1 Samuel 2:3

1 Samuel 2:3

In all God's dealings with us there is one thing of which we may be perfectly sure, they will be done deliberately; delicately, by measurement, with accuracy, in proportion. We are quite safe there from all hastiness and inconsideration those two banes of human judgment. Job's prayer is always answered, "Let me be weighed in the balance." Alike the greatest and the least from those giants of nature, the everlasting hills, down to the dust of the earth, and to the smallest thought which ever flashed through a man's mind all are weighed.

I. Let us be sure that we give actions their proper place in the plan of our salvation. Actions never save a man. Actions have, strictly speaking, nothing to do with our salvation. But actions occupy four parts in the great scheme of our redemption. (1) They are the tests of life "He that abideth in Me, the same bringeth forth much fruit." (2) They are the language of love "If ye love Me, keep My commandments." (3) They glorify God before men "Let your light so shine before men that they, seeing your good works, may glorify your Father which is in Heaven." (4) And although they are not the meritorious causes of our final rewards, yet they determine the degrees and proportions of our final state "He will reward every man according as his work shall be."

II. It would be the greatest presumption on our part to say how God weighs our actions. It is sufficient to know that He does weigh them. That hand cannot err. But we may carry out God's own metaphor a little way and conceive it thus: (1) On the one hand is the action; on the other, what that action might have been, and ought to have been, and, but for our sin, would have been. (2) On the one side the action we did; on the other, the action we meant to do, and promised to do. (3) On the one side, what we have received; on the other, what we have rendered.

III. When God holds the scales of His children's actions. He puts in something of His own over and above, and when He puts that in, the beam that had preponderated against us, turns the other way, and "mercy rejoiceth against judgment." We should be careful not to usurp an office which only Omniscience can rightly exercise.

IV We must all feel that when we are weighed in these holy scales the verdict can only be, "Tekel; thou art weighed in the balances and found wanting." But the Lord Jesus Christ died upon the cross. That death is on the one side, and the whole world's guilt is on the other. God is "weighing them" the blood of Christ and the sins of all mankind. God has balanced you and your substitute, and God is satisfied for His sake for ever and ever.

J. Vaughan, Sermons,15th series, p. 189.

References: 1 Samuel 2:3. Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. xxix., No. 1736. 1 Samuel 2:6. Ibid.,vol. ix., No. 523. 1 Samuel 2:8. J. H. Evans, Thursday Penny Pulpit,vol. iii., p. 387. 1 Samuel 2:9. G. Brooks, Outlines of Sermons,p. 176.