The Riches of Bunyan: Selected from His Works
by John Bunyan · English · Gutenberg #5831 · 898,067 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: The Riches of Bunyan: Selected from His Works
Author: John Bunyan
Editor: Jeremiah Chaplin
Release date: June 1, 2004 [eBook #5831]
Most recently updated: December 29, 2020
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5831
Credits: Charles Aldarondo and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE RICHES OF BUNYAN: SELECTED FROM HIS WORKS ***
Charles Aldarondo and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
THE RICHES OF BUNYAN:
SELECTED FROM HIS WORKS,
FOR
THE AMERICAN TRACT SOCIETY,
BY Rev. Jeremiah Chaplin.
WITH AN INTRODUCTORY NOTICE
BY
REV. WILLIAM R. WILLIAMS. D. D.
NEW YORK
1850
CONTENTS.
PREFATORY NOTICE, by Rev. Dr. Williams
I. GOD
Glory of God
Majesty of God
Justice of God
Holiness of God
Sovereignty of God
Sovereignty of God in conversion
Providence of God in conversion
Condescension of God
Mercy of God
God the justifier
Glory of God in redemption
God a father
Faithfulness of God
Presence of God
God's repenting
Providence of God
II. THE TRINITY
III. THE SCRIPTURES
IV. MAN
The image of God
Value of the soul
Adam's transgression
Depravity of Nature
Love of sin
Sin
Pride
Envy
Drunkenness
Sinners
Sinful ease
The child and the bird
The sinner warned
Conscience
A good conscience
A tender conscience
A guilty conscience
V. THE LAW
Its nature and effects
The law and the gospel
The law a rule of life
VI. DIVINE GRACE
Grace, love, and mercy
Grace described
Operation of grace
Grace abused
Grace, the water of life
VII. CHRIST
The incarnation of Christ
The humanity of Christ
The humiliation of Christ
The glory of Christ
The love of Christ
The righteousness of Christ
Christ a complete Saviour
Christ not a Saviour by his example
Christ a teacher
The death of Christ
The resurrection of Christ
The glorification of Christ
The offices of Christ
Christ an intercessor
Christ an advocate
VIII. THE HOLY SPIRIT
IX. JUSTIFICATION BY FAITH
Faith the instrumental cause of salvation
True and false faith distinguished
Faith and works
Justification and sanctification distinguished
X. CONVICTION OF SIN
XI. CONVERSION
The difficulty of conversion
Conversion the power of God
Regeneration
The strait gate
Coming to Christ
Temptations of the soul coming to Christ
Trials and encouragements of the awakened
Fears in coming to Christ
Mercy's experience
Fears and encouragements of the awakened
Despair of mercy unreasonable
Power of the gospel
Bunyan's conversion
Fears about election
Young converts
XII. THE CHRISTIAN DESCRIBED
Happiness of the Christian
Dignity of the Christian
The family in heaven and earth
Feebleness of the Christian
The Christian under a sense of guilt--Bunyan's experience
Sin and the Saviour
The Christian in darkness
The valley of the shadow of death
The Christian doubting
Indwelling sin
Mr. Fearing
Encouragement for the doubting Christian
Adoption
Christ our life
Union with Christ
Life of faith
Divine love improved
Holy living
Opportunities improved
Good works
Self-denial
Obedience in little things
Motives to holy living
Obedience rewarded
Self-examination
Watchfulness
Constitution-sins
The Christian professor admonished
Failings and sins of Christians
The backslider
XIII. THE CHRISTIAN RACE
XIV. TRIALS OF THE CHRISTIAN
Affliction--its nature and benefits
Persecution
Bunyan's trial and imprisonment
Martyrs
Christian courage
The Christian warfare
The Christian armor
XV. TEMPTATIONS
Temptations of Satan
Temptations of the world
Encouragements for the tempted
Bunyan's temptations
XVI. SECURITY OF CHRISTIANS
XVII. THE PROMISES
XVIII. CHRISTIAN GRACES
Faith
Trust
Faith and hope
Hope
Patience
Love
Fear
Humility
Zeal
Repentance
XIX. PRAYER
Characteristics of prayer
Preparation for prayer
The throne of grace
Prayer in the name of Christ
Benefit of prayer
Discouragements in prayer
Discouragements to prayer removed
Affectionate confidence in prayer
God's method of answering prayer
Relief in prayer
Faith in prayer
Wrestling prayer
The publican's prayer
Posture in prayer
Closet-iniquity
Formal prayer
The prayerless
XX. FALSE PROFESSION
Hypocrisy
Christ's love abused
Perversion of the truth
A Latitudinarian
Changing sins
The unholy professor
The fruitless professor
The unpardonable sin
The man in the iron cage
XXI. THE CHURCH
From the preface to the "Holy City"
Church-fellowship
The church a light
Spiritual character of the church
Warning to the professor
Church-order
The church in affliction
Satan's hostility to the church
Security of the church
Future glory of the church
XXII. THE MINISTRY
Importance of the ministry
Duty of churches to the ministry
Different classes of ministers
Duty of ministers
Ministers warned
Ministers servants of the church
Gifts and grace in ministers
The false minister
The minister at the day of judgment
Bunyan's ministry
Bunyan's character and principles
XXIII. ANTICHRIST
Antichrist described
Rise and progress of antichrist
Corruption of the church by antichrist
Conflict between the church and antichrist
Fall of antichrist
Manner of antichrist's destruction
Present state of antichrist
Slaying of the witnesses
Reasons for antichrist's destruction
Time of antichrist's destruction
Signs of antichrist's destruction
Hope of antichrist's destruction
Effects of antichrist's destruction
Warning against a return to antichrist
Introduction to the "Holy City"
The wooden cross
XXIV. DEATH
Death of the sinner
Death of the Christian
The Christian wishing to depart
The dying Christian
Death of Mr. Badman's wife
Death of Standfast
Death of Christian and Hopeful
Bunyan's death
XXV. THE RESURRECTION
Salvation complete at the resurrection
XXVI. THE JUDGMENT
The saints judged
Saints rewarded at the judgment
Sinners judged
Sinners without excuse at the judgment
"Ignorance" condemned at the judgment
XXVII. HEAVEN
Happiness and glory of heaven
Employments of heaven
Soul and body glorified in heaven
Christ the glory of heaven
The glory of salvation
Heaven
XXVIII. HELL
XXIX. MISCELLANEOUS
The Sabbath
Woman
The family
Bunyan's domestic character
Dr. Owen
Truth
Style
The old and new dispensations
The Pilgrim in New England
NOTICES OF BUNYAN
PREFATORY NOTICE.
The subscriber has been requested by his friend the Rev. Jeremiah
Chaplin, the worthy son of an honored father, [Footnote: The late
Rev. Dr. Chaplin, the founder and first president of Waterville
college, in the state of Maine.] and the editor of the present
selections from Bunyan, to attach to them some prefatory remarks.
Needless as he feels it himself to be, and presumptuous as, to some,
the attempt even may seem, to say aught in behalf of a work that,
faithfully drawn as it is from Bunyan's overflowing stores, can
require no other recommendation; yet the subscriber could not refuse
all compliance with the wishes of one who has given diligent and
hearty and appreciating study to the rich and varied remains of "the
immortal Dreamer."
Many of the Christians of our time, though conversant with the
PILGRIM'S PROGRESS, and HOLY WAR, are apparently little aware of the
glowing genius, and fervent piety, and strong sense, and picturesque
imagery, and racy, vigorous English, that mark the many other
writings of the honored tinker of Elstow. These last, if less known
than the story of the pilgrimage to the Celestial City, and of the
siege and recovery of the good town of Mansoul, yet bear all of them
the traces of the same vivid fancy, the same earnest heart, and the
same robust and sanctified intellect. To save from comparative
disuse and consequent unprofitableness--from being buried in an
undeserved seclusion, if not oblivion, many sparkling truths, and
pithy sayings, and pungent rebukes, likely to do great good if they
could but have, in our busy day, a more general currency over the
wide mart of the world;--and to bespeak a new circle of influence,
and a broader sphere of notoriety and usefulness for these
overlooked legacies of a good and great man of a former age, has
been the editor's object in the prolonged sifting to which he has
subjected all Bunyan's writings. Of that patient and conscientious
study the present selection has been the result. It is not hoped, or
even wished for them, that in the case of any readers able to give
the requisite leisure, these excerpts should supersede the original
writings. But these last, in mass, are beyond the means and the time
which are at the command of many Christians, who would yet greatly
prize the briefer examples of Bunyan's experience and Bunyan's
teachings that are here presented. And even to others of more
affluence and leisure, this manual may serve to commend the author's
works in their entireness. Mr. Chaplin himself would most anxiously
disavow any claim to have exhausted the mines from which he brings
these gatherings. His specimens resemble rather those laces which
the good Bunyan tagged in Bedford jail--not in themselves garments,
but merely adjuncts and ornaments of larger fabrics. He who would
see the entire wardrobe of the Dreamer's mind, and the shape and
proportions of the goodly vestures of truth in which he sought to
array himself and his readers, must, after handling these the LACES,
turn to the ROBES, from whose edge these have been skilfully
detached.
In the character and history of JOHN BUNYAN, the great Head of the
church seems to have provided a lesson of special significance, and
singular adaptedness, for the men and the strifes of our own time.
Born of the people, and in so low a condition, that one of Bunyan's
modern reviewers, by a strange mistake, construed Bunyan's
self-disparaging admissions to mean that he was the offspring of
gypsies--bred to one of the humblest of handicrafts, and having but
the scantiest advantages as to fortune or culture, he yet rose,
under the blessings of God's word and providence and Spirit, to
widest usefulness, and to an eminence that shows no tokens of
decline. Down to our own times, the branches of his expanding
influence seem daily spreading and extending themselves; and the
roots of his earthly renown seem daily shooting themselves deeper,
and taking a firmer hold on the judgment of critics and the hearts
of the churches. When the English houses of Parliament were recently
rebuilt, among the imagery commemorative of the nation's literary
glories, a place was voted for the bust of the Bedford pastor, once
so maligned and persecuted. Once tolerated by dainty Christians for
the sake of his piety, while they apologized for what they deemed
his uncouthness; he is now, at last, even from men of the world, who
do not value that piety, receiving the due acknowledgment of his
rare genius and witching style. It is not many years since Gilpin,
an English clergyman of cultivated taste--himself a ready and
popular writer--issued an edition of the Pilgrim's Progress,
modified, if not rewritten in much of its phraseology, because he
deemed the original too rude for usefulness. In our own day, one of
the highest authorities as to the graces and powers of our language,
the English statesman and scholar, T. B. Macaulay, has pronounced
upon that style, which Gilpin by implication so disparaged, the most
glowing eulogies. Schools and leisure and wealth are useful, but
they are not indispensable either to felicity or to honor. Bunyan
lacked them all; and yet in the absence of them achieved greatness
--and what is far better, wide and enduring usefulness. No man, with
God's exhaustless Scriptures in his hands, and with the rich book of
nature and providence open in its pictured radiance before his eyes,
needs to have either a dwindling or an impoverished soul. Of that
latter volume, the works of God, as of that former, the word of God,
Bunyan was evidently a delighted and unwearied student. His
references to birds and insects, flowers and running brooks and
evening clouds, and forests and mountains, all show a man whose
nature was genially awake to the harmony and beauty of the material
world that lay in order and splendor around him. It was, in Bunyan,
no mere mimicry caught from books and companions--the echo of any
fashion of his times. He writes of what he had seen with his own
eyes; and seems to avoid aiming at aught beyond that. Hence to the
ocean, which probably he never thus saw--and which had he beheld it
in its placid vastness, or in its stormy wrath, he could not well
have forgotten--his writings contain, as far as we remember, no
allusions, in all the varied and exuberant imagery which they
employ. His books, more than those of his more learned
contemporaries, Richard Baxter, and John Owen, that "mighty
armor-bearer of the truth," as Bunyan happily calls him, were
written exclusively from the resources of his own personal
observation. And, in consequence of this, they have the freshness
and odors of the outer world pervading them--scents and sounds of
the highways along which, in the trampings of his trade, he had
plodded, and of the hedges that had shaded him. To use the language
of the patriarch's benediction, they have "THE SMELL OF A FIELD
WHICH THE LORD HATH BLESSED." His books are, like Walton's Angler,
of the open air, and the purling streams. You catch, back of the
good man's Bible, as he reverently ponders and commends it, glimpses
of rural landscapes, and of open skies--God's beautiful world, still
lovely, even though sin has marred it. Like the Sermon on the Mount,
Bunyan's page has the traits of field-preaching. And it was so,
also, in his references to the inner world of his own heart. He
wrote not from the dried specimens of earlier collectors--from the
shrivelled and rustling leaves of some old herbary--from the
philosophy and metaphysical analysis of other men's emotions, so
much as from the glowing records of his own consciousness and
experience, the fruits of grace and plants of righteousness,
blooming and fragrant in the watered garden of his own heart. And
this dipping of the pencil into his own soul, and into the freshness
of nature around him, is doubtless a part of the secret of his
perpetual originality and unsating freshness. Now, when men say
repiningly, and in a temper which impeaches alike society and
providence, that a lowly lot, with its necessary privations and its
consequent ignorance, is a barrier, perpetual and insuperable,
against usefulness and happiness and honor, we turn to the name and
memory of Bunyan as an embodied denial of the impeachment, and as
carolling forth their cheerful rebuke of such unmanly and ungodly
plaints. With God's grace in the heart, and with the gleaming gates
of his heaven brightening the horizon beyond the grave, we may be
reformers; but it cannot be in the destructive spirit displayed by
some who, in the prophet's language, amid darkness on the earth,
"fret themselves, and curse their King and their God, and look
upward." Poverty cannot degrade, nor ignorance bedwarf, nor
persecution crush, nor dungeon enthral the free, glad spirit of a
child of God, erect in its regenerate strength, and rich in its
eternal hopes and heritage. And this hopeful and elastic temperament
colors and perfumes every treatise that Bunyan sent out even from
the precincts of his prison. With a style sinewy as Cobbett's, and
simple and clear as Swift's; with his sturdy, peasant nature showing
itself in the roundness and directness of his utterance, how little
has he of their coarseness. He was not, on the one hand, like
Cobbett, an anarchist, or libeller; but yet, on the other hand, as
little was he ever a lackey, cringing at the gates of Power, or a
train-bearer in the retinue of Fashion. Still less was he, like
Swift, the satirist of his times and of his kind, snarling at his
rulers, and turning at last to gnaw, in venomous rage, his own
heart. And yet he who portrayed the character of By-ends, and noted
the gossipings of Mrs. Bats-eyes, lacked neither keenness of vision,
nor niceness of hand, to have made him most formidable in satire and
irony.
His present station in the literature of Britain affords an
illustration, familiar and obvious to every eye, of God's
sovereignty, and of the arrangements of Him "who seeth not as man
seeth." Had Pepys, or any other contemporary courtier that hunted
for place and pension, or fluttered in levity and sin, in the
antechambers of the later Stuarts, been asked, who of all the
writers of the times were likely to go down to posterity among the
lights of their age, how ludicrously erroneous would have been his
apportionments of fame. Pepys might, from the Puritan education of
his boyhood, have named Owen, Bates, and Baxter; or from the
Conformist associations of his later years, have selected South, or
Patrick, or Tillotson, as the religious writers who had surpassed
all rivalry, or named a Walton or Castell, as having taken bonds of
fame for the perpetuity of their influence. Had he known of
Clarendon's preparations to become the historian of the Commonwealth
and Restoration, or of Burnet's habits of preserving memoirs of the
incidents and characters around him, he might have conjectured their
probable honors in after-times. But in poetry he would have classed
Dryden the royalist far above Milton the republican apologist of
regicide; and might, aping the fashions of the palace, have
preferred to either the author of Hudibras together with the lewd
playwrights who were the delight of a shameless court--hailing the
last as the most promising candidates for posthumous celebrity. How
little could he have dreamed that among these Puritans and
Non-conformists, whose unpopular cause he had himself deserted, and
whom his royal masters Charles and James had betrayed, amerced,
exiled, and incarcerated; in those conventicles so closely watched
and so sternly visited, which these persecuted confessors yet by
stealth maintained; aye, and in those dungeons, whither the informer
so often from these conventicles dragged them, British freedom had
its truest guardians, and British literature some of its noblest
illustrations. How little thought he that God had there, in his old
and glorious school of trial, his "hidden ones," like Bunyan, whose
serene testimony was yet to shine forth victorious over wrong and
neglect, and reproach and ridicule, eclipsing so many contemporary
celebrities, and giving to the homes and the sanctuaries of every
land inhabited by an English race, one of the names "men will not
willingly let die." How little could gilded and callous favorites of
the palace have dreamed that their Acts of Uniformity and Five-mile
Acts, and the like legislation of ecclesiastical proscription, were
but rearing for the best men of the age, in the prisons where they
had been immured, a Patmos, serene though stern, where the sufferer
withdrew from man to commune with the King of kings. There the
prisoned student was receiving for the churches new lessons of
surpassing beauty and potency; and the confessor, pillaged by
informers and bullied by judges, and lamented in his own stricken
household and desolate home, but only derided by his godless
sovereign and heartless courtiers, yet often found himself
compensated for every loss, when, like an earlier witness for the
gospel of the Cross, enwrapped "IN THE SPIRIT, ON THE LORD'S DAY."
Such were the schools where Non-conformist piety received its
temper, its edge, and its lustre. The story of Bunyan is, we say,
one of the golden threads binding together into harmony and
symmetry, what, seen apart, seem but fragmentary and incoherent
influences--the track of a divine Providence controlling the fates
and reputations of the race. It is a Providence disappointing men's
judgments and purposes, exalting the lowly and depressing the
illustrious, rebuking despondency on the one hand and on the other
curbing presumption, setting up one and putting down another. This
is done even now and even here, as one of the many intimations which
even time and earth present, of that final and universal reparation
which is reserved for the general resurrection and the last
judgment. Then the unforgetting and universal Sovereign will avenge
all the forgotten of his people, nor leave unpunished one among the
tallest and mightiest of his enemies. As the foreshadowing of this,
there is often in this life what Milton has called, "a resurrection
of character." Seen in Bunyan and others on earth, it will be one
day accomplished as to all the families of mankind. We pronounce TOO
SOON upon the apparent inequalities of fame and recompense around
us; while we fail to take in the future as well as the present, and
attempt to solve the mysteries of time without including in the
field of our survey the retributions of that eternity which forms
the selvage and hem of all the webs of earth. And we pronounce not
only too soon but VERY SUPERFICIALLY upon the inequalities of
happiness in the lot of those who fear and those who scorn God;
while we look mainly or merely to the outward circumstances of home
and station and bodily well-being, but take no note of the inner and
more enduring elements of felicity, supplied to the sufferer for
Christ by the blended powers of conscience and of hope--the one of
them purified and pacified by the blood of the great sacrifice on
Calvary; the other of them steadily and cheerfully soaring to the
glories and rest of the mount Zion above. Faithful, in his cage,
bearing the gibes and flouts of the rabble who thirsted for his
blood, was one of the happiest men in all Vanity Fair, even ere the
hour when his spirit mounted the fiery chariot that hurried him to
his celestial home.
The style of Bunyan, it may be further said, is one of the countless
and brilliant testimonials to the merit and power of our excellent
received version of the Bible. Shut out, as Bunyan was, from direct
contact with much other literature, he was most thoroughly
conversant with the remains of prophets and apostles, embalmed in
that venerable work. With those scriptures his mind was imbued,
saturated, and tinged, through its whole texture and substance. Upon
the phraseology and imagery and idioms of that book was formed his
own vernacular style, so racy, glowing, and energetic--long indeed
underrated and decried, but now beginning to receive its due honors,
and winning the praise of critics whose judgment and taste few will
have the hardihood to impeach. No immaculate perfection, indeed, is
claimed for the English version of the Scriptures. No perfect
version has the world ever seen, or is it ever like to see; but the
writings of Bunyan must be admitted to stand among the many crowding
trophies of the power of our common Bible to furnish the mind with
"thoughts that breathe and words that burn"--with holiest
conceptions and mightiest utterances.
