APPLICATION: Unbelief Hath The Same Pre-eminence Among Sins as Faith Above All Graces 2/2

    There are two sins that claim a pre-eminence in hell—hypocrisy and unbelief; and therefore other sin­ners are threatened to ‘have their portion with the hypocrites,’ Matt. 24:51, and ‘with unbelievers,’ Luke 12:46; as if those infernal mansions were taken up principally for these, and all others were but inferior prisoners.  But of the two unbelief is the greater, and that which may, with an emphasis, be called above this or any other, ‘the damning sin.’  ‘He that believeth not is condemned already,’ John 3:18.  He hath his mittimus already to jail; yea, he is in it already in a sense—he hath the brand of a damned person on him.  The Jews are said, Rom. 11.32, to be shut up ‘in unbelief.’  A surer prison the devil cannot keep a sinner in.  Faith shuts the soul up in the promise of life and happiness, as God shut Noah into the ark.  It is said, ‘the Lord shut him in,’ Gen. 7:16.  Thus faith shuts the soul up in Christ, and the ark of his covenant, from all fear of danger from heaven or hell; and [thus too,] on the contrary, unbelief shuts a soul up in guilt and wrath, that there is no more possibility for an unbeliever of escaping damnation, than for one to escape burning that is shut up in a fiery oven.  No help can come to the sinner so long as this bolt of un­belief is on the door of his heart.  As our salvation is attributed to faith, rather than to other graces —though none [be] wanting in a saved person—so sinners’ damnation and ruin is attributed to their unbelief, though the other sins [are] found with it in the person damned.  The Spirit of God passeth over the Jews’ hypocrisy, murmuring, rebellion, and lays their destruction at the door of this one sin of unbelief.  ‘They could not enter in because of unbelief,’ Heb. 3:19.

           O sinners!—you who live under the gospel I mean—if you perish, know beforehand what is your undoing—it is your unbelief that does it.  If a malefactor that is condemned to die be offered his life by the judge upon reading a psalm of mercy, and he reads not, we may say his not reading hangs him. The promise of the gospel is this psalm of mercy, which God offers in his son to law‑condemned sinners.  Be­lieving is reading this psalm of mercy.  If thou believ­est not and are damned, thou goest to hell rather for thy final unbelief than any of thy other sins, for which a discharge is offered thee upon thy receiving Christ and believing on him.  Let this cause us all to rise up against this sin, as the Philistines did against Samson, whom they called the destroyer of their country,’ Judges 16:24.  This is the destroyer of your souls, and that is worse; yea, it destroys them with a bloodier hand than other sins do that are not aggravated with this.  We find two general heads of indictments upon which the whole world of sinners shall be condemned at the great day, II Thes. 1:8.  There Christ’s coming to judgment is expressed; and those miserable undone creatures that shall fall under his condemning sentence, are comprised in these two [classes]—such as ‘know not God,’ and such as ‘obey not the gospel of Jesus Christ.’  The heathens' negative unbelief of the gospel shall not be charged upon them, because they never had it preached to them.  No; they shall be sent to hell for ‘not knowing God,’ and so shall escape with a lighter damnation by far, than Jews or Christian Gentiles to whom the gospel hath been preached —though to some of these with a stronger and longer continued beam of light than [has been the lot of] others.  The dismal charge which shall be brought against these will be, that they have not obeyed the gospel of our Lord Jesus; that is, not believed on Christ—called therefore the ‘obedience of faith,’ Rom. 16.26.  And certainly, we cannot but think that there shall be a torment proper to these gospel refusers, which those that never had the offer of grace shall not feel, in hell.  And among those that obey not the gospel the greatest vengeance waits for them that have had the longest and most passionate treaty of mercy allowed them.  These are they that put God to the greatest expense of mercy, and therefore they must necessarily expect the greatest proportion of wrath and vengeance to be measured to them; yea, their unbelief puts Christ, and the grace of God in him, to the greatest shame and scorn that is possible for creatures to do; and it is but righteous that God should therefore put their unbelief and themselves with it to the greatest shame before men and angels, of any other sinners.

APPLICATION: Unbelief Hath The Same Pre-eminence Among Sins as Faith Above All Graces 1/2

           Use First.  Is faith the chief of graces?  This may help us to conceive of the horrible nature of unbelief. This surely will deserve as high a place among sins as faith hath among the graces.  Unbelief!  It is the Beel­zebub, the prince of sins.  As faith is the radical grace, so is unbelief a radical sin, a sinning sin.  As of all sinners, those are most infamous who are ringleaders and make others sin—which is the brand that God hath set upon Jeroboam's name, ‘Jeroboam, who did sin, and who made Israel to sin,’ I Kings 14:16—so among sins, they are most horrid that are most pro­ductive of other sins.  Such a one is unbelief above any other.  It is a ring-leading sin, a sin-making sin. The first poisonous breath which Eve sucked in from the tempter was sent in the words, ‘Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?’ Gen. 3:1.  As if he had said, ‘Consider well on the matter. Do you believe God meant so?  Can you think so ill of God as to believe he would keep the best fruit of the whole garden from you?’  This was the traitor’s gate, at which all other sins entered into her heart; and it continues of the same use to Satan to this day, for the hurrying souls into other sins—called therefore, ‘an evil heart of unbelief, in departing from the living God,’ Heb. 3:12.  The devil sets up this sin of un­belief as a blind betwixt the sinner and God, that the shot which come from the threatening, and are level­led at the sinner’s breast, may not may not be dreaded and feared by him.  And then the wretch can be as bold with his lust, as the pioneer is at his work, when once he hath got his basket of earth between him and the enemies’ bullets.  Nay, this unbelief doth not only choke the bullets of wrath which are sent out of the law's fiery mouth, but it damps the motions of grace which come from the gospel.  All the offers of love which God makes to an unbelieving heart, they fall like seed into dead earth, or, like sparks into a river, they are out as soon as they fall into it.

           ‘The word’—it is said—‘did not profit them, not being mixed with faith in them that heard it,’ Heb. 4:2. The strength of this whole body of sin lies in this lock of unbelief.  There is no mastering of a sinner while unbelief is in power.  This will carry all arguments away, whether they be from law or gospel, that are pressed upon him, as easily as Samson did the doors, posts, with bar and all, from the city of Gaza, Judges 16:2.  It is a sin that doth keep the field—one of the last of all the others; that which the sinner is last con­vinced of, and the saint ordinarily last conqueror of. It is one of the chief strengths and fastnesses unto which the devil retreats when other sins are routed. O how oft do we hear a poor sinner confess and bewail other sins he hath lived in formerly, with brinish tears, but will not hearken yet to the offer of mercy in Christ.  Bid him believe on Christ, and he shall be saved—which was the doctrine Paul and Silas preach­ed to the trembling jailor, Acts 16:31—alas! he dares not, he will not; you can hardly persuade him it is his duty to do so.  The devil hath now betaken himself to this city of gates and bars, where he stands upon his guard; and, the more strongly to fortify himself in it, he hath the most specious pretenses for it of any other sin.  It is a sin that he makes the humbled soul commit out of fear of sinning, and so stabs the good name of God, for fear of dishonouring him by a saucy presumptuous faith.  Indeed it is a sin by which Satan intends to put the greatest scorn upon God, and unfold all his cankered malice against him at once.  It is by faith that the saints ‘have obtained a good report.’  Yea, it is by the saints' faith that God hath a good report in the world.  And, by unbelief, the devil doth his worst to raise an evil report of God in the world; as if he were not what his own promise and his saints’ faith witness him to be.  In a word, it is a sin that hell gapes for of all the others.