(2.) The pleasures of sin must needs be short, because life cannot be long, and they both end together. Indeed, many times the pleasure of sin dies before the man dies. Sinners live to bury their joy in this world. The worm breeds in their conscience before it breeds in their flesh by death. But be sure that the pleasure of sin never survives this world. The word is gone out of God’s mouth, every sinner shall ‘lie down in sorrow and wake in sorrow.’ Hell is too hot a climate for wanton delights to live in. Now faith is a provident, wise grace, and makes the soul bethink itself how it may live in another world. Whereas the carnal heart is all for the present; his snout is in the trough, and, while his draught lasts he thinks it will never end. But faith hath a large stride; at one pace it can reach over a whole life of years and see them done while they are but beginning. ‘I have seen an end of all perfections,’ saith David. He saw the wicked, when growing on their bed of pleasure, cut down, and burning in God’s oven, as if it were done already, Ps. 37:2. And faith will do the like for every Christian according to its strength and activity. And who would envy the condemned man his feast which he hath in his way to the gallows.
Answer 3. Faith outvies Satan’s proffers by showing the soul where choicer enjoyments are to be had at a cheaper rate. Indeed, ‘best is best cheap.’ Who will not go to that shop where he may be best served? This law holds in force among sinners themselves. The drunkard goes where he may have the best wine; the glutton where he may have the best cheer. Now faith presents such enjoyments to the soul that are beyond all compare best. It leads to the promise, and entertains it there, at Christ’s cost, with all the rich dainties of the gospel. Not a dish that the saints feed on in heaven but faith can set before the soul, and give it, though not a full meal, yet such a taste as shall melt it in 'joy unspeakable and full of glory.’ This sure must needs quench the temptation. When Satan sends to invite the Christian to his gross fare, will not the soul say, ‘Should I forsake those pleasures that cheered, yea ravished, my heart, to go and debase myself with sin's polluted bread, where I shall be but a fellow-commoner with the beast, who shares in sensual pleasures with man—yea, become worse than the beast—a devil, like Judas, who arose from his Master’s table to sit at the devil’s?’
Second Dart of pleasing temptations. ‘The lust of the eyes.’ This is quenched by faith. By ‘the lust of the eyes,’ the apostle means those temptations which are drawn from the world’s pelf and treasure. [It is] called so, in the first place, because it is the eye that commits adultery with these things. As the unclean eye looks upon another man's wife, so the covetous eye looks upon another's wealth to lust after it. In the second place it is called so, because all the good that in a manner is received from them is but to please the eye. ‘What good is there to the owners thereof, saving the beholding of them with their eyes?’ Ecc. 5:11. That is, if a man hath but to buy food and raiment enough to pay his daily shot of necessary expenses, the surplusage serves only for the eye to play the wanton with. Yet we see how pleasing a morsel they are to a carnal heart. It is rare to find a man that will not stoop, by base and sordid practices, to take up this golden apple. When I consider what sad effects this temptation had on Ahab, who, to gain a spot of ground of a few acres, that could not add much to a king’s revenues, durst swim to it in the owner’s blood, I wonder not to see men whose condition is necessitous nibbling at the hook of temptation, where the bait is a far greater worldly advantage. This is the door the devil entered into Judas by. This was the break-neck of Demas’ faith, he embraced ‘this present world.’ Now faith will quench a temptation edged with these.
