“Justice and judgment are the habitation of thy throne: mercy and truth shall go before thy face. Blessed is the people that know the joyful sound: they shall walk, O Lord, in the light of thy countenance. In thy name shall they rejoice all the day: and in thy righteousness shall they be exalted” (Psalm 89:14-16).

One of the attributes of God which we seem to neglect and not take into account is that the Lord is just. He does not in any sense reward us with any kind of harshness or vengefulness or vindictiveness. He is just; He is obliged to be just.

“Justice and Judgment are the habitation of your throne”. So God clearly demarcates between evil and good, righteousness and unrighteousness: and those who are His children do likewise. They do not compromise with evil, they have a true sense of justice. They do not want injustice and oppression to be perpetuated, and today we see many people just turn and look away when they are confronted with evil or injustice or greed or graft or corruption. No, God obviously visits those who have no regard for moral values in judgment. That is why we dare not have an inanimate God. We dare not have a God of our own making. We dare not make an image and call it God.

God is God. His holiness is so basic that when you come with people who do not even know that God is holy, you simply cannot fathom such people. They do not have a true sense of direction, they cannot have it. Their compass is false. They are totally misdirected in their ways because God is not in their hearts. When the Lord Jesus Christ comes into our hearts we love to see justice, in our courts of law, in our judges, in our magistrates, on our streets, and in our offices. We do not want to gain any undue advantage over some weak person. We don’t want to see the poor oppressed. We don’t want to turn away or look the other way when someone is doing harm to another.

Today we are confronted with a situation where people do not want to get involved. On the other hand, a Christian is involved. He is involved with these issues of Righteousness, of Judgment, of Love, and of Mercy. The Bible tells us that Mercy and Truth shall go before His face. So if God is with you and God is directing you, the same will happen to you.

Mercy, oh, how marvellous! Mercy for a sinner! Mercy for the man who has grieved God and broken His heart! Mercy for the one who has been responsible to break the heart of God. Your sin and my sin are responsible for Calvary. Your sin and my sin came upon the sinless body of the Lord Jesus Christ and, therefore, through His death and resurrection, there is mercy offered for us. Truth says, “Now this man has fallen short, this man can never enter the Kingdom of Heaven, this man has gone contrary to My law, the truth. This man has trampled down the truth, so there can be no place for this man in Heaven.”

Now Mercy says, “Yes, because this man has acknowledged that in the Cross of Jesus Christ his sin has been dealt with, because this man has confessed the truth about himself that he is a sinner and has come short of the glory of God, there is mercy for him.” What a wonderful God we have! Mercy for the sinner. Mercy for you and me.

Therefore we rejoice in God our Saviour. You remember the song of Mary, “My soul doth magnify the Lord, And my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour” (Luke 1:46-47).

What is the cause of our rejoicing today? You know the excitements pass over so quickly and leave an aftermath of pain and sorrow, a sense of guilt and shame. Most of the joys of this world are evanescent, ephemeral; they pass away and leave a bitter taste behind. But a man who rejoices in the Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ, his is an enduring joy. You know it is to be experienced, cannot be explained. So you had better take hold of Jesus and experience this joy—the joys which are for evermore, the pleasures which are at God’s right hand. You know today’s religion seems to be getting pleasure as quickly as possible, and at any price and at the cost of anybody. You want to tread over bodies, tread over lives, walk over virginity, but obtain pleasure.

Now that kind of pleasure, that selfish pleasure does not satisfy. It can only bring guilt and sorrow and a backwash of disease and misery and death. Here we are told, “In your righteousness shall they be exalted.” For those who love God’s righteousness, for those who are willing to pay the price to establish, and to work ... righteousness, there is a price to be paid. “You will be hated,” the Lord Jesus Christ told us. “And ye shall be hated of all men for my name’s sake: but he that endureth to the end shall be saved” (Matthew 10:22).

Now there is a price to be paid for righteousness. People may hate you, slander you, and look askance at you, but “in your righteousness you shall be exalted.” As we are full of Jesus, He sets us apart as the sons of God. We are clothed upon by His righteousness. I do not mean, my friend, that this is a theoretical righteousness but this is a practical righteousness which I am referring to. When the Lord Jesus was touched by that woman who had an issue of blood for twelve years, virtue went out of Him. You know power went out of Him, and she was healed. His righteousness is a healing righteousness, it is not a condemning righteousness; it is not a Pharisaic righteousness; it is a river of blessing—a river that brings righteousness.

—Joshua Daniel

“And looking round about upon them all, [Jesus] said unto the man [with the withered hand], Stretch forth thy hand. And he did so: and his hand was restored whole as the other. And they were filled with madness; and communed one with another what they might do to Jesus.

And it came to pass in those days, that He went out into a mountain to pray, and continued all night in prayer to God. And when it was day, He called unto Him His disciples: and of them He chose twelve, whom also He named apostles; Simon, (whom He also named Peter,) and Andrew his brother, James and John, Philip and Bartholomew, Matthew and Thomas, James the son of Alphæus, and Simon called Zelotes, and Judas the brother of James, and Judas Iscariot, which also was the traitor.

And He came down with them, and stood in the plain, and the company of His disciples, and a great multitude of people out of all Judæa and Jerusalem, and from the sea coast of Tyre and Sidon, which came to hear Him, and to be healed of their diseases; and they that were vexed with unclean spirits: and they were healed. And the whole multitude sought to touch Him: for there went virtue out of Him, and healed them all” (Luke 6:10-19).

