A SERMON
SHOWING-
THAT MAN WAS CREATED UPON THE FOUNDATIOH
■
ETERNAL REDEMPTION;
A.XD ALSO,
EXPLANATION OF THE MYSTERY
EVIL AND GOD.
BY
LOVICK PIERCE, D. I).,
OF THE SOUTH GEORGIA I gi'Hl'EK BSCE.
MACON, GA.:
J. W. BURKE & CO., PRINTERS, STATIONERS AND BINDERS.
1870.
—
A SEKMON
SHOWING
THAT MAN WAS CREATED UPON THE FOUNDATION
OF
ETERNAL REDEMPTION;
AND ALSO,
AN EXPLANATION OF THE MYSTERY
OF
EVIL AND GOD.
BY
LOVICK PIERCE, D. E.,
OF THE SOUTH GEORGIA CONFERENCE.
MACON, GA.:
J. W. BUBIIE & CO., STATIONERS, PRINTCRS AND BINDERS.
1870.
PREFACE.
The following views I submit, at the earnest request of many of my
friends who have heard me on several occasions on the Eternal Counsels
and Purposes of the Everlasting Godhead, respecting man. It had long
seemed to me, that there was somewhere a link wanting in the mysterious
chain of events binding man and God together, so as to justify the ways of
God to man. And the old Calvinistic views of God's relation to man, were
only more perplexing. In this very unpleasant dilemma, I determined to
examine the whole ground, presented as faith-ground to man's inquiring
mind, for it was most certain to my reason, that God intended to be
understood in this revelation of Himself.
And although I am, perhaps, not the man to fully unfold this mysteri¬
ous volume, yet I am fully satisfied, that, with my soundings, some
greater man will bring my little ship safe to the harbor of truth.
That the counsels and purposes of the Godhead were all graciously
provisional in reference to man, explains the whole gospel scheme of
salvation. THE AUTHOR.
SERMON.
" Who hath saved us, and called us with an holy calling, not
according to our works, hut according to his own purpose and
grace, which was given us in Christ Jesus before the world
began ;
But is now made manifest by the appearing of our Saviour
Jesus Christ, who hath abolished death, and hath brought life
and immortality to light through the Gospel.''7
II Timothy, i. 9, 10.
As Moses was significantly ordered to put his shoes from
off his feet, as he approached the mysterious burning bush at
Horeb, because the ground on which he stood was holy, so
do I intend to approach, in my humble way, the sublime
mysteries of the eternal counsels of the Everlasting God¬
head, the co-equal and co-eternal Father, Son and Holy
Ghost, and with the modesty which any humble minister of
Christ should feel when proposing to expound to others the
great mystery of godliness—God manifested in the flesh.
And while listening, from the vestibule of this sanctuary of
oracular responses, I hear one inspired apostle premonishing
the church, that in the epistles of another inspired apostle
are some things written by him on these very counsels and
purposes, settled in the Godhead from eternal years before
creation's date, hard to be understood, which the unlearned
and the unstable wrest, as they do also the other Scriptures,
to their own destruction. These things, however, are only
hard to be understood. They are not impassable bounds to
the mind. They can be understood. But they are the very
Scriptures which unlearned and unstable ministers and lay¬
men wrest, as they do also the other Scriptures. This work
of wresting the Scriptures is not charged here as a willful
corruption or perversion of these difficult passages, but as
6
Sermon on II Timothy, i- 9, 10.
the result of ignorance and instability. I am bound to say,
from my long experience, that the Scriptures, especially these
Scriptures, can not be understood by the unlearned. But I
do not allow that the "unlearned" embraces all but the few
thoroughly educated men who engage in the work of exposi¬
tion of the Scriptures. But the " unlearned " embraces all
who are not educated in the principles of safe Scripture exe¬
gesis, which I understand to be the explanation of Scripture
by Scripture. The Bible is its own commentary. Hence
the damage done to the faith by the renowned schools of the-
ology, has been done by the dogmatic assumption ot the
denomination ruling in the school, that its doctrines are the
doctrines of truth, and these doctrines having been wrought
up into standard works of theology—as that denomination
understands theology—these works are placed in the hands of
theological students just as Blackstone would be in the hands
of a student of law. And assuming the doctrines taught in
the standard works to be the doctrines of the Bible, of course
the Bible is studied, not to see that the doctrines taught in
the text books are fairly deduced from it, but simply to sus¬
tain the doctrine maintained in the text books. Of course,
to whatever extent this school of divines may have mistaken
the sense of any mysterious utterance of God, these mis¬
guided students in theology will wrest it, which really means
wrench it, from its proper place in theology, and will press
it into another sense. He that offers anything to others, as
arising from his text, but what the mind of the Spirit put in
it, is a novice.
Well did St. Paul say to Timothy, "Study to show thy¬
self approved unto God, as a workman that needeth not to be
ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth, which is the
word of God." This right division of the word of truth,
Paul held, could not be compassed without study; and this
study must never be to make the Bible prove any doctrine or
dogma, but solely to ascertain what the Bible does teach as
doctrine.
All I have heretofore written is merely to prepare my way
for a more successful approach to the venerable citadel of
predestinarianism. Its ancient towers must not be foolishly
Sermon on II Timothy, i. 9, 10. 7
assailed. They are believed, even by minds of vast capacity,
to have been built of Scripture material; and this would, I
apprehend, have been my opinion, if it had not been that
those Scriptures which seemed to fit very nicely into those
Calvinistic towers, would not, according to my common sense,
at all fit into the revealed aspects of God's character. I was
therefore repelled from entering into these castles of defense.
I am glad now that I am eighty-five years old, that I took
time to survey and re-survey these fortifications.
I have been very much aided in my research by Peter's allu¬
sion, as above quoted, to Paul's writings. Two orders of men
wrest the Scriptures—-the unlearned and the unstable. Now,
while it is true that the doctrines I seek to demolish have been
believed and defended by learned men, it may also be true,
that those very men may have been unlearned, in the sense
in which Peter used the epithet, that is, as to a right under¬
standing of Scripture. It is well known that in the ecclesi¬
astical college I refer to, in olden times its religious curriculum
was eminently predestinarian. Every child was raised up to
believe that God, for his own glory, had ordained all things—
whatsoever cometh to pass. This had, at best, only a qualified
strand of truth in it. It was true as far as it applied exclu¬
sively to the eternal purposes of God in Christ, as to manner,
time, place, and special issues, which depended alone upon
the good will of Plis pleasure, and no further. But these
predestinarian disciples were educated to believe that what¬
soever cometh to pass was ordained to come to pass, and that
God might have prevented it if he would. Of course, all
who believed in this sort of predestination read the Scrip¬
tures only to support this dogma. They had, of course, to
unlearn all they had falsely learned in theology, before they
could cease from wresting Paul's hard-to-understand Scrip¬
tures. My doctrine is, that whatever a man learns wrong,
he is unlearned in, and he must of necessity do violence to
all sound principles of interpretation to support his erroneous
views.
