Exhortations To The Sinner To Embrace This Peace With God Offered, In The Gospel 5/5

 Fourth. Consider what thou doest when thou re­fusest peace with God.  Determinations of war or peace use to be the result of the most grave counsels and mature deliberation possible.  Think and think again, what thou doest, before thou breakest off the treaty of peace, lest thou makest work for repentance when it will be bootless.  But, lest thou shouldst not be so faithful to God and thy own soul as to give thy conscience liberty to speak freely in this matter, I shall do it for thee, and tell thee what thou doest when thou rejectest peace.  Thou justifiest thy former hostilities against God, and declarest that thou wilt vouch what thou hast done, let God right himself as well as he can.  He that refuseth a pardon, either denieth he hath done wrong, or, which is worse, stands to defend it.  Thou hadst as good say thou de­sirest not to be friends with God, but hast a mind to perpetuate the feud betwixt God and thee, like Amil­car, who was such an enemy to Rome, that, when he died, he made his son Hannibal heir to his hatred against them.  Is it not enough that thou hast fought so many battles on earth against thy Maker, but wilt thou keep the quarrel up in another world also, where there is no more possibility to put an end to it than to eternity itself?  Thou throwest the greatest scorn up­on God that it is possible for a creature to do.  As if God’s love and hatred were such inconsiderable things that they need not, when cast into the scale of thy thoughts, preponderate^[3] thee either way—the one to move thy desire, or the other thy fear!  In a word, thou consentest to thy own damnation, and desperately flingest thyself into the mouth of God’s flaming wrath, which gapes in the threatening upon thee. God is under an oath to procure thy destruction, if thou diest in this mind, which God forbid!  Death is the trap-door which will let thee down to hell’s dungeon; and when once thou art there, thou art where thou wilt have space enough to weep over thy past folly, though here thou hast neither mind nor leisure to make God thy friend.  The very thoughts of those offers of peace which once thou hadst, but no heart to embrace them, will be like so much salt and vinegar, with which thy accusing conscience will be continually basting thee, as thou liest roasting in hell-fire, to make thy torment the more intolerable.  I know this language grates on the sinners’ ears, but not so ill as the gnashing of the sinner’s own teeth will in hell.

           I have read of a foolish, I may say cruel, law among the Lacedemonians^[4], that none should tell his neighbour any ill news befallen him, but every one should be left, in process of time, to find it out them­selves.  Many among us, I think, would be content if there were such a law, that might tie up ministers’ mouths from scaring them with their sins, and the miseries that attend their unreconciled state.  The most are more careful to run from the discourse of their misery, than to get out of the danger of it—are more offended with the talk of hell, than troubled for that sinful state that shall bring them thither.  But alas! when, then, shall we show our love to the souls of sinners if not now, seeing that in hell there remains no more offices of love to be done for them?  Hell is a pest-house, that we may not write so much on the door of it as ‘Lord, have mercy on them that are in it.’ Nay, they who now pray for their salvation, and weep over their condition, must then with Christ vote for their damnation, and rejoice in it, though they be their own fathers, husbands, and wives they see there. O, now bethink yourselves, before the heart of God and man be hardened against you!

           Question.  But how may a poor sinner be at peace with God?

1. See and be sensible of the feud and enmity that at present stands betwixt God and thee.  2. Look thou propoundest right ends in thy desire of reconciliation with God.  3. Throw down thy rebellious arms, and humbly submit to his mercy.  4. Hie thee, as soon as may be, to the throne of grace, and humbly present thy request to God to be at peace with thee through Christ.

Exhortations To The Sinner To Embrace This Peace With God Offered, In The Gospel 4/5

           (c) Look into the commission God gives his am­bassadors, and still his heart appears in the business, whether you consider the largeness of it, on the one hand, or the strictness of it on the other.  First, the largeness of it—‘Go and preach,’ saith Christ, ‘the gospel to every creature.’  Make no difference—rich or poor, great sinners or little, old sinners or young.  Offer peace to all that will but repent and believe.  Bid as many come as will; here is room for all that come.  Again, the strictness of it on the other hand. O what a solemn charge have they of delivering their message faithfully!  Paul trembles at the thoughts of loitering—‘Woe is me if I preach not.’  What an argument doth Christ use—fetched from his very heart—to persuade Peter to be careful, ‘If thou lovest me, feed my sheep.’  As if he had said, ‘Peter, thou now art in tears for thy cowardice in denying me, but thou hast yet one way left, for all that unkindness, to demonstrate thy love to me, and that is by feeding my sheep; do this, and trouble not thyself for that.’ Christ shows more care of his sheep than of himself.

