FOUR CONSIDERATIONS proving the sin of despair to exceed all others together 1/3

Consideration 1.  Despair opposeth God in the greatest of all his commands.  the greatest command without all compare in the whole Bible, is to believe.  When those Jews asked our Lord Jesus, ‘What shall we do, that we might work the works of God?’ mark his answer, ‘This is the work of God, that ye believe on him whom he hath sent,’ John 6:28, 29.  As if he had said, The most compendious way that I am able to give you, is to receive me into your hearts by faith; do this, and you do all in one.  This is the work that is instar omnium—all in all.  All you do is undone, and yourselves also, till this work be done, for which you shall have as much thanks at God’s hands as if you could keep the whole law.  Indeed, it is accepted in lieu of it: ‘To him that worketh not, but believeth on him that justifieth the ungodly, his faith is counted for righteousness,’ Rom. 4:5; where ‘he that worketh not,’ is not meant a slothful lazy sinner that hath no list to work, nor a rebellious sinner whose heart riseth against the work which the holy law of God would employ him in; but the humbled sinner, who desires and endeavours to work, but is no way able to do the task the law as a covenant sets him, and therefore is said to have a law‑sense not to work, because he doth not work to the law’s purpose, so as to answer its de­mands, which will accept nothing short of perfect obedience.  This man’s faith on Christ is accepted for righteousness; that is, God reckons him so, and so he shall pass at the great day by the judge’s sentence, as if he had never trod one step awry from the path of the law.  Now, if faith be the work of God above all other, then unbelief is the work of the devil, and that to which he had rather thou shouldst do than drink or drab.  And despair is unbelief at the worst.  Unbelief among sins is as the plague among disease, the most dangerous; but when it riseth to despair, then it is as the plague with the tokens that bring the certain message of death with them.  Unbelief is despair in the bud, despair is unbelief at its full growth.

           Consideration 2.  Despair hath a way peculiar to itself of dishonouring God above other sins.  Every sin wounds the law, and the name of God through the law's sides.  But this wound is healed when the peni­tent sinner by faith comes to Christ and closeth with him.  God makes account, reparations now are fully made through Christ—whom the believer receives —for the wrong done to his law, and his name vindi­cated from the dishonour cast upon it by the crea­ture’s former iniquities; yea, that it appears more glorious because it is illustrious, by the shining forth of one title of honour, not the least prized by God himself—his forgiving mercy—which could not have been so well known to the creature, if not drawn forth to act upon this occasion.  But what would you say of such a prodigious sinner that, when he hath wounded the law, is not willing to have it healed? when he hath dishonoured God, and that in a high provoking man­ner, is not willing that the dirt he hath cast on God’s face should be wiped off?  Methinks I see every one of your choler to rise at the reading of this, against such a wretch, and hear you asking, as once Ahasu­erus did Esther, ‘Who is he, and where is he, that durst presume in his heart to do so?’ Est. 7:5.  Would you know?  Truly, the adversary and enemy is this wicked despair.  The despairing soul is the person that will not let Christ make satisfaction for the wrong that by his sins he hath done to God.  Suppose a man should wound another dangerously in his passion, and when he hath done, will not let any chirurgeon come near to cure the wound he hath made.  Every one would say his last act of cruelty was worse than his first.

To the greatness of all the rest, faith opposes THE GREATNESS OF THIS ONE SIN OF DESPAIR

           Third.  Faith, to quench this fiery dart headed with the greatness of sin, and shot by Satan to drive the poor and penitent soul to despair, teacheth him to oppose the greatness of this one sin of despair to the greatness of all his other sins.  ‘What,’ saith faith, ‘would Satan persuade thee, because thou hast been so great and prodigious a sinner, therefore not to be­lieve, or dare to think the promise hath any good news for thee?  Retort thou, O my soul, his argument upon himself, and tell him [that] that very thing by which he would dissuade thee from believing, doth much more deter thee from despairing; and that is the greatness of this sin above all thy other.’  Grant to be true what he chargeth thee withal, that thou art such a monster in sin as he sets thee forth—though thou hast no reason to think so upon his bare report, but yield him his saying—dost thou think to mend the matter or better thy condition by despairing?  Is this all the kindness he will show thee, to make thee of a great sinner, a desperate sinner like himself? This, indeed, is the only way he can think of to make thee worse than thou art.  And, that this is true, faith is able to prove by these four considerations of this bloody horrid sin, which will easily evince more mal­ignity to be in this one sin of despair, than in any other, yea, all other together.  1. Despair opposeth God in the greatest of all his commands.  2. Despair hath a way peculiar to itself of dishonouring God above other sins.  3. Despair strengthens and enrages all other sins in the soul.  4. The greatness of this sin of despair appears in this, that the least sin enven­omed by it is unpardonable, and without this the greatest is pardonable.

