Isaiah 63:12

MAN'S chief end is to glorify and enjoy God. God's greatest and highest objective is to make to Himself a glorious and an everlasting name. Since God is God, it must be so, for He is full of love and kindness to His creatures, and He cannot more fully bless His creatures than by making Himself known to them. Everything that is good, true, holy, excellent and loving, is in God. He is not only the Giver of "every good and every perfect gift," but He is, Himself, the sum and substance of all blessing! And it is for the highest good of all the creatures He has made, that they should know their God. "Man, know yourself," is a frequent exhortation of the philosophers of earth—and self-knowledge is said to be the highest form of knowledge, but it is not. "Man, know your God," is a far wiser precept, for knowledge of God as far excels all other knowledge as the heavens are higher than the earth! It is life eternal to know Him, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom He has sent. Know your God, then, for here your hope, your comfort, your holiness, your Heaven will be found! God may well desire to make to Himself a name—that is to say, to make Himself known—because He is worthy to be known. There is no name so well worthy of publication. There is no Character like His. There is none that can be compared to Him. Even among the gods of the heathen, if they were gods, there is none like our God and, indeed, there is none other. He can truly say, "I am Jehovah, and there is none beside Me." He ought to be known and it is a worthy motive of His actions that He should make unto Himself a great name. This knowledge of God is the Heaven of the perfect! I believe they have no higher joy in the Land of Light than to know God. The blaze of their glory is the Presence of Deity. The height of their Heaven is that God is near them and that they are near to Him.

I told you, in the reading, that Israel had a golden age, a time of great familiarity with God, when Jehovah was very near to His people in their sufferings and was afflicted in their affliction—when He helped them in everything they did and the Angel of His Presence saved them. But after all that the Lord had done for them, there came a cold period. The people went astray from the one living and true God. They fell into the ritualism of the golden calf. They must have something visible, something that they could see and worship. Even after they were brought into the Promised Land and the Lord had worked great wonders for them, they turned aside to false gods till they worshipped strange deities that were no gods and provoked Jehovah to jealousy. "They rebelled and vexed His Holy Spirit: therefore He was turned to be their enemy and He fought against them." Not that He ceased to love His chosen, but He must be just and He could not patronize sin—so He sent their enemies against them and they were sorely smitten, and brought very low. Then it was that they began to remember the days of old and to sigh for Him whom they had treated so evilly. And they said, one to another, "Where is He that brought them up out of the sea with the shepherd of His flock? Where is He that put His holy Spirit within him? That led them by the right hand of Moses with His glorious arm, dividing the water before them, to make Himself an everlasting name? That led them through the deep, as an horse in the wilderness, that they should not stumble? As a beast goes down into the valley, the Spirit of the Lord caused him to rest: so did You lead Your people to make Yourself a glorious name." I have but a short time, as the Communion Service is to follow and, therefore, I must leave much unsaid that I think your own imagination will make up to you at home.

MAN'S chief end is to glorify and enjoy God. God's greatest and highest objective is to make to Himself a glorious and an everlasting name. Since God is God, it must be so, for He is full of love and kindness to His creatures, and He cannot more fully bless His creatures than by making Himself known to them. Everything that is good, true, holy, excellent and loving, is in God. He is not only the Giver of "every good and every perfect gift," but He is, Himself, the sum and substance of all blessing!