That all the saints of God, or sheep of Jesus Christ, shall be saved, and none of them shall so fall away as eternally to perish.

The truth of this point I shall prove by divers arguments and scriptures.

And my first argument shall be taken from eternal election, which dependeth wholly upon the absolute sovereignty of God, who hath power over all His creatures, and may do with His own as it seemeth good in His eternal wisdom, and good pleasure of His will.

I shall premise one or two things before I proceed to confirm this argument.

1. That God set up Jesus Christ as Mediator from everlasting, as the Head and Spring of our election; therefore it is said, We were chosen in him before the foundation of the world (Eph. 1:4). It was the only act of love and free grace of the Father, therefore not to be ascribed to the merits of Jesus Christ: For though Christ hath merited our salvation, yet He did not procure or merit our election; for Christ Himself was the fruit of this eternal blessing and privilege, it being then the sole act of God’s sovereign grace and love. It follows,

2. That all the ways which were ordered in the wisdom of God, for the accomplishing the ends of election, are of the father’s appointment also; for whatsoever Christ hath done in working out of our Redemption, it was according to the purpose and determinate counsel of His own will and sovereign goodness. Jesus Christ was first chosen, or elected, by the Father, as Head and Mediator, and only Foundation to bear up the whole building, which the Almighty designed to raise: The Father’s love, did precede Christ’s glorious mission; therefore He was only of the Father’s designation; Who verily was foreordained before the foundation of the world, but was manifest in these last days (I Pet. 1:20). Christ was first chosen as the Well-head of grace and glory, and then others were chosen in Him, by and through whom they should be redeemed and raised to a state of grace and holiness here, and to eternal happiness in Heaven hereafter: For whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brethren (Rom. 8:29). To the image of His Son, that is, to Christ’s likeness as Mediator, and taking our nature; not to Christ barely considered as God, for as Christ is God. Now this Conformity being absolutely designed in election, Christ, in the contrivance and intention of the Father, was the first Exemplar and Copy of it, or the main Center, to which all must be brought that were given unto Him; the Father setting Him up, and electing Him as Head of all that should be saved, or as the glorious Bridegroom, and therefore it was requisite He should be consulted about those who were to be the members of His body, and His own blessed spouse for ever: And since Christ was also to suffer and undergo such pain and sorrow in the purchasing and redeeming of them, it was necessary He should not only freely assent and consent in the choice of them, but also be certain of the obtaining and securing them all to and for Himself for ever, and not run the hazard of enjoying or not enjoying of them; which must follow He did, if the doctrines of some men of dark minds were true.

To proceed, it may not be amiss to consider what is contained in the bowels of my first argument, viz. that there is a peculiar people, or some certain persons (as personally considered) of the lost children of the first Adam, who are elected or chosen of God, in Christ, from all eternity, of His own sovereign grace and good pleasure, ordained unto everlasting life; and that this decree of election doth prevent their final falling, or make it impossible that any of them should ever so apostatize as eternally to perish.

The Argument being thus fairly stated, it calls upon me to do two things.

First, To prove that there is such a particular and personal election of a peculiar people of the lost sons of Adam.

Secondly, To show how this prevents their final falling, and makes it impossible that any of them should ever so apostatize as eternally to perish.

A little to open the first of these.

1. I say of peculiar persons, which denotes it belonging to them only and to none else; others are passed by, or not afforded by any such divine act of grace the like privilege: they are God’s jewels, or His peculiar treasure, though until called and cleansed (Mal. 3:17), their inward filth and pollution purged away, they cannot be delighted in by Him, or be loved with a love of complacency; though from eternity God did love all His, with a love of good Will, purpose of grace and of benevolence.

I say personally elected; that is, the objects of this grace, or of this election were singled out and pitched upon by name; not with respect had to such or such qualifications foreseen in them, they being repenting, believing, and holy persons, but chosen in Christ, the Head of Election, that they should believe, should repent, and should be holy and without blame before him in love (Eph. 1:4). They are chosen that they may be holy; not because they were holy, or God foresaw they would be Holy.

I say, they were ordained to everlasting life. Now to predestinate, decree, or ordain, denotes the same thing, and signifies the absolute purpose of God to bring them into a state of grace here, through Jesus Christ, and to eternal glory and happiness hereafter: Hence it is said, As many as were ordained to eternal life, believed, or appointed; and He that ordered or ordained the end, ordained the means also, and so prepared them for everlasting life.

They were chosen in Christ; in the Mediator, in their blessed Head, that they standing might be secured through their union with Him, and His righteousness being imputed to them, according to God’s eternal purpose.

2. And further, to make good the first part of what I have laid down, viz. That there is such a particular election; what lies more clear in the Word of God, and the election of Jacob, I shall here first mention, as a full proof of what I say; For the children not yet born, neither having done only good or evil, that the purpose of God according to election might stand, not of works, but of him that calleth (Rom. 9:11). Here the apostle designedly or on purpose confirms, not only the doctrine of personal election, but also that of Preterition, of a passing by, or rejection of the other; and all resulting from the eternal purpose and good pleasure of God’s will; As it is written, Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I hated (Rom. 9:13). The main scope of Paul in this place is to show, that God hath not cast off all Israel, that is, those who are the true Israel, or such who are the children of the promise, or that do belong to Christ according to the election of grace; see 5, 6, 7, 8 verses: therefore they that run the love of God and election here spoken of, to the posterity of Jacob, and reprobation to the posterity of Esau, and will not have it to be understood of their particular persons, do palpably abuse the sacred text and drift of the Holy Ghost.

Now that all men may know that election doth run to, or take hold of particular persons, and that not for any foreseen faith or holiness in them, Paul saith, The children being not yet born, neither having done good or evil. And therefore adds, not of works, that is, of foreseen worthiness or desert in Jacob, but that the purpose of God, according to election might stand, (That is, stand firm as an act of God’s sovereign love and grace only) and abide a blessed truth against all the opposition and cavils of cloudy minds.

I might have mentioned Abraham, Isaac, Moses, David, and others; also Jeremiah of whom God says, Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee (Jer. 1:5); that is, I knew thee to be one of them that I had chosen and given to my Son, or one of mine elect ones; and I sanctified and ordained thee a prophet.

Moreover, in the New Testament that our Saviour calls His disciples by name and tells them, that he knew whom he had chosen, (John 13:18) excluding Judas; He must therefore intend their eternal election, for as I said before, Judas was chosen to the Apostleship: also Paul by name. Jesus Christ declares (to Ananias) was a chosen vessel, not only as an Apostle, but one also comprehended in the election of grace. Do but observe the Nature of his conversion, and what he was before and when called by the special grace of God.

Moreover of this number and sort, were those that the Lord speaks of in Elias’s time which Paul mentions, I have reserved to my self seven thousand men who have not bowed the knee to Baal (Rom. 11:4). Though it is a certain number put for an uncertain as to us, yet all their particular persons were chosen, and known to God; Even so at this present time also there is a Remnant according to the election of grace (Rom. 11:5). God had some particular persons then whom He had from everlasting elected, and so He hath now; According as he hath chosen us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before him in love: Us, as such and such particular persons, not such of such and such qualification, viz. as being believers, obedient and holy persons; No, no, but that they might believe, etc. election will produce faith: it is, because they are elected that they do believe. But ye believe not, because ye are not of my sheep, as I said unto you (John 10:26) that is, not such as were ordained to believe, and ordained to eternal life. And as many as were ordained unto eternal life believed (Acts 13:48). As it was hinted before, Christ hath elect persons, or sheep, that yet believe not. I have much people (saith he to Paul) in this city (Acts 18:10).

Unto these testimonies I shall add one or two more; as that of Paul, touching the saints at Thessalonica. Knowing, brethren beloved, your election: For our Gospel came not to you in word only, but also in power, and in the Holy Ghost, etc. By the evident operations of God’s Spirit, the apostle knew they were elected: We cannot know our election, but by special vocation, or as it is manifest in the fruits and effects of it. There is a knowledge of things, when we argue from the cause to the effect: So, when we argue from the effect to the cause. Now what is election, but a choosing some out of others? Thus the angels that stand were elected, and the rest were left to the power they had, or passed by, or reprobated (I Tim. 5:21). Peter also confirms the doctrine of personal election, calling the persons to whom he wrote his epistle, Elect according to the foreknowledge of God, or His eternal purpose; and therefore were separated unto God by special grace, or effectual calling; through sanctification of the Spirit to obedience, etc. The Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, are concerned in our salvation; the Father elects, this is principally ascribed to the first Person in the Godhead; the Son purchaseth, He redeems; and the Holy Spirit renews, calls, and sanctifies. Now the purchase of the Son extends no further than the election of the Father; nor the sanctification of the Spirit, further than the purchase or redemption of the Son: Sanctification here, takes in the whole work of the Holy Spirit in regeneration and actual holiness, to the final fitting and making the soul meet for the eternal inheritance.

So much shall serve to prove that there is an election of particular persons.

Object. But may be some will Object, If this be so, what need any man concern himself about his salvation, as to seek it or labor after it: for if he be elected, he shall be saved; but if not, let him do what he can, he cannot be saved, he cannot frustrate God’s decree, nor alter the thing that is gone out of his mouth.

Answer. I answer, All mankind are under the strongest obligation imaginable to God, as He is their Creator, and they His creatures; as He is their only Lord and Supreme Governor, they are bound to fear Him, and obey His laws, let Him do what He will with them. Is not that a base and sorbid principle in a servant or subject, to do nothing but for mere self-profit and advantage?

2. Paul was certain of a crown of life, yet knew it was his duty to press towards the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus, and to keep down his body (Phil. 3:14). He strove as strenuously against sin, as if salvation could be merited by so doing; so that his election took him not off from a diligent care in use of means, in order to his attaining to eternal happiness.

3. God hath as well ordained the means, as the end, as I newly told you; both are appointed of God, and equally under His absolute decree: Men are not elected to salvation, but also to sanctification and holiness.

4. We are not to look upon the decree of God for a rule of life, but the Word of the gospel; secret things belong to God, etc. The decree can neither be a rule of life, nor ground of hope, but the precept and the promise, etc. He that leads an ungodly life, and pursues His filthy lusts, may assure himself, so living and dying, he shall be damned for ever: He that believes not in Christ, but rejects Him, and despiseth all the offers of His grace to the end of his life, no decree can save him; therefore if he will go on in sin presumptuously, let him take what will follow. On the other hand, he that doth believe in Christ, and conforms to the holy gospel, need not doubt of salvation, no decree can hinder him of salvation. Men ought to endeavor to believe and repent, and close with Christ upon a peradventure: If God peradventure will give them repentance to the acknowledging of the truth (II Tim. 2:25).

5. Because God hath absolutely determined the time of my life, and how long thou shalt live: And there is a time thou canst not pass; Wilt thou therefore forbear eating, or use of physician, to preserve thy life, and say, “If I eat not, I shall live my appointed time? What signify means or medicines, I will take no physician, no potion for if the time is come God hath set in His eternal decree, I shall die, nothing can save my life.” Would not all think you were under a fearful temptation and delusion of the Devil?

6. Did not God absolutely tell Paul, that He had given him the lives of all that were with him in the ship, and that none of them should perish? Yet he said, Except these abide in the ship, ye cannot be saved (Acts 27:31). Whosoever therefore that doth neglect the means God hath appointed, in order to the obtaining the end, let it be what it will, doth but tempt God, and comply with the Devil, let his pretence be what it will.

7. No decree of God necessitates men to sin: for though the free grace of God is the absolute cause of election; and no foreseen faith or holiness; yet foreseen wickedness, unbelief and disobedience, is the procuring cause of the reprobation (Jude 4) and of the damnation of them that perish: O Israel, thou hast destroyed thyself, but in me is thine help (Hos. 13:9).

8. Were any ever damned that did what they could in the use of all means under the light of the gospel, to be saved Brethren, God (may justly and) will condemn men for their not improving their one talent. Nor will it be a good plea for such to say, I knew thou wert an hard man, reaping where thou hast not sown, (Matt. 25:24) etc. Thus some men seem to charge God, “I am not elected. There is an election of grace, of special and distinguishing grace, and man hath no power in his own will; and God doth not give me power to believe, and will He damn me? Doth he expect to reap where he hath not sown, and gather where he hath not strawed?”  Such shall have no excuse, as our Savior shows, at the great day. The Lord of that Servant shows the fault lay in his own Sloth and wickedness; and his dread of his Lord’s severity, was but a frivolous pretence and unreasonable excuse; for if he had feared any such thing, he should have done what he could; he should have put out his money to the exchange, and then he should have received his own with increase. Thus God may as justly another day reply upon those who think to excuse their lewd and wicked lives, their unbelief and contempt of His Word, from their not being elected, and not having power of themselves to believe and repent, not receiving His efficacious grace; O ye wicked and slothful wretches. May he not say, “did ye suspect or fear you were not elected? Why did you not then give all diligence to attend upon the Means, and to make your calling sure, as all they do that are elected? Do you plead the power of your own wills, to repent one while, and that you wanted power at another time, and that I gave you not my special grace? but had you not power to keep from Taverns and Alehouses, to keep from lying, stealing, swearing, and other profane deeds of darkness? Had you not power to read, to hear my Word, to pray? If you had done your uttermost in improving of the talent I gave you, would I have been wanting to you but since you did not that, why should I trust you with more?”  Brethren, are these men’s eyes evil, because God’s eye is God? Is He unjust in giving effectual grace to some, because He doth not bestow it upon all? Had He not took hold of a few, the whole lump of mankind would have destroyed themselves, and none would have been saved. Was God unjust in electing some of the Angels, because He passed by others of them?

9. In the day of judgment, God will be just, and all men’s mouths shall be stopped: This you may assure your selves of, He will be justified when he judges, and clear when he condemns (Ps. 51:4). He that had not on the wedding-garment was speechless. God will not then proceed with men upon election and reprobation, but upon their believing, or not believing: He will render to every man according to their works (Rom. 2:6). All men’s mouths shall be stopped, and every man’s conscience witness against him. Alas, men do not act or exercise that human faith in respect of the report of the gospel, which they do in respect of other matters and things that are made known to them, or do not bring forth the fruit of such an historical faith, but so much to this objection.

————

(A Golden Mine Opened, pp. 169-175, 1694 edition).

“And there arose a great storm of wind, and the waves beat into the ship, so that it was now full. And He was in the hinder part of the ship, asleep on a pillow: and they awake Him, and say unto Him, Master, carest thou not that we perish? And He arose, and rebuked the wind, and said unto the sea, Peace, be still. And the wind ceased, and there was a great calm. “And He said unto them, Why are ye so fearful? How is it that ye have no faith?”–Mark 4:37-40

I wish professing Christians in this day studied the four Gospels more than they do. I know that all Scripture is profitable. I do not wish to exalt one part of the Bible at the expense of another. But I think it would be good for some, who are very familiar with the Epistles, if they knew a little more about Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

Now, why do I say this? I say it because I want professing Christians to know more about Christ. It is well to be acquainted with all the doctrines and principles of Christianity. It is better to be acquainted with Christ Himself. It is well to be familiar with faith, and grace, and justification, and sanctification. They are all matters pertaining to the King. But it is far better to be familiar with Jesus Himself, to see the King’s own face, and to behold His beauty.

Now the Gospels were written to make us acquainted with Christ. The Holy Ghost has told us the story of His life and death,—His sayings and His doings, four times over. Four different inspired hands have drawn the picture of the Saviour. His ways, His manners, His feelings, His wisdom, His grace, His patience, His love, His power, are graciously unfolded to us by four different witnesses. Ought not the sheep to be familiar with the Shepherd? Ought not the patient to be familiar with the Physician? Ought not the bride to be familiar with the Bridegroom? Ought not the sinner to be familiar with the Saviour? Beyond doubt it ought to be so. The Gospels were written to make men familiar with Christ, and therefore I wish men to study the Gospels.

On whom must you and I build our souls if we would be accepted with God? We must build on the rock, Christ. From whom must you and I draw that grace of the Spirit which we daily need in order to be fruitful? We must draw from the vine, Christ. To whom must we look for sympathy when earthly friends fail us or die? We must look to our elder brother, Christ. By whom must our prayers be presented if they are to be heard on high? They must be presented by our advocate, Christ. With whom do we hope to spend the thousand years of glory, and the after-eternity? With the King of kings, Christ. Surely we cannot know this Christ too well. Surely there is not a word, nor a deed, nor a day, nor a step, nor a thought in the record of His life, which ought not to be precious to us. We should labour to be familiar with every line that is written about Jesus.

Come now, and let us study together a page in our Master’s history. Let us consider what we may learn from the verses of Scripture which stand at the head of this tract. You see Jesus there crossing the Lake of Galilee, in a boat, with His disciples. You see a sudden storm arise while He is asleep. The waves beat into the boat, and fill it. Death seems to be close at hand. The frightened disciples awake their Master and cry for help. He arises and rebukes the wind and waves, and at once there is a calm. He mildly reproves the faithless fears of His companions, and all is over. Such is the picture. It is one full of deep instruction. Come now, and let us examine what we are meant to learn.

I. Learn, first of all, that following Christ will not prevent your having earthly sorrows and troubles.

Here are the chosen disciples of the Lord Jesus in great anxiety. The faithful little flock which believed when Priests, and Scribes, and Pharisees were all alike unbelieving, is allowed by the Shepherd to be much disquieted. The fear of death breaks in upon them like an armed man. The deep water seems likely to go over their souls. Peter, James, and John, the pillars of the Church about to be planted in the world, are much distressed.

Perhaps they had not reckoned on all this. Perhaps they had expected that Christ’s service would at any rate lift them above the reach of earthly trials. Perhaps they thought that He who could raise the dead, and heal the sick, and feed multitudes with a few loaves, and cast out devils with a word,—He would never allow His servants to be sufferers upon earth. Perhaps they had supposed He would always grant them smooth journeys, fine weather, an easy course, and freedom from trouble and care.

If the disciples thought so they were much mistaken. The Lord Jesus taught them that a man may be one of His chosen servants and yet have to go through many an anxiety and endure many a pain.

Reader, it is good to understand this clearly. It is good to understand that Christ’s service never did secure a man from all the ills that flesh is heir to, and never will. If you are a believer, you must reckon on having your share of sickness and pain, of sorrow and tears, of losses and crosses, of deaths and bereavements, of partings and separations, of vexations and disappointments, so long as you are in the body. Christ never undertakes that you shall get to heaven without these. He has undertaken that all who come to Him shall have all things pertaining to life and godliness. But He has never undertaken that He will make them prosperous, rich, or healthy, and that death shall never come to their family.

I have the privilege of being one of Christ’s ambassadors. In His name I can offer eternal life to any man, woman, or child, who is willing to have it. In His name I do offer pardon, peace, grace, glory, to any son or daughter of Adam who reads this. But I dare not offer that person worldly prosperity as a part and parcel of their Gospel. I dare not offer him long life, an increased income, and freedom from pain. I dare not promise the man who takes up the cross and follows Christ, that in the following he shall never meet with a storm.

I know well that many do not like these terms. They would prefer having Christ and good health,—Christ and plenty of money,—Christ and no deaths in their family,—Christ and no wearing cares,—Christ and a perpetual morning without clouds. But they do not like Christ and the cross,—Christ and tribulation,—Christ and the conflict,—Christ and the howling wind,—Christ and the storm.

Reader, is this the thought of your heart? Believe me, if it is you are very wrong. Listen to me, and I will try to show you you have yet much to learn.

How should we know who are true Christians if following Christ was the way to be free from trouble? How should we discern the wheat from the chaff if it were not for the winnowing of trial? How should we know whether men served Christ for His own sake or from selfish motives, if His service brought health and wealth with it as a matter of course? The winds of winter soon show us which of the trees are evergreen and which are not. The storms of affliction and care are useful in the same way. They discover whose faith is real, and whose is nothing but profession and form.

How would the great work of sanctification go on in a man if he had no trial? Trouble is often the only fire which will burn away the dross that clings to our hearts. Trouble is the pruning-knife which the great Husbandman employs in order to make us fruitful in good works. The harvest of the Lord’s field is seldom ripened by sunshine only. It must go through its days of wind, and rain, and storm.

Reader, if you desire to serve Christ and be saved, I entreat you to take the Lord on His own terms. Make up your mind to meet with your share of crosses and sorrows, and then you will not be surprised. For want of understanding this, many seem to run well for a season, and then turn back in disgust, and are cast away.

Reader, if you profess to be a child of God, leave to the Lord Jesus to sanctify you in His own way. Rest satisfied that He never makes any mistakes. Be sure that He does all things well. The winds may howl around you, and the waters swell. But fear not: “He is leading you by the right way, that He may bring you to a city of habitation” (Psalm cvii. 7).

II. Learn, in the second place, that the Lord Jesus Christ is truly and really man.

There are words used in this little history, which, like many other passages in the Gospels, bring out this truth in a very striking way. You are told that when the waves began to break on the ship, Jesus was in the hinder part, “asleep on a pillow.” He was weary, and who can wonder at it, after reading the account given in the 4th of Mark? After labouring all day to do good to souls,—after preaching in the open air to vast multitudes, Jesus was fatigued. Surely if the sleep of the labouring man is sweet, much more sweet must have been the sleep of our blessed Lord!

Reader, I ask you to settle deeply in your mind this great truth,—that Jesus Christ was verily and indeed man. He was equal to the Father in all things, and the eternal God. But He was also man, and took part of flesh and blood, and was made like unto us in all things, sin only excepted. He had a body like our own. Like us, He was born of a woman. Like us, He grew and increased in stature. Like us, He was often hungry and thirsty, and faint and weary. Like us, He ate and drank, rested and slept. Like us, He sorrowed, and wept, and felt. It is all very wonderful, but so it is. He that made the heavens went to and fro as a poor weary man on earth! He that ruled over principalities and powers in heavenly places took on Him a frail body like our own. He that might have dwelt for ever in the glory which He had with the Father, amidst the praises of legions of angels, came down to earth and dwelt as a man among sinful men. Surely this fact alone is an amazing miracle of condescension, grace, pity, and love.

I find a deep mine of comfort in this thought, that Jesus is perfect man no less than perfect God. He in whom I am told by Scripture to trust is not only a great High Priest, but a feeling High Priest. He is not only a powerful Saviour, but a sympathizing Saviour. He is not only the Son of God mighty to save, but the Son of man able to feel.

Who does not know that sympathy is one of the sweetest things left to us in this sinful world? It is one of the bright seasons in our dark journey here below when we can find a person who enters into our troubles, and goes along with us in our anxieties,—who can weep when we weep, and rejoice when we rejoice.

Sympathy is far better than money, and far rarer too. Thousands can give who know not what it is to feel. Sympathy has the greatest power to draw us and to open our hearts. Proper and correct counsel often falls dead and useless on a heavy heart. Cold advice often makes us shut up, shrink, and withdraw into ourselves, when tendered in the day of trouble. But genuine sympathy in such a day will call out all our better feelings, if we have any, and obtain an influence over us when nothing else can. Give me the friend who, though poor in gold and silver, has always ready a sympathizing heart.

Reader, our God knows all this well. He knows the very secrets of man’s heart. He knows the ways by which that heart is most easily approached, and the springs by which that heart is most readily moved. He has wisely provided that the Saviour of the Gospel should be feeling as well as mighty. He has given us one who has not only a strong hand to pluck us as brands from the burning, but a sympathizing heart on which the labouring and heavy-laden may find rest.

I see a marvellous proof of love and wisdom in the union of two natures in Christ’s person. It was marvellous love in our Saviour to condescend to go through weakness and humiliation for our sakes, ungodly rebels as we are. It was marvellous wisdom to fit Himself in this way to be the very Friend of friends, who could not only save man but meet him on his own ground. I want one able to perform all things needful to redeem my soul. This Jesus can do, for He is the eternal Son of God. I want one able to understand my weakness and infirmities, and to deal gently with my soul while tied to a body of death. This again Jesus can do, for He was the Son of man, and had flesh and blood like my own. Had my Saviour been God only, I might perhaps have trusted Him, but I never could have come near to Him without fear. Had my Saviour been man only, I might have loved Him, but I never could have felt sure that He was able to take away my sins. But, blessed be the Lord, my Saviour is God as well as man, and man as well as God: God, and so able to deliver me,—man, and so able to feel with me. Almighty power and deepest sympathy are met together in one glorious person, Jesus Christ, my Lord. Surely a believer in Christ has a strong consolation. He may well trust, and not be afraid.

Reader, if you know what it is to go to the throne of grace for mercy and pardon, do not forget that the Mediator by whom you draw near to God is the Man Christ Jesus.

Your soul’s business is in the hand of a High Priest who can be touched with the feeling of your infirmities. You have not to do with a being of so high and glorious a nature that your mind can in no wise comprehend Him. You have to do with Jesus, who had a body like your own, and was a man upon earth, like yourself. He well knows that world through which you are struggling, for He dwelt in the midst of it thirty-three years. He well knows the contradiction of sinners, which so often discourages you, for He endured it Himself. He well knows the art and cunning of your spiritual enemy, the devil, for He wrestled with him in the wilderness. Surely with such an advocate you may well feel bold.

Reader, if you know what it is to apply to the Lord Jesus for spiritual comfort in earthly troubles, you should well remember the days of His flesh, and His human nature.

You are applying to One who knows your feel­ings by experience, and has drunk deep of the bitter cup, for He was a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief. Jesus knows the heart of a man,—the bodily pains of a man,—the difficulties of a man,— for He was a man Himself, and had flesh and blood upon earth. He sat wearied by the well at Sychar. He wept over the grave of Lazarus, at Bethany. He sweat great drops of blood at Gethsemane. He groaned with anguish at Calvary. He is no stranger to your sensations. He is acquainted with everything that belongs to human nature, sin only excepted.