THREE WAYS by which faith teaches the soul to draw out the virtue of the promises 4/4

3. Way.  Faith presents the Christian with a cloud of witnesses to whom the promise hath been fulfilled; and these as great sinners as himself is. Scripture examples are promises verified.  They are book-cases, which faith may make use of by way of encouragement, as well as promises.  God would nev­er have left the saints’ great blots to stand in the Scriptures, to the view of the world in all succeeding generations, had not it been of such use and advan­tage to tempted souls, to choke this temptation, which of all other makes the most dangerous breach in their souls—so wide sometimes, that despair itself is ready to enter in at it.  Blessed Paul gives this very reason why such acts of pardoning mercy to great sin­ners are recorded, Eph. 2.  He shows first what foul filthy creatures himself and other believers contem­porary with him were before they were made par­takers of gospel grace.  ‘Among whom also we all had our conversation in times past in the lusts of our flesh,’ Eph. 2:3; and then he magnifies the rich mercy of God, that rescued and took them out of that damned desperate state.  ‘But God, who is rich in mercy, for his great love wherewith he loved us,... hath quickened us together with Christ,’ ver. 4.

           And why must the world know all this?  O, God had a design and plot of mercy in them to more than themselves—‘That in the ages to come he might shew the exceeding riches of his grace in his kindness to­ward us through Christ Jesus,’ ver. 7.  Wherever the gospel comes this shall be spoken of, what great sins he had forgiven to them, that unbelief might have her mouth stopped to the end of the world, and this ar­row which is so oft on Satan’s string made headless and harmless.  God commanded Joshua to take twelve stones out of the midst of Jordan and set them up.  And observe the reason, ‘That this may be a sign among you, that when your children ask their fathers in time to come, saying, What mean ye by these stones?  Then ye shall answer them, That the waters of Jordan were cut off before the ark of the covenant of the Lord; when it passed over Jordan, the waters of Jordan were cut off: and these stones shall be for a memorial unto the children of Israel for ever,’ Joshua 4:6, 7.  Thus God hath, by his pardoning mercy, taken up some great notorious sinners out of the very depths of sin, who lay at the very bottom, as it were, of hell, swallowed up and engulfed in all manner of abomination; and these he hath set up in his word, that when any poor tempted souls to the end of the world—who are even overwhelmed with fears from the greatness of their sins—shall see and read what God hath done for these, they may be relieved and comforted with these examples, by God intended to be as a memorial of what he hath done for others in time past, so a sign what he shall do, yea, will, for the greatest sinners to the world’s end, upon their repen­tance and faith.  No sins, though as great and many as the waters of Jordan themselves, shall be able to stand before the mercy of God’s gracious covenant, but shall all be cut off and everlastingly pardoned to them.

           O who can read a Manasseh, a Magdalene, a Saul, yea, an Adam—who undid himself and a whole world with him—in the roll of pardoned sinners, and yet turn away from the promise, out of a fear that there is not mercy enough in it to serve his turn? These are as landmarks, that show what large bound­aries mercy hath set to itself, and how far it hath gone, even to take into its pardoning arms the great­est sinners, that make not themselves incapable thereof by final impenitency.  It were a healthful walk, poor doubting Christian, for thy soul to go this circuit, and oft to see where the utmost stone is laid and boundary set by God’s pardoning mercy—farther than which he will not go—that thou mayest not turn in the stone to the prejudice of the mercy of God by thy own unbelief, nor suffer thyself to be abused by Satan’s lies, who will make nothing to remove God’s land‑mark, if he may by it but increase thy trouble of spirit, though he be cursed for it himself.  But if, after all this, thy sins seems to exceed the proportion of any one thou canst find pardoned in Scripture —which were strange—yet faith at this plunge hath one way left beyond all these examples for thy soul’s succour, and that is to fix thy eye on Christ, who, though he never had sin of his own, yet laid down his life to procure and purchase pardon for all the elect, and hath obtained it; they are all, and shall, as they come upon the stage, be pardoned.  ‘Now,’ saith faith, ‘suppose thy sins were greater than any one saint’s; yet are they as great as all the sins of the elect to­gether?’  Thou darest not surely say or think so.  And cannot Christ procure thy pardon, who art but a sin­gle person, that hath done it for so many millions of his elect?  Yea, were thy sins as great as all theirs are, the sum would be the same; and God could forgive it if it lay in one heap, as well as now when it is in several.  Christ is ‘the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world,’ John 1:29.  See here all the sins of the elect world trussed up in one fardel, and he carries it lightly away into the land of forgetfulness. Now faith will tell thee, poor soul, that the whole vir­tue and merit of Christ’s blood, by which the world was re­deemed, is offered to thee, and shall be com­municated to thy soul in particular.  Christ doth not retail and parcel out his blood and the purchase of it, some to one and some to another; then thou mightest say something; but he gives his whole self to the faith of every believer.  All is yours, you are Christ’s.  O, what mayest thou not, poor soul, take up from the promise, upon the credit of so great a Redeemer?

