GOD’S
WAY OF PEACE
A
BOOK FOR THE ANXIOUS
BY:
HORATIUS BONAR, D.D.
Redacted
by Ronald Coleman, PhD.
“To
him who works not, but believes.” Rom. iv.2
This
volume is stereotyped and perpetuated by a donation from the late Mrs.
E. K.
Smith, of
As
a tribute of respect and affection to the memory of her mother, Mrs.
Matthew
Kerr.
CHAPTER
I. GOD’S
TESTIMONY CONCERNING MAN
CHAPTER
II. MAN’S
OWN CHARACTER NO GROUND OF PEACE
CHAPTER
III. GOD’S
CHARACTER OUR RESTING PLACE
CHAPTER
IV. RIGHTEOUS
GRACE
CHAPTER
V. THE
BLOOD OF SPRINKLING
CHAPTER
VI. THE
PERSON AND WORK OF THE SUBSTITUTE
CHAPTER
VII. THE
WORD OF THE TRUTH OF THE GOSPEL
CHAPTER
VIII. BELIEVE AND
BE SAVED
CHAPTER
IX. BELIEVE
JUST NOW
CHAPTER
X. THE
LACK OF POWER TO BELIEVE
CHAPTER
XI. INSENSIBILITY
CHAPTER
XII. JESUS,
ONLY
“God’s
way of Peace”, by the Rev. Horatius Bonar of
Its
use is commended to pastors and laymen who would lead burdened
individuals to
the enjoyment of Peace with God.
(There
is a plethora of richness in many out of print books that should be
read
today. I have
redacted this book for the
purpose of making it readable for people of the 21st
century. I have
changed grammar, punctuation, and the
flow of words to make this book much easier to comprehend. However, I did not change
the gist of its
message. -Dr.
Ronald Coleman)
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
understands;” none that even seeks after God, and still more
none that loves
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, no “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
Savoir. But, if he
cannot say this, “his
mouth is stopped,” and he is “guilty before
God.” However
favorably a good outward life may
dispose him 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
believes not is condemned already;
because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of
God.” “He
that believes not God has made him a
liar; because he believes not the record which God gave of his
Son.” “He
that believes 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 that 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
that 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 judges, 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.
CHAPTER II.
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, then there can
be no hope of
acquittal for us on the ground of personal character of goodness,
either of
heart or life. What
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 in this way 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 Savoir 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 until 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 or 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 been 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 that
he has condemned.
I knew an awakened
soul who, in the bitterness of his spirit, in this way 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 works not,” says he in
a second; [2] “not
justified by the works of the law,”
says 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 consciousness 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 what will make pardon a present,
a sure,
and a righteous thing. Can
our best
doings, our best feelings, our best prayers, and our best sacrifices
bring this
about? No, 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 until 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. In this way do many act
among us. 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 has rejected
thy confidences,
and you shall 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. 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 what 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 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.
Neither knowledge of self nor consciousness 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
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 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
and 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 us, 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.
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
what
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 that 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 that attends
restoration of spiritual health come at second hand, from thinking
about our
change. It comes
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, or 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 yourself 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, which “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
stouthearted, and 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. 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 inquietude. 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 suffices us;” he answers, “Have I been so
long time with you, and yet
have you 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
excellence 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 Savior 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 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 what God has made known
of himself were
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. What he shows
us of ourselves is only evil;
what 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
you. 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 what 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]
CHAPTER IV.
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 guilt 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.
Therefore 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 the real nature of the love
that he
professes to have received is. He
is
easily soothed to sleep, because he has never been fully awake. He is, at best, a
stony-ground hearer soon
losing the poor measure of joy that he may have, 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 that the grace of God
holds out. He must
be satisfied on this point and see
that the grace is righteous grace before he can enjoy it. The more alive he is to
his own
unrighteousness, the more does he feel the need of ascertaining the
righteousness of the grace that 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.
What 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.
Until the later is done, there cannot be real peace. The hurt is healed
slightly and peace is
spoken where there is no peace.[17]
Speaking peace where there is peace can only bring about
the healing of
the hurt.
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 Savior;”[18] not only
righteous in spite of his
justifying the ungodly, but also righteous in doing so.
It shows salvation as an act of
righteousness; no, 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
has appeared to put away sin by the
sacrifice of himself.” “Christ
has suffered
for us in the flesh.” “Christ
has once
suffered for sins, the just for the unjust.”