Are you poor and needy? So also was Jesus. The foxes had holes, and the birds of the air had nests, but the Son of Man had not where to lay His head. He dwelt in a despised city. Men used to say, “Can any good thing come out of Nazareth?” (John i. 46). He was esteemed a carpenter’s son, He preached in a borrowed boat, rode into Jerusalem on a borrowed ass, and was buried in a borrowed tomb.

Are you alone in the world, and neglected by those who ought to love you? So also was Jesus. He came unto His own, and they received Him not. He came to be a Messiah to the lost sheep of the house of Israel, and they rejected Him. The princes of this world would not acknowledge Him. The few that followed Him were publicans and fishermen. And even these at the last forsook Him, and were scattered every man to his own place.

Are you misunderstood, misrepresented, slandered, and persecuted? So also was Jesus. He was called a glutton and a wine-bibber, a friend of publicans, a Samaritan, a madman, and a devil. His character was belied. False charges were laid against Him. An unjust sentence was passed upon Him, and, though innocent, He was condemned as a malefactor, and as such died on the cross.

Does Satan tempt you, and offer horrid suggestions to your mind? So also did he tempt Jesus. He bade Him to distrust God’s fatherly providence. “Command these stones to be made bread.” He proposed to Him to tempt God by exposing Himself to unnecessary danger. “Cast Thyself down” from the pinnacle of the temple. He suggested to Him to obtain the kingdoms of the world for His own, by one little act of submission to himself. “All these things will I give Thee, if Thou wilt fall down and worship me.”

Do you ever feel great agony and conflict of mind? Do you feel in darkness, as if God had left you? So did Jesus. Who can tell the extent of the sufferings of mind He went through in the garden? Who can measure the depth of His soul’s pain when He cried, “My God, My God! why hast Thou forsaken Me?”

Ah, reader, it is impossible to conceive a Saviour more suited to the wants of man’s heart than our Lord Jesus Christ; suited not only by His power, but by His sympathy; suited not only by His divinity, but by His humanity. Labour, I beseech you, to get firmly impressed on your mind that Christ, the refuge of souls, is man as well as God. Honour Him as King of kings, and Lord of lords; but while you do this, never forget that He had a body, and was a man. Grasp this truth, and never let it go. The unhappy Socinian errs fear fully when he says that Christ was only man, and not God; but let not the rebound from that error make you forget that while Christ was very God, He was also very man.

Listen not for a moment to the wretched argument of the Roman Catholic, when he tells you that the Virgin Mary and the saints are more sympathizing than Christ. Answer him, that such an argument springs from ignorance of the Scriptures, and Christ’s true nature. Answer him, that you have not so learned Christ, as to regard Him only as an austere Judge, and a Being to be feared. Answer him, that the four Gospels have taught you to regard Him as the most loving and sympathizing of Friends, as well as the mightiest and most powerful of Saviours. Answer him, that you want no comfort from saints and angels, from the Virgin Mary or from Gabriel, so long as you can repose your weary soul on the Man Christ Jesus.

III. Learn, in the third place, that there may be much weakness and infirmity even in a true Christian.

You have a striking proof of this in the conduct of the disciples here recorded, when the waves broke over the ship. They awoke Jesus in haste. They said to Him in fear and anxiety, “Master, carest Thou not that we perish?”

There was impatience. They might have waited till their Lord thought fit to arise from His sleep.

There was unbelief. They forgot that they were in the keeping of One who had all power in His hand. “We perish.”

There was distrust. They spoke as if they doubted their Lord’s care and thoughtfulness for their safety and well-being. “Carest Thou not that we perish?”

Poor faithless men! What business had they to be afraid? They had seen proof upon proof that all must be well so long as the Bridegroom was with them. They had witnessed repeated examples of His love and kindness towards them, sufficient to convince them that He would never let them come to real harm. But all was forgotten in the present danger. Sense of immediate peril often makes men have a bad memory. Fear is often unable to reason from past experience. They heard the winds. They saw the waves. They felt the cold waters beating over them. They fancied death was close at hand. They could wait no longer in suspense. “Carest Thou not,” said they, “that we perish?”

But, after all, let us understand this is only a picture of what is constantly going on among believers in every age. There are too many disciples, I suspect, at this very day, like those who are here described.

Many of God’s children get on very well so long as they have no trials. They follow Christ very tolerably in the time of fair weather. They fancy they are trusting Him entirely. They flatter themselves they have cast every care on Him. They obtain the reputation of being very good Christians. But suddenly some unlooked-for affliction assails them. Their property makes itself wings and flies away; their own health fails; death comes up into their house; tribulation or persecution ariseth because of the Word; and where now is their faith? Where is the strong confidence they thought they had? Where is their peace, their hope, their resignation? Alas, they are sought for and not found! They are weighed in the balance and found wanting. Fear, and doubt, and distress, and anxiety break in upon them like a flood, and they seem at their wits’ end. I know that this is a sad description: I only put it to the conscience of every real Christian, whether it is not correct and true?

Reader, the plain truth is that there is no literal and absolute perfection among true Christians so long as they are in the body. The best and brightest of God’s saints is but a poor mixed being: converted, renewed, and sanctified though he be, he is still compassed with infirmity. There is not a just man upon earth that always doeth good, and sinneth not. In many things we offend all. A man may have true saving faith, and yet not have it always close at hand, and ready to be used.

Abraham was the father of the faithful. By faith he forsook his country and kindred, and went out according to the command of God, to a land he had never seen. By faith he was content to dwell in the land as a stranger, believing that God would give it to him for an inheritance. And yet this very Abraham was so far overcome by unbelief, that he allowed Sarah to be called his sister, and not his wife, through the fear of man. Here was great infirmity. Yet there have been few greater saints than Abraham.

David was a man after God’s own heart. He had faith to go out to battle with the giant Goliath, when he was but a youth. He declared his belief that the Lord, who delivered him from the paw of the lion and bear, would deliver him from this Philistine. He had faith to believe God’s promise that he should one day be king of Israel, though he was owned by a few followers,—though Saul pursued him like a partridge on the mountains, and there often seemed but a step between him and death. And yet this very David at one time was so far overtaken by fear and unbelief, that he said, “I shall one day perish by the hand of Saul.” He forgot the many wonderful deliverances he had experienced at God’s hand. He only thought of his present danger, and took refuge among the ungodly Philistines. Surely here was great infirmity. Yet there have been few stronger believers than David.

I know it is easy for a man to reply, “All this is very true, but it does not excuse the fears of the disciples. They had Jesus actually with them: they ought not to have been afraid. I should never have been so cowardly and faithless as they were!” I tell the man who argues in that way, that he knows little of his own heart. I tell him no one knows the length and breadth of his own infirmities, if he has not been tempted. No one “can say how much weakness might appear in himself if he was placed in circumstances to call it forth.

Reader, have you faith in Christ ? Do you feel such love and confidence in Him that you cannot understand being greatly moved by any event that could happen? It is all well: I am glad to hear it. But has this faith been tried? Has this confidence been put to the test? If not, take heed of condemning these disciples hastily. Be not high-minded, but fear. Think not because your heart is in a lively frame now, that such frame will always last. Say not, because your feelings are warm and fervent to-day, “To morrow shall be as to-day, and much more abundant.” Say not because your heart is lifted up just now with a strong sense of Christ’s mercy, “I shall never forget Him as long as I live.” Oh, learn to abate something of this flattering estimate of yourself! You do not know yourself thoroughly: there are more things in your inward man than you are at present aware of. The Lord may leave you, as He did Hezekiah, to show you “all that is in your heart” (2 Chron. xxxii. 31). Blessed is he that is clothed with humility. Happy is he that feareth always. Let him that thinketh he standeth, take heed lest he fall.

Why do I dwell on this? Do I want to apologize for the corruptions of professing Christians, and excuse their sins? God forbid! Do I want to lower the standard of sanctification, and counten­ance any one in being a lazy, idle soldier of Christ? God forbid! Do I want to wipe out the broad line of distinction between the converted and the un­converted, and to wink at inconsistencies? Once more I say, God forbid! I hold strongly that there is a mighty difference between the true Christian and the false!—between the believer and the un­believer, between the children of God and the children of the world. I hold strongly that this difference is not merely one of faith, but of life,—not only one of profession, but of practice. I hold strongly that the ways of the believer should be as distinct from those of the unbeliever, as bitter from sweet, light from darkness, heat from cold.

But I do want young Christians to understand what they must expect to find in themselves. I want to prevent their being stumbled and puzzled by the discovery of their own weakness and in­firmity. I want them to see that they may have true faith and grace, in spite of all the devil’s whispers to the contrary, though they feel within many doubts and fears. I want them to observe that Peter, and James, and John, and their brethren, were true disciples, and yet not so spiritual but that they could be afraid. I do not tell them to make the unbelief of the disciples an excuse for themselves, but I do tell them that it shows plainly that so long as they are in the body they must not expect faith to be above the reach of fear.

Above all, I want all Christians to understand what they must expect in other believers. You must not hastily conclude that a man has no grace merely because you see in him some corruption. There are spots on the face of the sun, and yet the sun shines brightly, and enlightens the whole world; there is quartz and dross mixed up with many a lump of gold that comes from Australia, and yet who thinks the gold on that account worth nothing at all? There are flaws in some of the finest diamonds in the world; and yet they do not prevent their being rated at a priceless value. Away with this morbid squeamishness, which makes many ready to excommunicate a man if he only has a few faults! Let us be more quick to see grace, and more slow to see imperfections! Let us know if we cannot allow there is grace where there is corruption, we shall find no grace in the world. We are yet in the body: the devil is not dead. We are not yet like the angels. Heaven is not yet begun. The leprosy is not out of the walls of the house, however much we may scrape them, and never will be till the house is taken down. Our bodies are indeed the temple of the Holy Ghost, but not a perfect temple, until they are raised or changed. Grace is indeed a treasure, but a treasure in earthen vessels. It is possible for a man to forsake all for Christ’s sake, and yet to be overtaken occasionally with doubts and fears.

Reader, I beseech you to remember this. It is a lesson worth attention. The Apostles believed in Christ, loved Christ, and gave up all to follow Christ. And yet you see in this storm the Apostles were afraid. Learn to be charitable in your judgment of them. Learn to be moderate in your expectations from your own heart. Contend to the death for the truth, that no man is a true Christian who is not converted and is not a holy man. But allow that a man may be converted, have a new heart, and be a holy man, and yet be liable to infirmity, doubts, and fears.

IV. Learn, in the fourth place, the power of the Lord Jesus Christ.

You have a striking example of His power in the history upon which I am now dwelling. The waves were breaking into the ship where Jesus was. The terrified disciples awoke Him, and cried for help. “He arose and rebuked the wind, and said unto the sea, Peace, be still. And the wind ceased, and there was a great calm.” This was a wonder­ful miracle. No one could do this but one who was almighty.

Make the winds cease with a word! Who does not know that it is a common saying in order to describe an impossibility, “You might as well speak to the wind?” Yet Jesus rebukes the wind, and at once it ceases. This was power. Calm the waves with a voice! What reader of history does not know that a mighty king of England tried in vain to stop the tide rising on the shore? Yet here is one who says to raging waves in a storm, “Peace, be still,” and at once there was a calm. Here was power.

Reader, it is good for all men to have clear views of the Lord Jesus Christ’s power. Let the sinner know that the merciful Saviour, to whom he is urged to flee, and in whom he is invited to trust, is nothing less than the Almighty, and has power over all flesh to give eternal life. (Rev. i. 8; John xvii. 2). Let the anxious inquirer understand that if he will only venture on Jesus, and take up the cross, he ventures on One who has all power in heaven and earth. (Matt. xxviii. 18). Let the believer remember as he journeys through the wilderness, that his Mediator, and Advocate, and Physician, and Shepherd, and Redeemer, is Lord of lords, and King of kings, and that through Him all things may be done. (Rev. xvii. 14; Phil. iv. 13.) Let all study the subject, for it deserves to be studied.

Study it in His works of creation. “All things were made by Him; and without Him was not anything made that was made” (John i. 3). The heavens, and all their glorious hosts of inhabitants,—the earth, and all it contains,—the sea and all that is in it,—all creation from the sun on high to the least worm below, was the work of Christ. He spake, and they came into being: He commanded, and they began to exist. That very Jesus, who was born of a poor woman at Bethlehem, and lived in a carpenter’s house at Nazareth, had been the former of all things. Was not this power?

Study it in His works of providence, and the orderly continuance of all things in the world. “By Him all things consist” (Col. i. 17). Sun, moon, and stars, roll round in a perfect system. Spring, summer, autumn, and winter, follow one another in regular order. They continue to this day and fail not, according to the ordinance of Him who died on Calvary. (Psalm cxix. 91). The kingdoms of this world rise and increase, and decline and pass away. The rulers of the earth plan, and scheme, and make laws, and change laws, and war, and pull down one, and raise up another. But they little think that they rule only by the will of Jesus, and that nothing happens without the permission of the Lamb of God. They do not know that they and their subjects are all as a drop of water in the hand of the Crucified One, and that He increaseth the nations, and diminisheth the nations, just according to His mind. Is not this power?

Study the subject, not least, in the miracles worked by our Lord Jesus Christ during the three years of His ministry upon earth. Learn, from the mighty works which He did, that the things which are impossible with man are possible with Christ. Regard every one of His miracles as an emblem and figure of spiritual things. See in it a lovely picture of what He is able to do for your soul. He that could raise the dead with a word can just as easily raise man from the death of sin. He that could give sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, and speech to the dumb, can also make sin­ners to see the kingdom of God, hear the joyful sound of the Gospel, and speak forth the praise of redeeming love. He that could heal leprosy with a touch can heal any disease of heart. He that could cast out devils can bid every besetting sin yield to His grace. Oh, reader, begin to read Christ’s miracles in this light! Wicked, and bad, and corrupt as you may feel, take comfort in the thought that you are not beyond Christ’s power to heal. Remember that in Christ there is not only a fulness of mercy, but a fulness of power.

Study the subject in particular as placed before you this day. I dare be sure your heart has some­times been tossed to and fro like the waves in a storm. You have found it agitated like the waters of the troubled sea when it cannot rest. Come and hear this day that there is One who can give you rest. Jesus can say to your heart, whatever may be its ailment, “Peace, be still!

What though your conscience within be lashed by the recollection of countless transgressions, and torn by every gust of temptation? What though the remembrance of past hideous profligacy be grievous unto you, and the burden intolerable? What though your heart seems full of evil, and sin appears to drag you whither it will, like a slave? What though the devil rides to and fro over your soul like a conqueror, and tells you it is vain to struggle against him, there is no hope for you? I tell you there is One who can give even you pardon and peace. My Lord and Master Jesus Christ can rebuke the devil’s raging, can calm even your soul’s misery, and say even to you, “Peace, be still!” He can scatter that cloud of guilt which now weighs you down. He can bid despair depart. He can drive fear away. He can remove the spirit of bondage, and fill you with the spirit of adoption. Satan may hold your soul like a strong man armed, but Jesus is stronger than he, and when He com­mands, the prisoners must go free. Oh, if any troubled reader wants a calm within, let him go this day to Jesus Christ, and all shall yet be well!

But what if your heart be right with God, and yet you are pressed down with a load of earthly trouble? What if the fear of poverty is tossing you to and fro, and seems likely to overwhelm you? What if pain of body be racking you to distraction day after day? What if you are suddenly laid aside from active usefulness, and compelled by infirmity to sit still and do nothing? What if death has come into your home, and taken away your Rachel, or Joseph, or Benjamin, and left you alone, crushed to the ground with sorrow? What if all this has happened? Still there is comfort in Christ. He can speak peace to wounded hearts as easily as calm troubled seas. He can rebuke rebellious wills as powerfully as raging winds. He can make storms of sorrow abate, and silence tumultuous passions as surely as He stopped the Galilean storm. He can say to the heaviest anxiety, “Peace, be still!” The floods of care and tribulation may be mighty, but Jesus sits upon the water-floods, and is mightier than the waves of the sea. (Psalm xciii. 4). The winds of trouble may howl fiercely round you, but Jesus holds them in His hand, and can stay them when He lists. Oh, if any reader this day is broken-hearted, and care­worn, and sorrowful, let him go to Jesus Christ, and cry to Him, and he shall be refreshed. “Come unto He,” He says, “all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest” (Matthew xi. 28).

Reader, I invite you this day to take large views of Christ’s power. Doubt anything else if you will, but never doubt Christ’s power. Whether you do not secretly love sin may be doubtful. Whether you are not privately clinging to the world may be doubtful. Whether the pride of your nature is not rising against the idea of being saved as a poor sinner by grace may be doubtful. But one thing is not doubtful, and that is, that Christ is able to save to the uttermost, and will save you, if, by grace, you seek Him with all your heart and mind..

V. Learn, in the last place, how tenderly and patiently the Lord Jesus deals with weak believers.

You see this truth brought out in His word to His disciples, when the wind ceased, and there was a calm. He might well have rebuked them sharply. He might well have reminded them of all the great things He had done for them, and re­proved them for their cowardice and mistrust, but there is nothing of anger in the Lord’s words. He simply asks two questions. “Why are ye so fear­ful? How is it that ye have no faith?”

The whole of our Lord’s conduct towards His disciples on earth deserves close consideration. It throws a beautiful light on the compassion and long-suffering that there is in Him. No master surely ever had scholars so slow to learn their lessons as Jesus had in the apostles. No scholars surely ever had so patient and forbearing a teacher as the apostles had in Christ. Gather up all the evidence on this subject that lies scattered through the Gospels, and see the truth of what I say.

At no time of our Lord’s ministry did the dis­ciples seem to comprehend fully the object of His coming into the world. The humiliation, the atonement, the crucifixion, were hidden things to them. The plainest words and clearest warnings from their Master of what was going to befall Him seemed to have no effect on their minds. They understood not. They perceived not. It was hid from their eyes. Once Peter even tried to dissuade our Lord from suffering. “Be it far from Thee, Lord,” he said: “this shall not be unto Thee.” (Matt. xvi. 22; Luke xviii. 34; ix. 45).

Frequently you will see things in their spirit and demeanour which are not at all to be commended. One day we are told they disputed among them­selves who should be greatest. (Mark ix. 34). Another day they considered not His miracles, and their hearts were hardened. (Mark vi. 52). Once two of them wished to call down fire from heaven upon a village because it did not receive them. (Luke ix. 54). In the garden of Gethsemane the three best of them slept when they should have watched and prayed. In the hour of His betrayal they all forsook Him and fled, and worst of all, Peter, the most forward of the twelve, denied His Master three times with an oath.

Even after the resurrection you see the same un­belief and hardness of heart cling to them. Though they saw their Lord with their eyes, and touched Him with their hands, even then some doubted. So weak were they in faith! So slow of heart were they to believe all that the prophets had written. So backward were they in understanding the mean­ing of our Lord’s words, and actions, and life, and death.

But what do you see in our Lord’s behaviour towards these disciples all through His ministry? You see nothing but unchanging pity, compassion, kindness, gentleness, patience, longsuffering, and love. He does not cast them off for their stupidity. He does not reject them for their unbelief. He does not dismiss them for ever for cowardice. He teaches them as they are able to bear. He leads them on step by step, as a nurse does an infant when it first begins to walk. He sends them kind messages as soon as He is risen from the dead. “Go,” He said to the women, “Go tell My brethren, that they go into Galilee, and there shall they see Me” (Matt. xxviii. 10). He gathers them round Him once more. He restores Peter to his place, and bids him feed His sheep. He condescends to sojourn with them forty days before He finally ascends. He commissions them to go forth as His messengers, and preach the Gospel to the Gentiles. He blesses them in parting, and encourages them with that gracious promise, “I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world” (Matt. xxviii. 20). Truly this was a love that passeth know­ledge. This is not the manner of man.

Let the entire world know that the Lord Christ is very pitiful, and of tender mercy. He will not break the bruised reed, nor quench the smoking flax. As a father pitieth his own children, so He pitieth them that fear Him. As one whom his mother comforteth, so will He comfort His people. He calls for the lambs of His flock as well as for the old sheep. He cares for the sick and feeble ones of His fold as well as for the strong. It is written that He will carry them in His bosom, rather than let any of them be lost. (Isaiah xl. 11). He cares for the least member of His body, as well as for the greatest. He cares for the babes of His family as well as the grown up men. He cares for the tenderest little plants in His garden as well as for the cedar of Lebanon. All are in His book of life, and all are under His charge. All are given to Him in an everlasting covenant, and He has undertaken, in spite of all weaknesses, to bring every one safe home. Only let a sinner lay hold on Christ by faith, and then, however feeble, Christ’s word is pledged to him: “I will never leave thee nor forsake thee.” He may correct him occasionally in love. He may gently reprove him at times. But He will never, never give Him up. The devil shall never pluck him from Christ’s hand.

Let all the world know that the Lord Jesus will not cast away His believing people because of short­comings and infirmities. The husband does not put away his wife because he finds failings in her. The mother does not forsake her infant because it is weak, feeble, and ignorant. And the Lord Christ does not cast off poor sinners who have com­mitted their souls into His hands because He sees in them blemishes and imperfections. Oh, no! it is His glory to pass over the faults of His people, and heal their backslidings,—to make much of their weak graces, and to pardon their many faults. Verily, the 11th of Hebrews is a wonderful chapter. It is marvellous to observe how the Holy Ghost speaks of the worthies whose names are recorded in that chapter. The faith of the Lord’s people is there brought forward, and had in remembrance. But the faults of many a one, which might easily have been brought up also, are left alone, and not mentioned at all.

Who is there now among my readers that feels desires after salvation, but is afraid to become decided, lest by-and-by he should fall away? Con­sider, I beseech you, the tenderness and patience of the Lord Jesus, and be afraid no more. Fear not to take up the cross, and come out boldly from the world. That same Lord and Saviour who bore with the disciples is ready and willing to bear with you. If you stumble, He will raise you. If you err, He will gently bring you back. If you faint, He will revive you. He will not lead you out of Egypt, and then suffer you to perish in the wilder­ness. He will conduct you safe into the promised land. Only commit yourself to His guidance, and my soul for yours, He shall carry you safe home. Only hear Christ’s voice and follow Him, and you shall never perish.

Who is there among the readers of this tract that has been converted, and desires to do his Lord’s will? Take example this day by your Master’s gentleness and longsuffering, and learn to be tender-hearted and kind to others. Deal gently with young beginners. Do not expect them to know everything and understand everything all at once. Take them by the hand. Lead them on and encourage them. Believe all things, and hope all things, rather than make that heart sad which God would not have made sad. Deal gently with backsliders. Do not turn your back on them as if their case was hope­less. Use every lawful means to restore them to their former place. Consider yourself, and your often infirmities, and do as you would be done by. Alas, there is a painful absence of the Master’s mind among many of his disciples! There are few Churches, I fear, in the present day, which would have received Peter into communion again for many a long year, after denying His Lord. There are few believers ready to do the work of Barnabas,—willing to take young converts by the hand, and encourage them at their first beginnings. Verily we want an outpouring of the Spirit upon believers almost as much as upon the world.

And now, reader, I have only to ask you to make a practical use of the lessons I have brought before you. You have heard this day five things.

First. That Christ’s service will not secure you against troubles.

Second. That Christ is very man as well as God.

Third. That believers may have much weakness and infirmity.

Fourth. That Christ has all power: and

Fifth. That Christ is full of patience and kind­ness towards His people.

Remember these five lessons, and you will do well.

David Brainerd was an American missionary to the Native Americans who had a particularly fruitful ministry among the Delaware Indians of New Jersey.

“Only eternity will reveal how many fires of evangelistic zeal have been lit by the perusal of the account of [David Brainerd's] short but powerful ministry.”¹

David Brainerd (1718-1747), a missionary to the American Indians, has become one of the most influential missionaries of all time. His personal ministry lasted only three years, but his journal and diary, edited and published by Jonathan Edwards, have inspired countless missionaries over the years to reach thousands, or even millions, of souls across the globe. His life was not an easy one; in fact, he suffered hardships of many kinds. It was for enduring these difficulties in order to further the gospel of Christ that he has gained such respect and had such a far-reaching effect. He life is worthy of study for anyone who desires to have a impact with their life on the growth of the Kingdom of God.

David was born on Sunday, April 20, 1718, in Haddam, Connecticut, to Hezekiah and Dorothy Brainerd. He came from a very notable family. His grandfather, Daniel Brainerd, had come to Connecticut at the age of eight from Essex, England, for reasons yet unknown. Daniel eventually became very influential as “the greatest landowner, a commissioner for the General Court, a justice of the peace, and a deacon in the church.”² Daniel’s son, Hezekiah, followed him in public leadership as a representative in the General Assembly, Speaker of the House, and a member of the Governor’s Council. In reward for his service Hezekiah was given three hundred acres of land. David’s mother, Dorothy, had been the widow of Daniel Mason and came from a family heritage of ministers. She brought a son, Jeremiah Mason, into the family when she married Hezekiah in 1707, and she eventually bore nine more children, of which David was the sixth.

In addition to being influential in the community, David’s family was very devout. Hezekiah has been called a man “of great personal dignity and self-restraint, of rigid notions of parental prerogative and authority, of the strictest puritanical views as to religious ordinances, of unbending integrity as a man and a public officer, and of extreme scrupulousness in his Christian life.”³ Under his father’s instruction, David practically grew up in the Congregational church. As young as age seven he was expressing concern for his soul. This Christian foundation probably helped him even then to endure the first major struggles of his life.