THREE WAYS by which faith teaches the soul to draw out the virtue of the promises 3/4

 (2.) End.  The second end of the promise is the believer’s comfort.  The word, especially this part of it, was on purpose writ, that ‘through patience and comfort of the Scriptures they might have hope,’ Rom. 15:4.  God was willing to give poor sinners all the se­curity and satisfaction that might be, concerning the reality of his intentions, and immutability of that counsel which his mercy had resolved upon from eternity, for the saving of all those who would em­brace Christ, and the terms offered through him in the gospel; which, that he might do, he makes publi­cation in the Scripture, where he opens his very heart and exposeth the purposes of his love—that from everlasting he had taken up for the salvation of poor sinners—to their own view in the many precious promises, that run like veins throughout the whole body of the Scriptures, and these with all the seals and ratifications which either his wisdom could find, or man’s jealous unbelieving heart desire, and all this on a design to silence the querulous spirit of poor tempted souls, and make their life more comfortable, who, pursued by the hue and cry of their high climb­ing sins, take sanctuary for their lives in Christ Jesus. As we have it in totidem verbis—in so many words, ‘That by two immutable things, in which it was im­possible for God to lie, we might have a strong consolation, who have fled for refuge to lay hold upon the hope set before us,’ Heb. 6:18.  And because that of the greatness and multitude of the creature's sins, is both the heaviest millstone which the devil can find to tie about the poor sinner’s neck, in order to the drowning him in despair, and that knife also which is the oftenest taken up by the tempted sinner’s own hands for the murdering his faith; therefore the more frequent and abundant provision is made by God against this.  Or read for this purpose these choice scriptures, Ex. 34:5; Jer. 3, the whole chapter; Isa. 1:18; 45:7-9, 12; Heb. 7:25; I John 1:9; these, and such like places, are the strongholds which faith re­treats into when this battery is raised against the soul.

Canst thou for shame be gravelled, saith faith, O my soul, with an argument drawn merely from the greatness of thy sins, which is answered in every page almost in the Bible, and to confute which so consider­able part of Scripture was written?  Thus faith hisseth Satan away with this his argument, that he counts so formidable, as they would do a wrangling sophister out of the schools, when he boldly and ridiculously denies some known principle, acknowledged by all for a truth that have not lost their wits.  But I would not be here mistaken.  God forbid, that while I am curing despair I should cause presumption in any.  These two distempers of the soul are equally mortal and dangerous, and so contrary, that, like the cold stom­ach and the hot liver in the same person, while the physician thinks to help nature in the one to a heat for digesting its food, he sometimes unhappily kindles a fire in the other that destroys nature itself.  Thus, while we labour to cheer the drooping soul’s spirits, and strengthen him to retain and digest the promise for his comfort, we are in danger of nourishing that feverish heat of presumptuous confidence, which is a fire will soon eat out all care to please, and fear to displease, God; and consequently all ground of true faith in the soul.  Faith and fear are like the natural heat and radical moisture in the body, which is never well but when both are preserved.  ‘The Lord taketh pleasure in them that fear him, in those that hope in his mercy.’  Let me therefore caution thee, Christian. As thou meanest to find any relief from the mercy of God in a day of distress, take heed thou dost not think to befriend thyself with hopes of any favour thou mayest find from it, though thou continuest thy friendship with thy lusts.  [It were] a design as infecable as to reconcile light and darkness, and bring day to dwell with night.  Thou needest not indeed fear to believe the pardon of thy sins—if thou re­pentest of them—merely because they are great; but tremble to think of sinning boldly, because the mercy of God is great.  Though mercy be willing to be a sanctuary to the trembling sinner, to shelter him from the curse of his sin; yet it disdains to spread her wing over a bold sinner, to cover him while he is naught with his lust.  What! sin because there are promises of pardon, and these promises made by mercy, which as far exceeds our sins as God doth the creature!  Truly this is the antipodes to the meaning that God’s mercy had in making them, and turns the gospel with its heels upwards.  [It is] as if your servant should get to your cellar of strong waters, and with them make him­self drunk, which you keep for them when sick or faint, and then only to be used.  O take heed of quaf­fing thus in the bowls of the sanctuary.  It is the sad soul, not the sinning, that this wine of consolation belongs to.

