Alienation and Reconciliation 2
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C. But as I have shown you the reconciliation of our persons, I will endeavor now to show you the reconciliation of our HEART and AFFECTIONS.
1. The first step toward it is the reconciling of the CONSCIENCE.We know, painfully know, what a guilty conscience is. This guilty conscience, the Scripture calls "an evil conscience" (Heb. 10:22), not because it is evil in itself, but because it testifies of evil to us. Now until this conscience is purged, or purified, by the blood of Christ, there is no reconciliation of the heart unto God. The apostle, therefore, says, "How much more shall the blood of Christ, who, through the eternal Spirit offered himself without spot to God, purge your conscience from dead works to serve the living God." (Heb. 9:14.) We cannot, therefore, "draw near unto God with a true heart, in full assurance of faith," until our heart is "sprinkled from an evil conscience." (Heb. 10:22.) But when by the blood of sprinkling, which speaks better things than the blood of Abel, the conscience is thus purged from guilt, filth, and dead works; when the guilt of sin is removed and pardon proclaimed, then the love of God is shed abroad in the heart, and his mercy revealed to the soul. This guilty conscience is now reconciled, for there is no longer law, wrath, and terror to produce enmity and division.
2. But next comes the reconciliation of the HEART and AFFECTIONS."My son, give me your heart." (Prov. 23:26.) "My heart is fixed, O God, my heart is fixed; I will sing and give praise." (Psalm. 57:7.) "Set your affections on things above, not on things on the earth" (Col. 3:2.) But our heart and affections by nature are alienated from the love of God, ever wandering after strangers, going out after idols, and seeking their gratification in earthly objects. These affections, then, of ours need to be reconciled, that is, brought home, gathered up into the bosom of the Lord, made to flow in sweet harmony with the love of God, so that they may be fixed where Jesus sits at his right hand. But this reconciliation of the affections only flows into the soul with the love of God shed abroad in the heart. Love begets love. "We love him because he first loved us." "The love of Christ constrains us." Thus, when the Lord is pleased to drop a sense of his goodness, love, and mercy into the soul, it constrains us to love him with a pure heart fervently. Without some measure of this heavenly love all religion is but a task and a burden, the wearisome service of a slave, not the loving obedience of a child. But "love is of God, and every one that loves is born of God and knows God. He that loves not, knows not God, for God is love." (1 John 4:7, 8.) Blessed is he then who can say, "We have known and believed the love that God has to us. God is love; and he that dwells in love dwells in God, and God in him." (1 John 4:16.)
3. But as a necessary consequence of this, there will be next the reconciliation of our WILLof that powerful principle in the mind which Bunyan well calls "Lord Will-be-will," for, whether lord or lady, it is the ruling master or mistress, the grand director or directoress of every other faculty; for it is, to use another figure, the motive-power of both soul and body. But in a state of nature, this will, with all its strength and power, with all the train that it drags submissively along, is directly opposed to the will of God. What God hates, it loves; what God loves, it hates. And as this will influences our words and actions, the things which God has forbidden us both to say and do, we both speak and practice. In this state, therefore, our will and God's will are at thorough variance. But what reconciliation can there be unto God inwardly, feelingly, experimentally, as long as our will is opposed to his? In order to be one they must be brought together, to harmonize mutually with each other; and as our will is by nature evil, God cannot and will not change his good into our bad. Therefore our will is to melt into God's will, otherwise we are not one with God nor fully reconciled to him.
But as I cannot do this myself, I need a power to be put forth in my soul to reconcile my will to the will of God, which is and only can be done by the grace of the Spirit showing me what God's will is and constraining me by every godly motive to submit to it. But his will may be in many cases very contrary to my will. The road I may have to travel may be a thorny road, a path of tribulation, temptation, and deep affliction; and things may occur continually which may very much fret and gall my natural disposition, sadly mortify my pride, cut my flesh, and wound my feelings. How, then, under these painful circumstances, my carnal mind still remaining as it was full of enmity and rebellion, is my will to submit to God's will? By the power of his all-sufficient and all-powerful grace melting my will into submission to his!
