Mackay (1793-1873) was at this time the parish minister of Dunoon. This is the second of two sermons on the text; it is somewhat abridged and comes from his volume, Sermons on the Christian Warfare and Titles of Christ.
Isaiah 9:6. The Prince of Peace
In already addressing you from these words, we endeavoured to state the nature and fitness of the title which is here given to Christ, in His being called a Prince; and then we spoke about that peace of which He is said to be the Prince. This peace embraces great, eternal interests and gives its character to the most important of all relations in which we stand as created beings: our relation to God. If indeed we are now among His people, we know this peace; if we reject the peace He offers us, we are still His enemies.
We shall now, in dependence on God’s help, set before you some essential features of this peace. We have already observed that it is specially a peace with God, and that there is an implied reconciliation of mind, in His people individually, to the supremacy and government of God, to His character and will, and to the gracious offers which through Christ He makes to us in the gospel. We tried to prove that the mind of man is by nature opposed to all these: and so we sought to show you that this peace with God necessarily implies enlightening the mind in the knowledge of God, and His gracious and merciful will toward us made manifest in Jesus Christ.
The same enlightening of the mind continually impresses the character and attributes of God on the minds of God’s people
This is done in such a measure as brings them not only to be reconciled to God in the spirit of their minds, but also gives them the principle of love to God, when they see His character and attributes manifested in the face of Jesus Christ. That is, God’s attributes and character are made known by Christ’s personal character, His doings and sufferings, His doctrines, promises and precepts. Apart from such an enlightening, there cannot be true peace with God. There may be outward worshipping of God; there may be a profession of reverence toward Him and of respect to His service and cause, but there can be no true reconciliation to Him in heart and mind. We should surely suppose it is possible to know whether one has received such an enlightening. If this is deemed too hard a test, surely there is no rational being who ponders the matter at all, who may not know, whether he is seeking it or not, whether he truly desires to receive it. Those who do not can be very easily known to themselves, and even to others, by their not seeking God, by avoiding His claims and calls upon them, seeking to put away from their mind the thoughts of God and the consideration of eternal things. At all events, they may recognise themselves by not seeking these thoughts, or wishing, or striving to keep hold of them. To all who have that character, Christ is not the Prince of Peace: you are not His subjects; you do not enjoy the peace which He purchased and which He is still offering you; and you clearly do not seek to receive it.
We warn you of your imminent danger. You are the enemies of God and of your own souls; and we now repeat that the only way of deliverance from this state is to seek God now, while He yet offers to enlighten your mind by the Spirit of truth, while that gracious Spirit is willing to come and dwell with you. You must seek from God, through Christ Jesus, His powerful, enlightening guidance, to give you that mind. Otherwise you must continue to be enemies of God, on the road to eternal destruction. Your time and opportunities of grace are fast passing away, and we call on you now to seek God, that your soul may be saved by the glorious Prince of Peace.
Peace of Conscience
But this peace consists also in peace of conscience. The conscience of the natural man accuses him of sin; it speaks to him with a condemning voice; it forewarns him, sometimes at least, of a judgement to come, and he trembles like Felix. Yet he puts away these warnings, as that unhappy man did to Paul’s, and returns again to his sins. It is true that such people make a kind of peace with their conscience, and here we shall try to set before you the essential difference between a false peace of conscience and what Christ as the Prince of Peace gives to His people.
A false peace of conscience
A false peace of conscience is generally obtained in one of two ways. When natural conscience denounces your sins, you may make it your chief business to silence it. Your only desire is to rid yourselves of the trouble it gives you; and you succeed in this with fearful ease. But how? By sinning all the more. If conscience warns you of one sin, you silence it and obtain peace by committing others – perhaps more aggravated sins. Indeed any sin committed is a specially aggravated sin to you, when you commit it with a view to silencing the accusations of conscience. But consider this: whatever you resort to, to procure relief of mind from such accusations – whether business, or pleasures, or frivolous amusement or worldly enjoyment – call it by whatever name you may, and let men accept it as harmless or even laudable– you are sinning against God. Such things, gild them as you may with a soothing name, are sin to you. They are committed against God when, in His condescension and kindness, He seeks to instruct and warn you by the voice of your conscience. You are fleeing from God, and you cannot prosper at the end of such a course. You may attain the peace you seek; the voice of conscience is silenced perhaps in the turbulence of your basest passion, to which you willingly give a loose rein and, instead of seeking to Christ for peace, you enter into willing league with the enemies of Christ. Alas, your peace is dearly purchased indeed by heaping up materials which will yet be as fuel to your soul, which the wrath of God shall one day set on fire to torment you in flames that can never be quenched – if you persist in this course. You think you will escape this condemnation when you succeed in drowning the voice of its fearful forebodings. Yet you sometimes know that your conduct is foolish, that something like insanity is clearly written on it. But the fearful evil of sin is indeed clearly displayed in the deplorable character of your mind.