The conclusion is a natural one, that as Peter refers to
" the other Scriptures also," meaning some which Paul did
not write, he alludes doubtless to Paul's quotations from
8 Sermon on II Timothy, i- 9, 19.
the Old Testament concerning the hardening of Pharaoh s
heart, the loving Jacob and hating Esau, and the potters
power over the same lump of clay to make one vessel to
honor and another to dishonor, all of which, as read by an
iron-clad predestinarian, must teach the lawless exercise of
power on the part of God, because the exercise of power in
this way is indispensable to his conception of sovereign grace ;
and his idea of sovereign grace bestowed on the elect, just
because God would bestow it, underlay all other doctrines.
Of course, if in the exercise of sovereign grace God ordained
some to everlasting life, just because he would do it as a sov¬
ereign Lord, so also he must have ordained others to ever¬
lasting wrath, just because he would do it. For the moment
predestinarians drop out this idea "just because he would,"
the bubble of sovereign grace explodes, and the mind gravi¬
tates to the more complacent conception of God in Christ,
providing salvation for all on condition of faith. I do not
misstate the faith of every full-blown predestinarian. In all
their catechisms this is a cardinal item, that God did all these
sovereign deeds for his own glory. This expression, thus
used, I object to as being unsound, because it antagonizes the
declaration that God sent his Son into the world that the
world, through him, might be saved. But if this dogma of
Calvinism is true, then there never was provision in the
atonement whereby the lost might have been saved. And yet
reason itself determines, in spite of prejudice, that no human
soul can ever be justly lost, unless it might and ought to have
been saved, in accordance with God's pleasure. God declares
that he has no pleasure in the death of the wicked; and in
reference to the causes of his pleasure they have always been
the same. If the death of sinners now is repugnant to God's
essential nature, it is certain he will never sentence any soul
of man to perdition except for refusing to believe in the name
of the only begotten Son of God, who died for him, and in
this unbelief there could be no moral guilt, except it takes
its demerit from rejecting an offered Saviour.
But it is time I should venture an opinion upon those things
in the writings of St. Paul himself, which Peter said were
hard to be understood. These hard sayings, I readily infer,
Sermon on II Timothy, i. 9, 10. 9
are those which the Spirit itself indicated as the only phrases
that could convey to us an adequate idea of the Father's eternal
purposes of grace in Christ Jesus our Lord, so as fully to
sustain the truth, that all the purposes of God in Christ
Jesus were eternal purposes, which I beg my readers to keep
constantly in mind as the polar star on my voyage in search
of truth. These things in the writings of St. Paul were
hard to be understood, because they were used in reference to a
provisional scheme of mercy toward man which existed in the
purpose of God, through Jesus Christ, in the eternal years
which preceded the actual incarnation of God's everlasting Sou.
These came out in the.writings of St. Paul, not because he
was more fully inspired than Peter, James and John, but
'because he was emphatically a chosen vessel unto Christ, to
bear his name unto the Gentiles, and kings, and the children
of Israel. Acts, ix. 15. And he speaks of himself as hav¬
ing been set for the defense of the Gospel, which special
commission must have meant much more than the mere
preaching of the Gospel. Accordingly, we find nearly all of
his writings are defensive in their character, especially the
Epistles to the Romans, Galatians, Ephesians and Colossians.
In these writings we find this apostle defending the Gospel
by an evangelical explanation of the Abrahamic covenant in
its ground of justification by faith only, and in its inclusion
of Gentiles, in its ample fold of covenant mercies and secu¬
rities, notwithstanding the narrow prejudices of the Jews,
which rendered this review of the Abrahamic covenant neces¬
sary in order to show, that the calling of the Gentiles was
but the revelation of a mystery which had been hid in God
from ages—thus carefully securing the idea of God's eternal
purpose in Christ Jesus against all vague notions of there
being new conceptions and purposes in the mind of God,—
which please note.
I argue, then, that it is illogical to draw general conclu¬
sions from terms or phrases used by St. Paul in reference
to special issues, arising under the eternal purposes of the
Father, through his eternal Son; or to the special provisions
in the Abrahamic covenant, that in Christ, as the true seed of
Abraham, should all the families of the earth be blessed.
10 Sermon on II Timothy, i. 9, 10.
This was being most gloriously fulfilled in a manner which
proved the time to be an epoch in the order of God's eternal
purpose. This especially made the terms employed by Paul
a lingual necessity, such as "foreknown," "predestinate,"
" election," " the called according to his purpose," the being
"chosen in Christ before the foundation of the world," and
God's "working all things after the counsel of his own
will." I confess that minds biased by church catechisms,
doctrinal discourses, and belief in eternal decrees, might with
apparent ease reach some of the conclusions adopted by sin¬
cere Calvinists. But Peter here calls to mind the danger of
misconstruing some of Paul's writings as being difficult to
be understood, for the reason that their true meaning is not
seen if construed in a general and indefinite sense, but seen
only when construed definitely in reference to divine pur¬
poses—alluded to in God's own way, in promises, prophe¬
cies and covenants. According to the rule of Scripture
exegesis, nothing is ever to be taught for Scripture doctrine
which is presumptuously or inferentially pressed out of a few
isolated sayings of doubtful meaning, when there are other
terms of unequivocal meaning denying such import, as pre¬
sumption and inference might set up.
We will now explain some of those Scripture terms which
have been wrested from their simple import. " Foreknowl¬
edge " is one of these abused terms. Even in my times, all
those holding the predestinarian faith associated foreknowl¬
edge in God with their favorite idea of his eternal love,
which (in their faith) could only be shown in the eternal
election of some to everlasting life. Of an eternal provision
for all, so as to render the destruction of our race in Adam
avoidable, by creating man upon an eternal purpose to
become incarnated, in which the divine nature was to be
revealed—God manifested in the flesh—of this view, they
neither saw nor felt any enthusiastic love, which was a very
unfavorable religious symptom. It really betokened a selfish¬
ness which is apalling. They were all Antinomians. "Once
in grace, always in grace," was their hobby. And, unwit-
ingly as I suppose, but very naturally as all will see, they
sloped down this inclined plane, insured for everlasting life,
Sermon on II Timothy, i. 9, 10. 11
as they assumed it to be, with boastings of carnal joy, because
they dressed themselves up in a vague idea of the imputed
righteousness of Christ, in which they imagined God always
looked at them, so as to see them sober in Christ, when they
were drunken in themselves.