And Bunyan himself, as a theologian on whose head no learned academy
had laid its hand of patronage, or let fall its anointing dews, but
who, whether confronting the fanatics of his time or the
distinguished latitudinarian divines, showed himself so powerful a
reasoner, so acute and clear and practical a thinker, and so mighty
in his knowledge of the Scriptures--Bunyan himself, in his position
and merits as a theologian, furnishes a standing monument of the
power of the divine Spirit to fashion, by prayer and the study of
the Bible, by affliction and by temptation, and by bitter
persecutions even, a preacher, pastor, and writer, such as no
university need have disdained to own. To that Spirit Bunyan gave
zealous, earnest, and continual worship. Receiving his light and
power from that good Spirit, and anxiously directing to that great
Agent all the hopes and the praises of the flock whom he led, and of
the readers whom he taught, his writings remain to diffuse and
perpetuate the lesson of his life. Into whatever tribe of the
ancient East or of the remote West his Pilgrim has been introduced,
the name and story of the writer bear, as their great lesson, the
testimony that God's Scriptures are the richest of pastures to the
human soul; and that God the Holy Ghost, as working with those
Scriptures and by those Scriptures, is the one Teacher on whose
sovereign aid all the churches, all the nations, and all the ages
must depend. For the absence of those influences of the divine
Spirit no earthly lore can compensate; while the exuberance of those
influences may supply, as on Pentecost, the lack of all human
helpers and patrons, and more than replace all universities and all
libraries. We love to dwell on the illustrious Dreamer, as one of
those characters for whom man had done so little and God did so
much.
And to Christians who are neither authors nor preachers, this life
of romantic privacy and illustrious obscurity has its lessons, alike
to awe and to cheer, of solemn warning and of sustaining hope. No
scene or station of all the earth that can eye paradise, or catch
the gleams of the atoning cross, is truly ignoble or utterly
forlorn. He who promised that, in the last days, the inscription
which shone on the front of the high-priest's mitre, "HOLINESS UNTO
THE LORD," should be written also on the very bells of the horses,
and that "every pot" in Jerusalem, and its outlying streets should
become holy as the consecrated furniture of his own temple and
altar, can in like manner render the lowliest scenes of human art
and toil and traffic the schools of truth and duty and peace,
schools ministering alike to the truest happiness and to the most
perfect holiness of our race. He who gave, as in Bunyan's case he
did, to the maker or mender of culinary vessels the sacred skill to
grave the all-holy Name, as one dignifying and consecrating them, on
all the objects and scenes and accompaniments of his humble labors,
can, in our times and in our various stations, make each allowable
task of our earthly life to become also "HOLINESS TO THE LORD;" and
as the Christian's body is made a TEMPLE of the Holy Grhost, so can
he render the Christian himself, in all his social relations and
enterprises, "A PRIEST AND A KING UNTO GOD." And the great principle
of conciliation amid earth's jarring tribes and clashing interests,
and of true and helpful communion among mankind, is not external but
internal, not material but spiritual, not, terrene but celestial;
and is found in the blending by this one divine Spirit, of all
earth's inhabitants, in a common contrition before a common
redemption, tending as these inhabitants are, under a common sin and
doom, to the same inevitable graves; but all of them invited, in the
one name of one Christ, to aspire to the same heaven of endless and
perfect blessedness.
WILLIAM R. WILLIAMS.
NEW YORK, January, 1851.
THE RICHES OF BUNYAN.
I. GOD.
GLORY OF GOD.
God is the chief good--good so as nothing is but himself. He is in
himself most happy; yea, all good and all true happiness are only to
be found in God, as that which is essential to his nature; nor is
there any good or any happiness in or with any creature or thing but
what is communicated to it by God. God is the only desirable good;
nothing without him is worthy of our hearts. Right thoughts of God
are able to ravish the heart; how much more happy is the man that
has interest in God. God alone is able by himself to put the soul
into a more blessed, comfortable, and happy condition than can the
whole world; yea, and more than if all the created happiness of all
the angels of heaven did dwell in one man's bosom. I cannot tell
what to say. I am drowned. The life, the glory, the blessedness, the
soul-satisfying goodness that is in God, are beyond all expression.
It was this glory of God, the sight and visions of this God of
glory, that provoked Abraham to leave his country and kindred to
come after God. The reason why men are so careless of and so
indifferent about their coming to God, is because they have their
eyes blinded--because they do not perceive his glory.
God is so blessed a one, that did he not hide himself and his glory,
the whole world would be ravished with him; but he has, I will not
say reasons of state, but reasons of glory, glorious reasons why he
hideth himself from the world and appeareth but to particular ones.
What is heaven without God? But many there be who cannot abide God;
no, they like not to go to heaven, because God is there. The nature
of God lieth cross to the lusts of men. A holy God, a glorious holy
God, an infinitely holy God; this spoils all. But to the soul that
is awakened, and that is made to see things as they are, to him God
is what he is in himself, the blessed, the highest, the only eternal
good, and he without the enjoyment of whom all things would sound
but empty in the ears of that soul.
Methinks, when I consider what glory there is at times upon the
creatures, and that all their glory is the workmanship of God, "O
Lord," say I, "what is God himself?" He may well be called the God
of glory, as well as the glorious Lord; for as all glory is from
him, so in him is an inconceivable well-spring of glory, of glory to
be communicated to them that come by Christ to him. Wherefore, let
the glory and love and bliss and eternal happiness that are in God,
allure thee to come to him by Christ.
MAJESTY OF GOD.
What is God's majesty to a sinful man, but a consuming fire? And
what is a sinful man in himself, or in his approach to God, but as
stubble fully dry?
What mean the tremblings, the tears, those breakings and shakings of
heart that attend the people of God, when in an eminent manner they
receive the pronunciation of the forgiveness of sins at his mouth,
but that the dread of the majesty of God is in their sight mixed
therewith? God must appear like himself, speak to the soul like
himself; nor can the sinner, when under these glorious discoveries
of its Lord and Saviour, keep out the beams of his majesty from the
eyes of its understanding.
Alas, there is a company of poor, light, frothy professors in the
world, that carry it under that which they call the presence of God,
more like to antics than sober, sensible Christians; yea, more like
to a fool of a play, than those who have the presence of God. They
would not carry it so in the presence of a king, nor yet of the lord
of their land, were they but receivers of mercy at his hand. They
carry it even in their most eminent seasons, as if the sense and
sight of God, and his blessed grace to their souls in Christ, had a
tendency in it to make men wanton: but indeed it is the most
humbling and heart-rending sight in the world; it is fearful.
OBJECTION. But would you not have us rejoice at the sight and sense
of the forgiveness of our sins?
ANSWER. Yes; but yet I would have you, and indeed you shall when God
shall tell you that your sins are pardoned indeed, "rejoice with
trembling;" for then you have solid and godly joy: a joyful heart
and wet eyes in this, will stand very well together; and it will be
so, more or less. For if God shall come to you indeed, and visit you
with the forgiveness of sins, that visit removeth the guilt, but
increaseth the sense of thy filth; and the sense of this, that God
hath forgiven a filthy sinner, will make thee both rejoice and
tremble. O, the blessed confusion which will then cover thy face,
while thou, even thou, so vile a wretch, shalt stand before God to
receive at his hand thy pardon, and so the first-fruits of thy
eternal salvation. "That thou mayest remember, and be confounded,
and never open thy mouth any more, because of thy shame, when I am
pacified toward thee for all that thou hast done, saith the Lord
God." Jer. 33:8, 9; Ezek. 16:63.
Since the NAME of God is that by which his nature is expressed, and
since he naturally is so glorious and incomprehensible, his name
must needs be the object of our fear; and we ought always to have a
reverent awe of God upon our hearts at what time soever we think of
or hear his name; but most of all when we ourselves do take his holy
and fearful name into our mouths, especially in a religious manner;
that is, in preaching, praying, or holy conference.
Make mention then of the name of the Lord at all times with great
dread of his majesty on your hearts, and in great soberness and
truth. To do otherwise is to profane the name of the Lord, and to
take his name in vain.
Next to God's nature and name, his service, his instituted worship,
is the most dreadful thing under heaven. His name is upon his
ordinances, his eye is upon the worshippers, and his wrath and
judgment upon those that worship not in his fear.
His presence is dreadful; and not only his presence in common, but
his special, yea, his most comfortable and joyous presence. When God
comes to bring a soul news of mercy and salvation, even that visit,
that presence of God is fearful. When Jacoh went from Beersheba to
Haran, he met with God in the way by a dream, in the which he
apprehended a ladder set upon the earth, whose top reached to
heaven. Now in this dream, at the top of this ladder, he saw the
Lord, and heard him speak unto him, not threateningly, not as having
his fury come up into his face, but in the most sweet and gracious
manner, saluting him with promise of goodness after promise of
goodness, to the number of eight or nine. Yet, I say, when he awoke,
all the grace that discovered itself in this heavenly vision to him
could not keep him from dread and fear of God's majesty: "And Jacob
awoke out of his sleep and said, 'Surely the Lord was in this place,
and I knew it not;' and he was afraid, and said, 'How dreadful is
this place; this is none other but the house of God, and this is the
gate of heaven.'"
At another time, when Jacob had that memorable visit from God, in
which he gave him power as a prince to prevail with him; yea, and
gave him a name, that by his remembering it he might call God's
favor the better to his mind; yet, even then and there such dread of
the majesty of God was upon him, that he went away wondering that
his life was preserved. Man crumbles to dust at the presence of God;
yea, though he show himself to us in his robes of salvation. Gen.
28:10-17; 32:30.
JUSTICE OF GOD.
You may see a few of the sparks of the justice of God against sin
and sinners, by his casting off angels for sin from heaven and hell,
by his drowning the old world, by his burning of Sodom and Gomorrah
to ashes.
God is resolved to have the mastery. God is merciful, and is come
forth into the world by his Son, tendering grace unto sinners by the
gospel, and would willingly make a conquest over them for their good
by his mercy. Now he being come out, sinners like briars and thorns
do set themselves against him, and will have none of his mercy.
Well, but what says God? Saith he, "Then I will march on. I will go
through them, and burn them together. I am resolved to have the
mastery one way or another; if they will not bend to me and accept
of my mercy in the gospel, I will bend them and break them by my
justice in hell-fire."
HOLINESS OF GOD.
The holiness of God makes the angels cover their faces, and crumbles
Christians, when they behold it, into dust and ashes.
SOVEREIGNTY OF GOD.
The will of God is the rule of all righteousness, neither knoweth he
any other way by which he governeth and ordereth any of his actions.
Whatsoever God doeth, it is good because he doeth it; whether it be
to give grace or to detain it, whether in choosing or refusing. The
consideration of this made the holy men of old ascribe righteousness
to their Maker, even when yet they could not see the reason of his
actions; they would rather stand amazed and wonder at the heights
and depths of his unsearchable judgments, than quarrel at the most
strange and obscure of them.
SOVEREIGNTY OF GOD IN CONVERSION.
Mercy may receive him that we have doomed to hell, and justice may
take hold on him whom we have judged to be bound up in the bundle of
life. We, like Joseph, are for setting of Manasseh before Ephraim;
but God, like Jacob, puts his hands across, and lays his right hand
upon the worst man's head and his left hand upon the best, Gen. 48,
to the amazement and wonderment even of the best of men.
PROVIDENCE OF GOD IN CONVERSION.
Doth no man come to Jesus Christ by the will, wisdom, and power of
man, but by the gift, promise, and drawing of the Father? Then here
is room for Christians to stand and wonder at the effectual working
of God's providence, that he hath made use of as means to bring them
to Jesus Christ.
What was the providence that God made use of as a means, either more
remote or near, to bring thee to Jesus Christ? Was it the removing
of thy habitation, the change of thy condition, the loss of
relations, estate, or the like? Was it the casting of thine eye upon
some good book, the hearing thy neighbors talk of heavenly things,
the beholding of God's judgments as executed upon others, or thine
own deliverance from them, or thy being strangely cast under the
ministry of some godly man? O take notice of such providence or
providences. They were sent and managed by mighty power to do thee
good. God himself hath joined himself to this chariot, yea, and so
blessed it that it failed not to accomplish the thing for which it
was sent.
CONDESCENSION OF GOD.
Notwithstanding there is such a revelation of God in his word, in
the book of creatures, and in the book of providences, yet the
scripture says, "Lo, these are parts of his ways, but how little a
portion is heard of him;" so great is God above all that we have
read, heard, or seen of him, either in the Bible, in heaven, or
earth, or sea, or what else is to be understood. But now that a poor
mortal, a lump of sinful flesh, or, as the scripture phrase is, poor
dust and ashes, should be in the favor, in the heart, and wrapped up
in the compassions of such a God! O amazing; O astonishing
consideration! And yet, "this God is our God for ever and ever, and
he will be our guide even unto death."
MERCY OF GOD.
As God has mercies to bestow, and as he has designed to bestow them,
so those mercies are no fragments or the leavings of others, but
mercies that are full and complete to do for thee what thou wantest,
wouldst have, or canst desire. As I may so say, God has his bags
that were never yet untied, never yet broken up, but laid by him
through a thousand generations for those that he commands to hope in
his mercy.
I tell you, sirs, you must not trust your own apprehensions nor
judgments of the mercy of God; you do not know how he can cause it
to abound: that which seems to be short and shrunk up to you, he can
draw out and cause to abound exceedingly. There is a breadth and
length and depth and height therein, when God will please to open
it, that for its infiniteness can swallow up not only all thy sins,
but all thy thoughts and imaginations, and that also can drown thee
at last. "Now unto him that is able," as to mercy, "to do exceeding
abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power
that worketh in us, unto him be glory in the church by Christ Jesus
throughout all ages, world without end. Amen."
This therefore is a wonderful thing, and shall be wondered at to all
eternity, that the river of mercy, that at first did seem to be but
ancle deep, should so rise and rise that at last it became "waters
to swim in, a river that could not be passed over." Ezck. 47:5.
GOD THE JUSTIFIER.
The first cause of justification before God dependeth upon the will
of God, who will justify because he will; therefore the meritorious
cause must also be of his own providing, else his will cannot herein
be absolute; for if justification depend upon our personal
performances, then not upon the will of God. He may not have mercy
upon whom he will, but on whom man's righteousness will give him
leave; but his will, not ours, must rule here, therefore his
righteousness and his only. So then, men are justified from the
curse in the sight of God, while sinners in themselves.
GLORY OF GOD IN REDEMPTION.
In redemption by the blood of Christ, God is said to abound towards
us in all WISDOM. Here we see the highest contradictions reconciled;
here justice kisseth the sinner; here a man stands just in the sight
of God, while confounded at his own pollutions; and here he that
hath done no good, hath yet a sufficient righteousness, "even the
righteousness of God which is by faith of Jesus Christ."
The JUSTICE of God is here more seen than in punishing all the
damned.
The MYSTERY OF GOD'S WILL is here more seen than in hanging the
earth upon nothing; while he condemneth Christ though righteous, and
justifieth us though sinners, while he "maketh him to be sin for us,
and us the righteousness of God in him."
The POWER of God is here more seen than in making heaven and earth;
for, for one to hear and get the victory over sin when charged by
the justice of an infinite Majesty, in so doing he shows the height
of the highest power; for where sin by the law is charged, and that
by God immediately, there an infinite Majesty opposeth, and that
with the whole of his justice, holiness, and power; so then, he that
is thus charged and engaged for the sin of the world, must not only
he equal with God, but show it by overcoming that curse and judgment
that by infinite justice is charged upon him for sin.
When angels and men had sinned, how did they fall and crumble before
the anger of God! They had not power to withstand the terror, nor
could there be worth found in their persons or doings to appease
displeased justice. Here then is power seen: sin is a mighty thing;
it crusheth all in pieces, save him whose Spirit is eternal. Heb.
9:14. Set Christ and his sufferings aside, and you neither see the
evil of sin nor the displeasure of God against it; you see them not
in their utmost. Jesus Christ made manifest his eternal power and
godhead more by bearing and overcoming our sins, than in making or
upholding the whole world. 1 Cor. 1:24.
The LOVE AND MERCY of God are more seen in and by this doctrine than
any other way. Here is love, that God sent his Son--his darling--his
Son that never offended--his Son that was always his delight!
Herein is love, that he sent him to save sinners--to save them by
bearing their sins, by bearing their curse, by dying their death,
and by carrying their sorrows! Here is love, in that while we were
yet without strength, Christ died for the ungodly!
GOD A FATHER.
O how great a task is it for a poor soul that comes, sensible of sin
and the wrath of God, to say in faith but this one word, Father! I
tell you, however hypocrites think, yet the Christian that is so
indeed finds all the difficulty in this very thing; he cannot say
God is his Father. O, saith he, I dare not call him Father. And
hence it is that the Spirit must be sent into the hearts of God's
people for this very thing, to cry Father; it being too great a work
for any man to do knowingly and believingly without it. When I say
knowingly, I mean knowing what it is to be a child of God and to be
born again; and when I say believingly, I mean for the soul to
believe, and that from good experience, that the work of grace is
wrought in him. This is the right calling of God, Father; and not as
many do, to say in a babbling way the Lord's prayer by heart. No,
here is the life of prayer, when in or with the Spirit, a man being
made sensible of sin and how to come to the Lord for mercy, he
comes, I say, in the strength of the Spirit, and crieth, Father.
That one word spoken in faith, is better than a thousand prayers in
a formal, cold, lukewarm way.
Naturally the name of God is dreadful to us, especially when he is
discovered to us by those names that declare his justice, holiness,
power, and glory; but the word FATHER is a familiar word; it
frighteth not the sinner, but rather inclineth his heart to love and
be pleased with the remembrance of him. Hence Christ also, when he
would have us to pray with godly boldness, put this word FATHER into
our mouths, saying, "When ye pray, say, Our Father which art in
heaven;" concluding thereby that in the familiarity which by such a
word is intimated, the children of God may take more holdness to
pray for and ask great things. I myself have often found that when I
can say but this word, FATHER, it doth me more good than when I call
him by any other scripture name.
It is worth your noting, that to call God by his relative title was
rare among the saints in Old Testament times; but now in New
Testament times, he is called by no name so often as this, both by
the Lord Jesus Christ himself and by the apostles afterwards. Indeed
the Lord Jesus was he that first made this name common among the
saints, and that taught them in their discourses, in their prayers,
and in their writings, so much to use it; it being more pleasing to,
and discovering more plainly our interest in God, than any other
expression. For by this one name we are made to understand that all
our mercies are the offspring of God, and that we also who are
called are his children by adoption.
FAITHFULNESS OF GOD.
Faithfulness in him that rules is that which makes Zion rejoice,
because thereby the promises yield milk and honey. For now the
faithful God, that keepeth covenant, performs to his church that
which he told her he would. Wherefore our rivers shall run and our
brooks yield honey and butter. Job 20:17.
Let this teach all God's people to expect, to look, and wait for
good things from the throne. But O, methinks this throne out of
which good comes like a river, who but would be a subject to it? who
but would worship before it?
PRESENCE OF GOD.
God's presence is renewing, transforming, seasoning, sanctifying,
commanding, sweetening, and lightening to the soul. Nothing like it
in all the world: his presence supplies all wants, heals all
maladies, saves from all dangers, is life in death, heaven in hell,
all in all.
GOD'S REPENTING.
"And it repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth."
Repentance in us is a change of the mind, but in God a change of his
dispensations; for otherwise he repenteth not, neither can he,
because it standeth not with the perfection of his nature. "In him
is no variableness, nor shadow of turning."
Wherefore it is man, not God, that turns. When men reject the mercy
and ways of God, they cast themselves under his wrath and
displeasure; which, because it is executed according to the nature
of his justice and the severity of his law, they miss of the mercy
promised before; which that we may know, those shall one day feel
that shall continue in final impenitency. Therefore God, speaking to
their capacity, tells them he hath repented of doing them good. It
repented the Lord that he had made Saul king; and yet this
repentance was only a change of the dispensation which Saul by his
wickedness had put himself under; otherwise the Strength, the
Eternity of Israel will not lie nor repent.
The sum is, therefore, that men had now by their wickedness put
themselves under the justice and law of God; which justice, by
reason of its perfection, could not endure they should abide on the
earth any longer; and therefore now, as a just reward of their deed,
they must be swept from the face thereof.
PROVIDENCE OF GOD.
We should tremblingly glory and rejoice when we see God in the
world, though upon those that are the most terrible of his
dispensations. God the Creator will sometimes mount himself and ride
through the earth, in such majesty and glory that he will make all
to stand in the tent-doors to behold him. O how he rode in his
chariots of salvation, when he went to save his people out of the
land of Egypt. How he shook the nations. Then his glory covered the
heavens, and the earth was full of his praise. His brightness was as
the light: he had horns coming out of his hand, and there was the
hiding of his power.
These are glorious things, though shaking dispensations God is
worthy to be seen in his dispensations as well as in his word,
though the nations tremble at his presence. "O that thou wouldest
rend the heavens, that thou wouldest comedown," saith the prophet,
"that the mountains might flow down at thy presence."
"We know God, and he is our God, our own God; of whom or of what
should we be afraid? When God roars out of Zion, and utters his
voice from Jerusalem, when the heavens and the earth do shake, the
Lord shall be the hope of his people and the strength of the
children of Israel."
