By Professor R. WATTS, D.D., LL.D.
The above is an address given to the divinity students of the Assembly’s College, Belfast, in 1867. Dr. Watts occupied an eminent place as a Calvinistic theologian.—Editor.
I.
IT becomes my duty, young gentlemen, in accordance with the custom of the occasion, to address to you a few parting words. In determining the course of remark which I might most profitably pursue, I have thought it better to discuss a subject in which all classes of candidates for the ministry must have a common interest, than to draw up for each class an outline of study which it might be difficult to remember, and more difficult to carry out amid the legitimate recreations and varied engagements of the summer’s vacation. With regard to vacation studies I shall speak but one word. Beware of allowing your minds to lie fallow, and equally beware of that close application which must unfit those of you who are to return for the hard work of the coming session.
Among the many subjects which force themselves upon our attention in connection with the closing exercises, I know of none more befitting than “the Gospel Call.” It is eminently a practical subject. Upon the views which you entertain in regard to it will depend, to a very great extent, your success as ministers of Christ. It concerns the subject matter and form of your preaching. It is not simply a question in homiletics—a question in regard to the artistic structure of your sermons, but a question in regard to your theme itself. The question with which I would occupy your thoughts at present is not “how shall I cry?” but, “what shall I cry?” It does not necessarily follow from the fact that a man is out amid the moral desolations of our fallen world, lifting up his voice in the name of Christ as a Gospel herald, that he is therefore giving the Gospel call. One may possess, and wield with tremendous energy, a sharp sickle, and yet nought save ruin mark his pathway in the harvest field. It has pleased God to connect faith with hearing, but the hearing which is connected with faith, on the one hand, is, on the other, connected with the Word of God. If those to whom the herald comes are bound to judge of his doctrine, be assured it behoves the herald himself to see that his prophesying be according to the analogy of the faith. He who would avoid the anathema pronounced by the Apostle upon false teachers must take heed that he preach no other gospel than that which the Apostle preached.
1.
The first counsel I would offer you who are going forth to give the Gospel call, is that you clearly discriminate between the external and the internal call—between the call which the ambassador is commissioned to give, and the call which it is the office-work of the Holy Ghost to give. Bear in mind that you are not the only commissioners in this matter. He who commissions men, claims it as His prerogative that He has authority to send the Holy Ghost to render the embassy of the human ambassadors successful. However important in the chain of instrumentalities the delivery of the message by the human ambassador may be, we must not magnify it at the enormous sacrifice of the glory and honour due to the Spirit of God. The great truth must be recognised, that it is His to convince of sin, of righteousness, and of judgment; His to regenerate the dead soul; His to impart the graces of faith and repentance; His to sanctify, and comfort, and assure the souls of God’s people.
Besides the call which you are commissioned to give, there is, therefore, a call which no finite ambassador can give—a call which neither Paul nor Apollos could utter. Our Saviour refers to it as an evidence of His own high rank as the Son of God, that He had power to give this call. “The hour is coming, and now is when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God, and they that hear shall live.” The ground assigned for the claim thus advanced is most significant and conclusive, in regard to the nature of that power which is requisite to give the internal call—the call which raises the soul from the death sleep of sin. “For as the Father hath life in Himself, so hath He given to the Son to have life in Himself.” He, therefore, who claims to be able to give this call, ought also to be able to assign a like reason for the advancing of such a claim. The claim implies the possession of life as God possesses life, and if valid, proves, as in the case of Christ, the Deity of Him who advances it.
This call you are just as incompetent to give as you are to give the call to which it is likened. You can no more quicken, by your voice, a dead soul, than you can blow the trumpet of God. This incompetency you need not be ashamed to confess. The Apostle of the Gentiles confessed it, acknowledging that neither he that planteth is anything, nor he that watereth, but God that giveth the increase. He tells the Corinthians that whilst he had planted and Apollos had watered, they were nevertheless the husbandry of another, even of God. To the preacher, in other words, belongs the work of the sower and cultivator of the soil, but to God belongs that mysterious process by which the seed is made to germinate and yield the increase. To the same intent is that figurative representation of our Saviour’s: “So is the Kingdom of God as if a man should cast seed into the ground, and should sleep and rise night and day, and the seed should spring and grow up he knoweth not how. For the earth bringeth forth fruit of herself, first the blade, then the ear, and after that the full corn in the ear.” Connect with this reference to that process which is carried on in the bosom of the earth, independently of him who casts in the seed, what is taught in the Sermon on the Mount respecting the immediate agency of God, in what we are accustomed to call the operations of nature, and you will have the same distinction as that which the Apostle makes between the agency of the preacher and the agency of God. The grass and the lilies of the field spring from the bosom of the earth, but, as our Lord teaches in that sermon, they come not forth in their garniture of beauty by virtue of a power inherent in the soil or atmosphere, or in the added influences of the rains and the light of Heaven. They bear upon them the impress of a present all-directing intelligence, as if to furnish evidence of that presence, and rebuke those who refer everything to the operations of nature. There is a profuse variety of form, and tint, and shade irreconcilable with the theory that there is no agency at work save that of blind unintelligent forces. The exquisite skill and taste displayed proclaim the presence of an all-wise, beneficent, personal God. And thus, our Saviour teaches us, it is in the Kingdom of God. The sower of the Word scatters upon the wide field of the world—the wide field of our fallen race, the incorruptible seed of the Word. He may, and ought, with all the care and expectancy of a good husbandman, look night and day for the increase; but the increase cometh not of any thing in him. The Divine agency is as necessary to the germination of that incorruptible seed, as it is to the germination of the seed which the husbandman commits to the bosom of the earth. From such representations the only conclusion is that drawn by the Apostle: “So then neither is he that planteth anything, neither he that watereth, but God that giveth the increase.”