Is this an impossibility? It often seems so. But did not the Lord say to his apostle, "My grace is sufficient for you." (2 Cor. 12:9.) And is not that grace sufficient for us? Surely it is, if the Lord puts it forth. There is then a reconciling of our will even to afflictions, troubles, and the thorny path of tribulation in which the Lord is pleased to lead his saints. But when their will is thus reconciled to the will of God, then they see that the way in which he is leading them is a right way, though a rugged way, for it is bringing them to that "city which has foundations, whose builder and maker is God."
I have enlarged upon these points to show you more plainly that reconciliation has two very different aspects, which we must keep carefully separated, or we shall get into sad confusion, for we shall confound together the "work of Christ upon the cross" with the "work of the Holy Spirit upon the heart." There is, then, a reconciliation of our persons by the blood of the Lamb, and a reconciliation of our conscience, heart, and will by the inward operations of the Spirit of God, specially as revealing Christ, making him precious, and constraining us, by every godly constraint, to move, walk, and act in the fear and love of God.
It is of the reconciliation of our persons chiefly that the apostle speaks in our text. This is and ever must be the foundation of the other; for it was only because Christ has reconciled us unto God in the body of his flesh, by taking our nature into union with his own divine Person, offering that pure and sacred humanity upon the cross, and then dying as a sacrifice to God's offended justice, that any discovery of mercy can flow into the heart, any peace be experienced in the conscience, or any love be revealed with power to the soul.
But do observe in connection with this how the cross of Christ, the blood of the Lamb, opens a way for the vilest sinner to approach unto God. None of his sins, if he is enabled to believe in the name of God's only-begotten Son, shall be brought against him; they are all cast behind God's back, all washed away in the fountain of atoning blood, all covered by the robe of Immanuel's righteousness. "There is, therefore, now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit." (Rom. 8:1.) But as we feel our lost, undone condition, and get a view by faith, of Christ's blood and righteousness, we want to enjoy the mercy, to live under the sweet manifestations of the grace, and to have our souls brought under the operation of the Spirit, revealing those things with a divine power and sealing them upon the heart with a liberating, saving, and sanctifying influence. Thus reconciliation by the blood of the Lamb is not an unfruitful doctrine or dry speculation, is not a mere article of a sound creed that we may receive upon the testimony of Scripture, but is a truth pregnant with every grace, a tree loaded with gospel fruit, a fountain of all inward and outward holiness.
The more, therefore, that we know of being reconciled to God by Jesus Christ and brought near by the blood of the Lamb; the deeper insight we have into the mystery of the cross, the more freedom of access to God shall we experience and the more shall we rejoice in the hope of his glory. If then a man looks upon these things as a mere speculation, it plainly shows he is not under the teaching of the Spirit. Were the Spirit to bring the blood of the cross into his conscience and the love of God into his soul, he would feel the blessedness of these heavenly truths, and find them a most gracious and blessed fountain of life and peace in his inmost spirit.
III. Now comes our next point, which is PRESENTATION; "to present you holy." We must all one day stand before the judgment bar of God. But how shall we stand before that bar? In our own righteousness or in Christ's righteousness? You know what was the end of that guest who was found at the wedding feast without the wedding garment on. You remember the words which dropped from the master of the feast– "Bind him hand and foot and take him away, and cast him into outer darkness– there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth." Such will be the sentence of the master of the house against all who present themselves before God without the wedding garment. But our blessed Lord, it is said in our text, presents his people "holy and unblameable and unreproveable in the sight of God."
A. If we examine a little more closely this divine mystery of presentation, we may say that on three different occasions the Lord thus presents his people before God.
1. When his people first appeared in him as the chosen members of his mystical body, there was a presentation of the church before the eyes of God as she would shine forth in all her beauty and luster in her future glorified condition.Thus was she lovely in his loveliness (Ezek. 16:14); beautiful in his beauty ("Let the beauty of the Lord our God be upon us," Psalm. 90:17); holy in his holiness ("For both he that sanctifies and they who are sanctified are all of one," Heb. 2:11); and perfect in his perfections ("That they may be made perfect in one.")