He that knows the sea, knows the waves will toss themselves; he that
knows a lion, will not much wonder to see his paw or to hear the
voice of his roaring. And shall we that know our God, be stricken
with a panic fear when he cometh out of his holy place to punish the
inhabitants of the earth for their iniquity? We should stand like
those that are next to angels, and tell the blind world who it is
that is thus mounted upon his steed, and that hath the clouds for
the dust of his feet, and that thus rideth upon the wings of the
wind: we should say unto them, "This God is our God for ever and
ever, and he shall be our guide even unto death."
There are providences of two sorts, seemingly good and seemingly
bad; and those do usually as Jacob did when he blessed the sons of
Joseph, cross hands and lay the blessing where we would not. There
are providences unto which we would have the blessings entailed; but
they are not. And these are providences that smile upon the flesh,
such as cast into the lap health, wealth, plenty, ease, friends, and
abundance of this world's good: because these, as Manasseh's name
doth signify, have in them an aptness to make us forget our toil,
our low estate, and from whence we were; but the great blessing is
not in them.
There are providences again, that take away from us whatever is
desirable to the flesh; such are sickness, losses, crosses,
persecution, and affliction; and usually in these, though they shock
us whenever they come upon us, blessing coucheth and is ready to
help us. For God, as the name of Ephraim signifies, makes us
fruitful in the land of affliction. He therefore, in blessing his
people, lays his hands across, guiding them wittingly and laying the
chiefest blessing on the head of Ephraim, or in that providence that
sanctifies affliction. Abel-what to the reason of Eve was he, in
comparison with Cain? Rachel called Benjamin the son of her sorrow;
but Jacob knew how to give him a better name. Jabez, also, though
his mother so called him because, as it seems, she brought him forth
with more than ordinary sorrow, was yet more honorable, more godly,
than his brethren.
He that has skill to judge of providences aright, has a great
ability in him "to comprehend with other saints what is the breadth
and length and depth and height;" but he that has no skill as to
discerning them, is but a child in his judgment in those high and
mysterious things. And hence it is that some shall suck honey out of
that at which others tremble, for fear it should poison them. I have
often been made to say, "Sorrow is better than laughter, and the
house of mourning better than the house of mirth." And I have more
often seen that the afflicted are always the best sort of
Christians. There is a man never well, never prospering, never but
under afflictions, disappointments, and sorrows; why, this man, if
he be a Christian, is one of the best of men: "They that go down to
the sea, that do business in great waters, they see the works of the
Lord and his wonders in the deep."
I do not question but that there are some that are alive who have
been able to say the days of affliction have been the best unto
them, and who could, if it were lawful, pray that they might always
be in affliction, if God would but do to them as he did when his
hand was last upon them; for by them he caused his light to shine.
Oh how should we, and how would we were but our eyes awake, stand
and wonder at the preservations, the deliverances, the salvations,
and benefits with which we are surrounded daily, while so many
mighty evils seek daily to swallow us up as the grave!
How many deaths have some been delivered from and saved out of
before conversion. Some have fallen into rivers, some into wells,
some into the sea, some into the hands of men; yea, they have been
justly arraigned and condemned, as the thief upon the cross, but
must not die before they were converted. They were preserved in
Christ, and called.
II. THE TRINITY
IF in the Godhead there be but one, not three, then the Father, the
Son, or the Spirit must needs be that one, if any one only; so then
the other two are nothing. Again, if the reality of a being be
neither in the Father, Son, nor Spirit, as such, but in the eternal
Deity, without consideration of Father Son and Spirit as three, then
neither of the three are any thing but notions in us, or
manifestations of the Godhead, or nominal distinctions, so related
by the word; but if so, then when the Father sent the Son, and the
Father and Son the Spirit, one notion sent another one manifestation
sent another. This being granted, it unavoidably follows there was
no Father to beget a Son, no Son to be sent to save us, no Holy
Ghost to be sent to comfort us and to guide us into all the truth of
the Father and Son. At most it amounts to hut this: a notion sent a
notion, a distinction sent a distinction, or one manifestation sent
another. Of this error these are the consequences: we are only to
believe in notions and distinctions, when we believe in the Father
and the Son; and so shall have no other heaven and glory than
notions and nominal distinctions can furnish us withal.
If thou feel thy thoughts begin to wrestle about this truth, and to
struggle concerning this, one against another, take heed of
admitting such a question, "How can this be?" for here is no room
for reason to make it out; here is only room to believe it is a
truth. You find not one of the prophets propounding an argument to
prove it, but asserting it; they let it lie for faith to take it up
and embrace it.
"The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the
communion of the Holy Ghost, be with you all. Amen."
In a word, if you would see it altogether, God's love was the cause
why Christ was sent to bleed for sinners. Jesus Christ's bleeding
stops the cries of divine justice. God looks upon them as complete
in him, and gives them to him as by right of purchase. Jesus ever
lives to pray for them that are thus given unto him. God sends his
Holy Spirit into them to reveal this to them, sends his angels to
minister for them, and all this by virtue of an everlasting covenant
between the Father and the Son. "Happy the people that are in such a
case." He hath made them brethren with Jesus Christ, members of his
flesh and of his bones, the spouse of this Lord Jesus; and all to
show how dearly, really, and constantly he loveth us who by the
faith of his operation have laid hold upon him.
The doctrine of the Trinity! that is the substance, that is the
ground and fundamental of all, for by this doctrine and this only
the man is made a Christian; and he that has not this doctrine, his
profession is not worth a button.
You must know that sometimes the church in the wilderness has but
little light, hut the diminution of her light is not then so much in
or as to substantials, as it is as to circumstantial things; she has
then the substantials with her in her darkest day.
The doctrine of the Trinity! you may ask me what that is? I answer,
it is that doctrine that showeth us the love of God the Father in
giving his Son, the love of God the Son in giving himself, and the
love of the Lord the Spirit in his work of regenerating us, that we
may be made able to lay hold of the love of the Father by his Son,
and so enjoy eternal life by grace.
The Father's grace saveth no man without the grace of the Son,
neither do the Father and the Son save any without the grace of the
Spirit; for as the Father loves, the Son must die, and the Spirit
must sanctify, or no soul must be saved.
Some think that the love of the Father, without the blood of the
Son, will save them; but they are deceived, "for without shedding of
blood is no remission."
Some think that the love of the Father and blood of the Son will do,
without the holiness of the Spirit of God; but they are deceived
also, for "if any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of
his."
There is a third sort, that think the holiness of the Spirit is
sufficient of itself; but they are deceived also, for it must be the
grace of the Father, the grace of the Son, and the grace of the
Spirit, jointly, that must save them.
But yet, as these three do put forth grace jointly and truly in the
salvation of a sinner, so they put it forth after a diverse manner.
The Father designs us for heaven, the Son redeems from sin and
death, and the Spirit makes us meet for heaven: not by electing,
that is the work of the Father; not by dying, that is the work of
the Son; but by his revealing Christ, and applying Christ to our
souls, by shedding the love of God abroad in our hearts, by
sanctifying our souls, and taking possession of us as an earnest of
our possession in heaven.
III. THE SCRIPTURES.
THE Scriptures carry such a blessed beauty in them to that soul that
has faith in the things contained in them, that they do take the
heart and captivate the soul of him that believeth them into the
love and liking of them, believing all things that are written in
the law and the prophets, and having hope towards God that there
shall be a resurrection of the dead both of the just and unjust.
To him that believes the Scriptures aright, the promises or
threatenings are of more power to comfort or cast down, than all the
promises or threatenings of all the men in the world; and this was
the cause why the martyrs of Jesus did so slight both the promises
of their adversaries when they would have overcome them with
proffering the great things of this world unto them, and also their
threatenings when they told them they would rack them, hang them,
burn them. None of these things could prevail upon them or against
them.
I never had in all my life so great an inlet into the word of God as
now, [in prison.] Those scriptures that I saw nothing in before,
were made in this place and state to shine upon me. Jesus Christ
also was never more real and apparent than now. Here I have seen and
felt him indeed: O that word, "We have not preached unto you
cunningly devised fables," and that, "God raised Christ from the
dead and gave him glory, that our faith and hope might he in God,"
were blessed words unto me in this condition.
These three or four scriptures also have been great refreshments
in this condition to me, John 14:1-4; 16:33; Heb. 12:22-24; so that
sometimes, when I have been in the savor of them, I have been able
to laugh at destruction, and to fear neither the horse nor his
rider. I have had sweet sights of the forgiveness of my sins in this
place, and of my being with Jesus in another world. Oh the mount
Zion, the heavenly Jerusalem, the innumerable company of angels, and
God the judge of all, and the spirits of just men made perfect; and
Jesus has been sweet to me in this place: I have seen THAT here,
which I am persuaded I shall never while in this world be able to
express. I have seen a truth in this scripture, "Whom having not
seen, ye love; in whom, though now ye see him not, yet believing, ye
rejoice with joy unspeakable and full of glory."
The glass was one of a thousand. It would present a man one way with
his own features exactly, and turn it but another way and it would
show one the very face and similitude of the Prince of the pilgrims
himself. Yes, I have talked with them that can tell, and they have
said that they have seen the very crown of thorns upon his head by
looking in that glass; they have therein also seen the holes in his
hands, in his feet, and in his side. Yea, such an excellency is
there in that glass, that it will show him to one where they have a
mind to see him, whether living or dead, whether in earth or in
heaven, whether in a state of humiliation or in his exaltation,
whether coming to suffer or coming to reign. James I: 23-25; I Cor.
13:12; 2 Cor. 3:13.
Then said Greatheart to Mr. Valiant-for-Truth, "Thou hast worthily
behaved thyself; let me see thy sword." So he showed it him. "When
he had taken it into his hand, and looked thereon awhile, he said,
Ha, it is a right Jerusalem blade."
VALIANT. "It is so. Let a man have one of these blades, with a hand
to wield it and skill to use it, and he may venture upon an angel
with it. He need not fear its holding, if he can but tell how to lay
on. Its edge will never blunt. It will cut flesh and bones, and soul
and spirit, and all."
I saw then in my dream, that they went on in this their solitary
ground, till they came to a place at which a man is apt to lose his
way. Now, though when it was light their guide could well enough
tell how to miss those ways that led wrong, yet in the dark he was
put to a stand; but he had in his pocket a map of all ways leading
to or from the celestial city; wherefore he struck a light--for he
never goes without his tinder-box also--and takes a view of his book
or map, which bids him be careful in that place to turn to the right
hand.. And had he not been careful to look in his map, they had in
all probability been smothered in the mud; for just a little before
them, and that at the end of the cleanest way too, was a pit, none
knows how deep, full of nothing but mud, there made on purpose to
destroy the pilgrims in. Then thought I with myself, Who that goeth
on pilgrimage but would have one of these maps about him, that he
may look when he is at a stand which is the way he must take?
If we consider that our next state must be eternal, either eternal
glory or eternal fire, and that this eternal glory or this eternal
fire must be our portion according as the word of God revealed in
the holy Scriptures shall determine, who will not but conclude that
therefore the words of God are they at which we should tremble, and
they by which we should have our fear of God guided and directed?
for by them we are taught how to please him in every thing.
"Noah drank of the wine and was drunken." The Holy Ghost, when it
hath to do with sin, loves to give it its own name; drunkenness must
be drunkenness, murder must he murder, and adultery must bear its
own name. Nay, it is neither the goodness of the man, nor his being
in favor with God, that will cause him to lessen or mince his sin.
Noah was drunken; Lot lay with his daughters; David killed Uriah;
Peter cursed and swore in the garden, and also dissembled at
Antioch. But this is not recorded to the intent that the name of
these godly should rot, but to show that the best men are nothing
without grace, and that "he that standeth should not be high-minded,
but fear." Yea, they are also recorded for the support of the
tempted, who, when they are fallen, are oft raised up by considering
the infirmities of others. "Whatsoever things were written aforetime
were written for our learning, that we through patience and comfort
of the scriptures might have hope."
God's word has two edges; it can cut back-stroke and fore-stroke: if
it do thee no good, it will do thee hurt; it is the savor of life
unto life to those that receive it, but of death unto death to them
that refuse it.
I do find in most such a spirit of idolatry concerning the learning
of this world and wisdom of the flesh, and God's glory so much
stained and diminished thereby, that had I all their aid and
assistance at command, I durst not make use of aught thereof, and
that for fear lest that grace and those gifts that the Lord hath
given me, should be attributed to their wits, rather than to the
light of the word and Spirit of God. Wherefore I will not take of
them from a thread to a shoe-latchet, lest they should say, We have
made Abraham rich.
What you find suiting with the scriptures, take, though it should
not suit with authors; but that which you find against the
scriptures, slight, though it should be confirmed by multitudes of
them. Yea, further, where you find the scriptures and your authors
agree, yet believe it for the sake of scripture's authority. I honor
the godly as Christians, but I prefer the Bible before them; and
having that still with me, I count myself far better furnished than
if I had, without it, all the libraries of the two universities.
Besides, I am for drinking water out of my own cistern: what God
makes mine by the evidence of his word and Spirit, that I dare make
bold with. Wherefore, seeing, though I am without their learned
lines, yet well furnished with the words of God, I mean the Bible, I
have contented myself with what I have there found; and having set
it before your eyes,
I pray read and take, sir, what you like best; And that which you
like not, leave for the rest.
Read, and read again, and do not despair of help to understand
something of the will and mind of God, though you think they are
fast locked up from you. Neither trouble your heads though you have
not commentaries and expositions; pray and read, and read and pray;
for a little from God is better than a great deal from men: also
what is from men is uncertain, and is often lost and tumbled over
and over by men; but what is from God is fixed as a nail in a sure
place. There is nothing that so abides with us, as what we receive
from God; and the reason why Christians at this day are at such a
loss as to some things, is because they are content with what comes
from men's mouths, without searching and kneeling before God to know
of him the truth of things. Things that we receive at God's hand
come to us as things from the minting-house, though old in
themselves, yet new to us. Old truths are always new to us, if they
come to us with the smell of heaven upon them.
IV. MAN.
THE IMAGE OF GOD.
MAN is God's image, and to curse wickedly the image of God, is to
curse God himself. Suppose that a man should say with his mouth, I
wish that the king's picture were burned; would not this man's so
saying render him as an enemy to the person of the king? Even so it
is with them that by cursing wish evil to their neighbors or
themselves; they contemn the image of God himself.
This world, as it dropped from the fingers of God, was far more
glorious than it is now.
VALUE OF THE SOUL.
The soul is a thing, though of most worth, least minded by most. The
souls of most lie waste, while all other things are inclosed.
Soul-concerns are concerns of the highest nature, and concerns that
arise from thoughts most deep and ponderous. He never yet knew what
belonged to great and deep thoughts, that is a stranger to
soul-concerns.
The soul is capable of having to do with invisibles, with angels,
good or bad, yea, with the highest and supreme Being, even the holy
God of heaven. I told you before that God sought the soul of man to
have it for his companion; and now I tell you that the soul is
capable of communion with him, when the darkness that sin hath
spread over its face is removed. The soul is an intelligent power,
and it can be made to know and understand depths and heights and
lengths and breadths, in those high, sublime, and spiritual
mysteries that only God can reveal and teach; yea, it is capable of
diving unutterably into them. And herein is God, the God of glory,
much delighted--that he hath made for himself a creature that is
capable of hearing, of knowing and of understanding his mind, when
opened and revealed to it.
The greatness of the soul is manifest by the greatness of the price
that Christ paid for it to make it an heir of glory, and that was
his precious blood. We do use to esteem things according to the
price that is given for them, especially when we are convinced that
the purchase has not been made by the estimation of a fool. Now the
soul is purchased by a price, that the Son, the wisdom of God,
thought fit to pay for the redemption thereof; what a thing then is
the soul!
Suppose a prince, or some great man, should on a sudden descend from
his throne or chair of state, to take up, that he might put in his
bosom, something that he had espied lying trampled under the feet of
those that stand by; would you think that he would do this for an
old horseshoe, or for so trivial a thing as a pin or a point? Nay,
would you not even of yourselves conclude that that thing for which
the prince, so great a man, should make such a stoop, must needs be
a thing of very great worth? Why, this is the case of Christ and the
soul. Christ is the prince, his throne is in heaven, and as he sat
there he espied the souls of sinners trampled under the foot of the
law and death for sin. Now what doth he, but comes down from his
throne, stoops down to the earth, and there, since he could not have
the trodden-down souls without price, he lays down his life and
blood for them.
ADAM'S TRANSGRESSION.
In a word, Adam led mankind out of their paradise; that is one woe:
and put out their eyes, that is another; and left them to the
leading of the devil. O sad! Canst thou hear this, and not have thy
ears to tingle and burn on thy head? Canst thou read this and not
feel it, and not feel thy conscience begin to throb? If so, surely
it is because thou art either possessed with the devil, or beside
thyself.
O, this was the treasure that Adam left to his posterity, it was a
broken covenant, insomuch that death reigned over all his children,
and doth still to this day, as they come from him---both natural and
eternal death. Rom. 5.
DEPRAVITY OF NATURE.
Let a man be as devout as is possible for the law and the holiness
of the law. Yet if the principles from which he acts be but the
habit of soul, the purity, as he feigns, of his own
nature--principles of natural reason, or the dictates of human
nature; all this is nothing else but the old gentleman in his
holiday clothes: the old heart, the old spirit, the spirit of the
man, not the spirit of Christ, is here.
LOVE OF SIN.
Sin has been delightfully admitted to an entertainment by all the
powers of the soul. The soul hath chosen it rather than God; and
also, at God's command, refuses to let it go.
If there be at any time, as indeed there is, a warrant issued out
from the mouth of God to apprehend, to condemn and mortify sin, why
then the souls of sinners do presently make these shifts for the
saving of sin from things that by the word men arc commanded to do
unto it:
1. They will, if possible, hide it, and not suffer it to be
discovered.
2. As the soul will hide it, so it will excuse it, and plead that
this and that piece of wickedness is no such evil thing, men need
not be so nice.
3. As the soul will do this, so to save sin it will cover it with
names of virtue, either moral or civil.
4. If convictions and discovery of sin be so strong and so plain
that the soul cannot deny but that it is sin, and that God is
offended therewith, then it will give flattering promises to God
that it will indeed put it away; but yet it will prefix a time that
shall he long first, saying, Yet a little sleep, yet a little
slumber, yet a little folding of sin in my arms, till I am older,
till I am richer, till I have had more of the sweetness and the
delights of sin.
5. If God yet pursues, and will see whether this promise of putting
sin out of doors shall he fulfilled by the soul, why then it will be
partial in God's law; it will put away some, and keep some; put away
the grossest, and keep the finest; put away those that can best be
spared, and keep the most profitable for a help at a pinch.
6. Yea, if all sin must be abandoned, or the soul shall have no
rest, why then the soul and sin will part--with such a parting as it
is--even as Phaltiel parted with David's wife, with an ill-will and
a sorrowful mind; or as Orpah left her mother, with a kiss. 2 Sam.
3:16; Ruth 1:14.
7. And if at any time they can or shall meet with each other again,
and nobody never the wiser, O what courting will be between sin and
the soul.
By all these, and many more things that might be instanced, it is
manifest that sin has a friendly entertainment by the soul, and that
therefore the soul is guilty of damnation; for what do all these
things argue, but that God, his word, his ways and graces, are out
of favor with the soul, and that sin and Satan are its only pleasant
companions?
SIN.
Sin so sets itself against the nature of God that, if possible, it
would annihilate and turn him into nothing, it being in its nature
point-blank against him.
What a thing is sin; what a devil and master of devils is it, that
it should, where it takes hold, so hang that nothing can unclutch
its hold, but the mercy of God and the heart-blood of his dear Son.
No sin is little in itself; because it is a contradiction of the
nature and majesty of God.
O, sin, what art thou! What hast thou done! and what still wilt thou
further do, if mercy and blood and grace do not prevent thee!
Sin is the living worm, the lasting fire;
Hell soon would loss its heat, could sin expire.
Better sinless in hell, than to be where
Heaven is, and to be found a sinner there.
One sinless with infernals might do well,
But sin would make of heaven a very hell.
Look to thyself then, keep it out of door,
Lest it get in and never leave thee more.
No match has sin but God in all the world;
Men, angels, has it from their station hurled,
Holds them in chains as captives, in despite
Of all that here below is called might.
Release, help, freedom from it none can give,
But even He by whom we breathe and live.
Watch therefore, keep this giant out of door,
Lest, if once in, thou get him out no more.
Fools make a mock at sin, will not believe
It carries such a dagger in its sleeve.
How can it be, say they, that such a thing,
So full of sweetness, e'er should wear a sting?
They know not that it is the very spell
Of sin, to make men laugh themselves to hell.
