Last Lord's Day, we talked about abandonment, starting out with the trivial, discussing abandoning pets that are dearly beloved, and how people just move away and leave them, and what a betrayal it is, and what a cruelty it is, and then people abandon other people as well, don't they? And they do it because they decide they're not willing to bear the cost of maintaining their friendship or their duty to the animal or to the person, and so they just walk away. And we know that people abandon their children by abortion, or by neglect, or by abuse, or by just leaving them to grow up and not have the interaction and the affection and the love that's needed for the human mind to develop properly. And we know that people abandon their parents. They'll just leave them when they get old and sick, move away somewhere and never visit and not take care of them and not have compassion on them and not provide for them. They abandon their relatives, the people that they ought to love and have affection for, but they become alienated or full of hatred or whatever. They'll abandon their friends. for no reason and never give an explanation, or they'll abandon even their spouse, whether through divorce or just through a neglect and alienation. And what an abuse it is, what an evil it is, and how pervasive it is become in our society that these people will be ignored, unloved, and all affection and communication cut off, abandonment. by the ones whom you love. And the Scriptures exhort us to love one another and to bear one another's burdens, even when it costs us. You remember, one of the apostles wrote that we should remember those people who are in bonds as if bound with them, even when they're persecuted, even when they're in danger, even when they're in jail, even when it's a danger for us to even associate with them or not to abandon them. We're to love them and we're to bear their burdens. And so it is a cost not to abandon the ones we love, but then love is sacrifice. It's not just a feeling, it's not just an emotion, but it's consideration and work and sacrifice for the one that is loved. And for those who have been abandoned, what consolation we have in the promise that the Lord will never abandon His people. In Psalm 27 at verse 9, the psalmist cries out to God, hide not Thy face far from me. Put not Thy servant away in anger. Thou hast been my help. Leave me not, nor forsake me, O God of my salvation. When my father and my mother forsake me, then the Lord will take me up. And surely those words of the Savior, I will never leave you nor forsake you, are a comfort to anyone who has been abandoned by one whom he loves. And no one can separate us, can they, from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus. So even though Friends may fail and foes assail, even then the God of glory and our Lord Jesus Christ are ever with us and will not leave us, cannot be apprised apart from us, can they?" And you know, this is an astounding thing since the Lord Jesus has more reason than anybody to abandon His people because of the great cost of His love for us. That cost was incalculable. There will never be a person that has to pay a cost of love to a friend or a family member in order not to abandon them where Christ's cost and Christ's love was not far greater still when He refused to leave us. For He went to the cross and He bore all our sin, and he was subject to abandonment himself that he might not leave us helpless and alone. And so this morning a coda to this discussion about abandonment. While last Sunday we spoke about first animals and then people and the effects of abandonment and the feeling of abandonment, yet in thinking about it this week, I discovered that the greatest victim of abandonment, if you will, in the history is the very Lord of glory, is it not? Because His creatures all abandoned Him. Adam and Eve turned their backs on Him. They rebelled against Him. They wouldn't obey Him. And all throughout history, it has been one long record of abandonment and betrayal of the God of glory who loves us and who created us. You see, this is human history, really. The writing of human history is a writing of a serial betrayal and abandonment of the God of the universe. By and large, that people, the human race really turns away, turns away from God. dishonors him, despises, forsakes him, ignores him, all false gods, all worship of idols, all forms of atheism and evolutionism and scientific materialism, all of these are just fancy names for running away from God, abandoning God, defying God, repudiating God. What does the passage say they do not like to retain God in their thoughts. What can that be if not be a great and tragic abandonment of the one that made us? You know, you would think that just personal interest or personal greed or fear or any number of reasons would be reason enough not to turn away from God, not to abandon Him. And yet the whole world has abandoned Him. The whole world has walked away from Him. The whole world has not reciprocated to Him the love and the obedience and the affection that it ought to have. What does the Scripture say? Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, soul and mind and strength. And yet the world is full of hatred towards God. And at the very least, ignoring Him and acting as if He... is the furthest thing from the minds and hearts of the people. And not only that, but more specifically, the Lord's very people have left Him over and over and over again. I think of how Israel is the great picture of the abandonment of the Lord against their interests, against His will, in defiance of His love and provision and mercy towards them. Foretold was it not by Moses in several places, especially in Deuteronomy, but consider Deuteronomy 32 at verse 15. But Jeshurun waxed fat and kicked. Thou art waxed fat, thou art grown thick, thou art covered with fatness. Then he forsook God, which made him and lightly esteemed the rock of his salvation. They provoked him to jealousy with strange gods. With abominations provoked they him to anger. They sacrificed unto devils, not to God. To gods whom they knew not, to new gods that came newly up, whom your fathers feared not." You see, this is a dream or a vision of Moses looking into the future and predicting, foretelling how God's people would turn away from him. And they would do it after they became successful. and settled in the land, and fat with the good of the land. Then they would turn away from Him. Then they would forget Him, and they would walk off from Him. And then, of course, it took place. We read in Judges chapter 2 this morning. Consider it verse 10. And also, all that generation which gathered unto their fathers, there arose another generation after them which knew not the Lord, nor yet the works which He had done for Israel. And the children of Israel did evil in the sight of the Lord, and served Balaam, and they forsook the Lord God of their fathers, which brought them out of the land of Egypt, and followed other gods of the gods of the people that were around about them, and bowed themselves unto them, and provoked the Lord to anger, and they forsook the Lord, and served Baal and Ashtoreth." And of course, there would be a restoring of the people in David's time. And then once again, a foretelling of great abandonment and loss and walking away. Consider 1 Kings 9 at verse 6, But if ye shall at all turn from following me, the Lord warns against them, ye or your children, and will not keep my commandments and my statutes which I have set before you, but go and serve other gods and worship them. Then will I cut off Israel out of the land which I have given them. And this house which I have hallowed for my name will I cast out of my sight, and Israel shall be a proverb and byword among all people. And at this house which is high Everyone that passeth by it shall be astonished, and shall hiss, and they shall say, Why hath the Lord done this unto this land, and to this house? And they shall answer, Because they forsook the Lord their God, who brought forth their fathers out of the land of Egypt, and have taken hold upon other gods, and have worshipped them, and served them. Therefore hath the Lord brought upon them all this evil." He foretold or he mourned against the abandonment and turning away from the God of glory, even as they dedicated a great temple of worship unto the Lord. And then that abandonment was so greatly lamented when it came about over a period of hundreds of years, until at the time of Jeremiah, his whole book of the prophecy of Jeremiah is full of the subject of abandonment by God's people, of the Lord. For instance, in Jeremiah 2 at verse 9, Wherefore I will yet plead with you, saith the Lord, and with your children's children will I plead. For pass over the isles of Shittim, and see, and send unto Kedar, and consider diligently, and see, if there be such a thing, hath a nation changed their gods? which are yet no gods, but My people have changed their glory for that which doth not profit. Be astonished, O ye heavens, at this! Be horribly afraid! Be ye very desolate, saith the Lord! For My people have committed two evils. They have forsaken Me, the fountain of living waters, and hewed them out cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water." Jeremiah lamented here and 21 other places in his great book of prophecy the abandonment of the Lord and the foolishness of it. That it was even contrary to their own self-interest and yet they couldn't keep by the Lord. They couldn't keep by Him. They couldn't cleave unto Him. They turned their backs and they left Him. And He had done so many marvelous things for them and they showed contempt for it. and would not consider Him, and would not cleave unto Him, and would not love Him, would not obey Him. Oh, the prophet Isaiah, how he denounced this abandonment of the Lord by the people of Israel. At verse 2 of chapter 1, Hear, O heavens, and give ear, O earth, for the Lord hath spoken. I have nourished and brought up children, and they have rebelled against Me. The ox knoweth its owner, the ass his master's crib, but Israel doth not know, my people doth not consider. Ah, sinful nation, a people laden with iniquity, a seed of evildoers, children that are corruptors, they have forsaken the Lord. They have provoked the Holy One of Israel into anger. They have gone away backward. Why should ye be stricken anymore? Ye will revolt more and more. The whole head is sick, the whole heart faint. From the sole of the foot even into the head there is no more soundness in it. But wounds and bruises and putrefying sores, They have not been closed, neither bound up, nor mollified with ointment. Your country is desolate, your cities are burned with fire, your land strangers devoured in your presence, and it is desolate as overthrown by strangers. And the daughter of Zion is left as a cottage in a vineyard, as a lodge in a garden of cucumbers, as a besieged city, except the Lord of hosts had left unto us a very small remnant. We should have been as Sodom. and we should have been like unto Gomorrah." So you see, when the Lord Jesus comes in the fullness of time, is it surprising that He