The Spurgeon Series 1857 & 1858. Charles H. Spurgeon

had been broken, and the threatening was therefore of necessity brought into force. It was so with the flood: he threatened the earth, but he would not fully seal the sentence, and stamp it with the seal of heaven, until he had given time for repentance. Noah must come, and through his hundred and twenty years must preach the word; he must come and testify to an unthinking and an ungodly generation; the ark must be built, to be a perpetual sermon; there it must be upon its mountain top, waiting for the floods to float it, that it might be an every day warning to the ungodly. Oh heavens, why did you not at once open your floods? You fountains of the great deep, why did you not burst up in a moment? God said, “I will sweep away the world with a flood”: why, why did you not rise? “Because,” I hear them saying with gurgling notes, “because, although God had threatened, he was slow to sentence, and he said to himself, ‘Perhaps, they may repent; perhaps they may turn from their sin’; and therefore he ordered us to rest and to be quiet, for he is slow to anger.”

      11. And yet once more: even when the sentence against a sinner is signed and sealed by heaven’s broad seal of condemnation, even then God is slow to carry it out. The doom of Sodom is sealed; God has declared it shall be burned with fire. But God is tardy. He stops. He will himself go down to Sodom, that he may see its iniquity. And when he gets there guilt is rife in the streets. It is night, and the crew of the worse beasts besiege the door. Does he then lift his hands? Does he then say, “Rain hell out of heaven, oh skies?” No, he lets them pursue their riot all night, spares them to the last moment, and though when the sun was risen the burning hail began to fall, yet was the reprieve as long as possible. God was not in haste to condemn. God had threatened to root out the Canaanites; he declared that all the children of Ammon should be cut off; he had promised Abraham that he would give their land to his seed for ever, and they were to be utterly slain; but he made the children of Israel wait four hundred years in Egypt, and he let these Canaanites live all through the days of the patriarchs; and even then, when he led his avenging ones out of Egypt, he kept them forty years in the wilderness, because he was lothe to slay poor Canaan. “Yet,” he said, “I will give them time. Though I have stamped their condemnation, though their death warrant has come forth from the Court of King’s Bench, and must be executed, yet I will reprieve them as long as I can”: and he stops, until at last mercy had had enough, and Jericho’s melting ashes and the destruction of Ai signalled that the sword was out of its scabbard, and God had awakened like a mighty man, and like a strong man full of wrath. God is slow to execute the sentence, even when he has declared it.

      12. And ah I my friends, there is a sorrowful thought that has just crossed my mind. There are some men yet alive who are sentenced now. I believe that Scripture bears me out in a dreadful thought which I just wish to hint at. There are some men that are condemned before they are finally damned; there are some men whose sins go before them to judgment, who are given over to a seared conscience, concerning whom it may be said that repentance and salvation are impossible. There are some few men in the world who are like John Bunyan’s man in the iron cage, who can never get out. They are like Esau — they find no place of repentance, though like him they do not seek it, for if they sought it they would find it. There are many who have sinned “the sin to death,” concerning whom we cannot pray; for we are told, “I do not say that you shall pray for it.” But why, why, why are they not already in the flame? If they are condemned, if mercy has shut its eye for ever upon them, if it never will stretch out its hand to give them pardon, why, why, why are they not cut down and swept away? Because God says, “I will not have mercy upon them, but I will let them live a little while longer, though I have condemned them I am lothe to carry the sentence out, and will spare them as long as it is right that man should live; I will let them have a long life here, for they will have a fearful eternity of wrath for ever.” Yes, let them have their little whirl of pleasure; their end shall be most fearful. Let them beware, for although God is slow to anger, he is sure to do it.

      13. If God were not slow to anger, would he not have struck this huge city of ours, this behemoth city? — would he not have smashed it into a thousand pieces, and blotted out the remembrance of it from the earth? The iniquities of this city are so great, that if God should dig up her very foundations, and cast her into the sea, she would well deserve it. Our streets at night present spectacles of vice that cannot be equalled. Surely there can be no nation and no country that can show a city so utterly debauched as this great city of London, if our midnight streets are indications of our immorality. You allow, in your public places where you go, — I mean you, my lords and ladies — you allow things to be said in your hearing, of which your modesty ought to be ashamed. You can sit in theatres to hear plays at which modesty should blush; to say nothing of piety. That the ruder sex should have listened to the obscenities of La Traviata {a} is surely bad enough, but that ladies of the highest refinement, and the most approved taste, should dishonour themselves by such a patronage of vice is indeed intolerable. Let the sins of the lower theatres escape without your censure, you gentlemen of England, the lowest bestiality of the lowest hell of a playhouse can look to your opera houses for their excuse. I thought that with the pretensions this city makes to piety, for sure, they would not have gone so far, and that after such a warning as they have had from the press itself — a press which is certainly not too religious — they would not so indulge their evil passions. But because the pill is gilded, you suck down the poison: because the thing is popular, you patronise it: it is lustful, it abominable, it is deceitful! You take your children to hear what you yourselves never ought to listen to. You yourselves will sit in jovial and grand company, to listen to things from which your modesty ought to revolt. And I would fain hope it does, although the tide may for a while deceive you. Ah! God only knows the secret wickedness of this great city; it demands a loud and a trumpet voice; it needs a prophet to cry aloud, “Sound an alarm, sound an alarm, sound an alarm,” in this city; for truly the enemy grows upon us, the power of the evil one is mighty, and we are fast going to perdition, unless God shall put forth his hand and roll back the black torrent of iniquity that streams down our streets. But God is slow to anger, and does still restrain his sword. Wrath said yesterday, “Unsheathe yourself, oh sword”; and the sword struggled to get free. Mercy put her hand upon the hilt, and said, “Be still!” “Unsheathe yourself, oh sword!” Again it struggled from its scabbard. Mercy put her hand on it, and said, “Back!” — and it rattled back again. Wrath stamped his foot, and said, “Awake oh sword, awake!” It struggled yet again, until half its blade was drawn out; “Back, back!” — said Mercy, and with manly push she sent it back rattling into its sheath: and there it sleeps still, for the Lord is “slow to anger, and plenteous in mercy.”

      14. Now I am to trace this attribute of God to its source: why is he slow to anger?

      15. He is slow to anger, because he is infinitely good. Good is his name; “good” — God. Good in his nature; because he is slow to anger.

      16. He is slow to anger, again, because he is great. Little things are always swift in anger; great things are not so. The silly cur barks at every passerby, and bears no insult; the lion would tolerate a thousand times as much; and the bull sleeps in his pasture, and will endure much, before he lifts up his might. The leviathan in the sea, though he makes the deep to be hoary when he is enraged, yet is slow to be stirred up, while the little and puny are always swift in anger. God’s greatness is one reason of the slowness of his wrath.

      17. II. But to proceed at once to the link. A great reason why he is slow to anger is because he is GREAT IN POWER. This is to be the connecting link between this part of the subject and the last, and therefore I must beg your attention. I say that this word great in power connects the first sentence to the last; and it does so in this way. The Lord is slow to anger; and he is slow to anger, because he is great in power. “Why do you say that?” — one asks. I answer, he who is great in power has power over himself; and he who can keep his own temper down, and subdue himself, is greater than he who rules a city, or can conquer nations. We heard only yesterday, or the day before, mighty displays of God’s power in the rolling thunder which alarmed us; and when we saw the splendour of his might in the glistening lightning, when he lifted up the gates of heaven and we saw its brightness, and then he closed them again upon the dusty earth in a moment — even then we did not see anything