Part 25
I confess, I finished my former discourse on this text, with a meditation on death and judgment; how the gloom which hung around the saint in this life, is all dispelled at that blessed hour; and he who was unknown and despised among men, stands forth with honour amongst admiring angels: His hidden manner of life is for ever at an end. But in this discourse the secret and glorious springs of his life, _viz._ God and Christ, will naturally lead us to the same delightful meditations of futurity, as the hidden manner of it has done; and there is so rich a variety of new and transporting scenes and ideas attending that subject, that I have no need to tire you with unpleasing repetition, though I resume the glorious theme.
Let my consolations proceed then, and let the saints rejoice. At the moment of death, the soul may say, “Farewel, for ever, sins and sorrows, and perplexities; farewell, temptations of the alluring, and the affrighting kind; neither the vanities, nor the terrors of this world, shall reach me any more; for I shall from this moment for ever dwell where my joy, my life is. All my springs are in God, and I shall be for ever with him.”—And when the morning of the resurrection dawns upon the world, and the day of judgment appears, the body of a christian shall be called out of the dust, and shall bid farewell for ever to death and darkness; to disease and pain, to all the fruits of sin, and all the effects of the curse. Christ, who is the resurrection and the life, stands up a complete conqueror over all the powers of the grave: He bids the sacred dust, arise and live; the dust obeys, and revives; the whole saint appears exulting in life; the date of his immortality then begins, and his life shall run on to everlasting ages.
Methinks such lively views of death should incline us rather to desire to depart from the body, that we may dwell with Christ. Death is but a flight of the soul where its divine life is. Why should we make it a matter of fear then, to be absent from the body, if we are immediately present with the Lord! Methinks, under the influence of such meditations of the resurrection, faith should breathe, and long for the last appearance of Christ, and rejoice in the language of holy Job: _I know that my Redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth_; Job xix. 25. A christian should send his hopes and his wishes forward to meet the chariot-wheels of our Lord Jesus the Judge; for the day of his appearance is but the display of our life, and the perfection of our blessedness. _When Christ, who is our life, shall appear, then shall we also appear with him in glory_; Col. iii. 4. My thoughts kindle at the sound of that blessed promise, and I long to let contemplation loose on a theme so divinely glorious. If ever the pomp of language be indulged, and the magnificence of words, it must be to display this bright solemnity, this illustrious appearance, which outshines all the pomp of words, and the utmost magnificence of language. Come, my friends, let us meditate the sacred conformity of the saints to Christ, first, in their hidden, and then in their glorious life; as he was on earth, so are they; both hated of the world, both unknown in it. The disciples must be trained up for public honours, as their Master was, in this hideous and howling wilderness, in caves of darkness, or rather in a den of savages. They must follow the Captain of their salvation through a thousand dangers and sufferings; and they shall receive their crown too, and a glory like that which arrays their divine Leader.
O may I never think it hard to trace the footsteps of my Lord, though it be in a miry, or a thorny way! May I never repine at poverty and meanness of circumstance in my present pilgrimage! nor think it strange if the world scorn and abuse me, or if Satan, the foul spirit, should assault and buffet me sorely! Dare I hope to appear in glory, when Christ, who is my life appears; and can I not bear to attend him in sufferings and shame? Am I better than my blessed Lord? What poor attendants had the Son of God, at his first entrance into our world! How mean was every thing that belonged to him on earth! What vile and despicable raiment, unworthy of the Prince of glory! What coarse provision, and sorry furniture, to entertain incarnate godhead! And how impious was the treatment he found among men, and impudent temptations from the same foul spirit! He had snares, sorrows, and temptations, watching all around him: The sorrows of death compassed him about, and the powers of darkness crowded him with their envious assaults; earth and hell were at once engaged against him; they hung him bleeding on a cursed and infamous tree, lifted on high to be made a more public gazing-stock, and an object of wider scorn! Blessed Saviour! how divine was thy patience to endure all these indignities, and not call for thy Father’s legions, nor thy own thunder.
