Satan's Third Stratagem Defeated; viz. That in Which He Represents The Christian’s Breastplate as Bringing in The Opposition of The World 2/2

           

  Answer Second.  Suppose thy holy walking stirs up the wrath of ungodly ones against thee, know that there may be more mercy in their hatred than in their love.  Commonly the saints get good by the wrath of the wicked against them, not so oft by their favour and friendship.  Their displeasure wakens their care, and makes them more accurate (thus David prayed God to ‘make his way plain for him,’ because of his observing enemies), whereas their friendship too oft lays it asleep, and proves a snare to draw them into some sinful compliance with them.  Jehoshaphat was wound in too far by his correspondence with Ahab, so hard is it to keep in with God and wicked men also. Luther professed he ‘would not have Erasmus’s hon­our for a world;’ indeed the friendship he had with, and respect he had from, the great ones of the world made him mealy-mouthed in the cause of God.  The Moabites could not give Israel the fall at arm’s length, but when they closed in alliances with the children of Israel, then they were too hard for them.  Not their curses, but their embraces did them hurt.  Again, we can never lose the love, or incur the wrath of men, upon better or more advantageous terms than for keeping our ‘breastplate of righteousness’ close to us.

1. When we lose for this any love from men, we gain God’s blessing instead of it.  ‘Blessed are ye, when all men speak evil of you falsely, for my name’s sake,’ Matt. 5:11.  God’s blessing is a good roof over our head to defend us from the storm of man’s wrath. O it is sad, when a Christian opens the mouths of the wicked, by some unholy action, to speak evil of him! No promise will open then its door to hide thee from the storm of their railing tongues.  Man reviles and God frowns.  Little welcome such a one has, when he returns home to look into his own conscience, or con­verse with his God; but when it is for thy holiness they hate thee, God is bound by promise to pay thee love for their hatred, blessing for their cursing.  And truly that courtier has little cause to complain, that for a little disrespect from others, that cannot hurt him, is advanced higher in his prince’s favour.
2. While thy holy walking loseth thee some love from the world, it gains thee the more reverence and honour.They that will not love thee because thou art holy, cannot choose but fear and reverence thee, at the same time, for what they hate thee.  Let a saint comply with the wicked, and remit a little of his holi­ness to correspond with them, and he loses by the hand—as to his interest, I mean, in them—for by gaining a false love he loses that true honour which inwardly their consciences paid to his holiness.  A Christian walking in the power of holiness is like Samson in his strength, the wicked fear him; but when he shows an impotent spirit, by any indecency in his course to his holy profession, then presently he is taken prisoner by them, and falls under both the lash of their tongue and the scorn of their hearts. They can now dance about such a one, and make him their May-game, whose holiness even now kept them in awe.  It is not poverty, or the baseness of thy out­ward state in the world, that will render the contemp­tible, so long as thou keepest thy breastplate of righ­teousness on.  There sits majesty in the brow of holi­ness though clad in rags.  Righteous David commands reverence from wicked Saul.  The king himself does this homage to his poor exiled subject, ‘He wept, and said to David, Thou art more righteous than I,’ I Sam. 24:17.  Ay, this is as it should be, when carnal men are forced to acknowledge that they are outshot by the holy lives of Christians.  O Christians, do some singu­lar thing—what the best of your merely civil neigh­bours cannot do—and you sit sure in the throne of their consciences, even when they throw you out of their hearts and affections!  So long as the magicians did something like the miracles Moses wrought, they thought themselves as good men as he; but when they were nonplussed in the plague of lice, and could not, with all their art, produce the like, they acknowledged ‘the finger of God’ to be in it, Ex. 8:16.  Do not more than carnal men do, and you stand but level with themselves in their opinions of you, yea, they think themselves better than you, who pretend to holiness more than they.  It is expected that every one in the calling he professeth should more than a little exceed another that is not of that calling, which if he do not, he becomes contemptible.  We come to the applica­tion, in which we shall be the shorter, having sprink­led some­thing of this nature all along as we handled the doctrinal part.