So prominent a place did this great truth hold in the mind of the Apostle Paul, that he never, in any instance, applies the terms, call, calling, called to designate the external call—the call which it is the work of the ambassador to give. These terms are by him in reality applied to that call which the Spirit of God gives—that call which is accompanied by the impartation of spiritual life. This call the Apostle ascribes to God, and refers to it as a proof of the wisdom and sovereignty of God, in the administration of the economy of grace. This call, he informs us, God had kept under His own control, not simply in regard to the providential direction of the ambassador, but in regard to the success of his embassy. He did take control of the ambassadors, determining their number, enduing them with the qualifications necessary to their work, appointing the time of their going forth, directing all their movements in the subdivisions of the great harvest-field; but, as if for the express purpose of preventing all concerned from glorying in man, He kept in His own power the only call which the Apostle dignifies with the name. “Ye see your calling, brethren, how that not many wise men after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble are called.” The principles of the economy are illustrated in the administration of it. It is an economy of grace, and the administration is conducted so as to teach, that God is absolutely free in the selection of the vessels of mercy. Hence whilst the ambassador gives the call to all, without distinction of class or colour, or kindred, or tongue—to the unwise as well as to the wise—to the weak as well as to the mighty—to the base as well as to the noble—the Sovereign who sends him reserves to Himself the prerogative of giving efficiency to the message. It is because of this that the union of believers with Christ is not of man but of God. It is because of this that their faith does not stand in the wisdom of man but in the power of God. It is because of this that all who come to Jesus are taught of the Father. It is because of this that human depravity and consequent inability present no insuperable barrier to the extension of the kingdom of our enthroned King.
And this leads me to remark that the distinction between an external and an internal, effectual call, is necessarily involved in what the sacred Scriptures teach respecting the natural estate of man. If, as the sacred Scriptures teach, men are, by nature, dead in sin; if they are universally possessed of carnal minds, which are enmity against God; if, in this natural estate, they cannot receive the things of the Spirit of God, and cannot know them; if, whilst under the dominion of this all-enslaving power of a corrupt nature, they cannot please God, cannot come to Him, cannot see the kingdom of God, and are, moreover, under the thrall of a special bondage in which they are held by the god of this world, who darkens their minds lest the light of the glorious Gospel should shine unto them, and that this estate, with all its darkening, enslaving power, is penal, i.e., not a mere unaccountable calamity or chastisement, but a righteous infliction of a righteous law—is it not manifest that no mere word or act of an ambassador can disenthral and liberate such slaves? Surely if such be a fair representation of the estate in which the ambassador finds the revolted province to which he is commissioned, there is need for a call which he cannot utter, and a power which he cannot exert. Oh, how the heart of the ambassador who is awake to the estate of man by nature must sink within him as he enters this valley of vision—a valley as wide as this wide world of sin—if he were not persuaded that the economy of grace embraced, besides the human instrument, the omnipotent agency of the Holy Ghost! What but despair must seize upon our missionaries abroad and our ministers at home if they had not, in their felt impotency to the task of resuscitation, the privilege which Ezekiel had of crying—“Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live!”
Were it necessary, I might confirm all that has been thus far alleged in support of the doctrine of an inner as distinguished from an external call by reference to the experience of God’s people. As if to emphasise and elucidate the great truth that it is not of him that willeth, or of him that runneth, but of God that showeth mercy, the Head of the Church has permitted His servants to give the external call to all appearance in vain. He has not tied the conversion of men to the utterance of the external call with the bond of an uniform and invariable sequence. He has permitted His servants to labour in tears—tears drawn forth by fruitless toils. They have cast the seed of the Word upon soil dry as the dust of a land stricken with famine, and from the Carmel heights of prayerful vigils, with ever-recurring disappointment, they have looked for years for the rising of even a little cloud which might forbode the coming rain. When at length the brazen hue of the heavens has softened into the mildness of mercy before the gathering clouds as they rolled up from the boundless sea of grace, and the life-giving showers began to descend upon the thirsty ground, what could the care-worn watchers, who have all along been uttering the external call in the ears of a listless or reluctant people, do but fall down in adoration before a sovereign God, exclaiming, as they fell—”Oh, the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and the knowledge of God; how unsearchable are His judgments, and His ways past finding out!”
The distinction in question, therefore, is beyond all controversy a scriptural one, and I have been thus particular in establishing it because of its importance. It is a distinction which cannot be repudiated without the repudiation of the fundamental doctrines and principles of the economy of redemption. My first counsel to you, therefore, is, as I have already intimated, that you recognise this distinction. Recognise it that you may be duly impressed with the inveterate depravity and helplessness of man by nature. Recognise it that you may be kept humble, and sensible of your dependence for success upon the presence and power of the Holy Ghost. Recognise it that you may be preserved from despondency in times of spiritual deadness among the people of your charge. Recognise it that you may not ignore or invade the office-work of the Holy Spirit.
(To be continued.)