Delivered in Grove Chapel, Camberwell, Sunday Morning, Jan. 21, 1849, BY THE REV. JOSEPH IRONS.

"The God of Israel, whose habitation is in Jerusalem."-Ezra vii. 15. THIS short sentence I have selected from one of the most interesting narratives recorded in the Old Testament Scripture. Israel were gone into captivity in consequence of their idolatry; Jerusalem and the temple were forsaken; heathen monarchs tyrannizing over them; oppression, privation, and poverty pursuing them; their daily offerings ceased; their acts of worship reviled, and they themselves outcasts "ready to perish"-just as I apprehend Christians in England will be in a very short time, under Popish heathenism and Infidelity. God Almighty avert it! It pleased God, however, who can do what He will with heathen as well as with Christian hearts, to put it into the heart of the heathen monarch, Artaxerxes, to commission Ezra, and with him as many as were well disposed towards the worship of the God of Israel, to go to Jerusalem, and examine its state, and inquire concerning its prospects, and to take with them abundance of gold and silver, and everything necessary to rebuild the walls. While this order is going forth from the king's mouth, mark, that he does not himself claim any personal interest therein. "Your God," says he, "the Lord your God"-he never dared to say, "my God," or "our God." He knew Him not, and worshipped Him not; and all through the chapter, while the king is giving his solemn decree relative to Ezra's mission, he thus speaks of him, until we come to the conclusion, where Ezra takes up the language of praise, and says, "Blessed be the Lord God of our fathers"-there is the relationship declared-" which hath put such a Published in Weekly Numbers, 1d., and Monthly Parts, price 5d.

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thing in the king's heart to beautify the house of the Lord, which is in Jerusalem; and hath extended mercy unto me before the king and his counsellors, and before all the king's mighty princes." Now mark, "And I was strengthened as the hand of the Lord my God was upon me." I do not know if you have entered as I have done into the sweetness of this little phrase, “ my God," and appropriated it to yourself in soul exercise. "The hand of the Lord my God," is the language here used; but sometimes it is put in the plural, as “our God;" and I wish my hearers to know what it is for faith to be appropriating, at the moment he utters these words, all the blessedness which is contained therein.

The difference in phraseology is conspicuous between the heathen monarch and good old Ezra; and I wish the heathen in England would be as cautious not to tell lies as King Artaxerxes was. They often speak of "our Saviour," and "our God," though they know no more of Him than Artaxerxes did. If they said the God of heaven," the "God of His people," or the "God of Israel," as Artaxerxes did, they would be speaking the truth, but to call Him "our Saviour," and "our Lord," is downright falsehood, for they have no more dependence upon Him than the heathen have. I want people to speak the truth in simplicity. Now Artaxerxes did, though he was a heathen and worshipped images, and when he comes to speak of the God of Israel, he does not utter a false claim as millions do in England, but says in plain words, "The God of Israel whose habitation is "-not in my palace, but "in Jerusalem." It it is very common, among us, when we have a valued, or endeared friend, living at a distance, with whom we once had close intercourse, but have not seen for a long time, to inquire, "Where does my friend so-and-so live?" and if we were travelling through the city, town, or street, in which he resided, we should ask, "Can you tell me where so-and-so's habitation is?" and on being shown it, we should look at it with interest, even though we could not stop. Well, then, is it not desirable that Christians should know something of the habitation of their own God? My text says it is in Jerusalem. "The God of Israel whose habitation is in Jerusalem."

Let us then, first, say a few words about this holy alliance, the living God and this living Church; "the God of Israel,” and then a little about His elect habitation. These are the two points, then, which will engage our attention this morning as far as my strength, God assisting me, will hold out.

I bear in mind, with peculiar feelings of gratitude, that it is thirty-one years this day, since God sent me to open His commission in Camberwell; and during that thirty-one years we have known Him as the God of Israel, and have found a Jerusalem for Him, or rather He has found a Jerusalem for Himself. His habitation is here. He has lived here to the present hour, and I trust He will long continue to live with us here, for His own honour and glory. Let me then, first of all, invite your attention to this sacred description of the living God, and His Church. The God of Israel includes both. Israel His Church; and the God that claims it; a living God amidst a living people. I dwell upon this point with the more anxiety, and the more intense interest, because there is so much that now passes for Christianity, that is all dead together; dead works; dead doctrines; dead preachers; dead hearers; dead forms; and the living God taking no interest in it except to manifest

