Christ, Desire of the Nations
Few preachers have ignited Christian zeal quite so powerfully as Charles Haddon Spurgeon. For 38 years, his sermons from the pulpit at Metropolitan Tabernacle enthralled English men and women with the Christ of scripture. Central to Spurgeon's ministry was the evangelical spirit evidenced in the sermon republished here. A heart burning for the conversion of all peoples was – and is – more than one pastor's hobby horse. It is the heart of the Christian. For missionaries, but especially for faithful churches commited to survival by sending, this is a message that bears repeating, and often.
The following is an abbreviated version of Charles Spurgeon's 1870 sermon, "The Desire of All Nations."
“And I will shake all nations, and the desire of all nations shall come: and I will fill this house with glory, saith the LORD of hosts.” (Haggai 2:7)
“I will shake all nations,” and He who is the desire of all nations shall come—a rendering which is not incorrect, and is established by a great mass of theologians, though, according to some of the ablest critics, a rendering scarcely to be sustained by the original. He who is the desire of all nations shall come, and that shall be the glory of the second spiritual temple. Jesus Christ, then, is the desire of all nations, if so we read the text, and this is doubtless true.
All nations have a dark and dim desire for Him. I say a dark desire, for without that adjective I could scarcely speak the truth. Most interesting chapters have been written by students of the history of mankind upon the preparedness of men’s hearts for the coming of Christ at His incarnation. It is very certain that almost all nations have a tradition of the coming one.
The Jews, of course, expected the Messiah. There were persons instructed according to the culture of various nations, which, though they do not expect the Messiah quite as clearly as the Jews, had almost as shrewd a guess as to what He might be and do as the mere ritualistic and Pharisaic Jews had. There was a notion all over the world at that time of Christ’s coming, that some great one was to descend from heaven and to come into this world for this world’s good. He was in that respect darkly and dimly the desire of all nations.
But in all nations there have been some persons more instructed to whom Christ has really been the object of desire with much more intelligence. Job was a Gentile and a fearer of God. We have no reason to believe that Job was a solitary specimen of enlightened persons—we have reason rather to hope that in all countries all over the world God has had a chosen people, who have known and feared Him, who have not had all the light which has been given to us, but who better used what light they had and were guided by His secret Spirit to much more of light, perhaps, than we think it right, with our little knowledge, to credit them with.
These, then, as representatives of all the nations, were desiring the coming of the great Deliverer, the incarnate God. And in this sense, representatively, the whole of the world was desiring Christ in that higher sense—and He was the desire of all nations. But my brethren, does this mean, or does it not mean, that Christ is exactly what all the nations need? If they did but know, if they could but understand Him, He is just what they would desire and should desire. Were their reason taught rightly, and were their minds instructed by the Spirit to desire the best in all the world, Christ is just what they need.
All the world desires a way to God. Hence men set up priests and anoint them with oil, and smear them with I know not what, only that they maybe mediators between them and God. They must have something to come between their guilt and God’s glorious holiness. Oh, if they knew it, what they want is Christ. You want no other priest, but the great “Apostle and High Priest of our profession”. You want no mediator with God, but the one Mediator, the man Christ Jesus, who is also equal with God.
Oh! world, why will you go about to seek this priest and that other deceiver, when He whom you want is appointed by the Most High? He whom Jacob saw in his dream as the ladder which reached from earth to heaven is the only means—the Son of Man and yet the Son of God.
The world wants a peacemaker. Oh! how badly it wants it now! I seem, as I walk my garden, as I go to my pulpit, as I go to my bed, to hear the distant cries and moans of wounded and dying men. We are so familiarized each day with horrible details of slaughter, that if we give our minds to the thought, I am sure we must feel a nausea, a perpetual sickness creeping over us. The reek and steam of those murderous fields, the smell of the warm blood of men flowing out on the soil must come to us and vex our spirits. Earth needs a peacemaker and it is He, Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews, and the friend of Gentiles, the Prince of Peace, who will make war to cease unto the ends of the earth.
Man wants a purifier. Very many nations feel, somehow or other,that political affairs do not go as one could wish. There are great excellences in personal government, but great disadvantages. There are great excellences in republican government, but remarkable difficulties, too. There are supreme excellences, as we think, in our own form of government, but a great many things to be amended, for all that. And this world is altogether out of joint—it is a crazy old concern, and does not seem as if it could be amended with all the tinkering of our reformers in the lapse of years.
The fact is, it needs the Maker, who made it, to come in and put it to rights. It needs the Hercules that is to turn the stream right through the Augean stable. It wants the Christ of God to turn the stream of His atoning sacrifice right through the whole earth, to sweep away the whole filth of ages, and it never will be done unless He does it. He is the One, the true Reformer, the true rectifier of all wrong, and in this respect, the desire of all nations.
Oh, if the world could gather up all her right desires. If she could condense in one cry all her wild wishes. If all true lovers of mankind could condense their theories and extract the true wine of wisdom from them, it would just come to this—we want an Incarnate God and we have got the Incarnate God! Oh! nations, but you know it not! You, in the dark, are groping after Him and know not that He is there.
