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Horatius Bonar
"To him that worketh not, but believeth." Rom. iv.2
"God's way of peace", by the Rev. Horatius Bonar, of Scotland, has been adopted, and is now issued, by the Presbyterian Publication Committee with the belief that its wide circulation will be of the greatest service to the cause of Christ. To the troubled, anxious, and inquiring, it is a guide and helper. It leads them to Christ crucified, the present Saviour, the complete salvation - to Christ, not an assistant, but a Saviour. It incites him to labor for God's dear Son with the happy earnestness of those who are entirely, as well as freely, forgiven; whose reward is his approving smile.
Its use is commended to pastors and laymen who would lead burdened souls to the enjoyment of Peace with God.
God knows us. He knows what we are; he knows also
what he meant us to be; and upon the difference between these two
states he founds his testimony concerning us.
He is too loving to say anything
needlessly severe; too true to say anything untrue; nor can he
have any motive to misrepresent us; for he loves to tell of the
good, not of the evil, that may be found in any of the works of
his hands. He declares, them "good", "very good",
at first; and if he does not do so now, it is not because he
would not, but because he cannot; for "all flesh has
corrupted its way upon the earth."
God's testimony concerning man is,
that he is a sinner. He bears witness against him, not for him,
and testifies that "there is none righteous, no, not one;"
that there is "none that doeth good;" none "that
understandeth;" none that even seeketh after God, and still
more none that loveth him. God speaks of man kindly, but
severely; as one yearning over a lost child, yet as one who will
make no terms with sin, and will "by no means clear the
guilty." He declares man to be a lost one, a stray one, a
rebel, nay a "hater of God;" not a sinner occasionally,
but a sinner always; not a sinner in part, with many good things
about him; but wholly a sinner, with no compensating goodness;
evil in heart as well as life, "dead in trespasses and sins;"
an evil doer, and therefore under condemnation; an enemy of God,
and therefore "under wrath;" a breaker of the righteous
law, and therefore under "the curse of the law."
Man has fallen! Not this man or
that man, but the whole race. In Adam all have sinned; in Adam
all have died. It is not that a few leaves have faded or been
shaken down, but the tree has become corrupt, root and branch.
The "flesh," or "old man" - that is, each man
as he is born into the world, a son of man, a fragment of
humanity, a unit in Adam's fallen body, - is "corrupt."
He not merely brings forth sin, but he carries it about with him,
as his second self; nay, he is a "body" or mass of sin,
a "body of death," subject not to the law of God, but
to "the law of sin." The Jew, educated under the most
perfect of laws, and in the most favorable circumstances, was the
best type of humanity, - of civilized, polished, educated
humanity; the best specimen of the first Adam's sons; yet God's
testimony concerning him is that he is "under sin,"
that he has gone astray, and that he has "come short of the
glory of God."
The outer life of a man is not the
man, just as the paint on a piece of timber is not the timber,
and as the green moss upon the hard rock is not the rock itself.
The picture of a man is not the man; it is but a skillful
arrangement of colors which look like the man. The man that loves
God with all his heart is in a right state; the man that does not
love him thus is in a wrong one. He is a sinner; because his
heart is not right with God. He may think his life a good one,
and others may think the same; but God counts him guilty, worthy
of death and hell. The outward good cannot make up for the inward
evil. The good deeds done to his fellow man cannot be set off
against his bad thoughts of God. And he must be full of these bad
thoughts so long as he does not love this infinitely lovable and
infinitely glorious Being with all his strength.
God's testimony then concerning man
is, that he does not love God with all his heart; nay, that he
does not love him at all. Not to love our neighbor is sin; not to
love a parent is greater sin; but not to love God, our divine
parent, is greater sin still.
Man need not try to say a good word
for himself, or to plead "not guilty," unless he can
show that he loves, and has always loved God with his whole heart
and soul. If he can truly say this, he is all right, he is not a
sinner, and does not need pardon. He will find his way to the
kingdom without the cross and without a Saviour. But, if he
cannot say this, "his mouth is stopped," and he is
"guilty before God." However favorably a good outward
life may dispose himself and others to look upon his case just
now, the verdict will go against him hereafter. This is man's
day, when man's judgments prevail; but God's day is coming, when
the case shall be strictly tried upon its real merits. Then the
Judge of all the earth shall do right, and the sinner be put to
shame.
There is another and yet worse
charge against him. He does not believe on the name of the Son of
God, nor love the Christ of God. This is his sin of sins. That
his heart is not right with God is the first charge against him.
That his heart is not right with the Son of God is the second.
And it is this second that is the crowning crushing sin, carrying
with it more terrible damnation than all other sins together.
"He that believeth not is condemned already; because he he
hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God."
"He that believeth not God, hath made him a liar; because he
believeth not the record which God gave of his Son." "He
that believeth not shall be damned." Hence it was that the
apostles preached "repentance toward God, and faith toward
our Lord Jesus Christ." And hence it is that the first sin
which the Holy Spirit brings home to a man is unbelief; "when
he is come he will reprove the world of sin, because they believe
not on me."
Such is God's condemnation of man.
Of this the whole Bible is full. That great love of God which his
word reveals is based on this condemnation. It is love to the
condemned. God's testimony to his own grace has no meaning, save
as resting on or taking for granted his testimony to man's guilt
and ruin. Nor is it against man as merely a being morally
diseased or sadly unfortunate that he testifies; but as guilty of
death, under wrath, sentenced to the eternal curse; for that
crime of crimes, a heart not right with God, and not true to his
Incarnate Son.
This is a divine verdict, not a
human one. It is God, not man, who condemns, and God is not a man
that he should lie. This is God's testimony concerning man, and
we know that this witness is true.
If God testify
against us, who can testify for us? If God's opinion of man's
sinfulness, his judgment of man's guilt, and his declaration of
sin's evil be so very decided, there can be no hope of acquittal
for us on the ground of personal character of goodness, either of
heart or life. That which God sees in us furnishes only matter
for condemnation, not for pardon.
It is vain to struggle or murmur
against God's judgment. He is the Judge of all the earth; and he
is right as well as sovereign in his judgment. He must be obeyed;
his law in inexorable; it cannot be broken without making the
breaker of it (even in one jot or tittle) worthy of death.
When the Holy Spirit opens the eyes
of the soul it sees this. Conviction of sin is just the sinner
seeing himself as he is, and as God has all along seen him. Then
every fond idea of self-goodness, either in whole or in part,
vanishes away. The things in him that once seemed good appear so
bad, and the bad things so very bad, that every self-prop falls
from beneath him, and all hope of being saved, in consequence of
something in his own character, is then taken away. He sees that
he cannot save himself; nor help God to save him. He is lost, and
he is helpless. Doings, feelings, strivings, prayings, givings,
abstainings, and the life, are found to be no relief from a sense
of guilt, and, therefore, no resting-place for a troubled heart.
If sin were but a disease or a misfortune, these apparent good
things might relieve him, as being favorable symptoms of
returning health; but when sin is guilt even more than disease;
and when the sinner is not merely sick, but condemned by the
righteous Judge; then none of these goodnesses in himself can
reach his case, for they cannot assure him of a complete and
righteous pardon, and, therefore, cannot pacify his roused and
wounded conscience.
He sees God's unchangeable hatred
of sin, and the coming revelation of his wrath against the
sinner; and he cannot but tremble. An old writer thus describes
his own case; "I had a deep impression of the things of God;
a natural condition and sin appeared worse than hell itself; the
world and vanities thereof terrible and exceeding dangerous; it
was fearful to have ado with it, or to be rich; I saw its day
coming; Scripture expressions were weighty; a Saviour was a big
thing in mine eyes; Christ's agonies were earnest with me; I
thought that all my days I was in a dream till now, or like a
child in jest; and I thought the world was sleeping."
The question, "Wherewith shall
I come before the Lord?" is not one which can be decided by
an appeal to personal character, or goodness of life, or prayers,
or performances of religion. The way of approach is not for us to
settle. God has settled it; and it only remains for us to avail
ourselves of it. He has fixed it on grounds altogether
irrespective of our character; or rather on grounds which take
for granted simply that we are sinners, and that therefore the
element of goodness in us, as a title, or warrant, or
recommendation, is altogether inadmissible, either in whole or
in part.
To say, as some inquiring ones do
at the outset of their anxiety, I will set myself to pray, and
after I have prayed a sufficient length of time, and with
tolerable earnestness, I may approach and count upon acceptance,
is not only to build upon the quality and quantity of our
prayers, but is to overlook the real question before the sinner,
"How am I to approach God in order to pray?" All
prayers are approaches to God, and the sinner's anxious question
is, "How may I approach God?" God's explicit testimony
to man is, "You are unfit to approach me;" and it is a
denial of the testimony to say, "I will pray myself out of
this unfitness into fitness; I will work myself into a right
state of mind and character for drawing near to God."
Anxious spirit! Were you from this moment to cease from sin, and
do nothing but good all the rest of your life, it would not do.
Were you to begin praying now, and do nothing else but pray all
your days, it would not do! Your own character cannot be your way
of approach, nor your ground of confidence toward God. No amount
of praying, or working, or feeling, can satisfy the righteous
law, or pacify a guilty conscience, or quench the flaming sword
that guards the access into the presence of the infinitely Holy
One.
That which makes it safe for you to
draw near to God, and right for God to receive you, must be
something altogether away from and independent of yourself; for,
yourself and everything pertaining to yourself God has already
condemned; and no condemned thing can give you any warrant for
going to him, or hoping for acceptance. Your liberty of entrance
must come from something which he has accepted; not from
something which he has condemned.
I knew an awakened soul who, in the
bitterness of his spirit, thus set himself to work and pray in
order to get peace. He doubled the amount of his devotions,
saying to himself, "Surely God will give me peace." But
the peace did not come. He set up family worship, saying, "Surely
God will give me peace." But the peace came not. At last he
bethought himself of having a prayer meeting in his house as a
certain remedy. He fixed the night; called his neighbors; and
prepared himself for conducting the meeting, by writing a prayer
and learning it by heart. As he finished the operation of
learning it, preparatory to the meeting, he threw it down on the
table saying, "Surely that will do, God will give me peace
now." In that moment, a still small voice seemed to speak in
his ear, saying, "No, that will not do; but Christ will do."
Straightway the scales fell from his eyes, and the burden from
his shoulders. Peace poured in like a river. "Christ will
do," was his watchword for life.
Very clear is God's testimony
against man, and man's doings, in this great matter of approach
and acceptance. "Not by works of righteousness which we have
done," says Paul in one place,[1]
and "to him that worketh not," says he in a second; [2] "not justified by the works
of the law," say he in a third.[3]
The sinner's peace with God is not
to come from his own character. No grounds of peace or elements
of reconciliation can be extracted from himself, either directly
or indirectly. His one qualification for peace is, that he needs
it. It is not what he has, but what he lacks of good that draws
him to God; and it is the conscienceness of his lack that bids
him look elsewhere, for something both to invite and embolden him
to approach. It is our sickness, not our health, that fits us for
the physician, and casts us upon his skill.
No guilty conscience can be
pacified with anything short of that which will make pardon a
present, a sure, and a righteous thing. Can our best doings, our
best feelings, our best prayers, our best sacrifices, bring this
about? Nay; having accumulated these to the utmost, does not the
sinner feel that pardon is just as far off and uncertain as
before? and that all his earnestness cannot persuade God to admit
him to favor, or bride his own conscience into true quiet even
for an hour?
In all false religion, the
worshipper rests his hope of divine favor upon something in his
own character, or life, or religious duties. The Pharisee did
this when he came into the temple, "thanking God that he was
not as other men."[4] So do
those in our day who think to get peace by doing, feeling, and
praying more than others, or than they themselves have done in
time past; and who refuse to take the peace of the free gospel
till they have amassed such an amount of this doing and feeling
as will ease their consciences, and make them conclude that it
would not be fair in God to reject the application of men so
earnest and devout as they. The Galatians did this also when they
insisted on adding the law of Moses to the gospel of Christ as
the ground of confidence toward God. Thus do many act among
ourselves. They will not take confidence from God's character or
Christ's work, but from their own character and work; though in
reference to all this it is written, "The Lord hath rejected
thy confidences, and thou shalt not prosper in them."[5] They object to a present
confidence, for that assumes that a sinner's resting place is
wholly out of himself, - ready-made, as it were, by God. They
would have this confidence to be a very gradual thing, in order
that they may gain time, and, by a little diligence in religious
observances, may so add to their stock of duties, prayers,
experiences, devotions, that they may, with some humble hope, as
they call it, claim acceptance from God. By this course of devout
living they think they have made themselves more acceptable to
God than they were before they began this religious process, and
much more entitled to expect the divine favor than those who have
not so qualified themselves. In all this the attempted resting-place
is self, - that self which God has condemned. They would
not rest upon unpraying, or unworking, or undevout self; but they
think it right and safe to rest upon praying, and working, and
devout self, and they call this humility! The happy
confidence of the simple believer who takes God's word at once,
and rests on it, they call presumption or fanaticism; their own
miserable uncertainty, extracted from the doings of self, they
speak of as a humble hope.
The sinner's own character, in any
form, and under any process of improvement, cannot furnish
reasons for trusting God. However amended, it cannot speak peace
to his conscience, nor afford him any warrant for reckoning on
God's favor; nor can it help to heal the breach between him and
God. For God can accept nothing but perfection in such a case,
and the sinner has nothing but imperfection to present. Imperfect
duties and devotions cannot persuade God to forgive. Besides, be
it remembered that the person of the worshipper must be accepted
before his services can be acceptable; so that nothing can be of
any use to the sinner save that which provides for personal
acceptance completely, and at the outset. The sinner must go to
God as he is, or not at all. To try to pray himself into
something better than a condemned sinner, in order to win God's
favor, is to make prayer an instrument of self-righteousness; so
that, instead of its being the act of an accepted man, it is the
purchase of acceptance, - the price which we pay to God for
favoring us, and the bribe with which we persuade conscience no
longer to trouble us with its terrors. No knowledge of self, nor
conscienceness of improvement of self, can soothe the alarms of
an awakened conscience, or be any ground for expecting the
friendship of God. To take comfort from our good doings, or good
feelings, or good plans, or good prayers, or good experiences, is
to delude ourselves, and to say peace when there is no peace. No
man can quench his thirst with sand, or with water from the Dead
Sea; so no man can find rest from his own character however good,
or from his own acts however religious. Even were he perfect,
what enjoyment could there be in thinking about his own
perfection? What profit, then, can there be in thinking about his
own imperfection?
Even were there many good things
about him, they could not speak peace: for the good things which
might speak peace, could not make up for the evil things which
speak trouble; and what a poor, self-made peace would that be
which arose from his thinking as much good and as little evil of
himself as possible. And what a temptation, besides, would this
furnish, to extenuate the evil and exaggerate the good about
ourselves, - in other words, to deceive our own hearts. Self-deception
must always, more or less, be the result of such estimates of our
own experiences. Laid open, as we are, in such a case, to all
manner of self-blinding influences, it is impossible that we can
be impartial judges, or that we can be "without guile,"[6] as in the case of those who are
freely and at once forgiven.
One man might say, My sins are not
very great or many; surely I may take peace. Another might say, I
have made up for my sins by my good deeds; I may have peace.
Another might say, I have a very deep sense of sin; I may have
peace. Another might say, I have repented of my sin; I may have
peace. Another might say, I pray much, I work much, I love much,
I give much; I may have peace. What temptation in all this to
take the most favorable view of self and its doings! But, after
all, it would be vain. There could be no real peace; for its
foundation would be sand, not rock. The peace or confidence which
comes from summing up the good points of our character, and
thinking of our good feelings and doings, or about our faith, and
love, and repentance, must be made up of pride. Its basis is self-righteousness,
or at least self-approbation.
It does not mend the matter to say
that we look at these good feelings in us, as the Spirit's work,
not our own. In one aspect this takes away boasting, but in
another it does not. It still makes our peace to turn upon what
is in ourselves, and not on what is in God. Nay, it makes use of
the Holy Spirit for purposes of self-righteousness. It says that
the Spirit works the change in us, in order that he may thereby
furnish us with a ground of peace within ourselves.
No doubt the Spirit's work in us
must be accompanied with peace; but not because he has given us
something in ourselves to draw our peace from. It is that kind of
peace which arises unconsciously from the restoration of
spiritual health; but not that which Scripture calls "peace
with God." It does not arise from thinking about the change
wrought in us, but unconsciously and involuntarily from the
change itself. If a broken limb be made whole, we get relief
straightway; not by "thinking about the healed member, but
simply in the bodily case and comfort which the cure has given.
So there is a peace arising out of the change of nature and
character wrought by the Spirit; but this is not reconciliation
with God. This is not the peace which the knowledge of
forgiveness brings. It accompanies it, and flows from it, but the
two kinds of peace are quite distinct from each other. Nor does
even the peace which attends restoration of spiritual health come
at second hand, from thinking about our change; but directly from
the change itself. That change is the soul's new health, and this
health is in itself a continual gladness.
Still it remains true, that in
ourselves we have no resting place. "No confidence in the
flesh" must be our motto, as it is the foundation of God's
gospel.
We have seen that a
sinner's peace cannot come from himself, nor from the knowledge
of himself, nor from thinking about his own acts and feelings,
nor from the consciousness of any amendment of his old self.
Whence, then, is it to come? How
does he get it?
