order to the setting himself up as his own rule.-He makes himself not only his own rule, but would make himself the rule of God, and give laws to his Creator. (1.) Man naturally disowns the rule God sets him. It is all one to deny his royalty and to deny his being; when we disown his authority, we disown his Godhead: it is the right of God to be the Sovereign of his creatures; and it must be a very loose and trivial assent that such men have to God's superiority over them, (and consequently to the excellency of his being, upon which that authority is founded,) who are scarce at ease in themselves, but when they are invading his rights, breaking his bands, casting away his cords, and contradicting his will. Every man naturally is a son of Belial, would be without a yoke, and leap over God's enclosures; and in breaking out against his sovereignty, we disown his being as God; for to be God and Sovereign are inseparable. He could not be God if he were not supreme; nor could he be a Creator without being a Lawgiver. To be God, and yet inferior to another, is a contradiction. To make rational creatures without prescribing them a law, is to make them without holiness, wisdom, and goodness. [1.] There is in man naturally an unwillingness to have any acquaintance with the rule God sets him. None that did understand and seek God. Psal. xiv. 2. The refusing instruction and casting his word behind the back is a part of atheism. Psal. I. 17. We are heavy in hearing the instructions either of law or gospel, and slow in the apprehension of what we hear. Heb. v. 11, 12. The people that God had hedged in from the wilderness of the world for his own garden, were foolish, and did not know God; were sottish, and had no understanding of him. Jer. iv. 22. The law of God is accounted a strange thing, Hos. viii. 12; a thing of a different climate, and a far country from the heart of man, wherewith the mind of man had no natural acquaintance, and had no desire to have any; or they regarded it as a sordid thing. What God accounts great and valuable, they account mean and despicable. Men may show a civility to a stranger, but scarce contract an intimacy: there can be no amicable agreement between the holy will of God and the heart of a depraved creature. One is holy, the other unholy; one is universally good, the other worth naught. The purity of the divine rule renders it nauseous to the impurity of a carnal heart. Water and fire may as well kiss each other and live together without quarrelling and hissing, as the holy will of God and the unregenerate heart of a fallen creature. The nauseating a holy rule is an evidence of atheism in the heart, as the nauseating wholesome food is of the unhealthy state of the stomach. It is found more or less in every Christian, in the remains, though not in a full empire. As there is a law in his mind whereby he delights in the law of God, so there is a law in his members whereby he wars against the law of God. Rom. vii. 22, 23. 25. How predominant is this loathing of the law of God, when corrupt nature is in its full strength, without any principle to control it! There is in the mind of such a one a darkness whereby it is ignorant of it, and in the will a depravedness whereby it is repugnant to it. If man were naturally willing and able to have an intimate acquaintance with and delight in the law of God, it had not been such a signal favour for God to promise to write the law in the heart. A man may sooner engrave the chronicle of a whole nation, or all the records of God in the Scripture, upon the hardest marble with his bare finger, than write one syllable of the law of God in a spiritual manner upon his heart. For, Men are negligent in using the means for the knowledge of God's will. All natural men are fools, who know not how to use the price God puts into their hands, Prov. xvii. 16; they put not a due estimate upon opportunities and means of grace, and account that law folly which is the birth of an infinite and holy wisdom. The knowledge of God which they may glean from creatures, and which is more pleasant to the natural taste of men, is not improved to the glory of God, if we believe the indictment the apostle brings against the gentiles. Rom. i. 21. And most of those that have dived into the depths of nature, have been more studious of the qualities of the creatures, than of the excellency of the nature, or the discovery of the mind of God in them; who regard only the rising and motions of the star, but follow not with the wise men its conduct to the King of the Jews. How often do we see men filled with an eager thirst for all other kind of knowledge; that cannot acquiesce in a twilight discovery, but are inquisitive into the causes and reasons of effects, yet are contented with a weak and languishing knowledge of God and his law, and are easily tired with proposals of them! He now that nauseates the means whereby he may come to know and obey God, has no intention to make the law of God his rule: there is no man that intends seriously an end, but he intends means in order to that end. As when a man intends the preservation or recovery of his health, he will intend means in order to those ends, otherwise he cannot be said to intend his health; so he that is not diligent in using means to know the mind of God, has no sound intention to make the will of and law of God his rule. Is not the inquiry after the will of God made a work by the by, fain to lackey after other concerns of an inferior nature, if it hath any place at all in the soul? which is a despising the being of God. The notion of the sovereignty of God, bears the same date with the notion of his Godhead; and by the same way that he reveals himself, he reveals his authority over us, whether it be by creatures without, or conscience within. All authority over rational creatures consists in commanding and directing; the duty of rational creatures in compliance with that authority consists in obeying. Where there is therefore a careless neglect of those means which convey the knowledge of God's will and our duty, there is an utter disowning of God as our sovereign and our rule. When any part of the mind and will of God breaks in upon men, they endeavour to shake it off, as a man would a sergeant that comes to arrest him; they like not to retain God in their knowledge. Rom. i. 28. A natural man receives not the things of the Spirit of God; that is, into his affection; he pusheth them back as men do troublesome and importunate beggars; they have no kindness to bestow upon them. They thrust with both shoulders against the truth of God, when it presseth in upon them; and dash as much contempt upon it as the Pharisees did upon the doctrine our Saviour directed against their covetousness. As men naturally delight to be without God in the world, so they delight to be without any offspring of God in their thoughts. Since the spiritual palate of man is depraved, divine truth is unsavoury and ungrateful to us, till our taste and relish is restored by grace: hence men damp and quench the motions of the Spirit to obedience and compliance with the dictates of God; strip them of their life and vigour, and kill them in the womb. How unable are our memories to retain the substance of spiritual truth; but, like sand in a glass, put in at one part, it runs out at the other! Have not many a secret wish that the Scripture had never mentioned some truths, or that they were blotted out of the Bible, because they face their consciences, and discourage those boiling lusts they would with eagerness and delight pursue? Methinks that interruption John gives our Saviour when he was upon the reproof of their pride, looks little better than a design to divert him from a discourse so much against the grain, by telling him a story of their prohibiting one to cast out devils, because he followed not them. Mark ix. 33. 