that he is insulted by it. But amidst all the deadness that pervades nominal Christendom He has a living people, and He is known as a living God amongst them. Now I do not want to limit the Israel of God within a narrower circle than that within which He Himself has limited it. I do not want to fix upon any one tribe, whether Judah, Benjamin, Issachar, Naphthali, or Asher, and say that that is all Israel. That would be bigotry. That would be an untruth. It required the whole of the tribes of Israel to make up the one cove nant people of God. It requires all the living-I shall keep to this phrase in Jerusalem to make up the one Church of the living God; and, therefore, previous to putting in your claim as the Psalmist did, "This God is our God," I beg of you to examine this point, “Am I alive?" I do not mean animal life. Your presence here to-day tells us you have that. I do not mean a mental life merely, which makes you capable of reading, thinking, examining, weighing, and measuring one thing against another, forming conclusions and tracing causes to effects. The mental powers may go forth to a wonderful extent in this direction, and yet there may be no spiritual life, no heaven-born life, no life that is capable of enjoying God, no life derived from heavenly birth. I cannot protest too strongly against that nominal thing that they call Christianity, which goes upon the supposition that a poor worm of the earth can do what he likes with it, believe it or not, receive it or reject it, adopt it or abandon it, according to his own caprice. My hearers, all the Christianity that you can do so much by is a blank; it is a counterfeit; it is worse than a counterfeit, it is a robbery of God, and a deception of your own soul. It possesses no life. God forbid that I should undervalue my animal existence; I only wish I had more strength in my limbs. God forbid that I should undervalue my mental existence. The thinking powers are very valuable, and particularly so when cultivated by the Holy Spirit's teaching and put forth for God. But if I had all the mental powers of all the philosophers that ever lived, and all the bodily strength of a Sampson or a Hercules, yet if I have not life derived from heavenly birth, capable of enjoying God; life supernatural that cannot be chained to earth, that soars above the world, and that the world cannot understand or possess; if I have not a life that is "hid with Christ in God," a life that is "Christ Himself in me the hope of glory," I am not one of God's Israel, at least not manifestly so. God's Israel are a living people; they are descendants from a covenant Head; born not of the will of the flesh nor of man, but of God. Examine this point, beloved, and inquire whether you really belong to God's Church, to His living people. This day will be assembled together vast multitudes, with a decent appearance, and, perhaps, with a tolerable degree of morality in outward life, who will go through their lessons and retire from their seats and return to their homes as dead to all spiritual things as the benches upon which they sit. Oh, that God would send forth His quickening grace, and cause the precious promise to be fulfilled, "The dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God, and they that hear shall live." Do not be content with a mental religion, I beseech you. Do not be content with a philosophical religion. Do not be content with what is sometimes termed a "gentlemanly religion." "To the poor the gospel is preached," and you must be brought to this one point or perish for ever, I have the life of God in my soul, that nothing can extinguish."

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Now pass on to mark this holy alliance a little further-the God of Israel-infinitude, associated with a royal seed, or, to use a different idiom, with a seed royal. Do not imagine that amalgamation is to be suffered, that the world is to come into any part or claim. It is the royal seed. It is the God of Israel, and the Israel of God. We must chime upon these two words, as constituting the essence of the gospel of Christ. "The God of Israel," and I do not know where to find in the Scriptures that Jehovah is accounted the God of the Philistines; but there are many places where Dagon is said to be their god, and those who are of the Philistines will go and bow down to him. And such were the distinctions kept up, that when the ark, the symbol and emblem of the presence of the God of Israel, was carried into the house of Dagon, the god of the Philistines, Dagon fell from his eminence, and could not pick himself up, and when they picked him up he fell again and was broken to pieces, and nothing left of him but his stumps. Be sure of this then, the God of Israel and the god of the Philistines cannot live together. The god of the Philistines, Dagon, must fall when the God of the whole earth, who is the God of Israel in a covenant sense, comes in contact with Him. I conceive this to be the curse of the present day, that people are determined that Dagon and the God of Israel shall occupy the same temple, that Popery and Protestantism shall be married, that darkness and light shall be mingled, and that he who believeth and an Infidel shall hail each other as brothers. My Bible forbids it, and the God of Israel forbids it. But when I come to look at the sacred union which is set forth in my text, I find that the God of Israel is associated with Israel, and that Israel is a royal seed, and its very name signifies a prevailing prince before God, and here is the God of Israel associating Himself with, and giving Himself to, and claiming as His own, the Israel whom He has chosen in the covenant Head from everlasting.