Look to thyself, then, deal with sin no more,
Lest He that saves, against thee shut the door.
There are sins against light, sins against knowledge, sins against
love, sins against learning, sins against threatenings, sins against
promises and vows and resolutions, sins against experience, sins
against examples of anger, and sins that have great and high and
strange aggravations attending them; the which we are ignorant of,
though not altogether, yet in too great a measure.
Sins go not alone, hut follow one another as do the links of a
chain.
A presumptuous sin is such a one as is committed in the face of the
command, in a desperate venturing to run the hazard, or in a
presuming upon the mercy of God through Christ, to be saved
notwithstanding: this is a leading sin to that which is
unpardonable, and will be found with such professors as do hanker
after iniquity.
One leak will sink a ship; and one sin will destroy a sinner.
He that lives in sin and hopes for happiness hereafter, is like him
that soweth cockle and thinks to fill his barn with wheat and
barley.
Crush sin in the conception, lest it bring forth death in thy soul.
Some men's hearts are narrow upwards and wide downwards--narrow as
to God, but wide for the world.
PRIDE.
Pride is the ringleader of the seven abominations that the wise man
nameth. Prov. 6: 16, 17.
Apparel is the fruit of sin; wherefore, let such as pride themselves
therein remember, that they cover one shame with another. But let
them that are truly godly have their apparel modest and sober, and
with such shame-facedness put them on; remembering always, that the
first cause of our covering our nakedness was the sin and shame of
our first parents.
ENVY.
Mr. Badman's envy was so rank and strong, that if it at any time
turned its head against a man, it would hardly ever be pulled in
again. He would watch over that man to do him mischief, as the cat
watches over the mouse to destroy it; yea, he would wait seven years
but he would have an opportunity to hurt him, and when he had it, he
would make him feel the weight of his envy. This envy is the very
father and mother of a great many hid eous and prodigious
wickednesses. It both begets them, and also nourishes them up till
they come to their cursed maturity in the bosom of him that
entertains them.
DRUNKENNESS.
Drunkenness is so beastly a sin, a sin so much against nature, that
I wonder that any who have but the appearance of men can give up
themselves to so beastly, yea, worse than beastly a thing.
Many that have begun the world with plenty, have gone out of it in
rags, through drunkenness. Yea, many children that have been born to
good estates, have yet been brought to a flail and a rake through
this beastly sin of their parents.
Yea, it so stupefies and besots the soul, that a man who is far gone
in drunkenness is hardly ever recovered to God. Tell me, when did
you see an old drunkard converted? No, no; such a one will sleep
till he dies, though he sleep on the top of a mast; so that if a man
have any respect either to credit, health, life, or salvation, he
will not be a drunken man.
"And Noah was uncovered." Behold ye now, that a little of the fruit
of the vine lays gravity, grey hairs, and a man that for hundreds of
years was a lover of faith, holiness, goodness, sobriety, and all
righteousness, shamelessly as the object to the eye of the wicked.
"And Noah lived after the flood three hundred and fifty years." He
lived, therefore, to see Abraham fifty-and-eight years old; he lived
also to see the foundation of Babel laid, nay, the top-stone
thereof; and also the confusion of tongues; he lived to see of the
fruit of his loins, mighty kings and princes. But in all this time
he lived not to do one, work that the Holy Ghost thought worthy to
record, for the savor of his name or the edification and benefit of
his church, save only, that he died at "nine hundred and fifty
years:" so great a breach did this drunkenness make upon his spirit.
SINNERS.
Usually in wicked families, some one or two are more arch for
wickedness than are any other that are there. Now such are Satan's
conduit-pipes; for by them he conveys of the spawn of hell, through
their being crafty in wickedness, into the ears and souls of their
companions.
"And she bare Cain:" the first sprout of a disobedient couple, a man
in shape, but a devil in disposition.
The sinner, when his conscience is fallen asleep and grown hard,
will lie like the smith's dog at the foot of the anvil, though the
fire-sparks fly in his face.
Peace in a sinful course is one of the greatest of curses.
There is a wicked man that goes blinded, and a wicked man that goes
with his eyes open, to hell; there is a wicked man that cannot see,
and a wicked man that will not see, the danger he is in; but
hell-fire will open the eyes of both.
The soul with some is the game, their lusts are the dogs, and they
themselves are the huntsmen; and never do they more halloo and lure
and laugh and sing, than when they have delivered up their soul,
their darling, to these dogs.
I may safely say, that the most of men who are concerned in a trade,
will be more vigilant in dealing with a twelvepenny customer, than
they will be with Christ when he comes to make unto them by the
gospel a tender of the incomparable grace of God.
SINFUL EASE.
'Tis true there is no man more at ease in his mind--with such ease
as it is--than the man that hath not closed with the Lord Jesus, but
is shut up in unbelief. Oh, but that is the man that stands
convicted before God, and that is bound over to the GREAT ASSIZE!
that is the man whose sins are still his own, and upon whom the
wrath of God abideth; for the ease and peace of such, though it keep
them far from fear, is but like to that of the secure thief that is
ignorant that the constable standcth at the door: the first sight of
an officer makes his peace to give up the ghost. Oh, how many
thousands that can now glory that they were never troubled for sin
against God--I say, how many be there that God will trouble worse
than he troubled cursed Achan, because their peace, though false and
of the devil, was rather chosen by them than peace by Jesus Christ,
than peace with God by the blood of his cross.
Awake, careless sinners, awake, and arise from the dead, and Christ
shall give you light. Content not yourselves either with sin or
righteousness, if you be destitute of Jesus Christ; but CRY, CRY, Oh
cry to God for light to see your condition by. Light is in the word
of God, for therein is the righteousness of God revealed; cry
therefore for light to see this righteousness by: it is a
righteousness of Christ's finishing, of God's accepting, and that
which alone can save the soul from the stroke of eternal justice.
THE CHILD AND THE BIRD.
"My little bird, how canst thou sit
And sing amidst so many thorns?
Let me but hold vipon thee get,
My love with honor thee adorns.
Thou art at present little worth,
Five farthings none will give for thee,
But prithee, little bird, come forth,
Thou of more value art to me.
"'Tis true it is sunshine to-day,
To-morrow birds will have a storm;
My pretty one, come thou away.
My bosom then shall keep thee warm.
Thou subject art to cold o' nights,
When darkness is thy covering;
At day thy danger's great by kites;
How canst thou then sit there and sing?
"Thy food is scarce and scanty too,
'Tis worms and trash that thou dost eat
Thy present state I pity do,
Come, I'll provide thee better meat.
I'll feed thee with white bread and milk,
And sugar-plums, if them thou crave;
I'll cover thee with finest silk,
That from the cold I may thee save.
"My father's palace shall be thine,
Yea, in it thou shalt sit and sing;
My little bird, if thou'lt be mine,
The whole year round shall be thy spring.
I'll teach thee all the notes at court,
Unthought-of music thou shalt play,
And all that thither do resort
Shall praise thee for it every day.
"I'll keep thee safe from cat and cur,
No manner o' harm shall come to thee;
Yea, I will be thy succorer,
My bosom shall thy cabin be."
But lo, behold, the bird is gone!
These charmings would not make her yield;
The child's left at the bush alone,
The bird flies yonder o'er the field.
The child of Christ an emblem is;
The bird to sinners I compare;
The thorns are like those sins of theirs,
Which do surround them everywhere.
Her songs, her food, her sunshine day,
Are emblems of those foolish toys
Which to destruction lead the way--
The fruit of worldly, empty joys.
The arguments this child doth choose
To draw to him a bird thus wild,
Shows Christ familiar speech doth use,
To make the sinner reconciled.
The bird, in that she takes her wing
To speed her from him after all,
Shows us vain man loves any thing
Much better than the heavenly call.
THE SINNER WARNED.
Thy bed, when thou liest down in it, preacheth to thee thy grave;
thy sleep, thy death; and thy rising in the morning, thy
resurrection to judgment.
Wouldst thou know, sinner, what thou art? look up to the cross, and
behold a weeping, bleeding, dying Jesus; nothing could do but that,
nothing could save thee but his blood: angels could not, saints
could not, God could not, because he could not lie, because he could
not deny himself.
What a thing is sin, that it should sink all that bear its burden;
yea, it sunk the Son of God himself into death and the grave, and
had also sunk him into hell-fire for ever, had he not teen the Son
of God, had he not been able to take it on his hack and bear it
away.
O this Lamh of God! Sinners were going to hell; Christ was the
delight of his Father, and had a whole heaven to himself; hut that
did not content him, heaven could not hold him, he must come into
the world to save sinners.
Aye, and had he not come thy sins had sunk thee, thy sins had
provoked the wrath of God against thee to thy destruction for ever.
There is no man hut is a sinner; there is no sin hut would damn an
angel, should God lay it to his charge.
Sinner, the doctrine of Christ crucified cries therefore aloud unto
thee, that sin has made thy condition dreadful. See yourselves, your
sins, and consequently the condition that your souls are in by the
death and blood of Christ Christ's death gives us the most clear
discovery of the dreadful nature of our sins.
I say again, if sin he so dreadful a thing as to break the heart of
the Son of God, how shall a poor, wretched, impenitent, damned
sinner wrestle with the wrath of God?
Awake, sinners; you are lost, you are undone, you perish, you are
damned; hell-fire is your portion for ever, if you abide in your
sins, and be found without a Saviour in the dreadful day of
judgment.
Sinner, doth not all this discourse make thy heart twitter after the
mercy that is with God, and after the way that is made by this
plenteous redemption thereto? Methinks it should; yea, thou couldest
not do otherwise, didst thou but see thy condition. Look behind
thee, take a view of the path thou hast trodden these many years.
Dost thou think that the way that thou art in will lead thee to the
strait gate, sinner? Ponder the path of thy feet with the greatest
seriousness; thy life lies upon it; what thinkest thou? But make no
answer till in the night, till thou art in the night-watches;
commune with thine own heart upon thy hed, and there say what thou
thinkest of whither thou art going.
Oh that thou wert serious! Is not it a thing to be lamented, that
madness and folly should be in thy heart while thou livest, and
after that to go to the dead; when so much life stands before thee,
and light to see the way to it? Surely men void of grace and
possessed of carnal minds must either think that sin is nothing,
that hell is easy, and that eternity is short; or else that whatever
God has said about the punishing of sinners, he will never do as he
has said; or that there is no sin, no God, no heaven, no hell, and
so no good or bad hereafter; or else they could not live as they do.
But perhaps thou presumest upon it, and sayest, I shall have peace,
though I live so sinful a life. Sinner, if this wicked thought be in
thy heart, tell me again, dost thou thus think in earnest? Canst
thou imagine thou shalt at the day of account outface God, or make
him believe thou wast what thou wast not; or that when the gate is
shut up in wrath, he will at thy pleasure and to the reversing of
his own counsel, open it again to thee? Why shall thy deceived heart
turn thee aside, that thou canst not deliver thy soul, nor say, Is
there not a lie in my right hand?
Friend, because it is a dangerous thing to be walking towards the
place of darkness and anguish, and because notwithstanding, it is
the journey that most of the poor souls in the world are taking, I
have thought it my duty for preventing thee, to tell thee what sad
success those souls have had that have persevered therein. Why,
friend, it may be--nay, twenty to one, thou hast had thy back to
heaven and thy face towards hell ever since thou didst come into the
world. Why, I beseech thee, put a little stop to thy earnest race,
and take a view of what entertainment thou art like to have, if thou
do in deed and in truth persist in thy course. "Thy ways lead down
to death, and thy steps to hell." It may he, indeed, the path is
pleasant to the flesh, but the end thereof will he bitter to thy
soul. Hark! dost thou not hear the bitter cries of them that are
newly gone before thee, saying, "Let him dip the tip of his finger
in water, and cool my tongue; for I am tormented in this flame!"
Dost thou not hear them say, "Send one from the dead, to prevent my
father, my brother, my father's house, from coming to this place of
torment!" Shall not these mournful groans pierce thy flinty heart?
Wilt thou stop thine ears and shut thine eyes? And wilt thou NOT
regard? Take warning, and stop thy journey before it be too late.
Wilt thou he like the silly fly, that is not quiet unless she be
either entangled in the spider's web or burnt in the candle? O
sinner, sinner, there are better things than HELL to be had! There
is heaven, there is God, there is Christ, there is communion with an
innumerable assembly of saints and angels!
The poor, carnal, ignorant world miss of heaven, even because they
love their sins and cannot part with them John 3:9, 20.
The poor ignorant world miss of heaven, because they stop their ears
against convictions, and refuse to come when God calls. Prov. 1:
24-29.
The poor ignorant world miss of heaven, because the god of this
world hath blinded their eyes, that they can neither see the evil
and damnable state they are in at present, nor the way to get out of
it; neither do they see the beauty of Jesus Christ, nor how willing
he is to save poor sinners. 2 Cor. 4: 2, 3.
The poor ignorant world miss of heaven, because they defer coming to
Christ until the time of God's patience and grace is over. Some
indeed are resolved never to come; but some again say, "We will come
hereafter;" and so it comes to pass, that because God called and
they did not hear, so "they shall cry and I will not hear," saith
the Lord. Zech. 7: 11-13.
The poor ignorant world miss of heaven, because they have false
apprehensions of God's mercy. They say in their hearts, "We shall
have peace, though we walk in the imagination of our heart." Deut.
29: 19-21.
The poor ignorant world miss of heaven, because they make light of
the gospel that offers mercy to them freely, and because they lean
upon their own good meanings and thinkings and doings. Matt. 22:
1-5; Rom. 9: 30, 31.
The poor carnal world miss of heaven, because by unbelief, which
reigns in them, they are kept for ever from being clothed with
Christ's righteousness, and from washing in his blood, without which
there is no remission of sin nor justification.
Blush, sinner, blush! Ah, that thou hadst grace to blush.
My first word shall be to the openly profane. Poor sinner, thou
readest that many that expect heaven will go without heaven. What
sayest thou to this, poor sinner? If judgment begins at the house of
God, what will be the end of them that obey not the gospel of God?
This is Peter's question: canst thou answer it, sinner? Yea, I say
again, if judgment must begin at them, will it not make thee think,
What shall become of me? And I add, when thou shalt see the stars of
heaven tumble down to hell, canst thou think that such a muck-heap
of sin as thou art shall be lifted up to heaven? Peter asks thee
another question: "If the righteous scarcely be saved, where shall
the ungodly and the sinner appear?" Canst thou answer this question,
sinner? Stand among the righteous thou mayst not: "The ungodly shall
not stand in the judgment." Stand among the wicked thou then wilt
not dare to do: where wilt thou appear, sinner? To stand among the
hypocrites will avail thee nothing: "The hypocrite shall not come
before him," that is, with acceptance, "but shall perish."
Because it concerns thee much, let me over with it again. When thou
shalt see less sinners than thou art bound up by angels in bundles
to burn them, where wilt thou appear, sinner? Thou mayst wish
thyself another man, but that will not help thee, sinner. Thou mayst
wish, "Would I had been converted in time;" but that will not help
thee neither. And if, like the wife of Jeroboam, thou shouldst feign
thyself to be another, the prophet, the Lord Jesus, would soon find
thee out. What wilt thou do, poor sinner? Heavy tidings, heavy
tidings will attend thee, except thou repent, poor sinner!
Sluggard, art thou asleep still? art thou resolved to sleep the
sleep of death? Will neither tidings from heaven nor hell awake
thee? Wilt thou say still, "Yet a little sleep, a little slumber, a
little folding of the arms to sleep?"
O that I was one that was skilful in lamentation, and had but a
yearning heart towards thee, how would I pity thee; how would I
bemoan thee! Poor soul, lost soul, dying soul, what a hard heart
have I that I cannot mourn for thee! If thou shouldst lose but a
limb, a child, or a friend, it would not be so much; but, poor man,
it is thy soul: if it was to lie in hell but for a day, but for a
year, nay, ten thousand years, it would in comparison be nothing;
but O it is for ever! O this cutting EVER!
Sinner, awake; yea, I say unto thee, awake! Sin lieth at thy door,
and God's axe lieth at thy root, and hell-fire is right underneath
thee. I say again, awake. Every tree that bringeth not forth good
fruit, is hewn down and cast into the fire.
Poor sinner, awake: Eternity is coming, and his Son; they are both
coming to judge the world: awake; art yet asleep, poor sinner? let
me set the trumpet to thine ear once again. The heavens will he
shortly on a burning flame; the earth and the works thereof shall be
burned up, and then wicked men shall go into perdition: dost thou
hear this, sinner?
Hark again: the sweet morsels of sin will then be fled and gone, and
the bitter, burning fruits of them only left. What sayst thou now,
sinner? canst thou drink hell-fire? will the wrath of God be a
pleasant dish to thy taste? This must be thine every day's meat and
drink in hell, sinner.
I will yet propound to thee God's ponderous question, and then for
this time leave thee: "Can thine heart endure, or can thy hands be
strong in the day that I shall deal with thee, saith the Lord?" What
sayst thou? Wilt thou answer this question now; or wilt thou take
time to do it; or wilt thou be desperate and venture all? And let me
put this text in thine ear to keep it open, and so the Lord have
mercy upon thee: "Upon the wicked shall the Lord rain snares, fire,
and brimstone, and a horrible tempest; this shall be the portion of
their cup." Repent, sinners.
CONSCIENCE.
Conscience hath its place in the soul, where it is as a judge to
discern of things good or bad, and judge them accordingly. Romans 2:
14. This conscience is that in which is the law of nature, I Cor.
11: 14, which is able to teach the Gentiles that sin against the law
is sin against God.
Now this conscience, this nature itself, because it can control and
chide them for sin who give ear unto it--must it therefore be
idolized and made a god of? O wonderful! that men should make a God
and a Christ of their consciences because they can convince of sin.
Thou gayest, He that convinces of sins against the law, leads up to
the fulfilling of the law.. Friend, thy conscience convinces of sins
against the law: follow thy conscience, and it may lead thee under
the curse of the law, through its weakness; but it can never deliver
thee from the curse of the law by its power. For if righteousness
come by obedience to the law, or by thy conscience either, then
Christ is dead in vain. Gal. 2: 21.
A GOOD CONSCIENCE.
This must needs be a blessed help in distress, for a man to have a
good conscience when affliction hath taken hold on him; for a man
then, in his looking behind and before, to return with peace to his
own soul, that man must needs find honey in this lion.
This is the way to maintain always the answer, the echoing answer of
a good conscience in thy own soul. Godliness is of great use this
way; for the man that hath a good conscience to God-ward, hath a
continual feast in his own soul: while others say there is casting
down, he shall say there is lifting up; for God shall save the
humble person. Some indeed, in the midst of their profession, are
reproached, smitten, and condemned of their own heart, their
conscience still biting and stinging them because of the uncleanness
of their hands; and they cannot lift up their face unto God, they
have not the answer of a good conscience towards him, but must walk
as persons false to their God and as traitors to their own eternal
welfare. But the godly upright man shall have the light shine upon
his ways, and he shall take his steps in butter and honey. The work
of righteousness shall be peace, and the effect of righteousness,
quietness, and assurance for ever. "If our heart condemn us, God is
greater than our heart, and knoweth all things. Beloved, if our
heart condemn us not, then have we confidence towards God."
A TENDER CONSCIENCE.
A tender conscience is to some people like Solomon's brawling woman,
a burthen to those that have it; but let it be to thee like those
that invited David to go up to the house of the Lord.
A GUILTY CONSCIENCE.
"And Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord
God." These latter words are spoken, not to persuade us that men can
hide themselves from God, but that Adam and those that are his by
nature will seek to do it, because they do not know him aright.
These words therefore further show us what a bitter thing sin is to
the soul; it is only for hiding-work, sometimes under its
fig-leaves, sometimes among the trees of the garden. O what a
shaking, starting, timorous evil conscience is a sinful, guilty
conscience: especially when it is but a little awakened, it could
run its head into every hole, first by one fancy, then by another;
for the power and goodness of a man's own righteousness cannot
withstand or answer the demands of the justice of God and his holy
law.
There is yet another witness for the condemning transgressors of
these laws, and that is conscience: "Their consciences also bearing
witness," says the apostle. Conscience is a thousand witnesses.
Conscience! it will cry amen to every word that the great God doth
speak against thee. Conscience is a terrible accuser; it will hold
pace with the witness of God, as to the truth of evidence, to a
hair's breadth. The witness of conscience, it is of great authority;
it commands guilt and fastens it on every soul which it accuses.
Conscience will thunder and lighten at the day of judgment; even the
consciences of the most pagan sinners in the world will have
sufficient wherewith to accuse, to condemn, and to make paleness
appear in their faces and breaking in their loins, by reason of the
force of its conviction. O the mire and dirt that a guilty
conscience, when it is forced to speak, will cast up and throw out
before the judgment-seat. It must out; none can speak peace nor
health to that man upon whom God has let loose his own conscience.
