Exhortation to study the mystery of the gospel 1/3

Use Third. Be you provoked, who are yet stran­gers to this mystery, to get the knowledge of it—yea, endeavour to gain an intimate acquaintance with it.  To move you thereunto, I shall make use of the two arguments: 1. Consider the Author of this mystery.  2. The subject-matter of it.

1. Argument.  Consider the Author of the mys­tery of the gospel.  That book must needs be worth the reading which hath God for the author; that mys­tery deserves our knowledge which is the product of his infinite wisdom and love.  There is a divine glory sitting upon the face of all God's works.  It is impos­sible so excellent an artist should put his hand to an ignoble work.  ‘O Lord, how manifold are thy works! in wisdom hast thou made them all,’ Ps. 104:24.  But there is not the same glory to be seen in all his works. Our apostle tells us ‘there is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon; one star differs from another in glory.’  Now, among all the works of God that of man’s redemption may well pass for the master-piece.  The world itself was set up to be a stage for the acting of this piece of providence, where­in B@8LB@\648@H F@N\" J@Ø 1,@Ø—‘the manifold wisdom of God,’ is so curiously wrought, that angels themselves pry into it, and are wrapped up into an admiration of it, Eph. 3:10; I Peter 1:12.  God’s works deserve our study, and those most wherein he hath drawn the clearest portraiture of himself.  The gospel mystery therefore, above all other, should be searched into by us, being the only glass in which the glory of God is with open face to be seen.
2. Argument.  Consider the subject-matter of the gospel—Christ, and the way of salvation through him. What poor and low ends have all worldly mysteries! one to make us rich, another to make us great and honourable in the world, but none to make us holy here or happy hereafter;—this is learned only from the knowledge of Christ, who is revealed in the gos­pel, and nowhere else.  No doubt Solomon’s natural history, in which he treated ‘of all trees from the cedar to the hyssop, of all beasts, fowls, and creeping things,’ was a rare piece in its kind; yet one leaf of the gospel is infinitely more worth to us than all that large volume would have been;—so much more precious, by how much the knowledge of God in Christ is better than the knowledge of beasts and birds.  And we have reason to think it a mercy that the book is lost and laid out of our sight, which we should have been prone to have studied more than the Bible; not that it was better, but more suitable to the mould of our carnal minds.  But, to a gracious soul, enlightened with saving knowledge, no book to this of the Bible. Paul was a bred scholar; he wanted not that learning which commends men to the world, yet counts all dung and dog’s meat in comparison of ‘the excellency of the knowledge of Jesus Christ his Lord,’ Php. 3:8.  Well might he call it dog’s meat; for a man may feed all his lifetime on human learning, and die, in Scrip­ture sense, a dog at last.  It was the saying of Bona­venture, that he had rather lose all his philoso­phy than one article of his faith.  We read that those, Acts 19, were no sooner converted but they burned their books of curious arts.  Neither were they losers by it; for they had got acquaintance with one book that was worth them all.