Jesus said, "Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand." Jesus came to save sinners. People did repent and confess their sins. But one disciple closed his heart, hiding his sins until at last his own sin killed him. But the others created a new world. Thousands of men followed them. Joy and peace and a new love functioned in the new society.

There is power with Jesus which is above atomic power. Man uses this power for destruction. Jesus uses His power to bring peace and good will to society. Money does not make us happy and does not give us good will. You can pray throughout the night to bring heavenly power to earth to heal and to transform the wicked. The more we know of God, we find we cannot hate our brother. When you start loving your brother, you begin to share his burden. The love of money brings you down to hell. It hides all the angelic potentialities in you.

There was a man called Dr. Jekyll. He wanted to bring out all the evil in himself. He discovered a drug, which, when he drank, he shrank into an ugly Mr. Hyde. In that form he beat a man to death. When he finished his crimes, he would drink another drug and be transformed into the respectable Dr. Jekyll. Thus he played with himself. This procedure repeated many times. After sometimes even without the medicine, he would just turn into Mr. Hyde. The police started searching for him. One day while in a park, Dr. Jekyll turned into Mr. Hyde unexpectedly. He hurriedly got the transforming medicine through his friend and became Dr. Jekyll—but one day this medicine was exhausted and he was Mr. Hyde forever. He hid in a room. He wept and wept. One day the police broke the door open. In the meantime he drank some poison and died. We are doing things prompted by our evil nature. There is a medicine to bring back our angelic nature. That comes to us by looking at the Cross. We must not exhibit the “Hyde” in us. Jesus called Simon and transformed him into Peter. How many of us are Peters? God has a great purpose for you. The rivers of living waters must flow from you. Why do you hide yourself and your sins? You are already in hell. God wants us to be in Heaven. The work of salvation is completed and available to you. Will you be an angel? Now you may be a Saul but you can be a Paul. Satan prevents you from becoming an angel. Jesus' prayer is mighty and marvellous to change us.

St. Thomas came to India, a difficult place, and was a blessing. Abraham became a blessing. You must become a blessing.

—N. Daniel

Thomas Vincent was born in England in 1634 and became a Christian minister in London. A law passed in 1662 caused many Puritan ministers like him—who valued the Gospel and a good conscience—to be “ejected” from the institutional Church of England.

In 1665, the great plague struck London. It became an occasion for several of these “ejected” ministers to show great piety and zeal—and of God to show His providential preservation of life by protecting them from the plague as they worked in the midst of it.

Vincent had become tutor of an academy at Islington, but when the plague broke out he resolved to stay in the city, visit the sick, and preach to the distressed people. He told his Christian brethren that he had carefully examined the state of his own soul and could look death in the face with comfort. He thought it absolutely necessary that the many people then dying should have some spiritual assistance, and that he could never again have such an opportunity of ministerial usefulness as now, and that he had entirely committed himself to the disposal of Providence.

Supported by the ministers, who prayed for his protection and success, he began working diligently with fortitude. During the plague, he preached in some of the parish churches.

The awfulness of the judgment then before the eyes of the people gave great force to his addresses, and they wanted to know where he would preach the following Sunday. Many learned the necessity of salvation and the way to heaven through the blood of Christ. He visited all who sent for him without fear, and it pleased God to take special care of his life—for though 68 596 died in London of the plague that year, including seven persons in the family in which he lived, he continued in perfect health all the time. Thus were the promises in Psalm 91 fulfilled to this servant of God.

In a tract entitled God’s Terrible Voice in the City (1667), he wrote: “[T]he plague usually killeth within a few days, sometimes within a few hours. ... June: Now the citizens of London are put to a stop in the career of their trade; they begin to fear whom they converse [with] and deal [with], lest they should have come out of infected places. ... Now many houses are shut up where the plague comes, and the inhabitants shut in, lest, coming abroad, they should spread the infection. It was very dismal to behold the red crosses, and read in great letters, LORD, HAVE MERCY UPON US, on the doors, and watchmen standing before them with halberds; and such a solitude about those places, and people passing by them so gingerly, and with such fearful looks, as if they had been lined with enemies in ambush that waited to destroy them.” He recounted the destruction that followed in the subsequent months as well as God’s design in allowing both a plague and fire (1666) to afflict the city. He noted God’s “Voice” in the “history of the two late dreadful judgments of PLAGUE and FIRE in London” and provided its “Interpretation ... in a discovery of the cause and design of these judgments.” “God expects,” he noted, that “London should ACKNOWLEDGE their sins unto Him.”

Vincent was a lover of Jesus Christ, writing in The True Christians Love to the Unseen Christ: “if they (Christians) love Him (Christ) they will not think much of denying themselves, taking up His cross, and following Him wherever He leads them.”

He was a useful minister to a congregation at Hoxton for more than twelve years after the plague, and he died at the age of forty-four in 1678.

—From Samuel Dunn, Memoirs of Seventy-Five Eminent Divines, John Snow, 1844 (Google Books) and Anecdotes (originally published in 1841 by the Religious Tract Society of London). Republished by LutheranLibrary.org. Quoted on www.alecsatin.com.