SOME years ago the London Sovereign Grace Union published an excellent essay, in pamphlet form, entitled An Essay on the Fears and Doubts to which God’s People are Liable, by Augustus M. Toplady. If one were to credit some professing people of the Plymouth Brethren and Faith Mission type, with their Arminian Antinomian views, the Lord’s people are not supposed to have fears or doubts at all. Some of these will say that they believed savingly twenty, thirty, and, in some cases, forty years ago, and in all that time they never once had a doubt, fear, or a moment of unbelief, but, on the contrary, one long unbroken joyful communion with God. Many of our own people have, within recent years, come in contact with these professed believers, who can give a quite Scriptural account of their professed conversion, and they have been harassed and perplexed accordingly. Recently one such Faith Mission preacher published a pamphlet in which he states that from his professed conversion, many years ago, till now “He is sin-proof, Devil-proof, temptation-proof, and public-opinion-proof.”
The fact of the matter is that while the fears, doubts, and particular type of unbelief to which believers are liable are not part of the supernatural graces of the Spirit implanted in Christians, nevertheless such fears, doubts, and unbelief are peculiar to gracious souls. The psalms of David particularly and the whole Word of God generally show clearly that the believer’s life is not one of unbroken sunshine and sensible communion with God. Rather would the average Christian agree with the worthy Dr. Love that the path of the believer from regeneration to glorification is “a dark, intricate, and mysterious one.” The children of Israel literally, who are typical of Israel spiritually, did not go from the banks of the Red Sea to the Promised Land in six weeks, as they well might, but their circuitous wanderings took forty years, to try them, to prove them, and to let them see what was in their heart. The Lord’s people, in like manner, have to prove from personal experience of inbred corruption, as well as from the Word of God, that the human heart is “deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked.” They must learn, from personal experience, to sympathise with the Apostle Paul when he says “O, wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from this body of death,” from this mass of inbred corruption? Dr. Kennedy said that that was “the holiest groan that ever came from the heart of the Apostle,” and the late Rev. Donald MacFarlane, Dingwall, declared that that was when the Apostle Paul got his doctorate in divinity.
In conclusion, I think experienced Christians generally will agree with Bishop Beveridge when he wrote: “I do not only betray the inbred venom of my heart by poisoning my common actions, but even my most religious performances also, with sin. I cannot pray, but I sin; I cannot preach or hear a sermon, but I sin; I cannot give an alms or receive the sacrament, but I sin;—nay, I cannot even confess my sins, but my very confessions are aggravations of them; my repentance needs to be repented of, and my tears need washing in the blood of Christ.” There is no room for jolly happy-all-the-day Arminianism in the foregoing confession. No, we brought a sinning nature into this world with us, which can do nothing else but sin, and as this old Adamic nature is in the Lord’s people till their dying hour, they find themselves individually, inwardly, a company of two diametrically opposed armies, needing daily and hourly the supernatural counteracting gracious influence of the applied cleansing, healing, peace-speaking blood of atonement with every breath they draw. What sinful folly, therefore, to make a mere human arm our confidence, or to regard any man, however gracious, as infallible or perfect. “Call no man master.” Let us lean upon the Beloved alone.