But do not let us pass over this point without tracing their history, because the Israel of God was not better, in their Adam nature, than other nations, or in their fleshly character superior to those around them. Neither were they more numerous; and they were accounted "a stiff-necked and perverse generation." He knew they would "deal very treachously," and he called them "transgressors from the womb.' Therefore we cannot trace the sacred union between Israel and their God to anything in the creature. All that is in the creature is averse to it. Enough is in the creature to have forbidden anything like an approach, much more a union, between God and their souls. To what, then, must we trace it? Why, just to the covenant Head. They were chosen in Abraham, and Abraham was the friend of God and the type of Christ; and the covenant in which they were chosen was thus revealed to Abraham four hundred and thirty years before the giving of the law (Gen. xvii). Therefore we come to the conclusion, that all Israel, the true believers, the members of the mystical body of Christ, who shall inherit heaven in eternity in the Jerusalem above, were chosen in Christ "from before the foundation of the world," and that nothing can revoke that choice, or alter that act of electing love. If we do not begin here, and rest here too, we shall make miserable blunders in every part of divinity. Trace all up to this, and you will see how God has acted with, and towards, and among His people, in all ages.

For the sake of illustration, let us look at Israel. In the very first feature of their history, they turn murderers in heart, conspire against

the life of their dear brother Joseph, and show perverse and wicked dispositions. "Behold this dreamer cometh," said they, "come now, therefore, and let us slay him, and cast him into some pit, and we will say some evil beast hath devoured him, and we shall see what will become of his dreams." What! these the chosen of God-these the Israel of God-these the patriarchs and the heads of the twelve tribes! Mark their conduct, the oppression they endured in Egypt. Mark the time which elapsed before they cried to God at all. Behold them as fugitives and vagabonds in the midst of a strange land, as much as in in the time of Artaxerxes. Yet God says, "I have seen the affliction of my people." The relationship was not interrupted; they were still His people, and He their God. So, when He sent His command to Pharaoh, He said, "Let my people go." There is the sacred claim, "I am their God and they are my people." Oh, do keep to this, because it stamps a dignity upon the Church of the living God, to view the fact, that infinitude is associated with worms of the earth, who are of the seed royal, who spring from Abraham, and they that are Christ's are of the seed of Abraham, said the Lord.

Pass on, just to mark that there is a veritable portion on both sides, with the God of Israel and with the Israel of God; and it is so stated in His precious word, "The Lord's portion is His people." What! such enslaved, degraded, rebellious, ruined, filthy, corrupt creatures as the whole election of grace are in their natural condition, God's portion— "the lot of His inheritance?" Are they to be left so? He does not say that they shall be, or may be, my portion, if they will wash themselves clean, return and repent, flee from sin and practice righteousness. No: He says, He will make them holy, because they are His people. Look next, at the apostle's illustration of this inheritance, this portion, this wealth, that Jehovah claims as His own. He prayed that the people in his day might know much of God, and adds, "That ye may know what is the hope of his calling, and what the riches of the glory of his inheritance in the saints." That is God's Israel. Who would believe that the expression can mean the people of God? You, who know your state by nature, your depravity and ruin, and who often lie abased before God, does it not overwhelm you with astonishment and gratitude, that Jehovah can look on you and say, "These are the riches of the glory of my inheritance?" Then mark what Malachi says in confirmation of this, "They shall be mine, saith the Lord of Hosts, in that day when I make my jewels," or "my special treasure," as the margins in our old Bibles read. So we find that the Lord's people are His portion, proclaimed to be so by Moses, illustrated as a rich and glorious portion by the apostle, while His claim is confirmed by Malachi, in the closing up of the Old Testament Scripture.

Pause, and ask to whom you belong; ask seriously whether God has laid His claim to you, whether you have been made to hear His voice, and to feel the "lighting down of His arm;" whether He has called you out of Egypt, given you life Divine, and set His mark upon you as an owner does upon his sheep. If He has, depend upon it, the devil, as well as the world, will hate you, and you will experience persecution. But now take the opposite portion, for I said it is a veritable portion on both sides. The Lord's people set forth their claim under the direction of the Holy Ghost, "The Lord is my portion, saith my soul, therefore will I hope in Him." Can anything be more