should be subject to the very same abandonment by the very same people of Israel? They despised the Holy One of Israel. They preferred in the end Barabbas, a murderer. And the saddest line, no doubt, is found in the Gospel of St. Matthew chapter 26 at verse 56, "...then all the disciples forsook Him and fled." The Lord has thousands of years of practice being abandoned by those whom He loves. And every person Whoever lived has done so. They've all rebelled. They've all turned away from Him. They've all forsaken the Lord. We've all abandoned Him. And so what is the response of our great God to this long and disreputable history of abandonment by His people? whom He loves. What is His response? Why, it is to bring us back to Himself through His glorious gospel. He has entreated us and provided for us and sacrificed for us even after we've abandoned Him, even after we've turned our backs against Him. Rather, He's gone on further to draw us back unto Himself. You see, if it is wrong to abandon even a beloved animal, much more so a friend, and even more so members of your own family, your own mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, spouse, and so forth. How great a crime is it to abandon and turn against our very God, our very Maker, the One who has the right to all obedience and love and fealty and devotion, who has a claim greater than any other person might have to our love and affection. How great a crime must it be to abandon and turn against the Lord of glory? How could we be reconciled for so profound an insult? So great a crime. You know, sometimes when one person abandons another person, even when that person decides to turn back, the person they've left will refuse to receive them back. So great will be the hurt. So great will be the pain. So great will be the insult. Imagine the insult to the Lord by the abandonment of His people. What a great crime it is. And that crime cannot just be ignored or written off or just blindly forgiven. But oh, it was punished instead in our Lord Jesus, wasn't it? When He went to the cross. Think of it, the evil of our turning on God, forsaking Him, disobeying Him, abandoning Him after all His kindness to us. The evil of all that was judged on the One who never betrayed, who never disobeyed, who never abandoned the Father. No wonder He cried out when it came down to it as He hung on the cross, My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me, the Son, whoever lived and whoever loved the Father, who always had sweet communion together from eternity past, who was perfectly agreed together, profoundly satisfied in love for each other. Now on the cross, he finds himself alienated, forsaken in agony and shame, bearing the sin of a people who had abandoned their God and rebelled against Him. God had a right to abandon His people forever. And yet it was the Savior who bore that abandonment, that punishment for us and in our place. We never know what it means to be abandoned by God, do we? Because our Lord Jesus was left by the Father for us at Calvary. He was abandoned and He felt that abandonment that we might never have to know what it was truly like. And in this way, The Lord Jesus knows from both perspectives, you see, how awful abandonment truly is. As God, as the second person of the Trinity, he has experienced, he has had to deal with abandonment by his people for six millennia. And as man, he experienced being betrayed and abandoned by Israel in general, and then by his own friends at that very crucial point. And as the God-man on the cross, he experienced in our place, the wrath of God and the forsaking by God, the abandonment by God in judgment for the sin that he had become in our place. And so if you feel sorrow and abandonment by family or friends, know this, that the Lord Jesus empathizes because He knows. He knows very well. But the question that we must ask ourselves is, do we forsake the Savior in little ways. I don't mean in turning away from the faith. I don't mean in denying the Lord that bought us. I don't mean in terms of becoming apostate, but I mean in little ways. I think of how we can abandon the Lord Jesus by treating Him as if He's not there, by treating Him as if He's not our very best friend and our Savior and our Lord. by having no prayer with Him, no communion, no church. Some mornings, when I arise from my sleep, the first thing I think of is the goodness of God in giving us the Savior, and I thank Him for it. But sometimes, on about 10.30 or 11, I'll be sitting somewhere doing something, all of a sudden this thought will strike me, you know, I haven't even thought about the Savior all day yet. and I'm filled with shame and sadness. How can it be that the one who loved me the most, the one who will never abandon me, how can it be that I could even for a few hours not think of Him, not be full of love towards Him, not commute with Him? He's always there. He's always there to hear. He's always there to sympathize. He's always there to protect and to rescue and to raise up. Always there to forgive. And yet we treat him like somebody that we sometimes that we really want to avoid seeing, don't we? We don't want to waste the time, don't want to take the time, don't want to be distracted from all the interesting things and important things that are distracting us. It reminds me of that parable he told about the thorny ground where the gospel seed was choked out by the cares of this world and by the deceitfulness of riches. You see, the cares of this world seem more important than the gospel, and the riches seem more valuable than the gospel, don't