SERMON LIX (2)

What this beholding him imports, comes next to be considered, under our second general head.

And here I take it for granted, that it cannot imply a beholding the Lord Jesus in person with our bodily eyes. It is true, indeed, when John called upon the people and his disciples to behold the Lamb of God, they were thus highly favoured: and we are apt to say within ourselves, Blessed are the eyes which saw what they saw; and so undoubtedly they were. But had their views terminated only in beholding his person, or knowing him barely according to the flesh, they might notwithstanding have died in their sins, and been condemned to depart from him into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels.—Our Lord himself hath told us, that there will be many who will plead that they eat and drank in his presence, and heard him preach in their streets, to whom he will say, “Verily I know you not.” A true beholding of the Lamb of God, must therefore necessarily import something more; and what can that be but a beholding him with an eye of faith? This is what the Old Testament saints were invited to, when the glorious Redeemer called upon them in those emphatic terms, “Behold me, behold me;” and again, “Look unto me, all the ends of the earth.” This our Lord in another place terms, believing on him: “Blessed are they which have not seen me, and yet have believed:” not barely as the result of a mere rational conviction, which is no more than an historical faith, but as the consequence of a true spiritual conviction of our being every way undone, and liable to eternal condemnation without him. This is believing on him with the heart, and is sometimes expressed by coming to, receiving, and trusting in him: different expressions, but all importing one and the self same thing. “I wound, and I heal.” That is the method the Holy Ghost takes, and that is the pattern gospel ministers must follow in preaching him. From any other, though prescribed to us by an angel from heaven, good Lord, deliver us!

But secondly. By beholding the Lamb of God, we are to understand not only looking to him so as to trust him for the pardon of our sins, but beholding him so as to have our hearts broke with a true and godly sorrow for having crucified and slain him by them. For thus speaks the Lord by the mouth of the Prophet Zechariah, “They shall look upon him whom they have pierced, and they shall mourn for him, as one that mourneth for an only son, and shall be in bitterness for him, as one that is in bitterness for his first-born.” This prediction was in some degree fulfilled immediately after the descent of the Holy Ghost, in the days of Pentecost, when so many being pricked to the heart, were made to look to, believe on, and lament over a pierced Jesus. But it will be continually fulfilling in the experience of every true beholder of the Lamb of God, till time shall be no more. True faith, at the same time as it opens the heart to receive Christ, melts and dissolves it into tears of godly sorrow, for having betrayed and crucified him. Such were the tears of Mary, when she washed the feet of her sin-forgiving Lord. They flowed from a sense of pardoning love. She loved much, having much forgiven her. And though she knew the Lord had forgiven her, yet she could not forgive herself. Hinc illæ lachrymæ. Hence those repenting tears: they proceeded from love: sorrow, flowing from any other principle, is not a godly, but a legal sorrow, which the most abandoned wretch may have without the least degree of saving grace. Thus we hear of a Judas his repenting, and of an Esau crying out with an exceeding bitter cry; but the one all the while was a prophane person, and the other immediately went and hanged himself. And why? Their sorrow was only extorted by a fear of hell, and a despairing sense of impending ruin. It is true, a godly sorrow may, and I believe generally does, begin with something of this nature; but then it does not end there. Through want of a due consideration of this, it is to be feared, many seeming converts have taken up with a few legal convictions, which never ended in savingly and truly beholding the Lamb of God. May none here present, by a half-way repentance, and hypocritical sorrow for sin, add to the unhappy number!