But, this was the hour of thy appointed combat, the place of thy voluntary obscurity, and the season of thy hidden life; and thy saints must bear thy resemblance in both worlds. How unspeakable were thy past sorrows! and thy present glories all unspeakable! How infinitely different were these dark and mournful scenes, from the joys and honours thou hast purchased by those very sufferings! Sacred honours and joys without alloy, which thou art now possessed of as their great forerunner, and hast made ready for thy subjects in thy own kingdom! What robes of light shall array thy followers in that day; What bright planet, or brighter star, shall be the place of thy dwelling? or shall all those shining worlds be mansions of various residence, as thou shalt lead thy saints successively through the vast and numerous provinces of thy boundless dominion? Sorrow, sin, and temptation, shall be named no more, unless to triumph over them in immortal songs. The fairest spirits of light, in their own heavenly forms, shall be the companions and attendants of the children of God. Jesus, the Lord of glory, is their king and head, the leader of their triumph, and the pattern of their exaltation. Jesus shall appear in his meridian lustre, as the Sun of Righteousness in the noon of heaven; yet the beams of his influence shall be gentle as the morning-star. There needs no other sun in that upper world; the Lamb is the light thereof. Jesus, the ornament of paradise, and the delight of God, shall be the eternal and beatific object of their senses, and their souls; they must be _where he is, to behold his glory_.
The blessed God shall dwell among them, and lay out upon them the riches of his own all-sufficiency, riches of wisdom, grace, and power, all-suprising, and all-infinite. Divine power shall then reveal all the glory that has been laid up for them, of old, in the purposes of God, or in the promises of the book of life. But it was fit it should be hidden there, while the time of their probation lasted; it was fit they should live by faith, and under some degrees of darkness, while the ages of sin and temptation were rolling away: It was divinely proper that eternal life should not break forth; nor the splendours of the third heaven be made too conspicuous, till the six thousand years of mortality and death had finished their revolutions round the lower skies, and had answered the scheme of divine counsel and judgment, on a world where sin had entered.
But life and heaven must not be hid for ever. The almighty word, in that day, shall bid the ancient decree bring forth, and the promise unfold itself in public light. What new worlds of unseen felicity! what scenes of delight, and celestial blessings, never yet revealed to the race of Adam! When the rivers of pleasure, that had run under ground from the earth’s foundation, shall break up in immortal fountains.
Mercy and truth shall lavish out upon men with an unsparing hand all those treasures of life which were hid in God, and in the gospel for them. The All-wise shall please himself in making so noble creatures, out of so mean materials, dust and ashes. Glorified saints are master-pieces of divine skill; and the blessed original, or first exemplar of them, the man Jesus, is the perfection of the contrivance of God; here he has abounded in all wisdom and prudence. Then the inhabitants of upper worlds shall see an illustrious and holy creation, rising out of the ruins of this wretched globe, involved all in guilt, and weltering in penal fire. When this scene opens, what sounding acclamations shall echo from world to world, and new universal honours be paid to Divine wisdom! The morning-stars shall sing together again, and those holy armies shout for joy. The grace of God descending to earth, in days past, had in some measure prepared his children for glory: But in that day he shall enlarge their capacities, both of sense and of mind, to an inconceivable extent, and shall fill the powers of their glorified nature with the fruits of his love, new and old.
And what if the limits of our capacity shall be for ever stretching themselves on all sides, and for ever drinking in larger measures of glory; What an astonishing state of ever-growing pleasure! What an eternal advance of our heaven! The godhead is an infinite ocean of life and blessedness, and finite vessels may be for ever swelling, and for ever filling in that sea of all-sufficiency. There must be no tiresome satiety in that everlasting entertainment. God shall create the joys of his saints ever fresh: He shall throw open his endless stores of blessing, unknown even to the first rank of angels; and feast the sons and daughters of men with pleasures a-kin to those which were prepared for the Son of God. For verily he took not upon him the nature of angels, but the likeness of sinful flesh: And when he shall appear the second time without sin to our salvation, we shall then be made like him, for we shall see him as he is. _Amen._
HYMN FOR SERMONS IX. and X. _The Hidden Life of a Christian._
O happy soul, that lives on high, While men lie groveling here! His hopes are fix’d above the sky, And faith forbids his fear.
His conscience knows no secret stings, While grace and joy combine To form a life, whose holy springs Are hidden and divine.
He waits in secret on his God; His God in secret sees: Let earth be all in arms abroad, He dwells in heavenly peace.
His pleasures rise from things unseen, Beyond this world and time, Where neither eyes nor ears have been, Nor thoughts of mortals climb.