           (d) The joy God expresseth when poor sinners come into the offer of peace.  Joy is the highest testi­mony that can be given to our complacency in any thing or person.  Love to joy is as fuel to the fire.  If love lay little fuel of desires on the heart, then the flame of joy that comes thence will not be great.  Now God's joy is great in pardoning poor sinners that come in; therefore his affection great in the offer thereof. It is made the very motive that prevails with God to pardon sinners, ‘because he delighteth in mercy,’ Micah 7:18.  ‘Who is a God like unto thee, that pardon­eth iniquity, and passeth by the transgression of the remnant of his heritage? he retaineth not his anger for ever, because he delighteth in mercy.’  God doth all this, ‘because he delighteth in mercy.’  Ask why the fisher stands all night with his angle in the river.  He will tell you, ‘because he delights in the sport.’  Well, you now know the reason why God stands so long waiting on  sinners, months, years, preaching to them; it is that he may be  gracious in pardoning them, and in that act delight himself.  Princes very oft pardon traitors to please others more than themselves, or else it would never be done, but God doth it chiefly to delight and gladden his own merciful heart. 

 Hence the business Christ came about—which was no other but to reconcile sinners to God—is called ‘the pleasure of the Lord,’ Isa. 53:10.  The Lord takes such joy and pleasure in this, that, whereas other fathers —whose love to their  children sinks infinitely beneath any comparison with the love of God to Christ —mourn at the death of their children, and most of all when violent and bloody, God takes content in his Son's death; yea, had the chief hand in the procuring of it, and that with infinite complacency: ‘It pleased the Lord to bruise him.’  And what joy could God take in his Son’s death, but as it made way for him and his poor creature that were fallen out, and at open war one against another, to fall in again by a happy accord?  And now, speak, O sinner! if God doth so affectionately desire to be reconciled with thee, doth it not much more behove thee to embrace the peace, than it doth him to offer it?  There is but one thing more I would desire thee, sinner, to consider, and then I leave thee to thy own choice.

Exhortations To The Sinner To Embrace This Peace With God Offered, In The Gospel 3/5

(1.) In his contriving a way for reconciling sinners to himself.  What men strongly desire, they stretch their wits to the utmost how to accomplish. ‘The liberal man deviseth liberal things,’ Isa. 32:8.  It shows the heart exceeding large in charity, when a man shall sit down and study how he may find out ways for the exercise of his charity; whereas, most men, alas! beat their brains how they may save their purses and escape with giving as little as may be to the poor.  O what a rare invention hath God found out for showing mercy, which hath so many mysterious passages in it, that angels themselves are put hither to school, that by studying this mystery of God’s reconciling sinners to himself by Christ, they might know ‘the manifold wisdom of God!’ Eph. 3:10.

           (2.) By the early discovery he made of this to the sons of men.  He would go among us, for no sooner had man broken the peace, and taken up rebellious arms against his Maker, but the Lord's heart relented towards him, and could not let the sun go down on his wrath against him, but must, in the very same day that he sinned, let him hear of a Saviour, by preaching peace to him, in ‘the seed of the woman,’ Gen 3:15. Little did Adam think that God had such a message in his mouth for him, when he first heard him coming towards him, and for fear ran his head into a bush, meditating a flight from him, if he had known whither to have gone.  O, that ‘Adam, where art thou?’ sounded, no doubt, in his guilty ears, like the voice of an avenging God calling him, a malefactor, to execution!  But it proved the voice of a gracious God, com­ing, not to meet man in his way returning to him, but to seek him out, who had lost all thoughts of him, that he might give some ease to his own gracious heart, now full of mercy to his poor creature, by dis­closing to him the purposes of grace which he had there conceived towards him.  Surely his heart was very full, or else this would not have burst out so soon.

           (3.) The great ordinance of the gospel-ministry, which God hath set up in the church, on purpose to treat with sinners upon a peace, speaks his deep affection to the work, II Cor. 5:18.  One would have thought it had been enough to print his thoughts and purposes of mercy in the Scripture, though he had done no more.  Princes, when they put out a statute or law, expect all their subjects should inquire after it, and do not send one to every town, whose office shall be to give notice thereof, and persuade people to sub­mit to it.  Yet this the great God doth.  The minister’s work from one end of the year to the other, what is it but to beseech sinners to be reconciled to God?  And in this observe,

           (a) The persons he sends to preach.  Not angels, foreigners to our nature, who, though they wish us well, yet are not so intimately concerned in man’s fall, as to give them the advantage of preaching with those melting bowels, that God would have them filled with who go on his errand.  No, he sends men, with whom he may converse familiarly, creatures of like passions—whose nature puts them under the same depravation, temptation, condemnation with ourselves—who can, from the acquaintance they have with their own hearts, tells us the baseness of ours —from the fire of God’s wrath, which hath scorched them for their sins, [can] tell us the desert of ours, and the danger we are in by reason of them—as also, from the sweet sense that the taste of God’s love in Christ hath left on their souls, can commend the cheer and feast they invite us to upon their own knowledge.  Did not God, think you, desire good speed to his embassage when he chose such to carry it?

           (b) Observe the qualifications required in those he employs as ambassadors to offer peace to sinners.  ‘The servant of the Lord must not strive; but be gentle unto all men, apt to teach, patient, in meekness instructing those that oppose themselves,’ II Tim. 2:24, 25.  O how careful is God that nothing should be in the preacher to prejudice the sinner’s judgment, or harden his heart, against the offer of his grace.  If the servant be proud and hasty, how shall they know the master is meek and patient?  God would have them do nothing to make the breach wider, or hinder a happy close betwixt him and them.  Indeed, he that will take the bird must not scare it.  A froward peevish messenger is no friend to him that sends him.  Sinners are not pelted into Christ with stones of hard provoking language, but wooed into Christ by heart-melting exhortations.