THREE WAYS by which faith teaches the soul to draw out the virtue of the promises 2/4

2. Way.  Faith attends to the end of the prom­ises, which give a further prospect of their greatness. Now a word, which is the light faith goes by, discovers a double end of promises, especially of the promise of pardoning mercy.

           (1.) End.  The exalting and magnifying the riches of free grace, which God would have appear in all its glory—so far, I mean, as it is possible to be exposed to the creature’s view; for the full sight of God’s glory is an object adequate to his own eye and none else.  See this counsel and mysterious design sweetly opened, Eph. 1:6, 9, 11, 12.  The sums of it all will amount to this, that God in himself hath taken up a purpose of pardoning and saving a company of poor sinners for Christ's sake; and this he hath prom­ulgated in the promises of the gospel.  And the plot of all is, that he might gather these all together at last in heaven—some of which are already there, others of them at present on earth, and some yet unborn—and, when they shall all meet together in one glorious choir, that there they may, by their triumphant songs and hallelujahs, fill the heavens with praiseful acclam­ations of thankfulness to the glory of that mercy which hath thus pardoned and saved them.  Now, faith  observing the praise of God’s mercy to be the end aimed at by him in the promise, comes with good news to the trembling soul, and tells it that if God will be but true to his own thoughts, and keep his eye on that mark where at first he hath set it, impossible it is that he should reject any poor penitent sinner merely for the greatness of the sins he hath committed.

           It is the exaltation of his mercy, saith faith, that God hath in his eye, when he promiseth pardon to poor sinners.  Now, which exalts this most? to pardon little or great sinners?  Whose voice will be highest and shrillest in the song of praise, thinkest thou? Surely his to whom most is forgiven; and therefore God cannot but be most ready to pardon the greatest sinners when truly penitent.  A physician that means to be famous will not send away those that most need his skill and art, and only practise upon such diseases as are slight and ordinary.  They are the great cures which ring far and near.  When one, given over by himself and others as a dead man, is, by the skill and care of a physician, rescued out of the jaws of death that seemed to have inclosed him, and raised to health; this commends him to all that hear of it, and gains him more reputation than a whole year’s prac­tice in ordinary cures.  The great revenue of praise is paid into God’s exchequer from those who have had great sins pardoned.  He that hath five hundred pence forgiven will love more than he that hath but fifty, by Christ’s own judgment, Luke 7:43.  And where there is most love there is like to be most praise;—love and praise being symbolical, the one resolving into the other.  The voice of a Manasseh, a Magdalene, and a Paul, will be heard, as I may so say, above all the rest in heaven's concert.  The truth is, greatness of sin is so far from putting a bar to the pardoning of a peni­tent sinner in God's thoughts; that he will pardon none—how little sinners soever they have been —except they see and acknowledge their sins to be great, before they come to him on such an errand. And therefore he useth the law to make way, by its convictions and terrors on the conscience, for his pardoning mercy, to ascend the throne in the peni­tent sinner’s heart with the more magnificence and honour, Rom. 5:20.  ‘The law entered’—that is, it was promulgated first by Moses, and is still preached —‘that the offence might abound:’—that is in the conscience by a deeper sense and remorse.  And why so, but that ‘where sin abounded, grace might much more abound?’  We must needs shape our thoughts of the mercy that pardons our sins, suitable to the thoughts we frame to ourselves of the sins we have committed.  If we conceive these little, how can we think the other great?  And if we tremble at the great­ness of our sins, we must needs triumph and exult at the transcendency of the mercy which so far exceeds their bulk and greatness.  He that wonders at the height of some high mountain, would much more wonder at the depth of those waters which should quite swallow and cover it from being seen.

