II.
(Continued from page 20.)
MY second counsel is, that in giving the external call you keep by the terms of your commission. You will find yourselves tried, sorely tried, in regard to this matter. When you have proclaimed the terrors of a broken law; when you have endeavoured to impress men with the exceeding breadth of the commandment; when you have demonstrated their guilt, depravity, and helplessness; when you have shown, on the authority of God’s Word, that the sinner can neither atone for his sins, nor cleanse his corrupt nature—and you cannot preach the gospel at all without doing all this—the question will occur to you, or will be forced upon you by others, “Where, then, is the use or righteousness of calling upon men to repent and believe?” You will be asked, “Why do you ply dead men with arguments?” If men have no power to repent, why call them to repentance? If they be destitute of power to believe, why call them to faith? These questions, which come with peculiar force to the heart of a young minister who sets about his work in right earnest are, perhaps, among the most fertile sources of error. They have driven men to abandon the terms of their commission, and to invent theories of man’s estate by nature, and, consequently, theories of the effect of Adam’s sin upon his posterity, which may seem to justify them in calling upon men everywhere to repent. You need not be informed that such has been the origin of the Pelagian and Semi-Pelagian theories. Both these theories have one and the same motto, “Men ought, therefore they can.” According to both, responsibility infers ability. Questions like these have led many a preacher to deny the doctrine of the imputation of Adam’s sin to his posterity, and, ultimately, to deny the doctrine of the imputation of Christ’s righteousness to His people. Take heed that, in the earnestness of your first love as ambassadors for Christ, you fall not into like errors. If you will but reflect upon the distinction now adverted to, you will find these Semi-Pelagian and Pelagian objections utterly shorn of their strength. The objector who asks, “Why call upon men to repent, and believe, if they have not power to repent and believe?” must assume that the preacher stands alone in this matter—that the only call given is the external call. The proper answer to all such questions, therefore, is obvious. The interrogator must be shown that he is ignoring the office-work of the Holy Ghost, and, along with this, the doctrine of the imputation of Adam’s sin to his posterity. An objection which cannot be urged, except on this fearful assumption, is, of course, utterly anti-Christian and subversive of the gospel.
Be not tempted, then, through fear of the charge of inconsistency, to leave out of your preaching the doctrine of human depravity, and the consequent doctrine of human inability and utter helplessness. Be assured that you have failed in one most important particular, if your preaching have produced the impression that men are but partially injured, or merely weakened by the fall. Men will never look to Christ until they are convinced of their own utter helplessness. Your success, under God, embraces, as one of its essential conditions, the utter destruction of every hope founded on human resource of any kind whatever, whether that resource be one of imagined righteousness, or of imagined moral and spiritual strength. Your preaching is not of the Pauline stamp, if it do not stop every mouth and make your auditors feel that they are both guilty and helpless before God. Make no secret of the sinner’s helplessness, but, at the same time, proclaim, on the authority of God’s Word, the sinfulness of such helplessness. Tell all men that the helplessness of the carnal mind, which is enmity against God, and which neither is, nor can be, subject to the law of God, is a helplessness for which there is no apology. Take your stand on this principle and you will have the consent of all men, for you will have conscience, as well as the Word of God, on your side. The man who opposes you must undertake to apologise for that species of helplessness which arises from the possession of dispositions, which all men, outside the field of theological controversy, pronounce sinful in and of themselves, irrespective of their origin, and in proportion to their virulence. In counselling you thus to preach, I am but repeating the admonition, “Take heed to the terms of your commission.” The gospel you are to preach embraces within its provisions, not only righteousness for the guilty, but cleansing for the defiled, strength for the weak, sight for the blind, and disenthralment for them that are bound. Beware, therefore, lest by your representations of the estate of man you leave no room for such a gospel as this.