David’s teenage years were, in fact, quite a struggle for him. When he was only nine, his father died. Only five years later, his mother also died. After this, he lived for four years in East Haddam with his older sister, Jerusha, her husband, Samuel Spencer, and her three children. During this time he was often depressed and lonely. He himself described this saying that from his youth he was “somewhat sober, and inclined rather to melancholy.”⁴ Throughout his life he would be struggling against his tendency toward depression. Jonathan Edwards said that he was “by his constitution and natural temper, so prone to melancholy and dejection of spirit.”⁵ He was soon to face even more difficult battles.

In April of 1733, after he turned nineteen, Brainerd moved to a farm in Durham, 10 miles West of Haddam, that he had inherited from his father. There, he developed a desire to obtain an education, and he became very concerned about his religion. In 1738, he moved in with Phineas Fiske, the pastor of the church at Haddam, to pursue his religious interests. After Fiske’s death, he continued his pursuit with his brother, and he soon felt great distress for his soul, realizing that he was selfishly trusting in his works for salvation. Though he had not yet had a conversion experience, he made a commitment at age 20 to enter into ministry and began plans to attend Yale College. On Sunday, July 22, 1739, at age 21, he finally had a conversion experience:

I was walking again in the same solitary place, where I was brought to see myself lost and helpless… I had been thus endeavoring to pray… then, as I was walking in a dark thick grove, unspeakable glory seemed to open to the view and apprehension of my soul. I do not mean any external brightness, for I saw no such thing… Thus God, I trust, brought me to a hearty disposition to exalt Him and set Him on the throne… At this time, the way of salvation opened to me with such infinite wisdom, suitableness, and excellency, that I wondered I should ever think of any other way of salvation; was amazed that I had not dropped my own contrivances, and complied with this lovely, blessed, and excellent way before.⁶

Shortly after this time, in September 1739, he enrolled at Yale.

David Brainerd’s sufferings were to increase during his college years. He was older than most of the students, but, as a freshman, he was still subject to hazing from the upperclassmen. He also battled against constant sickness. During his first year, he was sent home for several weeks with the measles. During his second year, he began spitting up blood and was again sent home. This was most likely an early sign of the tuberculosis that would eventually be the cause of his death.

When he returned the second time, he found that the Great Awakening and a visit from George Whitefield had drastically changed the college. Brainerd gladly joined the student body in becoming a New Light, while the administration remained staunchly Old Light. Insults and disrespect grew between the two groups. On September 9, 1741, Jonathan Edwards gave the commencement address at Yale titled “The Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God.” To the disappointment of the administration, Edwards supported the students. This was probably the first meeting between Brainerd and the honorable Mr. Edwards.

The same day as Edwards’ address, the college trustees issued a statement saying: “If any student of this College shall directly or indirectly say, that the Rector, either of the Trustees or Tutors are hypocrites, carnal or unconverted men, he shall for the first offense make a public confession in the hall, and for the second offense be expelled.”⁷ That winter, a freshman overheard Brainerd say in a private conversation that the tutor Chauncey Whittlesey had “no more grace than a chair.” He was also reported as saying that he was surprised the Rector Thomas Clap “did not drop down dead”⁸ for fining students who became followers of Gilbert Tennent. Brainerd denied the latter, but refused to offer a public apology for the former, though he confessed his guilt. As a result, he was expelled from the college, though he stood at the top of his class academically.

Having been denied a Yale degree, Brainerd reevaluated the direction of his life. He moved several times, living with and being trained by Pastor Jedediah Mills, Pastor Joseph Bellamy, and the preacher Jonathan Dickinson. He spent much of his time studying and praying, seeking God for direction for his life. On July 29, 1742, he received a license to preach from the New Lights in the Association of Ministers of the East District of Fairfield County, Connecticut. With his license, he began preaching occasionally, but he still did not have a place or ministry to call his own. This transition period, however, was soon to end.

In 1741, John Sergeant, a missionary to the Indians, had visited the Forks of the Delaware River in Pennsylvania and seen their great need. He asked Scottish Society for Propagating Christian Knowledge (SSPCK) to appoint a missionary to them. On November 8, 1742, Brainerd received a letter from Ebenezer Pemberton of New York asking him to consider this ministry to the Indians, and on November 25 he accepted the commission and began what would become his life’s legacy. He would now forever be known as a missionary to the American Indians.

Brainerd spent the next six months preparing for his ministry. He traveled some, visiting friends and family and viewing the mission field he would soon enter. Then, he served as a pastor for six weeks that winter in a Congregational church in East Hampton, Long Island. While there, he gained some missionary experience by preaching to the nearby Indians, who were under the care of Azariah Horton, another missionary commissioned by the SSPCK. In doing so, Brainerd became overwhelmed with the destitute position of the Indians and felt “something of flatness and deadness”⁹ in his spirit. His heart went out to the Indians, and he developed a greater love for them. Meanwhile, he became more aware of his inadequacies, feeling extremely vile and incompetent for the job at hand.

At the end of the winter, Brainerd was ready to travel to Pennsylvania, but the SSPCG deemed the area too dangerous. Consequently, on April 1, 1743, he instead traveled to Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and began his ministry to the Mohegan Indians at Kaunaumeek. Through the spring months, he lived with a Scottish man and slept on a bed of straw. He traveled a mile and a half each day to be able to preach to the Indians, and he struggled daily with depression, loneliness, and physical discomfort. His diary entry on May 18, 1743 remarks:

My circumstances are such, that I have no comfort on any kind but what I have in God. I live in the most lonesome wilderness; have but one single person to converse with, that can speak English. Most of the talk I hear is either Highland Scotch or Indian. I have no fellow Christian to whom I might unbosom myself or lay open my conversation about heavenly things and join in social prayer. I live poorly with regard to the comforts of life. Most of my diet consists of boiled corn, hasty-pudding, etc. I lodge on a bundle of straw, my labor is hard and extremely difficult, and I have little appearance of success, to comfort me.¹⁰

Brainerd lived alone in a wigwam through most of the summer and finally, on July 30, 1743, he moved into a hut he had built for himself.

Brainerd’s year in Kaunaumeek was very eventful. In June 1743, he visited the SSPCK in New Jersey before setting up his first school for the Indians. He appointed his current interpreter, John Wauwaumpequunnaunt, as the headmaster, and found some encouragement through this new work; it was much easier to teach the Indians Christian truths after they had learned some English. Still, although they listened to him, Brainerd never thought the Indians really understood or accepted his message.

In September he visited New Haven to attend commencement at Yale, but he became very sick while he was there, again with symptoms of tuberculosis. Fortunately, friends in New Haven were able to treat him back to health. After returning to Kaunaumeek, he gave more attention to learning the Indian’s language under the teaching of John Sergeant at Stockbridge; this also helped him to communicate his message more effectively. In March 1744, Brainerd was given a chance to leave the wilderness and become the pastor of the church in East Hampton, Long Island. By this time, however, his devotion as a minister to the Indians far outweighed his desire for a comfortable position, and he chose to stay. On May 1, 1744, however, he received orders from the SSPCK to move to his original commission with the Indians in Pennsylvania. Thus, the Mohegan Indian’s were left to be cared for by John Sergeant, and Brainerd moved to the Forks of Delaware. Before delving deep into his work there, however, the SSPCK ordained him as a Presbyterian minister on June 12, 1744.

Upon his arrival in Delaware, Brainerd was discouraged at the state of the Indians. They had been scattered into the wilderness by land hungry whites and, though they seemed open to Christianity, they were very leery of listening to any white people. Nevertheless, he began preaching in turn to both the Indians and a nearby settlement of Irish. He lived with white people, where he had some English fellowship, and would travel each day to teach the Indians. As the word spread of this new teaching, the congregation of Indians soon grew from about twenty-five to over forty. Brainerd was somewhat encouraged by their response, as many “began to renounce their idolatry and refused to take part in the feasts during which sacrifices were offered to mysterious deities. Many became concerned about the state of their souls.”¹¹ Still, although they rejected some of their old ways, they did not put their hope in God as a savior. Brainerd was very discouraged by this and did not think that his efforts in the Forks of Delaware were any success. In an attempt to find more success and reach more Indians, he took two trips to the Susquehanna River. Although Indians there had some interest in the gospel he was preaching, Brainerd still found little tangible success in his work. In addition, he became very ill during his second journey to the Susquehannah.

During this time, Brainerd became increasingly reliant upon God’s working on the Indians before he would have any success. He described this in his June 27, 1744, diary entry: “My soul seemed to rely wholly upon God for success, in the diligent and faithful use of means. Saw, with greatest certainty, that the arm of the Lord must be revealed for the help of these poor heathen, if ever they were delivered from the bondage of the powers of darkness.”¹² His desire to see the Indians saved grew deeper than it had ever been. On July 23 of the same summer he wrote: “Had sweet resignation for the divine will and desired nothing so much as the conversion of the heathen to God, and that His kingdom might come in my own heart and the hearts of others.”¹³ Brainerd’s Calvinistic belief in God’s sovereignty was strengthened, and his dependence on God grew.

On June 19, 1745, Brainerd left the Forks of Delaware and went to Crossweeksung, New Jersey, where he would find the great success he had been searching for. As in Pennsylvania, he found on his arrival that the Indians were scattered throughout the land. Unlike before, however, they offered no objections to his preaching and began to quickly gather others to hear the message. As the Indians became increasingly interested, he began meeting with them individually to discuss the things he had been teaching.

At the end of July, during a return visit to the Forks of Delaware, a major breakthrough occurred in Brainerd’s ministry: his interpreter, Moses Tautomy, and his wife were saved, coming into an “experimental” knowledge of Christianity and being baptized. This helped tremendously because Tautomy was then able to understand Christian doctrine and communicate it more clearly. In addition, other Indians were more likely to take the message seriously because of their respect for Tautomy as a landowner and leader.

When Brainerd returned to Crossweeksung in August, the Indians were eagerly awaiting him. On August 6 he described his first convert. It was a woman “who obtained comfort, I trust, solid and well grounded. She seemed to be filled with love to Christ, at the same time behaved humbly and tenderly, and appeared afraid of nothing so much as of grieving and offending Him whom her soul loved.”¹⁴ That month, only six weeks after his first visit to Crossweeksung, Brainerd witnessed a spiritual awakening among the Indians. He was greatly encouraged as many came to a saving knowledge of Christ and many more traveled great distances to hear his message. He attributed this response fully to God’s sovereign work in their lives:

I never saw the work of God appear so independent of means as at this time. I discoursed to the people, and spoke what, I suppose, had a proper tendency to promote convictions. But God’s manner of working upon them appeared so entirely supernatural and above means that I could scarce believe He used me as an instrument, or what I spake as means of carrying on His work… God appeared to work entirely alone, and I saw no room to attribute any of this work to any created arm.¹⁵

Brainerd took this opportunity to begin discipling a new community of believers. He began baptizing those who showed evidence of their salvation, and throughout the fall he met with Indians individually to give them more teaching. On December 21, 1745, he began giving catechetical lectures to those who were ready for even deeper discipleship. On January 31, 1746, a schoolmaster arrived and began teaching children during the day and adults in the evenings. In April Brainerd began administering communion, and he taught them to pray and fast in preparation for it. That spring he took a huge step in his ministry by moving the Indians from Crossweeksung to Cranberry, New Jersey, so they could live close to one another in a permanent community and be taught easily. Less than a year after his arrival Brainerd had a congregation of over 130 Christian Indians who looked to him for guidance in both sacred and secular matters. This was the success he had been searching for:

I know of no assembly of Christians where there seems to be so much of the presence of God, where brotherly love so much prevails, and where I should so much delight in the public worship of God, in general, as in my own congregation; although not more than nine months ago, they were worshiping devils and dumb idols under the power of pagan darkness and superstition. Amazing change this! Effected by nothing less than divine power and grace!¹⁶

In the fall of 1746 Brainerd’s illness began to overcome him. His diary is full of complaints about how weak he was and how hard it was to continue his ministry in his physical condition. Consequently, he left the Indians in November and traveled to New England, where he was cared for by friends. In March 1947, he returned for what would be his last visit to the Indians before his death. By this time he was very depressed by his sickness and even looked forward to death. On May 19, 1747, Brainerd moved into Jonathan Edwards’ home in New Hampton, where he would spend the last nineteen weeks of his life under the care of Edwards’ daughter, Jerusha. Finally, what he referred to in his diary as “that glorious day”¹⁷ came; he died of tuberculosis on October 9, 1747, at the age of 29.

It seems certain that before his death romantic interest grew between Brainerd and Jerusha. Her close attention to him, however, was costly; she died four months later, also from tuberculosis. Despite the immediate loss of his daughter, Jonathan Edwards considered it a “gracious dispensation of Providence” that Brainerd was at his home during his last days. Brainerd’s life and diary had been an inspiration to the Edwards family, and in response Jonathan edited and published The Life and Diary of David Brainerd. In time, this became his most published and most read work. For over two centuries now, it has served as an inspiration to ministers and missionaries throughout the world.

Certainly Brainerd’s work was extraordinary, but the question still remains: why have the records of his short ministry had such a profound and lasting impact? To answer this, several characteristics of Brainerd’s ministry must be considered.

First, David Brainerd gave up his life in complete devotion to the Lord’s work. We can see a picture of this in some of his final words:

It is impossible for any rational creature to be happy without acting all for God. God Himself could not make him happy any other way… There is nothing in the world worth living for but doing good and finishing God’s work, doing the work that Christ did. I see nothing else in the world that can yield any satisfaction besides living to God, pleasing Him, and doing his whole will.¹⁸

Although he was originally concerned about material comforts, Brainerd came to believe that nothing mattered except serving God. He also sought God regularly through prayer and fasting. He records days of prayer and fasting more than anything else in his diary. In fact, it was so important to him that he taught the Indians to pray and fast before he would administer communion to them. Clearly, Brainerd had a heart that was intent on seeking God and doing His will to the best of his ability.

Second, it is worthy to note that Brainerd built for the long term. Part of his mission strategy was to build schools and bring the Indians together into a close, permanent community that could be easily taught and cared for. In doing so he became not only their religious leader, or pastor, but also their secular leader. He helped the Indians to restructure their entire lives around a Christian worldview. Integral to this vision of discipleship was the time that he spent discoursing with individuals and catechizing with small groups. He was able then to have direct, personal influence in the Indians’ lives. Brainerd worked to establish the Kingdom of God among the Indians in a way that would long outlive his ministry to them.

Third, he faced immense physical suffering. His sickness hounded him throughout his life. Whether he was taking breaks from school or was detained during his travels, reoccurring symptoms of tuberculosis often kept him from working at the tasks at hand. Eventually, of course, it took him completely out of his ministry and soon took his life as well. In addition to sickness, he dealt with many other physical discomforts, such as sleeping on straw, living in a wigwam, and riding full days through the rain. After growing up in an important, wealthy family, this must have been very difficult for him. Nevertheless, Brainerd forsook material pleasures for the satisfaction of doing the Lord’s work.

Fourth, he often struggled with depression and loneliness. His diary is full of entries about his discouragement. Sometimes he was disappointed about the way his ministry was going, and other times he was distraught over the blackness of his soul. At least twenty-two times he longed for death as a way of escape from his depression¹⁹, and, though he had made good friends among the Indians, he longed for a soul mate, something he never found, though he might have found it in Jerusha Edwards had they survived longer.

Finally, Brainerd’s ministry was deemed a success. Had his ministry ended after only his first two years of mission work, he may not have had such a great impact, because it was not until his third year that his ministry showed much fruit. It is the victories that are exalted and inspire mankind, not the failures. Thus, the far-reaching effect Brainerd has had is in large part due to his work being visibly successful in the end.

The impact of The Life and Diary of David Brainerd has come as ministers have identified themselves with Brainerd’s life. It has motivated them to faithfully pursue God and His ministry through all of their physical and emotional sufferings. It has shown the great reward of serving God with complete abandonment. As John Piper wrote, “Brainerd’s life is a vivid, powerful testimony to the truth that God can and does use sick, discouraged, beat-down, lonely, struggling saints, who cry to him day and night, to accomplish amazing things for his glory.”²⁰ The testimony of Brainerd’s life gives hope to ministers desiring to faithfully continue Christ’s work.

This, then, is the story of David Brainerd. As a man, he was unable to do the tasks set before him. As a missionary, God carried him through all his struggles in order bring the gospel to the American Indians in a personal way. Brainerd’s perseverance and success has inspired many other missionaries since then to continue their work as well. Thus, his three years of faithful service to the American Indians has impacted the entire world for centuries. Knowing this, Brainerd might have said: to God be the glory, for great things He has done.

“May the Lord of the harvest send forth other laborers into this part of His harvest, that those who sit in darkness may see great light, and that the whole earth may be filled with the knowledge of Himself! Amen.”²¹

————

Endnotes

¹John Thornbury, David Brainerd: Pioneer Missionary to the American Indians. (Darlington, England: Evangelical Press, 1996) 298.

² Jonathan Edwards, The Life and Diary of David Brainerd. Norman Pettit, ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985) 313.

³ Ibid. 33.

⁴ Jonathan Edwards, The Life and Diary of David Brainerd. Philip E. Howard, Jr., ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1949) 57.

⁵ Ibid. 46.

⁶ Ibid. 70.

⁷ Jonathan Edwards, The Life and Diary of David Brainerd. Norman Pettit, ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985) 41.

⁸ Ibid. 42.

⁹ Jonathan Edwards, The Life and Diary of David Brainerd. Philip E. Howard, Jr., ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1949) 116.

¹⁰ Ibid. 124.

¹¹ John Thornbury, David Brainerd: Pioneer Missionary to the American Indians. (Darlington, England: Evangelical Press, 1996) 120.

¹² Jonathan Edwards, The Life and Diary of David Brainerd. Philip E. Howard, Jr., ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1949) 167.

¹³ Ibid. 174.

¹⁴ Ibid. 214-215.

¹⁵ Ibid. 224.

¹⁶ Ibid. 277.

¹⁷ Ibid. 364.

¹⁸ Ibid. 366.

¹⁹ Ibid. 6.

²⁰ Piper 5.

²¹ Jonathan Edwards, The Life and Diary of David Brainerd. Philip E. Howard, Jr., ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1949) 253.

Selected Bibliography of Available Resources

Chesterman, A. “The Journals of David Brainerd and of William Carey.” Baptist Quarterly 19 (1961):147-156.

Conforti, Joseph. “Jonathan Edwards’s Most Popular Work: The Life of David Brainerd and Nineteenth-Century Evangelical Culture.” Church History 54 (June 1985):188-201.

Conforti, Joseph. “David Brainerd and the Nineteenth Century Missionary Movement.” Journal of the Early Republic 5 (1985):309-329.

Conforti, Joseph A. Jonathan Edwards, Religious Tradition, & American Culture. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1995.

“David Brainerd: One Continual Flame for God.” Glimpses issue #79. Online. http://www.gospelcom.net/chi/glimpsef/glimpses/glmps079.shtml

“David Brainerd.” Online. http://www.webzonecom.com/ccn/bio/bio08.txt

Dassow, Peter. The Life of David Brainerd: the Search for the New Light. Online. http://www.hillsdale.edu/dept/phil&rel/je/BrainerdD/Dassowp.html

Edwards, Jonathan. The Life and Diary of David Brainerd. Norman Pettit, ed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985.

Edwards, Jonathan. The Life and Diary of David Brainerd. Philip E. Howard, Jr., ed. Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1949.

Fisher, Benjamin A. As a Flame of Fire. Online. http://www.hillsdale.edu/dept/phil&Rel/JE/BrainerdD/FisherB.html

Harris, Paul. “David Brainerd and the Indians: Cultural Interaction and Protestant Missionary Ideology.” American Presbyterians 72 (1994):1-9.

Pettit, Norman. “Prelude to mission: Brainerd’s expulsion from Yale.” The New England Quarterly 59 (Mar. 1986):28-50.

Petit, Norman. “The Life of David Brainerd: Comments on the Manuscript and Text.” Yale University Library Gazette 60 (1986):137-144.

Piper, John. “Oh, that I may never loiter on my heavenly journey!” Reflections on the Life and Ministry of David Brainerd. Paper for the Bethlehem Conference for Pastors, January 31 1990. Online. http://www.desiringgod.org/online_library/onlinearticles/biographies/90Brainerd.htm

Pointer, Richard W., “‘Poor Indians’ and the ‘Poor in Spirit’: The Indian Impact on David Brainerd.” The New England Quarterly 67 (Sept. 1994):403-426.

Perdue, Theda. “Letters from Brainerd.” Journal of Cherokee Studies 4 (1979):6-9.

Thornbury, John. David Brainerd: Pioneer Missionary to the American Indians. Darlington, England: Evangelical Press, 1996.

Weddle, David L. “The Melancholy Saint: Jonathan Edwards’s Interpretation of David Brainerd as a Model of Evangelical Spirituality.” Harvard Theological Review 81 (July 1988):297-318.

Ziff, Larzer. Writing in the New Nation: Prose, Print, and Politics in the Early United States. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991.

Source: Wholesome Words

I. THE PLAN

Men and women today feel lost and astray in this world. A glance at our modern art, poetry or novels, or five minutes’ conversation with a sensitive unbeliever, will assure us of that. In an age that has won a higher degree of control over the forces of nature than any before, this may seem odd; but it is not really odd. It is God’s judgment, which we have brought down on ourselves by trying to feel too much at home in this world.

For that is what we have done. We have set our faces against the idea that one should live on the basis that there is something more than this world to live for. Even if we privately thought that the materialists were wrong in denying God and another world exist, we have not allowed our belief to stop us living on materialistic principles: treating this world as if it were the only home we should ever have, and concentrating exclusively on arranging it to our comfort. We thought we could build heaven on earth, and tried. And now God has judged us for our impiety. In less than half a century, we have had two “hot” world wars and one “cold” one, and now we find ourselves in the age of such horrors as nuclear warfare and brainwashing. In such a world, it is not possible to feel at home. It is a world which has disappointed us. We expected life to be friendly (why? – but we did); instead, however, it has mocked our hopes and left us disillusioned and baffled. We thought we knew what to make of life, but now we do not know whether anything can be made of it. We thought of ourselves as wise men, but now we find ourselves like benighted children, lost in the dark.

Sooner or later, this was bound to happen; for God’s world is never friendly to those who forget its Maker. The Buddhists, who link their atheism with a thorough pessimism about life, are to that extent right. Without God, man loses his bearings in this world, and he cannot find them again till he has found the One whose world it is. God made our life, and God alone can tell us its meaning. If we are ever to make sense of life in this world, we must know about God. And if we want to know the facts about God, we shall be wise to turn to the Bible.

Reading the Bible

Let us read the Bible then – if we can. But can we? The truth is that many of us have lost the ability to read the Bible. When we open our Bibles, we do so in a frame of mind which forms an insuperable barrier to our ever reading it at all. This may sound startling, but it is not hard to show that it is true.

When you sit down to any other book, you treat it as a unit. You look for the plot, or the main thread of the argument, and follow it through to the end. You let the author’s mind lead yours. Whether or not you allow yourself to “dip” before settling down to the book properly, you know that you will not have understood it till you have been through it from start to finish, and if it is a book that you want to understand you set aside time to read it in full. But when we come to Holy Scripture, our behavior is different. In the first place, we are in the habit of not treating it as a book – a unit – at all, but simply as a collection of separate stories and sayings. We take it for granted before we look at the text that the burden of them – or, at least, of as many of them as affect us – is either moral advice or comfort for those in trouble. So we read them (when we do) in small doses, a few verses at a time. We do not go through individual books, let alone the two complete Testaments, as a single whole. We browse through the rich old Jacobean periods of the Authorized Version, waiting for something to strike us. When the words bring to our minds a soothing thought or a pleasant picture, we feel that the Bible has done its job for us. It seems that the Bible is for us not a book, but a collection of beautiful and suggestive snippets, and it is as such that we use it. The result is that we never read the Bible at all. We take it for granted that we are handling Holy Writ in the truly religious way; but in truth, our use of it is more than a little superstitious. It is the way of natural religiosity, perhaps, but not of true religion.

For God does not mean Bible-reading to function simply as a drug for fretful minds. The reading of Scripture is intended to awaken our minds, not to send them to sleep. God asks us to approach Scripture as His Word – a message addressed to rational creatures, men with minds; a message which we cannot expect to understand without thinking about it. “Come now, and let us reason together,” said God to Judah through Isaiah (Isa. 1:18), and He says the same to us every time we take up His book. He has, indeed, taught us to pray for divine enlightenment as we read: “open thou mine eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of thy law” (Ps. 119:18); but this is a prayer that God will enable us to think about His Word with insight, and we effectively prevent its being answered if after offering it we make our minds a blank and stop thinking as we read. Again, God asks us to read the Bible as a book – a single story with a single theme. We are to read it as a whole, and as we read, we are to ask ourselves: what is the plot of this book? What is its real subject? What is it really about? Unless we ask these questions, we shall never reach the point from which we can see what it is saying to us about our own individual lives.

When we do reach this point, we shall find that God’s real message to us is more drastic, and at the same time more heartening, than anything that human religiosity could conceive.

The Main Theme

What do we find when we try to read the Bible as a single unified whole, with our minds alert to observe what it is really about?