38. How glad are men when they can raise a battery against a command of God, and raise some smart objection whereby they may shelter themselves from the strictness of it! When men cannot shake off the notices of the will and mind of God, they have no pleasure in the consideration of them. Which could not possibly be, if there were a real and fixed design to own the mind and law of God as our rule: subjects or servants that love to obey their prince and master, will delight to read and execute his orders. The devils understand the law of God in their minds, but they loathe the impressions of it upon their wills. Those miserable spirits are bound in chains of darkness, evil habits in their wills, that they have not a thought of obeying that law they know. It was an unclean beast under the law, that did not chew the cud: it is a corrupt heart that doth not chew truth by meditation. A natural man is said not to know God, or the things of God; he may know them notionally, but he knows them not affectionately. A sensual soul can have no delight in a spiritual law. To be sensual and not to have the Spirit, are inseparable. Jude 19. Natural men may indeed meditate upon the law and truth of God, but without delight in it: if they take any pleasure in it, it is only as it is knowledge, not as it is a rule; for we delight in nothing that we desire, but upon the same account that we desire it. Natural men desire to know God and some part of his will and law, not out of a sense of their practical excellency, but a natural thirst after knowledge: and if they have a delight, it is in the act of knowing, not in the object known, not in the duties that stream from that knowledge; they design the furnishing their understandings, not the quickening their affections; like idle boys that strike fire, not to warm themselves by the heat, but sport themselves with the sparks; whereas, a gracious soul accounts not only his meditation, or the operations of his soul about God and his will to be sweet, but he hath a joy in the object of that meditation. Psal. civ. 34. Many have the knowledge of God who have no delight in him or his will. Owls have eyes to perceive that there is a sun, but by reason of the weakness of their sight have no pleasure to look upon a beam of it; so neither can a man by nature love or delight in the will of God, because of his natural corruption: that law that riseth up in men for conviction and instruction, they keep down under the power of corruption; making their souls not the sanctuary, but prison of truth. Rom. i. 18. They will keep it down in their hearts, if they cannot keep it out of their heads, and will endeavour not to know and taste the spirit of it. There is, further, a rising and swelling of the heart against the will of God.-Internal. God's law cast against a hard heart, is like a ball thrown against a stone wall, by reason of the resistance rebounding the further from it. The meeting of a divine truth and the heart of man, is like the meeting of two tides, the weaker swells and foams. We have a natural antipathy against a divine rule; and therefore when it is clapped close to our consciences, there is a snuffing at it, and high reasonings against it. Corruption breaks out more strongly; as water poured on lime sets it on fire, and the more water is cast upon it the more furiously it burns; or as the sunbeam shining upon a dunghill makes the steams the thicker and the stench the more noisome, neither being the positive cause of the smoke in the lime, or the stench in the dunghill, but by accident the causes of the eruption. "But sin, taking occasion by the commandment, wrought in me all manner of concupiscence: for without the law sin was dead." Rom. vii. 8. Sin was in a languishing posture, as if it were dead; like a lazy garrison in a city, till upon an alarm from the adversary, it takes arms and revives its courage: all the sin in the heart gathers together its force to maintain its standing; like the vapours of the night, which unite themselves more closely to resist the beams of the rising sun. Deep conviction often provokes fierce opposition; and sometimes disputes against a divine rule end in blasphemies. Acts xiii. 45. Contradicting and blaspheming are coupled together. Men naturally desire things that are forbidden, and reject things commanded, from the corruption of nature, which affects an unbounded liberty, and is impatient of returning under that yoke it hath shaken off; and therefore rageth against the bars of the law as the waves roar against the restraint of a bank. When the understanding is dark and the mind ignorant, sin lies as dead: "A man scarce knows he hath such motions of concupiscence in him, he finds not the least breath of wind, but a full calm in his soul; but when he is awakened by the law, then the viciousness of nature being sensible of an invasion of its empire, arms itself against the divine law, and the more the command is urged, the more vigorously it bends its strength, and more insolently lifts up itself against it;"1 he perceives more and more atheistical lusts than before; all manner of concupiscence, more leprous and contagious than before. When there are any motions to turn to God, a reluctancy is presently perceived; atheistical thoughts bluster in the mind like the wind, they know not whence they come, nor whither they go: so unapt is the heart to any acknowledgment of God as his ruler, and any re-union with him. Hence men are said to resist the Holy Ghost, Acts vii. 51; to fall against it, as the word signifies, as a stone or any ponderous body falls against that which lies in its way: they would dash to pieces or grind to powder that very motion which is made for their instruction, and the Spirit too which makes it, and that not from a fit of passion, but an habitual repugnance. "Ye always resist!" - External; it is a fruit of atheism, in the fourth verse of this Psalm: "Who eat up my people as they eat bread." How do the revelations of the mind of God meet with opposition! and the carnal world, like dogs, bark against the shining of the moon! so much men hate the lights, that they spurn at the lanthorns that bear it; and because they cannot endure the treasure, often fling the earthen vessels against 1 Thes. Salmur. De Spiritu Servitutis, Thes. 19. |