the cry of our genteel sinners, “We do not want to go into a church or chapel: we spend our Sunday in the worship of the god of nature.” And very fine worship it is. I mostly find that those people who worship the “god of nature” worship the god of fallen nature — that is, the devil: not the God of the glorious nature which is spread about us in the roaring sea, the rolling flood and the blooming meadows — no, for the most part, the men who talk like that, know in their own conscience, that the god they worship, is their belly, their own lusts; and they glory in their shame. Do not believe all the nonsense that you hear from the Sunday league and all that, when they talk about worshipping the god of nature. Do they do it? Follow any of them into their private haunts, and see whether any of this fine devotion of theirs, has any existence whatever, and I think you will discover at once, that they are greater hypocrites than the men they call hypocrites.
7. But again, is it not rather a suspicious circumstance, that these men who are so much ahead of us, that they worship the god of nature prefer the company, according to their own confession, of sheep, and bulls and horses, and skylarks, to the presence of the saints of God? It looks rather suspicious, when a man finds more congenial company in a sheepfold than he does in an assembly of intelligent beings. It looks as if his own mind were brutish, when he can never get his spirit into a devotion mode until he is in the midst of brutes. For my part, I feel more able to worship God in the great congregation, in the assembly of the saints, than anywhere else: “In the courts of the Lord’s house, in the midst of you, oh Jerusalem; praise the Lord!” I know that all his works praise him. It is my joy to feel, that the changing seasons are only the varied aspects of God: that spring speaks of his tenderness and love, summer of his majesty, autumn of his bounty, and winter of his awful power: but still I know, that in his sanctuary I behold his glory yet more fully, and there I discover him to my heart’s solace and delight. The true Christian can worship God in nature; but a man who has not learned to worship God in his house, I am quite sure has not learned to worship God anywhere. Natural religion is just a lie; men may say much about it, but it does not exist. Trace these Pharisaic members of the synagogue of Satan to their homes, and you will find that they make this natural religion an excuse for irreligion. It is an utter impossibility for any man to come to God in worship, except through Jesus Christ.
8. See, then, how my text excludes all acceptance with God for any who do not receive Christ to be the Son of God, the Mediator. Men sometimes say, “All are right; whether they are Jews or Gentiles, whatever they may be, they are all right.” Now, be it understood once for and all, that the religion of Christ gives no basis for such a fancy. It claims for itself alone the solitary throne in the kingdom of religious truth. It uses no chains and racks to obtain an unwilling profession of its faith; but the unbeliever is not flattered with promises of security, but, rather, he is threatened with a doom dreadful beyond all thought. There is not, in this book of God, one single sentence which could lead me to believe that there is a way to God for the Mohammedan, for the Jew, or for anyone who does not come to him through Jesus Christ. The religion of Christ is exclusive in this. It declares, that no man can lay any other foundation, than what is laid on Jesus Christ. It declares that no man can come to God except through Jesus. All the charity of which some men talk is deceitful and valueless. We can have no hope for those who do not receive Christ. We pity them, we love them, we pray for them, we plead for them, that they may be brought to this; but we dare not deceive them, we dare not tell them that God will hear their prayers, if they will not come to him through Jesus Christ. No, we will be as tolerant as Jesus was, but Jesus himself said, “He who does not believe must be damned,” and whoever you may be, — Unitarian, Socinian, infidel, deist, theist, or what-not, however sincere your prayers, God abhors and hates them if you do not offer them through Jesus Christ, the one way between the sinner and God.
9. II. There are other men who, conscious that they cannot come to God as perfect beings in the way of worship, desire to approach him in the way of penitence. But note, even in the way of penitence, no man can come to God except through Jesus Christ. Those tears in your eyes, when Jesus the sun of righteousness shines on them, are as diamonds in the esteem of the God of mercy; but even your tears, and sighs, and groans, cannot prevail with the heart of God, unless they are mingled with a humble faith in Jesus Christ his only Son.