I will speak of foreknowledge first, as we find the word
in Acts ii., in Peter's sermon on the day of Pentecost. There
he declares, that Christ was not crucified as other malefactors
were—by force—but emphatically was delivered to death,
" by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God,"
which means, that he died because he came to die; died in
fulfillment of an assignment made of him, in the determinate
counsel and foreknowledge of God. That Christ laid down
his life, is the anchor truth in this divine economy. Hence,
Christ said to his disciples, foretelling his crucifixion, that
no man took his life from him, but that he laid it down of
himself; that he had power to lay it down and power to take
it up again. This taking it up again was to be the insurance
of our faith in him, as the veritable son of God. Therefore,"
Paul admits, that the truth of our preaching and the value
of our faith depend upon the truth of* Christ's resurrection,
at the instance of his own will. Bright was the moment
when two of his lately saddened disciples could say to the
others, " Christ is risen indeed." This determinate counsel
and foreknowledge of God in the death of Christ, finds an
easy solution in the simple fact, that God could not be made
manifest but by incarnation, nor his love of man displayed,
except by his taking on himself human nature, as he intended
to produce it in its creation, and in which he intended to die
for it in its fallen and helpless state, as the unanswerable
proof, that God is love. That God foreknew that man would
fall is undeniable, and that he, therefore, made him in full
view of his fall, and provided for it, it is only reasonable to
believe.
Yet there is neither good sense nor truth in the mischievous
conclusion, that the Creator either ordained or designed the
fall of man; or that his foreknowledge of it had anything
to do with the freedom of man's will, that was at all adverse
to its responsible agency. The text we are disabusing of
12 Sermon on II Timothy, i. 9, 10.
these unnatural ideas of God, only says, that Christ was
delivered to die upon the determinate counsel and foreknowl¬
edge of God, which puts us upon our guard against the puny
idea, that the scheme of redemption Avas an after-thought in
the mind of God, wherein he merely showed his skill in
meeting an emergency. Such a view of God would minify,
rather than magnify his wisdom. But in these peculiar texts
of Scripture, God, by his own Holy Spirit, has revealed to us
such features of himself as to extricate us from the dangerous
wilderness through Avhich the mind might fail to travel safely
when trying to settle questions, on the mystery of God and
evil. This perplexing pathway, I maintain, is made easy in
the \dews herein submitted.
I next consider foreknowledge as referred to in 1 Peter, i. 2.
" Elect, according to the foreknowledge of God the Father,
through sanctification of the Spirit, unto obedience and sprink¬
ling of the blood of Jesus Christ." Believe this text of all
the mists of error with which predestinarian prejudice has
enveloped it, and interpret it by the general sense of Scrip¬
ture upon the subject of provisional redemption, and it is as
clear as an unclouded day. This is the reason why, in so many
places in the New Testament, an interest in Christ, as a
Saviour in the purposes of the Godhead, always antedates all
other acts in the Godhead, whereof this is reported as the
primary and principal one. Peter, speaking of the precious
blood of Christ as of a lamb without blemish, says, " who
was verily foreordained before the foundation of the world,
but was manifested in these latter (fays." 1. Peter, i. 19, 20.
These passages—of which there are many—are all designed
to teach us, that the first movement in the mind of the God¬
head, amid the cycles of eternal years, contemplated incarna¬
tion for the work of redemption. It is, therefore, said of
Christ in the aggregation of his creating powers, that he
himself is before all things. "According to the foreknowledge
of God the Father," therefore, cannot be applied to any other
doctrine than that God the Father forekneAV everything con¬
nected with or growing out of this, his eternal purpose, in
Christ Jesus, in view of the incarnation.
Nor could any other view of the passage ever have been
Sermon on II Timothy, i. 9, 10. 13
taken, if it had not been for false notions of divine sovereignty,
and of eternal election by sovereign grace, which amounts
to nothing more, in this view of it, than sovereign caprice, a
transaction in the Godhead, without reason or rhyme to pro¬
voke it, except the display of sovereignty, an idea as unworthy
of God as it is unlike him. But having fallen upon this idea
of eternal election by sovereign grace, it became necessary to
build up a theological fabric in general agreement with this
nucleas idea; wherefore, the unelected were disposed of as
vessels of wrath, fitted for destruction, upon whom God was
represented as pouring out his wrath in order to make his
power known. And after these predestinarian believers had
settled upon the idea of an eternal election of a part of man¬
kind to everlasting life, to believe in what they called " final
perseverance," was a necessity; for it would have been
absurd to believe that God had chosen his own people unto
everlasting life, upon the security of his eternal love, the
choice resting entirely upon this elective love, without be¬
lieving likewise in the infallibility of the elect. Absolute
election is obliged to be irrespective of all conditions and
contingencies. For the moment you admit there are inter¬
vening conditions in order to an election, and supervening
contingencies controlling its final issue, that moment you deny
any such election, as hardshell Calvinism has always held.
It is true, there is electing love and predestinating acts alluded
to in the New Testament. But a careful exegesis ought to
satisfy every one that in these Scriptures it was the mind of
the Spirit to set right and to keep right the mind of the
Church, on all of those things which had their origin, and
were to find their completion, only in the issues which were
provided for " after the counsel of his own will." Hence
all those Scriptures which an unguarded predestinarian might
quote in support of his eternal election scheme, such as,
" according as we were chosen in him before the foundation
of the world " has no more reference to his idea of a possi-
tive, eternal personal election of A— passing over B—, than
they have to a common municipal election. This passage
means, that in the perceptions of the eternal mind, according
to the provision of which God made all estimates, he never
14 Sermon on II Timothy, i. 9, 10.
chose any one except in Christ Jesus, and all were chosen in
Christ Jesus before the foundation of the world; for he was
before all things, not merely as God, but as Jesus Christ our
Lord. Not one was chosen in Adam, but even Adam him¬
self was chosen in Christ before the foundation of the world.
He was made upon Christ's credit, or else he had not been
made at all, as we will hereafter prove. All that is said of
God's foreknowledge of events, depending on foreknowledge
for their certainty, is confined with scrupulous care to those
things with which God, in the counsels of his own will, had
charged himself.
Personally, no child of Adam had any more agency in his
transgression than it had in his creation. All this being
foreseen, or if it is preferred foreknown, was provided against.
Common sense says, that progeny could not have been allowed
Adam after the fall, but on the basis of atonement. Atone¬
ment could not be made by the guilty party, but it had been
provided for in the eternal purpose of incarnation. Progen-
itively, all mankind were contained in Adam. He was em¬
phatically, because designedly so, the man-seed. In him all
fell, because he was the seed-man. In this state and stage
of our existence, redemption took us up. Therefore, we were
redeemed as a race, in the seed-man. And it was as impos¬
sible for any child of Adam to be born without the benefit
of redemption, as it was without the injury of the fall. They
of course run together. Paul, however, in Roman v, main¬
tains that the blessings bestowed through Christ did, in some
way, exceed the injuries inherited by the fall. On this point
more hereafter. I will only now say, that our redemption
as a race in Adam, renders the idea of election or limited
redemption exceedingly absurd. Indeed, the universality of
the atonement is everywhere spoken of as what must be, if
atonement is at all made. So it was done in its symbolic
preface in the annual atonement of the Jews.