Exhortations To The Sinner To Embrace This Peace With God Offered, In The Gospel 2/5

Second. Consider who it is that offers peace to thee—the great God.  It is hard to say which speaks the greatest wonder—for God to offer, or thee to de­ny what he offers.  We marvel not to see the undutiful child on his knee, labouring to soften his father’s heart with his tears, which he hath hardened against him with his rebellions; nor a condemned traitor prostrate at his prince’s foot, begging for his life, now forfeited to the justice of the law; but it is something strange to see the father become suppliant to his child, more, for the traitor to open his dungeon door and find his prince standing there, and that upon no other errand than to desire him to accept of a pardon. And yet self-love may be the great motive for this seeming self-denial.  The parent doth but love himself when he steps below his place to gain his child, that carries so much of its parent’s life about him. And such necessity of state there is sometimes, that great princes are forced to stoop to the meanest, yea worst of his subjects.  A prince’s safety may be so intimately concerned in a traitor’s life that he cannot cut off his head without imminent danger to the crown that stands upon his own.  But none of these straits forced God to take up thoughts of peace to his poor creature; no, they are the birth of free condescending love.  And now, think again, sinner, before the great God hath a denial from thee.  If a neighbour, the poorest in the town, and he one that hath done thee wrong, and not received it from thee, comes to thee and desires peace, shouldst thou reject the motion?  Would not thy conscience reproach thee to thy dying day?  How then wilt thou endure to look God or conscience in the face, if thou refusest peace at God’s hands that thou doth not treat, like men, when their sword is broke, and they cannot fight, but when he hath absolute power over thy life—which is ever in his hands—yea, a God that hath ever received the wrong—never did thee any—yea, should have done thee none, if he had long before this hanged thee up in chains of darkness among the damned.

           Third. Consider how God offers thee peace.

1. He offers peace sincerely.He covers not fraud under a treaty of peace.  Among men there hath been horrible juggling in this case.  The flag of peace is oft hung out at lip only, to draw them within the reach of their dagger, which is ready to smite them, as Joab did Abner, ‘under the fifth rib.’  In all the civil wars of France the poor Protestants found peace more costly to them than war; they beat the Papists in the field, when open enemies, but were betrayed by them in the chamber, when false friends.  But for thy com­fort know it is, ‘a God of truth’ thou treatest with.  Never did he shed the blood of war in peace, or give a soul to the sword of his wrath, after quarter taken and peace given.  ‘If we confess,....he is just and faithful to forgive.’  His promises are not ‘yea and nay,’ like the devil’s, who lays them so that he may have the credit both ways.  No, the very heart of God may be seen as through a crystal window in the promise; they are all ‘yea and amen’ in Christ, II Cor. 1:20.
2. He offers peace affectionately,his heart deep­ly engaged in the tenders of mercy to poor sinners; which will appear,

         

Exhortations To The Sinner To Embrace This Peace With God, Offered In The Gospel 1/5

First. Consider what it is that is offered thee —peace with God.  A thing so indispensable—thou canst not have less, and so comprehensive—thou needest have no more than this, and what cometh with it, to make thee truly, fully happy.  Of all the variety of enjoyments with which it is possible thy table can be spread, this is a dish can least be spared. Take away peace, and that but of an inferior nature —outward peace—and the feast is spoiled, though it be on a prince’s table.  David’s children had little stomach to their royal dinner when one of them was slain that sat at the board with them.  And what taste can you have in all your junkets while God is in array against you; many sinners slain before your eye by God's judgments; and the same sword that hath let out their blood, at thy throat, while the meat is in thy mouth?  Methinks your sweet morsels should stick in your throat, and hardly get down, and hardly get down, while you muse on these things.  O sinner! is not this as a toad swelling at the bottom of thy most sweetly sugared cup—that the controversy yet depends betwixt God and thee?  Thy sins are unpar­doned, and thou a dead damned creature, however thou dost frolic it for the present in thy prison. Would you not wonder to see a man at his sport, hunting or hawking, and one should tell you that that man is to be hanged tomorrow?  Truly God is more merciful to thee than thou canst promise thyself, if he stay the execution till another day.  I confess, when I meet a man whose life proclaims him an unreconciled sinner, and see him spruce up himself with the joy of his children, estate, honour, or the like, in this life, it administers matter of admiration [amazement] to me, what such a one thinks of God or himself.  Canst thou think it is long thou shalt sit at this fire of thorns thou hast kindled, and not God for thee?  Must it needs provoke a creditor to see his debtor live high, and go brave, all at his cost, and all the while never think of getting out of his debt, or of making his peace with him?  Much more then doth it provoke God to see sinners spend upon his bounty—lead joyful jovial lives in the abundance of outward enjoyments he lends them, but take no thought of making peace with him in whose debt‑book they are so deep in arrears.