2. Again, when he died upon the cross, rose from the dead, went up on high, and sat on the right hand of the Father as her Head, Representative, and Surety in the courts of bliss, then in a mystical sense the ascended Savior presented his Church before the eyes of his heavenly Father, as washed from all her pollution in the fountain of his precious blood, and justified by the imputation of his perfect obedience. Upon this presentation the Scripture especially dwells as a truth so blessedly adapted to our present state as feeling ourselves defiled by sin. Yes even now the saints can sometimes sing, "Unto him who loved us and washed us from our sins in his blood." (Rev. 1:5.) So also the saints are said to have "washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb." (Rev. 7:14.) Thus, in a mystical sense, our blessed Lord presented his people when he went up on high before the eyes of the Father as so washed in his blood, and clothed in his righteousness, that they appeared in him without spot or blemish.
3. And then will come that crowning transaction in the great day, when he will present them before the throne of his Father in all the beauties of holiness, not only as redeemed by his blood but as sanctified by his Spirit, glorious in soul as perfectly holy, and glorious in body as conformed to his glorified image. Then will he be able to say to his heavenly Father as he thus presents them in glory, "Behold, I and the children which you have given me."
B. But as our text speaks of presentation as following upon reconciliation, it is doubtless this last presentation that the apostle means, when he says "to present you holy, and unblameable, and unreproveable in his sight." He seems also in it to direct our thoughts to two different ways in which the people of God are finally to be presented before the throne of the Most High. The first seems to regard their external, the other their internal state.
1. Their EXTERNAL state. First, then, they are to be presented "unblameable and unreproveable."I understand by these words their perfect justification before the throne of God in the great day. For just consider what must be the condition of a man in body and soul for the eye of God to see no fault in him, when in his sight the very heavens are not clean and he charges his angels with folly? What must that man be, or in what state must he stand, to be absolutely without blame before the eyes of infinite Purity? Surely no man can have the presumption to think he can stand before God thus without blame in his own obedience. Have not you, the very darkest and most ignorant among you, sufficient light of conviction in your own conscience to tell you this, so that even you who are without divine teaching are sufficiently convinced of sin to oblige you to flee to some general idea of God's mercy to give you hope?
How, then, can any man who has the light of life in his bosom think for a moment he can stand before the throne of an all-seeing God, unblameable, unreproveable, if he has to stand there in his own righteousness? No! no man can ever stand the scrutiny of a just and holy God if his own good works are his only acceptance. It is only as washed from all our sins in the blood of the Lamb, only as clothed in his spotless righteousness, that we can stand before the throne, as John says, "without fault." (Rev. 14:5.) The holiest man upon earth must sink under the wrath of God if he has no other title than the obedience of his own hands.
2. Their INTERNAL state. But the apostle uses the expression "holy,"which I understand, not merely in the sense of being sanctified by virtue of union with Christ, as "of God made unto us sanctification," but also of that inward holiness which is wrought in the heart by the grace of the Spirit. The apostle bids us in this very chapter "give thanks unto the Father who has made us fit for the inheritance of the saints in light." Thus we see, that there is not only an external beauty in which the church stands as adorned with the wedding robe of Christ's righteousness, but an internal beauty as sanctified by his Spirit. Both of those are expressed in the words of the Psalm, "The king's daughter is all gloriouswithin; her clothing is of wrought gold." (Psalm 45:13.) The clothing of wrought gold is Christ's righteousness; the glory within is her perfect sanctification of the Spirit. These are "the beauties of holiness" in which she will appear. (Psalm 110:3.)