Brethren, I may add Christ is certainly the desire of all nations in this respect, that we desire Him for all nations. Oh! that the world were encompassed in His Gospel! Would God the sacred fire would run along the ground, that the little handful of corn on the top of the mountains would soon make its fruit to shake like Lebanon. Oh! when will it come, when will it come that all the nations shall know Him? Let us pray for it. Let us labor for it.
And one other meaning I may give to this—He is the desirable one of all nations, bringing back the former translation of this text. He is the choice one of all nations. He is the chief among ten thousand and the altogether lovely. He, whom we love, is such a one that He can never be matched by another, his rival could not be found among the sons of men. There is none like Him. There is none like Him among the angels of light. There is none that can stand in comparison with Him.
The desire, the one that ought to be desired, the most desirable of all the nations, is Jesus Christ, and it is the glory of the Christian church, which is the second temple, that Christ is in her, her Head, her Lord. It is never her glory that she condescends to make an iniquitous union with the State. It is her glory that Christ is her sole King. It is her glory that He is her sole Prophet, He is her sole Priest, and that He then gives to all His people to be kings and priests with Him, Himself the center and source of all their glory and their power.
I cannot stay longer, though the theme tempts me, but must just give you the last word, which is this, the visible glory of the true second temple will be Christ’s second coming. He, Himself, is her glory, whether at His first coming or at His second coming. The church will be no more glorious at the second coming than now.
“What!” say you, “no more glorious!” No, but more apparently glorious. Christ is as glorious on the cross as He is on the throne—it is the appearance only that shall alter. Then shall the righteous shine forth as the sun in the kingdom of their Father, but they evermore are brightness itself, in the person of Jesus Christ.
Now, brethren, we are to expect, as long as this world lasts, that all things will shake that are to be moved. They will go on shaking.We call the world sometimes “terra firma”—it is not this world, surely, that deserves such a name as that—there is nothing stable beneath the stars. All things else will shake, and as the shaking goes on, Jesus Christ will, to those who know Him, become more and more their desire.
I suppose, if the world went on, in some things mending and improving, and were to go up to a point, we should not want Christ to come in a hurry, we would rather that things should be perpetuated—but the shaking will make Christ more and more the desire of the nations. “The whole creation groaneth,” is groaning up to now, but it will groan more and more “in pain together travailing”—the apostle says—“even until now.” The travailing pains grow worse, and worse, and worse, and it will be so with this world—it will travail till at last it must come to the consummation of her desire.
The church will say, “Come, Lord Jesus.” She will say it with gathering earnestness. She will continue still to say it, though there are intervals in which she will forget her Lord, but still her heart’s desire will be that He will come. And at last He will surely come and bring to this world not only Himself, the desire of all nations, but all that can be desired, for those days of His, when He appears, shall be to His people as the days of heaven upon earth, the days of their honor, the days of their rest—the day in which the kingdoms shall belong unto Christ.
Oh! brethren, it is not for me to go into details on a subject which would require many discourses, and which could not be brought out in the few last words of a discourse. But here is the great hope of that splendid building, the church, which is desired. Her glory essentially lies in the Incarnate God, who has come into her midst.
Her glory manifestly will lie in the second coming of that Incarnate God, when He shall be revealed from heaven to those that look and are waiting for and hasting unto the coming of the Son of God—looking for Him with gladsome expectation. And this is the joy of the church. He has gone, but He has left word, “I will come again, and will receive you unto myself, that where I am, ye may be also.”
Remember the words that were spoken of the angels to the church,“Ye men of Galilee, why stand ye here, gazing up into heaven? This same Jesus who is gone up from you into heaven shall so come in like manner as ye have seen him go up into heaven.” In propria persona—in very deed and truth, He shall come:
“These eyes shall see Him in that day,
The God that died for me;
And all my rising bones shall say,
Lord, who is like to Thee?”
Then shall come the adoption, the raising of the body, the reception of a glory to that body reunited to the soul, such as we have not dreamed of, for eye has not seen, nor ear heard, neither has it entered into the heart of man to conceive what God has prepared for them that love Him. Though He has revealed them unto us by His Holy Spirit, for the Spirit searches all things, yea, the deep things of God, yet have our ears heard but little thereof, and we have not received the full discovery of the things that shall be hereafter. The Lord bless you! May you all be parts of His church, have a share in His glory, and a share in the manifestation of that glory at the last.
Dear hearer, I would send you away with this one query in your ear—Is Christ your desire? Could you say, with David, “He is all my salvation and all my desire”? Could you gather up your feet in the bed, with dying Jacob, and say, “I have waited for thy will, O God”? By your desire shall you be known. The desire of the righteous shall be granted. Delight yourself also in the Lord, and He shall give you the desire of your heart.
But the desire of many is a groveling desire. It is a sinful desire. It is a disgraceful desire—a desire which, if it be attained, the attainment of it will afford very brief pleasure. Oh! sinner, let your desires go after Christ. Remember if you would have Him, you have not to earn Him—fight for Him—win Him—but He is to be had for the asking.
“Lay hold,” says the apostle, “on eternal life.” As if it were ours, if we did but grip it. God give us grace to lay hold on eternal life, for Jesus from the cross is saying, “Look unto me, and be ye saved, all ye ends of the earth,” and from His throne of glory He still is saying, “Come unto me,” exalted on high, to give repentance and remission of sin, and He will give them both to those who seek Him. Seek Him, then, this night. God grant it for His Son’s sake. Amen.