The first thing we find is that this book is not primarily about man at all. Its subject is God. He (if the phrase may be allowed) is the chief actor in the drama, the hero of the story. The Bible proves on inspection to be a factual survey of His work in this world, past, present, and to come, with explanatory comment from prophets, psalmists, wise men and apostles. Its main theme is not human salvation, but the work of God vindicating His purposes and glorifying Himself in a sinful and disordered cosmos by establishing His kingdom and exalting His Son, by creating a people to worship and serve Him, and ultimately by dismantling and re-assembling this order of things, so rooting sin out of His world entirely. It is into this larger perspective that the Bible fits God’s work in saving man. And it depicts the God who does these things as more than a distant cosmic architect, more than a ubiquitous heavenly uncle, more than an impersonal life-force – more than any of the petty substitute deities which inhabit our twentieth century minds. He is the living God, present and active everywhere, “glorious in holiness, fearful in praises, doing wonders” (Exod. 15:11). He gives Himself a name – Yahweh (Jehovah: see Exod. 3:14-15; 6:2-3) – which, whether it be translated “I am that I am” or “I will be that I will be” (the Hebrew means both), is a proclamation of His self-existence and self-sufficiency, His omnipotence and His unbounded freedom. This world is His; He made it, and He controls it; He “worketh all things after the counsel of his own will” (Eph. 1:11). His knowledge and dominion extend to the smallest things: “The very hairs of your head are all numbered” (Matt. 10:30). “The LORD reigneth” – the Psalmists make this unchangeable truth the starting-point for their praises again and again (see Psa. 93:1; 96:10; 97:1; 99:1). Though hostile forces rage and chaos threatens, God is King; therefore His people are safe. Such is the God of the Bible.

And the Bible’s dominant conviction about Him, a conviction proclaimed from Genesis to Revelation, is that behind and beneath all the apparent confusion of this world lies His plan. That plan concerns the perfecting of a people and the restoring of a world through the mediating action of Christ. God governs human affairs with this end in view, and human history is a record of the outworking of His purposes. It has been truly said that history is – His story. The Bible details the stages in God’s plan. God visited Abraham, led him into Canaan, and entered into a covenant relationship with him and his descendants – “an everlasting covenant, to be a God unto thee and to thy seed after thee . . . I will be their God” (Gen. 17:7 f). He gave Abraham a son. He turned Abraham’s family into a nation, and led them out of Egypt into a land of their own. Over the centuries He prepared them and the Gentile world for the coming of the Savior-King, “who verily was foreordained before the foundation of the world, but was manifest in these last times for you, who by him do believe in God” (1 Pet. 1:20f). At last, “when the fullness of the time was come, God sent forth His Son, made of a woman, made under the law, to redeem them that were under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons” (Gal. 4:4f). The covenant promise to Abraham’s seed is now fulfilled to all who put faith in Christ: “if ye be Christ’s, then are ye Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise” (Gal. 3:29). The plan for this age is that the gospel should go through the world, and “a great multitude . . . of all nations, and kindreds, and peoples, and tongues” (Rev. 7:9) be brought to faith in Christ; after which, at Christ’s return, heaven and earth will in some unimaginable way be re-made, and where “the throne of God and of the Lamb” is, there “his servants shall serve him: and they shall see his face . . . and they shall reign for ever and ever” (Rev. 22:3-5).

This is the plan of God, says the Bible. It cannot be thwarted by human sin, because human sin itself is taken up into it, and defiance of God’s revealed will is used by God for the furtherance of His will for events. Joseph’s brothers, for instance, sold him into Egypt. “Ye thought evil against me,” said Joseph afterwards, “but God meant it unto good . . . to save much people alive” (Gen. 50:20); “so it was not you that sent me hither, but God” (Gen. 45:8). The cross of Christ itself is the supreme illustration of this principle. “Him, being delivered by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God,” said Peter in his Pentecost sermon, “ye . . . by wicked hands have crucified and slain”(Acts 2:23). At Calvary God over-ruled Israel’s sin, which He foresaw, as a means to the salvation of the world. Thus it appears that man’s lawlessness does not thwart God’s plan for His people’s redemption; rather, through the wisdom of omnipotence, it is turned to the service of that plan.

Accepting the Plan

This, then, is the God of the Bible, the God with whom we have to do: a God who reigns, who is master of events, and who works out through the stumbling service of His people and the folly of His foes alike His own eternal purpose for His world. And now we begin to see what the Bible really has to say to a generation like our own which feels itself lost and bedeviled in an inscrutably hostile order of things. There is a plan, says the Bible. There is sense in things, but you have missed it. Turn to Christ; seek God; give yourself to the service of His plan, and you will have found the key to living in this world which has hitherto eluded you. “He that followeth me,” Christ promises, “shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life” (John 8:12). Henceforth you will have a motive: God’s glory. You will have a rule: God’s law. You will have a Friend in life and death: God’s Son. You will have in yourself the answer to the doubting and despair called forth by the apparent meaninglessness, even malice, of circumstances: the knowledge that “the LORD reigneth,” and that “all things work together for good to them that love God, to them that are the called according to his purpose” (Rom. 8:28). Thus, you will have peace.

And the alternative? We may defy and reject God’s plan in our unbelief, but we cannot escape it. For one aspect of His plan is the judgment of sin. Those who reject the gospel offer of life through Christ bring upon themselves the dark eternity appointed for all such. Those who choose to be without God shall have what they choose; God respects their choice. But this also is part of the plan, and God’s will is done no less in the condemnation of unbelievers than in the salvation of those who put faith in Christ.

Such are the outlines of God’s plan, the central message about God which the Bible brings us. Its exhortation to us is that of Eliphaz to Job: “Acquaint now thyself with him, and be at peace; thereby good shall come unto thee” (Job 22:21). In the light of our knowledge that “the LORD reigneth”, working out His plan for His world without let or hindrance, we can begin to appreciate both the wisdom of this advice and the glory that lies hidden in this promise.

II. ALL THINGS . . . FOR GOOD

“The Lord reigneth.” The Creator is King in His universe. God “worketh all things after the counsel of his own will” (Eph. 1: 11). The decisive factor in world history, the purpose which really controls it and the key which really interprets it, is God’s eternal plan. We have seen that the sovereign lordship of God is the basis of the biblical message and the foundation-fact of Christian faith.

But this is a truth which raises problems for sensitive and thoughtful souls at many points. Like other matters of faith, it is not an object of rational demonstration, and circumstances on occasion prompt the most painful doubts about it. Some of the things which happen to God’s servants, in particular, hurt and bewilder us: how, we ask, can these misfortunes, these frustrations, these apparent setbacks to God’s cause be any part of His will? And we find ourselves tempted when we contemplate events of this sort (of which the Christian world is full) to deny either the reality of God’s government or, if not that, at least the perfect goodness of the God who governs. To draw either conclusion would be easy – but it would also be false; and when we are tempted to do so, we should stop and ask ourselves certain questions.

“The Secret Things”

In the first place: ought we to be surprised when we find ourselves for the moment baffled by what God is doing? Surely not. We must not forget what we are. We are not gods; we are creatures, and no more than creatures; and, as creatures, we have no right or reason to expect that at every point we shall be able to comprehend the wisdom of our Creator. He Himself has reminded us, “My thoughts are not your thoughts . . . as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are . . . my thoughts than your thoughts” (Isa. 55:9). Furthermore, the King has made it clear to us that it is not His pleasure to disclose all the details of His policy to His human subjects. As Moses declared, when he had finished expounding to Israel what God had revealed of His will for them – “the secret things belong unto the LORD our God: but those things which are revealed belong unto us . . . that we may do all the words of this law” (Deut. 29:29). The principle illustrated here is that God has disclosed His mind and will so far as we need to know it for practical purposes, and we are to take what He has disclosed as a complete and adequate rule for our faith and life. But there still remain “secret things” which He has not made known and which, in this life at least, He does not intend us to discover. And the reasons behind God’s providential dealings sometimes fall into this category.

Job’s case illustrates this. Job was never told at any stage about the challenge which God met by allowing Satan to plague His servant in the manner which the book describes. All Job knew was that the omnipotent God was morally perfect and that it would be blasphemously false to deny His goodness under any circumstances. He refused, therefore, to “curse God” even when his livelihood, his children and his health had been taken from him (Job 2:9-10). Fundamentally, in his heart, he maintained this refusal to the end, though the well-meant platitudes which his smug friends churned out at him drove him almost crazy and at times forced out of him wild words about God of which he had later to repent. Though not without a struggle, Job held fast his integrity throughout the time of testing, and maintained his confidence in God’s goodness unshaken. And his confidence was in due course vindicated, for when the time of testing ended, after God had come to Job in mercy to renew his humility (40:1-5; 42:1-6), and Job had obediently prayed for the souls of his three maddening friends, it is recorded that “the LORD gave Job twice as much as he had before” (42:10). “Ye have heard of the patience of Job,” writes James, “and have seen the end of the Lord; that the Lord is very pitiful, and of tender mercy” (James 5:11). Did the bewildering series of catastrophes that overtook Job mean that God had abdicated His throne, or abandoned His servant? Not at all; as Job in due course proved by experience. But the reason why God had for a time plunged him into darkness was never told him. And may not God, for wise purposes of His own, treat others of His best followers as He treated Job?

But there is more to be said yet.

What is God doing?

In the second place: has God left us entirely in the dark as to what He is doing in His providential government of the world? Indeed, no. He has, in fact, given us extremely full information as to the central purpose which He is executing, and thereby, as we shall see, has given us a very positive rationale of the trying experiences of Christians which constitute our present problem.

What is God doing? In a word, He is “bringing many sons unto glory” (Heb. 2:10). He is saving a great company of sinners. He has been engaged in this task since history began. He first spent many centuries preparing a people and a setting of world-history in readiness for the coming of His Son. Then He sent His Son into the world in order that there might be a gospel, and now He sends His gospel through the world in order that there may be a Church. He has exalted His Son to the throne of the universe, and Christ from His throne now calls sinners to Himself, keeps them, leads them, and finally, brings them to be with Him in His glory. God is saving men and women through His Son: first, by justifying and adopting them into His family for Christ’s sake as soon as they believe, thus restoring the relationship between them and Himself which sin had broken; and then, within that restored relationship, by continually working in and upon them to renew them in the image of Christ, so that the family likeness (if the phrase may be allowed) shall appear in them more and more. And it is this renewal of ourselves, progressive here and to be perfected hereafter, which Paul identifies with the “good” for which “all things work together . . . to them that love God . . . the called according to his purpose.” For God’s purpose, as Paul explains in the next verse, is that those whom God has chosen and in love has called to Himself should “be conformed to the image of his Son, that he (the Son) might be the firstborn among many brethren” (Rom. 8:28-29). All God’s ordering of circumstances, Paul tells us, is a means designed for the fulfillment of this purpose. The “good” for which all things work is not, therefore, the immediate ease and comfort of God’s children (as is, one fears, too often supposed), but their ultimate holiness and conformity to the likeness of Christ.

Does this help us to understand how adverse circumstances may find a place in God’s plan for His people? Certainly, it does; it throws a flood of light upon the whole problem, as the writer to the Hebrews demonstrates. To Christians who had grown disheartened and apathetic under the pressure of constant hardship and victimizations, we find him writing thus: “Have you forgotten the exhortation which addresses you as sons?” “My son, do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord, nor lose courage when you are punished [better, reproved, as R.V.] by him. For the Lord disciplines him whom he loves, and chastises every son whom he receives. It is for discipline that you have to endure. God is treating you as sons; for what son is there whom his father does not discipline? . . . We have had earthly fathers to discipline us and we respected them. Shall we not much more be subject to the Father of spirits and live? . . . He disciplines us for our good, that we may share his holiness. For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant; later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it” (Heb. 12:5-11, R.S.V., quoting Prov. 3:11-12). It is striking to see how this writer, like Paul, equates the Christian’s “good”, not with ease and quiet, but with sanctification. The passage is so plain that it needs no comment, only frequent re-reading whenever we find it hard to believe that whatever the form of rough handling which circumstances (or our fellow-Christians) are giving us can possibly be God’s will.

The Purpose of it All

However, there is more to be said still. A third question which we should ask ourselves when the problems of providence distress us is: what is God’s ultimate end in His dealings with His children? Is it simply their happiness, or is it something more? The Bible indicates that it is something more. It is the glory of God Himself.

God’s end in all His acts is ultimately Himself. There is nothing morally dubious about this; if we allow that man can have no higher end than the glory of God, how can we say anything different about God Himself? The idea that it is somehow unworthy to represent God as aiming at His own glory in all that He does seems to reflect a failure to remember that God and man are not on the same level; and to show lack of realization that, whereas a man who makes his own well-being his ultimate end does so at the expense of his fellow-creatures, God has determined to glorify Himself by blessing His creatures. His end in redeeming man, we are told, is “the praise of the glory of his grace,” or simply “the praise of his glory” (Eph. 1:6, 12, 14). He wills to display His resources of mercy (the “riches” of His grace, and of His glory – “glory” being the sum of His attributes as He reveals them: Eph. 2:17; 3:16) in bringing His saints to their ultimate happiness in the enjoyment of Himself. But we may ask, how does this bear on the problem of providence? In this way: it gives us insight into the way in which God saves us, and suggests the reason why He does not take us to heaven the moment we believe. We see that He leaves us in a world of sin to be tried, tested, belabored by troubles that threaten to crush us – in order that we may glorify Him by our patience under suffering, and in order that He may display the riches of His grace and call forth new praises from us as He constantly upholds and delivers us. Psalm 107 is a majestic declaration of this.

Is it a hard saying? Not to the man who has learned that his chief end in this world is to “glorify God, and (in so doing) to enjoy Him for ever.” To glorify God by patient endurance and to praise Him for His gracious deliverances: to live the whole of one’s life, through smooth and rough places alike, in sustained obedience and thanksgiving for mercy received – to seek and find one’s deepest joy, not in spiritual lotus eating, but in discovering through each successive storm and conflict the mighty adequacy of Christ to save – and in the sure knowledge that God’s way is best, both for our own welfare and for His glory: that is the heart of true religion. No problems of providence will shake the faith of the man who has truly learned this.

III. THE GLORY OF GOD

God the Creator rules His world for His own glory. “Unto him are all things” (Rom. 11:36); He Himself is the end of all His works. He does not exist for our sake, but we for His. It is the nature and prerogative of God to please Himself, and His revealed good pleasure is to make Himself great in our eyes. “Be still,” He says to us, “and know that I am God: I will be exalted among the heathen, I will be exalted in the earth” (Ps. 46:10). God’s overriding goal is to glorify Himself.

Its Reasonableness

Now this is a truth which at first we find hard to receive. Our immediate reaction to it is an uncomfortable feeling that such an idea is unworthy of God: that self-concern of any sort is really incompatible with moral perfection, and in particular with God’s nature as love. Sensitive and morally cultured people are sincerely shocked by the thought that God’s ultimate end is His own glory, and protest most heatedly against it. Why, they say, this is to depict God as essentially no different from a bad man, even from the devil himself! It is an immoral and outrageous doctrine, and if the Bible teaches it, so much the worse for the Bible! Indeed, they often draw this conclusion explicitly with regard to the Old Testament. A volume, it is said, which depicts God so persistently as a “jealous” Being, always concerned first and foremost about His “honor,” cannot be regarded as Divine truth, for God is not like that, and it is no less than blasphemy, real if unintentional, to think that He is. Since these convictions are widely and strongly held, it is worth while before we go further to pause and consider what validity they have.

We begin by asking: why are they asserted with so much heat? On other theological questions, men can disagree calmly enough; but it seems a universal experience that protests against the doctrine that God’s chief end is His glory are made with passion and rhetoric and even bluster. The reason is not far to seek, and it does credit to the moral earnestness of the speakers. Their outbursts of feeling spring, as passionate outbursts in conversation so often do, from a bad conscience. These persons are sensitive to the sinfulness of continual self-seeking. They know themselves well enough to see that a guilty craving to gratify self is at the root of all their moral weaknesses and shortcomings; they are, indeed, trying as best they can to face it and fight it. A condemning conscience continually reminds them that whenever they seek their own pleasure and aggrandizement, and use their fellow-beings as a means to this end, they do wrong. Hence, they conclude that for God to be self-centered would be equally wrong, and the vehemence with which they reject the idea that the holy God is supremely concerned to exalt Himself reflects their acute sense of the guiltiness of their own past acts of self-seeking.

But is their conclusion valid at all? On reflection, it appears to be a complete mistake. If it is right for man to have the glory of God as his goal, can it be wrong for God to aim at the same goal? If man can have no higher end and motive than God’s glory, how can God? And if it is wrong for man to seek a lesser end than this, then it would be wrong for God too. The reason why it cannot be right for man to live for himself, as if he were God, is simply the fact that he is not God; and the reason why it cannot be wrong for God to seek His own glory is simply the fact that He is God. Those who would not have God seek His glory in all things are really asking that He should cease to be God. And there is no greater blasphemy than to will God out of existence.

If the objectors’ line of reasoning is so clearly false, why are so many today convinced by it? The appearance of plausibility which this view derives from our inbred sinful habit of making God in our own image, and thinking of Him as if He and we stood, as it were, on the same level, so that His obligations to us and ours to Him correspond; as if He were bound to serve us and further our well-being with the same entire selflessness with which we are in duty bound to serve Him. This is, in effect, to think of God as if He were a man, albeit a great one. If this way of thinking were right, then for God to seek His own glory in everything would indeed make Him comparable to the worst of men and to Satan himself. But our Maker is not a man, not even an omnipotent superman, and this way of thinking of Him is not right. It is, in fact, gross idolatry. (You do not have to make a graven image picturing God as a man to be an idolater; a mental image of this sort is all that you need to break the second commandment.) We must not imagine that the obligations which bind us, as creatures, to Him bind Him, as Creator, equally to us. Dependence, of whatever form, is a one-way relation, and carries with it one-way obligations. Children, for instance, ought to obey their parents – not vice versa! And our dependence as creatures upon our Creator binds us to seek His glory without in the least committing Him to seek ours. For us to glorify Him is always a duty; for Him to bless us is never anything but grace. The only thing that, as God, He is bound to do is the thing that He has bound us to do – to glorify Himself.

We conclude, then, that it is the very reverse of blasphemy to speak of God as self-centered; it would, indeed, be irreligious not to. It is the glory of God to have made all things for Himself and to use them as means for His own exaltation. The clear-headed Christian will insist on this. And he will insist too that it is the glory of man that he is privileged to function as a means to this end. There can be no greater glory for man than to be a means of glorifying God. “Man’s chief end is to glorify God” – and it is in so doing that man finds his true dignity as God’s creature. The modern humanist, who thinks that man is at his noblest and most god-like when he has thrown off the shackles of religion, imagines that by asserting that man is no more than a means to God’s glory we rob human life of all real worth. The truth, however, is the opposite. Human life without God has no real worth; it is a mere monstrosity. But when we say that man is no more than a means to God’s glory, we are also saying that man is no less than that – and thus showing how human life can have meaning and value. The only man in this world who enjoys a complete contentment is the man who knows for certain that there is no more worthwhile and satisfying life, no nobler or more significant life, than the life that he is living already; and the only man who knows this is the man who has learned that the way to be truly human is to be truly godly, and whose heart desires nothing more – and nothing less – than to be a means, however humble, to God’s chief end – His own glory and praise.

Its Meaning

But what does it mean to say that God’s chief end is His glory? To many of us, perhaps, the phrase “the glory of God” is rather empty. With what meaning does the Bible fill it?

The word translated “glory” in the Old Testament originally expressed the idea of weight. From this it came to be applied to that about a person which makes him “weighty” in others’ eyes, and prompts them to honor and respect him. Thus, for instance, Jacob’s gains and Joseph’s wealth are called “glory” (Gen. 31:1; 45:13). Then the word was extended to mean honor and respect itself. Accordingly, the Bible uses it with reference to God in a double connection, speaking, on the one hand, of the glory that belongs to God – the Divine splendor and majesty attaching to all God’s revelations of Himself – and, on the other hand, of glory that is given to God – the “honor” and “blessing,” praise and worship, which God has a right to receive, and which is the only fit response to the revelation of His holy presence. [“The glory of the God of Israel came . . . and I fell on my face . . .” (Ezek. 43:2f.).] The term “glory” thus connects the thoughts of God’s praiseworthiness and of His praise  of the majesty of the revelation of His power and presence from which religion springs, and of the worship which is the right response when we realize that God stands before us, and we before Him.

Take these two thoughts separately for a moment.

(a) In revelation, God shows us His Glory. “Glory” means Deity in manifestation. Creation reveals Him [“the heavens declare the glory of God” (Ps. 19:1); “the whole earth is full of his glory” (Isa. 6:3)]. In Bible times, He disclosed His presence by means of theophanies, which were termed His “glory” (the shining cloud in the tabernacle and temple, Exod. 40:34, 1 Kings 8:10 f.; Ezekiel’s vision of the throne and the wheels, Ezek. 1:28; etc.). Believers now behold His glory fully and finally displayed “in the face of Jesus Christ” (2 Cor. 4:6). Wherever we see God in action, there we see His glory – He presents Himself before us as holy and adorable, summoning us to bow down and worship.

(b) In religion, we give God glory. We do this by every act of response to His revelation of grace: by worship and praise [“whoso offereth praise glorifieth me” (Ps. 50:23); “give unto the Lord the glory due unto his name” (Ps. 96:8); “ . . . glorify God for his mercy” (Rom. 15:9)]; by believing His Word; by trusting His promises (that was how Abraham gave glory to God, Rom. 4:20); by confessing Christ as Lord, “to the glory of God the Father” (Phil. 2:11); by obeying God’s law [“the fruits of righteousness” are to “the glory and praise of God” (Phil. 1:11)]; by bowing to His just condemnation of our sins (so Achan gave God glory, Josh. 7:19f.); and, generally, by seeking in all ways to make Him great (which means making self small) in our daily lives.

Now we are in a position to see what is meant by the statement that God’s chief end is His glory. It means that His unchanging purpose is so to display to His rational creatures the glory of His wisdom, power, truth, justice and love that they come to know Him and, knowing Him, to give Him glory for all eternity by love and loyalty, worship and praise, trust and obedience. The kind of fellowship that He intends to create between us and Him is a relationship in which He gives of His fullest riches, and we give of our heartiest thanks, and both to the highest degree. When He declares Himself to be a “jealous” God, and proclaims: “my glory will I not give to another” (Isa. 4:8; 48:11), His concern is to safeguard the purity and richness of this relationship. Such is the goal of God.

And all God’s works are means to this end. The only answer that the Bible ever gives to the class of questions that begin: “why did God . . .?” is: for His own glory. It was for this that God decreed to create, and for this that He willed to permit sin. He could have kept man from transgression; He could have barred Satan out of the garden, or have confirmed Adam so that he became incapable of sinning (as He will do to the redeemed in heaven); but He did not. Why? For His own glory. It is often said, most truly, that nothing in God is so glorious as His redeeming love – the mercy which wins back transgressors through the blood-shedding of God’s own Son. But there would have been no revelation of redeeming love had sin not been first permitted.

Again: why did God choose to redeem? He need not have done so; He was not bound to take action to save us. His love for sinners, His resolve to give His Son for them, was a free choice which He need never have made. Why did it please Him to love and redeem the unlovely? The Bible tells us why. “To the praise of the glory of his grace . . . to the praise of his glory . . .” (Eph. 1:6, 12, 14).

We see the same purpose determining point after point in the plan of salvation. Some He elects to life, others He leaves under merited judgment, “willing to show his wrath, and to make his power known . . . and that he might make known the riches of his glory on the vessels of mercy . . .” (Rom. 9:22f). He chooses to make up the bulk of His Church from the riff-raff of the world – persons who are “foolish . . . weak . . . base . . . despised.” Why? “That no flesh should glory in his presence . . . that, according as it is written, He that glorieth, let him glory in the Lord” (1 Cor. 1:26-31). Why does not God root indwelling sin out of His saints in the first moment of their Christian life, as He will do the moment they die? Why, instead, does He carry on their sanctification with a slowness that is painful to them, so that all their lives they are troubled by besetting sins and never reach the perfection they desire? And why is it His custom to give them a hard passage through this world? The answer is, again, that He does all this for His own glory: to expose to us our own weakness and impotence, so that we may learn how utterly we depend upon His grace, and how limitless are the resources of His saving power. “We have this treasure in earthen vessels,” wrote Paul, “that the excellency of the power may be of God, and not of us” (2 Cor. 4:7). We might pursue this line of thought much further, did space permit. Once for all, let us rid our minds of the idea that things are as they are because God cannot help it. God “worketh all things after the counsel of his will” (Eph. 1:11), and all things are as they are because God has chosen that they should be; and the reason for His choice in every case is that it makes for His glory for things to be so.

The Godly Man

In conclusion, let us define what godliness is. We can say straight away that it is not simply a matter of externals, but of the heart; that it is not a natural growth, but a supernatural gift; that it is found only in those who have seen their sin, who have sought and found Christ, who have been born again, who have repented. But this is only to circumscribe and locate godliness; our present question is, what essentially is it? The answer follows from what has already been said. Godliness is the quality of life which exists in those who seek to glorify God.