Cain will now cry, "My punishment is greater than I can bear;" Judas
will hang himself; and both Belshazzar and Felix will feel the
joints of their loins to be loosened, and their knees to smite one
against another, when conscience stirreth.
When conscience is once thoroughly awakened, as it shall be before
the judgment-seat, God will need say no more to the sinner than
Solomon said to filthy Shimei, "Thou knowest all the wickedness that
thy heart is privy to." As who should say, "Thy conscience knows,
and can well inform thee of all the evil and sin that thou art
guilty of." To all which it answers even as face answers a face in a
glass; or as an echo answers the man that speaks: as fast, I say, as
God chargeth, conscience will cry out, "Guilty, guilty, Lord; guilty
of all, of every whit; I remember clearly all the crimes thou layest
before me." Thus will conscience be a witness against the soul in
the day of God.
V. THE LAW.
ITS NATURE AND EFFECTS.
THE law is the chief and most pure resemblance of the justice and
holiness of the heavenly Majesty, and doth hold forth to all men the
sharpness and keenness of his wrath.
This is the rule and line and plummet whereby every act of every man
shall be measured; and he whose righteousness is not found every way
answerable to this law, which all will fall short of but they that
have the righteousness of God by faith in Jesus Christ, he must
perish.
The law is spiritual, I am carnal. Therefore every requirement is
rejected and rebelled against. Strike a steel against a flint, and
the fire flies about you. Strike the law against a carnal heart, and
sin appears, sin multiplies, sin rageth, sin is strengthened.
Sin seen in the glass of the law is a terrible thing; no man can
behold it and live. "When the commandment came, sin revived and I
died;" when it came from God to my conscience, as managed by an
almighty arm, then it slew me. And now is the time to confess sin,
because now a soul knows what it is, and sees what it is, both in
the nature and consequence of it.
He that is under the law is under the edge of the axe.
The proper work of the law is to slay the soul, and leave it dead,
in a helpless state.
The law has laid all men for dead as they come into the world; but
all men do not see themselves dead, until they see the law that
struck them dead striking in their souls and having struck them that
fatal blow. As a man that is fast asleep in a house, and that on
fire about his ears, and he not knowing it because he is asleep;
even so because poor souls are asleep in sin, though the wrath of
God, the curse of his law, and the flames of hell have beset them
round about, yet they do not believe it because they are asleep in
sin. Now, as he that is awakened and sees this, sees that through
this he is a dead man, even so they that see their state by nature,
being such a sad condition, do also see themselves by that law to be
dead men naturally.
Take heed of fleshly wisdom. Reasoning suiteth much with the law: "I
thought verily that I ought to do many things against the name of
Jesus," and so to have sought for life by the law. For thus reason
will say, Here is a righteous law, the rule of life and death;
besides, what can be better than to love God, and my neighbor as
myself? Again, God has thus commanded, and his commands are just and
good; therefore, doubtless, life must come by the law. Further, to
love God and keep the law, are better than to sin and break it; and
seeing men lost heaven by sin, how should they get it again but by
working righteousness? Besides, God is righteous, and will therefore
bless the righteous. O the holiness of the law! It mightily swayeth
with reason when a man addicts himself to religion. The light of
nature teaches that sin is not the way to heaven; and seeing no word
doth more condemn sin, than the words of the ten commandments, it
must needs be therefore the most perfect rule for holiness.
Wherefore, says reason, the safest way to life and glory is to keep
myself close to the law. But though the law indeed be holy, yet the
mistake as to the matter in hand is as wide as the east from the
west; for therefore the law can do thee no good, because it is holy
and just; for what can he that has sinned expect from a law that is
holy and just? Naught but condemnation. "There is one that accuseth
you, even. Moses in whom ye trust."
Here is the poison; to set this law in the. room of a Mediator, as
those do who seek to stand just before God thereby. And then nothing
is so dishonorable to Christ, nor of so soul-destroying a nature as
the law; for that, thus placed, has not only power when souls are
deluded, but power to delude by its real holiness, the
understanding, conscience, and reason of a man; and by giving the
soul a semblance of heaven, to cause it to throw away Christ, grace,
and faith.
Alas, he who boasteth himself in the works of the law, he doth not
hear the law. When that speaks, it shakes mount Sinai, and writeth
death upon all faces, and makes the church itself cry out, A
Mediator! else we die.
The law out of Christ is terrible as a lion; the law in him is meek
as a lamb.
FAITHFUL. "So I went on my way up the hill. Now when I had got about
half-way up, I looked behind me and saw one coming after me swift as
the wind; so he overtook me just about the place where the settle
stands.
"So soon as the man overtook me, he was but a word and a blow; for
down he knocked me, and laid me for dead. But when I was a little
come to myself again, I asked him wherefore he served me so. He
said, 'Because of thy secret inclination to Adam the first;' and
with that he struck me another deadly blow on the breast, and beat
me down backwards; so I lay at his foot as dead as before. When I
came to myself again, I cried to him for mercy; but he said, 'I
know not how to show mercy;' and with that knocked me down again. He
had doubtless made an end of me, but that one came by and bid him
forbear."
CHRISTIAN. "Who was it that bid him forbear?"
FAITHFUL. "I did not know him at first, but as he went by I
perceived the holes in his hands and his side; then I concluded that
he was our Lord. So I went up the hill."
CHRISTIAN. "The man that overtook you was Moses. He spareth none,
neither knoweth he how to show mercy to those that transgress his
law."
FAITHFUL. "I know it very well; it was not the first time that he
has met with me. It was he that came to me when I dwelt securely at
home, and that told me he would burn my house over my head if I
staid there."
This ungodly fear of God, is that which will put men upon adding to
the revealed will of God their own inventions and their own
performances of them, as a means to pacify the anger of God. For the
truth is, where this ungodly fear reigneth, there is no end of law
and duty. When those that you read of in the hook of Kings, 2 Kings,
17: 26, were destroyed by the lions because they had set up idolatry
in the land of Israel, they sent for a priest from Babylon that
might teach them the manner of the God of the land; but behold, when
they knew it, being taught it by the priest, yet their fear would
not suffer them to be content with that worship only. "They feared
the Lord," saith the text, "and served their own gods." And again,
"So these nations feared the Lord, and served their graven images."
It was this fear also that put the Pharisees upon inventing so many
traditions; as the washing of cups, and beds, and tables, and
basins, with abundance of such other gear. Mark 7: 4. None knows the
many dangers that an ungodly fear of God will drive a man into.
How has it racked and tortured the papists for hundreds of years
together! for what else is the cause but this ungodly fear, at least
in the most simple and harmless of them, of their penances--as
creeping to the cross, going barefoot on pilgrimage, whipping
themselves, wearing of sackcloth, saying so many pater-nosters, so
many Ave-Marias, making so many confessions to the priest, giving so
much money for pardons, and abundance of other the like---but this
ungodly fear of God? For could they be brought to believe this
doctrine, that Christ was delivered for our offences and raised
again for our justification, and to apply it by faith with godly
boldness to their own souls, this fear Would vanish, and so
consequently all those things with which they so needlessly and
unprofitably afflict themselves, offend God, and grieve his people.
THE LAW AND THE GOSPEL.
Thou must have salvation either at the door of the law or at the
door of grace. "But," sayest thou, "I am for having it at the hands
of both. I will trust solely to neither. I love to have two strings
to my bow. If one of them, as you think, can help me by itself, my
reason tells me that both can help me better; therefore will I be
righteous and good, and will seek by my goodness to be commended to
the mercy of God; for surely he that hath something of his own to
ingratiate himself into the favor of his prince withal, shall sooner
obtain his mercy and favor than one that comes to him stripped of
all good."
I answer, "But there are not two ways to heaven: there is but one
'new and living way which Christ hath consecrated for us through the
veil, that is to say, his flesh;' and besides that one, there is no
more. Heb. 10: 19-24. Why then dost thou talk of two strings to thy
bow?"
Mercy then is to be found alone in Jesus Christ. Again, the
righteousness of the law is to be obtained only by faith of Jesus
Christ; that is, in the Son of God is the righteousness of the law
to be found; for he, by his obedience to his Father, is become the
end of the law for righteousness. And for the sake of his legal
righteousness---which is also called the righteousness of God,
because it was God in the flesh of the Lord Jesus that did
accomplish it---are mercy and grace from God extended to whomsoever
dependeth by faith upon God, by this righteousness of Jesus, for
them.
He that is dark as touching the scope, intents, and nature of the
law, is also dark as to the scope, nature, and glory of the gospel.
I must confess it is a wonderful mysterious thing, and he had need
have a wiser spirit than his own that can rightly set these two
covenants in their right places, that when he speaks of the one he
doth not jostle the other out of its place. O, to be so well
enlightened as to speak of the one, that is the law, for to magnify
the gospel---and also to speak of the gospel so as to establish and
yet not to idolize the law, nor any particulars thereof---it is
rare; and to be heard and found but in very few men's breasts.
A man may appeal from the law to the throne, from Moses to
Christ---from him that spoke on earth to him that speaks from
heaven; but from heaven to earth, from Christ to Moses, none can
appeal. Acts 3: 22, 23.
Tell me, you that desire to mingle the law and the gospel together,
and to make of both one and the same gospel of Christ, did you ever
see yourselves undone and lost, unless the righteousness, blood,
death, resurrection, and intercession of that man Christ Jesus in
his own person, were imputed to you; and until you could by faith
own it as done for you, and counted yours by imputation? Yea, or no?
Nay, rather, have you not set up your consciences and the law, and
counted your obedience to them better and of more value than the
obedience of the Son of Mary without you to be imputed to you? And
if so, it is because you have not been savingly convinced by the
Spirit of Christ of the sin of unbelief.
I would riot be mistaken; I do not say that the Spirit of Christ
gives the least liberty to sin; God forbid; but its convictions are
of a more saving and refreshing nature than the convictions of the
law, and do more constrain the soul to holiness than that: the law
saying, Work for life; the Spirit saying, Now to him that worketh
not (for life,) but believeth on him that justifieth the ungodly,
his faith is counted for righteousness. As thus: if I should owe to
two creditors ten thousand talents, the one should say unto me,
"Thou owest me five thousand talents, pay that thou owest;" the
other should say, "Thou owest me five thousand talents, and I
frankly and freely forgive thee all."
Now, these expressions are contrary one to another; even so is the
end of the convictions of the law not according to the end of the
convictions of the Spirit of Christ: the one saying, "Pay me that
thou owest;" the other saying, "Thou art frankly and freely forgiven
all."
Then the Interpreter took Christian by the hand, and led him into a
very large parlor that was full of dust, because never swept; the
which, after he had reviewed it a little while, the Interpreter
called for a man to sweep. Now, when he began to sweep, the dust
began so abundantly to fly about, that Christian had almost
therewith been choked. Then said the Interpreter to a damsel that
stood by, "Bring hither water and sprinkle the room;" the which,
when she had done, it was swept and cleansed with pleasure.
Then said Christian, "What means this?"
The Interpreter answered, "This parlor is the heart of a man that
was never sanctified by the sweet grace of the gospel; the dust is
his, original sin and inward corruptions that have defiled the whole
man. He that began to sweep at first is the law; but she that
brought water and did sprinkle it, is the gospel. Now whereas thou
sawest that so soon as the first began to sweep, the dust did so fly
about that the room by him could not be cleansed, but that thou wast
almost choked therewith: this is to show thee that the law, instead
of cleansing the heart by its working, from sin, doth revive, put
strength into, and increase it in the soul, even as it doth discover
and forbid it; for it doth not give power to subdue it. Rom. 5: 20;
7:11; 1 Cor. 15:56."
Again, as thou sawest the damsel sprinkle the room with, water,
upon which it was cleansed with pleasure this is to show thee that
when the gospel comes in the sweet and precious influences thereof
to the heart, then, I say, even as thou sawest the damsel lay the
dust fry sprinkling the floor with water, so is sin vanquished and
subdued, and the soul made clean through the faith of it, and
consequently fit for the King of glory to inhabit. John 14: 21-23;
15:3; Acts 15:9; Rom. 16: 25, 26; Eph. 5:26.
When Christ dwells in my heart by faith and the moral law dwells in
my members, the one to keep up peace with God, the other to keep my
conversation in a good decorum, then am I right, and not till then.
But this will not be done without much experience, diligence, and
delight in Christ. For there is nothing that Satan more desires,
than that the law may abide in the conscience of an awakened
Christian, and there take up the place of Christ and faith; for he
knows if this may be obtained, the veil is presently drawn over the
face of the soul, and the heart darkened as to the knowledge of
Christ; and being darkened, the man is driven into despair of mercy,
or is put upon it to work for life. There is therefore much
diligence required of him that will keep these two in their places
assigned them of God; much diligent study of the word, diligent
prayer, with diligence to walk with God in the world.
When this law with its thundering threatenings doth attempt to lay
hold on thy conscience, shut it out with a promise of grace: cry,
The inn is taken up already; the Lord Jesus is here entertained, and
here is no room for the law. Indeed, if it will be content with
being my informer, and so lovingly leave off to judge me, I will be
content; it shall be in iny sight, I will also delight therein: but
otherwise, I being now made upright without it, and that too with
that righteousness which this law speaks well of and approveth, I
may not, will not, cannot, dare not make it my saviour and judge,
nor suffer it to set up its government in my conscience; for by so
doing I fall from grace, and Christ Jesus doth profit me nothing.
The sum then of what hath been said is this: the Christian hath now
nothing to do with the law as it thundereth and burneth on Sinai, or
as it bindeth the conscience to wrath and the displeasure of God for
sin; for from its thus appearing he is freed by faith in Christ. Yet
he is to have regard thereto, and is to count it holy, just, and
good; which that he may do, he is always, whenever he seeth or
regards it, to remember that he who giveth it to us is MERCIFUL,
GRACIOUS, LONG-SUFFERING, and ABUNDANT IN GOODNESS AND TRUTH.
Here thou mayst say, O law, thou mayst roar against sin, but thou
canst not reach me; thou mayst curse and condemn, but not MY SOUL;
for I have a righteous Jesus, a holy Jesus, a soul-saving Jesus, and
he hath delivered me from thy threats, thy curses, thy
condemnations; I am out of thy reach and out of thy bounds; I am
brought into another covenant, under better promises of life and
salvation, free promises to comfort me without my merit, even
through the blood of Jesus, the satisfaction given to God for me by
him.
The law is that which standeth at the entrance of the paradise of
God, as a flaming sword, turning every way to keep out those that
are not righteous with the righteousness of God--that have not skill
to come to the throne of grace by that new and living way which he
hath consecrated for us through the veil, that is to say, his flesh.
For though this law, I say, be taken away by Christ Jesus for all
that truly and savingly believe, yet it remains in full force and
power in every tittle of it against every soul of man that now shall
be found in his tabernacle, that is in himself and out of the Lord
Jesus; it lie'th, I say, like a lion rampant at the gates of heaven,
and will roar upon every unconverted soul, fiercely accusing every
one that new would gladly enter in through the gates into this city.
So then, he that can answer all its most perfect and legal commands,
and that can live in the midst of devouring fire and there enjoy God
and solace himself, he shall dwell on high and shall not be hurt by
this law. His place of defence shall be the munitions of rocks;
bread shall be given him, and his waters shall he sure; thine eyes
shall behold the King in his beauty, they shall see the land that is
very far off.
THE LAW A RULE OF LIFE.
The law is cast behind the back of many, when it should be carried
in the hand and heart that we might do it, to the end the gospel
which we profess might he glorified in the world. Let then the law
be with thee to love it, and do it in the spirit of the gospel, that
thou be not unfruitful in thy life. Let the law, I say, be with
thee, not as it comes from Moses, but from Christ; for though thou
art set free from the law as a covenant for life, yet thou still art
under the law to Christ; and it is to be received by thee, as out of
his hand, to be a rule for thy conversation in the world.
VI. DIVINE GRACE.
GRACE, LOYE, AND MERCY.
_I_ FIND that the goodness of God to his people is diversely
expressed in his word, sometimes by the word grace, sometimes by the
word love, and sometimes by the word mercy. When it is expressed by
that word grace, then it is to show that what he doeth is of his
princely will, his royal bounty, and sovereign pleasure. When it is
expressed by that word love, then it is to show us that his
affection was and is in what he doeth, and that he doeth what he
doeth for us with complacency and delight. But when it is set forth
to us under the notion of mercy, then it bespeaks us to be in a
state both wretched and miserable, and that his bowels and
compassions yearn over us in this our fearful plight.
GRACE DESCRIBED.
There are many things which men call the grace of God that are not.
1. The light and knowledge that are in every man.
2. That natural willingness that is in man to be saved.
3. That power that is in man by nature to do something, as he
thinketh, towards his own salvation.
But do thou remember that the grace of God is his good-will and
great love to sinners, in his Son Jesus Christ; by the which
good-will they are sanctified, through the offering up of the body
of Jesus Christ once for all.
His blood is not laws, nor ordinances, nor commandments, but a
price, a redeeming price. He justifies us by bestowing upon us, not
by expecting from us. He justifies us by his grace, not by our
works.
OPERATION OF GRACE.
The good child is not the first-born, but Abel. God often doth as
Jacob did, even cross hands in bestowing blessings, giving that
which is best to him that is least esteemed; for Cain was "the man"
in Eve's esteem: she thought, when she had him, she had got an
inheritance; but as for Abel (vanity,) he was little worth; by his
name they showed how little they set by him.
It is so with the sincere to this day; they bear not the name of
glory with the world: Cain with them is the profitable son; Abel is
of no credit with them, neither see they form or comeliness in him;
he is the melancholy or lowering child whose countenance spoils the
mirth of the world. "The heart of the wise is in the house of
mourning, but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth."
Abel, last in appearance, but in truth the first in grace; as it
also is at this day. Who do so flutter it out as our ruffling,
formal worshippers? Alas, the good, the sincere, the humble, they
seem to be least and last; but the conclusion of the tragedy will
make manifest that the first is last and the last first.
"And the Lord had respect unto Abel and to his offering." Herein are
the true footsteps of grace discovered; the person must be the first
in favor with God---the person first, the performance afterwards:
for though it be true among men that the gift makes way for the
acceptance of the person, yet in the order of grace it is after
another manner; for if the person be not first accepted, the
offering must be abominable; for it is not a good work that makes a
good man, but a good man makes a good work. The fruit does not make
a good tree, but a good tree bringeth forth good fruit.
Abel then presented his person and offering, as shrouding both by
faith under the righteousness of Christ, which lay wrapped up in the
promise; but Cain stands upon his own legs, and so presents his
offering. Abel therefore is accepted, both his person and offering,
while Cain remains accursed. This then makes the difference hetwixt
Abel and his brother; Abel had faith, but Cain had none. Abel's
faith covered him with Jesus Christ; therefore he stood righteous in
his person before God.
There is a man proceeded against for life by the law and the
sentence of death is in conclusion most justly and righteously
passed upon him by the judge. Suppose now, that after this, this man
lives and is exalted to honor, enjoys great things, and is put into
place of trust and power, and this by him that he has offended, even
by him that did pass the sentence upon him.
What will all say, or what will they conclude, even upon the very
first hearing of this story? Will they not say, "Well, whoever he
was that found himself wrapped up in this strange providence, must
thank the mercy of a gracious prince; for all these things bespeak
grace and favor?"
Forgiveness is according to the riches of God's grace, wherein he
has abounded towards us in all wisdom and prudence. Grace can
continue to pardon, favor, and save---from falls, in falls, and out
of falls. Grace can comfort, relieve, and help those that have hurt
themselves; and grace can bring the unworthy to glory. This the law
cannot do; this man cannot do; this angels cannot do; this God
cannot do, but only by the riches of his grace, through the
redemption that is in Christ Jesus.
A throne is the seat of majesty and greatness; it is not for things
of an inferior quality to ascend or assume a throne. Now, then,
since this river of water of life proceeds from the throne, it
intimates that in grace and mercy there is great majesty; for grace,
as it proceeds, has a voice from the throne. And indeed there is
nothing in heaven or earth that can so awe the heart as the grace of
God. Hos. 3: 5. It is that which makes a man fear; it is that which
makes a man tremble; it is that which makes a man how and bend, and
break to pieces. Jer. 33: 9; Exod. 34: 6-9. Nothing has such
majesty, and commanding greatness in and upon the hearts of the sons
of men, as has the grace of God. There is nothing overmastereth the
heart like grace, and so obligeth to sincere and unfeigned obedience
as that.
Strong grace makes corruptions weak and strikes them through, laying
them at the point of death, always gasping for life.
Mercy and the revelation thereof is the only antidote against sin.