“His own self bore 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 and keystone of the universe.
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. To meet
this terrible
necessity the Son of God took flesh and died!
He died because it was written, “The soul that
sins, 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 what
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, and judgment-proof. Realizing this, the chief
of sinners can say,
“Who is he that condemns?”
What peace for the
stricken conscience there is 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 and also 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.
CHAPTER V.
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 that 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 furnish 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 that 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 blood and the fire preserved
the essence
of the original burnt offering -, 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 especially 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 takes
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
you eat thereof you
shall surely die;” and it is written, “The soul
that sins, 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 expiation. It
said life must be given for life before
sin can be pardoned; but 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. 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 “niter 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--we have done 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 covered all
over
with that guilt whose penalty is death, the great High Priest brings in
the
blood. That blood
represents death; it
is God’s expression for death.
It is
then sprinkled on us, and death, which is the law’s penalty,
passes on us. We
die.
We undergo the sentence and the guilt passes away. We are cleansed! The sin that was like
scarlet becomes as snow
and what was like crimson becomes as wool.
It is in this way that we make use of the blood of Christ
in believing;
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 in this way we are counted in law, and treated
by God,
as men who have paid the whole penalty.
We have been “washed from their sins in his
blood.”[21]
Such are the glad
tidings of life, through him who died.
They are tidings that 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; 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 and no mere deliverer or gracious benefactor.
Those who think they have told the whole
Gospel when they have spoken of Jesus revealing the love of God do
greatly err. If
Christ were not the Substitute, he is
nothing. If he did
not die as the Sin
bearer, he has died in vain. Let
us not
be deceived on this point or 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 came to die! He
did not redeem us by
a little loss, a little sacrifice, a little labor, or by a little
suffering.
“He redeemed us to God by his blood;”
“the precious blood of Christ.”
He gave all he had for us, even his life.
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.”
In this way 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. 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. 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 that they
bring is a denial both of righteousness and grace.
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 that 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. Doing
this your conscience shall be pacified
and your soul shall find rest.
It is into
Christ’s
death that we are baptized. Therefore
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 that 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.
We
are treated as if it were we ourselves who had died.
Because of this we are justified from 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.
CHAPTER VI.
Life comes to us
by
way of death; and therefore grace bounds towards us in righteousness. This we have seen in a
general way. 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 that 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 dwells in him;” “he that has
seen him has seen the Father;” and “he
that hears him, hears 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
“Savior;” “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 what was lost;” He went about
speaking words of grace
such as man never spoke, saying, “I am the Way, and the
truth, and the Life: no
man comes unto the Father, but by me.”
He went out and in as The Savior, 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 Savior 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!
It is not the
person
of Christ or his birth or 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 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 far
off. The veil said
to the sinner,
“Godhead is within;” but is also said,
“You cannot enter until 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 that contain the good news.
They
are few and they are plain so that a child may remember and understand
them. They are the
caskets that contain
the heavenly gems. They
are the cups
that hold the living water for the thirsty soul, the golden baskets in
which
God has placed the bread of life, and the true bread that came down
from heaven
of which if man eats 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 your name will put their trust in
you.”
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 you have received, and wherein you stand; by which also you
are
saved, if you keep in memory what I preached unto you. For I delivered unto you
first of all what 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 you 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 that is “the
power of God unto salvation to every one who believes.
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: God has given to us
eternal life; and this life is in his Son.”
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 that the Holy Spirit attaches to
these, 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,
before 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 behooves
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! 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 has 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 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
who
died, yes rather, that is risen again, and who is even at the right
hand of
God, who also makes intercession for us.”
“Who gave himself for our sins.”
“Christ has 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 outside the gate.” “Christ also
suffered for us.” “Who in
his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree?”
“Christ also has once
suffered for sins, the just for the unjust.”
“Christ has suffered for us in the
flesh.” “He is the propitiation for our
sins.” “Unto him who loved us and
washed us from our sins in his own blood.” “I am He
who lives and was dead, and
behold I am alive for evermore.” “You were slain
and have redeemed us to God by
your blood.”
These are all
divine
truths written in divine words. These
sayings are faithful and true; they come from Him who cannot lie. They are as true in these
last days as they
are today--“the word of our God shall stand
forever.” In
them we find the authentic exposition of
the facts that 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
better
or happier news to the sinner than this?