The godly man does not object to the thought that his highest vocation is to be a means to God’s glory; rather, he finds it a source of great satisfaction and contentment. His ambition is to follow out the great formulae in which Paul summed up the practice of Christianity: “glorify God in your body”; “whether therefore ye eat, or drink, or whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory of God” (1 Cor. 6:20; 10:31). His dearest wish is to exalt God with all that he is in all that he does. He follows in the footsteps of Him who could say at the end of His life here: “I have glorified thee on the earth” (John 17:4), and who told the Jews: “I honour my Father . . . I seek not mine own glory . . .” (John 8:49f.). He thinks of himself in the manner of George Whitefield who said: “Let the name of Whitefield perish, so long as God is glorified.” Like God Himself, the godly man is supremely jealous that God, and God only, should be honored. Indeed this jealousy is a part of the image of God in which he has been renewed. There is now a doxology written on his heart, and he is never so truly himself as when he is praising God for the glorious things that He has done already and pleading with Him to glorify Himself yet further. We may say that it is by his prayers that he is known – to God, if not to men. “What a man is alone on his knees before God,” said Murray McCheyne, “that he is, and no more.” In this case, however, we must say no less. For prayer in secret is the veritable mainspring of the godly man’s life. And when we speak of prayer, we are not referring to the prim, proper, stereotyped, self-regarding formalities which sometimes pass for the real thing. The godly man does not play at prayer, for his heart is in it. Prayer to him is his chief work. And the burden of his prayer is always the same, the expression of his strongest and most constant desire – “Be thou exalted, Lord, in thine own strength.” “Be thou exalted, O God, above the heavens.” “Father, glorify thy name.” “Hallowed be thy name.” (Ps. 21:13; 57:5; John 12:28; Matt. 6:9). By this God knows His saints, and by this we may know ourselves.

Editor’s Note :

We began our study on Jude 3 with Thomas Manton and noted how the doctrine of faith in this verse is given three descriptions, namely – 1. It is Delivered, 2. It is Once Delivered for all times and 3. It is Delivered to the Saints of God.  After having made these expository remarks on the verse, we saw last week in part 2 of our study, how Manton then moved onto expounding the main doctrine taught by this passage.

In this final part of this series Puritan expositor Thomas Manton considers the use or the application of the main observation he has made of this verse.

Outline :

I. Occasion

II. The matter and drift of this epistle

1. The Act : Contend Earnestly
2. The Object : Faith

A. Description of Faith :

i. manner of its conveyance : given not invented
ii. time of its giving out to the world : once for all
iii. persons to whom its given : Saints

Digression : Faith as Grace of Faith
Obs1 : Faith is to be given.
Obs2 : Faith is said to be once given
Obs3 : Faith is not given to every one but the saints

 B. Faith as Doctrine of Faith :

i. Delivered : Not invented, but given

Obs1 : The mercy of God in delivering this faith or rule of salvation.

a. The benefit of the word.
b. The benefit of inscripturation
c. The mercy of God appeareth in preserving it
d. That God raises gifted men to expound and apply this faith
e. That the light cometh to us, and shineth in this land.
f. That it is given to persons in particular in the power and efficacy of it.
Use : God is the author and disposer of the message: receive it ‘as the word of God,’ and then it will ‘profit you.

Obs2 : The duty of the church concerning it.

a. To publish, own, and defend the truth in the present age.
b. To preserve the truth, and transmit it pure to the next age

ii. Once Delivered : for all times, never to be altered.

Because :
a. all is done so fully and perfectly, that nothing can be added.
b. this rule can never be destroyed.

iii. Delivered To The Saints : holy people of God.

a. The men that the Spirit of God made use of as penmen were ‘holy men’.
b. Holy persons are only fit to preach the faith.
c. None are fit publicly to defend the truth but the holy
d. None receive the truth so willingly as the saints do
e. None retain the truth more firmly than the saints do.

III. Main Observation

1. Doctrine : it is the duty of Christians to contend earnestly for the faith once given to the saints.

A. That we may not discredit ourselves and the truth.

i. That truth is honoured by a bold and resolute defence of it
ii. That we may not dishonour ourselves, and discredit our own profession.

B. That we may not hazard ourselves and the truth.

i. That we may not endanger ourselves.
ii. That we may not hazard the truth.

a. The preciousness of truth
b. The trust that is reposed in us for the next age, that is an obligation to faithfulness

(this week’s outline)

2. Use : It presseth us to this earnestness of contention and zeal for the truths of God.

A. What we must contend for.

B. Who must contend, and in what manner.

i. Private Christians must have a share in this holy contention

a. To search out the truth, that they may not fight blindfold
b. To own the profession of the truth, whatever it cost them.
c. To honour the truth by their conversations
d. To comprise all in a few words, whatever maketh for the truth, all that must the people do

ii. There is something that the magistrate may do

iii. Ministers are to contend for the truth

Manton’s Exposition : 

Use. It presseth us to this earnestness of contention and zeal for the truths of God. We live in a frozen age, and cursed indifferency hath done a great deal of mischief. Christians! is error grown less dangerous, or the truth of religion more doubtful? Is there nothing certain and worth contention, or are we afraid to meddle with such as shroud themselves under the glorious name of saints? We will not oppose saints, and so let the ‘truth’ go that was given to the saints, to be kept by them. Oh! my brethren, Paul withstood Peter to the face when truth was like to suffer, Gal. ii. 11. So should we withstand them to the face rather than make such sad work for the next age, and leave our poor babes to the danger of error and seduction. What is become of our zeal? ‘There is none valiant for the truth upon the earth.’ Prejudices and interests blind men so that they cannot see what they see, and are afraid to be zealous, lest they should be accounted bitter. We have been jangling about discipline, and now doctrine itself is like to escape us. In the name of God let us look about us. Are there not crafty thieves abroad that would steal away our best treasure, and in the midst of the scuffle cheat us and our posterity of the gospel itself. We have been railing at one another for lesser differences, and now we begin to be ashamed of it. Satan hopeth that error and blasphemy itself shall go scot-free. Ah! my brethren, it is time to awake out of sleep. Whilst we have slept the enemy hath come and sown tares. What a tattered religion shall we transmit to ages to come, if there be not a timely remedy! To help you I shall show: – 1. What we must contend for.  2. Who must contend, and in what manner.

1. What we must contend for.

For every truth of God, according to its moment and weight. The dust of gold is precious; and it is dangerous to be careless in the lesser truths: ‘Whosoever shall break the least of the commandments, and teach men so to do,’ &c., Mat v. 19. There is nothing superfluous in the canon. The Spirit of God is wise, and would not burden us with things unnecessary. Things comparatively little may be great in their own sphere, especially in their season, when they are the truths of the present age, and now brought forth by God upon the stage of the world, that we may study his mind in them. Better heaven and earth should be blended together in confusion, saith Luther, than one dust of God’s truth should perish. If the Lord call us out to the defence of them, whatever cometh of it we must be faithful. A man may make shipwreck of a good conscience in small matters. Say not, ‘It is a little one, and my soul shall live.’ Hearken to Satan, and this will be a little one, and that shall be a little one, till we have littled away all the principles of faith. I tell you, the world hath counted those small things for which the children of God have ventured their all. It is your duty to ‘take the little foxes,’ Cant. ii. 15. The first appearances of error are many times modest. There is a chain of truths; the devil taketh out a link here and a link there, that all may fall to pieces. See 2 Thes. ii. 2, ‘Let no man deceive you with such doctrine as that the day of Christ is at hand.’ Why? They might say there is no great danger in that. Peter saith, ‘The end of all things draweth nigh.’ 1 Peter iv. 7. The seducers said, enestèke, it ‘is at hand;’ and Peter saith, èggike, ‘it draweth nigh.’ Here is no great difference. Ay! but be not shaken in mind, saith Paul, ‘neither by letter nor by word nor by spirit, as if the day of the Lord were at hand;’ that is, take heed of such suggestions, under what pretence soever they are brought to you, either of revelations or collections from my doctrine; it is all a falsehood. Why is Paul so earnest? Because Satan had an aim to make them look for the sudden coming of Christ, which not happening accordingly, to make them fall a-questioning all the truths of God. So Gen. iii. 3, ‘Ye shall not eat nor touch lest ye die.’ That was Satan’s repetition. Whereas God had said, Gen. ii. 17, ‘Thou shalt surely die.’ No great difference, but Satan got a great deal of advantage by it Therefore be not ‘ignorant of Satan’s devices.’ The Council of Nice would not gratify Arius in a letter, and Nestorius in a letter. The lesser truths are not to be slighted in their time and place; they deserve an earnest contention. The martyrs were not foolish nor prodigal of their lives; they knew what they did when they durst not give place for a moment.All this is not spoken to justify undue rigours, such as are without any temper of Christian moderation, or those frivolous controversies about trifles, such as have no foundation in the word; as about the observance of Easter between the eastern and western churches, which difference grew so high that they excommunicated each other; or about celebrating the Lord’s Supper with leavened or unleavened bread; or the fierce bickerings between Chrysostom and Epiphanius about Origen’s books, set on by Theophilus, in pursuit of which many were slain, the senate house pulled down, and the great church at Constantinople set on fire; nor to justify mere verbal strifes about ‘words and names,’ forbidden by the apostle, 2 Tim. ii. 14; 1 Tim. vi. 4. Vainglorious men, if they can get but a different method of expression, cry, No new light, and so there is a great deal of noise stirred up about a mistake. Nor to justify the breaking of church fellowship and communion, and making rents in the body of Christ, because of difference of opinion in smaller matters, when we agree in the more weighty things. We are to ‘walk together as far as we are agreed,’ Phil. iii. 16; and externals wherein we differ, lying far from the heart of religion, are nothing to faith and the new creature, wherein we agree, Gal. v. 6, and vi. 15 The most weight should be pitched upon the fundamentals and essentials of religion; and when there is an agreement there, private differences in smaller matters should not make us break off from one another. False zeal is unevenly carried out to these lower things, both in opinion and practice; and usually young professors are eager upon disputes, impatient of contradiction, and lay out all their strength this way, to excuse their care in the more weighty matters of Christianity; whereas ‘the kingdom of God doth not stand in meat and drink, but in peace and righteousness and joy in the Holy Ghost,’ Rom. xiv. 17. The itch of disputing and zeal for an opinion, rather than religion in the main, are bad characters. Again, when men, though in the right, think there is no religion or holiness but within the compass of such an opinion, this is censorious rigour, or to be ‘righteous over-much,’ Eccles. vii. 17; or when a lesser dissent is loaded with all the odious consequences that you can fancy in your thoughts, though disclaimed by the party dissenting; when Eloi is turned into Elias, and things are perverted by a misinterpretation, as Christ’s words were, John i. 19, compared with Mat. xxvi. 61; – briefly, when men upon every small occasion draw all things to extremity, and break out into contumely, revilings, persecution, biting and devouring one another, it is not zeal, but fierceness and brutish immoderation. Therefore, all this excepted, it standeth us upon to be zealous even to sufferings for the lesser truths, that we may prevent the further encroachments of Satan, and antichrist, his eldest son, upon the liberties and privileges of the saints.But now, besides the lesser things, there are fundamentals and essentials in religion, which challenge the choicest of our care and zeal, that they may be kept entire and without violation; the ignorance of them is damnable, and the denial heretical: to determine what they are is an undertaking of great concernment to the Christian world, but of too high a nature for the present exercise. I shall only mention a few points which seem to be en prootois, matters concerning the foundation; as the creation of the world by God in six days out of nothing, God’s providence, man’s misery by sin, deliverance by Christ, the necessity of the new creature, the resurrection of the dead, and the everlasting recompenses. These are points of the greatest moment, though I cannot but say that others also are fundamental; but these come to mind as being of the most practical concernment.

2. Who must strive, and in what manner.

I answer – All in their place, and in that way that is proper to them.

[1.] Private Christians must have a share in this holy contention; their duty is partly -

(a.)To search out the truth, that they may not fight blindfold, or by an unhappy mistake lavish out their zeal upon fancies which they affect, or ordinances and doctrines of men. People are never so furious as when they have least ground and reason for what they assert; yea, and error never prevaileth so much as when Christians are all flame and affection without judgment, and do not understand the reasons of that religion which they do profess. See 1 Peter iii. 15, ‘A reason of the hope that is in you;’ and 2 Peter iii. 17, idion stèrugmon, ‘their own steadfastness;’ that is, such a steadfastness as doth arise from solid grounds in their own hearts, and not merely from the consent of others.

(b.) To own the profession of the truth, whatever it cost them. I say, it is their duty to own the profession of the truth; for the public owning of the people it is a great let and restraint to tyranny, and such innovations as otherwise a carnal magistrate would introduce into the church by force and power. See Acts iv. 21, they let them go because of the people; so Mat. xiv. 5, and xxi. 46. And again, I say they must own it whatever it cost them, for zealous defences are a great honour to the truth. The disputations of the doctors do not commend it to the world so much as the death of the martyrs; and therefore, though you cannot dispute for the truth, yet you should die for the truth: ‘Ye have not yet resisted unto blood.’ &c., Heb. xii. 4. We cannot be at too much cost to preserve so precious a treasure to posterity. And here even women may put in a share; they have lives to sacrifice upon the interest of the truth, and usually they do not fall in vain.

(c.) To honour the truth by their conversations: there are heretical manners as well as heretical doctrines; and there are many that are otherwise of an orthodox belief, yet make others sectaries and disciples of their vices: some live atheism; there are Antinomians in practice; an apostate is a practical Arminian. Therefore Christians are called to ‘hold forth the word of life’ in their conversations, Phil, ii. 16; and to ‘make the doctrine of God the Saviour comely,’ Titus ii. 10, by glorifying God in that course of life to which they are disposed. To preach and write for the truth doth not honour it so much as to ‘walk in the truth,’ 3 John 4; and the life is a better witness of the reality of religion than the tongue.

(d.) To comprise all in a few words, whatever maketh for the truth, either with God or men, all that must the people do: ‘We can do nothing against the truth, but for the truth,’ saith Paul, 2 Cor. xiii. 8. To God you must pray, that he would send forth not only labourers, but champions, Mat. ix. 38; not only such as can handle the trowel, but the sword in the battles of the church. To men, you are to quicken those that have gifts to look to their duty in this kind: ‘Say to Archippus, Take heed to thy ministry which thou hast received in the Lord,’ Col. iv. 17. Many may be stirred up by your exhortations, that otherwise would lie useless in idleness and privacy: in the battle the trumpeter hath his use as well as the soldier. Neither are they to be admonished only, but assisted; and by that means you have an interest in the glory of the work: 3 John 8, ‘We ought to receive such, that we may be fellow-helpers to the truth;’ sunergoi, co-workers; your helping hand is to the action, and God will not be unmindful of it: yea, if you bear any part of the toil, by performing any labour of love to them, it shall turn to a good account in the day of the Lord. Hezekiah’s servants did but copy out the proverbs, and it is mentioned to their praise, Prov. xxv. 1. All this may be done by persons of a private gift and station.

[2.] There is something that the magistrate may do: ‘He is the minister of God for good.’ Rom. xiii. 4; not only for good civil, but spiritual; and therefore doth the apostle bid us pray for them, that they may be keepers of both the tables: 1 Tim. ii. 2, ‘That we may lead a quiet life under them, in all godliness and honesty.’ Heathen have asserted, that it belongeth to the magistrates’ duty chiefly to look after matters of religion; much more is it evident by the light of Christianity. The kings of the Old Testament are commended for their zeal in this kind; and in the times of the gospel it is prophesied that ‘kings shall be the church’s nursing fathers, and queens her nursing mothers,’ Isa. xlix. 23, which they cannot be if they suffer poison to be given to God’s little ones without any let and restraint. It is a clear truth that if a man give up himself to Christ, he is to give up himself to him in every relation; his wit, wealth, parts, authority, all to be laid out for the use and service of Christ: he that doth not give up all, giveth nothing; we are to be Christ’s in every capacity. Therefore a magistrate as a magistrate must not only countenance religion, but also discountenance error, and hinder the spreading of it within his charge. It is by Christ that ‘kings reign.’ Prov. viii. 15, from him they received their power, and to him must they give an account of the exercise of it in the great day of recompenses; therefore they are bidden to ‘be wise and to kiss the Son,’ Ps. ii. 10-12, which certainly noteth more than a negative act or not opposing: there must be something positive, a zealous defence of the truth in their way, or else God will reckon with them. Those Gallios that are indifferent to Christ and antichrist cannot expect a long and happy reign. I cannot see how they can be true to civil interest unless they be careful for the suppression of error; for when false doctrines are freely vented, it is to be supposed they will find a general reception, for the most are the worst; and then, when the generality of a nation are corrupted, national judgments will not long be kept off, the whole body is sure to smart for it; for, as the Jewish proverb is, two dry sticks will set a green one on fire. Besides that error is masterly and bloody, and loveth to give law; therefore, ere it be too late, they should look to the civil peace, for if men be quiet, God will not, when his honour and truth and worship is neglected. But of this more hereafter.

[3.] Ministers are to contend for the truth, for by their office and station in the church they are captains of the people in this war against Satan and his adherents; therefore it is required of them that they should be able to handle the sword and the trowel; not only to ‘exhort by sound doctrine,’ but to ‘convince the gainsayers,’ Titus i. 9. These are pistoi anthroopoi, 2 Tim. ii. 2, ‘The faithful men,’ the feoffees in trust, to whom truth is committed; they are the salt of the earth, Mat. v. 13, those that must season the world with gracious principles; therefore they must above all others labour in the defence of the truth, otherwise they are compared to ‘dumb dogs that bark not’ when the thieves come to steal away the treasure, Isa. lvi. 10, 11. Now ministers must contend, partly by preaching, warning the people of the wolves that are abroad, Acts xx. 29; partly by disputing, Acts xv. 2, and xviii. 28, that by the knocking of flints light may fly out, and that truth may beat its enemy hand to hand in the open field; and partly by writing, for many times disputes are carried on with so much tumult and popular noise, that truth is lost in the crowd; besides, by this means we are a help to posterity, that, together with the poison, the antidote may be transmitted to them.

In general the church’s communication and preaching must continually chip away at the main “defeaters” the main, widely held objections to Christianity that form an “implausibility structure” keeping most people from solid faith thought because “all the smart people I know don’t believe Christianity.”

Here are the main ones in U.S. cities today:

The other religions. “No one should insist their view of God is better than all the rest. All religions are equally valid.”

Evil and suffering. “A good, all-powerful God wouldn’t allow this evil and suffering. Therefore, this God doesn’t exist or can’t be trusted.”

The ethical straitjacket. “We must be free to choose for ourselves how to live – no one can impose this on us. This is the only truly authentic life.”

The record of Christians. “If Christianity is the true religion, why would so much oppression happen in history with the support of the church?”

The angry God. “Christianity is built around a condemning, judgmental deity who demands blood sacrifice even to forgive.”

The unreliable Bible. “The Bible can’t be trusted historically or scientifically and much of its teaching is socially regressive.”

Summary: A city-center church today must use presuppositional reasoning more than the old evidential approach. It has to show that all doubts and objections to Christianity are themselves alternate beliefs and faith-acts. (If you say, “I just can’t believe that there is only one true religion” – that is a faith-act. You can’t prove that.) And when you see your doubts are really beliefs, and when you require the same amount of evidence for them that you are asking of Christian beliefs, then it becomes evident many of them are very weak and largely adopted because of cultural pressure. The city-center church redundantly weaves responses to these defeaters into every area so that people “in process” will have these major barriers to faith removed.
In general the church’s communication and preaching must also continually lay down important building blocks toward robust faith. In more Christian cultures (i.e., Christendom), evangelism was simpler. Now it requires more of a process:

Deconstruct your doubts. Your doubts are really beliefs, and you can’t avoid betting your life and destiny on some kind of belief in God and the universe. Non-commitment is impossible. Faith-acts are inevitable.

Realize you already know there is a God. You actually already believe in God at the deep level, whatever you tell yourself intellectually. Our outrage against injustice despite how natural it is (in a world based on natural selection) shows that we already do believe in God at the most basic level but are suppressing that knowledge for our convenience. The Christian view of God means world is not the product of violence or random disorder (as in both the ancient and modern accounts of creation) but was created by a triune God to be a place of peace and community. So at the root of all reality is not power and individual self-assertion (as in the pagan and postmodern view of things) but love and sacrificial service for the common good.

Recognize your biggest problem. You aren’t spiritually free. No one is. Everyone is spiritually enthralled to something. “Sin” is not simply breaking rules but is building your identity on things other than God, which leads internally to emptiness, craving, and spiritual slavery and externally to exclusion, conflict, and social injustice.

Discern the difference between religion and the gospel. There is a radical difference between religion, in which we believe our morality secures for us a place of favor in God and in the world, and gospel Christianity, in which our standing with God is strictly a gift of grace. These two different core understandings produce very different communities and character. The former produces both superiority and inferiority complexes, self-righteousness, religiously-warranted strife, wars, and violence. The latter creates a mixture of both humility and enormous inner confidence, a respect for the “Other” and a new freedom to defer our needs for the common good.

Understand the Cross. All forgiveness entails suffering and that the only way for God to forgive us and restore justice in the world without destroying us was to come into history and give himself and suffer and die on the Cross in the person of Jesus Christ. Both the results of the Cross (freedom from shame and guilt, awareness of our significance and value) and the pattern of the Cross (power through service, wealth through giving, and joy through suffering) radically changes the way we relate to God, ourselves, and the world.

Embrace the resurrection. There is no historically possible alternative explanation of the rise of the Christian church than the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ. And if Jesus was raised from the dead as a forerunner of the renewal of all the material and physical world, then this gives Christians both incentive to work to restore creation (fighting poverty, hunger, and injustice) as well as infinite hope that our labors will not be in vain. And finally, it eliminates the fear of death.

Practical points:

1) A church that continually chips away at defeaters and continually lays down the basic building blocks of faith in all its services and meetings will actually be training Christians within the basic weekly gatherings on how to do evangelism within their culture. Much evangelism will then happen naturally. Christians will talk more wisely to non-Christian friends and have the confidence to bring them to church meetings because they trust the attractiveness and intelligibility of what will happen there. Some non-Christians will always be getting converted in the ordinary meetings of the church and they in turn will bring others. Ultimately this is the most powerful dynamic for evangelism. Evangelistic programs won’t help if the church itself isn’t permeated with the missional mindset.

2) This does not preclude evangelistic programs at all! If the church’s basic ministry and mindset is missional, then specific, focused evangelistic outreaches and programs will be highly effective.

Source: Reformation Theology: This is an excerpt from Tim Keller’s four-part series on MINISTRY IN THE NEW GLOBAL CULTURE OF MAJOR CITY-CENTERS

Part II. – THE KEY TO EVERYTHING

We have seen that the gospel is the way that anything is renewed and transformed by Christ–whether a heart, a relationship, a church, or a community. It is the key to alldoctrine and our view of our lives in this world. Therefore, all our problems come from a lack of orientation to the gospel. Put positively, the gospel transforms our hearts and thinking and approaches to absolutely everything.

A. The Gospel and the individual.

1. Approach to discouragement. When a person is depressed, the moralist says, “you are breaking the rules–repent.” On the other hand, the relativist says, “you just need to love and accept yourself”. But (assuming there is no physiological base of the depression!) the gospel leads us to examine ourselves and say: “something in my life has become more important than God, a pseudo-savior, a form of works- righteousness”. The gospel leads us to repentance, but not to merely setting our will against superficialities. It is without the gospel that superficialities will be addressed instead of the heart. The moralist will work on behavior and the relativist will work on the emotions themselves.

2. Approach to the physical world. Some moralists are indifferent to the physical world–they see it as “unimportant”, while many others are downright afraid of physical pleasure. Since they are seeking to earn their salvation, they prefer to focus on sins of the physical like sex and the other appetites. These are easier to avoid than sins of the spirit like pride. Therefore, they prefer to see sins of the body as worse than other kinds. As a result, legalism usually leads to a distaste of pleasure. On the other hand, the relativist is often a hedonist, someone who is controlled by pleasure, and who makes it an idol. The gospel leads us to see that God has invented both body and soul and so will redeem both body and soul, though under sin both body and soul are broken. Thus the gospel leads us to enjoy the physical (and to fight against physical brokenness, such as sickness and poverty), yet to be moderate in our use of material things.

3. Approach to love and relationships. Moralism often makes relationships into a “blame-game”. This is because a moralist is traumatized by criticism that is too severe, and maintains a self-image as a good person by blaming others. On the other hand, moralism can use the procuring of love as the way to “earn our salvation” and convince ourselves we are worthy persons. That often creates what is called “co- dependency”–a form of self-salvation through needing people or needing people to need you (i.e. saving yourself by saving others). On the other hand, much relativism/liberalism reduces love to a negotiated partnership for mutual benefit. You only relate as long as it is not costing you anything. So the choice (without the gospel) is to selfishly use others or to selfishly let yourself be used by others. But the gospel leads us to do neither. We do sacrifice and commit, but not out of a need to convince ourselves or others we are acceptable. So we can love the person enough to confront, yet stay with the person when it does not benefit us.

4. Approach to suffering. Moralism takes the “Job’s friends” approach, laying guilt on yourself. You simply assume: “I must be bad to be suffering”. Under the guilt, though, there is always anger toward God. Why? Because moralists believe that God owes them. The whole point of moralism is to put God in one’s debt. Because you have been so moral, you feel you don’t really deserve suffering. So moralism tears you up, for at one level you think, “What did I do to deserve this?” but on another level you think, “I probably did everything to deserve this!” So, if the moralist suffers, he or she must either feel mad at God (because I have been performing well) or mad at self (because I have not been performing well) or both. On the other hand, relativism/pragmatism feels justified in avoiding suffering at all costs–lying, cheating, and broken promises are OK. But when suffering does come, the pragmatist also lays the fault at God’s doorstep, claiming that he must be either unjust or impotent. But the cross shows us that God redeemed us through suffering. That he suffered not that we might not suffer, but that in our suffering we could become like him. Since both the moralist and the pragmatist ignore the cross in different ways, they will both be confused and devastated by suffering.