Every renewed act of fleeing from God, of sinning against Him, hardens your heart more and more against any purpose or effort of returning to Him. It makes you more averse to have anything to say to, or to do with, God. Is that not a dreadful condition? These repeated sins kindle within you a hatred to whatever is spiritual or holy or pure, and the bending of the knee to God is studiously avoided. If possible, you would get away from the holy Word of God, as if it was a fire that would burn you, or poison that would destroy you. You cannot bear any communing with your own heart, or with others, about God or godliness. You are filled, or soon will be, with hatred even to what resembles godliness; and under all these fearful signs of coming wrath, which will consume God’s adversaries, you are perhaps contented, in so far as you have succeeded in silencing conscience!
Be warned that every time you silence conscience, you only give it a new but awful strength, which will come upon you at last with the power of ten thousand voices of thunder, to overwhelm your soul with despair, under the condemning look of the righteous Judge of the earth, the Prince of Peace, whom now you despise and reject. Listen then to the warnings of conscience, and seek God, so that you may learn where to find a better and a surer peace – a peace with God, through Jesus Christ, which will fill your soul with true quietness and joy and which will bring everlasting freedom from the power and the hardening influence of sin.
Yet there is another peace which the natural conscience obtains but is not the peace of which Christ is the Prince. You who purchase this peace are not perhaps so hardened in sin as others whom we have already addressed. Your course is different; it is not so obviously contrary to godliness. The truth is that your conscience gives you little trouble, except when you dread some unwelcome consequence of your sin. You listen to the accusations of conscience, and you fear that they are the truth. You then turn to duties, to prayers, to promises, to resolutions; perhaps you vow to change and to give up that specific sin of which conscience is accusing you. You practise these duties for a time; but only till the tormentor within you stops terrifying your soul; and whenever you succeed in ridding yourselves of it, you forget, as speedily as possible, all your purposes, resolutions and vows of amendment. Your prayers cease; you can now do without Him again. You do not indeed forget your prayers, for you set much value on them in your own opinion; you think they are very good, fervent, acceptable to God, and that they have procured you His favour. Meantime, conscience is silenced, and the worst feature is that you think well of it; you think you are truly Christians, very serious, very promising – very superior to many others around him. After all, when this kind of peace is restored to you, sin is restored in all its power, and on you go to it with as keen relish as before; and you live as carelessly, as indifferent to His will, and as destitute as before of any true reverence, or fear, or love of His character and glory. Is this the character of a Christian? Is this the deportment of a subject of Christ, as the Prince of Peace? No, it is as different from Christian character as light is from darkness. And we beseech you, whose false, temporary peace of conscience is thus miserably patched up from time to time, to consider that this truly is not the peace of God which passes knowledge, and that you need to seek a better peace, on a more lasting foundation.
Counsel to both classes
To both classes we have addressed, we would offer this counsel: your conscience needs to be enlightened as much as awakened. It has never yet been truly awakened at all. It has only testified to you of special sins. With that measure of awakening, if you had truly sought God, it might have come to more. But since you have trusted in what you have done, you have not received the counsel of God in His Word; you have not listened to its declarations about sin and to what the Word says is your personal state; you have always been departing from God. In fact, and you may well know it, we cannot but think that you feel your peace very insecure. You are always afraid of more terror coming upon you. You feel from time to time as if you were indeed building your house on the sand; and so you are.
Consider these two things. A truly awakened conscience sends the sinner to seek peace with God, not merely peace with himself. A conscience, when truly awakened, sees the guilt of sin to consist not merely in specific outward acts, but in the being and power of sin in the mind and soul. You have not yet experienced these two feelings, and therefore you still need to have your conscience truly awakened, and to seek that God would truly enlighten your mind. When conscience is both enlightened and made alive by the power of the Spirit of God, it looks to the nature of sin as opposed to the will, government and character of God. Now, in all that has happened to you, you have had little or no consideration of God; if any, they were indistinct and terrifying. Even those were but short-lived and imperfect. It was your own discomfort, or your fear of temporal evil, that prevailed in your mind.