It can only come from God; and it
is in knowing God that he gets it. God has written a volume for
the purpose of making himself known; and it is in this revelation
of his character that the sinner is to find the rest that he is
seeking. God himself is the fountainhead of our peace; his
revealed truth is the channel through which this peace finds its
way into us; and his Holy Spirit is the great interpreter of that
truth to as: "Acquaint thyself now with God, and be at peace."[7] Yes, acquaintanceship with God is
peace!
Had God told us that he was not
gracious, that he took no interest in our welfare, and that he
had no intention of pardoning us, we could have no peace and no
hope. In that case our knowing God would only make us miserable.
Our situation would be like that of the devils, who "believe
and tremble;"[8] and the more
we knew of such a God, we should tremble the more. For how
fearful a thing must it be to have the great God that made us,
the great Father of Spirits, against us, not for us!
Strange to say, this is the very
state of disquietude in which we may find many who profess to
believe in a God "merciful and gracious!" With the
Bible in their hands, and the cross before their eyes, they
wander on in a state of darkness and fear, such as would have
arisen had God revealed himself in hatred not in love. They seem
to believe the very opposite of what the Bible teaches us
concerning God; and to attach a meaning to the Cross, the very
opposite of what the gospel declares it really bears. Had God
been all frowns, and the Bible all terrors, and Christ all
sternness, these men could not have been in a more troubled and
uncertain state than that in which they are.
How is this? Have they not
misunderstood the Bible? Have they not mistaken the character of
God, looking on him as an "austere man" and a "hard
master?" Are they not laboring to supplement the grace of
God by something on their part, as if they believed that this
grace was not sufficient to meet their case, until they had
attracted it to themselves by some earnest performances, or
spiritual exercises, of their own?
God has declared himself to be
gracious. "God is love." He has embodied this grace in
the person and work of his beloved Son. He has told us that this
grace is for the ungodly, the unholy, the unfit, the stout-hearted,
the dead in sin. The more, then, that we know of this God and of
his grace, the more will his peace fill us. Nor will the
greatness of our sins, and the hardness of our hearts, or the
changeableness of our feelings, discourage or disquiet, however
much they may humble us, and make us dissatisfied with ourselves.
Let us study the character of God:
- holy, yet loving; the love not interfering with the holiness,
nor the holiness with the love; absolutely sovereign, yet
infinitely gracious; the sovereignty not straightening the grace,
nor the grace the sovereignty; drawing the unwilling, yet not
hindering the willing, if any such there be; quickening whom he
will, yet having no pleasure in the death of the wicked;
compelling some to come in, yet freely inviting all! Let us look
at him in the face of Jesus Christ; for He is the express image
of his person, and he that hath seen Him hath seen the Father.
The knowledge of that gracious character, as interpreted by the
cross of Christ, is the true remedy for our disquietness. insufficient
acquaintanceship with God lies at the root of our fears and
gloom. I know that flesh and blood cannot reveal God to you, and
that the Holy Spirit alone can enable you to know either the
Father or the Son. But I would not have you for a moment suppose
that this Spirit is reluctant to do his work in you; nor would I
encourage you in the awful thought, that you are willing while he
is unwilling; or that the sovereignty of God is a hindrance to
the sinner, and a restraint of the Spirit. The whole Bible takes
for granted that all this is absolutely impossible. Never can the
great truths of divine sovereignty and the Spirit's work land us,
as some seem to think they may do, in such a conflict between a
willing sinner and an unwilling God. The whole Bible is so
written by the Spirit, and the gospel was so preached by the
apostles, as never to raise the question of God's willingness,
nor to lead to the remotest suspicion of his readiness to furnish
the sinner with all needful aid. Hence the great truths of God's
eternal election, and Christ's redemption of his Church, as we
read them in the Bible, are helps and encouragements to the soul.
But interpreted as they are by many, they seem barrier-walls, not
ladders for scaling the great barrier-wall of man's
unwillingness; and anxious souls become land-locked in
metaphysical questions, out of which there can be no way of
extrication save that of taking God at his word.
In the Bible God has revealed
himself. In Christ he has done so most expressively. He has done
so that there might be no mistake as to it on the part of man.
Christ's person is a revelation of
God. Christ's work is a revelation of God Christ's words are a
revelation of God. He is in the Father, and the Father in him.
His words and works are the words and works of the Father. In the
manger he showed us God. In the synagogue of Nazareth he showed
us God. At Jacob's well he showed us God. At the tomb of Lazarus
he showed us God. On Olivet, as he wept over Jerusalem, he showed
us God. On the cross he showed us God. In the tomb he showed us
God. In his resurrection he showed us God. If we say with Philip,
"Show us the Father, and it sufficeth us;" he answers,
"Have I been so long time with you, and yet hast thou not
known me? He that hath seen me hath seen the Father."[9] This God whom Christ reveals as
the God of righteous grace and gracious righteousness, is the God
with whom we have to do.
To know his character as thus
interpreted to us by Jesus and his cross, is to have peace. It is
into this knowledge of the Father that the Holy Spirit leads the
soul whom he is conducting, by his almighty power, from darkness
to light. For everything that we know of God we owe to this
divine Teacher, this Interpreter, this "One among a thousand."[10] But never let the sinner imagine
that he is more willing to learn than the Spirit is to teach.
Never let him say to himself, "I would fain know God, but I
cannot of myself, and the Spirit will not teach me."
It is not enough for us to say to
some dispirited one, "It is your unbelief that is keeping
you wretched; only believe, and all is well." This is true;
but it is only general truth; which, in many cases, is of no use,
because it does not show him how it applies to him. On this point
he is often a fault; thinking that faith is some great work to be
done, which he is to labor at with all his might, praying all the
while to God to help him in doing this great work; and that
unbelief is some evil principle, requiring to be uprooted before
the gospel will be of any use to him.
But what is the real meaning of
this faith and this unbelief?
In all unbelief there are these two
things, - a good opinion of one's self, and a bad opinion of God.
So long as these two things exist, it is impossible for an
inquirer to find rest. His good opinion of himself makes him
think it quite impossible to win God's favor by his own religious
performances; and his bad opinion of God makes him unwilling and
afraid to put his case wholly into his hands. The object of the
Holy Spirit's work, in convincing of sin, is to alter the
sinner's opinion of himself, and so to reduce his estimate of his
own character, that he shall think of himself as God does, and so
cease to suppose it possible that he can be justified by any
excellency of his own. Having altered the sinner's good opinion
of himself, the Spirit then alters his evil opinion of God, so as
to make him see that the God with whom he has to do is really the
God of all grace.
But the inquirer denies that he has
a good opinion of himself, and owns himself a sinner. Now a man
may say this; but really to know it is something more than saying.
Besides, he may be willing to take the name of sinner to himself,
in common with his fellow men, and not at all own himself such a
sinner as God says he is, - such a sinner as needs a whole
Saviour to himself, - such a sinner as needs the cross, and
blood, and righteousness of the Son of God. He may not have quite
such a bad opinion of himself as to make him sensible that he can
expect nothing from God on the score of personal goodness, or
amendment of life, or devout observance of duty, or superiority
to others. It takes a great deal to destroy a man's good opinion
of himself; and even after he has lost his good opinion of his
works, he retains his good opinion of his heart; and even after
he has lost that, he holds fast his good opinion of his own
religious duties, by means of which he hopes to make up for evil
works and a bad heart. Nay, he hopes to be able so to act, and
feel, and pray, as to lead God to entertain a good opinion of
him, and receive him into favor.
All such efforts spring from
thinking well of himself in some measure; and also from his
thinking evil of God, as if he would not receive him as he is. If
he knew himself as God does, he would no more resort to such
efforts than he would think of walking up an Alpine precipice.
How difficult it is to make a man think of himself as God does!
What but the almightiness of the Divine Spirit can accomplish
this?
But the inquirer says that he has
not a bad opinion of God. But has he such an opinion of him as
the Bible gives or the cross reveals? Has he such an opinion of
him as makes him feel quite safe in putting his soul into his
gracious hands, and trusting him with its eternal keeping? If
not, what is the extent or nature of his good opinion of God? The
knowledge of God, which the cross supplies, ought to set all
doubt aside, and make distrust appear in the most odious of
aspects, as a wretched misrepresentation of God's character and a
slander upon his gracious name. Unbelief, then, is the belief of
a lie and the rejection of the truth. It obliterates from the
cross the gracious name of God, and inscribes another name, the
name of an unknown god, in which there is no peace for the sinner
and no rest for the weary.
Accept, then, the character of God
as given in the gospel; read aright his blessed name as it is
written upon the cross; take the simple interpretation given of
his mind toward the ungodly, as you have it at length in the glad
tidings of peace. Is not that enough? If that which God has made
known of himself be not enough to allay your fears, nothing else
will. The Holy Spirit will not give you peace irrespective of
your views of God's character. That would be countenancing the
worship of a false god, instead of the true God revealed in the
Bible. It is in common connection with the truth concerning the
true God, "the God of all grace," that the Spirit gives
peace. It is the love of the true God that he sheds abroad in the
heart.
The object of the Spirit's work is
to make us acquainted with the true Jehovah, that in him we may
rest; not to produce in us certain feelings, the consciousness of
which will make us think better of ourselves, and give us
confidence toward God. That which he shows us of ourselves is
only evil; that which he shows us of God is only good. He does
not enable us to feel or to believe, in order that we may be
comforted by our feeling or our faith. Even when working in us
most powerfully he turns our eyes away from his own work in us,
to fix it on God, and his love in Christ Jesus our Lord. The
substance of the gospel is the NAME of the great Jehovah,
unfolded in and by Jesus Christ; the character of him in whom we
"live and move and have our being," as the "just
God, yet the Saviors,"[11]
the Justifier of the ungodly.
Inquiring spirit, turn your eye to
the cross and see these two things, - the Crucifiers and the
Crucified. See the Crucifiers, the haters of God and his Son.
They are yourself. Read in them your own character, and cease to
think of making that a ground of peace. See the Crucified. It is
God himself; incarnate love. It is the God who made you,
suffering, dying for the ungodly. Can you suspect his grace? Can
you cherish evil thoughts of him? Can you ask anything farther to
awaken in you the fullest and most unreserved confidence? Will
you misinterpret that agony and death by saying that they do not
mean grace, or that the grace which they mean is not for you?
Call to mind that which is written, - "Hereby perceive we
the love of God, that he laid down his life for us."[12] "Herein is LOVE, not that
we love God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the
propitiation of our sins."[13]
We have spoken of
God's character as "the God of all grace."[14] We have seen that it is in
"tasting that the Lord is gracious" that the sinner has
peace.[15]
But let us keep in mind that this
grace is the grace of a righteous God; it is the grace of one who
is Judge as well as Father. Unless we see this we shall mistake
the gospel, and fail in appreciating both the pardon we are
seeking, and the great sacrifice through which it comes to us. No
vague forgiveness, arising out of mere paternal love, will do. We
need to know what kind of pardon it is; and whether it proceeds
from the full recognition of our absolute guiltiness by him who
is to "judge the world in righteousness." The right
kind of pardon comes not from love alone, but from law; not from
good nature, but from righteousness; not from indifference to
sin, but from holiness.
The inquirer who is only half in
earnest overlooks this. His feelings are moved, but his
conscience is not roused. Hence he is content with very vague
ideas of God's mere compassion for the sinner's unhappiness. To
him human guilt seems but human misfortune, and God's acquittal
of the sinner little more than the overlooking of his sin. He
does not trouble himself with asking how the forgiveness comes,
or what is the real nature of the love which he professes to have
received. He is easily soothed to sleep, because he has never
been fully awake. He is, at the best, a stony-ground hearer; soon
losing the poor measure of joy that he may have got; becoming a
formalist; or perhaps a trifler with sin; or it may be, a
religious sentimentalist.
But he whose conscience has been
pierced, is not so easily satisfied. He sees that the God, whose
favor he is seeking, is holy as well as loving; and that he has
to do with righteousness as well as grace. Hence the first
inquiry that he makes is as to the righteousness of the pardon
which the grace of God holds out. He must be satisfied on this
point, and see that the grace is righteous grace, ere he can
enjoy it all. The more alive he is to his own unrighteousness,
the more does he feel the need of ascertaining the righteousness
of the grace which we make known to him.
It does not satisfy him to say,
that, since it comes from a righteous God, it must be righteous
grace. His conscience wants to see the righteousness of the way
by which it comes. Without this it cannot be pacified or "purged;"
and the man is not made "perfect as pertaining to the
conscience;"[16] but must
always have an uneasy feeling that all is not right; that his
sins may one day rise up against him.
That which soothes the heart will
not always pacify the conscience. The sight of the grace will do
the former; but only the sight of the righteousness of the grace
will do the latter. Till the later is done, there cannot be real
peace. The hurt is healed slightly, and peace is spoken where
there is no peace.[17] The
healing of the hurt can only be brought about by speaking peace
where there is peace.
Here the work of Christ comes in;
and the cross of the Sin-bearer answers the question which
conscience has raised, - "Is it righteous grace?" It is
this great work of propitiation that exhibits God as "the
just God, yet the Saviour;"[18]
not only righteous in spite of his justifying the ungodly, but
righteous in doing so. It shows salvation as an act of
righteousness; nay, one of the highest acts of righteousness that
a righteous God can do. It shows pardon not only as the deed of a
righteous God, but as the thing which shows how righteous he is,
and how he hates and condemns the very sin that he is pardoning.
Hear the word of the Lord
concerning this "finished" work. "Christ died for
our sins." "He was wounded for our transgressions, he
was bruised for our iniquities." "Christ was once
offered to bear the sins of many." "He gave himself for
us." "He was delivered for our offences." "He
gave himself for our sins." "Christ died for the
ungodly." "He hath appeared to put away sin by the
sacrifice of himself." "Christ hath suffered for us in
the flesh." "Christ hath once suffered for sins, the
just for the unjust." "His own self bare our sins in
his own body on the tree."
These expressions speak of
something more than love. Love is in each of them; the deep,
true, real love of God; but also justice and holiness; inflexible
and inexorable adherence to law. They have no meaning apart from
law; law as the foundation, pillar, keystone of the universe.
But their connection with law is
also their connection with love. For as it was law, in its
unchangeable perfection, that constituted the necessity for the
Surety's death, so it was this necessity that drew out the
Surety's love, and gave also glorious proof of the love of him
who made him to be sin for us. For if a man were to die for
another, when there was no necessity for his doing so, we should
hardly call his death a proof of love. At best, such would be
foolish love, or, at least, a fond and idle way of showing it.
But to die for one, when there is really need of dying, is the
true test of genuine love. To die for a friend when nothing less
will save him; this is the proof of love! When either he or we
must die; and when he, to save us from dying, dies himself, this
is love. There was need of a death, if we were to be saved from
dying. Righteousness made the necessity. And, to meet this
terrible necessity, the Son of God took flesh and died! He died,
because it was written, "The soul that sinneth it shall die."[19] Love led him down to the
cradle; love led him up to the cross! He died as the sinner's
substitute. He died to make it a righteous thing in God to cancel
the sinner's guilt and annul the penalty of his everlasting death.
Had it not been for this dying,
grace and guilt could not have looked each other in the face; God
and the sinner could not have come nigh; righteousness would have
forbidden reconciliation; and righteousness, we know, is as
divine and real a thing as love. Without this exception, it would
not have been right for God to receive the sinner nor safe for
the sinner to come.
But now, mercy and truth have met
together; now grace is righteousness, and righteousness is grace.
This satisfies the sinner's conscience, by showing him righteous
love for the unrighteous and unlovable. It tells him, too, that
the reconciliation brought about in this way shall never be
disturbed, either in this life or that which is to come. It is
righteous reconciliation, and will stand every test, as well as
last throughout eternity. The peace of conscience thus secured
will be trial-proof, sickness-proof, deathbed-proof, judgment-proof.
Realizing this, the chief of sinners can say, "Who is he
that condemneth?"
What peace for the stricken
conscience is there in the truth that Christ died for the
ungodly; and that it is of the ungodly that the righteous God is
the Justifier! The righteous grace thus coming to us through the
sin-bearing work of the "Word made flesh," tells the
soul, at once and forever, that there can be no condemnation for
any sinner upon earth, who will only consent to be indebted to
this free love of God, which, like a fountain of living water, is
bursting freely forth from the foot of the Cross.
Just, yet the Justifier of the
ungodly! What glad tidings are here! Here is grace; God's free
love to the sinner; divine bounty and goodwill, altogether
irrespective of human worth or merit. For this is the scriptural
meaning of that often misunderstood word "grace."
This righteous free love has its
origin in the bosom of the Father, where the only begotten has
his dwelling. It is not produced by anything out of God himself.
It was man's evil, not his good, that called it forth. It was not
the drawing to the like, but to the unlike; it was light
attracted by darkness, and life by death. It does not wait for
our seeking, it comes unasked as well as undeserved. It is not
our faith that creates it or calls it up; our faith realizes it
as already existing in its divine and manifold fullness. Whether
we believe it or not, this righteous grace exists, and exists for
us. Unbelief refuses it; but faith takes it, rejoices in it, and
lives upon it. Yes, faith takes this righteous grace of God, and,
with it, a righteous pardon, a righteous salvation, and a
righteous heirship of the everlasting glory.
But an inquirer
asks, What is the special meaning of the blood, of which we read
so much? How does it speak peace? How does it "purge the
conscience from dead works?" What can blood have to do with
the peace, the grace, and the righteousness of which we have been
speaking?
God has given the reason for the
stress which he lays upon the blood; and, in understanding this,
we get to the very bottom of the grounds of a sinner's peace.