5. Approach to sexuality. The secularist/pragmatist sees sex as merely biological and physical appetite. The moralist tends to see sex as dirty or at least a dangerous impulse that leads constantly to sin. But the gospel shows us that sexuality is to reflect the self-giving of Christ. He gave himself completely without conditions. So we are not to seek intimacy but hold back control of our lives. If we give ourselves sexually we are to give ourselves legally, socially, personally–utterly. Sex only is to happened in a totally committed, permanent relationship of marriage.

6. Approach to one’s family. Moralism can make you a slave to parental expectations, while pragmatism sees no need for family loyalty or the keeping of promises and covenants if they do not “meet my needs”. The gospel frees you from making parental approval an absolute or psychological salvation, pointing how God becomes the ultimate father. Then you will neither be too dependent or too hostile to your parents.

7. Approach to self-control. Moralists tell us to control our passions out of fear of punishment. This is a volition-based approach. Liberalism tells us to express ourselves and find out what is right for us. This is an emotion-based approach. The gospel tells us that the free, unloseable grace of God “teaches” us to “say no” to our passions (Titus 2:13) if we listen to it. This is a whole-person based approach, starting with the truth descending into the heart.

8. Approach to other races and cultures. The liberal approach is to relativize all cultures. (“We can all get along because there is no truth”.) The conservatives believe there is truth for evaluation of cultures, and so they choose some culture as superior and then they idolize it, feeling superior to others in the impulse of self-justifying pride. The gospel leads us to be: a) on the one hand, somewhat critical of all cultures, including our own (since there is truth), but b) on the other hand, we are morally superior to no one. After all, we are saved by grace alone. Christians will exhibit both moral conviction yet compassion and flexibility. For example, gays are used to being “bashed” and hated or completely accepted. They never see anything else.

9. Approach to witness to non-Christians. The liberal/pragmatist approach is to deny the legitimacy of evangelism altogether. The conservative/moralist person does believe in proselytizing, because “we are right and they are wrong”. Such proselytizing is almost always offensive. But the gospel produces a constellation of traits in us. a) First, we are compelled to share the gospel out of generosity and love, not guilt. b) Second, we are freed from fear of being ridiculed or hurt by others, since we already have the favor of God by grace. c) Third, there is humility in our dealings with others, because we know we are saved only by grace alone, not because of our superior insight or character. d) Fourth, we are hopeful about anyone, even the “hard cases”, because we were saved only because of grace, not because we were likely people to be Christians. d) Fifth, we are courteous and careful with people. We don’t have to push or coerce them, for it is only God’s grace that opens hearts, not our eloquence or persistence or even their openness. All these traits not only create a winsome evangelist but an excellent neighbor in a multi-cultural society.

10. Approach to human authority. Moralists will tend to obey human authorities (family, tribe, government, cultural customs) too much, since they rely so heavily on their self-image of being moral and decent. Pragmatists will either obey human authority too much (since they have no higher authority by which they can judge their culture) or else too little (since they may only obey when they know they won’t get caught). That means either authoritarianism or anarchy. But the gospel gives you both a standard by which to oppose human authority (if it contradicts the gospel), but on the other hand, gives you incentive to obey the civil authorities from the heart, even when you could get away with disobedience.

11. Approach to human dignity. Moralists often have a pretty low view of human nature–they mainly see human sin and depravity. Pragmatists, on the other hand, have no good basis for treating people with dignity. Usually they have no religious beliefs about what human beings are. (If they are just chance products of evolution, how do we know they are more valuable than a rock?) But the gospel shows us that every human being is infinitely fallen (lost in sin) and infinitely exalted (in the image of God). So we treat every human being as precious, yet dangerous!

12. Approach to guilt. When someone says, “I can’t forgive myself”, it means there is some standard or condition or person that is more central to your identity than the grace of God. God is the only God who forgives–no other “god” will. If you cannot forgive yourself, it is because you have failed your real God, your real righteousness, and it is holding you captive. The moralist’s false god is usually a God of their imagination which is holy and demanding but not gracious. The pragmatist’s false god is usually some achievement or relationship.

13. Approach to self-image. Without the gospel, your self-image is based upon living up to some standards–whether yours or someone’s imposed upon you. If you live up to those standards, you will be confident but not humble. If you don’t live up to them, you will be humble but not confident. Only in the gospel can you be both enormously bold and utterly sensitive and humble. For you are both perfect and a sinner!

14. Approach to joy and humor. Moralism has to eat away at real joy and humor– because the system of legalism forces you to take yourself (your image, your appearance, your reputation) very seriously. Pragmatism on the other hand will tend toward cynicism as life goes on because of the inevitable cynicism that grows. This cynicism grows from a lack of hope for the world. In the end, evil will triumph–there is no judgment or divine justice. But if we are saved by grace alone, then the very fact of our being Christians is a constant source of amazed delight. There is nothing matter-of-fact about our lives, no “of course” to our lives. It is a miracle we are Christians, and we have hope. So the gospel which creates bold humility should give us a far deeper sense of humor. We don’t have to take ourselves seriously, and we are full of hope for the world.

15. Approach to “right living”. Jonathan Edwards points out that “true virtue” is only possible for those who have experienced the grace of the gospel. Any person who is trying to earn their salvation does “the right thing” in order to get into heaven or in order to better their self-esteem (etc.). In other words, the ultimate motive is self-interest. But persons who know they are totally accepted already do “the right thing” out of sheer delight in righteousness for its own sake. Only in the gospel do you obey God for God’s sake, and not for what God will give you. Only in the gospel do you love people for their sake (not yours), do good for its own sake (not yours), and obey God for his sake (not yours). Only the gospel makes “doing the right thing” a joy and delight, not a burden or a means to an end.

B. The Gospel and the church.

1. Approach to ministry in the world. Legalism tends to place all the emphasis on the individual human soul. Legalistic religion will insist on converting others to their faith and church, but will ignore social needs of the broader community. On the other hand, “liberalism” will tend to emphasize only amelioration of social conditions and minimize the need for repentance and conversion. The gospel leads to love which in turn moves us to give our neighbor whatever is needed–conversion or a cup of cold water, evangelism and social concern.

2. Approach to worship. Moralism leads to a dour and somber worship which may be long on dignity but short on joy. A shallow understanding of “acceptance” without a sense of God’s holiness can lead to frothy or casual worship. (A sense of neither God’s love nor his holiness leads to a worship service that feels like a committee meeting.) But the gospel leads us to see that God is both transcendent yet immanent. His immanence makes his transcendence comforting, while his transcendence makes his immanence amazing. The gospel leads to both awe and intimacy in worship, for the Holy One is now our Father.

3. Approach to the poor. The liberal/pragmatist tends to scorn the religion of the poor and see them as helpless victims needing expertise. This is born out of a disbelief in God’s common grace or special grace to all. Ironically, the secular mindset also disbelieves in sin, and thus anyone who is poor must be oppressed, a helpless victim.  The conservative/moralists on the other hand tend to scorn the poor as failures and weaklings. They see them as somehow to blame for their situation. But the gospel leads us to be: a) humble, without moral superiority knowing you were “spiritually bankrupt” but saved by Christ’s free generosity, and b) gracious, not worried too much about deservingness”, since you didn’t deserve Christ’s grace, c) respectful of believing poor Christians as brothers and sisters from whom to learn. The gospel alone can bring “knowledge workers” into a sense of humble respect for and solidarity with the poor.

4. Approach to doctrinal distinctives. The “already” of the New Testament means more boldness in proclamation. We can most definitely be sure of the central doctrines that support the gospel. But, the “not yet” means charity and humility in non-essentials beliefs. In other words, we must be moderate about what we teach except when it comes to the cross, grace and sin. In our views, especially those that Christians cannot agree on, we must be less unbending and triumphalistic (“believing we have arrived intellectually”). It also means that our discernment of God’s call and his “will” for us and other must not be propagated with overweening assurance that your insight cannot be wrong. Vs. pragmatism, we must be willing to die for our belief in the gospel; vs. moralism, we must not fight to the death over every one of our beliefs.

5. Approach to holiness. The “already” means we should not tolerate sin. The presence of the kingdom includes that we are made “partakers of the divine nature” (II Pet. 1:3). The gospel brings us the confidence that anyone can be changed, that any enslaving habit can be overcome. But the “not yet” our sin which remains in us and will never be eliminated until the fullness of the kingdom comes in. So we must avoid pat answers, and we must not expect “quick fixes”. Unlike the moralists, we must be patient with slow growth or lapses and realize the complexity of change and growth in grace. Unlike the pragmatists and cynics, we must insist that miraculous change is possible.

6. Approach to miracles. The “already” of the kingdom means power for miracles and healing is available. Jesus showed the kingdom by healing the sick and raising the dead. But the “not yet” means nature (including us) is still subject to decay (Rom.8:22-23) and thus sickness and death is still inevitable until the final consummation. We cannot expect miracles and the elimination of suffering to be such a normal part of the Christian life that pain and suffering will be eliminated from the lives of faithful people. Vs. moralists, we know that God can heal and do miracles. Vs. pragmatists, we do not aim to press God into eliminating suffering.

7. Approach to church health. The “already” of the kingdom means that the church is the community now of kingdom power. It therefore is capable of mightily transforming its community. Evangelism that adds “daily to the number of those being saved” (Acts 2:47) is possible! Loving fellowship which “destroyed…the dividing wall of hostility” between different races and classes is possible! But the “not yet” of sin means Jesus has not yet presented his bride, the church “as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish” (Eph.5:27). We must not then be harshly critical of imperfect congregations, nor jump impatiently from church to church over perceived blemishes. Error will never be completely eradicated from the church. The “not yet” means to avoid the overly severe use of church discipline and other means to seek to bring about a perfect church today.

8. Approach to social change. We must not forget that Christ is even now ruling in a sense over history (Eph.1:22ff). The “already” of grace means that Christians can expect to use God’s power to change social conditions and communities. But the “not yet” of sin means there will be “wars and rumors of wars”. Selfishness, cruelty, terrorism, oppression will continue. Christians harbor no illusions about politics nor expect utopian conditions. The “not yet” means that Christians will not trust any political or social agenda to bring about righteousness here on earth. So the gospel keeps us from the over-pessimism of fundamentalism (moralism) about social change, and also from the over-optimism of liberalism (pragmatism).

Sum: All problems, personal or social come from a failure to use the gospel in a radical way, to get “in line with the truth of the gospel” (Gal.2:14). All pathologies in the church and all its ineffectiveness come from a failure to use the gospel in a radical way. We believe that if the gospel is expounded and applied in its fullness in any church, that church will look very unique. People will find both moral conviction yet compassion and flexibility. For example, gays are used to being “bashed” and hated or completely accepted. They never see anything else. The cultural elites of either liberal or conservative sides are alike in their unwillingness to befriend or live with or respect or worship with the poor. They are alike in separating themselves increasingly from the rest of society.

“Even as the Son of man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give His life a ransom for many.”—Matthew 20:28.

 I begin this morning with the doctrine of Redemption. “He gave his life a ransom for many.”

The doctrine of Redemption is one of the most important doctrines of the system of faith. A mistake on this point will inevitably lead to a mistake through the entire system of our belief.

Now, you are aware that there are different theories of Redemption. All Christians hold that Christ died to redeem, but all Christians do not teach the same redemption. We differ as to the nature of atonement, and as to the design of redemption. For instance, the Arminian holds that Christ, when He died, did not die with an intent to save any particular person; and they teach that Christ’s death does not in itself secure, beyond doubt, the salvation of any one man living. They believe that Christ died to make the salvation of all men possible, or that by the doing of something else, any man who pleases may attain unto eternal life; consequently, they are obliged to hold that if man’s will would not give way and voluntarily surrender to grace, then Christ’s atonement would be unavailing. They hold that there was no particularity and speciality in the death of Christ. Christ died, according to them, as much for Judas in Hell as for Peter who mounted to Heaven. They believe that for those who are consigned to eternal fire, there was a true and real a redemption made as for those who now stand before the throne of the Most High. Now, we believe no such thing. We hold that Christ, when He died, had an object in view, and that object will most assuredly, and beyond a doubt, be accomplished. We measure the design of Christ’s death by the effect of it. If any one asks us, “What did Christ design to do by His death?” we answer that question by asking him another—”What has Christ done, or what will Christ do by His death?” For we declare that the measure of the effect of Christ’s love, is the measure of the design of it. We cannot so belie our reason as to think that the intention of Almighty God could be frustrated, or that the design of so great a thing as the atonement, can by any way whatever, be missed of. We hold—we are not afraid to say that we believe—that Christ came into this world with the intention of saving “a multitude which no man can number;” and we believe that as the result of this, every person for whom He died must, beyond the shadow of a doubt, be cleansed from sin, and stand, washed in blood, before the Father’s throne. We do not believe that Christ made any effectual atonement for those who are for ever damned; we dare not think that the blood of Christ was ever shed with the intention of saving those whom God foreknew never could be saved, and some of whom were even in Hell when Christ, according to some men’s account, died to save them.

I have thus just stated our theory of redemption, and hinted at the differences which exist between two great parties in the professing church. It shall be now my endeavour to show the greatness of the redemption of Christ Jesus; and by so doing, I hope to be enabled by God’s Spirit, to bring out the whole of the great system of redemption, so that it may be understood by us all, even if all of us cannot receive it. For you must bear this in mind, that some of you, perhaps, may be ready to dispute things which I assert; but you will remember that this is nothing to me; I shall at all times teach those things which I hold to be true, without let or hindrance from any man breathing. You have the like liberty to do the same in your own places, and to preach your own views in your own assemblies, as I claim the right to preach mine, fully, and without hesitation.

Christ Jesus “gave his life a ransom for many;” and by that ransom He wrought out for us a great redemption. I shall endeavour to show the greatness of this redemption, measuring it in five ways. We shall note its greatness, first of all from the heinousness of our own guilt, from which He has delivered us; secondly, we shall measure His redemption by the sternness of divine justice; thirdly, we shall measure it by the price which He paid, the pangs which He endured; then we shall endeavour to magnify it, by noting the deliverance which He actually wrought out; and we shall close by noticing the vast number for whom this redemption is made, who in our text are described as “many.”

I. First, then we shall see that the redemption of Christ was no little thing, if we do but measure it, first by OUR OWN SINS.

My brethren, for a moment look at the hole of the pit whence ye were digged, and the quarry whence you were hewn. Ye, who have been washed, and cleansed, and sanctified, pause for a moment, and look back at the former state of your ignorance; the sins in which you indulged, the crimes into which you were hurried, the continual rebellion against God in which it was your habit to live. One sin can ruin a soul for ever; it is not in the power of the human mind to grasp the infinity of evil that slumbereth in the bowels of one solitary sin. There is a very infinity of guilt couched in one transgression against the majesty of Heaven. If, then, you and I had sinned but once, nothing but an atonement infinite in value could ever have washed away the sin and made satisfaction for it. But has it been once that you and I have transgressed? Nay, my brethren, our iniquities are more in number than the hairs of our head; they have mightily prevailed against us. We might as well attempt to number the sands upon the sea-shore, or count the drops which in their aggregate do make the ocean, as attempt to count the transgressions which have marked our lives. Let us go back to our childhood. How early we began to sin! How we disobeyed our parents, and even then learned to make our mouth the house of lies! In our childhood, how full of wantonness and waywardness we were! Headstrong and giddy, we preferred our own way, and burst through all restraint which godly parents put upon us. Nor did our youth sober us. Wildly we dashed, many of us, into the very midst of the dance of sin. We became leaders in iniquity; we not only sinned ourselves, but we taught others to sin. And as for your manhood, ye that have entered upon the prime of life, ye may be more outwardly sober, ye may be somewhat free from the dissipation of your youth; but how little has the man become bettered! Unless the sovereign grace of God hath renewed us, we are now no better than we were when we began; and even if it has operated, we have still sins to repent of, for we all lay our mouths in the dust, and cast ashes on our head, and cry, “Unclean! Unclean!” And oh! ye that lean wearily on your staff, the support of your old age, have ye not sins still clinging to your garments? Are your lives as white as the snowy hairs that crown your head? Do you not still feel that transgression besmears the skirts of your robe, and mars its spotlessness? How often are you now plunged into the ditch, till your own clothes do abhor you! Cast your eyes over the sixty, the seventy, the eighty years, during which God hath spared your lives; and can ye for a moment think it possible, that ye can number up your innumerable transgressions, or compute the weight of the crimes which you have committed? O ye stars of Heaven! the astronomers may measure your distance and tell your height, but O ye sins of mankind! ye surpass all thought. O ye lofty mountains! the home of the tempest, the birthplace of the storm! man may climb your summits and stand wonderingly upon your snows; but ye hills of sin! ye tower higher than our thoughts; ye chasms of transgressions! ye are deeper than our imagination dares to dive. Do you accuse me of slandering human nature? It is because you know it not. If God had once manifested your heart to yourself, you would bear me witness, that so far from exaggerating, my poor words fail to describe the desperateness of our evil. Oh! if we could each of us look into our hearts today—if our eyes could be turned within, so as to see the iniquity that is graven as with the point of the diamond upon our stony hearts, we should then say to the minister, that however he may depict the desperateness of guilt, yet can he not by any means surpass it. How great then, beloved, must be the ransom of Christ, when He saved us from all these sins! The men for whom Jesus died, however great their sin, when they believe, are justified from all their transgressions. Though they may have indulged in every vice and every lust which Satan could suggest, and which human nature could perform, yet once believing, all their guilt is washed away. Year after year may have coated them with blackness, till their sin hath become of double dye; but in one moment of faith, one triumphant moment of confidence in Christ, the great redemption takes away the guilt of numerous years. Nay, more, if it were possible for all the sins that men have done, in thought, or word, or deed, since worlds were made, or time began, to meet on one poor head—the great redemption is all-sufficient to take all these sins away, and wash the sinner whiter than the driven snow.

Oh! who shall measure the heights of the Saviour’s all-sufficiency? First, tell how high is sin, and, then, remember that as Noah’s flood prevailed over the tops of earth’s mountains, so the flood of Christ’s redemption prevails over the tops of the mountains of our sins. In Heaven’s courts there are today men that once were murderers, and thieves, and drunkards, and whoremongers, and blasphemers, and persecutors; but they have been washed—they have been sanctified. Ask them whence the brightness of their robes hath come, and where their purity hath been achieved, and they, with united breath, tell you that they have washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the Lamb. O ye troubled consciences! O ye weary and heavy-laden ones! O ye that are groaning on account of sin! the great redemption now proclaimed to you is all-sufficient for your wants; and though your numerous sins exceed the stars that deck the sky, here is an atonement made for them all—a river which can overflow the whole of them, and carry them away from you for ever.

This, then, is the first measure of the atonement—the greatness of our guilt.

II. Now, secondly, we must measure the great redemption BY THE STERNNESS OF DIVINE JUSTICE.

“God is love,” always loving; but my next proposition does not at all interfere with this assertion. God is sternly just, inflexibly severe in His dealings with mankind. The God of the Bible is not the God of some men’s imagination, Who thinks so little of sin that He passes it by without demanding any punishment for it. He is not the God of the men who imagine that our transgressions are such little things, such mere peccadilloes that the God of Heaven winks at them, and suffers them to die forgotten. No; Jehovah, Israel’s God, hath declared concerning Himself, “The Lord thy God is a jealous God.” It is His own declaration, “I will by no means clear the guilty.” “The soul that sinneth, it shall die.” Learn ye, my friends, to look upon God as being as severe in His justice as if He were not loving, and yet as loving as if He were not severe. His love does not diminish His justice, nor does His justice, in the least degree, make warfare upon His love. The two things are sweetly linked together in the atonement of Christ. But, mark, we can never understand the fullness of the atonement till we have first grasped the Scriptural truth of God’s immense justice. There was never an ill word spoken, nor an ill thought conceived, nor an evil deed done, for which God will not have punishment from some one or another. He will either have satisfaction from you, or else from Christ. If you have no atonement to bring through Christ, you must for ever lie paying the debt which you never can pay, in eternal misery; for as surely as God is God, He will sooner lose His Godhead than suffer one sin to go unpunished, or one particle of rebellion unrevenged. You may say that this character of God is cold, and stern, and severe. I cannot help what you say of it; it is nevertheless true. Such is the God of the Bible; and though we repeat it is true that He is love, it is no more true that He is love than that He is full of justice, for every good thing meets in God, and is carried to perfection, whilst love reaches to consummate loveliness, justice reaches to the sternness of inflexibility in Him. He has no bend, no warp in His character; no attribute so predominates as to cast a shadow upon the other. Love hath its full sway, and justice hath no narrower limit than His love. Oh! then, beloved, think how great must have been the substitution of Christ, when it satisfied God for all the sins of His people. For man’s sin God demands eternal punishment; and God hath prepared a Hell into which He casts those who die impenitent. Oh! my brethren, can ye think what must have been the greatness of the atonement which was the substitution for all this agony which God would have cast upon us, if He had not poured it upon Christ. Look! look! look with solemn eye through the shades that part us from the world of spirits, and see that house of misery which men call Hell! Ye cannot endure the spectacle. Remember that in that place there are spirits for ever paying their debt to divine justice; but though some of them have been for these four thousand years sweltering in the flame, they are no nearer a discharge than when they began; and when ten thousand times ten thousand years shall have rolled away, they will no more have made satisfaction to God for their guilt than they have done up till now. And now can you grasp the thought of the greatness of your Saviour’s mediation when He paid your debt, and paid it all at once; so that there now remaineth not one farthing of debt owing from Christ’s people to their God, except a debt of love. To justice the believer oweth nothing; though he owed originally so much that eternity would not have been long enough to suffice for the paying of it, yet, in one moment Christ did pay it all, so that the man who believeth is entirely justified from all guilt, and set free from all punishment, through what Jesus hath done. Think ye, then, how great His atonement if He hath done all this.

I must just pause here, and utter another sentence. There are times when God the Holy Spirit shows to men the sternness of justice in their own consciences. There is a man here today who has just been cut to the heart with a sense of sin. He was once a free man, a libertine, in bondage to none; but now the arrow of the Lord sticks fast in his heart, and he has come under a bondage worse than that of Egypt. I see him today, he tells me that his guilt haunts him everywhere. The Negro slave, guided by the pole star, may escape the cruel ties of his master and reach another land where he may be free; but this man feels that if he were to wander the wide world over he could not escape from guilt. He that hath been bound by many irons, can yet find a file that can unbind him and set him at liberty; but this man tells you that he has tried prayers and tears and good works, but cannot escape the gyves from his wrist; he feels as a lost sinner still, and emancipation, do what he may, seems to him impossible. The captive in the dungeon is sometimes free in thought, though not in body; through his dungeon walls his spirit leaps, and flies to the stars, free as the eagle that is no man’s slave. But this man is a slave in his thoughts; he cannot think one bright, one happy thought. His soul is cast down within him; the iron has entered into his spirit, and he is sorely afflicted. The captive sometimes forgets his slavery in sleep, but this man cannot sleep; by night he dreams of hell, by day he seems to feel it; he bears a burning furnace of flame within his heart, and do what he may he cannot quench it. He has been confirmed, he has been baptized, he takes the sacrament, he attends a church or he frequents a chapel, he regards every rubric and obeys every canon, but the fire burns still. He gives his money to the poor, he is ready to give his body to be burned, he feeds the hungry, he visits the sick, he clothes the naked, but the fire burns still, and do what he may he cannot quench it. O, ye sons of weariness and woe, this that you feel is God’s justice in full pursuit of you, and happy are you that you feel this, for now to you I preach this glorious Gospel of the blessed God. You are the man for whom Jesus Christ has died; for you He has satisfied stern justice; and now all you have to do to obtain peace of conscience, is just to say to your adversary who pursues you, “Look you there! Christ died for me; my good works would not stop you, my tears would not appease you: look you there! There stands the cross; there hangs the bleeding God! Hark to His death-shriek! See Him die! Art thou not satisfied now?” And when thou hast done that, thou shalt have the peace of God which passeth all understanding, which shall keep thy heart and mind through Jesus Christ thy Lord; and then shalt thou know the greatness of His atonement.

III. In the third place, we may measure the greatness of Christ’s Redemption by THE PRICE HE PAID.

It is impossible for us to know how great were the pangs of our Saviour; but yet some glimpse of them will afford us a little idea of the greatness of the price He paid for us. O Jesus, who shall describe thine agony?

“Come, all ye springs,
Dwell in my head and eyes; come, clouds and rain!
My grief hath need of all the wat’ry things,
That nature hath produc’d. Let ev’ry vein
Suck up a river to supply mine eyes,
My weary weeping eyes; too dry for me,
Unless they get new conduits, new supplies,
To bear them out, and with my state agree.”