What more can he ask to satisfy him, than what 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
“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
that enters into our ears. We
do not
need to exert ourselves to bring it near; nor need we 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 to
remove some
fancied remainder of distance we shall fail, not simply because these
actions
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 near to all. 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
that it as
already near. This
is “the word of the
truth of the Gospel.”
CHAPTER VII.
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 would 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 what 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. Do not
allow 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 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 is the Gospel. His own words are the
truest, simplest, and
best. They are not
only the likeliest to
meet our case; but they are the words that he has promised to honor and
to
bless.
Let us hear 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.”
“You are a God ready to pardon, gracious and
merciful.” “His mercy endures
forever.” “You, Lord, are good, and ready to
forgive, and plenteous in mercy
unto all those who call upon you;” “you are a God
full of compassion and
gracious long-suffering, and plenteous in mercy and truth;”
“your mercy is
great unto the heavens;” “your mercy is great above
the heavens;” “his tender
mercies are over all his works;” “Who is a God like
you, that pardons iniquity
and passes by the transgressions of the remnant of his heritage; he
does not
retain his anger forever because he delights in mercy;” “I will love
them freely;” “God so loved the
world, that he gave his only begotten Son;” “God
commends his love towards us;”
“God, who is rich in mercy, for the great love wherewith he
has loved us, even
when we were dead in sins;” “the kindness and love
of God our Savior toward
man;” “according to his mercy he saved
us;” “in this was manifested the love of
God towards us, because 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.”
Those 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 that 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. What
use is it
to read and re-read words so familiar?”
Much use in 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 that he delights to honor as his messengers of joy to the soul. Hear 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 lives and abides forever; it
is like a
fire, and like a hammer that breaks the rock in pieces.
The Gospel is the power of God.
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 what 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 that 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,
as you gazed, the star seemed to come out in the sky. Your persevering
search
ended in the discovery of the long sought gem.
It happens the
same
way with those passages that 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. There
are wonders beyond price hidden in
each. Take them up
again. Search and
study them. The
Holy Spirit is most willing to reveal to
you the glory that 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 the 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 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 until 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. 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. 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 until I am made an
honest
man, then I shall give it up? 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 until 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 were one of your worst sins, how absurd it is to say
that I am
not entitled to trust him until I am converted!
For is not that just saying, “I am not entitled
to trust him until I
trust him?”
You say that you
know
God to be gracious, yet, by your actions, 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.
No, 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
until God enlightens my mind.” If God had told you that
waiting is the way of
light, then you would be right. But
he
has nowhere told you to wait. Your
idea
of waiting is a mere excuse for not trusting him immediately. If your way of proceeding
were 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. 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 that he has not commanded; 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; no more, you throw the blame
on God
for not being willing to do immediately what 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 and that you are not
guilty of
unbelief.
It will not do. The command is:
“Believe in the Lord Jesus
Christ.” Nothing
less than this is
pleasing to God. Although
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, although he may
desire to give up stealing.
The question is
not
as to whether prayer is a duty; rather, the question should be is it a
right
and acceptable thing to pray in unbelief.
Unbelieving prayer is prayer to an unknown God. 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
who comes 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 until 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; no, 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 you but knew this God and his great gift of love, you would ask him
and he
would give you 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 that I have quoted at length from His 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, and dig into it.
“My son,” says God, our Father,
“receive my words; hide my commandments
with you; incline your ear unto wisdom; take fast hold of instruction;
attend
unto my wisdom and bow your ear to my understanding; keep my words and
lay up
my commandments with you.”
Do not say
these messages are only for the children of God.
As if to prevent this, God in this way speaks
to the simple, the scorners, and the fools.
“Turn 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 to
you, these words are Spirit and they are Life.”
Again I say to
you,
honor the words of God. Make
much of
them. Those who
honor me I will honor,
is as true of Scripture as it is of the God of Scripture. Peace, light; comfort,
life; salvation and
holiness are wrapped up in them. “Your
word hats quickened me.”
“I will never
forget your precepts: for with them you have quickened me.”
It is through
belief
of the truth that God has from the beginning chosen us to salvation. It is with the word of
Truth that he begat
us. This is in
perfect harmony with the
great truth of man’s total helplessness and his need of the
Almighty Spirit.
“So then
faith comes
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 Savior. The person 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 that 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 you saved, through faith; and that not
of yourselves: it
is the gift of God.”
Faith 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 that must be properly performed in order to qualify or fit us for
pardon. It is not
faith as a religious
duty that 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 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.”