           What folly had it been for the Jews, when Ahasu­erus had sealed the warrant for their destruction, to have gone and painted their houses, planted their fields, and let out their hearts in the enjoyment of their estates, without taking care, in the first place, of getting that bloody decree reversed?  A worse sot art thou, that doest all these, while thou carriest the sen­tence of death from God’s mouth, about thee in thy own conscience.  Sir Thomas More, when in the Tower, would not so much as trim himself, saying, ‘There was a controversy betwixt the king and him for his head, and till that was at a happy end, he would be at no cost about it.’  Scum but off the froth of his wit and you may make a solemn use of it.  Certainly all the cost you bestow on yourselves to make your lives pleasurable and joyous to you is mere folly, till it be decided what will become of the suit betwixt God and you, not for your heads, but souls, yea soul and body, whether for heaven or hell.  O were it not thy wisest choice to begin with making thy peace, and then thou mayest soon lead a happy life!  We say, ‘He that gets out of debt grows rich.’  I am sure the recon­ciled soul cannot be poor.  As soon as the peace is concluded a free trade is opened betwixt God and the soul. 

If once pardoned, thou mayest then sail to any port that lies in God’s dominions, and be welcome. All the promises stand open with their rich treasure. Take, poor soul, full lading in of all the precious things they afford, even as much as thy faith can bear, and none shall hinder thee.  As a man may draw the wine of a whole vessel through one tap, so faith may draw the comfort of all the covenant out of this one promise of reconciliation.  If reconciled, then the door is open to let thee into communion with God in all his ordinances.  God and thou being agreed may now walk together, whereas before thou couldst not look into God’s presence but his heart rose against thee, as one at the sight of his enemy, ready to draw upon thee with his judgments.  ‘The smith,’ we say, ‘and his penny, both are black.’  So wert thou with all thy duties and performances, while unreconciled in his eye.  But now thy ‘voice is sweet, and countenance comely.’  All the attributes of God, thy ally, are thine: his horses and chariots thine, as Jehoshaphat told Ahab.  Whenever any enemy puts thee in fear, you know where to have a friend that will take part with thee.  All his providences, though like bees, they fly some this way, and some that, yea, one contrary to another, as, thou thinkest, impossible to trace them, are yet all at work for thee; and thy soul is the hive wherein they will unlade the sweet fruit of all their labour, though possibly it may be night—the evening of thy days—before thou findest it.  In a word, if reconciled, thou standest next step to heaven; ‘whom he justifies, them he glorifies,’ Rom. 8:30.  Thou art sure to be there as soon as death rends the veil of thy flesh, which is all that interposeth between thee and it.

Application

        

   

Let it provoke everyone to labour to get an inter­est in this peace of reconciliation with God which the gospel brings.  Peace with God!  Sure it is worth the sinner’s having, or else the angels were ill employed when they welcomed the tidings thereof into the world at our Saviour’s birth with such acclamation of joy.  ‘Glory to God,....on earth peace,’ Luke 2:14.  Yea otherwise Christ himself was deceived in his purchase, who, if a sinner's peace with God be not of high praise and value, hath little to show for the effusion of his heart-blood, which he thought well spent to gain this.  But this we cannot believe.  And yet to see how freely God offers peace and pardon to the sons of men through Christ, and how coy, yea sullen and cross they are to the motion:—one that does not well know them both—God's infinite goodness, and wretched man's horrible baseness—might be ready to think it some low prized ware which lay upon God’s hands, and this to be the cause why God is so earnest to put it off, and man so loath to take it off his hands. 

Ah poor deluded wretches! who is the wicked counsellor that hardens your hearts from embracing your own mercies?  None, sure, but a devil can hate God and you so much.  And hath he sped so well in his own quarrel against God, that he should be hearkened to by thee, poor sinner?  Can he give thee armour that will quench God's bullets?  How then is it that he is so unkind to himself as to let them lie burning in his own bosom to his unspeakable torment?  Or will he lend thee any pity when thou hast by his advice undone thyself?  Alas! no more than the cruel wolf doth the silly sheep, when he hath sucked her blood and torn her in pieces.  Think, and think again, poor sinner, what answer thou meanest to send to heaven before God calls his ambassadors home, and the treaty break up, never to be renewed again. And that thou mayest not want some seasonable mat­ter for thy musing thoughts to enlarge upon on this subject, let me desire thee to treat with thy own heart upon these four heads.  First. Consider what it is that is offered thee.  Second. Who it is that offers it. Third. How he offers it.  Fourth. What thou dost when thou refusest it.