they? But they're deceitful. They're deceitful riches, and they're just the cares of this world. How terrible it would be if we were allowed or allowed ourselves in any way to walk away from the Lord Jesus for any time, because He'll never leave us behind. He'll never forsake us. You know, the Lord foretold in most glorious terms the retrieval of His abandoned ones, the retrieval of those who had walked away from Him, the restoration of them to His love and affection and fellowship. I think of Isaiah 49 at verse 13, where we read, "'Sing, O heavens, and be joyful, O earth, and break forth into singing, O mountains, For the Lord hath comforted his people, and will have mercy upon his afflicted. But Zion said, The Lord hath forsaken me, and my Lord hath forgotten me. Can a woman forget her sucking child that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb? Yea, they may forget, yet will I not forget thee." Behold, I have graven Thee upon the palms of My hands. Thy walls are continually before Me." This is where the songwriter gets the words to that song, My name on the palm of His hands, eternity cannot erase. Eternity cannot erase. And then finally, in Isaiah 62, Isaiah 62 at verse 4, we read this beautiful Poetic description of the restoration of the ones who left the Lord and how the Lord brought them back and restored them. Thou shalt no more be termed forsaken, neither shall thy land be any more termed desolate, but thou shalt be called Hephzibah, and thy land Beulah. For the Lord delighteth in thee. That's what Hephzibah means. The Lord delighteth in thee. And thy land shall be married. That's what Beulah means, to be married, to be possessed as a wife by a husband. For as a young man marrieth a virgin, so shall thy sons marry thee. And as the bridegroom rejoiceth over the bride, so shall thy God. rejoice over thee." You see, we are restored and returned like the apostle Peter wrote, 1 Peter 2 and 25, for you were as sheep going astray, but are now returned to the shepherd and bishop of your souls, the Lord's table. represents or pictures the great price of our Lord Jesus, of the God of glory's refusal to abandon his people who had abandoned him. And he went to the cross and he took on himself all of our sin and shame. And that included the awful crime of abandoning the God of glory. He took all that on himself and he was subject to the punishment for it all. including the crime of abandonment. He was subject to the punishment of it all in our place, that we might be freely accepted back, we who trusted in the Lord Jesus, that we might never be forsaken. And by the power of God, in the end, that we might never forsake again the one who has restored us and rescued us. But the scriptures tell us in that new covenant, that He has changed our hearts and our minds so that we know the Lord because He has cast away all our sins and remembered our iniquities against us no more. Let's give thanks for the Lord's table. for the price that our Lord Jesus paid to save us and for the fact that because that debt is paid, our sins on Jesus laid, there'll never be any basis for our being punished or rejected or forsaken. The Lord has got us and will not let us go. No man can pluck us out of His hands. Let's give thanks for the bread that reminds us of the body broken for us on the cross. O God, our Father, we rejoice that You have loved us so. Even when we turned against You, even when we, with Adam and in our own proper persons ourselves, rebelled against You and treated You with contempt and dishonored You and spurred Your love, We thank you that you loved your people and you used all your mighty power and sovereign will to draw us unto your son, to restore that fellowship which was broken, that affection that was turned sour and cast behind us. You did not leave us or abandon us, but you brought us unto yourself. Oh, the great love that spread the feast, that sweetly forced us in, And we thank You that You didn't allow, that You would not tolerate Your people abandoning You, but You have brought us unto Yourself. You have loved us with a love that cannot be thwarted. And You have shown that love for us in Jesus, in delivering them up for Your people, in clothing Him with human flesh, that He might be made like His brethren, that He might lead many sons to glory, that He might have a body to sacrifice in our place. We thank You for that sacrifice that He made and that body that was broken for us as is portrayed in this feast of the bread and the wine. We thank You that our Lord Jesus could not be dissuaded even when He was abandoned by His friends to abandon His people but he has secured us forever and nothing can steal us away again. And we praise you and thank you for the sacrifice that he made for us and for this feast, which he gave us to remember it by. We pray these things in Jesus name. Amen. The scriptures tell us that on the night he was betrayed, he took the bread and he broke it. And he said, take and eat, this is my body which is broken, for you this do in remembrance of me. And the Scriptures tell us that after they had supped, he took the cup and he blessed it. And he said, drink ye all of it, this cup is the new covenant in my blood for the remission of sins. Do it as often as ye do it in remembrance of me. The scriptures tell us as often as we eat this bread and drink this cup, we do preach the Lord's death till he comes. Let's stand and sing number 64 in the black book. His be the victor's name who fought the fight alone. Triumphant saints, no honor claim. His conquest was their own. Let's stand and sing this.