The sacrifices of old, from the
days of Abel downward,furnishes us with the key to the meaning of
the blood, and explain the necessity for its being "shed for
the remission of sins." "Not without blood"[20] was the great truth taught by
God from the beginning; the inscription which may be said to have
been written on the gates of tabernacle and temple. For more than
two thousand years, during the ages of the patriarchs, there was
but one great sacrifice, - the burnt offering. This, under the
Mosaic service, was split into parts, - the peace offering,
trespass offering, sin offering, etc. In all of these, however,
the essence of the original burnt offering was preserved, - by
the blood and the fire, which were common to them all. The blood,
as the emblem of substitution, and the fire, as the symbol of
God's wrath upon the substitute, were seen in all the parts of
Israel's service; but specially in the daily burnt offering, the
morning and evening lamb, which was the true continuation and
representative of the old patriarchal burnt offering. It was to
this that John referred when he said "Behold the Lamb of
God, that taketh away the sin of the world." Israel's daily
lamb was the kernel and core of all the Old Testament sacrifices;
and it was its blood that carried them back to the primitive
sacrifices, and forward to the blood of sprinkling that was to
speak better things than that of Abel.
In all these sacrifices the
shedding of the blood was the infliction of death. The "blood
was the life;" and the pouring out of the blood was the
"pouring out of the soul." This blood shedding or life-taking
was the payment of the penalty for sin; for it was threatened
from the beginning, "In the day thou eatest thereof thou
shalt surely die;" and it is written, "The soul that
sinneth, it shall die," and again, "The wages of sin is
death."
But the blood shedding of Israel's
sacrifices could not take sin away. It showed the way in which
this was to be done, but it was in fact more a "remembrance
of sins," than an expiation. It said life must be given for
life, ere sin can be pardoned; but then the continual repetition
of the sacrifices showed that there was needed richer blood than
Moriah's altar was ever sprinkled with, and a more precious life
than man could give.
The great blood-shedding has been
accomplished; the better life has been presented; and the one
death of the Son of God has done what all the deaths of old could
never do. His one life was enough; his one dying paid the
penalty; and God does not ask two lives, or two deaths, or two
payments. "Christ was once offered to bear the sins of many.
In that he died, he died unto sin once." "He offered
one sacrifice for sins forever."
The "sprinkling of the blood,"
was the making use of the death, by putting it upon certain
persons or things, so that these persons or things were counted
to be dead, and, therefore, to have paid the law's penalty. So
long as they had not paid that penalty, they were counted unclean
and unfit for God to look upon; but as soon as they had paid it,
they were counted clean and fit for the service of God. Usually
when we read of cleansing, we think merely of our common process
of removing stains by water and soap. But this is not the figure
meant in the application of the sacrifice. The blood cleanses,
not like the prophet's "nitre and much soap," but by
making us partakers of the death of the Substitute. For what is
it that makes us filthy before God? It is our guilt, our breach
of law, and our being under sentence of death in consequence of
our disobedience. We have not only done what God dislikes, but
what his righteous law declares to be worthy of death. It is this
sentence of death that separates us so completely from God,
making it wrong for him to bless us, and perilous for us to go to
him.
When thus covered all over with
that guilt whose penalty is death, the blood is brought in by the
great High Priest. That blood represents death; it is God's
expression for death. It is then sprinkled on us, and thus death,
which is the law's penalty, passes on us. We die. We undergo the
sentence; and thus the guilt passes away. We are cleansed! The
sin which was like scarlet becomes as snow; and that which was
like crimson becomes as wool. It is thus that we make use of the
blood of Christ in believing; for faith is just the sinner's
employing the blood. Believing what God has testified concerning
this blood, we become one with Jesus in his death; and thus we
are counted in law, and treated by God, as men who have paid the
whole penalty, and so been "washed from their sins in his
blood."[21]
Such are the glad tidings of life,
through him who died. They are tidings which tell us, not what we
are to do, in order to be saved, but what He has done. This only
can lay to rest the sinner's fears; can "purge his
conscience;" can make him feel as a thoroughly pardoned man.
The right knowledge of God's meaning in this sprinkling of the
blood, is the only effectual way of removing the anxieties of the
troubled soul, and introducing him into perfect peace.
The gospel is not the mere
revelation of the heart of God in Christ Jesus. In it the
righteousness of God is specially manifested; and it is this
revelation of the righteousness that makes it so truly "the
power of God unto salvation." The blood shedding is God's
declaration of the righteousness of the love which he is pouring
down upon the sons of men; it is the reconciliation of law and
love; the condemnation of the sin and the acquittal of the sinner.
As "without shedding of blood there is no remission; so the
gospel announces that the blood has been shed by which remission
flows; and now we know that "the Son of God is come,"
and that "the blood of Christ cleanses us from all sin."
The conscience is satisfied. It feels that God's grace is
righteous grace, that his love is holy love. There it rests.
It is not by incarnation but by
blood shedding that we are saved. The Christ of God is no mere
expounder of wisdom; no mere deliverer or gracious benefactor;
and they who think they have told the whole gospel, when they
have spoken of Jesus revealing the love of God, do greatly err.
If Christ be not the Substitute, he is nothing to the sinner. If
he did not die as the Sinbearer, he has died in vain. Let us not
be deceived on this point, nor misled by those who, when they
announce Christ as the Deliverer, think they have preached the
gospel. If I throw a rope to a drowning man, I am a deliverer.
But is Christ no more than that? If I cast myself into the sea,
and risk my life to save another, I am a deliverer. But is Christ
no more? Did he but risk his life? The very essence of Christ's
deliverance is the substitution of Himself for us, his life for
ours. He did not come to risk his life; he cam to die! He did not
redeem us by a little loss, a little sacrifice, a little labor, a
little suffering, "He redeemed us to God by his blood;"
"the precious blood of Christ." He gave all he had,
even his life, for us. This is the kind of deliverance that
awakens the happy song, "To him that loved us, and washed us
from our sins in his own blood."
The tendency of the world's
religion just now is, to reject the blood; and to glory in a
gospel which needs no sacrifice, no "Lamb slain." Thus,
they go "in the way of Cain." Cain refused the blood,
and came to God without it. He would not own himself a sinner,
condemned to die, and needing the death of another to save him.
This was man's open rejection of God's own way of life. Foremost
in this rejection of, what is profanely called by some scoffers,
"the religion of the shambles," we see the first
murderer; and he who would not defile his altar with the blood of
a lamb, pollutes the earth with his brother's blood.
The heathen altars have been red
with blood; and to this day they are the same. But these
worshippers know not what they mean, in bringing that blood. It
is associated only with vengeance in their minds; and they shed
it, to appease the vengeance of their gods. But this is no
recognition either of the love or the righteousness of God.
"Fury is not in him;" whereas their altars speak only
of fury. The blood which they bring is a denial both of
righteousness and grace.
But look at Israel's altars. There
is blood; and they who bring it know the God to whom they come.
They bring it in acknowledgment of their own guilt, but also of
his pardoning love. They say, "I deserve death;" but
let this death stand for mine; and let the love which otherwise
could not reach me, by reason of guilt, now pour itself out on me."
Inquiring soul! Beware of Cain's
error on the one hand, in coming to God without blood; and beware
of the heathen error on the other, in mistaking the meaning of
the blood. Understand God's mind and meaning, in "the
precious blood" of his Son. Believe his testimony concerning
it; so shall thy conscience be pacified, and thy soul find rest.
It is into Christ's death, that we
are baptized, and hence the cross, which was the instrument of
that death, is that in which we glory. The cross is to us the
payment of the sinner's penalty, the extinction of the debt, and
the tearing up of the bond or handwriting which was against us.
And as the cross is the payment, so the resurrection is God's
receipt in full, for the whole sum, signed with his own hand. Our
faith is not the completion of the payment, but the simple
recognition on our part of the payment made by the Son of God.
By this recognition, we become so one with Him who died and rose,
that we are henceforth reckoned to be the parties who have paid
he penalty, and treated as if it were we ourselves who had died.
Thus are we justified from the sin, and then made partakers of
the righteousness of him, who was not only delivered for our
offences, but who rose again for our justification.
Life comes to us through death; and thus grace
bounds towards us in righteousness. This we have seen in a
general way. But we have something more to learn concerning him
who lived and died as the sinner's substitute. The more that we
know of his person and his works, the more shall we be satisfied,
in heart and conscience, with the provision which God has made
for our great need.
Our sin-bearer is the Son of God,
the eternal Son of the Father. Of him it is written, "In the
beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word
was God." He is "the brightness of his glory, and the
express image of his person." He is "in the Father, and
the Father in him;" "the Father dwelleth in him;"
"he that hath seen him hath seen the Father;" and
"he that heareth him, heareth him that sent him." He is
the "Word made flesh;" "God manifest in flesh;"
"Jesus the Christ, who has come in the flesh." His name
is "Immanuel," God with us; Jesus, the "Saviour;"
"Christ," the anointed One, filled with the Spirit
without measure; "the only begotten of the Father, full of
grace and truth."
He came preaching the gospel of the
kingdom, that is, the good news about the kingdom; teaching the
multitudes that gathered round him; healing the sick, and opening
the eyes of the blind, and raising the dead; "receiving
sinners and eating with them." "He came to seek and to
save that which was lost;" he went about speaking words of
grace such as man never spake, saying, "I am the Way, and
the truth, and the Life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me."
He went out and in as The Saviour, and in his whole life we see
him as the Shepherd seeking his lost sheep, as the woman her lost
piece of silver, and as the father looking out for his lost son.
He is "mighty to save;" he is "able to save to the
uttermost;" he came to be "the Saviour of the world."
In all these things thus written
concerning Jesus, there is good news for the sinner; such as
should draw him, in simple confidence to God; making him feel
that his case has really been taken up in earnest by God; and
that God's thoughts towards him are thoughts, not of anger, but
of peace and grace. Heaven has come down to earth! There is
goodwill toward man. He is not to be handed over to his great
enemy. God has taken his side, and stepped in between him and
Satan. This world is not to be burned up, nor its dwellers made
eternal exiles from God! The darkness is passing away, and the
true light is shining!
Yet it is not the person of Christ,
nor his birth, nor his life, that can suffice. That the Son of
God took a true but a sinless humanity of the very substance of
the virgin; becoming bone of our bone, and flesh of our flesh;
being in very deed the woman's seed; that he dwelt among us for a
lifetime, is but the beginning of the good news; the Alpha, but
not the Omega. This was shown to Israel, and to us also, in the
temple veil. That veil was the type of the flesh; and, so long as
that curtain remained whole, there was no entrance into the near
presence of God. The worshipper was not indeed frowned upon; but
he had to stand afar off. The veil said to the sinner, "Godhead
is within;" but is also said, "You cannot enter till
something more has been done." The Holy Ghost, by it,
signified that the way into the Holiest was not yet open. The
rending of the veil; that is, the crucifixion of "the Word
made flesh," opened the way completely.
Hence it is that the Holy Spirit
sums up the good news in one or two special points. They are
these: Christ was crucified. Christ died. Christ was buried.
Christ rose again from the dead. Christ went up on high. Christ
sits at God's right hand, our "Advocate with the Father,"
"ever living to make intercession for us."
These are the great facts which
contain the good news. They are few and they are plain; so that a
child may remember and understand them. They are the caskets
which contain the heavenly gems. They are the cups which hold the
living water for the thirsty soul; the golden baskets in which
God has placed the bread of life, the true bread which came down
from heaven, of which if man eat he shall never die. They are the
volumes in whose brief but blessed pages are written the records
of God's mighty mercy; records so simple that even the "fool"
may read and comprehend them; so true that all the wisdom of the
world, and all the wiles of hell, cannot shake their certainty.
The knowledge of these is salvation.
On them we rest our confidence; for they are the revelation of
the name of God; and it is written, "They that know thy name
will put their trust in thee."
Let us listen to apostolic
preaching, and see how these facts form the heads of primitive
sermons; sermons such as Peter's at Jerusalem, or Paul's at
Corinth and Antioch. Peter's sermon at Jerusalem was that Jesus
of Nazareth, who was crucified, had been raised from the dead and
exalted to the throne of God, being made Lord and Christ. This
the apostle declared to be "good news." Paul's sermon
at Antioch was, in substance the same, - a statement of the facts
regarding the death and resurrection of Jesus; and the
application of that sermon was in these words, "Be it known
unto you, men and brethren, that through this man is preached
unto you the forgiveness of sins: and by him all that believe are
justified." His sermon at Corinth was very similar. He gives
us the following sketch of it: "Moreover, brethren, I
declare unto you the gospel which I preached unto you, which also
ye have received, and wherein ye stand; by which also ye are
saved, if ye keep in memory what I preached unto you. For I
delivered unto you first of all that which I also received, how
that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures; and
that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day
according to the Scriptures." Then he adds: "So we
preach, and so ye believed."
Such was apostolic preaching. Such
was Paul's gospel. It narrated a few facts respecting Christ;
adding the evidence of their truth and certainty, that all who
heard might believe and be saved. In these facts the free love of
God to sinners is announced; and the great salvation is revealed.
It is this gospel which is "the power of God unto salvation
to every one that believeth. For therein is the righteousness of
God revealed from faith to faith." Its burden was not,
"Do this or do that; labor and pray, and use the means;"
- that is, law, not gospel: - but Christ has done all! He did it
when he was "delivered for our offences, and raised again
for our justification." He did it all when he "made
peace by the blood of his cross." "It is finished."
His doing is so complete that it has left nothing for us to do.
We have but to enter into the joy of knowing that all is done!
"This is the record, that God hath given to us eternal life;
and this life is in his Son."
But let us gather together some of
the "true sayings of God" concerning Christ and his
work. In these we shall find the divine interpretation of the
facts above referred to. We shall see the meaning which the Holy
Spirit attaches to these, and so our faith shall not "stand
in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God." It is in
this way that the Lord himself, ere he left the earth, removed
the unbelief of the doubters around him. He reminded them of the
written word, "Thus it is written, and thus it behooved the
Christ to suffer and to rise from the dead the third day; and
that repentance and remission of sins should be preached in his
name, among all nations beginning at Jerusalem."
Hear, then, the word of the Lord!
For heaven and earth shall pass away, but these words shall not
pass away. "Who was delivered for our offences, and raised
again for our justification." "God hath not appointed
us to wrath, but to obtain salvation by our Lord Jesus Christ,
who died for us, that, whether we wake or sleep, we should live
together with him." "By the which will we are
sanctified, through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once
for all." "In due time Christ died for the ungodly."
"It is Christ that died, yea rather, that is risen again,
who is even at the right hand of God, who also maketh
intercession for us." "Who gave himself for our sins."
"Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being
made a curse for us." "In whom we have redemption
through his blood, the forgiveness of sins according to the
riches of his grace." "He humbled himself and became
obedient unto death, even the death of the cross." "Remember
that Jesus Christ, of the seed of David, was raised from the
dead, according to my gospel." "Who gave himself for us."
"Christ was once offered to bear the sins of many."
"Jesus also, that he might sanctify the people with his own
blood, suffered without the gate." "Christ also
suffered for us." "Who his own self bare our sins in
his own body on the tree." "Christ also hath once
suffered for sins, the just for the unjust." "Christ
hath suffered for us in the flesh." "He is the
propitiation for our sins." "Unto him that loved us,
and washed us from our sins in his own blood." "I am He
that liveth and was dead, and behold I am alive for evermore."
"Thou wast slain, and hast redeemed us to God by thy blood."
These are all divine truths written
in divine words. These sayings are faithful and true; they come
from Him that cannot lie; and they are as true, in these last
days, as they were eighteen hundred years ago; for "the word
of our God shall stand forever." In them we find the
authentic exposition of the facts which the apostles preached;
and in that we learn the glad tidings concerning the way in which
salvation from a righteous God has come to unrighteous man. Jesus
died! That is the paying of the debt, the endurance of the
penalty; the death for death! He was buried. That is the proof
that his death was a true death, needing a tomb as we do. He rose
again. This is God's declaration that he, the righteous Judge, is
satisfied with the payment, no less than with him who made it.
Could there be a better, gladder
news to the sinner than this? What more can he ask to satisfy
him, than that which has so fully satisfied the holy Lord God of
earth and heaven? If this will not avail, then he can expect no
more. If this is not enough, then Christ has died in vain.
God has thus "brought near his
righteousness." We do not need to go up to heaven for it;
that would imply that Christ had never come down. Nor do we need
to go down to the depths of the earth for it; that would say that
Christ had never been buried and never risen. It is near. It is
as near as is the word concerning it, which enters into our ears.
We do not need to exert ourselves to bring it near; nor to do
anything to attract it towards us. It is already so near, so very
near, that we cannot bring it closer. If we try to get up warm
feelings and good dispositions in order to remove some fancied
remainder of distance, we shall fail; not simply because these
actings of ours cannot do what we are trying to do, but because
there is no need of any such effort. The thing is done already.
God has brought his righteousness nigh to the sinner. The office
of faith is not to work, but to cease working; not to do
anything, but to own that all is done; not to bring near the
righteousness, but to rejoice in it as already near. This is
"the word of the truth of the gospel."
How shall I come before God, and stand in his
presence, with happy confidence on my part, and gracious
acceptance on his?