Superiority Of Our Nature In Christ To Its State In Adam

1. The reconciled sinner hath the advantage of Adam in his union to God.  2. The reconciled sinner hath the advantage of Adam in his communion with God.
2. The reconciled sinner hath the advantage of Adam in his union to God.  And that,

(1.) As it is nearer.  The union is nearer, because God and man make one person in Christ.  This is such a mystery as was not heard of by Adam in all his glory.  He, indeed, was in league of love and friend­ship with God—and that was the best flower in his crown—but he could lay no claim to such kindred and consanguinity as now—with reverence be it spoken—the reconciled soul can with God.  This comes in by the marriage of the divine nature with the human, in the person of Christ, which personal union is the foundation of another, a mystical union betwixt Christ and the person  of every believer; and this is so near a union, that, as by the union of the divine nature and human, there is one person, so also by this mystical union, the saints and their head make one Christ, ‘for as the body is one, and hath many members, and all the members of that one body, being many, are one body: so also is Christ,’ I Cor. 12:12.  Ecclesia est Christus explicatus—the church is nothing but Christ displayed.  Who can speak what an advance this is to the human nature in general, and to the persons of believers in especial?—such a one, as it leaves not only Adam, but angels, beneath a reconciled sinner in this respect.  Adam, at first, was made but ‘little lower than the angels;’ but, by this pair of unions, God hath set the reconciled soul more than a little above them both, for Christ, by taking on him, not ‘the nature of angels’—though the more an­cient and noble house—but the seed of Abraham,’ made ‘the elder serve the younger.’  Even angels themselves minister to the meanest saint, as unto their Master’s heir, Heb. 1:14.

(2.) As it is stronger.  Therefore stronger, because nearer.  The closer stones stand together the stronger the building.  The union betwixt God and Adam in the first covenant, was not so near but Adam might fall, and yet God’s glory stand entire and un­shaken; but the union now is so close and strong be­twixt Christ and his saints, that Christ cannot be Christ without his members.  ‘Because I live,’ saith Christ, ‘ye shall live also,’ John 14:19—implying that their life was bound up in his, and [that] it was as easy for him to be turned out of heaven as for them to be kept out.  The church is called Christ's ‘body, the fullness of him that filleth all in all,’ Eph. 1:23.  A body is not full if it hath not every member and joint, though never so little, and them in their fullness too. The saints’ graces is Christ's glory, II Cor. 8:23; and, though his essential glory as God receives no filling from his saints, or their graces, yet consider him in his mediatorship as head of his church, so Christ’s glory is daily filling, as the elect are called in daily, and as those that are called in grow up to their ap­pointed stature.  Christ hath not his fullness till the saints have their perfection and complement of grace in heaven’s glory.

2. The reconciled sinner hath the advantage of Adam in his communion with God.The nearer, we use to say, the dearer.  Communion results from un­ion.  If the union be nearer and stronger between a reconciled soul and God than Adam’s was, his communion must needs be sweeter and fuller.  Why else is the communion between husband and wife fuller than of friend and friend, but because the union is closer?  God converseth with Adam as a friend with his friend and ally, but with the reconciled soul as a husband with his wife.  ‘For thy Maker is thy husband,’ Isa. 54:5.  There is a double sweetness peculiar to the reconciled sinner’s communion with God.

(1.) There is, in Christ, a foundation laid for greater familiarity with God, than Adam was at first capable of.  He, indeed, was the son of God, yet he was kept at a further distance, and treated with more state and majesty, from God, than now the reconciled soul is; for, though he was the son of God, by crea­tion, yet ‘the Son of God’ was not then ‘the Son of man’ by incarnation; and at this door comes in the believer's sweetest familiarity with God.  The Christian cannot now lift up an eye of faith to God, but sees his own nature standing upon the throne by him, in the person of Christ.  And, if the sight of Joseph at Pharaoh's right hand, in court favour and honour, sent the patriarchs home with such joyful news to their aged father, what a ravishing message of joy must faith carry then to the soul of a reconciled sin­ner, when it comes in after some vision of love in an ordinance and saith, ‘Cheer up, O my soul, I see Jesus Christ, thy near kinsman, at God’s right hand in glory, to whom ‘all power is given in heaven and earth;’ fear not, he is so nigh in blood to thee that he cannot be unmindful of thee, except he should do what is unnatural in thyself, that is, hide himself from his own flesh.’  The lower a prince stoops to the meanest of his subjects, the more familiar he makes himself to his subjects.

It was a wonderful condescension in the great God, who can have no compeer, first to make man, and then to strike so friendly a league and covenant with him.  This God doth now with every reconciled soul, and that too enriched with so many astonishing circumstances of condescending grace as must needs speak the way of the believer’s access to God more familiar.  God, in this second and new alliance with the poor creature, descend from his throne—exc­hanges his majestic robes of glory for the rags of man’s frail flesh.  He leaves his palace to live for a time in his creature’s humble cottage, and there not only familiarly converses with him, but, which is stranger, ministers to him, yea, which is more than all these, he surrenders himself up to endure all manner of indignities from his sorry creature’s hand; and when this, his coarse entertainment is done, back he posts to heaven, not to complain to his Father how he hath been abused here below, and to raise heaven’s power against those that had so ill-entreated him, but to make ready heaven’s palace for the reception of those who had thus abused him, and now will but accept of his grace; and lest these yet left on earth  should fear his re-assumed royalty and majesty in heaven's glory would make some alteration in their affairs in his heart—to give them therefore a constant demonstration that he would be the same in the height of his honour that he was in the depth of his abasement—he goes back in the same clothes he had borrowed of their nature, to wear them on the throne in all his glory—only some princely cost bestowed, to put them into the fashion of that heavenly kingdom, and make them suit with his glorified state—giving them a pattern by this, what their own vile bodies, which are now so dishonourable, shall be made another day.  Now none of all those circumstances were found in God’s first administration to Adam, and therefore this is the more familiar.