But before passing away from this foreknowledge question,
I must further consider its bearing upon the strangers scat¬
tered abroad, whom Peter salutes as God's " elect." This
relation was " according to the foreknowledge of the Father,
through sanctification of the Spirit unto obedience and sprink-
Sermon on II Timothy, i. 9, 10. 15
ling of the blood of Jesus Christ." The question then is,
were these persons elected before they were regenerated, or
were they elected because they were regenerated according to
the foreknowledge of God the Father ? This is the question
which the structure of the passage must determine. If the
salvation of these elect was made certain upon the basis of
absolute election, then, in so far as their salvation was guar¬
anteed by their eternal election, they were saved in their
sins. And it is vain for any believer in this eternal, personal
election to demur. For if the election of God's children
into this relation to him depends at all upon the moral
changes subsequently to be experienced, their election was
not eternal, but conditional, and depending on such spiritual
agencies and results as Peter specifies. This is our opinion,
and their election according to the foreknowledge of God the
Father, is so stated, because all the foreknowledge of the
Father, as revealed to us in reference to human salvation,
was through Jesus Christ, his everlasting Son. In this view
of it, the election of these scattered saints, according to the
foreknowledge of the Father, is quite a different thing from
what it would have been if their election had been in any
effective sense by the foreknowledge of God. If eternal elec¬
tion was, according to the Calvinistic edition of it, absolutely
by foreknowledge, then God, from all eternity, determined
to elect to life eternal a definite portion of our race, and it is
held by that creed that he did so, by personal selection—for
in a case of this sort selection must precede election—and that
he ordained all the means of their conversion, and the time
when it should occur, and based his foreknowledge of his
numerical hosts upon what, in other perceptions of things
occurring, would be foreknowledge upon count, with the
sovereign determination, as soon as the roll of his chosen was
filled, to shut down upon the rest of mankind. If these pre¬
sentations of Calvinism are not overdrawn, then its steadfast
defenders must prepare to sustain all these absurdities, or
give up their conclusion as the offspring of texts wrested from
their original sense.
I will pass on now to the only other passage of Scripture
in which God's foreknowledge is used in reference to the
16 Sermon on II Timothy, i. 9, 10.
scheme of redemption, in order to show its utter perversion
by a wrong apprehension of what is predestinated. For the
fact, that God did predestinate something in the issues of
gospel calling, invests the term, "predestinate" with eternal
interest to the Church. This passage is Romans, viii, 29.
" For whom he did foreknow." The question is, to whom
did the apostle allude, the Jews or the Gentiles? And the
answer will be—the Gentiles ; and the reason of the phrase
was, because the apostle being the apostle of the Gentiles,
and set for the defence of the Gospel, was arguing, from the
promises and provisions of the Abrahamic covenant, the
right of the Gentile converts to come into the fellowship of
the saints without circumcision or ceremonial rites. This
defence of the divine economy, as provided for and promised
in the Abrahamic covenant, rendered it imperative in Paul's
argument in favor of the calling of the Gentiles, to say just
what he did say, as the inspired reporter of the mind of the
Spirit in this portion of divine revelation. For let me remind
you now, that it is everywhere manifest in these Scriptures,
in which God is declaring his own counsels and the issues
arising thereupon, that he never gives any reason for his ac¬
tion but the good pleasure of his own will. How strange it
would look, even to our minds, if the sovereign of the uni¬
verse, in making a revelation of himself to man, and of his
times and seasons wrhen he would inaugurate an event as
epochal in the moral history of the world as the calling of
the Gentiles "into the mystery of the fellowship" wTas,
should explain his movements as if he were accountable to
his obliged creatures as men are to men. No, my brethren,
he must speak as God, as one having authority. So he did
speak. Hence the apostle of the Gentiles, in defending their
call into this fellowship against the false notion of the Jews,
"was compelled to show them that it was no innovation upon
the principles of Abrahamic covenant, but only a bringing
out by express revelation what had been hid in God from
ages and from generations, but was now revealed unto his
holy apostles, which was, in its sum, that the Gentiles should
be fellow heirs with Jewish Christians; that they were the
very people intended when the Lord promised Abraham
Sermon on II Timothy, i. 9, 10. 17
that he would make him the father of many nations. In the
way of natural descendants, this was impossible; and the
whole communication satisfies me that it was to his honorable
title, the Father of the Faithful, that this promise looked.
Abraham became a sort of spiritual progenitor of the race of
believers. He was the first man, in my opinion, that ever
believed in the Lord exactly in the order of gospel faith.
Wherefore, by way of eminence, he was called the father of
the faithful, as monumental and prophetic of the great
truth, that God was in Christ reconciling the world unto him¬
self, and as an eternal offset against all ritualism. Abraham
was a Gentile at the time he believed the Lord, and his faith
was counted to him for righteousness. That is, his faith took
hold on the Lord our righteousness, so as to be equal to
legal innocence, inasmuch as Christ, in the divine economy,
is the end of the law for righteousness to every one that
believeth. Abraham was never titled a Jew, I judge, until
after he was circumcised. Circumcision was, in the Jewish
line and in the Jewish Church, a sacrament of covenant obli¬
gation. It was therefore a duty that this sign of the covenant
should be affixed to the children of covenant obligees. It
never was intended, in the divine economy, that parents in
covenant with God should bring up children as Gentiles
" without God in the world," and the phrase here is used in
reference to an unbound state. And it is impossible for be¬
lieving parents to bind their children to the service of God,
without some covenant sacramental bond. And this must
be imposed in the order ot God, and children must be im¬
pressed with the belief, that they are put thus by divine
arrangement into covenant relation with God. Abraham,
however, was counted as an adult Gentile, because God could
not enter into covenant with a child; not even with Isaac,
although so significantly a promised child. But he did enter
into covenant with Abraham, and that in full view of the
promised son, who was evidently objectively included in the
covenant sacrament of circumcision, because in Isaac his seed
was to be called. In all these things, which I understand
were being worked out after the counsel of God's own will,
I see the commencement of the organic church of God, built
b .
18 Sermon on II Timothy, i. 9, 10.
upon Christ, its chief corner stone. The church in the wil¬
derness was the original church of God, familiarly called the
Jewish Church. Abraham believed, and was justified by
faith as a Gentile, that is in uncircumcision. But fourteen
years afterwards he was ordered into circumcision, as the
head of this covenant compact, and at the same time as head
and chief thereof, he was ordered to affix this sign of the
covenant upon his household, and upon his children.
St. Paul's allusion in this passage, then, is to the promi¬
nent place given to the Gentiles in the promises of the Abra-
hamic covenant. It was of this making of Abraham a father
of many nations that St. Paul said : "For whom he did fore¬
know, he did predestinate to be conformed to the image of
his Son, that he might be the first born among many breth¬
ren." By blood he could not be the father of many nations.