This is the sinner's question; and
he asks it because he knows that there is guilt between him and
God. No doubt this was Adam's question when he stitched his fig
leaves together for a covering. But he was soon made to feel that
the fig leaves would not do. He must be wholly covered, not in
part only; and that by something which even God's eye cannot see
through. As God comes near, the uselessness of his fig leaves is
felt, and he rushes into the thick foliage of Paradise to hide
from the Divine eye. The Lord approaches the trembling man, and
makes him feel that his hiding place will not do. Then he began
to tell him what will do. He announces a better covering and a
better hiding place. He reveals himself as the God of grace, the
God who hates sin, yet who takes the sinner's side against the
sinner's enemy, - the old serpent. All this through the seed of
the woman - "the man" who is the true "hiding
place." Adam can now leave his thicket safely; and feel that
in this revealed grace, he can stand before God without fear or
shame. He has heard the good tidings, and brief as they are, they
have restored his confidence and removed his alarm.
Let us hear the good news, and let
us hear it as Adam did, - from the lips of God himself. For that
which is revealed for our belief is set before us on God's
authority, not on man's. We are not only to believe the truth,
but we are to believe it because God has spoken it. Faith must
have a divine foundation.
We gather together a few of these
divine announcements; asking the anxious soul to study them as
divine. Nor let him say that he knows them already; but let him
accept our invitation, to traverse, along with us, the field of
gospel statement. It is of God himself that we must learn; and it
is only by listening to the very words of God that we shall
arrive at the true knowledge of what the gospel is. His own words
are the truest, the simplest, and the best. They are not only the
likeliest to meet our case; but they are the words which he has
promised to honor and to bless.
Let us hear, then, the words of God
as to his own "grace," or "free love," or
"mercy." "The Lord passed by before him, and
proclaimed, the Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious, long-suffering,
and abundant in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands,
forgiving iniquity, and transgression, and sin." "The
Lord is long suffering and of great mercy." "His
mercies are great." "The Lord your God is gracious and
merciful." "Thou are a God ready to pardon, gracious
and merciful." "His mercy endureth forever."
"Thou, Lord, art good, and ready to forgive, and plenteous
in mercy unto all them that call upon thee;" "thou art
a God full of compassion and gracious, long-suffering, and
plenteous in mercy and truth;" "thy mercy is great unto
the heavens;" "thy mercy is great above the heavens;"
"his tender mercies are over all his works;" "Who
is a God like unto thee, that pardoneth iniquity and passeth by
the transgressions of the remnant of his heritage; he retaineth
not his anger forever, because he delighteth in mercy;"
"I will love them freely;" "God so loved the
world, that he gave his only begotten Son;" "God
commendeth his love towards us;" "God, who is rich in
mercy, for the great love wherewith he hath loved us, even when
we were dead in sins;" "the kindness and love of God
our Saviour toward man;" "according to his mercy he
saved us;" "in this was manifested the love of God
towards us, because that God sent his only begotten Son into the
world, that we might live through him; herein is love, not that
we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the
propitiation for our sins;" "the only begotten of the
Father, full of grace and truth;" "grace and truth came
by Jesus Christ;" "the word of his grace;" "the
gospel of the grace of God."
Such are a few of the words of Him
who cannot lie, concerning his own free love. These sayings are
faithful and true; and though perhaps we may but little have
owned them as such, or given heed to the blessed news which they
embody, yet they are all fitted to speak peace to the soul even
of the most troubled and heavy laden. Each of these words of
grace is like a star sparkling in the round, blue sky above us;
or like a well of water pouring out its freshness amid desert
rocks and sands. Blessed are they who know these joyful sounds.
Let no one say, - "We know all
these passages; of what use is it to read and re-read words so
familiar?" Much every way. Chiefly because it is in such
declarations regarding the riches of God's free love that the
gospel is wrapped up; and it is out of these that the Holy Spirit
ministers light and peace to us. Such are the words which he
delights to honor as his messengers of joy to the soul. Hear
then, in these, the voice of the Spirit's love of the Father and
the Son! If you find no peace coming out of them to you, as you
read them the first time, read them again. If you find nothing
the second time, read them once more. If you find nothing the
hundredth or thousandth time, study them yet again. "The
word of God is quick and powerful;" his sayings are the
lively oracles; his word liveth and abideth forever; it is like a
fire, and like a hammer that breaketh the rock in pieces. The
gospel is the power of God; and it is by manifestation of the
truth, that we commend ourselves to every man's conscience in the
sight of God.
There are no words like those of
God, in heaven or in earth. Hence it is that we are to study that
which is written, for He Himself wrote it for you. Do not think
it needless to read these passages again and again. They will
blaze up at last; and light up that dark soul of yours with the
very joy of heaven.
You have sometimes looked up to the
sky at twilight, searching for a star which you expected to find
in its wonted place. You did not see it at first, but you knew it
was there, and that its light was undiminished. So, instead of
closing your eye or turning away to some other object, you
continued to gaze more and more intently on the spot where you
knew it was. Slowly and faintly the star seemed to come out in
the sky, as you gazed; and your persevering search ended in the
discovery of the long sought gem.
Just so it is with those passages
which speak to you of the free love of God. You say, I have
looked into them, but they contain nothing for me. Do not turn
away from them, as if you knew them too well already, yet could
find nothing in them. You have not seen them yet. There are
wonders beyond all price hidden in each. Take them up again.
Search and study them. The Holy Spirit is most willing to reveal
to you the glory which they contain. It is his office, it is his
delight, to be the sinner's teacher. He will not be behind you in
willingness. It is of the utmost moment that you should remember
this; lest you should grieve and repel him by your distrust.
Never lose sight of this great truth, that the evil thing in you,
which is the root of bitterness to the soul, is distrust of God;
distrust of the Father, who so loved the world as to give his
Son; distrust of the Son, who came to seek and save that which
was lost; distrust of the Holy Ghost, whose tender mercies are
over you, and whose work is to reveal the Christ of God to your
souls. Besides, keep this in mind, that in teaching you he is
honoring his own word and glorifying Christ. You need not then
suspect him of indifference toward you, or doubt his willingness
to enlighten the eyes of your understanding. While you are firmly
persuaded that it is only his teaching that can be of any real
use to you, do not grieve him by separating his love, in writing
the Bible for you, from his willingness to make you understand it.
He who gave you the word will interpret it for you. He does not
stand aloof from you or from his own word, as if he needed to be
persuaded, or bribed by your deeds and prayers, to unfold the
heavenly truth to you. Trust him for teaching. Taste and see that
he is good. Avail yourself at once of his love and power.
Do not say I am not entitled to
trust him till I am converted. You are to trust him as a sinner,
not as a converted man. You are to trust him as you are, not as
you hope to be made ere long. Your conversion is not your warrant
for trusting him. The great sin of an unconverted man is his not
trusting the God that made him; Father, Son, and Spirit; and how
can any one be so foolish, not to say wicked, as to ask for a
warrant for forsaking sin? What would you say to a thief who
should say, I have no warrant to forsake stealing; I must wait
till I am made an honest man, then I shall give it up? And what
shall I say to a distruster of God, who tells me that he has no
warrant for giving up his distrust, for he is not entitled to
trust God till he is converted? One of the greatest things in
conversion is turning from distrust to trust. If you are not
entitled to turn at once from distrust to trust, then your
distrust is no sin. If, however, your distrust of the Holy Spirit
be one of your worst sins, how absurd it is to say, I am not
entitled to trust him till I am converted! For is not that just
saying, I am not entitled to trust him till I trust him?
You say that you know God to be
gracious, yet, by your acting, you show that you do not believe
him to be so; or, at least, to be so gracious as to be willing to
show you the meaning of his own word. You believe him to be so
gracious as to give his only begotten Son; yet the way in which
you treat him, as to his word, shows that you do not believe him
to be willing to give his Spirit to make known his truth. Nay,
you think yourself much more willing to be taught than he is to
teach; more willing to be blest than he is to bless.
You say, I must wait till God
enlightens my mind. If God had told you that waiting is the way
of light, you would be right. But he has nowhere told you to
wait; and your idea of waiting is a mere excuse for not trusting
him immediately. If your way of proceeding be correct, God must
have said both "Come" and "wait," "Come
now, but do not come now," which is a contradiction. When a
kind rich man sends a message to a poor cripple to come at once
to him and be provided for, he sends his carriage to convey him.
He does not say, "Come; but then, as you are lame, and have
besides no means of conveyance, you must make all the interest
you can, and use all the means in your power, to induce me to
send my carriage for you." The invitation and the carriage
go together. Much more is this true of God and his messages. His
word and his Spirit go together. Not that the Spirit is in the
word, or the power in the message, as some foolishly tell you.
They are distinct things; but they go together. And your mistake
lies in your supposing, that He who sent the one may not be
willing to send the other. You think that it is He, not yourself,
who creates the interval which you call "waiting;"
although this waiting is, in reality, a deliberate refusal to
comply with a command of God, and a determination to do something
else, which he has not commanded, instead; a determination to
make the doing of that something else an excuse for not doing the
very thing commanded! Thus it is that you rid yourself of blame
by pleading inability; nay more, you throw the blame on God, for
not being willing to do immediately that which he is most willing
to do.
God demands immediate acceptance of
his Son, and immediate belief of his gospel. You evade this duty
on the plea, that as you cannot accept Christ of yourself, you
must go and ask him to enable you to do so. By this pretext you
try to relieve yourself from the overwhelming sense of the
necessity for immediate obedience. You soothe your conscience
with the idea that you are doing what you can, in the mean time,
and that so you are not guilty of unbelief, as before, seeing you
desire to believe, and are doing your part in this great business!
It will not do. The command is
"Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ." Nothing less than
this is pleasing to God. And though it is every man's duty to
pray, just as it is every man's duty to love God and to keep his
statutes, yet you must not delude yourself with the idea that you
are doing the right thing, when you only pray to believe, instead
of believing. The thief is still a thief, though he may desire to
give up stealing, and pray to be enabled to give it up, until he
actually give it up.
The question is not as to whether
prayer is a duty; but whether it is a right and acceptable thing
to pray in unbelief. Unbelieving prayer is prayer to an unknown
God, and it cannot be your duty to pray to an unknown God.
You must go to your knees,
believing that God is willing, or that he is not willing, to
bless you. In the latter case, you cannot expect any answer or
blessing. In the former case, you are really believing; as it is
written, "He that cometh to God must believe that he is, and
that he is the rewarder of all those that diligently seek him."
In maintaining the duty of praying before believing, you cannot
surely be asserting that it is your duty to go to God in
unbelief? You cannot mean to say that you ought to go to God,
believing that he is not willing to bless you, in order that by
so praying you may persuade him to make you believe that he is
willing. Are you to perish in unbelief till in some miraculous
way faith drops into you, and God compels you to believe? Must
you go to God with unacceptable prayer, in order to induce him to
give you the power of acceptable prayer? Is this what you mean by
the duty of praying in order to believe? If so, it is a delusion
and a sin.
Understanding prayer in the
scriptural sense, I would tell every man to pray, just as I would
tell every man to believe. For prayer includes and presupposes
faith. It assumes that the man knows something of the God he is
going to; and that is faith. "Whosoever shall call on the
name of the Lord shall be saved." But then the Apostle adds,
"How shall they call on him in whom they have not believed?"
Does not this last verse go to the very root of the matter before
us? It is every man's duty to call upon the name of the Lord;
nay, it is the great sin of the ungodly that they do not do so.
Yet says the Apostle, "How shall they call on him in whom
they have not believed?"
But I do not enter further on this
point here. It may come up again. Meanwhile, I would just remind
you of the tidings concerning God's free love, in the free gift
of his Son. Listen to what He himself has told you regarding
this, and know that God who is asking you to call upon his name;
for if thou but knewest this God and his great gift of love, thou
wouldest ask him and he would give thee living water. Remember
that the gospel is not a list of duties to be performed, or
feelings to be produced, or frames which we are to pray ourselves
into, in order to make God think well of us, and in order to fit
us for receiving pardon. The gospel is the good news of the great
work done upon the cross. The knowledge of that finished work is
immediate peace.
Read again and again the wondrous
words which I have quoted at length from His own book. The Bible
is a living book, not a dead one; a divine one, not a human one;
a perfect one, not an imperfect one.[22]
Search it, study it, dig into it. "My son," says God,
our Father, "receive my words; hide my commandments with
thee; incline thine ear unto wisdom; take fast hold of
instruction; attend unto my wisdom and bow thine ear to my
understanding; keep my words and lay up my commandments with thee."
Do not say these messages are only for the children of God; for,
as if to prevent this, God thus speaks to the simple, the
scorners, the fools. "Turn ye at my reproof;" showing
us that it is in listening to His words that the simple, the
scorner, and the fool cease to be such and become sons. Do not
revert to the old difficulty about your need of the Holy Spirit;
for, as if to meet this, God, in the above pages, adds, "Behold
I will pour out my Spirit unto you, I will make known my words
unto you." Not for one moment would God allow you to suspect
his willingness to accompany his word with his Spirit.
Honor the words of God; and honor
him who wrote them, by trusting him for interpretation and light.
Do not disparage them by calling them a dead letter. They are not
dead. If you will use the figure of death in this case, use it
rightly. They are the savor of death unto death in them that
perish; but this only shows their awful vitality. As the blood of
Christ either cleanses or condemns, so the words of the Spirit
either kill or make alive. The words that I speak unto you, they
are Spirit, and they are Life.
Again I say to you, honor the words
of God. Make much of them. Them that honor me I will honor, is as
true of Scripture as it is of the God of Scripture. Peace, light,
comfort, life, salvation, holiness, are wrapt up in them. "Thy
word hath quickened me." "I will never forget thy
precepts: for with them thou hast quickened me."
It is through belief of the truth
that God hath from the beginning chosen us to salvation. It is
with the word of Truth that he begat us: and all this is in
perfect harmony with the great truth of man's total helplessness
and his need of the Almighty Spirit.
"So then faith cometh by
hearing, and hearing by the word of God." "Hear, and
your soul shall live."
It is the Holy Spirit alone that
can draw us to the cross and fasten us to the Saviour. He who
thinks he can do without the Spirit, has yet to learn his own
sinfulness and helplessness. The gospel would be no good news to
the dead in sin, if it did not tell of the love and power of the
divine Spirit, as explicitly as it announces the love and power
of the divine Substitute.
But, while keeping this in mind, we
may try to learn from Scripture what is written concerning the
bond which connects us individually with the cross of Christ;
making us thereby partakers of the pardon and the life which that
cross reveals.
Thus then it is written, "By
grace are ye saved, through faith; and that not of yourselves: it
is the gift of God."
Faith then is the link, the one
link, between the sinner and the Sin-bearer. It is not faith, as
a work or exercise of our minds, which must be properly performed
in order to qualify or fit us for pardon. It is not faith, as a
religious duty, which must be gone through according to certain
rules, in order to induce Christ to give us the benefits of his
work. It is faith, simply as a receiver of the divine record
concerning the Son of God. It is not faith considered as the
source of holiness, as containing in itself the seed of all
spiritual excellence and good works; it is faith alone,
recognizing simply the completeness of the great sacrifice for
sin, and the trueness of the Father's testimony to that
completeness; as Paul writes to the Thessalonians, "our
testimony among you was believed." It is not faith as a
piece of money or a thing of merit; but faith taking God at his
word, and giving him credit for speaking the honest truth, when
he declares that "Christ died for the ungodly," and
that the life which that death contains for sinners, is to be had
without money, and without price."
But let us learn the things
concerning this faith, from the lips of God himself. I lay great
stress on this in dealing with inquirers. For the more that we
can fix the sinner's eye and conscience upon God's own words, the
more likely shall we be to lead him aright, and to secure the
quickening presence of that Almighty Spirit who alone can give
sight to the blind. One great difficulty which the inquirer finds
in such cases, is that of unlearning much of his past experience
and teaching. Hence the importance of studying the divine words
themselves, by which the sinner is made wise unto salvation. For
they both unteach the false and imperfect, and teach the true and
the perfect.
Let us mark how frequently and
strongly God has spoken respecting faith and believing. "Without
faith it is impossible to please God." "Therein is the
righteousness of God revealed from faith to faith: as it is
written, The just shall live by faith." "The
righteousness of God which is by faith of Jesus Christ unto all
and upon all them that believe." "Whom God hath set
forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood...to
declare his righteousness; that he might be just, and the
justifier of him which believeth in Jesus." "He that
believeth shall be saved." "As many as received him, to
them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that
believe on his name." "As Moses lifted up the serpent
in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up, that
whosoever believeth in him should not perish but have eternal
life; for God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten
Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have
everlasting life. He that believeth on him is not condemned: but
he that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not
believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God."
"He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life, and he
that believeth not the Son shall not see life." "He
that heareth my word, and believeth on him that sent me, hath
everlasting life." "This is the work of God, that ye
believe on him whom he hath sent." "He that believeth
on me shall never thirst." "This is the will of him
that sent me, that every one which seeth the Son, and believeth
on him, may have everlasting life." "He that believeth
on me, though he were dead, yet shall he live; and whosoever
liveth and believeth in me shall never die." "I am come
a light into the world, that whosoever believeth on me should not
abide in darkness." "These are written that ye might
believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that
believing, ye might have life through his name." "By
him all that believeth are justified from all things."
"Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved."
"To him gave all the prophets witness, that through his name
whoever believeth in him shall receive remission of sins."
"To him that worketh not, but believeth on him that
justifieth the ungodly, his faith is counted for righteousness."
"Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to every one
that believeth." "If thou shalt confess with thy mouth
the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath
raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved." "It
pleased God, by the foolishness of preaching, to save them that
believe." "This is his commandment, that ye believe on
him whom he hath sent." "We have known and believed the
love that God hath to us." "Whosoever believeth that
Jesus is the Christ, is born of God." "He that
believeth on the Son of God hath the witness in himself; he that
believeth not God, hath made him a liar, because he believeth not
the record that God gave of his Son." "He that
believeth not shall be damned."
