beyond controversy that “now is the accepted time, and now is the day of salvation.”  The utterance of our Redeeming God, by His servant David, is:  “To-day if ye will hear His voice harden not your hearts.”  St. Paul, in the Epistle to the Hebrews, informs the world, that as God sware that those Israelites who did not believe and obey His servant Moses, during their wanderings in the desert, should not enter the earthly Canaan, so those, in any age and generation of men, who do not believe and obey His Son Jesus Christ, during their earthly pilgrimage, shall, by the same Divine oath, be shut out of the eternal rest that remaineth for the people of God (Hebrews iii. 7-19).  Unbelieving men, in eternity, will be deprived of the benefits of Christ’s redemption, by the oath, the solemn decision, the judicial determination of God.  For, this exercise of mercy, of which we are speaking, is not a matter of course, and of necessity, and which therefore continues forever and forever.  It is optional.  God is entirely at liberty to pardon, or not to pardon.  And He is entirely at liberty to say when, and how, and how long the offer of pardon shall be extended.  He had the power to carry the whole body of the people of Israel over Jordan, into the promised land, but He sware that those who proved refractory, and disobedient, during a certain definite period of time, should never enter Canaan.  And, by His apostle, He informs all the generations of men, that the same principle will govern Him in respect to the entrance into the heavenly Canaan.  The limiting of the offer of salvation to this life is not founded upon any necessity in the Divine Nature, but, like the offer of salvation itself, depends upon the sovereign pleasure and determination of God.  That pleasure, and that determination, have been distinctly made known in the Scriptures.  We know as clearly as we know anything revealed in the Bible, that God has decided to pardon here in time, and not to pardon in eternity.  He has drawn a line between the present period, during which He makes salvation possible to man, and the future period, when He will not make it possible.  And He had a right to draw that line, because mercy from first to last is the optional, and not the obligated agency of the Supreme Being.

Therefore, fear lest, a promise being left us of entering into His rest, any of you should seem to come short of it.  For unto you is the gospel preached, as well as unto those Israelites; but the word, did not profit them, not being mixed with faith in them that heard it.  Neither will it profit you, unless it is mixed with faith.  God limiteth a certain day, saying in David, “To-day, after so long a time,”—­after these many years of hearing and neglecting the offer of forgiveness,—­“to-day, if ye will hear His voice, harden not your hearts.”  Labor, therefore, now, to enter into that rest, lest any man fall, after the same example of unbelief, with those Israelites whom the oath of God shut out of both the earthly and the heavenly Canaan.