It was, therefore, in the sense in which he came to be called
" the father of the faithful," that he was the father of many
nations. He was the first man who ever believed in the
Lord by simple faith, and therefore the first to whom faith
was ever counted for righteousness in the Gospel acceptation
of the term. To Abraham, Christ, in his Old Testament
title, preached the Gospel.1 See Gal., iii. 8. Abraham's
faith was Gospel faith. In him, in this sense, were all the
families of the earth to be blessed. The privilege of being
justified by faith, without works, is the blessing primarily
intended. It is the blessing of Abraham coming upon the
Gentiles also. Paul, in answering his own question, affirms
that he was the God of the Gentiles as truly as he was of
the Jews, but this truth could not be thus asserted except
upon the purpose and the promises set forth in the Abrahamic
covenant. The Jews, in their nationality and in their eccle-
siasticism, had been a "peculiar people." But now Christ
had abolished in his flesh the enmity, even the law of com¬
mandments contained in ordinances, to make in himself of
twain one new man, so making peace, which never could
have been done if mannerism, mere mode of doing a thing,
had been made an ordinance. It was the law of command¬
ments, contained in ordinances, that Christ abolished in his
flesh, that is, by his sacrifice of himself. The Gentiles being
.Sermon on II Timothy, i. 9, 10. 19
in his covenant of grace, as long before stipulated for, could
not be otherwise referred to than as the people whom God
had foreknown. These he did not personally predestinate
either to happiness or misery, but he did predestinate them to
be conformed to the image of his Son, which is really one of
several forms of speech used to express the entire regeneration
of the/human soul.
We come now to offer our views of those passages where
"predestinate" is emphatically used. That in Romans, viii,
we have already seen, never did support the views of old
iron-clad predestinarianism, the election of some, the passing
by of others. As it regards the death of sinners—meaning
their eternal death, which eternal passing by provides for, and
that at the instance of God's own will—God has sworn upon
the truth of his own existence, that it is impossible to the
will of his good pleasure. The idea of God having done
any thing in his eternal counsels, the natural, outright work¬
ing of which is to lessen the chance of human salvation, to say
nothing of shutting any off by predestinating some to ever¬
lasting life, and leaving the remainder as he found them, is
slander against God's provisional love. His acts of predes¬
tination, as mentioned by St. Paul, all refer to the economy of
this salvation as a scheme, or else to its unalterable conditions
and requirements. In this passage is his predestination of
the Gentiles to the Gospel call, and of the terms of their sal¬
vation, subjectively considered. They were predestined to
be conformed to the image of God's Son as the rule of their
Christian fellowship. Therefore he called, justified and glo¬
rified Gentile believers as he did Jewish believers, putting
no difference between them. But after the favors so freely
bestowed on the Jews in their covenant blessings, to see the
Gentiles so easily and readily converted, with nothing to
commend them, did indeed need some justification. This
justification had been provided for in the justification of
Abraham by faith without works, and the predestination of
all the nations of the earth to enjoy the same privilege, that
is, to have their faith counted to them for righteousness. The
people thus provided for were the people whom God did
foreknow, and having provided salvation for them, he sent
20
Sermon on II Timothy, i. 9, 10.
his Gospel to them, with its fullness of grace and every
blessing. He did actually predestinate them to be conformed
to the image of his,Son, that his Son might be the first born
among many brethren. He is to have the pre-eminence in all
things as his divine right, and hlways to have it. But the
honor secured to him in this divine act of predestination
finds its complement in the fulfilment of the promise made
to Abraham : " And in thy seed shall all the nations or fam¬
ilies of the earth be blessed." Paul says Christ was this
seed. His becoming, then, the first-born among many breth¬
ren does not refer to believers numerically considered, as much
as to believers divinely considered. Christ's brethren are
out of every kindred and tongue, people and nation. So, as
Abraham, the human party to this covenant grace, became,
by his faith, the father of many nations, so did God's ever¬
lasting Son, who entered into covenant with Abraham, and
made him by the eminence of faith, while he was yet a Gen¬
tile, the father of the faithful, become himself the first-born
among many brethren. And still further, it may be that the
first begotten and the first-born, in the profound tongue of
heaven, may be of one meaning. If so, my view of revealed
truth in the premise is the trtith as it is in Jesus, which is,
that God's eternal purpose to become incarnate was the em¬
bryo conception of humanity. How sublime is the utterance—
and he is before all things, and by him all things consist!
This work of predestination is again called into notice in
Ephesians i. 5, but precisely in the same line of issues, that
is, in reference to the moral and spiritual changes indispen¬
sable to the consummation of mercy's final aim. As a part
of a great whole in God's eternal conception of human sal¬
vation, Paul says: " Having predestinated us to the adop¬
tion of children by Jesus Christ to himself, according to the
good pleasure of his will." Here the easy common sense
meaning of the passage is, that this predestination refers
alone to the decree of heaven in these premises, that except
a man be born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.
Wherefore, when Paul was mapping out upon the canvas of
revelation the eternal purpose of our redemption, and the
employment of instruments and of agencies in its effectua-
Sermon on II Timothy, i. 9, 10. 21
tion, it was impossible to make the good pleasure of God's
original will apparent without just such mediums of thought
as we have herein displayed. Of what avail could all the
grand parade of the cross be to us, or the minutiae of divine
foreknowledge, if it was not that God has ordained changes
and provided energies equal to the changes to be wrought,
and decreed our privilege in the necessary preparation ? The
predestinarian creed holds that these words mean that God
had predestinated some to be adopted as children, whereas the
words only mean, that he has ordained the adoption of chil¬
dren as an indispensable part of the plan of salvation.
Believers are not made children by adoption, but are adopted
because they are children. In their justification they receive
the Spirit of adoption, whereby they cry, Abba, Father. The
whole process of regeneration is given in these comprehensive
words: " For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, they
are the sons of God." And I may justly add—none others.
Alas! my Spirit-grieving friends, you will fail to be sealed by
the Holy Spirit of God against the day of redemption—the
day of .eternal judgment. No other seal but the seal of the
Spirit will pass you into heaven.
It was i# view of all this divine conception of human sal¬
vation by grace, through faith, offered freely and fully to
Jew and to Gentile, that Paul spoke of all believers as being
chosen in Christ before the foundation of the world, having
been predestinated to the adoption of children by Jesus Christ,
as their gracious privilege. God never chose any to his eter¬
nal favor except in Jesus Christ.
Again in verse 2, predestination comes in, in the same cate¬
gory, but here it is used in special reference to the Jews. No
doubt Pentecost was an epochal point in the dates of Gospel
times, and Paul reckoned from the converts of that mem¬
orable day, when he said, "In whom we have obtained an
inheritance, being predestinated according to the purpose of
him who worketh all things (meaning all these things) after
the counsel of his own will: that we (meaning Jews) should
be to the praise of his glory, who first trusted in Christ."