There is another most important point, in regard to which I would urge this same counsel upon you. In giving the gospel call, take heed to the warrant wherewith you accompany it. In calling upon men to believe, beware that you give no other warrant than what God’s Word authorises you to give. It is not uncommon for the young ambassador to feel that if he cannot assure every man he addresses that Christ died for him, he has no authority for inviting him to come to the Saviour. Under the influence of this feeling it is not unnatural for him to conclude, that a universal, undiscriminating call necessarily implies a universal, undiscriminating atonement, or satisfaction, on the part of Christ. The young preacher is all the more liable to fall into this error because it seems, at first sight, to enhance our conceptions of the magnitude and glory of the redemption that is in Christ.
The contrary, however, is the fact. As the former objection was shown to be founded on an assumption derogatory to the office-work of the Holy Spirit, so may the present embarrassment of the preacher be shown to arise from an assumption derogatory to the work of Christ. This will become manifest when you enter fully upon an exposition of that work—when you set forth the relations in which He stood, on the one hand to the sinner, and, on the other, to God and His law and justice—when you expound the covenant of redemption into which the Father entered with His Son, with its promises and conditions—when you depict with what strictness those conditions were enforced, and exhibit, in all its fulness, the work by which the adorable Redeemer fulfilled these conditions—when you further proceed to encourage the sinner, by assuring him that the work thus rendered by Christ, at the call and command of the Father, in fulfilment of the conditions of the everlasting covenant, was accepted of the Father, who gave testimony of His acceptance of it by raising him from the dead as the representative and first-fruits of His people; in a word, when you have expounded the gospel, you will see that the warrant of faith which consists in assuring all men that Christ died for them, is, in view of the awful fact that all men are not saved, utterly derogatory to the work of the Redeemer, as well as to the honour, the justice, and the truth of the everlasting Father. You will be led to conclude, that the professedly unlimited atonement is really so limited as to be no atonement at all.
Be assured there is something fundamentally wrong in a method of preaching which, of necessity, involves such consequences. The man for whom Christ did all that the Scriptures say He did—the man for whom Christ undertook in the everlasting covenant—the man for whom Christ not only died to meet the penal claims of God’s most holy law, but for whom He also obeyed it, meeting all its preceptive claims—the man for whose offences Christ was delivered, and for whose justification He was raised again—the man for whom He was made sin, for whom He bore the curse of the law, for whom He obtained eternal redemption, for whom He vanquished the last enemy, and for whose interest He has taken possession of the everlasting throne, is a man for whose regeneration, justification, sanctification, and final glorification, the wisdom, the justice, the love, the mercy, the truth, and omnipotence of God are pledged—pledged by promise, pledged by covenant, pledged by oath.
I need not say to you, that any representation of the gospel which comes short of this is just so far defective. Such a representation, however, is utterly irreconcilable with the warrant in question. No ambassador who regards Christ’s work as a real satisfaction to the law and justice of God, and that, too, in the specific form of the fulfilment of the conditions of a covenant, can give any such warrant to faith. The giving of such a warrant, in view of the unquestionable fact that millions of those for whom it is alleged the satisfaction was made, have perished, involves an impeachment of the love, and truth, and justice of the Father, or of the perfection of the all-perfect righteousness of Christ. Whatever difficulties you may feel in giving the gospel call, you must not attempt to obviate them by the adoption of a theory of the atonement, which strips it of all its glory, and abstracts from it all that renders it efficaciously redemptive, or that really constitutes it a ground of the faith of God’s people and a guarantee for their full and final salvation.
It is not thus you are to disembarass your message of difficulties, when you stand in Christ’s stead to beseech men to be reconciled to God. The embarrassment in question arises not from anything in the nature of the message the ambassador is appointed to deliver, but from the character of another, and a very different message, which, in the eagerness it may be of his desire for success, he has been led to substitute for it. Commissioned to “preach the gospel“—to preach Christ and Him crucified—to proclaim the unsearchable riches which are treasured up in His person and work—the ambassador has reduced the grand, the inexhaustible, theme to one sentence, and, shrivelling up his message, has discharged it in the one utterance—”Christ has died for you!” Out of this prime error has arisen all his embarrassment. Such a warrant of faith requires, as its background, either a special revelation in regard to the parties addressed or a universal atonement. Not being possessed of the former, the herald has endeavoured to find relief by adopting the latter.
