Ezekiel 18:4

Ezekiel 18:4

I. Every living soul is, in a sense, the subject, the sharer, of the privileges, the attributes of God. (1) There is, without contradiction, the privilege of life. Better than silent stone, or sounding waves, or moving worlds, is one who holds the eternal spark of life. Whatever comes we feel we know it; it is something to have lived. This is what it means. It is to have been single, separate, self-determining. Man is conscious that he is himself a cause,a self-determining power, that he can will, and freely choose between alternative courses. Free, personal, individual, he has indeed a splendid, if an awful, heritage lifeand like God's life: "All souls are Mine." (2) Another privilege of this lofty place in the scale of being is immortality. (3) A third privilege is the intuition of moral truth, and with this the sense of moral obligation.

II. If the soul is so endowed by God, it follows necessarily that God has a claim upon the soul. It is on success in realising, remembering, acting upon this truth of our relationship to God, that so much of our true happiness and our true dignity depends. Of what character is this claim? (1) God has a rightful claim upon our conscious dependence. We must render Him this service for many reasons. (a) Clearly because to do so is to recognise and reverence facts. We dodepend on God. He holds thee and me in the hollow of His hand. All things bright and dark, and glad and sorrowful, are full of the purposes of His unutterable compassion. (b) Such recognition is only a just outcome of gratitude. To be ungrateful is to be at once thoughtless and selfish and dishonourable. Gratitude is the loving recollection of those who, in some sense, first loved us. (c) The keeping alive the sense of conscious dependence upon God exercises upon our character a great moral influence. We never rise to the dignity of nature but by being natural. This dependence is one of those pure facts of nature which has imbibed none of the poison of the fall. Two powers accrue to the soul from cultivating the sense of it resignation and strength. (2) God's preserving and so richly endowing the soul gives Him a claim that in its plan and activities He should have the first place. (3) And lastly, God makes this claim upon you that you despise no soul.

III. We learn from this subject two serious lessons: (1) The first is individual responsibility. (2) The second that the soul's true beatitude is to know God.

W. J. Knox-Little, Manchester Sermons,p. 22.

Note some of the elements which constitute the soul's priceless worth.

I. When God says, "All souls are Mine," there is in the term "Mine" a peculiar force, inapplicable in a similar degree to any other created existence on earth. God places Himself by His indwelling in such a relation to the souls of His elect, that the parting with a lost soul becomes the occasion of profound, mysterious sadness to God Himself. He has lived in it. He had purposed to live in it for ever. He made it for this end.

II. The soul possesses the awful attribute of immortality; it is infinite in its duration. The sense of infiniteness is in itself overwhelming. The mind is incapable of conceiving infinite time or space, and is burdened even by the vague shadowy idea that imagination attempts to picture. When it is not in reference to time or space, but to the breathing, thinking soul, we may well shrink back with amazement and fear from the contemplation.

III. There are in the soul capacities which seem as inexhaustible as its duration of existence. The early dreams of youth often embody themselves in after life in actual realities; and in like manner the spiritual imaginations of the soul may be ideal pictures of what will hereafter be realised, of love, or beatitude, or power, or beauty, in worlds where all energies of the life attain their perfect fulness in God.

IV. Again, to enter into the mystery of a soul, it is necessary to consider its special vocation. Each separate soul is the embodying of a distinct idea of the mind of God. Each one is ordained to accomplish some one distinct purpose of God. This is the soul's vocation. It is this distinct personality which gives their dignity to individual men.

V. It is the property of every individual soul to comprehend more or less clearly the fact of its own responsibility, and to contemplate the end of its existence. Each dwells in a sphere of his own, revolving in his own orbit, which is beyond our earthly vision, as the real heavens are within the blue air which is the limit of our eyesight. All these elements of the inner world of life will in great measure depend, as to their character and intensity, on the apprehension which the soul has attained, through grace, of its own true dignity, its origin and purpose, its calling and its end.

T. T. Carter, Sermons,p. 1.

References: Ezekiel 18:4. Plain Sermons by Contributors to "Tracts for the Times," vol. vii., p. 153; Preacher's Monthly,vol. iv., p. 232; vol. viii., p. 288; vol. x., p. 308. Ezekiel 18:5. S. Cox, Expositions,3rd series, p. 30. Ezekiel 18:13. Ibid.,p. 16; E. V. Hall, Sermons in Worcester Cathedral,p. 58. Ezekiel 18:16; Ezekiel 18:17. H. S. Fagan, Good Words,1874, p. 842.