These are some of the many texts
which teach us what the link is between the sinner and the great
salvation. They show that it is our belief of God's testimony,
concerning his own free love, and the work of his Son, that makes
us partakers of the blessings which that testimony reveals. They
do not indeed ascribe any meritorious or saving virtue to our act
of faith. They show us that it is the object of faith, - the
person, or thing, or truth of which faith lays hold, - that is
the soul's peace and consolation. But still they announce most
solemnly the necessity of believing, and the greatness of the sin
of unbelief. In them God demands the immediate faith of all who
hear his testimony. Yet he gives no countenance to the self-righteousness
of those who are trying to perform the act of faith, in order to
qualify themselves for the favor of God; whose religion consists
in performing acts of a certain kind; whose comfort arises from
thinking of these well-performed acts; and whose assurance comes
from the summing up of these at certain seasons, and dwelling
upon the superior quality of many of them.
In some places the word trust
occurs where perhaps we might have expected faith. But the reason
of this is plain; the testimony which faith receives, is
testimony to a person and his good will, in which case, belief of
the testimony and confidence in the person are things inseparable.
Our reception of God's testimony is confidence in God himself,
and in Jesus Christ his Son. Hence it is that the Scripture
speaks of trust or confidence as that which saves us, as if it
would say to the sinner, "Such is the gracious character of
God, that you have only to put your case into his hands, however
bad it be, and entrust your soul to his keeping, and you shall be
saved."
In some places we are said to be
saved by the knowledge of God or of Christ; that is simply
knowing God as he has made himself known to us in Jesus Christ. (Isa.
liii.11; 1 Tim. ii.4; 2 Pet. ii.20). Thus Jesus spoke, "This
is life eternal, that they might know thee, the only true God,
and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent." And as if to make
simplicity more simple, the Apostle, in speaking of the facts of
Christ's death, and burial, and resurrection, says, "By
which ye are saved, if ye keep in memory what I preached unto you."[23]
The God connects salvation with
believing, trusting, knowing, remembering. Yet the salvation is
not in our act of believing, trusting, knowing, or remembering;
it is in the thing or person believed on, trusted, known,
remembered. Nor is salvation given as a reward for believing and
knowing. The things believed and known are our salvation. Nor are
we saved or comforted by thinking about our act of believing and
ascertaining that it possesses all the proper ingredients and
qualities which would induce God to approve of it, and of us
because of it. This would be making faith a meritorious, or, at
least, a qualifying work; and then grace would be no more grace.
It would really be making our faith a part of Christ's work, -
the finishing stroke put to the great understanding of the Son of
God, which, otherwise, would have been incomplete, or, at least,
unsuitable for the sinner, as a sinner. To the man that makes his
faith and his trust his rest, and tries to pacify his conscience
by getting up evidence of their solidity and excellence, we say,
miserable comforters are they all! I get light by using my eyes;
not by thinking about my use of them, nor by a scientific
analysis of their component parts. So I get peace by, and in
believing; not by thinking about my faith, or trying to prove to
myself how well I have performed the believing act. We might as
well extract water from the desert sands as peace from our own
act of faith. Believing in the Lord Jesus Christ will do
everything for us; believing in our own faith, or trusting in our
own trust, will do nothing.
Thus faith is the bond between us
and the Son of God; and it is so, not because of anything in
itself, but because it is only through the medium of truth, as
known and believed, that the soul can get hold of things or
persons. Faith is nothing, save as it lays hold of Christ; and it
does so by laying hold of the truth or testimony concerning him.
"Faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God,"
says the apostle. "Ye shall know the truth," says the
Lord, "and the truth shall make you free," and again,
"because I tell you the truth, ye believe me not...And if I
say the truth, why do ye not believe me?" We have also such
expressions as these: "Those that know the truth;"
"those that obey not the truth;" "The truth as it
is in Jesus;" "belief of the truth;" "acknowledging
of the truth;" "the way of truth;" "we are of
the truth;" "destitute of the truth;" "sanctify
them through thy truth;" "I speak forth the words of
truth;" "the Spirit of truth will guide you into all
truth." Most memorable in connection with this subject, are
the Lord's warnings in the parable of the sower, specially the
following: - "The seed is the word of God. Those by the
wayside are they that hear: then cometh the devil, and taketh
away the word out of their hearts, lest they should believe and
be saved." The words, too, of the beloved disciple are no
less so: - "He that saw it bare record, and his record is
true; and he knoweth that he saith true, that ye might believe;"
and, again, "These are written, that ye might believe that
Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing ye might
have life through his name."
This truth regarding Christ and his
sacrificial work, the natural man hates, because he hates Christ
himself. "They hated me," says the Lord; nay, more,
they hated me without a cause." It is not error that man
hates, but truth; and hence the necessity for the Holy Spirit's
work to remove that hatred, - to make the sinner even so much as
willing to know the truth or the True One. Yet there is no
backwardness on the part of God to give that Spirit; - and the
first dawnings of inquiry and anxiety show that something beyond
flesh and blood is at work in the soul.
But though it needs the power of
the divine Spirit to make us believing men, this is not because
faith is a mysterious thing, a great exercise or effort of soul,
which must be very accurately gone through in order to make it
acceptable, but because of our dislike to the truth believed, and
our enmity to the Being in whom we are asked to confide.
Believing is the simplest of all mental processes; yet not the
less is the power of God needed. Let not the inquirer mystify or
magnify faith in order to give it merit or importance in itself,
so that by its superior texture or quality it may justify him;
yet never, on the other hand, let him try to simplify it for the
purpose of making the Spirit's work unnecessary. The more simple
that he sees it to be, the more will he see his own guilt, in so
deliberately refusing to believe, and his need of the divine
Helper to overcome the fearful opposition of the natural heart to
the simple reception of the truth.
The difficulty of believing has its
real root in pure self-righteousness; and the struggles to
believe, the endeavors to trust, of which men speak, are the
indications of this self-righteousness. So far are these
spiritual exercises from being tokens for good, they are often
mere expressions of spiritual pride, - evidences of the desperate
strength of self-righteousness. It is worse than vain, then, to
try to comfort an anxious soul by pointing to these exercises or
efforts as proofs of existing faith. They are proofs either of
ignorance or of unbelief, - proofs of the sinner's determination
to do anything rather than believe that all is done. Doubts are
not the best evidences of faith; and attempts at performing this
great thing called faith are mere proofs of blindness to the
finished propitiation of the Son of God.
To do some great thing called
faith, in order to win God's favour, the sinner has no objection;
nay, it is just what he wants, for it gives him the opportunity
of working for his salvation. But he rejects the idea of taking
his stand upon a work already done, and so ceasing to exercise
his soul in order to effect a reconciliation, for which all that
is needed was accomplished eighteen hundred years ago, upon the
cross of Him who "was made sin for us, though he knew no
sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him."
You are in earnest now; but I fear you are making
your earnestness your Christ, and actually using it as a reason
for not trusting Christ immediately. You think your earnestness
will lead on to faith, if it be but intense enough, and long
enough persisted in.
But there is such a thing as
earnestness in the wrong direction; earnestness in unbelief, and
a substitution of earnestness for simple faith in Jesus. You must
not soothe the alarms of conscience by this earnestness of yours.
It is unbelieving earnestness; and that will not do. What God
demands is simple faith in the record which he has given you of
his Son. You say, "I can't give him faith, but I can give
him earnestness; and by giving him earnestness, I hope to
persuade him to give me faith." This is self-righteousness.
It shows that you regard both faith and earnestness as something
to be done in order to please God, and secure his good will. You
say, faith is the gift of God, but earnestness is not; it is in
my own power; therefore I will earnestly labor, and struggle, and
pray, hoping that ere long God will take pity on my earnest
struggles, nay, feeling secretly that it would be hardly fair to
him to disregard such earnestness. Now, if God has anywhere said
that unbelieving earnestness and the unbelieving use of means is
the way of procuring faith, I cannot object to such proceeding on
your part. But I do not find that he has said so, or that the
apostle in dealing with inquirers set them upon this preliminary
process for acquiring faith. I find that the apostles shut up
their hearers to immediate faith and repentance, bringing them
face to face with the great object of faith, and commanding them
in the name of the living God to believe, just as Jesus commanded
the man with the withered arm to stretch out his hand. The man
was thoroughly helpless, yet he is, on the spot, commanded to do
the very thing which he could least of all do, the thing which
Jesus only could enable him to do. The Lord did not give him any
directions as to a preliminary work, or preparatory efforts, and
struggles, and using of means. These are man's attempts to bridge
over the great gulf by human appliances; man's ways of evading
the awful question of his own utter impotence; man's unscriptural
devices for sliding out of inability into ability, out of
unbelief into faith; man's plan for helping God to save him;
man's self-made ladder for climbing up a little way out of the
horrible pit, in the hope that God will so commiserate his
earnest struggles as to do all the rest that is needed.
Now God has commanded all men
everywhere to repent; but he has nowhere given us any directions
for obtaining repentance. God has commanded sinners to believe,
but has not prescribed for them any preparatory steps or process
by means of which he may be induced to give them something which
he is not from the first most willing to do. It is thus that he
shuts them up to faith, by concluding them in unbelief. It is
thus that he brings them to feel both the greatness and the guilt
of their inability; and so constrains them to give up every hope
of doing anything to save themselves; - driving them out of every
refuge of lies, and showing them that these prolonged efforts of
theirs are hindrances, not helps, and are just so many rejections
of his own immediate help, - so many distrustful attempts to
persuade him to do what he is already most willing to do in their
behalf.
The great manifestation of self-righteousness,
is this struggle to believe. Believing is not a work, but a
ceasing from work; and this struggle to believe, is just the
sinner's attempt to make a work out of that which is no work at
all, to make a labor out of that which is a resting from labor.
Sinners will not let go their hold of their former confidence,
and drop into Christ's arms. Why? Because they still trust these
confidences, and do not trust him who speaks to them in the
gospel. Instead, therefore, of encouraging you to embrace more
and more earnestly these preliminary efforts, I tell you they are
all the sad indications of self-righteousness. They take for
granted that Christ has not done his work sufficiently, and that
God is not willing to give you faith till you have plied him with
the arguments and importunities of months or years. God is at
this moment willing to bless you; and these struggles of yours
are not, as you fancy, humble attempts on your part to take the
blessing, but proud attempts either to put it from you or to get
hold of it in some way of your own. You cannot, with all your
struggles, make the Holy Spirit more willing to give you faith
than he is at this moment. But our self-righteousness rejects
this blessed truth; and if I were to encourage you in these
efforts, I should be fostering your self-righteousness and your
rejection of this grace of the Spirit.
You say you cannot change your
heart or do any good thing. So say I. But I say more. I say that
you are not at all aware of the extent of your helplessness and
of your guilt. These are far greater and far worse than you
suppose. And it is your imperfect view of these that leads you to
resort to these appliances. You are not yet sensible of your
weakness, in spite of all you say. It is this that is keeping you
from God and God from you.
God commands you to believe and to
repent. It is at our peril that you attempt to alter this
imperative and immediate obligation by the substitution of
something preliminary, the performance of which may perhaps
soothe your terrors and lull your conscience to asleep, but will
not avail either to propitiate God or to life you into a safer,
or more salvable condition, as you imaging. For we are saved by
faith, not by efforts to induce an unwilling God to give us faith.
God commands you to believe; and,
so long as you do not believe, you are making him a liar, you are
rejecting the truth, you are believing a lie; for unbelief is, in
reality, the belief in a lie. Yes, God commands you to believe;
and your not believing is your worst sin; and it is by exhibiting
it as your worst sin, that God shuts you up to faith. Now, if you
try to extenuate this sin; if you lay this flattering unction to
your soul, that, by making all these earnest and laborious
efforts to believe, you are lessening this awful sin, and
rendering your unbelieving state a less guilty one; you are
deluding your conscience, and thrusting away from you that divine
hand which, by this conviction of unbelief, is shutting you up to
faith.
I do not remember to have seen this
better stated anywhere than in Fuller's "Gospel Worthy of
All Acceptation." I give just a few sentences: - "It is
the duty of ministers not only to exhort their carnal hearers to
believe in Jesus Christ for the salvation of their souls, but it
is at our peril to exhort them to anything short of it, or which
does not involve or imply it. We have sunk into such a
compromising way of dealing with the unconverted, as to have well
nigh lost the spirit of the primitive preachers; and hence it is
that sinners of every description can sit so quietly as they do
in our places of worship. Christ and his apostles, without any
hesitation, called on sinners to repent and believe the gospel;
but we, considering them as poor, impotent, and depraved
creatures, have been disposed to drop this part of the Christian
ministry. Considering such things as beyond the powers of their
hearers, they seem to have contented themselves with pressing on
them the things they could perform, still continuing enemies of
Christ; such as behaving decently in society, reading the
Scriptures, and attending the means of grace. Thus it is that
hearers of this description sit at ease in our congregations. But
as this implies no guilt on their part, they sit unconcerned,
conceiving that all that is required of them is to lie in the way
and wait the Lord's time. But is this the religion of the
Scriptures? Where does it appear that the prophets or apostles
treated that kind of inability, which is merely the effect of
reigning aversion, as affording any excuse? And where have they
descended in their exhortations to things which might be done,
and the parties still continue the enemies of God? Instead of
leaving out everything of a spiritual nature, because their
hearers could not find in their hearts to comply with it, it may
be safely affirmed that they exhorted to nothing else, treating
such inability not only as of no account with regard to the
lessening of obligation, but as rendering the subjects of it
worthy of the severest rebuke."...Repentance toward God, and
faith towards our Lord Jesus Christ, are allowed to be duties,
but not immediate duties. The sinner is considered as unable to
comply with them, and therefore they are not urged upon him; but
instead of them, he is directed to pray for the Holy Spirit to
enable him to repent and believe! This, it seems, he can do,
notwithstanding the aversion of his heart from everything of the
kind. But if any man be required to pray for the Holy Spirit, it
must be either sincerely and in the name of Jesus, or insincerely
and in some other way. The latter, I suppose, will be allowed to
be an abomination in the sight of God; he cannot, therefore, be
required to do this; and as to the former, it is just as
difficult and as opposite to the carnal heart as repentance and
faith themselves. Indeed, it amounts to the same thing; for a
sincere desire after a spiritual blessing, presented in the name
of Jesus, is no other than the prayer of faith."
The great thing which I would press
upon our conscience is the awful guilt that there is in unbelief.
Continuance in unbelief is continuance in the very worst of sins;
and continuance in it because (as you say) you cannot help it, is
the worst aggravation of your sin. The habitual drunkard says, he
cannot help it; the habitual swearer says, he cannot help it; the
habitual unbeliever says, he cannot help it. Do you admit the
drunkard's excuse? Or do you not tell him that it is the worst
feature of his case, and that he ought to be utterly ashamed of
himself for using such a plea? Do you say, I know you can't give
up your drunken habits, but you can go and pray to God to enable
you to give up these habits, and perhaps God will hear you and
enable you to do so. What would this be but to tell him to go on
drinking and praying alternately; and that, possibly, God may
hear his drunken prayers, and give him sobriety? You would not
deal with drunkenness in this way; ought you to deal thus with
unbelief? Ought you not to press home the unutterable guilt of
unbelief; and to show a sinner that, when he says I can't help my
unbelief, he is uttering his most dreadful condemnation, and
saying, I can't help distrusting God, I can't help hating God, I
can't help making God a liar; and that he might just as well say,
I can't help stealing and lying, and swearing.
Never let unbelief be spoken of as
a misfortune. It is awfully sinful; and its root is the desperate
wickedness of the heart. How resolutely evil must that heart be,
when it will not even believe! For this depravity of soul and
need of a heavenly Quickener, cannot palliate our unbelief, or
make it less truly the sin of sins. If our helplessness and
hardness of heart lessened our guilt, then the more wicked we
became, the less guilty we should be. The sinner who loves sin so
much that he cannot part with it, is the most guilty of all. The
man who says, I cannot love God, is proclaiming himself one of
the worst of sinners; but he who says, I cannot even believe, is
taking to himself a guilt which we may truly call the darkest and
most damnable of all.
Oh, the unutterable guilt involved
even in one moment's unbelief - one single act of an unbelieving
soul! How much more in the continuous unbelief of twenty or sixty
years! To steal once is bad enough, how much more to be a thief
by habit and repute! We think it bad enough when a man is
overtaken with drunkenness; how much more when we have to say of
him, he is never sober. Such is our charge against the man who
has not yet known Christ. He is a continuous unbeliever. His life
is one unbroken course of unbelief, and hence of false worship,
if he worships at all.[24] Every
new moment is a new act of unbelief; a new commission of the
worst of sins; the sin of sins; a sin in comparison with which
stealing and drunkenness, and murder, awful as they are, becomes
as trifles.
Let the thought of this guilt, Oh,
anxious soul, cut your conscience to the quick! Oh! tremble as
you think of what it is to be, not for a day or an hour, but for
a whole lifetime, an unbelieving man!
You say, I know all these things, yet they
bring me no peace.
I doubt much in that case whether
you do know them; and I should like you to doubt upon this point.