The main idea in all this stupendous conception of man's
redemption, is God's purpose to do it, and the bringing in of
22 Sermon on II Timothy, i. 9, 10.
all those collateral issues as parts of his eternal purpose in
Christ Jesus. Accordingly, proof is abundant that God did
ordain that this universal Gospel should first be preached $t
Jerusalem—the ancient seat of his divine manifestations, and
now the salient point of his Gospel triumphs, as the word
was about to go forth from Jerusalem, and his spiritual king¬
dom to receive its grand inauguration there. Hence, these
converts obtained their inheritance there, being predestinated
to this inheritance according to the purpose of him who
worketh all these things after thQ counsel of his own will,
and having in his own purpose determined to bring off this
glorious culmination of prophesy and of promise at Jerusa¬
lem at that time. It was true that they obtained an in¬
heritance because the time, and place, and manner of their
conversion, were all collateral issues of God's good purpose.
The controversy is not whether , there was any predestination
of events in the future of God's eternal purpose concerning
man's redemption and the Gospel dispensation, for these are
acknowledged facts, but whether there was any unconditional
election of some to life everlasting, and rejection of others
to endless woe. We say unconditional. This is the only
question. For the moment a predestinarian admits that be¬
lievers, as believers, are predestinated to everlasting life, as
the consummation of a wise and gracious economy of condi¬
tional salvation, and unbelievers predestined even to hell's
unquenchable fires and deathless worm, only as unbelievers,
he surrenders the whole question, in as far as logic, philosophy,
or sound theology, are involved. We all admit that the
ordinances of eternal life and of eternal death are as eternal
as the eternal purposes of God through Christ Jesus. But
they are issues of righteousness predicated of the equity of
redemption, as contrived and executed at the expense of the
Godhead alone, in view of making us voluntary beneficiaries
of offered salvation—for I affirm that the equity of eternal
death could never be vindicated under the government of
God upon any less a sin than the rejection of a Saviour, just
as he declares : "Ye would not come unto me that ye might
have life."
That God did not send his Son into the world to condemn
Sermon on II Timothy, i. 9, 10. 23
the world, but did send him into the world that the world,
through him, might be saved, he has intentionally declared.
The being lost can only occur, justly, as consequent upon the
privilege of being saved. This provisional arrangement, of
which we come next to speak, is so complete and perfect in
its adaptation to man's wants and God's justice, as to justify
the following finality : " He that believeth ismot condemned;
but he that believeth not, is condemned already ; because he
hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of
God." It is by faith, thus understood, that believers are
saved ; and by unbelief, thus practically persisted in, that
sinners are lost. But unbelief could not be thus fatal, but
because it is avoidable ; and it cannot be avoidable, unless
its wretched victims might be saved by practical faith,
through Jesus Christ our Lord.
After all these preliminary observations, we come to our
finishing summary of redemption's eternal conception, and
most glorious consummation.
The text itself is sermon enough, if it be fairly analyzed.
It sets out with the declaration, that we were neither saved
nor called according to our works, but are saved and called
according to God's own purpose and grace, which were given
us in Christ Jesus before the world began. The plan of sal¬
vation, therefore, did not arise upon some necessity that did
not exist in God's foreknowledge of it, if he carried out his
purpose to create man, which he was predetermined to do, in
full view of all that would occur, and, of course, in full view
of all the consequences therewith connected, and of the final
issues arising thereunder. Of course, faith is shut up to the
conviction that God saw it best to create man, although in
Adam he foresaw the fall. But it could not have been best
to create man on the line of a race by progenitive genera¬
tion, unless, by the incoming redemption, man's condition, as
a moral agent on trial, could have been made better and
safer by redemption than it could be by creation. This, as
Paul argues, could be, and accordingly is, made certain in
the benefits of the atoning merit in Christ, crucified for sin
and uncleanness. Therefore God, upon his own judgment,
and according to the counsel of his own will, did determine
24 Sermon on II Timothy, i. 9, 10.
to create the world, and all that therein is, with man as
its crowning glory, and its everlasting justification. And as
all this stupendous fabric was, from eternal time, designed to
be the theatre of incarnation, it was made not only by him,
but most emphatically for him. And it is a soul-stirring
fact, and a soul-cheering truth, that upon nothing that God
made in the work of creation, did he set his heart of love
but upon man. Even as far back as the days of Job, when
the glimmerings of a brighter future unveiled in prospective
expectation some movement on the part of God, in man's
behalf, the enchanted patriarch said, " What is man, that
thou shouldst set thy heart upon him, and that thou visitest
him every morning, and triest him every moment ?" What
a tide of thoughts rush upon my mind! What is man, sure
enough? Of such vast moment that God must create him,
arid of such infinite value that he would not risk his immor¬
tal interests upon life's trial-trip, until he was insured against
its perils by the mercy and grace which were given us in
Christ Jesus before the world began. But it could not be
given us before the world began, except in a provisional sense,
and in whatever sense it was given, in God's purpose, before
the world began, in that very sense do we hold our interest
in it this very day. It is in the sense of provisional satis¬
faction. If we accept it, we are accepted as sinners justified.
But if we reject it, we are ourselves rejected, and fall exactly
where we would have been, if we could have been allowed a
birth at all after the fall—that is, already condemned, being
under a broken law, with no propitiatory sacrifice to relieve
our condition—fallen into the hands of the living God.
I offer nothing as mere opinion. All will seem certain,
either by necessary implication or legitimate inference. There
are expressions in the Scriptures, occurring in this connection,
which come to us with a God-like majesty, such as: the time
is fulfilled • the kingdom of heaven is at hand; when the
fullness of the time was come, God sent forth his Son ; and
again, in the dispensation of the fullness of the times; in all
of which we are taught to see that God reigns supreme—
absolutely supreme—in regard to times and seasons, which
he has kept in his own power, because the sovereign control
Sermon on II Timothy, i. 9, 10. 25
of them, while it diminishes nothing from the moral freedom
of man, greatly magnifies the natural majesty of God. Paul,
in magnifying the riches of grace in the calling of the Gen¬
tiles, as perhaps the very dispensation of the fullness of the
times, says, " it is to the intent that now, unto the principali¬
ties and powers in heavenly places, might be known by the
church the manifold wisdom of God, according to the eternal
purpose which he purposed in Christ Jesus our Lord." What
is called the manifold wisdom of God, is so called because it
moved majestically forward through a period of forty centu¬
ries, filling up all the time a programme written in the
Father's eternal purposes in Christ Jesus.
And now commences my pathway through the intricate
counsels of the everlasting Godhead. And here let me say,
once for all, that there have always existed in the Godhead,
the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, no more, no less.
