"Salvation is of the LORD." -Jonah 2:9

"The secret of the LORD is with them who fear Him, and He will shew them His covenant." -Psalm 25:14 [KJV] Who would trust the secrets of his heart with an avowed enemy? David could reveal all that was in him to Jonathan. Why? Because he was his loving, faithful friend. He could trust his very life in his hands. There was a secret between them two, which no one else was privy to. When Jonathan shot the arrows as a signal to David, even the lad that gathered them up, “Knew not any thing; only Jonathan and David knew the matter” (I Samuel 20:39.)  Some professors are like this lad. The Lord will not trust them with His secret: they would abuse it. It is common to hear such lads in religion say, Well, if I were sure that God loved me with an everlasting love, had chosen me from eternity, and would keep me by His power, through faith unto salvation, what need I care how I live?  Do not such discover that they are strangers to the love and fear of the friends of God,...

"And they came unto the brook of Eshcol, and cut down from thence a branch with a cluster of grapes." -Numbers 13:23 [KJV] Was not this single cluster of God's earnest to the people of the sure possession of the land where those delicious fruits grew? And was not the size and weight of this one branch a sample how full and extensive all the blessings, both of the covenant and of the promised land, should be to the after possession of God's people? My soul, dost thou not see in it then a precious representation of Jesus, that one Branch, and of all that cluster of blessings which are in Him? Well might the church cry out concerning the Redeemer, "My beloved is unto me as a cluster of camphire in the vineyards of Engedi."   For whether this camphire, this copher, denotes the vine of Cyprus, or the fruit of the palm-tree, in either, or in both, the soul-strengthening, soul-exhilarating, soul-healing virtues of this unnumbered excellencies, may well...

"He led him about, He instructed him, He kept him as the apple of His eye." -Deuteronomy 32:10 [KJV] "He led them about." This was true literally. What a circuitous, tangled, backward and forward route was that of the children of Israel in the wilderness! Yet every step was under God's direction; they never moved till the cloudy pillar led the way. But how does the Lord lead about in grace? By leading His Israel into a path of which they do not see the end. One turn of the road hides the next. I have read that you may make a road with a curve at every quarter of a mile, and yet in a hundred miles the distance will not be so much as a mile more than a perfectly straight line. So in grace. The length of the road swallows up the turnings. But these turnings make the road seem more round about than it really is. All before us is hidden. For instance, when the Lord begins a work of grace, He brings convictions of sin, opens up the spirituality of the l...