It is of a thawing nature; it will loose the heart that is frozen up
in sin; yea, it will make the unwilling willing to come to Christ
for life.
Some say, When grace and a good nature meet together, they do make
shining Christians: but I say, When grace and a great sinner meet,
and when grace shall subdue that great sinner to itself, and shall
operate after its kind in the soul of that great sinner, then we
have a shining Christian.
Men may fall by sin, but cannot raise up themselves without the help
of grace.
There were two men that went on pilgrimage; the one began when he
was young, the other when he was old: the young man had strong
corruptions to grapple with, the old man's were weak with the decays
of nature: the young man trode his steps as even as did the old one,
and was every way as light as he. Who now, or which of them, had
their graces shining clearest, since both seemed to be alike? The
young man's, doubtless; for that which heads it against the greatest
opposition, gives best demonstration that it is strongest.
As nature, even where grace is, cannot without the assistance of
that grace do any thing acceptably before God; so grace received, if
it be not also supplied with more grace, cannot cause that we
continue to do acceptable service to God.
A present dispensation of grace is like a good meal, a seasonable
shower, or a penny in one's pocket, all of which will serve for the
present necessity. But will that good meal that I ate last week
enable me without supply to do a good day's work in this? or, will
that seasonable shower which fell last year, be, without supplies, a
seasonable help to the grain and grass that is growing now? or will
that penny that supplied my want the other day--I say, will the same
penny also, without a supply, supply my wants to-day?
The day of grace is the day of expense; this is our spending time.
Hence we are called pilgrims and strangers in the earth; that is,
travellers from place to place, from state to state, from trial to
trial. Now, as the traveller at the fresh inn is made to spend fresh
money, so Christians, at a fresh temptation, at a new temptation,
are made to spend fresh and a new supply of grace. Great men, when
and while their sons are travellers, appoint that their bags of
money be lodged ready or conveniently paid in at such and such a
place; and so they meet with supplies. Why, so are the sons of the
great One; and he has allotted that we should travel beyond sea, or
at a great distance from our Father's house: wherefore he has
appointed that grace shall be provided for us, to supply at such a
place, such a state or temptation, as need requires. But withal, as
my lord expeeteth his son should acquaint him with the present
emptiness of his purse and with the difficulty he hath now to
grapple with; so God our Father expects that we should plead by
Christ our need at the throne of grace, in order to a supply of
grace. "Let us therefore come boldly to the throne of grace, that we
may obtain mercy and find grace to help in time of need."
Then I saw in my dream that the Interpreter took Christian by the
hand, and led him into a place where was a fire burning against a
wall, and one standing by it always casting much water upon it to
quench it; yet did the fire burn higher and hotter.
Then said Christian, "What means this?"
The Interpreter answered, "This fire is the work of grace that is
wrought in the heart; he that casts water upon it to extinguish and
put it out, is the devil; but in that thou seest the fire
notwithstanding burn higher and hotter, thou shalt also see the
reason of that." So he had him about to the backside of the wall,
where he saw a man with a vessel of oil in his hand, of which he did
also continually cast, but secretly, into the fire.
Then said Christian, "What means this?"
The Interpreter answered, "This is Christ, who continually with the
oil of his grace maintains the work already begun in the heart; by
the means of which, notwithstanding what the devil can do, the souls
of his people prove gracious still. 2 Cor. 12: 9. And in that thou
sawest that the man stood behind the wall to maintain the fire; this
is to teach thee that it is hard for the tempter to see how this
work of grace is maintained in the soul."
There is to be seen at the bottom of this holy river, the glory of
God. We are saved, saved by grace, saved by grace through the
redemption that is in Christ, to the praise and glory of God. And
what a good bottom is here. Grace will not fail, Christ has been
sufficiently tried, and God will not lose his glory; therefore they
that drink of this river, shall doubtless be saved; to wit, they
that drink of it with a spiritual appetite to it.
It pleased God, for the glory of his wisdom, to make this the way;
to wit, to set up grace to reign. I have often thought, and
sometimes said, If God will be pleased with any way, surely he will
be pleased with his own. Now this is the way of his own devising,
the fruit and effect of his own wisdom. Wherefore, sinner, please
him, please him in that wherein he is well pleased; come to the
waters, cast thyself into them and fear not drowning; let God alone
to cause them to carry thee into his paradise, that thou mayest see
his throne.
Let us take notice of the carriage of God to man, and again of man
to God, in his conversion.
First, of God's carriage to man. He comes to him while he is in his
sins; he comes to him now, not in the heat and fire of his jealousy,
but in the cool of the day, in unspeakable gentleness, mercy, pity,
and love--not in clothing himself with vengeance, but in a way of
entreaty, and meekly beseecheth the sinner to be reconciled unto
him. 2 Cor. 5: 19, 20.
It is expected among men, that he who gives the offence, should be
the first in seeking peace; but, sinner, betwixt God and man it is
not so: not that we loved God, not that we chose God; but God was in
Christ reconciling the world unto himself, not imputing their
trespasses unto them. God is the first that seeketh peace; and in a
way of entreaty, he bids his ministers pray you in Christ's stead:
"As if God did beseech you by us, we pray you in Christ's stead, be
ye reconciled to God."
O sinner, wilt thou not open? Behold, God the Father and his Son
Jesus Christ stand both at the door of thy heart, beseeching there
for favor from thee, that thou wilt be reconciled to them; with the
promise, if thou wilt comply, to forgive thee all thy sins. O grace,
O amazing grace! To see a prince entreat a beggar to receive an
alms, would be a strange sight; to see a king entreat the traitor to
accept of mercy, would be a stranger sight than that; but to see God
entreat a sinner, to hear Christ say, "I stand at the door and
knock, with a heart full and a heaven full of grace to bestow upon
him that opens;" this is such a sight as dazzles the eyes of angels.
What sayest thou now, sinner? Is not this God rich in mercy? hath
not this God great love for sinners? Nay, further, that thou mayst
not have any ground to think that all this is hut complimenting,
there is also here declared, that "God hath made him to be sin for
us, who knew no sin, that we might be made the righteousness of God
in him." If God would have stuck at any thing, it would have been at
the death of his Son; but he delivered him up for us freely: how
shall he not then with him freely give us all things?
Let us now come to the carriage of these sinners to God, and that
from the first day he begins to deal with their souls, even to the
time that they are to be taken up into heaven.
1. And to begin with God's ordinary dealing with sinners: when at
first he ministers conviction to them by his word, how strangely do
they behave themselves. They love not to have their consciences
touched; they like not to ponder upon what they have been, what they
are, or what is like to become of them hereafter: such thoughts they
count unmanly and hurtful. And now they are for any thing rather
than the word: an alehouse, a playhouse, sports, pleasures, sleep,
the world, and what not, so they may stave of the power of the word
of God.
2. If God now comes up closer to them, and begins to fasten
conviction upon the conscience, though such convictions be the first
step to faith and repentance, yea, to life eternal, yet what shifts
will they have to forget them and wear them off! Yea, although they
now begin to see that they must either turn or turn, yet ofttimes
they will study to waive a present conversion. They object, they are
too young to turn yet; seven years hence is time enough; when they
are old, or come upon a sick bed.
O what an enemy is man to his own salvation! I am persuaded that God
has visited some of you often with his word, and you have thrown
water, as fast as he hath by the word cast fire, upon your
conscience.
Christian, what had become of thee, if God had taken thy denial for
an answer, and said, "Then will I carry the word of salvation to
another, and he will hear it?"
"Sinner, turn!" says God. "Lord, I cannot attend to it," says the
sinner. "Turn or burn," says God. "I will venture that," says the
sinner. "Turn and be saved," says God. "I cannot leave my
pleasures," says the sinner; "sweet sins, sweet pleasures, sweet
delights," says the sinner. But what grace is it in God thus to
parley with the sinner! O the patience of God to a poor sinner! What
if God should now say, "Then get thee to thy sins, get thee to thy
delights, get thee to thy pleasures, take them for thy portion; they
shall be all thy heaven, all thy happiness, all thy portion?"
3. But God comes again, and shows the sinner the necessity of
turning now or not at all; yea, and giveth the sinner this
conviction so strongly that he cannot put it if. But behold, the
sinner has one spark of enmity still: if he must needs turn now, he
will either turn from one sin to another, from great ones to little
ones, from many to few, or from all to one, and there stop. But
perhaps convictions will not thus leave him. Why, then he will turn
from profaneness to the law of Moses, and will dwell as long as God
will let him, upon his own seeming goodness. And now observe him, he
is a great stickler for legal performance; now he will be a good
neighbor, he will pay every man his own, will leave off his
swearing, the ale-house, his sports, and carnal delights; he will
read, pray, talk of scripture, and be a very busy one in religion,
such as it is; now he will please God, and make him amends for all
the wrong he has done him, and will feed him with chapters, and
prayers, and promises, and vows, and a great many more such dainty
dishes as these; persuading himself that now he must be fair for
heaven, and thinks besides that he serveth God as well as any man:
but all this while he is as ignorant of Christ as the stool he sits
on, and no nearer heaven than was the blind Pharisee, only he has
got in a cleaner way to hell than the rest of his neighbors are.
Might not God now cast off this sinner, and cast him out of his
sight? might he not leave him to his own choice, to be deluded by
and to fall in his own righteousness, because he trusts to it and
commits iniquity?
But grace, preventing grace preserves him. It is true, this turn of
the sinner is a turning short of Christ. But,
4. God in this way of the sinner will mercifully follow him, and
show him the shortness of his performances, the emptiness of his
duties, and the uncleanness of his righteousness. This I speak of
the sinner, the salvation of whose soul is graciously intended and
contrived of God; for he shall by gospel light be wearied out of
all; he shall be made to see the vanity of all, and that the
personal righteousness of Jesus Christ, and that only, is it which
of God is ordained to save the sinner from the due reward of his
sins. But behold, the sinner now, at the sight and sense of his own
nothingness, falleth into a kind of despair; for although he hath it
in him to presume of salvation through the delusiveness of his own
good opinion of himself, yet he hath it not in himself to have a
good opinion of the grace of God in the righteousness of Christ.
Wherefore he concludeth that if salvation be alone of the grace of
God through the righteousness of Christ, and all of a man's own is
utterly rejected as to the justification of his person with God,
then he is cast away.
Now, the reason of this sinking of heart is the sight that God has
given him--a sight of the uncleanness of his best performance. The
former sight of his immoralities did somewhat distress him, and make
him betake himself to his own good deeds to ease his conscience;
wherefore this was his prop, his stay. But behold, now God has taken
this from under him, and now he falls. Wherefore his best doth also
now forsake him, and fly away like the morning dew.
Besides, this revelation of the emptiness of his own righteousness
brings also with it a further discovery of the naughtiness of his
heart, in its hypocrisies, pride, unbelief, hardness of heart,
deadness, and backwardness to all gospel obedience; which sight of
himself lies like millstones upon his shoulders, and sinks him yet
further into doubts and fears of damnation. For bid him now receive
Christ; he answers, he cannot, he dares not. Ask him why he cannot;
he will answer, he has no faith nor hope in his heart. Tell him that
grace is offered him freely; he says, "But I have no heart to
receive it." Besides, he finds not, as he thinks, any gracious
disposition in his soul, and therefore concludes he does not belong
to God's mercy, nor has an interest in the blood of Christ, and
therefore dares not presume to believe. Wherefore he sinks in his
heart, he dies in his thoughts, he doubts, he despairs, and
concludes he shall never be saved.
5. But behold, the God of all grace leaves him not in this distress,
but comes up now to him closer than ever; he sends the Spirit of
adoption, the blessed Comforter, to him to tell him God is love, and
therefore not willing to reject the broken in heart; bids him cry
and pray for an evidence of mercy to his soul, and says,
"Peradventure you may be hid in the day of the Lord's anger."
At this the sinner takes some encouragement; yet he can get no more
than that which will hang upon a mere probability, which, by the
next doubt that ariseth in the heart, is blown quite away, and the
soul left again in its first plight, or worse; where he lamentably
bewails his miserable state, and is tormented with a thousand fears
of perishing; for he hears not a word from heaven, perhaps for
several weeks together. Wherefore unbelief begins to get the mastery
of him, and takes off the very edge and spirit, of prayer, and
inclination to hear the word any longer; yea, the devil also claps
in with these thoughts, saying, "All your prayers, and hearing, and
reading, and godly company, which you frequent, will rise up in
judgment against you at last; therefore better it is, if you must be
damned, to choose as easy a place in hell as you can."
The soul at this being quite discouraged, thinks to do as it has
been taught, and with dying thoughts it begins to faint when it goes
to prayer or to hear the word. But behold, when all hope seems to be
quite gone, and the soul concludes, "I die, I perish," in comes on a
sudden the Spirit of God again, with some good word of God which the
soul never thought of before; which word of God commands a calm in
the soul, makes unbelief give place, encourages to hope and wait
upon God again: perhaps it gives some little sight of Christ to the
soul, and of his blessed undertaking for sinners.
But behold, so soon as the power of things again begins to wear off
the heart, the sinner gives place to unbelief, questions God's
mercy, and fears damning again. He also entertains hard thoughts of
God and Christ, and thinks former encouragements were fancies,
delusions, or mere think-sos.
And why doth not God now cast the sinner to hell, for thus abusing
his mercy and grace? O no: "He will have mercy on whom he will have
mercy, and he will have compassion on whom he will have compassion;"
wherefore goodness and mercy shall follow him all the days of his
life, that he may dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.
6. God, therefore, after all these provocations, comes by his Spirit
to the soul again, and brings sealing grace and pardon to the
conscience, testifying to it that its sins are forgiven and that
freely, for the sake of the blood of Christ. And now has the sinner
such a sight of the grace of God in Christ, as kindly breaks his
heart with joy and comfort. Now the soul knows what it is to eat
promises; it also knows what it is to eat and drink the flesh and
blood of Jesus Christ by faith; now it is driven by the power of his
grace to its knees, to thank God for forgiveness of sins and for
hopes of an inheritance among them that are sanctified by faith
which is in Christ; now it has a calm and a sunshine; now "he washes
his steps with butter, and the rock pours him out rivers of oil."
7. But after this, perhaps the soul grows cold again; it also
forgets the grace received, and waxes carnal; begins again to hanker
after the world; loseth the life and savor of heavenly things;
grieves the Spirit of God; wofully backslides; casteth off closet
duties quite, or else retains only the formality of them; is a
reproach to religion, and grieves the heart of them that are awake
and tender of God's name.
But what will God now do? Will he take this advantage to destroy the
sinner? No. Will he let him alone in his apostasy? No. Will he leave
him to recover himself by the strength of his now languishing grace?
No. What then? Why, he will seek this man out till he finds him, and
bring him home to himself again: "For thus saith the Lord God,
Behold I, even I, will both search my sheep, and seek them out, as a
shepherd seeketh out his flock in the day that he is among the sheep
that are scattered; so will I seek out my sheep, and will deliver
them out of all places where they have been scattered. I will seek
that which was lost, and bring again that which was driven away; I
will bind up that which was broken, and will strengthen that which
was sick." Ezek. 34:11-16.
Of God's ordinary way of fetching the backslider home I will not now
discourse; namely, whether he always breaketh his bones for his
sins, as he broke David's, or whether he will all the days of his
life for this leave him under guilt and darkness; or whether he will
kill him now, that he may not be condemned in the day of judgment,
as he dealt with them at Corinth. I Cor. 11: 30-32.
God is wise, and can tell how to imbitter backsliding to them he
loveth. He can break their bones and save them; he can lay them in
the lowest pit, in darkness and the deep, and save them; he can slay
them as to this life, and save them. And herein appears wonderful
grace, that Israel is not forsaken.
8. But suppose God deals not either of these ways with the
backslider, but shines upon him again, and seals up to him the
remission of his sins a second time, saying, "I will heal their
backslidings, and love them freely." What will the soul do now?
Surely it will walk humbly now, and holily all its days. It will
never backslide again, will it? It may happen it will not; it may
happen it will. It is just as his God keeps him; for although his
sins are of himself, his standing is of God; I say, his standing
while he stands, and his recovery if he falls, are both of God.
Wherefore, if God leaves him a little, the next gap he finds, away
he is gone again: "My people," says God, "are bent to backsliding
from me."
Here is grace. So many times as the soul backslides, so many times
God brings him back again--I mean the soul that must be saved by
grace; he renews his pardons and multiplies them. Yea, for aught I
know, there are some saints, and they not long-lived either, that
must receive, before they enter into life, millions of pardons from
God for these; and every pardon is an act of grace, through the
redemption that is in Christ's blood.
The first step to the cure of a wounded conscience is for thee to
know the grace of God, especially the grace of God as to
justification.
Grace can pardon our ungodliness and justify us with Christ's
righteousness; it can put the Spirit of Jesus Christ within us; it
can help us when we are down; it can heal us when we are wounded; it
can multiply pardons, as we through frailty multiply transgressions.
GRACE ABUSED.
A self-righteous man, a man of the law, takes grace and mercy for
his greatest enemy.
The best of things that are of this world are some way hurtful.
Honey is hurtful, wine is hurtful, silver and gold are hurtful; but
grace is not hurtful. Never did man yet catch harm by the enjoyment
and fulness of the grace of God. There is no fear of excess or
surfeiting here. Grace makes no man proud, no man wanton, no man
haughty, no man careless or negligent as to his duty that is
incumbent upon him, towards either God or man. No; grace keeps a man
low in his own eyes, humble, self-denying, penitent, watchful,
savory in good things, charitable: and makes him kindly affectioned
to the brethren, pitiful and courteous to all men.
True, there are men in the world that abuse the grace of God, as
some are said to turn it into wantonness and into lasciviousness.
But this is not because grace has any such tendency, but because
such men are themselves empty of grace, and have only done as death
and hell have done with wisdom, "heard the fame thereof with their
ears."
Some receive the rain of God and the droppings of his clouds,
because they continually sit under the means of grace. But alas,
they receive it as stones receive showers, or as dunghills receive
the rain: they either abide as hard as stones still, or else return
nothing to heaven for his mercy, hut as dunghills do, a company of
stinking fumes.
To slight grace, to do despite to the Spirit of grace, to prefer our
own works, thus derogating from grace---what is it but to contemn
God? to contemn him when he is on the throne, when he is on the
throne of his glory? I say again, it is to spit in his face, even
then when he commands thee to how before him, to be subject unto
him, and to glorify the grace of his glory, that proceeds from the
throne of his glory. If men in old time were damned because they
glorified him not as God, shall not they be more than damned, if
more than damned can he, who glorify him not for his grace? And, to
he sure, none glorify him for his grace but those that close in
therewith, and submit themselves thereto. Talkers of grace are but
mockers of God, but flatterers of God. Grace God has exalted; has
set it upon the throne, and so made it a king, and given it
authority to reign; and thou goest by and nearest thereof, but wilt
not submit thyself thereto, neither thy soul, nor thy life. Why,
what is this more than to flatter God with thy lips, and than to lie
unto him with thy tongue? What is this but to count him less wise
than thyself, while he seeks glory by that by which thou wilt not
glorify him---while he displays his grace before thee in the world
from the throne, and as thou goest by, with a nod thou callest it a
fine thing, but followest that which leadeth therefrom? Tremble,
tremble, ye sinners, that have despised the riches of his goodness.
The day is coming when ye shall behold and wonder and perish, if
grace prevaileth not with you to be content to be saved by it to the
praise of its glory, and to the glory of him who hath set it upon
the throne. Acts 13: 38-41.
There is a spring that yields water good and clear, but the channels
through which this water comes to us are muddy, foul, or dirty; now
of the channels the waters receive a disadvantage, and so come to us
as savoring of what came not with them from the fountain, hut from
the channels.
This is the cause of the coolness, and of the weakness, and of the
flatness, and of the many extravagances that attend some of our
desires: they come warm from the Spirit and grace of God in us; hut
as hot water running through cold pipes, or as clear water running
through dirty convey ances, so our desires gather soil.
GRACE--THE WATER OF LIFE.
"And he showed me a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal,
proceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb." Rev. 22: 1.
This "water of life" is the Spirit and grace of God, and the spirit
of life. Zech. 12: 10; John 4: 10, 11, 14; 7: 37-39; Rev. 11: 11.
A throne is the seat of justice: "Justice and judgment are the
habitation of thy throne." Psal. 89: 14. And it is also from justice
that this river of grace flows to us: justice to Christ, and justice
to those that are found in him. Rom. 3: 24. God declares that he can
justly justify, justly forgive: now, if he can justly justify and
justly forgive, then can he give grace and cause that it should
proceed to, yea, flow after us as a river. But whence must this
come? the text says, from the throne--from the throne, the seat of
justice; for from thence, by reason of what He hath found in Christ
for us, he in a way of righteousness and justice lets out to us
rivers of his pleasures, whoso original is that great and wide sea
of mercy that flows in his infinite heart beyond thought.