You have not attained to any steady, well-directed look towards God and eternity. Yet these, becoming influential in the mind, are essential principles in the very first movements of a truly awakened conscience, and they abide permanently. Without this awakening of conscience, peace with God cannot be attained. The truly awakened conscience will cause the sinner to feel shut out from access to God, because of sin. He will see this as the consequence of sin – it renders him guilty in the sight of God, being committed against Him, and it continually makes his mind hostile to God. Now, this is what appals the awakened soul; it humbles it in the dust in the presence of God – feeling that this sin pervades the mind, that it continually makes headway against the authority of God, and so, according to the justice, truth and holiness of God, it always brings the soul under righteous condemnation.
Peace with God is not so easily attained as you suppose; and however painful the reality of his condition may be, the sinner would not purchase peace by forgetting his guilt and turning away from considering it – because he now feels that he has to do with a just, all-knowing and righteous God. When he seeks God by prayer, he feels that sin is constantly mingled with his duties, and so he cannot purchase peace with God, or His favour. Let him pray and read the Word of God as he may; let him promise to forsake sin; yet he feels that all this will not avail him, that sin is still ruling within him, and that none of his doings and purposes will diminish his guilt, or commend him to God. He feels himself as sinful and guilty as ever, and without another’s help, his state would amount to absolute despair; without sin being pardoned he cannot have peace and cannot purchase pardon. The continued consciousness of sin gives him humbling and fearful testimony of this. All the while he may be using the name of Christ, and hearing much of Him, and reading much of Him in God’s Word. But all this will not give peace to the conscience; he is still a sinner in whom sin continually abounds. Peace of conscience cannot be attained unless a new principle is wrought in his mind which enables it to apprehend the Lord Jesus as its hope and peace. Christ died once for sin, the just for the unjust, that He might bring sinners to God; it is when this is borne in on the mind with power to see that all the remedy is provided in God Himself; to see that He who is the sacrifice for sin is Himself God over all and blessed for ever; to see that He came to take out of the way the guilt of sin that the soul feels is coming between itself and God’s favour. He took the guilt upon Himself, enduring it all, and is now exalted a Prince and a Saviour to give repentance and forgiveness.
It is when this view enters into the understanding and heart, and abides there, that it will give peace to the awakened conscience; just to hear of all this is not sufficient. When the soul’s attention is truly turned to consider the unspeakable value of the atonement which Christ made, who He is, this is what gives the conscience an essential element of its peace. The more He is considered as the great High Priest of His people’s profession, the more the soul admires His preciousness, His love in undertaking the work, and God’s grace in ordaining the way and making all the provision which the gospel reveals. This brings the mind to have Christ as the ground of its comfort and hope, as its Prince of Peace, and to rest upon Him for deliverance. In all this, the feeling of sin is not diminished. The individual does not seek to flee from the presence of God; but he is given confidence that the guilt of his sin will be pardoned, and he comes to God longing for that pardon to be sealed to him, in receiving from Christ a heart to hate sin, to overcome its ruling power, and to receive those new affections which would enable him truly to serve the Lord. His conscience cannot have peace but in looking to the cross of Christ, and he sees that the Lamb of God bore the sinner’s guilt, that the Prince of Peace there obtained the victory, in sustaining the anger of God against sin. The enlightening of mind which has turned the soul to consider the excellence of Christ’s sacrifice will also carry the soul to that knowledge of Christ which contemplates Him in His exalted condition as a Prince and a Saviour. To the believing mind, the Lord may grant such a measure of assurance of the willingness of Christ to bestow on the individual the full benefit of pardon, so that the conscience enjoys a peace which is unspeakable in its value and unchangeable in its very nature.
Even seeking to be thus united to Christ, in desiring, by His abounding grace, to receive Him and to be freed from the power of sin, gives a measure of peace, which no one can enjoy who has not experienced the awakening, the fear and the anxiety about sin, of which we have spoken. While the soul feels its own entire inability to believe on Christ as the Prince of Peace to it individually, it seeks with earnest, sincere desire that the Holy Spirit of truth would come and abide with it, to lead and guide it into the knowledge and faith of Christ more and more.