You take for granted much too easily that you know them. Seeing
they do not bring to your soul the peace which God says they are
sure to do, your wisest way would be to suspect the correctness
of your knowledge. If a trusty physician prescribes a sure
medicine for some complaint, and if on trial I find that what I
have taken does me no good, I begin to suspect that I have some
wrong medicine instead of that which he prescribed.
Now are you sure that the truth
which, you say you know, is the very gospel of the grace of God?
Or is it only something like it? And may not the reason of your
getting no peace from that which you believe, just be, because it
contains none? You have got hold of many of the good things, but
you have missed, perhaps, the one thing which made it a joyful
sound? You believe perhaps the whole gospel, save the one thing
which makes it good news to a sinner? You see the cross as
bringing salvation very near; but no so absolutely close as to be
in actual contact with you as you are; not so entirely close but
that there is a little space, just a hand breadth or a
hairbreadth, to be made up by your own prayers, or efforts, or
feelings? Everything, you say, is complete; but then, that want
of feeling in myself! Ah, there it is! There is the little
unfinished bit of Christ's work which you are trying to finish,
or to persuade him by your prayers, to finish for you! That want
of feeling is the little inch of distance which you have to get
removed before the completeness of Christ's work is available for
you!
The consciousness of insensibility,
like the sense of guilt, ought to be one of your reasons for
trusting him the more, whereas you make it a reason for not
trusting him at all. Would a child treat a father or a mother
thus? Would it make its bodily weakness a reason for distrusting
parental love? Would it not feel that that weakness was
thoroughly known to the parent, and was just the very thing that
was drawing out more love and skill? A stronger child would need
less care and tenderness. But the poor helpless palsied one would
be of all others the likeliest to be pitied and watched over.
Deal thus with Christ; and make that hardness of heart an
additional reason for trusting him, and for prizing his finished
work.
This state of mind shows that you
are not believing the right thing; but something else which will
not heal your hurt; or, at least, that you are mixing up
something with the right thing, which will neutralize all its
healing properties.
You must begin at the beginning
once more; and go back to the simplest elements of heavenly
truth, which are wrapped up in the great facts that Jesus died
and rose again; facts too little understood, nay, undervalued by
many; facts to which the apostles attached such vast importance,
and on which they laid so much stress; facts out of which the
primitive believers, without the delay of weeks or months,
extracted their peace and joy.
You say, I cannot believe. Let us
look into this complaint of yours.
I know that the Holy Spirit is as
indispensable to your believing, as is Christ in order to your
being pardoned. The Holy Spirit's work is direct and powerful;
and you will not rid yourself of your difficulties by trying to
persuade yourself that his operations are all indirect, and
merely those of a teacher presenting truth to you. Salvation for
the sinner is Christ's work; salvation in the sinner is the
Spirit's work. Of this internal salvation he is the beginner and
the ender. He works in you, in order to your believing, as truly
as he works in you after you have believed, and in consequence of
your believing.
This doctrine, instead of being a
discouragement, is one of unspeakable encouragement to the
sinner; and he will acknowledge this, if he knows himself to be
the thoroughly helpless being which the Bible says he is. If he
is not totally depraved, he will feel the doctrine of the
Spirit's work a hindrance, no doubt; but as, in that case, he
will be able to save himself without much assistance, he might
just set aside the Spirit altogether, and work his way to heaven
without his help!
The truth is, that without the
Spirit's direct and almighty help, there could be no hope for a
totally depraved being at all.
You speak of this inability to
believe as if it were some unprovided difficulty; and as if the
discovery of it had sorely cast you down. You would not have so
desponded had you found that you could believe of yourself,
without the Spirit; and it would greatly relieve you to be told
that you could dispense with the Spirit's help in this matter. If
this would relieve you, it is plain that you have no confidence
in the Spirit; and you wish to have the power in your own hands,
because you believe your own willingness to be much greater than
his. Did you but know the blessed truth, that his willingness far
exceeds yours, you would rejoice that the power was in his hands
rather than in your own. You would feel far more certain of
attaining the end desired when the strength needed is in hands so
infinitely gracious; and you would feel that the man who told you
that you had all the needed strength in yourself, was casting
down your best hope, and robbing you of a heavenly treasure.
How eagerly some grasp at the idea,
that they can believe, and repent, and turn of themselves, as if
this were consolation to the troubled spirit! as if this were the
unraveling of its dark perplexities! Is it comfort to persuade
yourself that you are not wholly without strength? Can you, by
lessening the sum total of your depravity and inability, find the
way to peace? Is it a relief to your burdened spirit to be
delivered from the necessity of being wholly indebted to the
Spirit of God for faith and repentance? Will it rescue you from
the bitterness of despair to be told that you had not enough
strength left to enable you to love God, yet that in virtue of
some little remaining power, you can perform this least of all
religious acts, believing on the Son of God?
If such be your feeling, it is
evident that you do not know the extent of your own disease, nor
the depths of your evil heart, you don't understand the good news
brought to you by the Son of God, - of complete deliverance from
all that oppresses you, whether it be guilt or helplessness. You
have forgotten the blessed announcement, "In the Lord have I
righteousness and strength." Your strength, as well as your
righteousness, is in another; yet, while you admit the former,
you deny the latter. You have forgotten, too, the apostle's
rejoicing in the strength of his Lord; his feeling that when he
was weak that he was strong; and his determination to glory in
his infirmities, that the power of Christ might rest upon him.
If you understand the genuine
gospel in all its freeness, you will feel that the man who tries
to persuade you that you have strength enough left to do without
the Spirit, is as great an enemy of the cross, and of your soul,
as the man who wants to make you believe that you are not
altogether guilty, but have some remaining goodness, and
therefore do not need to be wholly indebted for pardon to the
blood and righteousness of Immanuel. Without strength, is as
literal a description of your state, as without goodness."
If you understand the gospel, the consciousness of your total
helplessness would just be the discovery that you are the very
sinner to whom the great salvation is sent; that your inability
was all foreseen and provided for, and that you are in the very
position which needs, which calls for, and shall receive, the aid
of the Almighty Spirit.
Till you free yourself in this
extremity of weakness, you are not in a condition (if I may say
so) to receive the heavenly help. Your idea of remaining ability
is the very thing that repels the help of the Spirit, just as any
idea of remaining goodness thrusts away the propitiation of the
Saviour. It is your not seeing that you have no strength that is
keeping you from believing. So long as you think you have some
strength in doing something, - and specially in performing to
your own and Satan's satisfaction, that great act or exercise of
soul called "faith." But when you find out that you
have no strength left, you will, in blessed despair, cease to
work, - and (ere you are aware) - believe! For, if believing be
not a ceasing to work, it is at least the necessary and immediate
result of it. You expended your little stock of imagined strength
in holding fast the ropes of self-righteousness, but now, when
the conviction of having no strength at all is forced upon you,
you drop into the arms of Jesus. But this you will never do, so
long as you fancy that you have strength to believe.
Paul, after many years believing,
still drew his strength from Christ alone; how much more must you
and others who have never yet believed at all? He said, "I
take pleasure in my infirmities," that is, my want of
strength. You say, I am cast down because of it!
They who tell you that you have
some power left, and that you are to use that power in believing
and repenting, are enemies of your peace, and subverters of the
gospel. They, in fact, say to you that faith is a work, and that
you are to do that work in order to be saved. They mock you. In
yielding to them you are maintaining that posture which vexes and
resists the Spirit which is striving within you; you are proudly
asserting for fallen man a strength which belongs only to the
unfallen; you are denying the completeness of the divine
provision made for the sinner in the fullness of Him in whom it
pleased the Father that all fullness should dwell.
The following sentence from an old
writer is worth pondering:
"Ask him what it is he finds
makes believing difficult to him? Is it unwillingness to be
justified and saved? Is it unwillingness to be so saved by Jesus
Christ, to the praise of God's grace in him, and to the voiding
of all boasting in himself? This he will surely deny. Is it a
distrust of the truth of the gospel record? This he dare not own.
Is it a doubt of Christ's ability or goodwill to save? This is to
contradict the testimony of God in the gospel. Is it because he
doubts of an interest in Christ and his redemption? You tell him
that believing on Christ makes up the interest in him. If he says
he cannot believe on Christ, because of the difficulty of the
acting this faith, and that a divine power is needful to draw it
forth, which he finds not, you tell him that believing in Jesus
Christ is no work, but a resting on Jesus Christ; and that this
pretence is as unreasonable as that if a man wearied with a
journey, and who is not able to go one step farther, should
argue, I am so tired that I am not able to lie down, when,
indeed, he can neither stand nor go. The poor wearied sinner can
never believe on Jesus Christ till he finds he can do nothing for
himself, and in his first believing doth always apply himself to
Christ for salvation, as a man hopeless and helpless in himself.
And by such reasonings with him from the gospel, the Lord will (as
he hath often done) convey faith, and joy, and peace, by
believing."
Your puzzling yourself with this
"cannot," shows that you are proceeding in a wrong
direction. You are still laboring under the idea that this
believing is a work to be done by you, and not the simple
acknowledgment of a work done by another. You would fain do
something in order to get peace, and you think that if you could
only do this great thing called faith, God would reward you with
peace. In this view, faith is a price as well as a work; whereas
it is neither; but a ceasing from work and from attempting to pay
for salvation. Faith is not a climbing of the mountain; but a
ceasing to attempt it, and allowing Christ to carry you up in his
arms.
You seem to think that it is your
own act of faith that is to save you; whereas it is the object of
your faith, without which your own act of faith, however well
performed, is nothing. Supposing that this believing is a mighty
work, you ask, "How am I to get it properly performed?"
But your peace is not to come from any such performance, but
entirely from Him to whom the Father is pointing, "Behold my
servant whom I have chosen." As if he would say, "Look
at him as Israel looked at the serpent of brass: forget
everything about yourself, - your faith, your frames, your
repentance, your prayers, - and look at Him." It is in Him,
and not in your poor act of faith, that salvation lies. It is in
Him and in his boundless love that you are to find your resting
place. Out of Him, not out of your exercise of soul concerning
him, that peace is to come. Looking at your own faith will only
minister to your self-righteousness; it is like letting your left
hand know what your right hand doeth. To seek for satisfaction as
to the quality or quantity of your faith, before you will take
comfort from Christ's work, is to preceed upon the supposition
that the work is not sufficient of itself to give you comfort, as
soon as received; and that until made sufficient by a certain
amount of religious feeling, it contains no comfort to the
sinner; in short, that the comforting or comfortable ingredient
is an indescribable something, depending for its efficiency
chiefly upon the superior excellence of your own act of faith,
and the success of your own exertions in putting it forth.
Your inability, then, does not lie
in the impossibility of your performing aright this great act of
believing, but of ceasing from all such self-righteous attempts
to perform any act, or do anything whatever, in order to your
being saved. So that he real truth is, that you have not yet seen
such a sufficiency in the one great work of the Son of God upon
the cross, as to lead you utterly to discontinue your wretched
efforts to work out something of your own. As soon as the Holy
Spirit shows you the entire sufficiency of the great
propitiation, for the sinner, just as he is, you cease your
attempts to act or work, and take, instead of all such exercises
of yours, that which Christ has done. The Spirit's work is not to
enable a man to do something which will save him or help to save
him, but so to detach him from all his own exertions and
performances, whether good, bad, or indifferent, that he should
be content with the salvation which the Saviour of the lost has
finished.
Remember that what you call your
inability God calls your guilt; and that this inability is a
willful thing. It was not put into you by God; for he made you
with the full power of doing everything he tells you to do. You
disobey and disbelieve willingly. No one forces you to do either.
Your rejection of Christ is the free and deliberate choice of
your own will.
That inability of yours is a
fearfully wicked thing. It is the summing up of your depravity.
It makes you more like the devil than almost anything else.
Incapable of loving God, or even of believing on his Son! Capable
of only hating him, and of rejecting Christ! Oh, dreadful guilt!
Unutterable wickedness of the human heart!
Is it really the cannot that is
keeping you back from Christ? No, it is the will not. You have
not got the length of the cannot. It is the will not that is the
real and present barrier. "Ye will not come to me that ye
might have life." "Whosoever will, let him take the
water of life freely."
If your heart would speak out it
would say, "Well, after all, I cannot, and God will not."
And what is this but saying, "I have a hard-hearted God to
deal with, who won;t help or pity me?" Whatever your
rebellious heart may say, Christ's words are true, "Ye will
not." What he spoke when weeping over impenitent Jerusalem
he speaks to you, "I would but ye would not."
"They are fearful words,"
writes Dr. Owen, "ye would not." Whatever is pretended,
it is will and stubbornness that lie at the bottom of this
refusal." And oh! what must be the strength as well as the
guilt of this unbelief, when nothing but the almightiness of the
Holy Ghost can root it out of you?
You are perplexed by the doctrine
of God's sovereignty and election. I wonder that any man
believing in a God should be perplexed by these. For if there be
a God, a King, eternal, immortal, and invisible, he cannot but be
sovereign, - and he cannot but do according to his own will, and
choose according to his own purpose. You may dislike these
doctrines, but you can only get quit of them by denying
altogether the existence of an infinitely wise, glorious, and
powerful Being. God would not be God were he not thus absolutely
sovereign in his present doings and his eternal pre-arrangements.
But how would it rid you of your
perplexities to get quit of sovereignty and election? Suppose
these were not aside, you still remain the same depraved and
helpless being as before. The truth is, that the sinner's real
difficulty lies neither in sovereignty nor election, but in his
own depravity. If the removal of these hard doctrines (as some
call them) would lessen his own sinfulness, or make him more able
to believe and repent, the hardship would lie at their door; but
if not, then these doctrines are no hindrance at all. If it be
God's sovereignty that is keeping him from coming to Christ, the
sinner has serious matter of complaint against the doctrine. But
if it be his own depravity, is it not foolish to be objecting to
a truth that has never thrown one single straw of a hindrance in
the way of his return to God?[25]
Election has helped many a soul to heaven; but never yet hindered
one. Depravity is the hindrance; election is God's way of
overcoming that hindrance. And if that hindrance is not overcome
in all, but only in some, who shall find fault? Was God bound to
overcome it in all? Was he bound to bring every man to Christ,
and to pluck every brand from the burning? Do not blame God for
that which belongs solely to yourself; nor be troubled about His
sovereignty when the real cause of trouble is your own
desperately wicked heart.
You say that you do not feel yourself to be
a sinner; that you are not anxious enough; that you are not
penitent enough.
Be it so. Let me, however, ask you
such questions as the following: -
1. Does your want of feeling alter
the gospel? Does it make the good news less free, less blessed,
less suitable? Is it not glad tidings of God's love to the
unworthy, the unlovable, the insensible? Your not feeling your
burdens does not affect the nature of the gospel, nor change the
gracious character of Him from whom it comes. It suits you as you
are, and you suit it exactly. It comes up to you on the spot, and
says, Here is a whole Christ for you, - a Christ containing
everything you need. Your acquisition of feeling would not
qualify you for it, nor bring it nearer, nor buy its blessings,
nor make you more welcome, nor persuade God to do anything for
you that he is not at this moment most willing to do.
2. Is your want of feeling and
excuse for your unbelief? Faith does not spring out of feeling,
but feeling out of faith. The less you feel the more you should
trust. You cannot feel aright till you have believed. As all true
repentance has its root in faith, so all true feeling has the
same. It is vain for you to attempt to reverse God's order of
things.
3. Is your want of feeling a reason
for your staying away from Christ? A sense of want should lead
you to Christ, and not keep you away. "More are drawn to
Christ," says old Thomas Shepherd, "under a sense of a
dead, blind heart, than by all sorrows, humiliations, and terrors."
The less of feeling or conviction that you have, you are the more
needy; and is that a reason for keeping aloof from him? Instead
of being less fit for coming, you are more fit. The blindness of
Bartimeus was his reason for coming to Christ, not for staying
away. If you have more blindness and deadness than others, you
have so many more reasons for coming, so many fewer for standing
afar off. If the whole head is sick and the whole heart faint,
you should feel yourself the more shut up to the necessity of
coming, - and that immediately. Whatever others may do who have
convictions, you who have none dare not stay away, nor even wait
an hour. You must come!
4. Will your want of feeling make
you less welcome to Christ? How is this? What makes you think so?
Has he said so, or did he act, when on earth, as if this were his
rule of procedure/ Had the woman of Sychar any feeling when he
spoke to her so lovingly? Was it the amount of conviction in
Zaccheus that made the Lord address him so graciously, "Make
haste, for today I must abide at thy house?" The balm of
Gilead will not be the less suitable for you, nor the physician
there the less affectionate and cordial, because, in addition to
other diseases, you are afflicted with the benumbing palsy. Your
greater need only gives him an opportunity of showing the extent
of his fullness, as well as the riches of his grace. Come to him,
then, just because you do not feel. "Him that cometh to me I
will in no wise cast out." Whatever you may feel, or may not
feel, it is still a faithful saying, and worthy of all
acceptation, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save
sinners. Do not limit the grace of God, nor suspect the love of
Christ. Confidence in that grace and love will do everything for
you; want of confidence, nothing. Christ wants you to come; not
to wait, nor to stay away.
5. Will your remaining away from
Christ remove your want of feeling? No. It will only make it
worse; for it is a disease which he only can remove. So that a
double necessity is laid upon you for going to Him. Others who
feel more than you may linger. You cannot afford to do so. You
must go immediately to Him who is exalted "a Prince and a
Saviour, to give repentance to Israel, and the forgiveness of
sins." Seeing that distance and distrust will do nothing for
you, try what drawing near and confidence will do. To you, though
the chief of sinners, the message is, "Let us draw near."
