We have heard with our ears, O God, our fathers have told us what work Thou didst in their days, in the times of old. – Psalm 44:1
When people hear about what God used to do, one of the things they say is, “Oh, that was a very long time ago.” They imagine that times have changed since then . . . “Things were in a different state then from what they are now.” Granted, but I want to know what it means by “the things” and what that has to do with. I thought it was God that did the things. Has God changed? Is He not an immutable God, the same yesterday, today, and forever? Does that not furnish an argument to prove that, what God has done at one time, He can do at another time?
Others say, “Oh, well, I look upon these things as great one-time miracles. We are not to expect them now.” But that is the very reason we do not get them and see them occur. If we had learned to expect them, we should no doubt obtain them, but we put them up on the shelf, as being out of the common order of our regular faith, and as being only the special rare curiosities of biblical history. We imagine such supernatural and divine things, however true they might be, to be prodigies of providence; we cannot imagine them to be according to the ordinary working of God’s mighty power.
I beseech you, my friends, to reject that idea, and put it out of your mind. Whatever God has done in the past in the way of converting sinners is to be looked upon as a precedent, for “His arm is not shortened, that He cannot save, nor His ear heavy, that He cannot hear.”
– C. H. Spurgeon