And the intelligible revelation of this sublime mystery to
angels and to men, was the eternal motive in the Godhead
for the creation of this material empire of God, and man, its
princely lord. Indeed, allow me modestly to suggest that
whatever we have gained in knowledge and in faith-ground by
the sensible and visible, we have gained by the mystery of
incarnation. God manifested in the flesh was the only alter¬
native. And "in the flesh" is sublimely emphatic. It
means our identical flesh, human flesh, as God intended to
produce it in creation. This was, no doubt, a part of the
Father's eternal purpose in Christ Jesus. The flesh, and its
lofty kind, chosen as the medium of divine incarnation, was
the eternal ideal of humanity, as sketched in the everlasting
mind of God, and as projected in his conception of it. Do
not look upon it as meagre or trite, when I say there were
other organizations of flesh, abounding in beauty and in vigor;
but it was only in our flesh that God could be manifested in
the flesh. To my mind, it seems more divine to conceive of
humanity as a living type of God's eternal purpose to mani¬
fest himself in the flesh, than it does to conceive of his pur¬
pose to assume our flesh, as the medium of his incarnation,
subsequently to his eternal purpose to create man, as his
original conception of humanity. And if I am right in tlfls
26 Sermon on II Timothy, i. 9, 10.
order of divine conception and purpose, then I am very sure
that my interpretation of the words, " Let us make man in
our own image," is in agreement "with their primary sense,
which was, " let us make man in the image of our future
manifestation in the flesh, a sample of the race for pffiich
incarnation is to be the mean and medium of atonement for
the sin of the race which is to follow." Hence Christ was
seen in apocalyptic vision, as a lamb slain from the founda¬
tion of the world.. What was to be a fact in the eternal
purpose, through Christ Jesus, was of equal value in its sav¬
ing efficacy in every age of the world. I argue that the
original conception of man was in the eternal purpose of in¬
carnation. Nor"can I see how any ingenuous mind can dis-
• sent. That the eternal purpose, in Christ Jesus, constituted
the programme of divine procedure in reference to our race,
and that whatever was indispensable to its consummation was
a part of the eternal purpose, are conclusions of sound logic;
and, of course, incarnation was a part of the Father's eternal
purpose, through Christ Jesus our Lord. This brings us to
the simple conclusion that to create man was also a part] of
this eternal purpose, and that too with the knowledge that
man would immediately fall from his primeval rectitude into
a condition where nothing but grace could save him, through
faith, and where all the grace in mercy's store could do noth¬
ing unless awful legal difficulties could be safely provided
against. He proceeded to create man, but all, doubtless, ac¬
cording to his eternal purpose, in Christ Jesus our Lord. I
am aware that some feeble minds will flinch a little in cross¬
ing, over the gulf spanned by my bridge, especially as they
will think they can see some Calvinistic timbers in its frame¬
work. To these I wish to say, that I cannot build without
using some of their timber, in so far as language goes. But
I d(f not build after their model at all. Where they put
together with bolts of predestination, I dovetail with prophe¬
cy, or promise, or with the sure clinch of God's own purposes
concerning his own plans of consummating his own counsels. .
It must be apparent to every reflecting mind, that man
would never have been created at all, if it had not been upon
the basis of God's eternal purpose in Christ Jesus;, so that,
Sermon on II Timothy, i. 9, 10.
27
as I read it, man was not made as if to give the Creator an
opportunity to redeem him if he chose to do it, but he was
made because, in the counsels of the Godhead, he was re¬
deemed. There was nothing risked. That-old predestina-
rian idea of a covenant between the Father and*the Son,
especially in so far as it rested on the vague conceit that the
covenant was entered into as the best that could be got after
the fall, and of the question of meeting an emergency being
an open one in the counsels of the Godhead—finally dis¬
posed of by the purchase of the elect, as the remuner¬
ation for the Son's condescension to die for them—-and of
the Father's bond of the gift of them to the Son, with infalli¬
ble security against all mishaps, is the most absurd conceit
that ever found favor outside of a maniac's mind, or of an
idiot's dream. It reduced all the story of God's free gift
of his only begotten Son to die for sinners, to a very mysti¬
fied mercantile transaction.
Nor can we relieve the case by going back into the years
of eternity, and imagining the Father and the Son pros¬
pecting the future of a race of immortal beings not yet
brought into existence, and reading, with unerring foreknowl¬
edge, their strange fortune in the fall of their original pro¬
genitor, whereby all the children would cotoe into existence
with a depraved nature, inherited, not made by personal de¬
falcation, placing them all, therefore, in their involuntary
relation to God, exactly upon the same level. Anything like
this supposed covenant between the Father and the Son, in
which a multitude among such creatures, without any merit,
were chosen to eternal life, and another multitude of them,
without any demerit rendering them less worthy of divine
commiseration, were left like driftwood upon a rushing cur¬
rent, to float away from God and heaven forever—God justi¬
fying himself by saying to the wailing soul, "I do thee no
harm; I only left thee where I found thee—O, fallen spirit."
I say, for one to charge God, whose essence is love, with
being a party to a covenant of such senseless shape as this
would be, is a religious lunatic or an indurated bigot. Before
it, blushing reason puts on a veil. But it is due to this cov¬
enant idea to say, that a covenant between the Father and
28
Sermon on II Timothy, i. 9, 10.
the Son is an absurd idea. A covenant cannot be made ex¬
cept where fallibility is a possible occurrence. Here it was not.
The Godhead was a unit in man's redemption. To make
man or not to make him may be regarded, in so far as mere
abstract right is involved, perfectly optional with God. But
as he, in the exercise of this option, did make man, it only
remains for us to rest satisfied that, in his unerring wisdom,
he determined it to be better to make man than to leave
man's place in this mighty empire an unhallowed void. And
he did make man—made him in full view of all that has
befallen him by the way. But not before he had, according
to his own purpose and grace which were given us in Christ
Jesus before the world began, made everything as secure as
it could be in view of man's moral accountability. The
abuse of his freedom the Creator could not prevent, and
leave man either capable of moral obedience, or a member of
a high and distinctive order of being. To have done this,
would have been virtually to uncreate. All, however, that
the Creator could do, by creation, was done when he launched
humanity upon life's endless flood. It is true, that when
we consider Adam as the vessel freighted with his race, and
o # \
all invested with immortality, we pause with breathless
anxiety, and when we see the stately vessel go down at the
first little bar thrown across its track, we naturally exclaim,
"is all lost?" But when we examine the records of the
Creator's will, we find that long before the vessel of humanity
was launched upon life's flood, insurance was taken, in the
counsels of the Godhead, against everything like irreparable
damage.
As we have already argued, we set down the purpose to
create man, and the purpose to be incarnated, as of the same
category in the eternal counsels and purposes of the Godhead.
Man's creation was a part of the eternal purpose, and it in¬
volved incarnation and crucifixion, to fulfill the eternal pur¬
pose of man's redemption. It was a matter one might have
looked for, that when the hour of his creation came, it would
be celebrated with a notice which showed his august lineage".
This was accordingly given. a Let us make man in our own
image," shows that it was a work of the Godhead counsels,
Sermon on II Timothy, i. 9, 10. 29
no mere creation, but a casket in which immortality was to
dwell, as in an earthly temple, a being whose lungs were to
be ?hflated first by the breath of God, because he was des¬
tined to become a living soul. All other breathing animals
drew their breath from the surrounding atmosphere, and so
would Adam, if it had not been for his living-soul destiny.