God commands you to come, without any further delay or
preparation; to bring with you your sins, your unbelief, your
insensibility, your heart, your will, your whole man, and to put
them into Christ's hands. God demands your immediate confidence
and instant surrender to Christ. "Kiss the Son," is his
message. His word insists on your return, - "Return unto the
Lord thy God." It shows you that the real cause of the
continuance of this distance is your unwillingness to let Christ
save you in his own way, - and a desire to have the credit of
removing your insensibility by your own prayers and tears.
6. Is not your insensibility one of
your worst sins? A hard-hearted child is one of the most hateful
of beings. You may pity and excuse many things, but not hard-heartedness.
"Thou art the man." Thou art the hard-hearted child!
Cease then to pity yourself, and learn only to condemn. Give this
sin no quarter. Treat it not as a misfortune, but as unmingled
guiltiness. You may call it a disease; but remember that it is an
inexcusable sin. It is one great all pervading sin added to your
innumerable others. This should shut you up to Christ. As an
incurable leper you must go to him for cure. As a desperate
criminal, you must go to him for pardon. Do not, I beseech you,
add to this awful sin, the yet more damning sin of refusing to
acknowledge Christ as the healer of all diseases, and the
forgiver of all iniquities.
Repentance is only to be got from
Christ. Why then should you make the want of it a reason for
staying away from him? Go to Him for it. He is exalted to give it.
If you speak of waiting, you only show that you are not sincere
in your desire to have it. No man in such circumstances would
think of waiting. Your conviction of sin is to come, not by
waiting, but by looking; looking to Him whom your sins have
crucified, and whom, by your distrust and unbelief, you are
crucifying afresh. It is written, "They shall look on me
whom they have pierced, and they shall mourn?"
Beware of fancying that convictions
are to save you, or that they are to be desired for their own
sakes. Thus writes an old minister, "I was put out of
conceit with legal terrors; for I thought they were good, and
only esteemed them happy that were under them; they came, but I
found they did me ill; and unless the Lord had guided me thus, I
think I should have died doting after them." And another
says, "Sense of a dead, hard heart is an effectual means to
draw to Christ; yea, more effectual than any other can be,
because it is the poor, the blind, the naked, the miserable, that
are invited."
As to what is called a "law-work,"
preparatory to faith in Christ, let us consult the Acts of the
Apostles. There we have the preaching of the apostolic gospel and
the fruits of it, in the conversion of thousands. We have several
inspired sermons, addressed both to Jew and Gentile; but into
none of these is the law introduced. That which pricked the
hearts of the thousands at Pentecost was a simple narrative of
the life, death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth,
concluding with these awful words, which must have sounded like
the trumpet of doom to those who heard them, "Therefore let
all the house of Israel know, that God hath made that same Jesus,
whom ye have crucified, both Lord and Christ." These were
words more terrible than law; more overwhelming than Sinai heard.
Awful as it would have been to be told, "Ye have broken the
whole law of God;" what was this to being told, "Ye
have crucified his Son?" The sin of crucifying the Lord of
glory was greater than that of breaking a thousand laws. And yet
in that very deed of consummate wickedness was contained the
gospel of the grace of God. That which pronounced the sinner's
condemnation, declared also his deliverance. There was life in
that death; and the nails which fastened the Son of God to the
cross, let out the pent up stream of divine love upon the
murderers themselves!
The gospel was the apostolic hammer
for breaking hard hearts in pieces; for producing repentance unto
life. It was a believed gospel that melted the obduracy of the
self-righteous Jew; and nothing but the good news of God's free
love, condemning the sin yet pardoning the sinner, will, in our
own day, melt the heart and soften human rock-work into men."
"Law and terrors do but harden;" and their power,
though wielded by an Elijah, is feeble in comparison with that of
a preached cross. "O blessed cross of Christ," as
Luther, using an old hymn, used to say, "there is no wood
like thine!"
The word repentance signifies in
the Greek, "change of mind;" and this change the Holy
Spirit produces in connection with the gospel, not the law.
"Repent and believe the gospel: does not mean get repentance
by the law, and then believe the gospel; but let this good news
about the kingdom which I am preaching, lead you to change your
views and receive the gospel. Repentance being put before faith
here, simply implies, that there must be a turning from what is
false in order to the reception of what is true. If I would turn
my face to the north, I must turn it from the south; yet I should
not think of calling the one of these preparatory to the other.
They must, in the nature of things, go together. Repentance,
then, is not, in any sense, a preliminary qualification for
faith, - least of all in the sense of sorrow for sin. "It
must be reckoned a settled point," says Calvin, "that
repentance not only immediately follows upon faith, but springs
out of it...They who think that repentance goes before faith,
instead of flowing from or being produced by it, as fruit from a
tree, have never understood its nature. And Dr. Colquahoun
remarks, "Justifying and saving faith is the mean of true
repentance; and this repentance is not the mean but the end of
that faith."
That terror of conscience may go
before faith, I do not doubt. But such terror is very unlike
Bible repentance; and its tendency is to draw men away from, not
to, the cross. Alarms, such as these, are not uncommon among
unbelieving men, such as Ahab and Judas. They will be heard with
awful distinctness in hell; but they are not repentance. Sorrow
for sin comes from apprehension of the mercy of God in Christ,
from the sight of the cross and of the love which the cross
reveals. The broken and the contrite heart is the result of our
believing the glad tidings of God's free love, in the death and
resurrection of his Son. Few things are more dangerous to the
anxious soul than the endeavors to get convictions, and terrors,
and humiliations, as preliminaries to believing the gospel. They
who would tell a sinner that the reason of his not finding peace
is that he is not anxious enough, nor convicted enough, nor
humble enough, are enemies to the cross of Christ. They who would
inculcate a course of prayer, and humiliation, and self-examination,
and dealing with the law, in order to believing in Christ, are
teaching what is the very essence of Popery; not the less
poisonous and perilous, because refined from Romish grossness,
and administered under the name of gospel.
Christ asks no preparation of any
kind whatsoever, - legal or evangelical, outward, or inward, - in
the coming sinner. And he that will not come as he is shall never
be received at all. It is not exercised souls, nor penitent
believers, nor well humbled seekers, nor earnest users of the
means, nor any of the better class of Adam's sons and daughters,
but "sinner", that Christ welcomes. He came not to call
the righteous, but sinners to repentance. This man receiveth
sinners.
Spurious repentance, the produce
and expression of unbelief and self-righteousness, may be found
previous to faith - just as all manner of evils abound in the
soul before it believes. But when faith comes, it comes not as
the result of this self-wrought repentance, - but in spite of it;
and this so called repentance will be afterwards regarded by the
believing soul as one of those self-righteous efforts, whose only
tendency was to keep the sinner from the Saviour. They who call
on penitent sinners to believe, mistake both repentance and
faith; and that which they teach is no glad tidings to the sinner.
To the better class of sinners (if such there be), who have by
laborious efforts got themselves sufficiently humbled, it may be
glad tidings; but not to those who are without strength, the
lost, the ungodly, the hard-hearted, the insensible, the lame,
the blind, the halt, the maimed. "It is not sound doctrine,"
says Dr. Colquhoun, "to teach that Christ will receive none
but the true penitent, or that none else is warranted to come by
faith to him for salvation. The evil of that doctrine is that it
sets needy sinners on spinning repentance, as it were, out of
their own bowels, and on bringing it with them to Christ, instead
of coming to him by faith to receive it from him. If none be
invited but the true penitent, then impenitent sinners are not
bound to come to Christ; and cannot be blamed for not coming."
You say, "I am not satisfied with the
motives that have led me to seek Christ; they are selfish."
That is very likely. The feelings of a newly awakened sinner are
not disinterested, neither can they be so.
You have gone in quest of salvation
from a sense of danger, or fear of the wrath to come, or a desire
to obtain the inheritance of glory. These are some of the motives
by which you are actuated.
How could it be otherwise? God made
you with these fears and hopes; and he appeals to them in his
word. When he says, "Turn ye, turn ye, for why will ye die?"
he is appealing to your fears. When he sets eternal life before
you, and the joys of an endless kingdom, he is appealing to your
hopes. And when he presents these motives, he expects you to be
moved by them. To act upon such motives, then, cannot be wrong.
Nay, not to act upon them, would be to harden yourself against
God's most solemn appeals. "Knowing the terror of the Lord,
we persuade men," says Paul. It cannot be wrong to be
influenced by this terror. "The remnant were affrighted, and
gave glory to the God of heaven." This surely was not wrong.
The whole Bible is full of such motives, addressed to our hopes
and fears.
When was it otherwise? Among all
the millions who have found life in Christ, who began in any
other way, or from any higher motive? Was it not thus that the
jailor began when the earthquake shook his soul, and called up
before his conscience the everlasting woe? Was it not a sense of
danger and a dread of wrath that made him ask, "What shall I
do to be saved?" And did the apostle rebuke him for this?
Did he refuse to answer his anxious question, because his motive
was so selfish? No. He answered at once, "Believe on the
Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved."
There is nothing wrong in these
motives. When my body is painted, it is not wrong to wish for
relief. When overtaken by sickness, it is not wrong to send for
the physician. You may call this selfishness, which He who made
us what we are, and who gave us these instincts, expects us to
act upon; and in acting on which, we may count upon his blessing,
not his rebuke. It is not wrong to dread hell, to desire heaven,
to flee from torments, to long for blessedness, to shun
condemnation, and to desire pardon.[26]
Let not Satan then ensnare you with such foolish thoughts, the
tendency of which is to quench every serious desire, under the
pretext of its not being disinterested and perfect.
You think that, were you seeking
salvation from a regard to the glory of God, you would be
satisfied. But what does that mean, but that, at the very first,
even before you have come to Christ, you are to be actuated by
the highest of all motives? He who has learned to seek God's
glory is one who has already come to Christ; and he who has
learned to do this entirely, is no sinner at all, and, therefore,
does not need Christ. To seek God's glory is a high attainment of
faith; yet you want to be conscious of possessing it before you
have got faith, - nay, in order to your getting it! Is it
possible that you can be deluding yourself with the idea that if
you could only secure this qualification, you might confidently
expect God to give you faith. This would be substituting your own
zeal for his glory, in the room of the cross of Christ.
Do not keep back from Christ under
the idea that you must come to him in a disinterested frame, and
from an unselfish motive. If you were right in this thing, who
could be saved? You are to come as you are; with all your bad
motives, whatever these may be. Take all your bad motives, add
them to the number of your sins, and bring them all to the altar
where the great sacrifice is lying. Go to the mercy seat. Tell
the High Priest there, not what you desire to be, nor what you
ought to be, but what you are. Tell him the honest truth as to
your condition at this moment. Confess the impurity of your
motives; all the evil that you feel or that you don't feel; your
hard-heartedness, your blindness, your unteachableness. Confess
everything without reserve. He wants you to come to Him exactly
as you are, and not to cherish the vain thought that, by a little
waiting, or working, or praying, you can make yourself fit, or
persuade Him to make you fit.[27]
"But I am not satisfied with
my faith," you say. No truly. Nor are you ever likely to be
so. At least I should hope not. If you wait for this before you
take peace, you will wait till life is done. It would appear that
you want to believe in your own faith, in order to obtain rest to
your soul. The Bible does not say, "Being satisfied about
our faith, we have peace with God," but "Being
justified by faith, we have peace with God;" and between
these two things there is a wonderful difference. Satisfaction
with Jesus and his work, not satisfaction with your own faith, is
what God expects of you. "I am satisfied with Christ,"
you say. Are you? Then you are a believing man; and what more do
you wish? Is not satisfaction with Christ enough for you or for
any sinner? Nay, and is not this the truest kind of faith? To be
satisfied with Christ, is faith in Christ. To be satisfied with
his blood, is faith in his blood. Do not bewilder yourself, or
allow others to bewilder you. Be assured that the very essence of
faith is being satisfied with Christ and his sinbearing work; ask
no more questions about faith, but go upon your way rejoicing, as
one to whom Christ is all.
Remember, the Baptist's words,
"He must increase, but I must decrease." Self, in every
form, must decrease, and Christ must increase. To become
satisfied with your faith would look as if you were dissatisfied
with Christ. The beginning, the middle, and end of your course
must be dissatisfaction with self, and satisfaction with Christ.
Be content to be satisfied with faith's glorious object, and let
faith itself be forgotten. Faith, however perfect, has nothing to
give you. It points you to Jesus. It bids you look away from
itself to Him. It bids you look away from itself to Him. It says,
"Christ is all." It bids you look to him who says,
"Look upon me;" who says, "Fear not, I am the
first and the last; I am he that liveth and was dead, and behold
I am alive forevermore."
If you were required to believe in
your own faith, to ascertain its quality, and to know that you
are born again before you were warranted to trust in Jesus, or to
have peace, you would certainly need to be satisfied with your
own faith. But you are not required to make good any personal
claim, save that you are a sinner; not that you feel yourself to
be one, (that would open up an endless metaphysical inquiry into
your own feelings,) but simply that you are one. This you know
upon God's authority, and learn from his word; and on this you
act whether you feel your sinfulness or not. The gospel needs no
ascertaining of anything about ourselves, save what is written in
the Bible, and what is common to all Adam's children, - that we
need a Saviour. It is upon this need that faith acts; it is this
need that faith presents at the throne of grace. The question,
then, is not, Am I satisfied with my faith? but, Am I a needy
sinner, and am I satisfied that in Christ there is all I need?
You say, "I am not satisfied
with my love." What! Did you expect to be so? Is it your
love to Christ, or his love to you, that is to bring you peace?
God's free love to sinners, as such, is our resting place. There
are two kinds of love in God, - his love of compassion to the
unbelieving sinner, and his love of delight and complacency to
his believing children. A father's love to a prodigal child is
quite as sincere as his love to his obedient, loving child at
home, though it be a different kind. God cannot love you as a
believer till you are such. But he loves you as a poor sinner.
And it is this love of his to the unloving and unlovable that
affords the sinner his first resting place. This free love of God
satisfies and attracts him. Herein is love, not that we loved
God, but that he loved us." "We love him because he
first loved us." "God so loved the world that he gave
his only begotten Son."
"I am not satisfied with my
repentance," you say. It is well. What should you have
thought of yourself had you been so? What pride and self-righteousness
would it indicate, were you saying, "I am satisfied with my
repentance, - it is of the proper quality and amount." If
satisfied with it, what would you do with it? Would you ground
your peace upon it? Would you pacify your conscience with it?
Would you go with it instead of the blood to a holy God? If not,
what do you mean by the desire to be satisfied with your
repentance before having peace with God?
In short, you are not satisfied
with any of your religious feelings; and it is well that you are
not; for, if you were, you must have a very high idea of
yourself, and a very low idea of what both law and gospel expect
of you. You are, I doubt not, right in not being satisfied with
the state of your feelings; but what has this to do with the
great duty of immediately believing on the Son of God? If the
gospel is nothing to you till you have got your feelings all set
right, it is no gospel for the sinner at all. But this is its
special fitness and glory, that it takes you up at the very point
where you are at this moment, and brings you glad tidings in
spite of your feelings being altogether wrong.
All these difficulties of yours
have their root in the self esteem of our natures, which makes us
refuse to be counted altogether sinners, and which shrinks from
going to God save with some personal recommendation to make
acceptance likely. Utter want of goodness is what we are slow to
acknowledge. Give up these attempts to be satisfied with yourself
in anything, great or small, faith, feeling, or action. The Holy
Spirit's work in convincing you of sin, is to make you
dissatisfied with yourself; and will you pursue a course which
can only grieve him away? God can never be satisfied with you on
account of any goodness about you; and why should you attempt to
be satisfied with anything which will not satisfy him? There is
but one thing with which he is entirely satisfied, - the person
and work of his only begotten Son. It is with Him that he wants
you to be satisfied, not with yourself. How much better would it
be to take God's way at once, and be satisfied with Christ? Then
would pardon and peace be given without delay. Then would the
favor of God rest upon you. For God has declared, that whoever is
satisfied with Christ shall find favor with him. His desire is
that you should come to be as one with him in this great thing.
He asks nothing of you, save this. But with nothing else than
this will he be content, nor will he receive you on any other
footing, save that of one who has come to be satisfied with
Christ, and with what Christ has done.
Surely all this is simple enough.
Does it exactly meet your case. Satisfaction with yourself, even
could you get it, would do nothing for you. Satisfaction with
Christ would do everything; for Christ is ALL. "This is my
beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased." Be pleased with him
in whom the Father is pleased, and all is well.
I suspect that some of those
difficulties of yours arise from the secret idea that the gospel
is just a sort of modified law, by keeping which you are to be
saved. You know that the old law is far above your reach, and
that it condemns, but cannot save you. But you think, perhaps,
that Christ came to make the law easier, to lower its demands, to
make it (as some say) an evangelical law, with milder terms,
suited to the sinner's weakness. That this is blasphemy, a
moment's thought will show you. For it means that the former law
was too strict; that is, it was not holy, and just, and good. It
denies also Christ's words, that he came not to destroy but to
fulfill the law. God has but one law, and it is perfect; its
substance is love to God and man. A milder law must mean an
imperfect one; a law that makes God's one law unnecessary; a law
that gives countenance to sin. Will obedience to an imperfect law
save the breaker of the perfect law? But faith does not make void
the law; it establishes it.
It is by a perfect law that we are
saved; else it would be an unholy salvation. It is by a perfect
law, fulfilled in every "jot and tittle," that we are
saved; else it would be an unrighteous salvation. The Son of God
has kept the law for us; he has magnified it and made it
honorable; and thus we have a holy and righteous salvation.