          

THREE WAYS by which faith teaches the soul to draw out the virtue of the promises 1/4

 1. Way.  Faith leads the soul to the spring‑head of the promises, where it may stand with best advan­tage, to take a view of their greatness and precious­ness.  Indeed we understand little of things till we trace them to their originals and can see them lying in their causes.  Then a soul will know his sins to be great when he sees them in their spring and source flowing from an envenomed nature that teems with enmity against God.  Then the sinner will tremble at the threatenings which roll like thunder over his head, ready to fall every moment in some judgment or other upon him, when he sees from whence they are sent; the perfect hatred that God bears to sin, and infinite wrath with which he is inflamed against the sinner for it.  In a word, then the poor trembling soul will not count the consolation of the promises small when it sees from what fountain it flows—the bosom of God’s free mercy.  This indeed is the original source of all promises.  The covenant itself, which comprehends them all is called ‘mercy,’ because the product of mercy.  ‘To perform the mercy promised to our fathers, and to remember his holy covenant,’ Luke 1:72.  Now, saith faith, if the promises flow from the sea of God’s free mercy, then they must needs be infinite as he is, boundless and bottomless as that is; so that to reject the promise, or question the suffi­ciency of the provision made in it upon this account, because thy sins are great or many, casts a dishonour­able reflection on that mercy, in whose womb the promise was conceived; and God will certainly bring his action of defamation against thee, for aspersing this his darling attribute, which he can least endure to see slandered and traduced.  God makes account you have done your worst against him, when once you re­port him to be unmerciful or but scant in his mercy. How great a sin this is may be conceived by the thoughts which God hath of this disposition and frame of spirit in his creature.  An unmerciful heart is such an abomination before the Lord that it hath few like it.  This lies at he bottom of the heathen’s charge, as the sediment and grossest part of all their horrid sins—they were ‘implacable, unmerciful,’ Rom. 1:31. Now, to attribute that to God which he so abhors in his creature, must needs make a heart tender of the good name of God to tremble and exceedingly fear. It was a dreadful punishment that God brought upon Jehoram, king of Judah, whom he ‘smote in his bowels with an incurable dis­ease,’ that after two years’ torment his very bowels fell out, II Chr. 21:18, 19.  And why did this sore and heavy plague befall him? Surely to let him know his want of bowels of mercy to his brethren and princes, whom he most cruelly butch­ered.  He had not bowels in his heart, and he shall therefore have none in his body.  Now, darest thou, saith faith, impute want of bowels to God, that he will not show mercy to thee, who penitently seeks it in Christ’s name, when thou seest what testimony he gives of his incensed wrath against those men who have hardened their bowels against their brethren, yea, their enemies?  O, have a care of this.  To shut thy own bowels of compassion from thy brother in need is s grievous sin, and brings it into question whether the love of God dwells in thee, I John 3:17; but, to asperse the merciful heart of God, as if his bowels of compassion were shut against a poor soul in need, that desires to repent and return, is transcen­dently the greater abomination, and it puts out of all question—where it is persisted in—that the love of God dwells not in him.  It is impossible that love to God should draw such a misshapen portraiture of God as this is

To the greatness of sin faith opposes THE GREATNESS OF THE PROMISES

           Second.  Faith quenches this temptation to des­pair, drawn from the greatness of sin, by opposing the greatness of the promises to sin’s greatness.  Faith only can see God in his greatness; and therefore none but faith can see the promises in their greatness, be­cause the value of promises is according to the worth of him that makes them.  Hence it comes to pass that promises have so little efficacy on an unbelieving heart, either to keep from sin, or to comfort under terror for sin.  Promises are like the clothes we wear, which, if there be heat in the body to warm them, then they will warm us; but if they receive no heat from the body, they give none to it.  Where there is faith to chase the promise, there the promise will af­ford comfort and peace abundantly; it will be as a strong cordial glowing with inward joy in the crea­ture’s bosom; but on a dead unbelieving heart it lies cold and ineffectual; it hath no more effect on such a soul than a cordial which is poured sown a dead man’s throat hath on him.  The promises have not comfort actually and formally as fire hath heat; then it were only going to them, and we should be warm, taking them up in our thoughts and we should be comforted; but virtually as fire is in the flint, which requires some labour and art to strike it out and draw it forth.  Now none but faith can learn us this skill of drawing out the sweetness and virtue of the promise, which it doth these three ways among many others: —1. Faith leads the soul to the spring‑head of the promises, where it may stand with best advantage to take a view of their greatness and preciousness.  2. Faith attends to the end of the promises, which gives a further prospect of their greatness.  3. Faith pre­sents the Christian with a cloud of witnesses to which the promise hath been fulfilled, and these as great sinners as himself.