Thus we find, also, the apostle bringing together justification and sanctification, "But you are washed, but you are sanctified, but you are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus and by the Spirit of our God." (1 Cor. 6:11.) Without this inward holiness there is no entrance into the courts of bliss, for without it there is no fitness for them. Can a bird live in the water or a fish in the air? The air is the element of the bird, the water the element of the fish; but each dies outside of its own element. So an unrenewed, unregenerated, unsanctified sinner could not live in the presence of God. The very brightness and splendor, the infinite purity and unspeakable majesty of the God of heaven would kill him; would strike him down to hell as it were with a thousand thunderbolts!
But the question may occur even to one who truly fears God, "Am I fit for heaven? I do not feel to be so; I am not holy, but corrupt and vile." Now we must bear in mind that in this present life our holiness is imperfect; it is not imperfect as regards its nature, but its development. Immediately when the Holy Spirit plants divine life in the soul it is fit for heaven, for he communicates in that divine operation a seed of perfect holiness. Was it not so with the thief upon the cross? On that very day when the Holy Spirit quickened his soul he was with Christ in paradise; as perfectly holy in spirit as ever he will be.
We may compare this seed of holiness, perhaps, to a seed in the husk. The seed germinates and expands, yet it is still surrounded by the husk. But when the husk falls off by the body dropping into the grave, then that seed of holiness which the blessed Spirit has implanted will expand all over the soul, pervading, and, so to speak, fully sanctifying every faculty. And finally, when the body is raised up from the grave in glory in the resurrection morn, both soul and body will be perfectly holy, as being both fully conformed to the glorious humanity of the Lord from heaven. Then will come the glorious presentation of the saints of God before the Father's throne without spot or wrinkle or any such thing.
IV. Now to our last point, which is CONTINUANCE, or, as I before named it, Continuation– "If you continuein the faith grounded and settled, and be not moved away from the hope of the gospel, which you have heard."
A. How personal is the appeal– how direct the challenge! "If YOU continue." All religion must be personal. You may have faith– your faith won't save me. I may have faith– my faith won't save you. I must live for myself; I must die for myself. My religion, to save my soul, must be one wrought in my heart by the power of God. Your religion, if it is to save your soul, must be wrought in your soul by the same divine power. Here, then, is the proof– Continuance, abiding. "He that endures to the end," and he only, "shall be saved." If you have the faith of God's elect, if it be but as a grain of mustard seed, you are saved already in the Lord Jesus Christ with an everlasting salvation. But if you depart from your profession, give up your religion, go into the world, fall into error, abandon the things you professed to love, and return like the dog to your vomit again, and, like the pig that was washed, to your wallowing in the mire, what will it prove? That a saint of God may fall away and perish? No! but that you are not a saint; that you really never received the truth in the love of it by the teaching and testimony of the blessed Spirit; that your faith is not the faith of God's elect, but a mere natural persuasion of your mind, a mere doctrinal speculation. For if were you possessed of a true and living faith, "the end" of it would be, as Peter declares, "the salvation of your soul." (1 Peter 1:9.)
This is the reason, then, why the Scripture lays such stress upon enduring and continuing, not as expressing any doubt whether the true saint of God will persevere to the end, but to show that where there is not this continuance, there the faith is not the gift or work of God, but a mere 'natural belief' of the word of truth, without any application of it with power to the heart. To continue, then, in the faith, and that faith such as I have described as the gift and work of God, is an evidence of it being real.
But sometimes for the past, we may take hope for the future. It may be many years since the Lord first called you by his grace. What has enabled you to continue up to thus day? How has your faith been preserved amid so many temptations and trials, so much internal and external opposition, so many fightings without, so many fears within? You well know that it is not by your own exertions, your own striving, but by the pure grace of God that you still stand. "Having obtained help of God, I continue unto this day" (Acts 26:22), was Paul's language, and will be the language of all who have his faith and his continuance.
B. But observe also that the apostle speaks of their being "grounded and settled,"that is, in the faith which they not only professed but possessed.
The expression "GROUNDED"signifies being firmly built upon the foundation. God has laid a foundation in Zion, even the Person of his own dear Son. To be "grounded," then, is to be firmly built upon this foundation; not only to have a standing upon it but a strong standing.
