Exhortation to study the mystery of the gospel 3/3

 (2.) Thou must become a disciple to Christ. Men do not teach strangers that pass by their door, or that come into their shops the mystery of their trade and profession; but their servants, and such as are willing to be bound apprentices to them.  Neither doth Christ promise to reveal the mysteries of the gospel to any but those that will give up their names to be his servants and disciples: ‘Unto you it is given to know the mystery of the kingdom of God: but unto them that are without, all these things are done in parables,’ Mark 4:11.  When once thou hast subscribed to the covenant of the gospel, thy indenture is sealed, Christ is now thy master he takes thee for one of his family and charge, and so will look to thy breeding and education; but for those on whose hearts and affections he hath no hold, they come may be to the ordinance, but, when the sermon is done, return to their old master again.  Sin is still their trade, and Satan their lord; is it like that Christ should teach them his trade?  The mystery of iniquity and of godli­ness are contrary; the one cannot be learned till the other be unlearned.

           (3.) If thou wouldst learn this mystery to any purpose, content not thyself with a brain-notional knowledge of it.  The gospel hath respect both to the head and heart—understanding and will.  To the un­derstanding it is a mystery of faith; to the heart and life it is a mystery of godliness.  Now these two must not be severed: ‘Holding the mystery of the faith in a pure conscience,’ I Tim. 3:9.  Here is both the manna, and a golden pot to keep it in—truth laid up in a pure conscience.  Knowledge may make thee a scholar, but not a saint; orthodox, but not gracious. What if thou wert able to write a commentary on all the Bible, and from the Scripture couldst confute all the errors and heresies which were at any time broached and vented against the truth; what would this avail thee, when thy own lusts confute, yea confound, thyself?  ‘If I understand all myster­ies,...and have not charity, I am nothing,’ I Cor. 13:2. He that increaseth knowledge, and doth not get grace with his knowledge, increaseth sorrow to himself, yea, eternal sorrow.  It would be an ease to gospel sinners in hell if they could rase the remembrance of the gos­pel out of their memories, and forget that they ever knew such truths.  In thy knowledge therefore of gos­pel mysteries, labour for these two things especially:

           (a) To see thy propriety in them.  Herein lies the pith and marrow of gospel knowledge.  When thou findest what Christ hath done and suffered for poor sinners, rest not till thou canst say with Paul ‘who loved me, and gave himself for me,’ Gal. 2:20.  When thou readest any precious promise, thou shouldst ask thy own soul, as the eunuch did Philip concerning that place of Isaiah, ‘Is it spoken to me, or of some other?’  Am I the pardoned person?  Am I one in Christ Jesus, to whom there is no condemnation?  How impatient were those two prisoners till Joseph had opened their dream, that they might know what should befall them!  The Scripture will resolve you whether your head shall be lift up to the gibbet in hell, or to the king's court in heaven.  Now in reading or hearing it preached, this is it thou shouldst listen after and inquire to know—where it lays thee out thy portion, whether in the promise or in the threatening. There is a sweet feast the gospel speaks of, but am I one of Christ’s guests that shall sit at it?  There are mansions prepared in heaven, but can I find one taken up for me there?

           (b) Labour to find the power and efficacy of gospel truths upon thee.  When our first parents had eaten that unhappy fruit which gave them and all mankind in them their bane, it is said then ‘they knew that they were naked;’ doubtless they knew it before their fall, but now they knew it with shame; they knew it, and sought for clothes to cover them, of which they found no want before.  I only allude to the place.  Many know what sin is, but it is not a soul-feeling knowledge: they know they are naked, but are not ashamed for their nakedness; they see no need of Christ’s righteousness to cover it, and of his grace to cure it.  Many know Christ died, and for what he died; but Christ’s death is a dead truth to them, it doth not procure the death of their lusts that were the death of him.  They know he is risen, but they lie still themselves rotting in the grave of their corruptions. They know Christ is ascended to heaven, but this draws not their souls after him.  A philosopher, being asked what he had got by philosophy, answered, ‘It hath learned me to contemn what others adore, and to bear what others cannot endure.’  If one should ask, What have you got by knowing the mystery of the gospel?  Truly you can give no account worthy of your acquaintance with it, except you can say, I have learned to believe what flesh and blood could never believe have taught me, and to do what I never could, till I had acquaintance with its heavenly truths.  This is to know ‘the truth as it is in Jesus,’ Eph. 4:21.  Had a sick man drunk some potion—which if it works will save his life, if not, will certainly be his death—O how troubled would he be while [until] he sees some operation it hath upon him! what means would he not use to set it awork!  If gospel truths work not effectually on thee for thy renovation and sanctifi­cation, thou art a lost man; they will undoubtedly be ‘a savour of death’ to thee.  O how can you then rest till you find them transforming your hearts and as­similating your lives to their heavenly nature!  Thus Paul endeavoured to know the power of Christ’s resurrection quickening him to a holy life here, without which he could not attain to a joyful resurrection hereafter, Php. 3:10, 11. The gospel is a glass, but not like that in which we see our bodily face.  This only shows what our feature is, and leaves it as it was; but that changeth the very complexion of the soul ‘from glory to glory,’ II Cor. 3:18.