There is a river, clear and pleasant, the streams whereof make glad
the city of God.
These are the waters that the doves love to sit by, because by the
clearness of these streams they can see their pretty selves as in a
glass. Song 5: 12.
These he the streams where the doves wash their eyes, and by which
they solace themselves and take great content. These streams are
instead of a looking-glass; their clearness presents us with an
opportunity of seeing our own features.
As in fair waters a man may see the hody of the sun, and of the
moon, and of the stars, and the very body of heaven; so ho that
stands upon the bank of this river, and that washeth his eyes with
this water, may see the Son of God, the stars of God, the glory of
God, and the habitation that God has prepared for his people. And
are not these pleasant sights? Is not this excellent water? Has not
this river pleasant streams?
Some men fly from the "river of the water of life," as from a bear;
arid some are afraid to drink of it, for fear it should he poison
unto them. Some again, dare not take it, because it is not mixed,
and as they, poor souls, imagine, qualified and made toothsome by a
little of that which is called the wisdom of this world. Thus one
shucks, another shrinks, and another will none of God. Meanwhile,
whoso shall please to look into this river, shall find it harmless
and clear; yea, offering itself to the consciences of all men to
make trial if it be not the only chief good, the only necessary
waters, the only profitable for the health of the soul, of all the
things that are in the world, and as clear of mischief as is the sun
of spots.
In old times the ancients had their habitations by the rivers; yea,
we read of Aroer, that stood upon the brink of the river Arnon.
Balaam also had his dwelling in his city Pethor, by the river of the
land of the children of his people. O, by the river side is the
pleasantest dwelling in the world; and of all rivers, the river of
the water of life is the best. They that dwell there shall not
hunger nor thirst, neither shall the heat or sun smite them; for he
that hath mercy on them shall lead them, even by springs of water
shall he guide them. Isa. 49: 10; Psal. 1: 3; Jer. 17: 8.
Trees planted by the rivers, and that spread out their roots by the
rivers, they are the flourishing trees, they bring forth their fruit
in their season. And the promise is, that men that take up their
dwellings by this river of water of life, shall be fruitful as such
trees.
If thou be a Christian, thou hast more than an ordinary call and
occasion to abide by these waters; thy things will not grow but by
these waters. Weeds, and the excellences of most men, we may find in
the barren wilderness; they grow under every hedge, Jer. 31: 12; but
thine are garden, and so choice, things, and will not thrive without
much water; no, not without the water of God's river. Isa. 21: 1-3.
Dwell therefore here, that thy soul may be as a watered garden.
By the characters that are given of this water of life, thou art
capacitated to judge, when a notion, a doctrine, an opinion comes to
thy ears, whether it is right good and wholesome, or how. This river
is pure, is clear, is pure and clear as crystal. Is the doctrine
offered unto thee so? or is it muddy and mixed with the doctrines of
men? Look, man, and see if the foot of the worshippers of Bel
[Footnote: Story of Bel and the dragon in the Apychrypha.] be not
there; and if the waters be not fouled thereby. What water is fouled
is not the water of life, or at least, not the water of life in its
clearness. Wherefore, if thou findest it not right, go up higher to
the spring-head; for always the nearer to the spring, the more pure
and clear is the water. Fetch then thy doctrine from afar, if thou
canst not have it good nearer hand. Job 36: 3. Thy life lies at
stake; the counterfeit of things is dangerous; every body that is
aware, is afraid thereof. Now a counterfeit here is most dangerous,
is most destructive; wherefore take heed how you hear what you hear;
for, as men say of the fish, by your color it will be seen what
waters you swim in. Wherefore look you well to yourselves.
The grace of God is called a river, to show that it is only suited
to those who are capable of living therein. Water, though it is that
which every creature desireth, yet is not an element in which every
creature can live. Who is it that would not have the benefit of
grace, of a throne of grace? But who is it that can live by grace?
even none but those whose temper and constitution is suited to
grace. Hence, as the grace of God is compared to a river, so those
that live by grace are compared to fish; for that, as water is that
element in which the fish liveth, so grace is that which is the life
of the saint. "And there shall be a very great multitude of fish,
because these waters shall come thither; for they shall he healed,
and every thing shall live whither the river cometh." Ezek. 47: 9.
Art thou a fish, man--art thou a fish? canst thou live in the water?
canst thou live always, and nowhere else hut in the water? is grace
thy proper element? The fish dieth if she be taken out of the water,
unless she be timely put in again; the saint dieth if he be not in
this river. Take him from his river, and nothing can make him live;
let him have water, water of life enough, and nothing can make him
die.
I know that there are some things besides fish that can make a shift
to live in the water; but the water is not their proper, their only
proper element. The frog can live in the water, but not in the water
only; the otter can live in the water, hut not in the water only.
Give some men grace and the world, grace and sin--admit them to make
use of their lusts for pleasure, and of grace to remove their guilt,
and they will make a pretty good shift, as we say; they will finely
scrabble on in a profession. But hold them to grace only, confine
their life to grace, put them into the river and let them have
nothing hut river, and they die; the word, and way, and nature of
grace, is to them as light bread, and their soul can do no other but
loathe it, for they are not suited and tempered for that element.
VII. CHRIST.
THE INCARNATION OF CHRIST.
THE first main design of the life and conversation of the Lord
Jesus, was that thereby God, the Eternal Majesty, according to his
promise, might be seen by, and dwell with, mortal men. For the
Godhead being altogether in its own nature invisible, and yet
desirous to be seen by and dwell with the children of men, therefore
was the Son, who is the self-same substance with the Father, clothed
with or tabernacled in our flesh, that in that flesh the nature and
glory of the Godhead might be seen by and dwell with us. "The word
was made flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory;" what
glory? "the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of
grace and truth." Again, "The life"--that is, the life of God in the
works and conversation of Christ--"was manifest, and we have seen it
and bear witness, and show unto you that eternal life which was with
the Father and was manifested unto us." And hence he is called the
image of the invisible God; or he by whom the invisible God is most
perfectly presented to the sons of men.
Did I say before that the God of glory is desirous to be seen of us?
Even so also have the pure in heart a desire that it should be so.
"Lord," say they, "show us the Father, and it sufficeth us." And
therefore the promise is for their comfort, that "they shall see
God." But how then must they see him? Why, in the person, and by the
life and works of Jesus, When Philip, under a mistake, thought of
seeing God some other way than in and by this Lord Jesus Christ,
what is the answer? "Have I been so long time with you," saith
Christ, "and hast thou not known me, Philip? He that hath seen me,
hath seen the Father; and how sayest thou then, Show us the Father?
Believest thou not that I am in the Father, and the Father in me?
The words that I speak unto you, I speak not of myself; hut the
Father, that dwelleth in me, he doeth the works. Believe me that I
am in the Father, and the Father in me, or else believe me for the
very work's sake."
See, here, that both the words and works of the Lord Jesus were not
to show you, and so to call you back to the holiness we had lost,
but to give us visions of the perfections that are in the Father.
"He hath given us the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of
Jesus Christ." And hence it is that the apostle, in that brief
collection of the wonderful mystery of godliness, places this in the
front thereof: "God was manifest in the flesh"--was manifested in
and by the person of Christ, when in the flesh he lived among us;
manifest, I say, for this as one reason, that the pure in heart, who
long after nothing more, might see him. "I beseech thee," said
Moses, "show me thy glory." "And will God indeed dwell with men on
the earth?" saith Solomon.
Though Adam be called the image or similitude of God, yet but so as
that he was the shadow of a more excellent image. Adam was a type of
Christ, who only is the express image of his Father's person, and
the likeness of his excellent glory; for those things that were in
Adam were but of a human, but of a created substance; but those
things that were in Christ, of the same divine and eternal
excellency with the Father.
Is Christ then the image of the Father, simply as considered of the
same divine and eternal excellency with him? Certainly not; for an
image is doubtless inferior to that of which it is a figure.
Understand, then, that Christ is the image of the Father's glory, as
born of the Virgin Mary, yet so as being very God also: not that his
Godhead in itself was a shadow or image, but by the acts and doing
of that man, every act being infinitely perfect by virtue of his
Godhead, the Father's perfections were made manifest to flesh. An
image is to be looked upon, and by being looked upon, another thing
is seen; so by the person and doings of the Lord Jesus, they that
indeed could see him as he was, discovered the perfection and glory
of the Father. "Philip, he that hath seen me, hath seen the Father;
and how sayest thou then, Show us the Father?" Neither the Father
nor the Son can by us at all be seen, as they are simply and
entirely in their own essence. Therefore the person of the Father
must be seen by us through the Son, as consisting of God and man;
the Godhead, by working effectually in the manhood, showing clearly
there through the infinite perfection and glory of the Father. "The
word was made flesh, and" then "we beheld his glory, the glory of
the only begotten of his Father"--he being in his personal
excellencies, infinitely and perfectly, what is recorded of his
Father, "full of grace and truth."
When Jesus Christ came down from glory, it was that he might bring
us to glory; and that he might be sure not to fail, he clothed
himself with our nature--as if we should take a piece out of the
whole lump instead of the whole, Heb. 11:l4--and invested it with
that glory which he was in before he came down from heaven. Eph.
2:6.
THE HUMANITY OF CHRIST.
We perceive love, in that the human nature, the nature of man, not
of angels, is taken into union with God. Whoso could consider this
as it is possible for it to be considered, would stand amazed till
he died with wonder. By this very act of the heavenly Wisdom we have
an inconceivable pledge of the love of Christ to man; for in that he
hath taken into union with himself our nature, what doth it signify
but that he intends to take into union with himself our persons? For
this very purpose did he assume our nature. Wherefore we read that
in the flesh he took upon him, in that flesh he died for us, "the
just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God."
The psalmist saith of Christ, that "he was fairer than the children
of men;" and that, as I believe in his outward man as well as in his
inward part, he was the exactest, purest, completest, and
beautifulest creature that ever God made, till his visage was so
marred by his persecutions; for in all things he had, and shall have
the preeminence.
THE HUMILIATION OF CHRIST
Christ did not only come into our flesh, but also into our
condition, into the valley and shadow of death, where we were, and
where we are, as we are sinners.
That which would have been death to some--the laying aside of glory,
and the King of princes becoming a servant of the meanest form--this
he of his own goodwill was heartily content to do. Wherefore he that
was once the object of the fear of angels, is now become a little
creature, a worm, an inferior one, born of a woman, brought forth in
a stable, laid in a manger, scorned of men, tempted of devils, was
beholden to his creatures for food, for raiment, for harbor, and a
place wherein to lay his head when dead. In a word, he made himself
of no reputation, took upon him the form of a servant, and was made
in the likeness of men, that he might become capable to do this
kindness for us, to give himself a ransom for us.
And it is worth your noting, that all the while that he was in the
world, putting himself upon those other preparations which were to
be antecedent to his being made a sacrifice for us, no man, though
he told what he came about to many, had, as we read of, a heart once
to thank him for what he came about. No; they railed on him they
degraded him, they called him devil, they said he was mad and a
deceiver, a blasphemer of God and a rebel against the state; they
accused him to the governor; yea, one of his own disciples sold him,
another denied him, and they all forsook him, and left him to shift
for himself in the hands of his horrible enemies, who beat him with
their fists, spat on him, mocked him, crowned him with thorns,
scourged him, made a gazing-stock of him, and finally, hanged him up
by the hands and feet alive, and gave him vinegar to increase his
affliction, when he complained that his anguish had made him
thirsty. And yet all this could not take his heart off the work of
our redemption. To die he came, die he would, and die he did, before
he made his return to the Father, for our sins, that we might live
through him.
When Christ betook himself to his ministry, he lived upon the
charity of the people; when other men went to their own houses,
Jesus went to the mount of Olives.
THE GLORY OF CHRIST.
Christ is rich indeed, both in his blood, resurrection,
intercession, and all his offices, together with his relations, and
all his benefits; all which he bestoweth upon every one that
receiveth him, and maketh them unspeakably wealthy.
The pearl, as it is rich, and so worth much, so again it is
beautiful and amiable, even to take the eyes of all beholders; it
hath, I say, a very sweet and sparkling light and glory in it,
enough to take the eye and affect the heart of all those that look
upon it. And thus is Christ to all that come to him, and by him to
the Father. "My Beloved is white and ruddy, the chiefest of ten
thousand; his mouth is most sweet, he is altogether lovely."
THE LOVE OF CHRIST.
Here is love, that God sent his Son, his darling, his Son that never
offended, his Son that was always his delight. Herein is love, that
he sent him to save sinners; to save them by bearing their sins, by
bearing their curse, by dying their death, and by carrying their
sorrows. Here is love, in that while we were yet enemies, Christ
died for us; yea, here is love, in that while we were yet without
strength, Christ died for the ungodly.
Oh, blessed Jesus, how didst thou discover thy love to man in thy
thus suffering! And, O God the Father, how didst thou also declare
the purity and exactness of thy justice, in that, though it was
thine only, holy, innocent, harmless, and undefiled Son Jesus, that
did take on him our nature and represent our persons, answering for
our sins instead of ourselves; thou didst so wonderfully pour out
thy wrath upon him, to the making of him cry out, "My God, my God,
why hast thou forsaken me?" And, O Lord Jesus, what a glorious
conquest hast thou made over the enemies of our souls--even wrath,
sin, death, hell, and devils--in that thou didst wring thyself from
under the power of them all. And not only so, but hast led them
captive which would have led us captive; and also hast received for
us that glorious and unspeakable inheritance that eye hath not seen,
nor ear heard, neither hath it entered into the heart of man to
conceive.
The great Bringer of the gospel is the good Lord Jesus Christ
himself; he came and preached peace to them that the law proclaimed
war against. And to touch a little upon the dress in which, by the
gospel, Christ presents himself unto us, while he offers unto sinful
souls his peace by the tenders thereof:
He is set forth as born for us, to save our souls. Isa. 9:6; Luke
2:9-12; 1 Cor. 15:3; Gal. 3:13; Rom 10:4; Dan. 9:24.
He is set forth before us as bearing our sins for us, and suffering
God's wrath for us.
He is set forth before us as fulfilling the law for us, and as
bringing everlasting righteousness to us for our covering.
Again, as to the manner of his working out the salvation of sinners
for them, that they might have peace and joy, and heaven and glory
for ever:
He is set forth as sweating blood while he was in his agony,
wrestling with the thoughts of death, while he was to suffer for our
sins, that he might save the soul. Luke 22:24.
He is set forth as crying, weeping, and mourning under the lashes of
justice that he put himself under, and was willing to bear for our
sins.
He is set forth as betrayed, apprehended, condemned, spit on,
scourged, buffeted, mocked, crowned with thorns, crucified, pierced
with nails and a spear, to save the soul from being betrayed by the
devil and sin; to save it from being apprehended by justice and
condemned by the law; to save it from being spit on in a way of
contempt by holiness; to save it from being scourged with guilt of
sins as with scorpions; to save it from being continually buffeted
by its own conscience; to save it from being mocked at by God; to
save it from being crowned with ignominy and shame for ever; to save
it from dying the second death; to save it from wounds and grief for
ever.
Dost thou understand me, sinful soul? He wrestled with justice, that
thou mightest have rest; he wept and mourned, that thou mightst
laugh and rejoice; he was betrayed, that thou mightest go free; was
apprehended, that thou mightst escape; he was condemned, that thou
mightst be justified, and was killed, that thou mightest live; he
wore a crown of thorns, that thou mightest wear a crown of glory;
and was nailed to the cross with his arms wide open, to show with
what freeness all his merits shall be bestowed on the coming soul,
and how heartily he will receive it into his bosom.
All this he did of mere good-will, and offers the benefit thereof
unto thee freely. Yea, he comes unto thee in the word of the gospel,
with the blood running down from his head upon his face, with his
tears abiding upon his cheeks, as with the holes fresh in his hands
and his feet, and as with the blood still bubbling out of his side,
to pray thee to accept of the benefit, and to be reconciled to God
thereby.
By this we may see his love, in that as a forerunner he is gone into
heaven to take possession thereof for us; there to make ready and
prepare for us our summer-houses, our mansions and dwelling-places;
as if we were the lords, and he the servant. Oh, this love!
Thou Son of the Blessed, what grace was manifest in thy
condescension! Grace brought thee down from heaven; grace stripped
thee of thy glory; grace made thee poor and despicable; grace made
thee bear such burdens of sin, such burdens of sorrow, such burdens
of God's curse as are unspeakable.
O Son of God, grace was in all thy tears; grace came bubbling out of
thy side with thy blood; grace came forth with every word of thy
sweet mouth; grace came out where the whip smote thee, where the
thorns pricked thee, where the nails and spear pierced thee. O
blessed Son of God, here is grace indeed! unsearchable riches of
grace! unthought of riches of grace! grace to make angels wonder,
grace to make sinners happy, grace to astonish devils!
And what will become of them that trample under foot this Son of
God?
Christ is the desire of nations, the joy of angels, the delight of
the Father. What solace then must that soul be filled with, that
hath the possession of him to all eternity.
Who can tell how many heart-pleasing thoughts Christ had of us
before the world began? Who can tell how much he then was delighted
in that being we had in his affections, as also in the consideration
of our beings, believings, and being with him afterwards?
Christ was never so joyful in all his life, that we read of, as when
his sufferings grew near; then he takes the sacrament of his body
and blood into his own hands, and with thanksgiving bestows it among
his disciples; then he sings a hymn, then he rejoices, then he comes
with a "Lo, I come." O the heart, the great heart that Jesus had for
us to do us good! He did it with all the desire of his soul.
When a man shall not only design me a purse of gold, but shall
venture his life to bring it to me, this is grace indeed. But, alas,
what are a thousand such short comparisons to the unsearchable love
of Christ?
Christ Jesus has bags of mercy that were never yet broken up or
unsealed. Hence it is said, he has goodness laid up; things reserved
in heaven for his. And if he breaks up one of these bags, who can
tell what he can do?
It is not exaltation, nor a crown, nor a kingdom, nor a throne that
shall make Christ neglect his poor ones on earth; yea, because he is
exalted and on the throne, therefore it is that such a river of
life, with its golden streams, proceeds with us. And it shall
proceed, to be far higher than ever were the swellings of Jordan.
Rev. 22:1.
How the brave sun doth peep up from beneath,
Shows us his golden face, doth on us breathe;
Yea, he doth compass us around with glories
Whilst he ascends up to his highest stories,
Where he his banner over us displays
And gives us light to see our works and ways.
Nor are we now, as at the peep of light,
To question is it day or is it night;
The night is gone, the shadow's fled away,
And now we are most certain that 'tis day.
And thus it is when Jesus shows his face,
And doth assure us of his love and grace.
This makes Christ precious, if I consider how he did deliver me: it
was, I, with his life, his blood; it cost him tears, groans, agony,
separation from God; to do it, he endured his Father's wrath, bare
his Father's curse, and died thousands of deaths at once.
2. He did this while I was his enemy, without my desires, without my
knowledge, without my deserts; he did it unawares to me.
3. He did it freely, cheerfully, yea, he longed to die for me; yea,
heaven would not hold him for the love he had to my salvation, which
also he has effectually accomplished for me at Jerusalem.
Honorable Jesus! precious Jesus! loving Jesus! Jonathan's kindness
captivated David, and made him precious in his eyes for ever. "I am
distressed for thee, my brother Jonathan," said he; "very pleasant
hast thou been to me; thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love
of women." Why, what had Jonathan done? Oh, he had delivered David
from the wrath of Saul. But how much more should He be precious to
me, who hath saved me from death and hell--who hath delivered me
from the wrath of God? "The love of Christ constraineth us." Nothing
will so edge the spirit of a Christian as, "Thou wast slain, and
hast redeemed us to God by thy blood." This makes the heavens
themselves ring with joy and shouting.
THE DAY, BEFORE THE SUN-RISING.
But all this while, where's he whose golden rays
Drive night away, and beautify our days?
Where's he whose goodly face doth warm and heal,
And show us what the darksome nights conceal?
Where's he that thaws our ice, drives cold away?
Let's have him, or we care not for the day.
Thus 'tis with those who are possessed of grace;
There's naught to them like the Redeemer's face.
Oh thou loving one, Oh thou blessed one, thou descrvest to have me;
thou hast bought me; thou deservest to have me all; thou hast paid
for me ten thousand times more than I am worth!