Let us learn the
things concerning this faith from the lips of God.
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 that 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 by which the sinner is made wise unto salvation.
For they 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.’” “It is the righteousness of God
that is by faith of Jesus Christ unto
all and upon all those who believe.”
“Whom God has 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 who believes in Jesus.”
“He who
believes shall be saved.”
“As many as
received him, to them he gave 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 believes in him should not perish but have eternal
life; for
God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that
whosoever
believes in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. He who believes on him is
not condemned: but
he who believes not is condemned already, because he has not believed
in the
name of the only begotten Son of God.”
“He who believes on the Son has everlasting
life, and he who does not
believe the Son shall not see life.”
“He
who hears my word, and believes on him who sent me, has everlasting
life.” “This
is the work of God—that you believe on
him whom he has sent.” “He
who believes
on me shall never thirst.”
“This is the
will of him who sent me, that every one who sees the Son, and believes
on him,
may have everlasting life.”
“He who
believes on me, though he were dead, yet shall he live; and whosoever
lives and
believes in me shall never die.”
“I am
come a light into the world, that whosoever believes on me should not
abide in
darkness.” “These
are written that you
might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that
believing, you
might have life through his name.”
“By
him all who believe are justified from all things.” “Believe on the
Lord Jesus Christ, and you
shall be saved.” “To
him gave all the
prophets witness, that through his name whoever believes in him shall
receive
remission of sins.” “To
him who works
not, but believes on him that justifies the ungodly, his faith is
counted for
righteousness.” “Christ
is the end of
the law for righteousness to every one who believes.” “If you shall
confess with your mouth the
Lord Jesus, and shall believe in your heart that God has raised him
from the
dead, you shall be saved.”
“It pleased
God, by the foolishness of preaching, to save them who
believe.” “This
is his commandment, that you believe on
him whom he has sent.” “We
have known
and have believed the love that God has for us.” “Whosoever
believes that Jesus is the Christ
is born of God.” “He
who believes on the
Son of God has the witness in himself; he who believes not God, has
made Him a
liar, because he believes not the record that God gave of his
Son.” “He
who believes not shall be damned.”
Those are some of
the
many texts that 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 that 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. 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 for this is
plain. The
testimony that 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 and in Jesus Christ his Son.
Hence it is that the Scripture speaks of trust or
confidence as what
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 it
is
said that we are saved by the knowledge of God or of Christ. That is
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
spoke Jesus, “This
is life eternal, that they might know You, the only true God, and Jesus
Christ
whom You have sent.” And
as if to make
simplicity simpler, the Apostle, in speaking of the facts of
Christ’s death,
burial, and resurrection, says, “By which you are saved, if
you keep in memory
what I preached to you.”[23]
God connects
salvation with believing, trusting, knowing, and 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,
and remembered. Salvation
is not 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 who
makes his faith and his trust his rest and tries to pacify his
conscience by
getting up evidence of their solidity and excellence it must be said,
“Miserable comforters are they all!” I
get light by using my eyes and 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; and 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 the Son of God, and us 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 except as
it lays hold of
Christ; and it does so by laying hold of the truth or testimony
concerning him. “Faith
comes by hearing, and hearing by the
word of God,” says the Apostle.
“You
shall know the truth,” says the Lord, “and the
truth shall make you free.”
And again, “Because I tell you the truth you
believe me not...And if I say the truth, why do you not believe
me?” We
have also such expressions as these: “Those
who know the truth;” “those who 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 your 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, specifically the following: “The seed is the word of
God. Those by the
wayside are those who hear. Then comes the devil and takes 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
who saw it bore record
and his record is true, and he knows that he says the truth, that you
might
believe.” And again, “These are written that you
might believe that Jesus is
the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing you might have life
through his
name.”
The natural man
hates
this truth regarding Christ and his sacrificial work because he hates
Christ
himself. “They
hated me,” says the Lord;
no, 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. The first
emergence of inquiry
and anxiety shows 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 that
must be
very accurately gone through in order to make it acceptable, but
because of our
dislike of 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
simpler that he sees it
to be, the more will he see his own guilt in so deliberately refusing
to
believe, and the more he will see 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 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.