The word "SETTLED"seems to signify such a settling down upon the foundation as never to be moved off it. You know that a building, say a bridge, must settle before we have any security that it will stand. When the scaffolding of the arch is taken away, it is an anxious time with the architect to ascertain whether the bridge will settle well, and how much.
So in grace– people make a profession, seem to run well, are full of zeal, ardor, and earnestness. But let us wait and see whether they will stand against persecution, temptation, the strength of sin, the corruptions of their heart, and the wiles of the adversary. Sooner or later all will fall into ruin– except those whom the Lord keeps by his mighty power through faith unto salvation. The blessedness, then, of having a living faith is, that the Lord will surely carry on the work he has begun. But how needful it is to examine ourselves whether we be in the faith, and whether by the continued operations of the Holy Spirit we are well grounded and settled upon the Rock of Ages!
C. But the apostle adds another evidence of our being among the number of those whom the Lord will present holy, and unblameable, and unreproveable in God's sight, which is"not to be moved away from the hope of the gospel which they have heard."The gospel, when it becomes the power of God unto salvation to a believing heart, raises up what the Scripture calls "a good hope through grace."
You have heard the gospel for many years from my lips. It is my desire to preach the gospel, and nothing but the gospel, and, if it be the will of God, with the Holy Spirit sent down from heaven, that it may be attended with a divine power to your soul. With God's help and blessing, may I never keep back part of the price, but preach the gospel, the whole gospel, and nothing but the gospel, whether you will hear or forbear.
But when you have received the gospel as a message from God, it has been a sweet sound in your heart, for it has come, not as the word of man, but as the word of God, "in power, and in the Holy Spirit, and in much assurance." You have seen and felt its freeness, its sweetness, its blessedness, its power, for it has at times broken your heart, melted down your soul, softened your spirit. Pardon and peace, light, life, liberty, and love have come with it; and thus as you embraced and felt the power of the gospel in your soul, it enabled you to cast anchor within the veil.
Now if ever you felt this power in your heart, you must never "be moved away from the hope of the gospel;" that is, from the hope in your soul which the power of the gospel has thus raised up. Whatever temptations then assail you, whatever doubts or fears trouble you, never, never give up your hope. By the mighty power of God, in spite of every foe and every fear, you must still believe against unbelief, still hope against despair, still love in spite of coldness, darkness, and death. But you say, "I cannot do this nor any one of them, for I am a poor, helpless creature." So are we all; but Christ's strength is made prefect in weakness. "As your day is so shall your strength be." For remember this, that if you do not "continue in the faith grounded and settled, but are moved away from the hope of the gospel which you have heard," it will prove that you never received it in power.
But so far as you do thus continue, it affords you a blessed evidence that you, who were once alienated, are now reconciled to God. And as you are enabled to believe this, and to feel the comfort of it, it will strengthen you to look forward to that blessed day when Christ will present you to his heavenly Father, not as now, a poor, feeble, wretched sinner, but arrayed in his perfect righteousness, with a body, not like your present, enfeebled by sickness, impaired by age, and encompassed by infirmity, but raised up by the power of God and perfectly conformed to the image of the glorified humanity of his dear Son.
Now if these things are old they must continue to be so, for I have no new doctrines to bring forward; if they are old, the Lord can soon make them new by applying them with new power to your soul, for he sends forth his Spirit, and renews the face of the earth. I need for my own salvation and consolation no new doctrines, but I do want to feel their power more, and live day by day more and more under their influence. And as I hope to live, so I hope to die by these doctrines. I shall desire nothing else upon a deathbed but a sweet experience of God's love, mercy, and truth to support me when my eye strings break, and heart and flesh fail. Then to find the Lord the strength of my heart here, and my blessed portion hereafter will make me willing to yield up to him my departing spirit. I commend this gospel, then, to you with all my heart. You cannot say that you have not heard it from my lips. The Lord bless it to your soul, and seal it with his own heavenly power upon your conscience.
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