Why the gospel and its professors are so slighted, misunderstood, and persecuted

Use First. This gives us a reason why the gospel, with the great offers it makes, is so slighted and re­jected by the wicked world.  The cause is, the bles­sings of the gospel are a mystery, and offered in such a way that carnal hearts skill not of them, and there­fore care not for them. The things it propounds are such as they like well enough, might they have them in a way suited to their carnal apprehensions.  The gospel offers riches and honours; who are not taken with these?  The gospel opens a mine of unsearchable riches, but in a mystery; it shows them a way how to be ‘rich in faith,’ ‘rich to God,’ rich for another world, while poor in this.  Our Saviour went about to learn the young man in the gospel the way to be rich—not by purchasing more land, but by selling what he had; but he would not follow his counsel.  The gospel offers pleasures and delights—and these the sensual world like well enough—but, alas! they please not their carnal coarse palate, because they are pleasures in a mystery, pleasures in mourning for sin, and mortifying of sin, not pleasures in satisfying them; pleasures in communion with Christ at an ordinance, not with a knot of good fellows over a pot at an ale-house; pleasures to the eye and palate of faith, not of sense; to feed their souls, not pamper and fat their bellies.  In a word, the gospel makes discovery of high and choice notions.  Surely now those who are the more sober part of the world, bookish men, and in love with good literature, whose souls crave intel­lectual food, and prize a lecture more than a feast, these will be highly pleased with the truths the gospel brings to light, being such rare mysteries that they can find in no other book.  Yet, alas! we see that the gos­pel doth as little please this sort and rank of men as any other.  Had it been filled with flowers of rhetoric, chemical experiments, philosophical notions, or max­ims of policy, O how greedily would they have em­braced it!  But it is wisdom in a mystery.  ‘We speak wisdom among them that are perfect: yet not the wisdom of this world, nor of the princes of this world, that come to nought,’ I Cor. 2:6.  Bradwardine, a great scholar, before he was meekened by the grace of the gospel, slighted Paul’s epistles, as afterward he con­fessed, because he did not express ingenium meta­physicum—a metaphysical head in his discourses.

           Again, we here have the reason why the gospel and its professors are not only slighted, but hated and persecuted.  For the gospel, it is a mystery, which the world knows not; and therefore opposed by it.  Ignorance is the mother of persecu­tion: ‘Father, for­give them, they know not what they do!’  The greatest enemies the gospel ever had were not the sensual and open profane—though these bad enough—but the superstitious and ignorantly devout, these have been they who have shown most fierceness and fury against the gospel.  Paul tells of the ‘devout’ persons that cruelly persecuted him, Acts 13:50.  None more hot against the truth than Paul himself, who was a strict Pharisee, but bloody enemy against the truth.  What reason then have we to pray for the increase of gospel light!  The more the gospel is known, the more kindly will it be entertained.

           Again, the professors of the gospel, why are they so hated and maligned, but because they partake of the mysterious nature of the gospel, and therefore their worth is not known?  They are high-born, but in a mystery; you cannot see their birth by their outward breeding—the arms they bear, revenues they have to live on, by which the world judges the greatness of persons and families.  No, their outside is mean, while their inside is glorious; and the world values them by what they know and see of their external port, and not by their inward graces.  They pass, as a prince in disguise of some poor man’s clothes, through the world, and their entertainment is accord­ingly.  Had Christ put on his robes of glory and ma­jesty when he came into the world, surely he had not gone out of it with so shameful and cruel a death; the world would have trembled at his footstool, which we see some of them did when but a beam of his deity looked forth upon them.  Did saints walk on earth in those robes which they shall wear in heaven, then they would be feared and admired by those who now scorn and despise them.  But, as God should not have had his design in Christ’s first coming had he so ap­peared, so neither would he in his saints, did the world know them, as one day they shall; therefore he is pleased to let them lie hid under the mean cover­ings of poverty and other infirmities, that so he may exercise their suffering graces, and also accomplish his wrath upon the wicked for theirs against them.

           The gospel as a mystery shows us the reason why carnal men do so bungle when they meddle with matters of religion.  Let them speak of gospel truths —what ignorance do they show!  Even as a countryman chops logic, and speaks of the liberal arts, so they of heavenly matters.  Do we not see that those who in worldly affairs will give you a wise and solid answer, in the truths of the gospel they speak like children and babes?  Yea, even those that have some brain-knowledge of the Scriptures, how dry and unsavoury is their discourse of spiritual things!  They are like a parable in a fool’s mouth.  So, when they engage in any duty of religion.  Put them to pray, hear the word, or meditate upon what they have heard; you had as good give a workman’s tools to him that was never of the trade.  They know not how to handle them; they go ungainsomely about the work, and cut all into chips.  Every trade hath its mystery, and religion above all callings, when none but those that are instructed in know how to manage.