But this conscience, which has its peace in Christ, beholding Him as the Lamb of God which takes away the sin of the world; and which cannot rest satisfied with any other source of hope or of peace than Him crucified, is still a conscience fearful of sin and watchful in testifying against it. It is now the friend of God in the soul; it testifies to the soul about the character of God, and of His saving grace in Jesus Christ. And while it is thus kept watchful against sin, it leads the individual carefully to avoid sinning. The conscience obtaining peace in Christ, urges the soul to consider Him, in His glory and excellence as God, hating sin with a perfect hatred; and this brings the soul to watch against sin, and to strive against its deceitfulness and power. The believer’s feeling that he commits sin, in spite of all he has experienced of its guilt and misery, always gives him much concern; but he comes to the Prince of Peace to seek from Him that exercise of His power which would subdue the whole mind to obey His perfect holy will. The terrors of the Lord, in denouncing punishment against sin are still heard by the soul thus awakened, and heard with attention, with reverence and godly fear. But the knowledge of the Prince of Peace brings peace to the conscience. His name is as a strong tower to the soul, and there the righteous flees and is safe.
Would you enjoy peace of conscience?
Seek first to be enlightened to see the guilt and misery of sin, so that you would realise that nothing but the atonement the Son of God made on the cross can help you. Further, nothing can help but a personal interest in its efficacy. Unless the Spirit so convinces you, you will remain at peace with sin in your soul, and under its power in all you do. Whatever other warnings you may have, and whatever terrors may come to you, they will be of no avail till you are brought to Christ as your only deliverer. Christ purchased this peace of conscience, to which His Spirit leads the soul through believing on Christ, and it will be maintained by the exercise of a growing faith in His name and government. The mind will still feel its own insufficiency to abstain from sin, to overcome its working, or to conquer it; but the enlightened conscience will testify to the soul about the glorious Prince of Peace, who rules over all and who can subdue all things to Himself. As peace of conscience first comes in through the knowledge of Christ, so it will be maintained in the degree that the soul is enabled to come to Him for deliverance from sin in its power. There is no instance in which the believer is overtaken by sin but he finds that he had ceased to depend on Christ. If so, he cannot recover peace till he is again brought to Christ, to have that believing view of Him in His glory, grace and power which will bring the soul to rest on Him again as the Prince of Peace, who is willing to receive and bless the soul, heal its backslidings, and grant spiritual blessings of His own purchase, according to its need.
Peace and Good Will Among Men
This peace, of which the Lord Jesus is the Author and Sovereign, also implies peace and good will among men; it will abound more and more among all who receive the knowledge of Christ. The treatment which Christ, His gospel and His people receive from the hands of the unconverted, is most unjust and unwise. They charge the gospel with the shortcomings of those who profess to receive and obey it. They incur a fearful reckoning against themselves who thus deal with God, and with the kingdom of His Son on earth. You individually are not called to look to the measure of the gospel’s power and influence as exhibited in fallible men, but to the gospel itself and its Author, who invites you to come to learn of Him. We admit most freely that the sins and shortcomings of those who profess to obey the gospel are grievous, that they may form sad stumbling-blocks in the way of awakened minds, and that these shortcomings are serious evils in a fearful degree. But that they should form, to any rational mind, a barrier against receiving and obeying the truth, as it is in Jesus Christ, is as much guilt as folly, chargeable on those who do not give heed to the gospel’s testimony, and do not seek the great salvation which it freely offers. It would be more rational to consider the great benefit which has come to the world, even in a temporal sense, by the measure in which the gospel of Christ has been received and its doctrines put into practice, by those who profess it.
Address to those who have experienced the truth
We would address those who have experienced the truth of those observations on the soul’s knowledge of God, through which the awakened conscience obtains peace. You must realise that your whole safety and eternal well-being are dependant on the grace and favour of God shown to you through Jesus Christ, and that the peace which you seek in Christ has its source in everlasting love. He manifested that everlasting love when you were at enmity with Him and entirely undeserving of anything from Him but righteous anger. You cannot but feel that the same evil passions which led you to trample on His divine authority, were also the means of setting you at variance with the true interests of those around you on earth. That inordinate attachment to earthly things, which excludes God and eternal things from the mind, had mastery over you, in preferring your own interests to those of others and your own reputation to those of others. However unobserved by the world all this may have been, it prevented you from cherishing towards your fellow creatures that desire for their good, those earnest wishes and efforts for their well-being which are the fulfilment of the law of Christ, even in this life. As for the life to come, while you remained ignorant of God and careless of His glory, you did not care for the spiritual and eternal interests of others; they gave you no concern. People may speak of individual acts which disturb the peace and good-will that ought to reign among men; they may criticise them; and far be it from us to deny that too frequent opportunity is given for such censures, even by those who profess godliness. But the great cause from which the animosities and wrongs proceed – which destroy the peace of society, which alienate man from man – is ignorance of God and the enmity against His government and will which reigns in the unrenewed heart. And never shall universal peace and good will prevail among the individuals, families and communities on the earth till the Prince of Peace receives universal homage from all.