Exhortation to study the mystery of the gospel 2/3

  Of all creatures in this visible world, light is the most glorious; of all light, the light of the sun without compare excels the rest.  Were this eye of the world put out, the earth would be a grot, a grave, in which we should be buried alive.  What were the Egyptians while under the plague of darkness but like so many dead men? they had friends, but could not see them; estates abroad in the fields, but could not enjoy them. Now what is the sun to the sensible world, that is Christ in the gospel to the intellectual world of souls. Without this ‘light of the knowledge of God in the face of Jesus Christ,’ what can the soul do or enjoy aright?  Man’s soul is of high, yea royal extraction, for God is ‘the Father of spirits;’ but this child meets his heavenly Father in the dark, and knows him not: ‘He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not,’ John 1:10.  And as it is of high birth, so intended for a high end, to glorify and enjoy God its Maker.  Now, for want of the knowl­edge of Christ it can do neither, but debaseth itself to the drudgery of sin and sensual embraces of the creature instead of God, for whom it was at first made; like the son of some great prince, who, not knowing his royal descent, casts himself away in mar­riage on some beggar’s daughter.  O how should we prize and study this mystery therefore that brings us to the true knowledge of God, and the way how we may recover our interest in him and happiness with him!  Man’s primitive happiness consisted in God’s love to him and his likeness to God.  The gospel dis­covers a way how man may be restored to both.  The first it doth, as it is a mystery of faith, by revealing Christ and his atonement for our reconciliation with God; the latter, as it is a mystery of godliness, and the instrument with Christ useth in the hand of his Spirit to create man anew, and as it were the tool to re-engrave the image of God upon him with.

           Question.  But how may we be led into the sav­ing knowledge of this mystery?

           (1.) Think not how to obtain it by the strength of thy reason or natural parts.  It is not learned as other secrets in nature or human arts, of which those that have the most piercing wit and strongest brain soon­est get the mastery.  None have been more mistaken, or erred more foully in their apprehensions about gospel truths, than the greatest scholars, sons of reason, and men admired for their parts and learning; the cause whereof may be partly their pride and self-confidence, which God ever was and will be an enemy to; and also because the mysteries of the gospel do not suit and jump with the principles of carnal reason and wisdom.  Whence it comes to pass that the wiser part of the world, as they are counted, have com­monly rejected the grand principles of evangelical faith as absurd and irrational.  Tell a wise Arian that Christ is God and man in one person, and he laughs at it, as they did at Paul when he mentioned the resurrection of the body, Acts 17:32, be­cause the key of his understanding fits not the wards of this lock.  When a merit‑monger hears of being justified by faith, and not by works, it will not go down with him. It seems as ridiculous to him that a man should be justified by the righteousness which another fulfills, as for a man to live by the meat another eats, and be warm with the clothes another wears.  Tell him, when he hath lived never so holily, he must renounce his own work, and be beholden to another’s merit; you shall as soon persuade him to sell his estate, to get his living by begging at another's door.  These are ‘hard sayings,’ at which they take offence, and go away, or labour to pervert the simplicity of gospel revelation to their own sense.  Resolve therefore to come, when thou readest the gospel, not to dispute with thy Maker, but to believe what he reveals to be his mind. Call not divine mysteries to give an account to thy shallow understanding.  What is this but to try a prince at a subject’s bar?  When thou hast laid aside the pride of thy reason, then thou art fit to be admit­ted a scholar in Christ’s school, and not till then.

           Objection.  But must we cease to be men when we become Christians?

           Answer.  No; we cease not to be men, but to be proud men, when we lay aside the confidence of our own understanding to acquiesce in the wisdom and truth of God.  An implicit faith is absurd and irra­tional when a man requires it of us, who may deceive or be deceived in what he saith.  But when God speaks, it is all the reason in the world we should believe what he saith to be true, though we cannot comprehend what he saith; for we know he who is infinite wisdom cannot himself be deceived, and he who is truth and faithfulness will not deceive us.

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.