(2.) There is the sweetness of pardoning mercy, and the bleeding love of Christ—who, by his death, purchased it for him—to be tasted in the reconciled soul’s communion with God.  This lump of sugar Adam had not in his cup.  He knew what the love of a giving God meant, but was stranger to the mercy of a forgiving God.  The reconciled soul experiments both.  The love of a father, more than ordinary kind, is a great comfort to a dutiful child—one that never displeased his father; but it carries no such wonder in it to our thoughts as the compassion and melting bowels of a father towards a rebellious child doth. And certainly the prodigal child, that is received again into his father's embraces, hath the advantage for loving his father more than his brother that never came under his father’s displeasure.  O this pardoning mercy, and the love of Christ that procured it! —they are the most spacious and fruitful heads for a gracious soul to enlarge his sweetest meditations up­on, here on earth.  But who can conceive what ravishing music glorified saints will make in running division on this sweet note?  I am sure the song their harps are tuned unto is ‘the song of the Lamb,’ Rev. 15:2, 3.  The saints’ finished happiness in heaven’s glory is a composition of all the rare ingredients pos­sible—so tempered by the wise hand of God, that, as none could well be spared, so not the taste of any one shall be lost in another.  But this ingredient of pardoning mercy, and of the stupendous love and wisdom of God through Christ therein, shall, as I may so say, give a sweet relish to all, and be tasted above all the rest.

Particular reasons why God adopts the method of reconciliation by the gospel 2/2

           Reason Second. God effected our peace by Christ, that he might for ever hide pride from his saints’ eyes.  Pride was the stone on which both angels and men stumbled and fell.  In man’s recovery, there­fore, he will roll that stone, as far as may be, out of the way—he will lay that knife aside with which man did himself the mischief.  And that he may do this, he transacts the whole business by Christ for them. Man’s project was to cut off the entail of his obedience to God, and set up for himself as a free and absolute prince, without holding upon his Maker.  A strange plot! for to effect this he must first have thrown away that being which God gave him, and, by self-creation—if such a thing had been possible —have bestowed a new one upon himself; then, indeed, and not till then, he might have had his will.

But alas! his pride to be what he could not, lost him what he had, and still might have, enjoyed.  Yet how foolish soever it now appears and infeasible, that was the plot pride had sprung into man’s heart.  Now, God, to preserve his children from all future assaults and batteries of hell at this door, chose such a way of reconciling and saving them, that, when the prince of the world comes to tempt them to pride, he should find nothing in them to give the least countenance or colour to such a motion; so that, of all sins, pride is such a one as we may wonder how it should grow, for it hath no other root to bear it up but what is found in man's dreaming fancy or imagination.  It grows, as sometimes we shall see a mushroom or moss, among stones, where little or no soil is for its root to take hold of.  God, in this gospel way reconciling sinners by Christ, makes him fetch all from without doors. Wilt thou, poor soul, have peace with God?  Thou must not have it from thine own penance for thy sins. ‘The chastisement of our peace was upon him;,’ Isa. 53:5.  O know thou art not thy own peacemaker!  That is Christ’s name, who did that work: ‘for he is our peace, who hath made both one,’ Eph. 2:14—Jew and Gentile one with God, and one with one another.

Wouldst thou be righteous?  Then thou must not ap­pear before God in thy own clothes.  It is another’s righteousness, not thy own, that is provided for thee. ‘Surely, shall one say, in the Lord have I righteousness,’ Isa. 45:24.  In a word, wouldst thou ever have a right in heaven’s glory?  Thy penny is not good silver to purchase it with.  The price must not come out of thy purse, but Christ’s heart; and therefore, as it is called the ‘purchased posses­sion,’ in regard of Christ —because he obtained it for us with a great sum, not ‘silver and gold,’ but his ‘precious blood’— so ‘an in­heritance’ in regard of us, because it descends upon us as freely as the father’s estate on his child, Eph. 1:14.  And why all this, but that the ‘lofty looks’ of man may be ‘humbled,’ and the ‘haughtiness of man’ should be ‘bowed down, and the Lord alone exalted’ in the day of our salvation?  

The manna is expounded by Christ himself in a type of him: ‘The bread of God is he which cometh down from heaven, and giveth life unto the world,’ John 6:33.  Now observe wherefore God chose that way of feeding them in the wilderness: ‘Who fed thee in the wilderness with manna, which thy fathers knew not, that he might humble thee,’ Deut. 8:16.  But wherein lay this great humbling of them?  Were they not shrewdly humbled think you, to be fed with such a dainty dish, which had God for its cook, and is called ‘angels’ food’ for its delicacy? Ps. 78:25—such, that if they needed any repast, might well suit their table.  I answer, it was not the meanness of the fare, but the manner of having it, which God intended should humble them.  Man is proud, and loves to be his own pro­vider, and not stand to another’s allowance.  The same feast sent in by the charity and bounty of another, will not go down so well with his high stomach as when it is provided at his own cost and charges; he had rather have the honour of keeping his own house, though mean, than to live higher upon the alms and allowance of an­other’s charity.  This made them wish themselves at their onions in their own gardens in Egypt, and their flesh-pots there, which though they were grosser diet, they liked better, because bought with their own penny.