But this is not all. A scriptural beholding of the Lamb of God, denotes not only such a relying on Christ for pardon of sin, as is attended with a truly godly sorrow for it, but such a believing on him, as is productive of a holy life, and a universal chearful observance of all his divine commands. When the two disciples mentioned in our text, heard John speak, we are told that they followed him, viz. the Lord Jesus Christ. And if God hath given us an hearing ear, when called upon to behold the Lamb of God, we shall certainly have an obedient heart, and follow him in the way of holy obedience. But then it will be an obedience flowing from love: A working not for, but from life. Not out of a servile fear of being damned, but from a grateful sense of having received the beginning of salvation in our hearts. And this is what the Apostle calls “faith working by love.” Many, I know, censure and look upon us as troublers of Israel, for preaching up the doctrine of justification by faith alone in the imputed righteousness of Jesus Christ. We own the charge. We do preach, and hope shall continue to preach it, till we can preach no more. Luther stiles it, Articulus stantis aut cadentis ecclesiæ; the article by which the church must stand or fall: and in the ninth article of our own church, it is termed, a most wholesome doctrine. Take away this, and you take away the only solid foundation upon which a truly weary and heavy-laden sinner can possibly build his hopes of pardon and acceptance in the sight of a holy and sin-avenging God. But why this outcry against the doctrine of justification by faith alone? They say this doctrine destroys good works. But do we, by preaching this doctrine, make void the law of God? No: We thereby establish the law. For, though faith alone justifies, yet, as the good old Puritans used to observe, That faith which is alone, justifieth not. Agreeable to this, speaketh the 12th article of our Church. “Albeit that good works, which are the fruits of faith, and follow after justification, cannot put away our sins, and endure the severity of God’s judgment, yet are they pleasing and acceptable to God in Christ, and do spring out necessarily of a true and lively faith, insomuch that by them a lively faith may be as evidently known as a tree is discerned by the fruit.” They, therefore, who object against our insisting upon justification by faith alone, as destructive of morality, not only betray great ignorance of the articles of our Church, and of God’s word, but give too great reason to suspect, that they never experienced the blessed influence of a true and lively faith in their own hearts. For true and undefiled religion, is nothing more or less, than a universal morality, founded upon the love of God and faith in Christ Jesus. And a true beholding him as pierced for our sins, will, in its own nature, sweetly compel us to cry out, “What shall we render unto the Lord?” It was this, that, perhaps, in a quarter of an hour, made that covetous worldling Zaccheus, give half of his goods to the poor; it was this, that all of a sudden made the Jailor wash the stripes of those whom he had but a little before thrust into an inward prison; it was this that caused Lydia, whose heart the Lord had opened, so freely to open her house to entertain the Apostles; and it was this that excited the Apostles themselves in general, and St. Paul in particular, to bid adieu to worldly honours, to glory in nothing but the cross of Christ, and to fly like an arch-angel from pole to pole, publishing the blessed and everlasting gospel. “The love of Christ, said he, constraineth us.” Preaching faith in this manner, seems to me the only scriptural way of preaching Christ: and by this means we shall steer a middle course between two dangerous extremes. For to insist only upon morality and good works, and not lay a true lively faith, as a foundation whereon they are to be built, (as it is to be feared too many do) is to act like Pharaoh’s task-masters, and bid people make brick without shewing them ♦where to get straw. “My soul, come not thou into their secret!” On the other hand, to call upon people to believe in, and behold the Lamb of God, and at the same time not exhort them to maintain good works, as an evidence and fruit of their beholding him, is the way to turn the grace of God into lasciviousness. And therefore, however evangelical such preachers may seem in their own eyes, yet if the writings of Moses and the Prophets, of our Lord and his Apostles, are to be our judges, they do not rightly divide the word of truth. “To their assembly, mine honour, be not thou united!”

Once more. A true beholding of the Lamb of God, implies such a beholding him, as will transform us into his divine likeness. This will be the effect of our seeing him as he is in heaven; and this, in its degree, will always be the consequence of our beholding him with an eye of a true and lively faith on earth. When Moses came down from mount Horeb, where he had been conversing with God, we are told, that his face shone; and if we have been upon the mount of ordinances beholding by faith the blessed Lamb of God, though our faces will not shine, yet our hearts will be moulded into his blessed image. This is what the Apostle Paul terms, in one place, “Being transformed by the renewing of our minds;” and in another, “Passing from glory to glory, even by the Spirit of the Lord.” All manifestations, of whatever kind or degree, if not attended with this transforming and truly sanctifying influence, are unprofitable, delusive, or merely imaginary. Balaam could call himself the man whose eyes were open, and the man who had seen the visions of the Almighty, and yet he was a poor worldling all the while. He loved the wages of unrighteousness, though forced by God not to receive them. Hence we may easily and rationally account for the falling away of some, and it may be the final apostacy of many others, who in the late religious stir, (as some are pleased to call it) seemed to be uncommonly gifted, and to be lifted up, as it were, to the third heaven. Satan being sensible that the Holy Spirit of God was working a great work upon the earth, turns himself into an angel of light, introduces his extraordinaries, and thereby mimics God’s true work now, as the magicians were once permitted to mimic the real miracles of Moses formerly. Such counterfeits, those who are not ignorant of Satan’s devices, ought from time to time to add all diligence to search out and detect; but after the utmost caution imaginable, I believe we shall find the saying of a very zealous Reformer (who thought, at his first coming out, that he should convert the whole world) to be too true, viz. “That old Satan will be, in many cases, too hard for young Melancthon.” Satan is an old practitioner, and we, comparatively speaking, but novices; and therefore no wonder, that we sometimes mistake his extraordinaries, for the powerful operations of the Holy Spirit; or look upon those, at least for a while, who are only stony-ground hearers, and have received the word with joy, as though they were truly converted to, and had by a living, soul-transforming faith, beheld the Lamb of God. Such mistakes may serve to make us more cautious. But to condemn a work in the lump, as merely delusive and diabolical, or roundly to affirm, that all the pretended subjects of it have taken up only with an ideal Christ, because some have mistaken imaginations for the true spiritual manifestation of God’s love to their hearts, discovers such an ignorance of scripture, of Satan’s devices, and the accounts given us of past revivals in all ages, that if one did not know the dreadful blindness of a bigotted sectarian zeal, and what a proneness there is in the best of men, to condemn every thing that doth not come just in their own way, we should think it morally impossible that good men should run such lengths as some have done of late, in censuring what I think may be called, amidst all the infirmities and weaknesses that have attended it, A great and glorious work of a God.