O Jesus! thou wast a sufferer from thy birth, a man of sorrows and grief’s acquaintance. Thy sufferings fell on thee in one perpetual shower, until the last dread hour of darkness. Then not in a shower, but in a cloud, a torrent, a cataract of grief, thine agonies did dash upon thee. See Him yonder! It is a night of frost and cold; but He is all abroad. It is night; He sleeps not, but He is in prayer. Hark to His groans! Did ever man wrestle as He wrestles? Go and look in His face! Was ever such suffering depicted upon mortal countenance as you can there behold? Hear His own words: “My soul is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death.” He rises: He is seized by traitors and is dragged away. Let us step to the place when just now He was engaged in agony. O God! and what is this we see? What is this that stains the ground? It is blood! Whence came it? Had He some wound which oozed afresh through His dire struggle? Ah! no. “He sweat, as it were, great drops of blood, falling down to the ground.” O agonies that surpass the word by which we name you! O sufferings that cannot be compassed in language! What could ye be that thus could work upon the Saviour’s blessed frame, and force a bloody sweat to fall from His entire body? This is the beginning; this is the opening of the tragedy. Follow Him mournfully, thou sorrowing church, to witness the consummation of it. He is hurried through the streets; He is dragged first to one bar and then to another; He is cast and condemned before the Sanhedrin; He is mocked by Herod; He is tried by Pilate. His sentence is pronounced—”Let Him be crucified!” And now the tragedy cometh to its height. His back is bared; He is tied to the low Roman column; the bloody scourge ploughs furrows on His back, and with one stream of blood His back is red—a crimson robe that proclaims Him emperor of misery. He is taken into the guard room; His eyes are bound, and then they buffet Him, and say, “Prophesy who it was that smote thee?” They spit into His face; they plait a crown of thorns, and press His temples with it; they array Him in a purple robe; they bow their knees, and mock Him. All silently He sits; He answers not a word. “When He was reviled, He reviled not again,” but committed Himself unto Him whom He came to serve. And now they take Him, and with many a jeer and jibe they drive Him from the place, and hurry Him through the streets. Emaciated by continual fastings, and depressed with agony of spirit He stumbles beneath His cross. Daughters of Jerusalem! He faints in your streets. They raise Him up; they put His cross upon another’s shoulders, and they urge Him on, perhaps with many a spear-prick, till at last He reaches the mount of doom. Rough soldiers seize Him, and hurl Him on His back; the transverse wood is laid beneath Him; His arms are stretched to reach the necessary distance; the nails are grasped; four hammers at one moment drive four nails through the tenderest parts of His body; and there He lies upon His own place of execution dying on His cross. It is not done yet. The cross is lifted by the rough soldiers. There is the socket prepared for it. It is dashed into its place: they fill up the place with earth; and there it stands.

But see the Saviour’s limbs, how they quiver! Every bone has been put out of joint by the dashing of the cross in that socket! How He weeps! How He sighs! How He sobs! Nay, more hark how at last He shrieks in agony, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” O sun, no wonder thou didst shut thine eye, and look no longer upon a deed so cruel! O rocks! no wonder that ye did melt and rend your hearts with sympathy, when your Creator died! Never man suffered as this man suffered, Even death itself relented, and many of those who had been in their graves arose and came into the city. This, however, is but the outward. Believe me, brethren, the inward was far worse. What our Saviour suffered in His body was nothing compared to what He endured in His soul. You cannot guess, and I cannot help you to guess, what He endured within. Suppose for one moment—to repeat a sentence I have often used—suppose a man who has passed into Hell—suppose his eternal torment could all be brought into one hour; and then suppose it could be multiplied by the number of the saved, which is a number past all human enumeration. Can you now think what a vast aggregate of misery there would have been in the sufferings of all God’s people, if they had been punished through all eternity? And recollect that Christ had to suffer an equivalent for all the hells of all His redeemed. I can never express that thought better than by using those oft-repeated words: it seemed as if Hell were put into His cup; He seized it, and, “At one tremendous draught of love, He drank damnation dry.” So that there was nothing left of all the pangs and miseries of Hell for His people ever to endure. I say not that He suffered the same, but He did endure an equivalent for all this, and gave God the satisfaction for all the sins of all His people, and consequently gave Him an equivalent for all their punishment. Now can ye dream, can ye guess the great redemption of our Lord Jesus Christ?

IV. I shall be very brief upon the next head. The fourth way of measuring the Saviour’s agonies is this: we must compute them by THE GLORIOUS DELIVERANCE WHICH HE HAS EFFECTED.

Rise up, believer; stand up in thy place, and this day testify to the greatness of what the Lord hath done for thee! Let me tell it for thee. I will tell thy experience and mine in one breath. Once my soul was laden with sin; I had revolted against God, and grievously transgressed. The terrors of the law gat hold upon me; the pangs of conviction seized me. I saw myself guilty. I looked to Heaven, and I saw an angry God sworn to punish me; I looked beneath me and I saw a yawning Hell ready to devour me. I sought by good works to satisfy my conscience; but all in vain, I endeavoured by attending to the ceremonies of religion to appease the pangs that I felt within; but all without effect. My soul was exceeding sorrowful, almost unto death. I could have said with the ancient mourner, “My soul chooseth strangling and death rather than life.” This was the great question that always perplexed me: “I have sinned; God must punish me; how can He be just if He does not? Then, since He is just, what is to become of me?” At last mine eyes turned to that sweet word which says, “The blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanseth from all sin.” I took that text to my chamber; I sat there and meditated. I saw one hanging on a cross. It was my Lord Jesus. There was the thorn-crown, and there the emblems of unequalled and peerless misery. I looked upon Him, and my thoughts recalled that word which says, “This is a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners.” Then said I within myself, “Did this man die for sinners? I am a sinner; then He died for me. Those He died for He will save. He died for sinners; I am a sinner; He died for me; He will save me.” My soul relied upon that truth. I looked to Him, and as I “viewed the flowing of His soul-redeeming blood,” my spirit rejoiced, for I could say,

“Nothing in my hands I bring,
Simply to this cross I cling;
Naked look to Him for dress;
Helpless come to Him for grace!
Black, I to this fountain fly;
Wash me, Saviour, or I die!”

And now, believer, you shall tell the rest. The moment that you believed, your burden rolled from your shoulder, and you became light as air. Instead of darkness you had light; for the garments of heaviness you had the robes of praise. Who shall tell your joy since then? You have sung on earth hymns of Heaven, and in your peaceful soul you have anticipated the eternal Sabbath of the redeemed. Because you have believed you have entered into rest. Yes, tell it the wide world over; they that believe, by Jesus’ death are justified from all things from which they could not be freed by the works of the law. Tell it in Heaven, that none can lay anything to the charge of Gods’ elect. Tell it upon earth, that God’s redeemed are free from sin in Jehovah’s sight. Tell it even in Hell, that God’s elect can never come there; for Christ hath died for them, and who is he that shall condemn them?

V. I have hurried over that, to come to the last point, which is the sweetest of all. Jesus Christ, we are told in our text, came into the world “to give his life a ransom for many.” The greatness of Christ’s redemption may be measured by the EXTENT OF THE DESIGN OF IT.

He gave His life “a ransom for many.” I must now return to that controverted point again. We are often told (I mean those of us who are commonly nicknamed by the title of Calvinists—and we are not very much ashamed of that; we think that Calvin, after all, knew more about the Gospel than almost any man who has ever lived, uninspired), we are often told that we limit the atonement of Christ, because we say that Christ has not made a satisfaction for all men, or all men would be saved. Now, our reply to this is, that, on the other hand, our opponents limit it: we do not. The Arminians say, Christ died for all men. Ask them what they mean by it. Did Christ die so as to secure the salvation of all men? They say, “No, certainly not.” We ask them the next question—Did Christ die so as to secure the salvation of any man in particular? They answer “No.” They are obliged to admit this, if they are consistent. They say, “No; Christ has died that any man may be saved if”—and then follow certain conditions of salvation. We say, then, we will go back to the old statement—Christ did not die so as beyond a doubt to secure the salvation of anybody, did He? You must say “No;” you are obliged to say so, for you believe that even after a man has been pardoned, he may yet fall from grace, and perish. Now, who is it that limits the death of Christ? Why, you. You say that Christ did not die so as to infallibly secure the salvation of anybody. We beg your pardon, when you say we limit Christ’s death; we say, “No, my dear sir, it is you that do it.” We say Christ so died that He infallibly secured the salvation of a multitude that no man can number, who through Christ’s death not only may be saved but are saved, must be saved, and cannot by any possibility run the hazard of being anything but saved. You are welcome to your atonement; you may keep it. We will never renounce ours for the sake of it.

Now, beloved, when you hear any one laughing or jeering at a limited atonement, you may tell him this. General atonement is like a great wide bridge with only half an arch; it does not go across the stream: it only professes to go half way; it does not secure the salvation of anybody. Now, I had rather put my foot upon a bridge as narrow as Hungerford, which went all the way across, than on a bridge that was as wide as the world, if it did not go all the way across the stream. I am told it is my duty to say that all men have been redeemed, and I am told that there is a Scriptural warrant for it—”Who gave himself a ransom for all, to be testified in due time.” Now, that looks like a very, very great argument indeed on the other side of the question. For instance, look here. “The whole world is gone after Him.” Did all the world go after Christ? “Then went all Judea, and were baptized of him in Jordan.” Was all Judea, or all Jerusalem baptized in Jordan? “Ye are of God, little children,” and “the whole world lieth in the wicked one.” Does “the whole world” there mean everybody? If so, how was it, then, that there were some who were “of God?” The words “world” and “all” are used in seven or eight senses in Scripture; and it is very rarely that “all” means all persons, taken individually. The words are generally used to signify that Christ has redeemed some of all sorts—some Jews, some Gentiles, some rich, some poor, and has not restricted His redemption to either Jew or Gentile.

Leaving controversy, however, I will now answer a question. Tell me, then, sir, whom did Christ die for? Will you answer me a question or two, and I will tell you whether He died for you. Do you want a Saviour? Do you feel that you need a Saviour? Are you this morning conscious of sin? Has the Holy Spirit taught you that you are lost? Then Christ died for you and you will be saved. Are you this morning conscious that you have no hope in the world but Christ? Do you feel that you of yourself cannot offer an atonement that can satisfy God’s justice? Have you given up all confidence in yourselves? And can you say upon your bended knees, “Lord, save, or I perish”? Christ died for you. If you are saying this morning, “I am as good as I ought to be; I can get to Heaven by my own good works,” then, remember, the Scripture says of Jesus, “I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.” So long as you are in that state I have no atonement to preach to you. But if this morning you feel guilty, wretched, conscious of your guilt, and are ready to take Christ to be your only Saviour, I can not only say to you that you may be saved, but what is better still, that you will be saved. When you are stripped of everything, but hope in Christ, when you are prepared to come empty-handed and take Christ to be your all, and to be yourself nothing at all, then you may look up to Christ, and you may say, “Thou dear, Thou bleeding Lamb of God! thy griefs were endured for me; by thy stripes I am healed, and by thy sufferings I am pardoned.” And then see what peace of mind you will have; for if Christ has died for you, you cannot be lost. God will not punish twice for one thing. If God punished Christ for your sin, He will never punish you. “Payment, God’s justice cannot demand, first, at the bleeding surety’s hand, and then again at mine.” We can today, if we believe in Christ, march to the very throne of God, stand there, and if it is said, “Art thou guilty?” we can say, “Yes, guilty.” But if the question is put, “What have you to say why you should not be punished for your guilt?” We can answer, “Great God, Thy justice and Thy love are both guarantees that Thou wilt not punish us for sin; for didst Thou not punish Christ for sin for us? How canst Thou, then, be just—how canst Thou be God at all, if Thou dost punish Christ the substitute, and then punish man himself afterwards?” Your only question is, “Did Christ die for me?” And the only answer we can give is—”This is a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ came into the world to save sinners.” Can you write your name down among the sinners—not among the complimentary sinners, but among those that feel it, bemoan it, lament it, seek mercy on account of it? Are you a sinner? That felt, that known, that professed, you are now invited to believe that Jesus Christ died for you, because you are a sinner; and you are bidden to cast yourself upon this great immovable rock, and find eternal security in the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

Editor’s Note :  

Last week, we began our study on Jude 3 with Thomas Manton and noted how the doctrine of faith in this verse is given three descriptions, namely – 1. It is Delivered, 2. It is Once Delivered for all times and 3. It is Delivered to the Saints of God. Manton after having made 2 observations on the first of these three aspects of faith – It is Delivered, moves to the second and the third in this week’s study. After having made these expository remarks on the verse, Manton then moves onto expounding the main doctrine taught by this passage.

Outline :
I. Occasion

II. The matter and drift of this epistle

1. The Act : Contend Earnestly
2. The Object : Faith

A. Description of Faith :

i. manner of its conveyance : given not invented
ii. time of its giving out to the world : once for all
iii. persons to whom its given : Saints

Digression : Faith as Grace of Faith
Obs1 : Faith is to be given.
Obs2 : Faith is said to be once given
Obs3 : Faith is not given to every one but the saints

 B. Faith as Doctrine of Faith :

i. Delivered : Not invented, but given

Obs1 : The mercy of God in delivering this faith or rule of salvation.

a. The benefit of the word.
b. The benefit of inscripturation
c. The mercy of God appeareth in preserving it
d. That God raises gifted men to expound and apply this faith
e. That the light cometh to us, and shineth in this land.
f. That it is given to persons in particular in the power and efficacy of it.
Use : God is the author and disposer of the message: receive it ‘as the word of God,’ and then it will ‘profit you.

Obs2 : The duty of the church concerning it.

a. To publish, own, and defend the truth in the present age.
b. To preserve the truth, and transmit it pure to the next age

(this week’s outline)

ii. Once Delivered : for all times, never to be altered.

Because :
a. all is done so fully and perfectly, that nothing can be added.
b. this rule can never be destroyed.

iii. Delivered To The Saints : holy people of God.

a. The men that the Spirit of God made use of as penmen were ‘holy men’.
b. Holy persons are only fit to preach the faith.
c. None are fit publicly to defend the truth but the holy
d. None receive the truth so willingly as the saints do
e. None retain the truth more firmly than the saints do.

III. Main Observation

1. Doctrine : it is the duty of Christians to contend earnestly for the faith once given to the saints.

A. That we may not discredit ourselves and the truth.

i. That truth is honoured by a bold and resolute defence of it
ii. That we may not dishonour ourselves, and discredit our own profession.

B. That we may not hazard ourselves and the truth.

i. That we may not endanger ourselves.
ii. That we may not hazard the truth.

a. The preciousness of truth
b. The trust that is reposed in us for the next age, that is an obligation to faithfulness

Manton’s Exposition : 

Secondly, now for the manner, once delivered; that is, once for all, as never to be altered and changed; and when the canon or rule of faith was closed up, there was nothing to be added further, as a part of the authentic and infallible rule, though the daily necessities of the church do call for a further explication. But you will say, You told us but now how the word was many times delivered, how then once? I answer – The apostle speaketh not of the successive manifestations of God’s will to prophet after prophet till the Old Testament was perfected, but of that common doctrine which the apostles and evangelists by one consent had published to the world, and which was now to settle into a rule, and so to remain without change till the coming of the Lord. Observe, that the doctrine of salvation was but once delivered, to remain for ever without variation. Paul chideth them for being withdrawn to ‘another gospel,’ Gal. i. 6; and Peter telleth them, to prevent the reception of feigned oracles, that they had ‘a surer word of prophecy.’ 2 Peter i. 19, a safe rule to trust to; and Paul biddeth Timothy ‘continue in the things which he had learned.’ 2 Tim. iii. 14,15; and our Lord saith, Mat. xxiv., ‘This word of the kingdom shall be preached to all nations.’

Now the doctrine of salvation is but once delivered -

(1.) Because all is done so fully and perfectly, that nothing can be added; there is enough to ‘make us wise to salvation.’ 2 Tim. iii. 15, and what should Christians desire more? There is enough to ‘make the man of God perfect.’ ver. 17, that is, to furnish him with all kind of knowledge for the discharge of his office; there needeth no more; there is enough to make us wise to preach, and you wise to practise; and it is certain enough that you need not spend your time in doubting and disputing; and it is full enough, you need nothing more to satisfy the desires of nature, or to repair the defects of nature: here is sufficient instruction to decide all controversies, and assoil all doubts, and to give us a sure conduct to everlasting glory.

(2.) Because this rule can never be destroyed. The word hath often been in danger of being lost, but the miracle of its preservation is so much the greater. In Josiah’s time there was but one copy of the law; in Diocletian’s time there was an edict to burn their bibles, and copies were then scarce and chargeable; yet still they were kept, and so shall be to the end of the world, for the sacraments must continue ‘till Christ come.’ Mat. xxviii. 20, and 1 Cor. xi. 26; and the word must be preached till we all ‘grow into a perfect body in Jesus Christ.’ Eph. iv. 12,13; not only de jure, but de facto, not only it must be so, but it shall be so. Well, then, expect not new revelations or discoveries of new truths beside the word, which is the immutable rule of salvation: ‘Hold fast till I come.’ Rev. ii. 25. Again, it checketh them that expect new apostles, endowed with a spirit of infallibility, to resolve all doubts and questions. We must give heed to the scriptures, ’till the day-star arise in our hearts,’ that is, till we have full communion with Christ; for our reward in heaven is expressed by ‘the morning star:’ Rev. ii. 28, ‘To him that overcometh I will give the morning star.’ Again, it confuteth the Familists, that dream of some days of the Spirit, wherein we shall have a greater light than is in the scriptures; they fancy the time of the law to be the days of the Father, the time of the gospel to be the days of the Son, and the latter end of the world to be saeculum Spiritus Sancti (as the Weigelians phrase it), the age of the Holy Ghost; but foolishly, for these are ‘the last times,’ Acts ii. 17, and Heb. i. 1; and the Holy Ghost was never more gloriously poured out than at Christ’s ascension, and greater things cannot be revealed to us than ‘God in Christ reconciling the world.’ Lastly, it is for the comfort of the saints that their salvation is put into a stated course, and God hath showed you what you must do if you would inherit eternal life.

Thirdly, the next circumstance is the persons to whom it was delivered, to the saints. It may be understood of the apostles, to whom it was delivered to be propagated; or of the church, to whom it was delivered to be kept, and who, in the constant use of scripture, are called saints. Observe, that saints are most interested in the acknowledgment, propagation, and defence of truth. The Christian faith was delivered to saints, and by saints, and none receive it so willingly, and defend it so zealously, and keep it so charily and faithfully as they do.

(1.) The men that the Spirit of God made use of as penmen were ‘holy men,’ specially purified and sanctified for this work: 2 Peter i. 21, ‘Holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost;’ and Eph iii. 5, ‘Revealed unto his holy apostles and prophets by the Spirit.’ These men were the fittest instruments to beget an external repute to the word. Surely they would not do anything for their own ends, and obtrude their own inventions upon the world as oracles from God. A carnal man’s testimony is liable to suspicion. Who would count that wholesome that cometh from a leprous hand? Yea, those that were not of eminent sanctity were not fit for such an employment: a novel doctrine, such as the gospel seemed to be in the world, needed all the advantages that might be, to gain a title and interest in their belief; therefore did the Lord make use of such holy and self-denying persons, who expected to gain nothing but ignominy, poverty, afflictions, bonds, death; these things did abide for them in every city.

(2.) Holy persons are only fit to preach the faith; sancta sanctis, holy men for holy things; it is an holy faith, and therefore fit to be managed by holy persons, that their hearts may carry a proportion with their work: Isa. lii. 11, ‘Be ye clean that bear the vessels of the Lord.’ The officers that carried the vessels and utensils of the temple out of Babylon were to take care of their cleanness. God purified Isaiah when he sent him to reprove, Isa. vi. 7, and the priests under the law that ministered before the Lord were to wash in the great laver. Regeneration is the best preparation for the ministry. Others disparage their testimony, and bring a reproach upon the gospel. People think we must say somewhat for our living, and so give us the hearing, but that is all. Oh! think of it, the credit of Christ lieth at stake; and since miracles are ceased, all the external confirmation that we can add to the word is by holiness of conversation. The Levites first cleansed themselves, and then cleansed the people, Neh. xii 30. The life of a minister is much either to edification or destruction; they take the lesson rather from your lives than your mouths, and by your levity or vanity sin cometh to be authorised: in short, either your doctrine will make your life blush, or your life will make your doctrine blush, and be ashamed.

(3.) None are fit publicly to defend the truth but the holy; they speak with more power, as from the heart and inward experience, and are more zealous as being more nearly concerned. They that partake of God’s nature will soonest espouse God’s cause and quarrel, and their zeal is most pure. Carnal men pervert religious differences; they change the nature of them, turning them into a strife of words, or a contention for interests; matters are not managed so purely as when there is conscience on both sides. The saints contend best for the saints’ faith: ‘We can do nothing against the truth, but for the truth,’ 2 Cor. xiii. 8. Zeal in carnal men is like fire in straw, quickly up and quickly down; but in the godly, it is like fire in wood, longer kept: ‘Wisdom is justified of her children.’ Mat. xi. 19; they are fittest to interpose. Again, false zeal is most passionate, without pity and meekness; but the flame is most pure and bright in a holy heart, which is subdued to the power of truth.

(4.) None receive the truth so willingly as the saints do. Holy persons can best understand what was written by holy men, they pierce into it more deeply; as iron that is red hot runneth further into the board than a sharp tool that is cold. God unbosometh himself to his familiars, Ps. xxv. 14; John vii. 17. Holy hearts are not clouded with the mists of lusts and interests Where there is purity there is brightness; mou katharsis ellampsis (Nazi. Orat. ut memini 40); the mind being separated from gross things, is fitted for the reception of spiritual mysteries. Paul saw most of God when he was blind to the world; the heart being taken off from the world, is erected to things supernatural and of a higher cognisance.

(5.) None retain the truth more firmly than the saints do. Manna was kept in a golden vessel, and so is truth in a pure soul: 1 Tim. iii. 9, ‘Holding the mystery of faith in a pure conscience.’ Holiness doth not blunt the wit, but sharpen; none have a worse spiritual sight than they that lack grace, 2 Peter i. 9. An unclean vessel soureth the liquor that is put into it; so doth a carnal heart pervert the faith and taint the judgment Let a man once be given up to some great lust, and you shall soon find him to be given up to some roaring error also; and when once they come to ‘make shipwreck of a good conscience.’ they do not long hold the faith that was once given to the saints, for grace and truth always thrive together.I come now to the main observation that is to be drawn from these words.Doctrine: That it is the duty of Christians in times of error and seducement to contend earnestly for the faith once given to the saints. It is their duty at all times, but then especially – (A.) That we may not discredit ourselves and the truth. (B.) That we may not hazard ourselves and the truth.A. Let me first speak to the discredit, and there I shall show -

(1.) That truth is honoured by a bold and resolute defence of it. We are not ashamed of it, though it be questioned and scorned in the world: Mat. xi. 19, ‘Wisdom is justified of her children.’ Neither John’s doctrine nor Christ’s doctrine would relish with the world, yet some had a reverent opinion of it for all that: Ps. cxix. 126,127, ‘They make void thy law, therefore I love it above pure gold.’ In times of defection our love to God and the ways of God should be the greater; as fountain water is hottest in coldest weather. It was an honour to the Christian religion that the primitive professors were glad of an occasion to die for it, and the more it was despised and persecuted, the more did they own it; falsehoods cannot endure the brunt of opposition.

(2.) That we may not dishonour ourselves, and discredit our own profession. He is but an ill servant of Christ that will not serve him when ‘the Lord hath need of him;’ when God distinguisheth sides, and crieth out, ‘Who is of my side, who?’ Exod. xxxii. 26. Times of error and seducement are searching, trying times. Light chaff is carried about with every wind, but the solid grain lieth still upon the ground: ‘The approved are made manifest,’ 1 Cor. xi. 19. There is a time not only to show love, but valour: Jer. ix. 3, ‘They are not valiant for the truth upon the earth.’ To be valiant for truth is to defend it in time of opposition, and to sparkle so much the more in a holy zeal because they pervert the right ways of the Lord. A Christian must have a heart as well as a liver; not only love the truth, but contend for it, and the more earnestly the more it is opposed. The apostle saith that a bishop must ‘hold fast the word of truth,’ Titus i. 9, antechomenon. The word signifieth a holding it fast against a contrary force; as when a man seeketh to wrest a staff out of another’s hand, he holdeth it the faster.B. The next reason is, that we may not endanger and hazard ourselves and the truth.

(1.) That we may not endanger ourselves. It is good to be able to defend religion when it is questioned; ignorant, secure, and careless spirits will certainly miscarry. Present truths and present errors have an aspect upon our interests; we must determine one way or another. Now how easily are they carried away with interests that have no principles, no idion stèrugmon, 2 Peter iii. 17, no proper ballast in their own spirits! Therefore let us strive to know the truth, to own the truth in a time of trial; it is needful. All errors and heresies are but men’s natural thoughts gotten into some valuable opinion, because backed with the defences of wit and parts. What are all the learned disputes against the truth, but the props of those vulgar misprisions and gross conceits that are in the heart of every natural and ignorant man? We have all a heretic in our bosoms, and are by nature prepared to drink in all kinds of errors and lies, and therefore we are said, Ps. lviii. 3, to ‘speak lies from the womb.’ because these things are in our natures. We are born Pelagians, and Libertines, and Papists. As in the new nature there is a cognation and proportion between us-and truth, so in the old nature there is an inclination to all manner of errors. Luther saith, Every man is born with a pope in his belly. And Mr Greenham hath a saying, that if all errors, and the memorials of them, were annihilated by the absolute power of God, so that there should not the least remembrance of them remain, yet there is enough in the heart of one man to revive them again the next day. Certainly whatever is suggested from without doth very well suit with the carnal thoughts that are in our own bosoms. Look upon any error or blasphemy that is broached in the world, and you will find it true. Is atheism vented? ‘The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God,’ Ps. xiv. 1. Gentilism, or the doctrine of many gods? So do we set up many gods: whatever we fear or love, that we worship: ‘Whose god is the belly,’ Phil. iii. 19. Every man naturally is a pagan and idolater. Pelagian tenets, wherein original sin is denied, are natural. Common people think they had ever a good heart towards God: ‘All these have I kept from my youth,’ Mat xix. 20. Chance and fortune, in a contradiction to God’s decrees, are a man’s natural opinions. So the doctrine of works and merit is in every man’s heart. What question more rife, when we begin to be serious, than ‘What shall I do?’ A ceremonious ritual religion is very pleasing to carnal sense; conjectural persuasions is but a more handsome word for the thoughts of ignorant persons; they say they cannot be assured, but they hope well. Doctrines of liberty are very suitable also to corrupt nature: ‘Cast away the cords,’ Ps. ii.; and ‘Who is lord over us?’ Ps. xii. 4. Nay, all sins are rooted in some error of judgment, and therefore they are called ‘errors,’ Ps. xix. 12. Well, then, for our own caution we had need stand for the truth, because error is so suitable to our thoughts; now when it spreadeth further, it is suitable also to our interests, and then we are in great danger of being overset.

