Sermon #1497
Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit
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SELF-RIGHTEOUSNESS—A SMOLDERING HEAP OF RUBBISH NO. 1497 A SERMON DELIVERED ON LORD’S-DAY MORNING, SEPTEMBER 28, 1879, BY C. H. SPURGEON, AT THE METROPOLITAN TABERNACLE, NEWINGTON. “Which say, Stand by yourself, come not near to me; for I am holier than you. These are a smoke in My nose, a fire that burns all the day.” Isaiah 65:5.
THE apostle Paul shall be our interpreter here. You remember how in the tenth chapter of his Epistle to the Romans he quotes from this chapter and says, “Isaiah is very bold and says, I was found of them that sought Me not; I was made manifest unto them that asked not after Me. But to Israel He says, All day long I have stretched forth My hands unto a disobedient and gainsaying people”? Isaiah was very bold to speak the gospel so plainly, when a legal spirit prevailed and very bold to defy the enmity of his own nation by declaring that they would be rejected for their sins, while the far-off heathen would be brought in by sovereign grace. He was bold to denounce hypocrites to their faces and to smite a proud nation with the threatenings of the Lord. Perhaps it was for this boldness that he suffered a cruel death by the hands of Manasseh. The application of the passage to Israel is just thus. Year after year, God dealt with great patience towards His chosen people, but they seemed to be desperately set upon idolatry in one form or another. Sometimes they worshipped Jehovah, but then they did it under figure and symbol, whereas He has expressly forbidden that even His own worship should be thus celebrated. He who said in the first commandment, “You shall have no other gods before Me,” also said in the second, “You shall not make unto you any graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth: you shall not bow down yourself to them, nor serve them.” At other times, they altogether rejected Jehovah and worshipped Baal and Ashtaroth and whole troops of the gods of the heathen and thus they provoked the Lord exceedingly. They also practiced necromancy, or pretended communion with the dead, witchcraft and sorcery and all manners of abominable rites, like the depraved nations around them. When this open rebellion was given up, as it was after the captivity, for the Jews have never been guilty of idolatry since that day, they fell into another form of the same evil, namely, self-righteousness—so that when our Lord came, He found selfrighteousness to be the crying sin of Israel—the Pharisees carrying it to such a pitch as to render it utterly ridiculous. They reckoned that the touch of a common person polluted their sacredness so that they needed to wash after walking down a street. When they traversed the ways, they took the edge of the pavement so that they might not brush against the garments of the passers-by and even in the temple, in prayer, they stood by themselves lest they should be defiled. Their whole spirit is expressed in the words of the text, “Stand by yourself, come not near to me; for I am holier than you.” This God declares to be as obnoxious to Him as smoke in a man’s nose. He could not bear it. He was no more able to tolerate their self-righteousness than to endure their idolatry. It is this last form of the evil of the Israelite heart which I am going to speak about this morning, because it is a phase of evil which is now common among us. Self-righteousness is rampant in our own day. There are many who come up to the courts of the Lord’s house and mingle among the followers of Christ who still say, “Stand by, for I am holier than you.” Our sermon is meant to be a cannonade against self-righteousness—that righteousness which a man makes a show of his own doings, his own feelings, his own alms, prayers, or sacraments—all such righteousness is to be utterly despised. I. The first point is this—THE SIN OF SELF-RIGHTEOUSNESS GROWS UP AMONG RELIGIOUS PEOPLE. It is not always the sin of the outside world, for many outsiders do not pretend to any righteousness at all and I fancy they think all the better of themselves for that. This is an idle plea which needs not many words to expose. “I make no profession,” says one. This is about as honorable a confesVolume 25
Tell someone today how much you love Jesus Christ.
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