He wants no pomp, nor royal throne To raise his figure here; Content, and pleased to live unknown, Till Christ his life appear.
He looks to heaven’s eternal hills, To meet that glorious day; Dear Lord, how slow thy chariot-wheels! How long is thy delay!
Footnote 23:
The bible, of old, was written on several sheets of parchment tacked together, and rolled up in a volume.
SERMON XI. _Nearness to God the Felicity of Creatures._ PSALM lxv. 4.—Blessed is the man whom thou choosest, and causest to approach unto thee, that he may dwell in thy courts. THE FIRST PART.
It was an elegant address that the queen of Sheba made to Solomon, when she had surveyed the magnificence of his court, and heard his wisdom; “Happy are thy men, and happy are these thy servants, who stand continually before thee!” 1 Kings x. 8. And there was much truth and honour in her speech. But the harp of David strikes a diviner note; Blessed is the man whom thou choosest, O God, that he may approach unto thee, and dwell in thy courts, in the holy sanctuary.
Whether, in these words, the Psalmist blesses those levites and priests, whose duty it was to attend the ark, and to dwell near the tabernacle, or whether he pronounces blessedness on every man of Israel, whose habitation nigh the ark gave him frequent opportunities to attend at that solemn worship, is not very necessary to determine. Either of these may be called dwelling in the courts of God. But it is most probable, that the sacred writer designs the second sense of the word, and that he includes himself in the desire or possession of this blessedness, though he was neither a priest nor a levite; for he uses the same phrase in several places, and applies it to himself; Ps. xxvii. 4. _One thing have I desired of the Lord, that will I seek after; that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life._ Ps. xxiii. 6.—_I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever._ By which he intimates, that he would seek the most frequent opportunities of approaching God in public worship.
It is sufficient to my present purpose, that the holy Psalmist makes the _blessedness of man_ to depend upon his _near approaches to God_.
Here we should remember that God is necessarily near to all his creatures, by his infinite knowledge, by his preserving and governing power: _He is not far from every one of us: for in him we live, and move, and have our being_; Acts xvii. 27, 28. But the privilege which David speaks of in my text, is a _peculiar approach of a creature to God_, which is a fruit of divine choice and favour. The souls who enjoy this blessing are chosen to it, and by divine providence and mercy are _caused to approach him_. What further explication of this phrase is necessary, will be sufficiently given in the following parts of the discourse.
Let this then be the doctrine which I shall attempt to confirm and improve, _viz._
Doctrine. Nearness to God is the foundation of a creature’s happiness.
This may be proved with ease, if we consider, what it is that makes an intelligent being happy: and how well such an approach to God furnishes us with all the means of attaining it. The ingredients of happiness are these three: 1. The contemplation of the most excellent object: 2. The love of the chiefest good: 3. And a delightful sense of being beloved by an all-sufficient power, or an almighty friend.
1. The contemplation of the most excellent object. And he who is nearest to God, has the fairest advantages of this kind. The understanding is a noble faculty of our natures; truth is its proper food; and truth, in all the boundless varieties and beauties of it, is the object of its pursuit, when it is refined from sensualities.
This is the delight of the _philosopher_, to search all the hidden wonders of nature, and pursue truth with a most pleasurable and restless fatigue: For this he climbs the heavens, traces the planetary and the starry worlds: For this he pries into the bowels of the earth, and sounds the depths of the ocean; and when, with immense toil of mind, he has found out some unknown natural truth, how are all the powers of his soul charmed within him, and he exults, as it were, in a little paradise!
But the souls who are admitted to draw nearest to God, contemplate infinite truth in its original. They converse with that divine artificer, who spread abroad these curtains of heaven, who moulded this globe of earth, and furnished the upper and the lower worlds with all their admirable varieties. He is a God of glory and beauty in himself, as well as the author of all the beauties of nature. All his perfections, as well as his works, yield heavenly matter for contemplation: He eminently contains in himself all the amazing scenes of nature, and the more transporting wonders of the world of grace; those mysteries wherein _he has abounded in all wisdom and prudence_: How the ruined sons of Adam were rescued from death, by the Son of God dying in their stead; how Satan was baffled in his most subtle designs, and the deepest policies of hell undermined, when the prince of darkness destroyed his own kingdom, by persuading men to put the Son of God to death.