The sinner has no
objection performing some great thing called faith in order to win
God’s favor;
no, it is just what he wants--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 because all that is needed was
accomplished
near two thousand 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 were 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 that 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 that
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 in this way that he shuts them up to faith by
concluding them in
unbelief. It is in
this way 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 what is no work at all, to make a labor out of what 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 until 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 nor 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 sleep, but will not
avail
either to propitiate God or to move you into a safer or more salvable
condition, as you imagine. 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 and you believe a lie.
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
think you
are lessening this awful sin and rendering your unbelieving state a
less guilty
one--then 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 as 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 that 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
that
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. Should you
deal in this way with
unbelief? Should
you not 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, and I can’t help making
God a liar. 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 guiltiest 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 that 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 what
he prescribed.
Now are you sure
that
the truth that 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 what you believe be because it contains none? You have got hold of many
of the good things,
but you have perhaps missed the one thing that made it a joyful sound? You believe perhaps the
whole Gospel, save
the one thing that 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 lack of feeling in myself!
Ah, there it is! There
is the little unfinished bit of
Christ’s work that you are trying to finish, or to persuade
him by your prayers
to finish for you! That
lack of feeling
is the little inch of distance that 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 this way? Would
it make its
bodily weakness a reason for distrusting parental love?
Would it not feel 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
this
way with Christ, and you 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 all
together, 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.
You speak of this
inability to believe as if it were some unproven 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 act, believing on the Son of
God?
If such were your
feeling it is evident that you do not know the extent of your own
disease or
the depths of your evil heart. You
do
not understand the good news brought to you by the Son of God--of
complete
deliverance from all that oppresses you, whether it is 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.
Until 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
Savior. It is your
not seeing that you
have no strength that is keeping you from believing.
But when you find out that you have no
strength left, you will in blessed despair cease to work--and (before
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 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 still drew
his
strength from Christ alone after many years of believing. How much more must you and
others who have
never yet believed? He
said, “I take
pleasure in my infirmities,” that is, in my lack 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 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 that
is striving within you. You
are proudly
asserting for fallen man a strength that 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?
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 until he finds he can do nothing for himself,
and in
his first believing does always apply himself to Christ for salvation,
as a man
hopeless and helpless in himself.
By
such reasoning with him from the Gospel, the Lord will (as He has 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. It is neither
but a ceasing from
work and from attempting to pay for salvation.
Faith is not a climbing of the mountain.
It is rather 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. Your
peace comes 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 does. To seek for satisfaction
as to the quality or
quantity of your faith, before you will take comfort from
Christ’s work, is to
proceed 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 that you be saved.
The 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, which which Christ has done.
The Spirit’s work is not to enable a man to
do something that will save him or help to save him.
The Spirit’s work is to detach a man from all
exertions and performances, whether good, bad, or indifferent, that he
should
be content with the salvation that the Savior of the lost has finished.
Remember that what
you call your inability God calls your guilt; and that this inability
is a
willful thing. God
did not put it into
you; 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. It makes you incapable of
loving God or even
of believing on his Son! Capable
of only
hating him and of rejecting Christ!
Oh,
dreadful guilt! Unutterable
turpitude 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. “You
will not come to
me so that you 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 will not help or pity me?” Whatever your rebellious
heart may say, Christ’s
words are true, “You will not.”
What he
spoke when weeping over impenitent Jerusalem he speaks to you,
“I would but you
would not.”
“They
are fearful
words,” writes Dr. Owen, “you 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 these should perplex any man believing in a
God. 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 in this way 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 were God’s sovereignty that is keeping him
from coming to Christ,
the sinner has serious matter of complaint against the doctrine. But if it were 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 what
belongs solely to yourself; nor be troubled about His sovereignty when
the real
cause of trouble is your own desperately wicked heart.
CHAPTER
XI
You say that you
do not feel yourself to
be a sinner, that you are not anxious enough, and that you are not
penitent
enough.
Be it so.
However, let me ask you such questions as the following:
1. Does your lack
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 lack of
feeling an 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
until 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 lack of
feeling a reason for
your staying away from Christ? A
sense
of lack 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 far 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 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 lack
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 your 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. “He
who comes 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 the lost.
Do not limit the grace of God, nor suspect
the love of Christ. Confidence
in that
grace and love will do everything for you; lack of confidence, nothing. Christ wants you to come. He does not want you to
wait or to stay away.
5. Will your
remaining away from Christ
remove your lack of feeling? No. It will only make it
worse; for it is a
disease that he only can remove. So
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 Savior, 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 your 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 on your part 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. “You
are the man.” You
are 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
lack 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. In this way 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,
and the
miserable who 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. What 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 has made that same Jesus, whom you
have
crucified, both Lord and Christ.”