           Reason Third.  God lays this method of reconciling sinners to himself by Christ, that it might be a peace with the greatest advantage possible—that God and man might meet again on better terms by this pa­cification, than when Adam stood in all his primitive glory.  God, no doubt, would not have let the beauty of his first workmanship to be so defaced by sin, had he not meant to have reared a more magnificent structure out of its ruins.  Now, God intending to print man’s happiness in the second edition with a fairer character than at the first, he employs Christ in the work, as the only fit instrument to accomplish so great a design.  Christ himself tells us as much: ‘I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly,’ John 10:10.  His coming was not to give those who were dead and damned bare peace, naked life, but ‘more abundantly’ than ever man had before the breach.  It was Christ in the sec­ond temple who filled it with a glory superlative to the first—Christ in the second creation of man, that lifts his head above the first state in happiness.  

As Adam was a pattern to all his seed—what he was in his innocent state, that should they all have been, if sin had not altered the scene, and turned the tables —so Christ is a pattern to all his seed of that glory which they shall be clothed with, I John 3:2.  ‘Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet ap­pear what we shall be: but we know that, when he shall appear, we shall be like him’—that is, ‘our vile bodies like his glorious body.’ as the apostle hath it, Php. 3.21, and our souls also, like his glorious soul. Now, by how much our nature in Christ is more glor­ious than it was in Adam, by so much the state of a reconciled sinner surpasseth Adam’s first condition. Some little discovery whereof, take in two particulars.

Particular reasons why God adopts the method of reconciliation by the gospel 1/2

  Reason First.  God lays this method of reconciling sinners to himself by Christ, that he might give the deepest testimony of his perfect hatred to sin in that very act wherein he expresseth the highest love and mercy to sinners.  No act of mercy and love like that of pardoning sin.  To receive a reconciled sinner into heaven is not so great an advance as to take a rebel into a state of favour and reconciliation.  The terms here are infinitely wider.  There is reason to expect the one, none to look for the other.  It is pure mercy to pardon, but truth, being pardoned, to save, Micah 7:19, 20.  Well, when God puts forth this very act, he will have the creature see his hatred to sin written upon the face of that love he shows to the sin­ner.  And truly this was but needful, if we consider how hard it is for our corrupt hearts to conceive of God’s mercy without some dishonourable reflection upon his holiness.  ‘I kept silence,’ saith God, Ps. 50:21.  And what inference doth the wicked draw from thence?  ‘Thou thoughtest that I was altogether such an one as thyself,’ that is, ‘thou thoughtest I liked sin as well as thyself.’  Now, if so plain and easy a text as God’s forbearing mercy be wrested, and a false gloss, so repugnant, not only to the end of God therein, but to the holy nature of God, imposed, how much more subject is forgiving mercy—that is so far superlative to that, and infinitely more luscious to the sinner’s palate—to be abused?  Some men gaze so long on this pleasing object that they are not willing to look off, and see any other attribute of God. 

Now, in this way of reconciling himself to sinners by Christ, he hath given such an argument to convince sinners that he is an implacable hater of sin, as hath not its fellow. It is true, every threat in the Bible tells us that sin finds no favour in God's heart; the guilty consciences of men, that hunt them home, and follow them into their own bosoms, continually yelling and crying dam­nation in their ears; the remarkable judgments which now and then take hold of sinners in this world; and much more the furnace which is heating for them in another world, show abundantly how hot and burning God's heart within him is in wrath against sin.  But, when we see him run upon his Son, and lay the en­venomed knife of his wrath to his throat, yea, thrust it into his very heart, and there let it stick—for all the supplications and prayers which in his bitter agonies he offered up to his Father, ‘with strong crying and tears’—without the least sparing of him, till he had forced his life, in a throng of sad groans and sighs, out of his body, and therewith paid justice the full debt, which he had, as man’s surety, undertaken to dis­charge—this, this I say, doth give us a greater advantage to conceive of God’s hatred to sin, than if we could stand in a place to see what entertainment the damned find in hell, and at once behold all the tor­ments they endure.  

Alas! their backs are not broad enough to bear the whole weight of God’s wrath at once—it being infinite and they finite, which, if they could, we would not find them lying in that prison for nonpayment.  But behold one here who had the whole curse of sin at once upon his back.  Indeed, their sufferings are infinite extensivè—extensively, because everlasting; but his were infinite intensivè —intensively.  He paid in one sum what they shall be ever paying, and yet never come to the last farthing of.  ‘The chastisement of our peace was upon him,’ Isa. 53:5.  ‘the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all,’ ver. 6.  Or [as it is in the margin], ‘he hath made the iniquity of us all to meet in him.’  The whole curse met in him, as all streams do in the sea—a vir­tual collection of all the threatenings denounced against sin, and all laid on him.  And now, take but one step more, and consider in how near relation Christ stood to God, as also the infinite and unspeakable love with which this relation was filled, and mutually endeared on each hand, and this at the very same time when he ascended the stage for this bloody tragedy to be acted on him in; and, I think, that you are at the highest stair the word of God can lead you to ascend by, into the meditation of this subject.