What a divine pleasure is it to converse with that wisdom which laid the eternal scheme of all these wonders, and of ten thousand more unknown beauties in the transactions of providence and grace, with which the blessed minds above are feasted to satisfaction! And besides all these God has reserved in himself a hidden world of new scenes to open hereafter, and an everlasting profusion of new wonders to display before the eyes of his favourites. Heaven is described by _seeing God_, by _beholding him face to face_, and by _knowing_ him in the way and manner in which _we are known_; 1 Cor. xiii. 12. And he is pleased to indulge some taste of this felicity to his children in this life, by mediums and glasses, by types and figures, by his word and ordinances, under the enlightening beams of his spirit. This is the _beauty of the Lord_, for the view of which David desired to _dwell in_ the sanctuary; Ps. xxvii. 4, that he might see the power and glory of God continually, as he had sometimes seen it there: that he might behold his beauty, and talk of his glorious goodness in his holy temple. O _how great is his goodness! and how great is his beauty_; Zech. ix. 17.
But contemplation alone cannot make a creature happy: This only entertains the understanding, which is but one faculty of our natures: the will and affections must have their proper entertainment too. Their beatific exercise may be comprized in the word love, either in the out-goings, or the returns of it: And this leads me to the following
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II. The next ingredient of a creature’s happiness, is, the love of the chiefest good. And those _whom God chooses, and causes to approach himself_, when they are under divine illuminations, see so much beauty and excellency in his nature, his power and wisdom, and so many lovely glories in his overflowing grace, that they cannot but love him above all things; and this love is a great part of their heaven. What sweeter pleasure is there in this lower world, than to give a loose to the affectionate powers of the soul, to converse with the most amiable and most desired object, to feed upon it without ceasing, and to dwell with it perpetually? But the most relishing enjoyments of this kind that mortality admits of, in the pursuit or possession of created good, are but faint and feeble shadows of the blessedness of holy souls in the love of God, who is the most amiable, and the best of beings: Therefore _they love him with all their heart and soul, with all their mind and strength_; and if they had more powers in nature that could be employed in love, they should all be laid out in the search and fruition of this first and best-beloved: for there are endless stores, and treasures of unknown loveliness in the godhead, to excite and entertain for ever the fresh efforts of the most exalted love. But for me to know, and to love the best of beings, cannot make me completely happy, unless I am _beloved_ of him also, and unless I _feel_ that he loves me. Happiness requires mutual love.
III. The third ingredient therefore of our felicity, and that which perfects the blessedness of a creature, is, the delightful sense of the love of an almighty friend. To know, to love, and to be beloved by such a being, must complete our bliss; one who hath all beauty, and all goodness in himself; one who can free us from every pain, secure us against every peril, and confer upon us every pleasure. This is the perfection of our heaven, when all these are enjoyed in a perfect degree, without any alloy. Now such is the state of those who _are chosen and caused to approach unto God_, so as to know him, and love him; that they have the chiefest advantages to obtain the assurance and taste of his love. The man whom the Psalmist pronounces blessed in my text, hopes for this pleasure in _the house of God_, that he shall be _satisfied with the_ divine _goodness_ there.
The _loving-kindness_ of God is life, or something _better than life_; Ps. lxiii. 3. and to have a sensation of this loving-kindness, is to feel that I live. To think, to know, and to be assured that I am beloved, by an all-sufficient power, _who can do more_ for me _than I can ask or think_, in life, and death, and in eternity, and to have pleasing and spiritual sensations of _this shed abroad in the heart_; this raises the christian near to the upper heaven, while he dwells on earth, and he _rejoices with joy unspeakable, and full glory_.
Some may object here and say, Is it no part of our blessedness then to love the saints, to rejoice in their love, to contemplate the works of God, and his wonders in creation and providence? Answer, Yes surely; and we have allowed it before: But when we take true satisfaction in any of these, it is as they proceed from God, as they relate to God, and lead our souls to centre in him; for God, who is the first cause, must be the last end of all, and no creatures, as divided from him, can make us either holy or happy.
I proceed to make some improvement of the few thoughts I have delivered on this subject.
I. My first reflection should be upon the scale of blessedness, or the several degrees of felicity that creatures are possessed of, according to their advancing approaches toward God: But my meditations dilate themselves here to so large an extent, as makes it necessary to adjourn this thought to the next discourse. I proceed therefore to the