O you that are upon this march [to hell,] I beseech you, consider a
little. What, shall Christ become a servant for you, and will you be
drudges for the devil? Shall Christ covenant with God for the
salvation of sinners, and shall sinners covenant with hell, death,
and the devil, for the damnation of their souls? Shall Christ come
down from heaven to earth to declare this to sinners; and shall
sinners stop their ears against these good tidings? Will you not
hear the errand of Christ, although he telleth you tidings of peace
and salvation? How if he had come, having taken a command from his
Father to damn you and to send you to dwell with devils in hell?
Sinners, hear this message, John 3: 16, 17, etc.; he speaketh no
harm, his words are eternal life; all men that give ear unto them
have eternal advantage by them-advantage, I say, that never hath an
end.
Besides, do but consider these two things; they may have some sway
upon thy soul.
1. When he came on his message, he came with tears in his eyes, and
did even weepingly tender the terms of reconciliation to them--I
say, with tears in his eyes. And when he came near the city with the
message of peace, beholding the hardness of their hearts, he wept
over it, and took up a lamentation over it, because he saw they
rejected his mercy, which was tidings of peace. I say, wilt thou
then slight a weeping Jesus, one that so loveth the soul that rather
than he will lose thee, he will with tears persuade thee?
2. Not only so, but also when he came, he came all on a gore of
blood, to proffer mercy to thee, to show thee still how dearly he
did love thee; as if he had said, "Sinner, here is mercy for thee;
but behold my bloody sweat, my bloody wounds, my accursed death;
behold, and see what danger I have gone through to come unto thy
soul. I am come indeed unto thee, and do bring thee tidings of
salvation, but it cost me my heart's blood before I could come at
thee, to give thee the fruits of my everlasting love."
THE RIGHTEOUSNESS OF CHRIST.
Many there are who, in the day of grace and mercy, despise those
things which are indeed the birthright to heaven, who yet when the
declining days appear will cry as loud as Esau, "Lord, Lord, open to
us;" but then, as Isaac would not repent, no more will God the
Father, but will say, "I have blessed these, yea, and they shall be
blessed; but as for you, Depart, you are workers of iniquity."
When I had thus considered these scriptures and found that thus to
understand them was not against, but according to the Scriptures,
this still added further to my encouragement and comfort, and also
gave a great blow to that objection--to wit, that the Scriptures
could not agree in the salvation of my soul.
And now remained only the hinder part of the tempest, for the
thunder was gone beyond me, only some drops did still remain that
now and then would fall upon me; but because my former frights and
anguish were very sore and deep, therefore it oft befell me still,
as it befalleth those that have been seared with the fire, I thought
every voice was, "Fire, fire'!" Every little touch would hurt my
tender conscience.
But one day, as I was passing into the field, and that too with some
dashes on my conscience, fearing lest yet all was not right,
suddenly this sentence fell upon my soul: "Thy righteousness is in
heaven;" and methought withal I saw with the eyes of my soul Jesus
Christ at God's right hand--there, I say, as my righteousness; so
that wherever I was, or whatever I was doing, God could not say to
me, he wanted my righteousness, for that was just before him. I also
saw, moreover, that it was not my good frame of heart that made my
righteousness better, nor yet my bad frame that made my
righteousness worse; for my righteousness was Jesus Christ himself,
"the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever."
Now did my chains fall off my legs indeed; I was loosed frorn my
afflictions and irons; my temptations also fled away; so that from
that time those dreadful scriptures [Footnote: Numb. 15:30; Jer.
7:16; Heb. 10:31; 12:27.] of God left off to trouble me: now went I
also home rejoicing, for the grace and love of God. So when I came
home, I looked to see if I could find that sentence, "Thy
righteousness is in heaven," but could not find such a saying;
wherefore my heart began to sink again, only that was brought to my
remembrance, "He is made unto us of God wisdom, righteousness,
sanctification, and redemption." By this word I saw the other
sentence true.
For by this scripture I saw that the man Christ Jesus, as he is
distinct from us as touching his bodily presence, so he is our
righteousness and sanctification before God. Here, therefore, I
lived for some time very sweetly at peace with God through Christ.
Oh, methought, Christ! Christ! there was nothing but Christ that was
before my eyes. I was now not only for looking upon this and the
other benefits of Christ apart, as of his blood; burial, or
resurrection, but considering him as a whole Christ--as he in whom
all these, and all his other virtues, relations, offices, and
operations met together, and that he sat on the right hand of God in
heaven.
Further, the Lord did also lead me into the mystery of the union
with the Son of God--that I was joined to him, and that I was flesh
of his flesh and bone of his bone; and now was that a sweet word to
me in Eph. 5:30. By this also was my faith in him as my
righteousness, the more confirmed in me; for if he and I were one,
then his righteousness was mine, his merits mine, his victory also
mine. Now, I could see myself in heaven and earth at once: in
heaven, by my Christ, by my Head, by my Righteousness and Life,
though on earth by body or person.
Let divine and infinite justice turn itself which way it will, it
finds One that can tell how to match it. For if it say, "I will
require the satisfaction of man," there is a man to satisfy its cry;
and if it say, "But I am an infinite God, and must and will have an
infinite satisfaction," here is One also that is infinite, even
"fellow" with God; fellow in his essence and being; fellow in his
power and strength; fellow in his wisdom; fellow in his mercy and
grace, together with the rest of the attributes of God. So that, let
justice turn itself which way it will, here is a complete person and
a complete satisfaction.
"The law," sayst thou, "must be obeyed." I answer, "Christ Jesus has
done that in his own person, and justified me thereby; and for my
part, I will not labor now to fulfil the law for justification, lest
I should undervalue the merits of the man Christ Jesus, and what he
has done without me; and yet will I labor to fulfil, if it were
possible, ten thousand laws, if there were so many. And Oh, let it
be out of love to my sweet Lord Jesus; for the love of Christ
constraineth me."
Though no man can be justified by the works of the law, yet unless
the righteousness and holiness by which they attempt to enter into
this kingdom be justified by the law, it is in vain once to think of
entering in at this strait gate. Now, the law justifieth not, but
upon the account of Christ's righteousness; if therefore thou be not
indeed found in that righteousness, thou wilt find the law lie just
in the passage into heaven to keep thee out.
CHRIST A COMPLETE SAVIOUR.
"This is the Father's will which hath sent me, that of all which he
hath given me, I should lose nothing, but should raise it up again
at the last day." John 6:39.
The Father therefore, in giving them to him to save them, must needs
declare unto us the following things:
1. That he is ABLE to answer this design of God to save them to the
uttermost sin, the uttermost temptation. Hence he is said to "lay
help on one that is mighty," mighty to save. Sin is strong, Satan is
also strong, death and the grave are strong, and so is the curse of
the law; therefore it follows, that this Jesus must needs be by God
the Father accounted almighty, in that he hath given his elect to
him to save them from these, and that in despite of all their force
and power. And he gave us testimony of this his might, when he was
employed in that part of our deliverance that called for a
declaration of it. He abolished death; he destroyed him that had the
power of death; he was the destruction of the grave; he hath
finished sin, and made an end of it; he hath vanquished the curse of
the law, nailed it to his cross, triumphed over them upon his cross,
and made a show of these things openly. Yea, and even now, as a sign
of his triumph and conquest, he is alive from the dead, and hath the
keys of death and hell in his own keeping.
2. The Father's giving them to him to save them, declares unto us
that he is and will be FAITHFUL in his office of Mediator, and that
therefore they shall be secured from the fruit and wages of their
sins, which is eternal damnation. And of this the Son hath already
given a proof; for when the time was come that his blood was by
divine justice required for their redemption, washing, and
cleansing, he as freely poured it out of his heart as if it had been
water out of a vessel; not sticking to part with his own life, that
the life which was laid up for his people in heaven might not fail
to be bestowed upon them.
3. The Father's giving of them to him to save them, declares that he
is and will be GENTLE AND PATIENT towards them under all their
provocations and miscarriages. It is not to be imagined, the trials
and provocations that the Son of God hath all along had with these
people that have been given to him to save. Indeed, he is said to be
A TRIED STONE; for he has been tried not only by the devil, guilt of
sin, death, and the curse of the law, but also by his people's
ignorance, unruliness, falls into sin, and declining to errors in
life and doctrine. Were we but capable of seeing how this Lord Jesus
has been tried, even by his people, ever since there was one of them
in the world, we should be amazed at his patience and gentle
carriages to them. It is said indeed, "The Lord is very pitiful,
slow to anger, and of great mercy." And indeed, if he had not been
so, he could never have endured their manners as he has done, from
Adam hitherto. Therefore are his pity and bowels towards his church
preferred above the pity and bowels of a mother towards her child.
"Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should not have
compassion on the son of her womb? Yea, they may forget, yet will I
not forget thee, saith the Lord."
God did once give Moses, as Christ's servant, a handful of his
people to carry them in his bosom, but no further than from Egypt to
Canaan; and this Moses, as is said of him by the Holy Ghost, was the
meekest man that was then to be found upon the earth. God gave them
to Moses that he might carry them in his bosom, that he might show
gentleness and patience towards them, under all the provocations
wherewith they would provoke him from that time till he had brought
them to their land. But he failed in the work; he could not exercise
it, because he had not that sufficiency of patience towards them.
But now it is said of the person speaking in the text, that "he
shall gather his lambs with his arm, shall carry them in his bosom,
and shall gently lead them that are with young."
4. The Father's giving them to him to save them, declares that he
hath a SUFFICIENCY OF WISDOM to wage with all those difficulties
that would attend him in his bringing his sons and daughters unto
glory. He hath made him to us to be wisdom; yea, he is called Wisdom
itself. And God saith, moreover, that he "shall deal prudently." And
indeed, he that shall take upon him to be the Saviour of the people,
had need be wise, because their adversaries are subtle above any.
Here they are to encounter the serpent, who for his subtlety
outwitted our father and mother when their wisdom was at highest.
But if we talk of wisdom, our Jesus is wise, wiser than Solomon,
wiser than all men, wiser than all angels; he is even "the wisdom of
God." And hence it is that he turneth sins, temptations,
persecutions, falls, and all things, for good unto his people.
I do not doubt but there is virtue enough in the blood of Christ,
would God Almighty so apply it, to save the souls of the whole
world. But it is the blood of Christ, his own blood, and he may do
what he will with his own. It is also the blood of God, and he also
may restrain its merits, or apply it as he sees good. But the coming
soul, he shall find and feel the virtue thereof, even the soul that
comes to God by Christ, for he is the man concerned in its worth.
There is sufficiency of merit in Christ to save a thousand times as
many more as are like to be saved by him.
No man needs at all to go about to come at life and peace and rest:
let him come directly from sin to grace, from Satan to Jesus Christ.
The cross, it stands and hath stood from the beginning as a way-mark
to the kingdom of heaven. Art thou inquiring the way to heaven? Why,
I tell thee Christ is the way; into him thou must get, into his
righteousness to be justified; and if thou art in him, thou wilt
presently see the cross: thou must go close by it, thou must touch
it, nay, thou must take it up, or else thou wilt quickly go out of
the way that leads to heaven, and turn up some of those crooked
lanes that lead down to the chambers of death.
Many there be that begin with grace and end with works, and think
that is the only way. Indeed, works will save from temporal
punishments, when their imperfections are purged from them by the
intercession of Christ; but to be saved and brought to glory, to be
carried through this dangerous world from my first moving after
Christ until I set foot within the gates of paradise, this is the
work of my Mediator, of my High-priest and Intercessor. It is he
that fetches us again when we are run away; it is he that lifts us
up when the devil and sin have thrown us down; it is he that
quickens us when we grow cold; it is he that comforts us when we
despair; it is he that obtains fresh pardon when we have contracted
sin, and that purges our consciences when they are laden with guilt.
I know that rewards do wait for them in heaven, that believe in
Christ, and shall do well on earth; but this is not a reward of
merit, but of grace. We are saved by Christ, brought to glory by
Christ, and all our works are no other ways made acceptable to God
but by the person and personal excellencies and works of Christ;
therefore, whatever the jewels are, and the bracelets and the
pearls, that thou shalt be adorned with as a reward of service done
for God in the world, for them thou must thank Christ, and before
all confess that he was the meritorious cause thereof.
Christ must be helpful to thee every way, or he will be helpful to
thee no way; thou must enter in by every whit of Christ, or thou
shalt enter in by never a whit of him. Wherefore look not to have
him thy Saviour, if thou take him not for King and Prophet; nay,
thou shalt not have him in any one, if thou dost not take him in
every one of these.
Christ shall bear the glory of our salvation from sin, preservation
in the midst of all temptations, and of our going to glory; also he
shall bear the glory of our labor in the gospel, of our gifts and
abilities, of making our work and labor effectual to the saving of
sinners, that in all things he might have the preeminence.
If you have indeed laid Christ, God-man, for your foundation, then
you do lay the hope of your felicity and joy on this, that the Son
of Mary is now absent from his children in his person and humanity,
making intercession for them and for thee in the presence of his
Father. 2 Cor. 5:6.
And the reason that thou canst rejoice hereat is, because thou hast
not only heard of it with thine ear, but dost enjoy the sweet hope
and faith of it in thy heart; which hope and faith are begotten by
the Spirit of Christ, which Spirit dwelleth in thee if thou be a
believer, and showeth those things to thee to be the only things.
And God having shown thee these things thus within thee, by the
Spirit that dwells in thee, thou hast mighty encouragement to hope
for the glory that shall be revealed at the coming again of the man
Christ Jesus; of which glory thou hast also greater ground to hope
for a share, because that Spirit which alone is able to discover to
thee the truth of these things, is given to thee of God as the first
fruits of that glory which is hereafter to be revealed---being
obtained for thee by the man Christ Jesus' death on Calvary, and by
his blood that was shed there, together with his resurrection from
the dead out of the grave where they had laid him.
Also, thou believest that he is gone away from thee in the same body
which was hanged on the cross, to take possession of that glory
which thou, through his obedience, shalt at his the very same man's
return from heaven the second time, have bestowed upon thee, he
having all this while prepared and preserved it for thee; as he
saith himself, "I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and
prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you to
myself; that where I am, there ye may be also."
Again, if thou hast laid Christ, God-man, for thy foundation, though
thou hast the Spirit of this man Christ within thee, yet thou dost
not look that justification should be wrought out for thee by that
Spirit of Christ that dwells within thee; for thou knowest that
salvation is already obtained for thee by the man Christ Jesus
without thee, and is witnessed to thee by his Spirit which dwells
within thee. And thus much doth this man Christ Jesus testify unto
us, where he says, "He shall glorify me," saith the Son of Mary. But
how? Why, "he shall take of mine"---what I have done and am doing
in the presence of the Father--"and shall show it unto you." John
16:14.
CHRIST NOT A SAVIOUR BY HIS EXAMPLE.
A third thing you mention is, that "the Son of God taught men their
duty by his own example, and did himself perform what he required of
them; and that himself did tread before us every step of that which
he hath told us leadeth to eternal life."
ANSWER. Now we are come to the point, namely, that "the way to
eternal life is, first of all, to take Christ for our example,
treading his steps." And the reason, if it be true, is weighty; for
"he hath trod every step before us which he hath told us leads to
eternal life."
"Every step." Therefore he went to heaven by virtue of an imputative
righteousness; for this is one of our steps thither.
"Every step." Then he must go thither by faith in his own blood for
pardon of sin; for this is another of our steps thither.
"Every step." Then he must go thither by virtue of his own
intercession at the right hand of God before he came thither; for
this is one of our steps thither.
"Every step." Then he must come to God and ask mercy for some great
wickedness which he had committed; for this is also one of our steps
thither.
But again, we will consider it the other way.
"Every step." Then we cannot come to heaven before we first be made
accursed of God; for so was he before he came thither.
"Every step." Then we must first make our body and soul an offering
for the sin of others; for this did he before he came thither.
"Every step." Then we must go to heaven for the sake of our own
righteousness; for that was one of his steps thither.
O, sir, what will thy gallant, generous mind do here? Indeed, you
talk of his being an expiatory sacrifice for us, but you put no more
trust to that than to baptism or the Lord's supper; counting that
with the other two but things indifferent in themselves.
You add again, that "this Son of God being raised from the dead and
ascended to heaven, is our high-priest there." But you talk not at
all of his sprinkling the mercy-seat with his blood, but clap upon
him the heathens' demons, negotiating the affairs of men with the
supreme God, and so wrap up [Footnote: That is, dismiss the
subject.] with a testification that it is needless to enlarge on the
point.
What man that ever had read or assented to the gospel, but would
have spoken more honorably of Christ than you have done? His
sacrifice must be stepped over; his intercession is needless to be
enlarged upon. But when it falleth in your way to talk of your human
nature, of the dictates of the first principles of morals within
you, and of your generous mind to follow it, Oh what need there is
now of amplifying, enlarging, and pressing it on men's consciences,
as if that poor heathenish pagan principle was the very Spirit of
God within us, and as if righteousness done by that was that and
that only that would or could fling heaven's gates off the hinges.
Yea, a little after you tell us that "the doctrine of sending the
Holy Ghost was to move and excite us to our duty, and to assist,
cheer, and comfort us in the performance of it;" still meaning our
close adhering, by the purity of our human nature, to the dictates
of the law as written in our hearts as men; which is as false as God
is true.
For the Holy Ghost is sent into our hearts, not to excite us to a
compliance with our old and wind-shaken excellencies that came into
the world with us, but to write new laws in our hearts, even the law
of faith, the word of faith and of grace, and the doctrine of
remission of sins through the blood of the Lamb of God, that
holiness might flow from thence.
CHRIST A TEACHER.
At this time I sat under the ministry of holy Mr. Gifford. whose
doctrine, by God's grace, was much for my stability. This man made
it much his business to deliver the people of God from all those
hard and unsound tests that by nature we are prone to. He would bid
us take special heed that we took not up any truth upon trust, as
from this or that or any other man or men; but cry mightily to God
that he would convince us of the reality thereof, and set us down
therein by his own Spirit in the holy word; "for," said he, "if you
do otherwise, when temptation comes strongly upon you, you not
having received them with evidence from heaven, will find you want
that help and strength now to resist, that once you thought you
had."
This was as seasonable to my soul as the former and latter rain in
their season, for I had found, and that by sad experience, the truth
of these his words; for I had felt that no man, especially when
tempted by the devil, "can say that Jesus Christ is Lord, but by the
Holy Ghost."
But O now, how was my soul led from truth to truth by God; even from
the birth and cradle of the Son of God, to his ascension and second
coming from heaven to judge the world.
Once I was troubled to know whether the Lord Jesus was a man as well
as God, and God as well as man; and truly, in those days, let men
say what they would, unless I had it with evidence from heaven, all
was nothing to me. Well, I was much troubled about this point, and
could not tell how to be resolved; at last, that in Rev. 5:6 came
into my mind: "And I beheld, and lo, in the midst of the throne, and
of the four beasts, and in the midst of the elders, stood a Lamb."
"In the midst of the throne"--thought I, there is the godhead; "in
the midst of the elders"--there is his manhood: but Oh, methought
this did glister; it was a goodly touch, and gave me sweet
satisfaction. That other scripture also did help me much in this:
"Unto us a child is born, unto us a Son is given, and the government
shall be upon his shoulders; and his name shall be called Wonderful,
Counsellor, the mighty God, the ever lasting Father, the Prince of
Peace."
O friends, cry to God to reveal Jesus Christ unto you; there is none
teacheth like him.
It would be long to tell you in particular how God did set me down
in all the things of Christ, and how he did, that he might do so,
lead me into his words; yea, and also how he did open them unto me,
and make them shine before me, and cause them to dwell with me, talk
with me, and comfort me over and over, both of his own being and the
being of his Son and Spirit, and word and gospel.
THE DEATH OF CHRIST.
We never read that Jesus Christ was more cheerful in all his life on
earth, than when he was going to lay down his life for his enemies;
now he thanked God, now he sang.
Christ died and endured the wages of sin, and that without an
intercessor, without one between God and him. He grappled
immediately with the eternal justice of God, who inflicted on him
death, the wages of sin; there was no man to hold off the hand of
God; justice had his full blow at him, and made him a curse for sin.
A second thing that demonstrates that Christ died the cursed death
for sin, is the frame of spirit that he was in at the time he was to
be taken. Never was poor mortal so beset with the apprehensions of
approaching death as was this Lord Jesus Christ; amazement beyond
measure, sorrow that exceeded seized upon his soul: "My soul is
exceeding sorrowful, even unto death. And he began to be sore
amazed, and to be very heavy." Add to this that Jesus Christ was
better able to grapple with death, even alone, than the whole world
joined all together. 1. He was anointed with the Spirit without
measure. 2. He had all grace perfect in him. 3. Never had any so
much of his Father's love as he. 4. Never one so harmless and
without sin as he, and consequently never man had so good a
conscience as he. 5. Never one prepared such a stock of good works
to bear him company at the hour of death as he. 6. Never one had
greater assurance of being with
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