These
were words more terrible than law and more overwhelming than Sinai
heard. Awful as it
would have been to be told, “You
have broken the whole law of God;” what was this to being
told, “You 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. What pronounced the
sinner’s condemnation
declared also his deliverance. There
was
life in that death; and the nails that 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 and 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.”
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 means 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 and
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 that 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 an
individual 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
believe
in Christ are teaching falsehood.
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. 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 receives 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. 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 Savior.
They who call on penitent sinners to believe
mistake both repentance and faith; and that what 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, and 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.”
JESUS ONLY
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 individual
are not disinterested; neither can they be so be.
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, turn, for why will you 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. No, 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 had been 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 in this way
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 you
shall be saved.”
There is nothing
wrong in these
motives. When my
body is pained, 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, but He who
made us what we are and who gave us these instincts expects us to act;
and in
acting 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 if
were you seeking
salvation from a regard to the glory of God you would be satisfied. Does that mean 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,
no, in order to obtaining 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
intractability. 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. At
least I should hope
not. If you wait
for this before you take
peace, you will wait until 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. What
more do you wish? Is
not satisfaction with Christ enough for
you or for any person? 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 sin-bearing
work; ask
no more questions about faith, but go upon your way rejoicing, as one
to whom
Christ is all.
Remember, John,
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 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 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 who lives 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. 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 Savior.
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? 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
is a
different kind. God
cannot love you as a
believer until you are such. He
loves
you if you are not. It
is this love of
his to the unloving and unlovable that affords a person 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? What
pride and
self-righteousness would it indicate if you were to say, “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
until you have got your feelings all set right, it is no Gospel at all. 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 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 lack 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 that can only grieve him away?
God can never be satisfied with you on account of any
goodness about
you. Why should you
attempt to be
satisfied with anything that will not satisfy him?
There is but one thing with which he is
entirely satisfied and that is 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 pardon
and peace would be
given without delay. Then
the favor of
God would 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 except that. 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. 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 the 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 therefore we have a holy and righteous salvation. Although above law in
himself, he was made
under the law for us. 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
believes.” FOR
CHRIST IS NOT A HELPER, BUT A
SAVIOR. 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.
Your other
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.
From the first to
the last, this
distinctiveness must 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 ponder over my own faith or unbelief, but over the
finished
work of Immanuel; I do not try to reckon up my experiences, to prove
that I
once was a believer, but I believe again as I did before; I do not
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
began to look at other objects; I am now recalled
from my wanderings to look at only Jesus.”
Some of your
difficulties seem to arise
from a commingling of the natural and the supernatural.
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 impelling 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 lit up like a new star in your firmament. It is not so.
While at the same time 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
right 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 of guilt that
had
bound the sinner. It
acts like an army
of liberation to a downtrodden 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
and 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 excellence
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 so neutralize each
other as to prevent a
person 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 was
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 gracious promise to man;
as a
revelation of the love of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost; as the book
of
grace, especially 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 as 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 until 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, yet the sinner will not come!
There is everything to draw and to win; yet the sinner
stands
aloof! Christ
receives 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 if this life were all there
is; 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 what 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 darkness 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,
nakedness,
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 when 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
that
they contain; and to understand them as figures is not only to convert
them
into unrealities, but also 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, 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 soul
hear his truthful warnings and tremble, for they shall all be fulfilled. Let the anxious soul
listen to his truthful
words of grace and be at peace. We
need
to be told this. 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 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
contumacious 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 that 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 own way and live;” nor in the least blunt the solemn
edge of his
gracious entreaty, “TURN YOU, TURN YOU, FOR WHY WILL YOU
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 “cleansed” or “filed,” and the chancellor “declared that they were filed 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 that flies into the air and soon vanishes; 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 remains everlastingly. Therefore we ought diligently to learn God’s word, and we must know certainly and believe that God himself speaks 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 having 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, that much creed and little faith is true of multitudes. 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, "For what reason was the Bible written?" It may be (if this be the case) a book 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, shows us the danger of saying that a man’s heart may be in its right place though his head contains a creed of 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, Jehovah 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 that 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; - no, 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. This pleasure of loving an infinitely lovable and glorious Being perforce 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, super-angelic 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, and 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.”
Christian Witness