The embarrassment, as already stated, was in nowise owing to the message he was authorised to communicate. Had he preached the gospel—had he preached Christ in the infinite dignity of His person as the incarnate Son of God; Christ in His federal relations as the covenant head and surety of His people; Christ in His relations to the law, both in regard to its preceptive and its penal claims; Christ in His relations to the Father and those given Him of the Father; Christ as shadowed forth in the priesthood and sacrifices that were under the law; Christ as the true and efficacious sin-bearer in the days of His flesh, and the all-prevalent intercessor now in heaven; Christ as the true prophet of His Church, who alone can unlock men’s hearts to receive the Word and make them wise unto salvation; Christ as the enthroned mediatorial King, into whose hands all power in heaven and earth has been delivered for the application of the redemption which, by His obedience and death, He has purchased—had he kept to this theme—to Christ and Him crucified—he could not have fallen into the error of reducing his entire message to one brief sentence, which, when explained, ignores the entire redemption with and mediatorial prerogatives of Him whom he was commissioned to preach.
In this sentence I have indicated what I mean by preaching the gospel. The preaching of the gospel does not consist in the utterance of one or two laconic invitations to come to Christ. The object of preaching is to produce both faith and repentance, and such invitations are fitted to produce neither. Faith in Christ as a mere man is not faith in Christ; faith in Christ as God alone is not faith in Christ; faith in Christ as God-man is not faith in Christ; faith in Christ is a spiritual apprehension of Him in His official relations, wherein the soul discovers the mercy of God towards sinners in Him, and is drawn out unto Him, in love and gratitude to God. Where true faith is produced, one of the effects or accompaniments of it is a feeling of admiration of the wisdom, love, and grace displayed in the plan of redemption. In the plan thus apprehended, the sinner beholds the provision which the law has already made him feel that he needs. He acquiesces in the plan, and embraces the Saviour, and the salvation it reveals. Of course, it is implied in all this that the plan of redemption has been expounded; that the law from whose condemnation it delivers has been proclaimed. This, therefore, is your sphere. You are to expound and proclaim to all men the way of life, by exhibiting Christ in the infinite dignity of His person and grace of His official relations and work; you are to urge upon men the duty of accepting the salvation offered by God in Him, and of submitting to be saved in the way which, in the infinite mercy of God, has thus been provided. In doing this, you are to ply those you address with all the arguments furnished by the worth of the soul, the bliss of heaven, the unutterable woes of the lost, the justice and wrath of God, revealed in His law and in the history of its administration, and by His love and mercy, as exhibited in Christ and His work. This done, you can assure them that all who obey this call shall be saved. This done, your work as an ambassador is done. You have said all you have authority to say. In the execution of such a commission, the question will come to you again and again—Can these bones live? But in your felt incompetency to quicken the dead which strew the valley of vision into which the Head of the Church may carry you, call to mind the truth to which your attention has been already directed; remember that you are a co-worker with God; that whilst you have charge of the external call, there is another—an internal call—given to the Omnipotent, life-giving Spirit, whose it is to shine into the hearts of men, and give them to behold that glory of God in the face of Christ which it is yours to display before the minds of men in their natural estate. When your work is done—when you have set before the natural man the things of the Spirit of God, they may be regarded by him as foolishness, and you may be made painfully aware of his inability to know them, but your work is not, therefore, a vain work. Paul had the same conviction respecting the powers of the natural man, and yet he preached Christ and Him crucified, sustained by the assurance that the Spirit of God, who had given the very words he preached, could give the spiritual discernment necessary to the saving apprehension of them.
(To be continued.)