           Should you see a father that has but one only son, and can have no more, make him his mittimus to prison; come into court himself, and sit judge upon his life; and with his own lips pass sentence of death upon him, and order that it be executed with the most exquisite torments that may be, yea, go to the place himself, and with his own eyes, and those not full of water, as mourning for his death, but full of fire and fury—yea, a countenance in every way so set as might tell all that see it, the man took pleasure in his child’s death;—should you see this, you would say, Surely he bitterly hates his son, or the sin his son hath committed.  This you see in God the Father towards his Son. It was he, more than men or devils, that procured his death.  Christ took notice of this, that the warrant for his death had his Father's hand and seal to it.  ‘Shall I not drink of the cup my Father gives me?’  Yea, he stands by and rejoiceth in it.  His blood was the wine that made glad the heart of God—‘It pleased the Lord to bruise him,’ Isa. 53:10.  When God corrects a saint he doth it, in a manner, unwillingly; but when Christ suffers, it pleaseth him; and not this from want of love in his heart to Christ, nor that any disobedience in Christ had hardened his Father’s against him —for he never displeased him—but from that hatred he had to sin, and from zeal to exalt his mercy towards sinners, by satisfying his justice on his Son.

Why God effects peace by the gospel

           Third.  Why doth God convey this peace of re­concilia­tion unto the sons of men in this way and by this method? or, in plainer terms, why doth God chose to reconcile poor sinners to himself by Christ? For this is the peace which the gospel proclaims, Col. 1:20, ‘And, having made peace through the blood of his cross, by him to reconcile all things unto himself;’ and, ver. 21, 22, ‘and you, that were sometime alienated and ene­mies in your mind by wicked works, yet now hath he reconciled in the body of his flesh through death, to present you holy and unblameable and unreproveable in his sight.’

           But let us reply.  They are too bold with God who say that he could not find out another way.  Who can tell that, except God himself had told him so?  Alas! how unmeet is the short line of our created un­derstanding for such a daring attempt as to fathom the unsearchableness of God's omnipotent wisdom! —to determine what God can, and what he cannot do!  But we may say, and not forgat to revere the Ma­jesty of heaven, that the wisdom of God could not have laid the method of salvation more advantageous to the exalting of his own glorious name, and his poor creatures’ happiness, than in this expedient of reconciling them to himself by Christ our great Peace-maker.  This transaction hath in it a happy temperament to solve all the difficulties on either hand; and, for its mysterious contrivance, it exceeds the workmanship which God put forth in making this exterior world—though in its kind so perfect and so glorious that the least creature tells its maker to be a Deity, and puts the atheist to shame in his own conscience that will not believe so; yet, I say, the plan of reconciliation exceeds this goodly frame of heaven and earth as far as the watch itself doth the case which covers it.  Indeed, God intended, by this way of rec­onciling poor sinners to himself, to make work for angels and saints to admire the mystery of his wisdom, power, and love therein, to everlasting.

           O, when they shall all meet together in heaven, and there have the whole counsel of God unfolded to them!—when they shall behold what seas were dried up, and what rocks of creature impossibilities digged through, by the omnipotent wisdom and love of God, before a sinner’s peace could be obtained, and then behold the work, notwithstanding all this, to be ef­fected and brought to a happy perfection—O how will they be swallowed up in adoring the abyss of his wis­dom, who laid the platform of all this according to the eternal counsel of his own will!  Surely the sun doth not so much exceed the strength of our mortal eyes as the glory of this will their understandings from ever fully comprehending it.  This, this is the piece which God drew on purpose, for its rare workmanship, to beautify heaven itself withal.  When Christ returned to heaven he carried none of this world's rarities with him—not its silver and gold, not crowns and diadems, which here men venture their lives, yea part with their souls, so prodigally for.  Alas! what are these, and the whole pride and gallantry of this world, to heaven?  

That which it glories most of, suits heav­en no better than the beggar’s dish and scraps do a prince’s table; or the patched, tattered coat of the one, the wardrobe of the other.  No, the Lord Christ came on a higher design than this to earth.  The en­terprise he under­took to achieve was to negotiate, yea effect, a peace betwixt God and his rebel creature man, that had by his revolt incurred his just wrath and vengeance.  This was a work that became God himself so well to engage in, that he thought none high and worthy enough to be trusted with the trans­acting of it beneath his only Son, who stayed here but while he had brought his negotiation to a happy period, and then carried the joyful tidings of its being finished back with him to heaven, which made his return infinitely welcome to his Father, and all the glorious inhabitants of heaven, his attendants.  But I shall proceed to give some more particular answer to the question propounded.