by Bishop J.C. Ryle, D.D.
(continued from page 298)
Why Unbelief is so Wonderful
II. Let us now inquire why and wherefore unbelief is so wonderful. What is there in it that made even the Lord Jesus the Son of God marvel?
No doubt there was something peculiar and extraordinary in the unbelief of the Jews. That the children of Israel, brought up from their infancy in the knowledge of the law and the prophets, trained from their earliest years to look for the Messiah, and to expect a mighty “prophet like unto Moses”, taught to believe in the possibility of miracles, and familiar with the story of miracle-working men,— that they should reject Jesus of Nazareth, and not be moved by the mighty works which He did among them, all this was truly wonderful and surprising. Wonderful that they should have such privileges, and yet make such a bad use of them! Wonderful that the door of life should be open, and heaven so near, and they should refuse to enter in!
But, I suspect, the Holy Ghost would have us look deeper than this. He would have us know that if we sit down and calmly consider unbelief, we cannot avoid the conclusion that there is something singularly marvellous about it, and never so much so as in these latter days of the world. Let me try to show what I mean.
(1) Peculiar to Adam’s Children
(1) For one thing, unbelief is a spiritual disease peculiar to Adam’s children. It is a habit of soul entirely confined to man. Angels in heaven above, and fallen spirits in hell beneath, saints waiting for the resurrection in paradise, lost sinners waiting for the last judgment in that awful place where the worm never dies, and the fire is not quenched,— all these have one point in common, they all believe. The rich man in the parable, when he lifted up his eyes in torment, and asked for a drop of water to cool his tongue, and pleaded hard for his five brethren, had bid an eternal farewell to unbelief. “The very devils,” says St James, “believe and tremble.” (James 2: 19.) Hateful, and hating, and malicious, and murderous, and lying as Satan is called in Scripture, we read that his agents cried, “We know Thee who Thou art, the Holy One of God.” “Art Thou come to torment us before the time?” (Matthew 8: 29.) But man, living man, is the only intelligent creature who is unbelieving! I say “living man” advisedly. Alas! What a waking up remains for many the moment the last breath is drawn. There is no unbelief in the grave. Voltaire now knows whether there is a sin-hating God; and David Hume now knows whether there is an endless hell. The infant of days, by merely dying, acquires a knowledge which the subtlest philosophers, while on earth, profess their inability to attain. The dead Hottentot knows more than the living Socrates. Surely a habit of soul so absolutely and entirely confined to “living man” may well be called marvellous.
(2) Its Arrogance and Presumption
(2) For another thing, unbelief is marvellous when you consider its arrogance and presumption. For, after all, how little the wisest of men know; and none are more ready to confess it than themselves. How enormously ignorant the greater part of mankind are, if you come to examine the measure of their knowledge! The education of the vast majority of people is wretchedly meagre and superficial. Most of us cease learning at twenty-one, and then plunge into some profession in which we have little time for thought and reading, and are annually more absorbed in family cares and troubles, and add little to our stock of knowledge. Fifty or sixty years after this our part is played out, and we retire from the stage, rarely leaving the world a wiser world than it was when we were born! And does unbelief become a creature like this? Is it seemly for him to talk in a sceptical and sneering tone about the revelation which the Eternal God has been pleased to make of Himself, and the unseen future, in the marvellous Book the Bible? I appeal to common sense for a reply. “Honest doubt” is a fine thing to talk about, and men are fond of saying it is “better than half the creeds”. But when a man tells you he is troubled with sceptical and unbelieving feelings about Christianity, while he has probably never studied a dozen pages of Butler, or Paley, or Chalmers, or McIlvaine, or Bishop Daniel Wilson, and never thought deeply about religion at all, it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that one of the most curious things in much unbelief is its wonderful self-conceit.
(3) Its Unfairness and One-sidedness
(3) For another thing, unbelief is marvellous when you consider its unfairness and one-sidedness. Who has not known that some of the minor facts and miracles of the Bible are the ostensible reasons which many assign why they cannot receive the Book as true, and make it their rule of faith and practice? They point to the ark, and the passage of the Red Sea, and Balaam’s ass, and Jonah in the whale’s belly, and ask you sarcastically if you really believe such things to be credible and historically true. And all this time they refuse to look at three great facts, which never can be denied, and which no higher criticism can possibly explain away.
(a) One of those facts is the historical Person Jesus Christ Himself. How He can have been what He was on earth, lived as He lived, taught as He taught, and made the mark He has certainly made on the world, if He was not very God, and One miraculously sent down from heaven, is a question which those who sneer at Balaam’s ass find it convenient to evade.
(b) Another fact is the Bible itself. How this Book, with all its alleged difficulties, written by a few Jews in a corner of the earth, who wrote nothing else worth reading, can be the Book that it is, so immeasurably and incomparably superior to anything else penned by man, and hold the position it holds after 1900 years’ use,— how all this can be, if the Book was not miraculously given by inspiration of God, is a knot which cannot be untied.
(c) The third and last fact is the effect which Christianity has had on mankind,— the amazing change which has taken place in the state of the world before Christianity, and since Christianity,— and the difference at this day between those parts of the globe where the Bible is read, and those where it is not known. Nothing, again, can account for this but the Divine origin of Scriptural religion. No other explanation will stand.
Now these three great facts are coolly ignored by many professing unbelievers! They will talk by the hour about minor difficulties in the way of faith, while they refuse to touch the weighty, patent facts which I have just been naming. The difficulties of infidelity are a wide and interesting subject, which deserves more attention from the defenders of Revelation than it receives. But the unfair and unreasonable extent to which many nowadays concentrate their minds on small disputable points of revealed religion, while they refuse to look at the great standing evidences of God’s truth, is to my mind one of the most marvellous features of modern unbelief.
(4) Unbelief’s Eventual Failure
(4) Fourthly, and lastly, unbelief is marvellous when you consider how the vast majority of those who profess it drop it, and give it up at last. Few of us perhaps have the least idea how seldom any man leaves the world an unbeliever. The near approach of death has a mighty effect on consciences, and brings into fearful relief the utter superficiality of much that is called scepticism. The very people who go through life sneering and scoffing at Christianity, and those who support it, continually break down in their own last hours, and are glad enough to send for the ministers of religion, and seek comfort in the old doctrine of the despised creeds. Some, with a mighty swing of the pendulum, go from one extreme to another, and, after living sceptics for years, go out of the world in grovelling credulity, or humblest submission to the worst superstitions of the Church of Rome. Others, who do not go so far, are willing to be read to and prayed with, and receive the Lord’s Supper, after neglecting every Christian ordinance, and despising God’s house for scores of years. Wretched indeed must systems be which prove so useless and comfortless in the hour when comfort is most wanted!
But the wonder of all wonders is, that these failures of unbelief are so notoriously and constantly occurring, and yet men will not see them, and the ranks of scepticism are perpetually filled by fresh recruits. If those who profess to deny Revelation generally died happy deaths, and left the world in great peace and joy, holding their opinions to the last, we might well expect them to have followers. But when, on the contrary, it is the rarest thing to see an unbeliever dying calmly in unbelief, and giving no sign of discomfort, while the vast majority of unbelievers throw down their arms at last, and seek for the very religious consolation which they once affected to despise, it is impossible to avoid one broad conclusion. That conclusion is, that of all spiritual diseases by which fallen man is afflicted, there is none so truly marvellous and unreasonable as unbelief.