(2.) That we may not hazard the truth. When errors go away without control, it is a mighty prejudice both to the present and the next age: ‘The dwellers upon earth’ rejoiced when God’s witnesses were under hatches, and there was none to contest with them, Rev. xi. 10. Fools must be answered, or else they will grow ‘wise in their own conceit,’ Prov. xxvi. 4, 5. Error is of a spreading, growing nature, therefore it is not good to retreat and retire into our own cells from the heat and burden of the day; let us stand in the gap and make resistance as God giveth ability.

Two motives will enforce this reason: -

(a.) The preciousness of truth: ‘Buy the truth and sell it not.’ It is a commodity that should be bought at any rate, but sold by no means, for the world cannot bid an answerable price for it. Christ thought it worthy his blood to purchase the gospel; by offering up himself he not only procured the comfort of the gospel, but the very publication of the gospel; therefore we should reckon it among our treasures and choicest privileges, and not easily let it go, lest we seem to have cheap thoughts of Christ’s blood.

(b.) The trust that is reposed in us for the next age, that is an obligation to faithfulness. We are not only to look to ourselves, but to posterity, to that doctrine which is transmitted to them; one generation teacheth another. And as we leave them laws and other national privileges, so it would be said if we should not be as careful to leave them the gospel: ‘Our fathers told us what thou didst in their days,’ Ps. xliv. 1. Every age is to consider of the next, lest we entail a prejudice upon them against the truth. What cometh from forefathers is usually received with reverence: ‘A vain conversation received by tradition from your fathers,’ 1 Peter i. 18. If you be not careful you may sin after you are dead; our errors and evil practices being continued and kept afoot by posterity. All the world had been lost in error and profaneness, if God had not stirred up in every age some faithful witnesses to keep up the memory of truth. There is in man a natural desire to do his posterity good; love is descensive. Oh! consider, how shall the children that are yet unborn come to the knowledge of the purity of religion, without some public monument or care on your part to leave religion undefiled? Antichrist had never prevailed so much if men had thought of after ages; they slept, and unwarily yielded to encroachment after encroachment, until religion began to degenerate into a fond superstition, or bundle of pompous and idle ceremonies; and now we see how hard it is to wean men from these things, because they have flowed down to them in the stream of succession, and challenge the authority and prescription of ancient customs. Look, as sometimes the ancestor a guilt is measured into the bosom of posterity, because they continued in their practices, Mat xxiii. 35, ‘That upon you may come all the righteous blood.’ &c.; so many times the miscarriages of posterity may justly be imputed to us, because they shipwrecked themselves upon our example: ‘The fathers ate sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.’ Well, then, let us perform the part of faithful trustees, and keep the doctrine of salvation, as much as in us lieth, pure and unmixed.

(To Be Continued..)

The Doctrine of the Trinity

When discussing the doctrine of the trinity, theologians like to distinguish between the ontological trinity and the economical trinity. The ontological trinity describes the inter-relationships of the three persons of the trinity as they have existed without change from all eternity. The economical trinity describes how those essential inter-relationships have come to concrete expression in the diverse and complementary roles that each person has undertaken to play in the great trinitarian work of redemption. The economical trinity is necessary for humans as an entrance into the abstract truths of the ontological trinity. Humans are so designed that they cannot simply absorb abstract truths without first encountering concrete expressions of those truths, which they can then use to form categories, or arrive at an understanding of the basic, unifying qualities underlying those concrete expressions. For example, a child could never come to grips with the semantic force of the term “loving” if he did not have specific, concrete actions pointed out to him as representative of the term. When a mother says, “Johnny, you need to be more loving, and share your toys with your brother…You need to be more loving, and help up your friend who has fallen down…”, eventually, Johnny is able to isolate a common disposition underlying all of those various actions, and come up with an idea of what it means to be loving. In the same way, it is only as we look at the historical activity of the triune Godhead, as he reveals himself in his work of redemption, that we can really get at what it means for the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit to be one God and yet three loving, unified, and distinct persons.

Assuming the basic legitimacy of this sentiment, we will first note some scriptural truths about the nature of the economical trinity, and only then arrive at some conclusions regarding the ontological trinity.

As we examine the biblical basis for the inter-relationship of the persons of the trinity as they work to redeem a people, we immediately encounter the idea of an inviolable agreement between these persons as to what the role of each should be, which antedates all of the steps that occurred to enact that work. This agreement is seen first between the Father and the Son: in Psalm 2:7-9 we hear the Messianic king recounting a promise that the Father had made to him, to give to him as an inheritance a people from the entire world. The fulfillment of this promise would entail the dramatic presentation of this king as the Son of God and hence would be the climactic economical display of the ontological Father/Son relationship that had always inhered in the Godhead1. The New Testament authors tell us that this promised event occurred at the resurrection of Christ from the dead (see Romans 1:3-4; Acts 13:33). In Isaiah 53:10-13, we encounter another glimpse of this agreement, which indicates the Son’s willingness to offer up his life for a certain people, for the redemption of their sins, and the Father’s willingness to give that people to the Son as his portion, in consequence of that redemptive work. We are assured that this redemptive work was indeed planned out from before the time that the first step was taken to enact it from such expressions as that phrase in Revelation 13:8, “the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world”.

This biblical motif, of an eternal agreement between the Father and the Son to accomplish redemption, finds its fullest expression in the gospel of John. There, the Son expresses his opinion many times both that the Father had given him a work to do, which he would most certainly accomplish (e.g. John 5:17-19, 30; 8:28-29; 10:17-18; 14:31; 17:4); and also, that the Father had promised to give him a certain people, none of whom he would ever lose (e.g. John 6:37-40; 10:29; 17:1-2, 6, 10). In this relationship, the Son would bring glory to the Father and the Father would bring glory to the Son (e.g. John 13:31-32; 17:1-5). In at least two passages, Jesus explicitly says that his accomplishment of the works which the Father had given him to do was intended to demonstrate that he was in the Father, and the Father was in him (John 10:38; 14:10-11). This is all but irrefutable proof that the economical trinity was indeed designed to display the essential, eternal inter-relationships within the ontological trinity.

Although the scriptural basis for an eternal agreement between the Spirit and the Father and Son is somewhat less explicit, it can likewise be derived from a couple of considerations. First, the Spirit is said to be “sent” on his redemptive mission, both by the Father and the Son (John 14:16-17, 26; 15:26; 16:7-14); and second, he is depicted in those same passages as engaging willfully in this redemptive task; and this is largely within the broader context of one of Jesus’ clearest discussions of the redemptive agreement between the Father and the Son (John 14-16). This leaves the conclusion virtually certain that the Spirit was also engaged in a pre-temporal agreement with the other persons of the Trinity to accomplish a specific role in the work of redemption. Furthermore, passages such as Ephesians 1:3-14, which clearly speak of the different parts that the three persons of the Godhead play in accomplishing redemption, argue for the same basic paradigm.

Now, the question only remains, “Is it appropriate to speak of this pre-temporal agreement between the persons of the trinity as a ‘Covenant of Redemption?”. Although the term “covenant” is nowhere in the bible used of this divine arrangement, I would contend that two considerations argue for the propriety of its usage in theology. First, this agreement manifests most explicitly the basic realities we see presented to us elsewhere in the scriptures, under the rubric “covenant”. There is a promised reward and a condition to be met, which includes the shedding of blood to make the agreement firm. In fact, it could almost be argued that the nature of the great biblical covenants could not be fully understood without first looking to the redemptive work of Christ on the cross as an explication of just what a covenantal agreement is (which the author of Hebrews is quite fond of doing); so that, to all practical intents and purposes, it is not just a covenant, but the prototypical covenant. And second, it fits the divine pattern of displaying the nature of God in mankind, in part, through his complex social relationships. God is a complex being, and it stands to reason that a mere individual human could never have shown forth the image of God as fully as humans in relationship. The eternal Father/Son relationship within the Trinity is imaged in the father/son relationship of mankind. So then, why could the most basic and foundational relationship of human society, the covenant of marriage, not image the eternal covenantal relationship between the members of the trinity? But here, we are encroaching on our next point, the ontological trinity.

As we have mentioned before, the ontological trinity can only be approached by means of the concrete truths of the economical trinity, as the persons of the Godhead engage in their covenantal work of redemption. In the economical trinity, we have seen that, by an irrevocable agreement which each person has willingly entered into, the members of the Godhead have undertaken to bring glory to each other. In the discharge of their peculiar offices, they are always in perfect harmony. This would lead us to understand the ontological trinity as an eternal, unchangeable relationship between the Father, Son, and Spirit which involves perfect harmony, love, and mutual glorification. And this is exactly the picture that we see in the gospel of John: the persons of the trinity have been bound together by a mutual indwelling, a mutual love, and a mutual glorification of each other from before the foundation of the world (e.g. John 5:20; 10:38; 14:10-11; 17:1-5; 21-24). The ontological trinity, then, may be summed up in this expression: an eternal covenant of love. In the economical trinity, we saw a pre-temporal covenant of redemption, harmoniously wrought through the diversely complementary offices of Father, Son, and Spirit, for the purpose of the loving glorification of each other. In the ontological trinity, we see an eternal covenant of love back of this pre-temporal covenant of redemption, which is the concrete expression of its ontological counterpart.

How does this doctrine of the trinity shape our understanding of the Christian mission? I would suggest that it gives direction to the mission’s ultimate goal; it illuminates the mission’s necessary means; and it clarifies the source from which the mission derives in the first place.

The Doctrine of the Trinity and the Goal of the Christian Mission

The most basic application of the doctrine of the trinity to the goal of Christian mission is simply this: if the inter-relationships of the ontological trinity are indeed covenantal, then the goal of Christian mission must also be covenantal. When God first created man, it was explicitly for the purpose of showing his own image. Man was different from all the creatures in the garden because he alone was created in the image of God (Genesis 1:26-27). When man fell and marred that image, God’s purpose was not frustrated: just as he had planned to show his image in creation, so he had planned to show his image even more fully in redemption. Not only did he create all things for his glory, he also engaged in all of his redemptive tasks for his own glory (see Isaiah 43:5-7); which is simply shorthand for the display of his own nature, which is eminently glorious.

What this means for the Christian mission is that, its ultimate goal is not simply to get as many individuals as possible off of the course of destruction, and into the bliss of heaven (as vital as that work of mercy is for displaying the character of a merciful God). On the contrary, it is all about reforming a new mankind that will display God’s image in covenantal unity, even as the trinity exists in a covenantal love and unity. This is why, throughout the history of the Old Testament, God’s dealings with mankind were ever enacted on the basis of the covenants that he had inaugurated with them (see Genesis 9:8-17; 17:1-8; Exodus 19:3-6; 2 Samuel 7:12-16), and they ever involved the formation of an indissoluble and unified people of grace, and not merely a composite collection of persons of grace. God chose and saved the nation of Israel, not one person in ten from every nation of the world. And even now that he is expanding his kingdom to include every nation, he is still doing so by bringing representatives of every tribe, tongue, people, and nation into one new people, his own kingdom of priests (cf. Ephesians 2:11-22; 3:6; 1 Peter 2:9-10; Revelation 5:9-10).

This concept has at least three applications to the goal of missions: first, a Christian missionary’s task, when dealing with any unbeliever, is not just to get him a ticket to heaven, but to bring him into a covenantal relationship with God. Christ died, not so that we might sit on clouds with halos and strum our harps, but to bring us to God (1 Peter 3:18). The ultimate expression of the blessings of redemption is being brought into a covenantal relationship with God himself, which is substantially similar to the inter-relationship of the eternal persons of the trinity. Jesus died, by his own confession, to keep believers “in the name” of God (John 17:11-12). What that means precisely becomes clearer a little later when Jesus prays that they would “be one in us” (that is, in the Father and the Son – John 17:21), and that he himself would be “in them” (John 17:23, 26). The final goal of the Christian mission is to bring believers into a personal relationship with God which precisely expresses the personal relationships within the eternal trinity.

Second, the task of Christian missions is to bring believers into a mutual relationship with each other which in itself reflects the inter-relationships within the trinity. Throughout the epistles the virtue of Christian unity is espoused and urged more than almost any other virtue (e.g. Ephesians 4:1-6; Philippians 1:27; 2:1-5). Believers show forth the divine, inter-trinitarian image when they are united in a diverse, loving, and mutually-honoring covenantal relationship.

Third, the goal of the Christian mission is ultimately to glorify God. If believers are to be perfectly happy, it is only to be by entering into a state similar to that of the perfectly blessed (i.e. happy) Godhead (e.g. 1 Tim. 1:11; 6:15). True Christian joy reflects the state of unruffled blessedness that has always existed in the trinity, the persons of which bring constant and illimitable joy to each other unceasingly. Therefore, it is a joy which is primarily designed to glorify God, that is, to display the nature of God. In other words, as great as are the blessings which God has given to followers of Jesus, those blessings themselves serve the greater purpose of glorifying God. God accomplished his work of redemption in order “to show…the riches of his grace in kindness towards us in Christ Jesus” (Ephesians 2:7). It was “to make known the riches of his glory in vessels of mercy, which he prepared beforehand unto glory” (Romans 9:23). Thus, any expression of the goal of the Christian mission which stops short with the needs of the unbeliever is essentially inadequate. Missions exists to bring eternal joy and life to sinners, but only because that will bring eternal glory to God, by displaying his nature in those whom he saves.

The Doctrine of the Trinity and the Means of the Christian Mission

Not only does trinitarian theology shape the goal toward which the Christian mission is striving; it also clarifies the means which are to be used in the pursuit of that goal. Redemption is ultimately an accomplishment of the triune God; he alone is the doer of the work, and therefore, any human activity must flow from his prior activity, and be directed and empowered by him. The mission that God left his people with is ultimately his mission, and advances on the basis of his eternal, immutable design; and so, any human activity which fails to take into account God’s redemptive plan as he has made it known is bound to be frustrated. Human mission endeavors are likely to be successful only as they understand the divine agenda and lean upon divine strength. This means that a first qualification for any missionary is a knowledge of the triune God; an awareness of the role of the persons of the Godhead in the work of redemption, as revealed in the scriptures; and a heart-attitude of faith in those joint operations of the persons of the Trinity.

For example, take the scriptural revelation of the work of the Father in the plan of redemption: he is the ultimate planner, the source from whom the whole work flows and is governed. We see throughout the gospel of John that the Son, in the fulfillment of his part of the redemptive work, acts in an unceasing obedience to the Father’s will (e.g. John 5:17-19, 30; 8:28-29; 10:17-18; 14:31; 17:4). Likewise the Spirit, when he comes, speaks not on his own, but only what he has heard from the Father and the Son (John 14:26; 15:26; 16:13-14). This role of the Father in planning out the work of redemption is seen with special clarity in the aspect of his choosing its subjects. We have already observed that the Father has chosen a specific people to give to the Son, and that the Son has purposed to redeem these alone (e.g. John 6:37-40; 10:29; 17:1-2, 6, 10); we may add to this testimony the witness of the epistles, which speaks of the Father’s choice of a certain people to be redeemed in no uncertain terms (e.g. Romans 8:29-30; Ephesians 1:3-6; 1 Peter 1:1-2). We may learn further from the revelation of scripture that this people is chosen out of every kindred, tribe, tongue, and nation (e.g. Revelation 5:9), and that it will be called out only when the gospel is proclaimed in all the world (e.g. Matthew 24:14).

So how does this truth affect the task of the Christian missionary? First, it gives him a clear directive in the pursuit of the task: as the Church continues to spread across the world, believers may know that in their missionary endeavors they ought to target the kindreds, tribes, tongues, and nations which are yet unreached, because they know that the conversion of representatives from these peoples is the Father’s will. Their task remains undone as long as there is any people group that has not heard the gospel, or that has not yet seen fruit from the proclamation of the gospel. Second, this understanding gives hope to missionaries laboring in the most difficult places. When Paul was experiencing opposition in Corinth, he was comforted by the realization that the Father had many people in that city, chosen for a redemption which had not yet been applied (see Acts 18:9-11). In the same way, the missionary who understands the biblical representation of the Father’s role in redemption has a strong hope that his labor will not be in vain, and has cause to cry out to God in faith for the success which has been promised. Because God has chosen a people, our ultimate success is guaranteed. This foundational awareness of the Father’s revealed role in the work of redemption drives a faithfulness which would otherwise wilt under the discouragement of unfavorable circumstances.

Consider as well the Son’s role in the work of redemption: he has determined to redeem the people God has chosen through his sacrificial blood, shed in their behalf; and in consequence of this redemption, he has won the right to return and judge the world, saving those who believe in him and condemning those who do not believe. Understanding this role clarifies the missionary’s task of proclaiming the gospel: for the account of this work is precisely the gospel he must proclaim. To the extent that one has not understood the role of the Son in redemption, he cannot proclaim the good news of that redemption. When Paul labored to bring the gospel to people, he emphasized Christ’s role as the returning judge and his resurrection from the dead, which had given him the authority to be Lord of the living and the dead (e.g. Acts 17:31; Romans 14:9). He also emphasized his shed blood, which serves as a fully acceptable propitiation for the sins of all who believe in Christ, and on that basis exhorted people to be reconciled to God (e.g. Acts 13:38-39; Romans 3:23-28; 1 Corinthians 1:23-24; 2 Corinthians 5:20-21). Now, to forget the part of Christ’s redemptive work which promises him the authority to come and judge the world, casting his enemies into eternal punishment, strips the gospel of its necessary context. Just asking a person, “Do you want to be saved?” is meaningless unless it is made clear what he must be saved from. But saying, “God has raised his Son from the dead, vindicating his authority to return to the earth and judge all who are opposed to him; would you be saved from the wrath that he will soon bring upon the earth in great fury?” that provides the necessary background to display the surpassing goodness of the good news. But not only must Christ’s judging role be emphasized; so also must his atoning, propitiatory role be emphasized, or else the news is not good at all. Saying, “Jesus has risen from the dead, and is Lord over all” is only bad news for anyone still in his sins. To the extent that the missionary does not understand the role of the Son in the work of redemption, therefore, he is left without a message to take to the nations of the world, the message by which all the Father’s chosen people will be called out.

Similarly, without an understanding of the Spirit’s role in redemption, the missionary is apt to be frustrated. It is only through the Spirit’s empowerment that the missionary can proclaim the good news with boldness and clarity (see Acts 1:8); and likewise, it is only through the Spirit’s work of convicting and regeneration that the elect of the Father can understand and come to Christ (e.g. John 3:5-8). Understanding the role of the Spirit directs the means of praying for and pursuing the evangelistic task; it also provides the ongoing confidence in the missionary’s own secure position in the favor of God. The Spirit is sent to seal and guarantee the final salvation of all who have once come to Christ (e.g. Romans 8:11-17; Ephesians 1:13-14); and without that constant witness and encouragement, the missionary is apt to despair at his own condition, especially when his circumstances grow difficult.

So then, an understanding of the inter-trinitarian roles in the work of redemption is a necessary foundation for the Christian missionary, shaping the message he has to take, clarifying to whom he has to take it, and providing inexhaustible hope and encouragement along the way. But there is also another way in which the doctrine of the trinity serves as the means of Christian evangelism; and that is, it is only as the trinitarian nature of God is displayed in the lives of Christians that unbelievers will come into a relationship with this triune God.

In his last discourse, Christ revealed to his disciples the means by which the world of unbelievers would recognize that they were truly followers of Christ: and that means was nothing other than the love they had for each other, which is reflective of the inter-trinitarian love of the persons of the Godhead (see John 13:34-35). When believers are brought into a covenantal relationship of love which is reflective of the eternal trinitarian covenant of love, people take notice. Mankind was created to display the image of God, and until he does so, he is living a life devoid of ultimate purpose. Mankind was created to know and enjoy God; and when he gets a glimpse of God’s nature, in the lives of believers, he realizes that he wants something like that, but he does not yet have it. This is why, in John 17:21, Jesus prayed that the disciples would be one even as he and the Father were one so that the world would believe that the Father had sent him! When the world sees the blessed trinity reflected in the lives of the disciples, it is only then that they will believe in the actual trinity, the Father and the Son whom he sent. So then, the shaping element of the doctrine of the trinity for the means of the Christian mission goes even beyond the fact that the knowledge of the redemptive work of the Godhead is a necessary foundation for taking the message to the world; in fact, the display of the inter-trinitarian relationships in the lives of the disciples constitutes a necessary means through which the gospel message may be understood and desired.

The Doctrine of the Trinity and the Source of the Christian Mission

Finally, we must notice that the doctrine of the trinity is the source from which the Christian mission flows. We have already observed that mankind was created to show forth the image of the triune God, as a diverse and yet unified covenant people, reflective of the diverse and complementary persons of the trinity. But just as our ontological existence as the people of God has its source in the nature of the ontological trinity, so our economical function as the people who are responsible to fulfill the Great Commission has its source in the economical trinity, by which the various persons of the Godhead undertook to accomplish the work of redemption.

In his high priestly prayer, Jesus explicitly relates the mission of the disciples to the mission that he himself had undertaken in pursuit of our redemption. Just as the Father sent Jesus, so Jesus has sent us. Just as the Son sanctified himself for his own mission, so he sanctifies us for our mission (see John 17:18-19). In other words, the economical functioning of the trinity is the source of the economical functioning of the Church of Christ, as she pursues the fulfillment of the Great Commission. This understanding may be fleshed out with a couple of further observations.

First, the redemptive role of the Son is the pattern for the economical functioning of the Church. Just as Christ suffered in his physical body to accomplish redemption, so now he is suffering in his mystical body to spread the effects of that redemption. In Colossians 1:24, Paul makes the stunning statement, “I am filling up in my flesh that which is lacking in the sufferings of Christ, in behalf of his body, which is the Church.” Just as Christ had to suffer in the flesh for the purchase of redemption, so now it remains for his mystical body to suffer for the spread of redemption. According to Paul, there is something lacking in the sufferings of Christ: it cannot be that any more sufferings are necessary to provide redemption; but there are more sufferings necessary to apply the redemption which has already been bought. It is necessary for the mystical body of Christ to suffer, or else redemption will not spread to all the people whom the Father has chosen.

This is because the sufferings of the believer are a necessary part of their witness, and so a necessary means for the fulfillment of the Great Commission. The proclamation of the gospel is the verbal testimony that tends toward the calling out of the elect; and suffering joyfully for righteousness’ sake, in the example of the Savior, is the dramatic representation of the gospel that tends toward the calling out of the elect. Both of these elements are necessary for the Christian mission. “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church” (Tertullian). It is only as the Church re-enacts the sufferings of Christ that the gospel will be powerful to spread throughout the earth. And so, in a very real sense, the functioning of the economical trinity is the necessary source for the advancement of the economical mission of the Church, that is, for the fulfillment of the Great Commission.

The second way in which the economical trinity is the source of the Christian mission is that, the same source by which the Son was guided in the accomplishment of his redemptive mission is now guiding the Church as she pursues her redemptive mission. Christ was sent out to accomplish the will of God, and it was the word of God that ever directed him as he pursued his task. He did not reveal anything of himself, but brought the word of God to the men whom the Father had chosen. “The words you gave to me, I gave to them” (John 17:8); “I have given to them your word, and the world hated them” (John 17:14). Similarly, the Spirit was sent to bring the word of God to his people (John 16:13). In the same way, the Church is set apart for her mission by the word of God. “Sanctify them through your truth; your word is truth” (John 17:17). In the economical trinity, Jesus was set apart for the mission of bringing the word of God to the people chosen by the Father, and the Spirit was likewise sent to bring the word of God to those people; but in the same way, the Church is now set apart for her mission by the word of God, and with the purpose of bringing that word to the world. The source which governed the redemptive tasks of the Son and the Spirit now govern the Church’s redemptive task of evangelization.

And not only is the source of direction the same in the economical trinity and the economical Church, but the source of sustenance and provision is likewise the same. Jesus, in the accomplishment of his redemptive task, was always guided and strengthened by the Spirit (e.g. Luke 4:1, 14, 18-21); and he was always sustained by prayer and fellowship with the Father (e.g. Luke 5:15-16). In the same way, the Church is accomplishing her mission only by the empowerment of the Spirit, and is sustained along the way through fellowship with the Father and prayer. Thus, the economical trinity, in particular the redemptive role of the Son, is the pattern, the source of direction, and the source of sustenance for the Christian mission today.

Conclusion

It is widely acknowledged that the doctrine of the trinity is foundational for Christian theology; it is less widely understood that the doctrine of the trinity is also foundational for Christian mission. It is my hope that this article will prove something of a first step in thinking through the ramifications of trinitarian theology on the goal, means, and source of the mission with which Christ left the Church, to take the gospel to the world.

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Source: Reformation Theology