Though above law in himself, he was made under the law for us;
and by the vicarious law keeping of his spotless life, as well as
by endurance unto death of that law's awful penalties, we are
redeemed from the curse of the law. "Christ is the end (the
fulfilling and exhausting) of the law, for righteousness to every
one that believeth." FOR CHRIST IS NOT A HELPER, BUT A
SAVIOUR. He has not come to enable us to save ourselves, by
keeping a mitigated law; but to keep the unmitigated law in our
room, that the law might have no claim for penalty, upon any
sinner who will only consent to be indebted to the law keeping
and law enduring of the divine Surety.
Others of your difficulties spring
from confounding the work of the Spirit in us with the work of
Christ for us. These two must be kept distinct; for the
intermingling of them is the subversion of both. Beware of
overlooking either; beware of keeping them at a distance from
each other. Though quite distinct, they go hand in hand,
inseparably linked together, yet each having its own place and
its own office. Your medicine and your physician are not the
same, yet they go together. Christ is your medicine, the Spirit
is your physician. Do not take the two works as if they were one
compounded work; nor try to build your peace upon some mystic
gospel which is made up of a strange mixture of the two. Realize
both, the outward and the inward; the objective and the
subjective; Christ for us, and the Holy Spirit in us.
As at the first, so to the last,
must this distinctiveness be observed, lest, having found peace
in believing, you lose it by not holding the beginning of your
confidence steadfast unto the end. "When I begin to doubt,"
writes one, "I quiet my doubts by going back to the place
where I got them first quieted; I go and get peace again where I
got it at the beginning; I do not sit down gloomily to must over
my own faith or unbelief, but over the finished work of Immanuel;
I don't try to reckon up my experiences, to prove that I once was
a believer, but I believe again as I did before; I don't examine
the evidence of the Spirit's work in me, but I think of the sure
evidences which I have of Christ's work for me, in his death, and
burial, and resurrection. This is the restoration of my peace. I
had begun to look at other objects; I am now recalled from my
wanderings to look at Jesus only."
Some of your difficulties seem to
arise from a mixing up of the natural and the supernatural. Now
the marvelous thing in conversion is, that while all is
supernatural (being the entire work of the Holy Ghost), all is
also natural. You are, perhaps unconsciously, expecting some
miraculous illapse of heavenly power and brightness into your
soul; something apart from divine truth, and from the working of
man's powers of mind. You have been expecting faith to descend,
like an angel from heaven, into our soul, and hope to be lighted
up like a new star in your firmament. It is not so. Whilst the
Spirit's work is beyond nature, it is not against nature. He
displaces no faculty; he disturbs no mental process; he does
violence to no part of our moral framework; he creates no new
organ of thought or feeling. His office is to set all to rights
within you; so that you never feel so calm, so true, so real, so
perfectly natural, so much yourself, - as when He has taken
possession of you in every part; and filled your whole man with
his heavenly joy. Never do you feel so perfectly free, - less
constrained and less mechanical, - in every faculty, as when he
has "brought every thought into captivity to the obedience
of Christ." The heavenly life imparted is liberty, and
truth, and peace; it is the removal of bondage, and pain. So far
from being a mechanical constraint, as some would represent, it
is the removal of the iron chain with which guilt had bound the
sinner. It acts like an army of liberation to a down-trodden
country; like the warm breath of spring to the frost-fettered
tree. For the entrance of true life, or living truth, into man's
soul, must be liberty, not bondage. "The truth shall make
you FREE."
Other difficulties arise out of
confused ideas as to the proper order of truth. Misplaced truth
is sometimes more injurious than actual error. In our statements
of doctrine, we are to have regard to God's order of things, as
well as to the things themselves. If you would solve the simplest
question in arithmetic, the figures must not only be the proper
ones, but they must be placed in proper order. So is it with the
doctrines of the word of God. Some seem to fling them about in
ill-assorted couples, or confused bundles, as if it mattered
little to the hearer or reader what order was preserved, provided
only certain truths were distinctly announced. Much trouble to
the anxious spirit has arisen from this reckless confusion. A
gospel in which election is placed first is not the gospel of the
apostles; though certainly a gospel in which election id denied
is still less the apostolic gospel. The true gospel is neither
that Christ died for the elect, nor that he died for the whole
world; for the excellency of the gospel does not lie in its
announcement of the numbers to be saved, but in its proclamation
of the great propitiation itself. Some who are supposed to be
holding fast the form of sound words present us with a mere
dislocation of the gospel, the different truths being so jumbled,
that while they may be all there, they produce no result. They
rather so neutralize each other as to prevent the sinner
extracting from them the good news which, when rightly put
together, they most assuredly contain. If the verses or chapters
of the Epistle to the Romans were transposed or jumbled together,
would it be the Epistle to the Romans, though every word were
there? So, if, in teaching the gospel, we do not begin at the
beginning; if, for instance, we tell the sinner what he has to
do, before we tell him what God has done; if we tell him to
examine his own heart before we tell him to study the cross of
Christ; we take out the whole gladness from the glad tidings, and
preach another gospel.
Do we not often, too, read the
Bible as if it were a book of law, and not the revelation of
grace? In so doing, we draw a cloud over it, and read it as a
volume written by a hard master. So that a harsh tone is imparted
in its words, and the legal element is made to obscure the
evangelical. We are slow to read it as the expansion of the first
graceious promise to man; as a revelation of the love of the
Father, Son, and Holy Ghost; as the book of grace, specially
written for us by the Spirit of grace. The law is in it, yet the
Bible is not law, but gospel. As Mount Sinai rears its head, an
isolated mass of hard, red granite, amid a thousand desert
mountains of softer and less stern material, so does the law
stand in the Bible; - a necessary part of it, - but not the
characteristic of it; added because of transgressions till the
seed should come. Yet have not our suspicious hearts darkened
this book of light? Do we not often read it as the proclamation
of a command to do, instead of a declaration of what the love of
God has done?
Oh, strange! We believe in Satan's
willingness to tempt and injure; but not in God's willingness to
deliver and to save! Nay, more, we yield to our great enemy when
he seduces into sin, and leads away from Christ and heaven; but
we will not yield to our truest friend, when he draws us with the
cords of a man, and with bands of love! We will not give God the
credit for speaking truly when he speaks in tender mercy, and
utters over the sinner the yearnings of his unfathomable pity. We
listen, as if his words were hollow; as if he did not mean what
he says; as if his messages of grace, instead of being the most
thoroughly sincere that ever fell on human ears, were mere words
of course.
There is nothing in the whole Bible
to repel the sinner, and yet the sinner will not come! There is
everything to draw and to win; yet the sinner stands aloof!
Christ receiveth sinners; yet the sinner turns away! He yearns
over them, weeps over them, as over Jerusalem; yet the sinner is
unmoved! The heavenly compassion is unavailing; the infinite long-suffering
touches not the stony heart, and the divine tears are thrown away.
The Son of God stretches out his hands all the day long, but the
outstretched hands are disregarded. All, all seems in vain to
arrest the heedless, and to win back the wanderer.
Oh, the amount of divine love that
has been expended upon this sad world, - that has been brought to
bear upon the needy sons of men! We sometimes almost doubt
whether it be true or possible, that God should lavish such a
love on such a world. But the cross is the blessed memorial of
the love, and that saying stands unchangeable: "God so loved
the world, that he gave his only begotten Son." Sometimes,
too, we say, What is the use of throwing away such love? Is not
the earnestness of God disproportioned to the littleness of its
object, - man? It would be so were this life all; were there no
eternity, no heaven, no hell, no endless gladness, and no
everlasting woe. But with such a destiny as man's; with an
eternity like that which is in store for him, - can any amount of
earnestness be too great? Can love or pity exceed their bounds?
Can the joy or grief over a sinner saved or lost be exaggerated?
He, whose infinite mind knows what
heaven is, knows what its loss must be to an immortal being. Can
He be too much in earnest about its gain? He whose all-reaching
foresight knows what hell is, in all its never-ending anguish,
sees afar off, and fathoms the horrors of the lost soul, its
weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth for ever; its horrible
sense of condemnation and immitigable woe; its cutting remorse,
its too late repentance, its hopeless sighs, its bitter memories
of earth's sunny hours; with all the thousand sadnesses that go
to make up the sum total of a lost eternity! Can he, then, pity
too much? Can he yearn too tenderly over souls that are madly
bent on flinging themselves into a doom like this? Can he use
words too strong, or too affectionate, in warning them against
such a darkness, and such a devil, and such a hell? Can he put
forth words too affectionate in beseeching them to make sure of
such a heaven as his?
In the minds of some, the idea
prevails, that sin quenches pity for the sinner, in the heart of
God.
It is not so. That it shall do so
hereafter, and that God will cease to pity the lost, is an awful
truth. The lost soul's eternity will be an unpitied eternity of
woe.
But, meanwhile, God's hatred of the
sin is not hatred of the sinner. Nay, the greatness of his sin
seems rather to deepen than to lessen the divine compassion. At
least we may say that the increasing misery which increasing sin
entails calls into new intensity the paternal pity of the God of
the spirits of all flesh. "It grieves him at his heart."
The farther the prodigal goes into the far country, the more do
the yearnings of the father's heart go out after him in unfeigned
compassion for the wretched wanderer, in his famine, and
nakedness, and degradation, and hopeless grief.
No; sin does not quench the pitying
love of God. The kindest words ever spoken to Israel were in the
very height of their apostasy and rebellion. The most gracious
invitation ever uttered by the Lord was to Capernaum, and
Bethsaida, and Chorazin, "Come unto me." The most
loving message ever sent to a Church was that to Laodicea, the
worst of all the seven, "Behold I stand at the door and
knock." It was Jerusalem, in her utmost extremity of guilt,
and rebellion, and unbelief, that drew forth the tears of the Son
of God. No; sin does not extinguish the love of God to the sinner.
Many waters cannot quench it, nor can the floods drown it. From
first to last, God pursues the sinner as he flies from him;
pursues him not in hatred, but in love; pursues him not to
destroy, but to pardon and to save.
God is not a man that he should lie.
He means what he says, when he speaks in pity, as truly as when
he speaks in wrath. His words are not mere random expressions,
such as man often uses when uttering vague sentiment, or trying
to produce an impression by exaggerated representations of his
feelings. God's words are all true and real. You cannot
exaggerate the genuine feeling which they contain; and to
understand them as figures, is not only to convert them into
unrealities, but to treat them as falsehoods. Let sinners take
God's words as they are; the genuine expressions of the mind of
that infinitely truthful Being, who never uses but the words of
truth and soberness. He is sovereign; but that sovereignty is not
at war with grace; nor does it lead to insincerity of speech, as
some seem to think it does. Whether we can reconcile the
sovereignty with the pity, it matters not. Let us believe them
both, because both are revealed in the Bible. Nor let us ever
resort to an explanation of the words of pity, which would imply
that they were not sincerely spoken; and that if a sinner took
them too literally and too simply, he would be sorely
disappointed; - finding them at last mere exaggerations, if not
empty air.
Oh, let us learn to treat God as
not merely the wisest, and the highest, and the holiest, but as
the most truthful of all beings. Let the heedless sinner hear his
truthful warnings, and tremble; for they shall all be fulfilled.
Let the anxious sinner listen to his truthful words of grace, and
be at peace. We need to be told this. For there is in the minds
of many, a feeling of sad distrust as to the sincerity of the
divine utterances, and a proneness to evade their plain and
honest meaning. Let us do justice, not merely to the love, but to
the truthfulness, of God. There are many who need to be reminded
of this; - yes, many, who do not seem to be at all aware of their
propensity to doubt even the simple truthfulness of the God of
truth.
God is love. Yes, God is love. Can
such a God be suspected of insincerity in the declarations of his
long-suffering, yearning compassion toward the most rebellious
and impenitent of the sons of men? That there is such a thing as
righteousness; that there is such a place as hell; that there are
such beings as lost angels and lost men, we know to be awful
certainties. But, however terrible and however true these things
may be, they cannot cast the slightest doubt upon the sincerity
of the great oath which God has sworn before heaven and earth,
that he has "no pleasure in the death of the wicked; but
that the wicked turn from his way and live;" nor in the
least blunt the solemn edge of his gracious entreaty, "TURN
YE, TURN YE, FOR WHY WILL YE DIE?"
[1] Titus iii.5
[2] Rom. iv.4
[3] Gal. ii.16
[4] Luke xviii 11
[5] Jer. ii.37
[6] Psalm xxxii.2
[7] Job xxii.21
[8] James ii.19
[9] John xiv. 8,9
[10] Job xxxiii. 23
[11] Is. xiv. 21
[12] 1 John iii.16
[13] 1 John iv. 10
[14] 1 Pet. v.10
[15] 1 Pet. ii.3
[16] Heb. ix. 9-14
[17] Jer. vi. 14
[18] Is. xiv. 21
[19] Ezek. xviii.4
[20] Heb. ix.7
[21] Rev. i.5. It is interesting to notice, in connection with this point, that the old Scotch terms in law for acquitting and condemning were "cleanse" and "fyle" (that is, defile). In the assize held upon the faithful ministers of the Church of Scotland in 1606, it was put to the court whether these said ministers should be "clenzed" or "fyled," and the chancellor "declared that they were fyled by manliest votes." See Calderwood, vol. vi. p. 388
[22] We must make a great difference between God's word and the word of man. A man's word is a little sound which flieth into the air and soon vanisheth; but the word of God is greater than heaven and earth, yea, it is greater than death and hell, for it is the power of God, and remaineth everlastingly. Therefore we ought diligently to learn God's word, and we must know certainly and believe that God himself speaketh with us." Luther
[23] As a good memory means the correct remembrance of the very things that have occurred; so the essence of a right faith is a belief of the right thing. And as bad memory is refreshed or corrected by presenting again and again the objects to be remembered, so a wrong faith (or unbelief) requires to have the full testimony of God to be presented to the soul.
[24] There is a tendency among some to undervalue doctrine, to exact morality at the expense of theology, and to deny the importance of a sound creed. I do not doubt that a sound creed has often covered an unsound life, and that much creed, little faith, is true of multitudes. But when we hear it said, "Such a man is far gone in error, but his heart is in its right place; he disbelieves the substitution on the cross, but he rests on Christ himself," - we wonder, and ask, What then was the Bible written for? It may be (if this be the case) a bood of thought like Bacon's Novum Organum, but it is no standard of truth, no infallible expression of the mind of an infallible being! The solemnity with which that book affirms the oneness of truth, and the awful severity with which it condemns every departure from the truth, as a direct attack on God himself, show us the danger of saying that a man's heart may be in its right place though his head contains a creed or error. Faith and unbelief are not mere mental manipulations, to which no moral value is attached. Doctrine is not a mere form of thought or phase of opinion. Within what limits such might have been the case had there been no revelation, I do not say. But, with a revelation, all mental transactions as to truth and error assume a moral character, with which the highest responsibility is connected; their results have a moral value, and are linked with consequences of the most momentous kind. On true doctrine rests the worship of the true God. If, then, Johovah is a jealous God, not giving his glory to another, unbelief must be one of the worst of sins; and error not only a deadly poison to the soul receiving it, but hateful to God as blasphemy against himself, and the same in nature as the blind theologies of paganism, on which is built the worship of Baal, or Brahm, or Jupiter. The real root of all unbelief is atheism. Man's guilty conscience modifies this, turns it into idolatry; or his sentimental nature modifies it, and turns it into pantheism. The fool's "No God" is really the root of all unbelief.
[25] Yet let me notice a way of speaking of this sovereignty which is not scriptural. Some tell the anxious sinner that the first thing he has to do, in order to faith, is to submit to this sovereignty, and that when he has done so, God will give him faith! This is far wrong surely. Submission to the divine sovereignty is one of the highest results of faith, - how can it be preparatory to faith? The sinner is told that he cannot believe of himself, but he can submit himself to God's sovereignty! He cannot do the lowest thing, but he can do the highest; - nay, and he must begin by doing the highest, in order to prepare himself for doing the lowest! It is faith, not unbelief, that will thus submit; and yet the unconverted sinner is recommended to do, and to do in unbelief, the highest act of faith! This surely is turning theology upside down.
[26] It is not wrong to love God for what he has done for us. Not to do so, would be the very baseness of ingratitude. To love God purely for what he is, is by some spoken of as the highest kind of love, into which enters no element of self. It is not so. For in that case, you are actuated by the pleasure of loving; and this pleasure of loving an infinitely lovable and glorious Being, of necessity introduces self. Besides, to say that we are to love God solely for what he is, and not for what he had done, is to make ingratitude an essential element of pure love. David's love showed itself in not forgetting God's benefits. But this pure love soars beyond David's and finds it a duty to be unthankful, lest perchance some selfish element mingle itself with its superhuman, superangelic purity.
[27] How reasonable, writes one, that we should just do that one small act which God requires of us, go and tell him the truth. I used to go and say, Lord, I am a sinner, do have mercy on me; but as I did not feel all this, I began to see that I was taking a lie in my hand, trying to persuade the Almighty that I felt things which I did not feel. These prayers and confessions brought me no comfort, no answer, so at last I changed my tone, and began to tell the truth - Lord, I do not feel myself a sinner; I do not feel that I need mercy. Now, all was right; the sweetest reception, the most loving encouragements, the most refreshing answers, this confession of truth brought down from heaven. I did not get anything by declaring myself a sinner, for I felt it not; but I obtained everything by confessing that I did not see myself one."
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