Man, being made in the image and likeness of his Creator,
he was perfect in the order of his kind. With reverence we
say it, his Creator did his best on him, and pronounced him
superlatively good, on his review of him. He endowed him
with a positive ability to stand in his lot, and with only
a negative ability to sin and fall. This difference de¬
serves our maturest thought. A mere negative ability to
sin, when actually evoked into sin, makes the sinner more
inexcusable, and the law-giver more vindicable, even where
vindication might be needed. But here it is not. Man must
be created able to sin, or unable to obey. Even with God
there was no alternative.
In man's creation, the Creator not only verified his own
goodness, in making man sinless and pure, but his kindness
and sympathy for him, by the small levy made on him, in
attestation of his obedience. It could not have been put
lower or made easier, and have been any requisition at all.
It was as simple as restraint could be. It consisted in refrain¬
ing from eating fruit off a certain tree, growing in the midst
of the garden—a garden which, I trow, beggared all other
gardens, over which evening zephyrs ever laded their wings
with fragrance. Withal, I have no idea that the fruit on
this test-tree was invested with any novelty. It was just
such fruit as Adam and Eve had celebrated their nuptial
love upon, perhaps only the day before. It asked nothing,
save to be let alone out of obedience to the Creator's injunc¬
tion, the sound of which had hardly died away when the
deed was done. Here let me say, that as the Creator could
not fill this part of his creative programme without blending
the animal along with the spiritual life for awhile. It may
furnish us with important views of moral relations, that even
in man's innocency, restraint was laid upon animal appetite,
as the door of entrance into sin.
30 Sermon on II Timothy, i. 9; 10.
Although man was thus carefully made and well en¬
dowed, he was doubtless made with the perfect foreknowl¬
edge that he would immediately sin and fall; and yet he*was
not made to fall; neither was his fall ordained ; nor yet was
his volition given him as a snare. He was as perfect in his
moral structure as he was in his physical. But he could not
have been thus perfect without the capability to sin. His
obedience was to be a voluntary, reverential obedience, as a
creature, to his Creator's behest. Keep away from eating this
forbidden fruit, and you will know only good ; but if you
approach, and take and eat, you will know evil. And so the
guilty pair did come to the knowledge of evil. They ate the
forbidden fruit.
But a few words on probationary existences. It is at least
presumable that a state of trial is indispensable to all crea¬
tures made to serve their Creator in holy obedience and rev¬
erential adoration. Hence we are satisfied that angels were
placed upon trial, as we learn some of them kept not their
first estate, but rebelled in some way against heaven's high
. and holy Monarch, and were cast down to hell, in chains of
everlasting darkness. This issue could only follow upon re¬
bellion, and rebellion upon trial. It is likely that the pro¬
bationary age of the angels has long since passed, and that
they are all confirmed in God's great angelic ministry. If
any one should inquire why fallen angels were not redeemed,
we answer, because they were individual existences. To
them belonged no progenitorship. They represented no de¬
scendants. They stood by themselves, and they fell by them¬
selves. But not so with Adam. If he fell, being the seed-man,
his issue must be of the same germination. Him fallen, his
issue must be, also. Hence the Son of God did not take on
him the nature of angels, but he did take on him the seed
of Abraham, which means the seed of man, generically con¬
sidered, but called the seed of Abraham, canonically consid¬
ered, because it was with Abraham that this Lord of the
Old Testament entered into covenant, promising him that in
his seed, meaning himself, in the genealogy of his human
nature, should all the families of the earth be blessed. And
so he tasted death for every man.
Sermon on II Timothy, i. 9, 10. 31
The great mystery of evil and God, which has so long
troubled inquisitive but bewildered minds, is, after all, suscep¬
tible of an explanation, which, to us, is easily understood.
The determination of God to manifest himself in the flesh,
and to create the flesh in which he intended to make himself
manifest, we perceive to have been co-existent in the eternal
counsels of the Godhead. The consummation of these coun¬
sels was to be through Jesus Christ our Lord. Herein I
learn, by implication, that the eternal purpose of the Father,
through his eternal Son, included the creation of man, be¬
cause it is not meet to think of incarnation aside from its ne¬
cessity, and we cannot think of eternal purposes to be per¬
fected through Jesus Christ, except as we contemplate him
in his effectual incarnation and crucifixion as a propitia¬
tory sacrifice for sin. In a word, let me assure you, my
friends, that you will always limp on your imperfect feet of
faith until you place Christ on earth, in your estimate of him,
where divine • revelation places him, as the Eternal Word,
which was with God, aud which was God. It was God the
Redeemer who was the Creator. Much is meant when it
said that this world was not only made by Christ as God,
but also for Christ as God. I do not believe this world would
ever have been made, if it had not been needed as the theatre
on which God was to be manifested in the flesh. Nor do I
believe that God could ever have been revealed in the entirety
of his character, either to angels or to men, except by incar¬
nation and crucifixion, not for friends, but for enemies. His
dying for sinneps, unobliged by outward forces, demonstrated
to angels and to men that God is love. Ten thousand angel
trumpeters, all flying through our heavens, and proclaiming
" God is love," could never have created a millionth part of the
soul-sustaining sense that God is really love, as one moment
in the garden of agony, or at the cross of crucifixion. That
God so loved the world as to give his Son to die for it, so as
to insure eternal life to all believers, and to give an equal
chance to all to be saved, is irrefragible proof of love divine.
God's love of man was the unanswered question, at least
prior to the day of angelic proclamation of the Saviour's
birth. It was the wonderful future of prophetic visions,
32 Sermon on II Timothy, i. 9, 10.
which the angels desired to look into. Their heartfelt in¬
terest in what God was about to do on the earth was sym¬
bolized by the cherubim which overshadowed the mercy
seat—yes, that most encouraging of all symbols—the mercy
seat.
The conclusion we reach, then, is that God knew as well
before he made man, that he would fall, as he now knows
he did fall. For known unto him are all things from the
beginning. The question, then, very naturally comes up,
why did God create man at all, knowing he would fall ? My
answer is, first, that he created man because it was best, or
else it would not have been done; and secondly, that it was
best because an amount of happiness, such as God delighted
to bestow, was by this creation increased up to the amount
of the bliss enjoyed by all the redeemed spirits of earth.
And if none but the little children, so graciously enfranchised
by Christ while here with us, were to celebrate redeeming
grace and dying love in immortal ecstacies in heaven, it
would fully justify the creation of man as he was created,
that is, upon the security of eternal redemption. If man
had not been created, he could not have been redeemed, he
could not have been saved; but having been redeemed in
the eternal counsels of the Godhead, all who believe will be
saved, besides the millions of the little ones, saved by the
sovereign mercy of redeeming grace. The creation of man
was, therefore, a work of love. The conclusion, therefore,
is, that God created man, knowing he would fall, because he
could do better for him by redemption than,he could do by
creation, and because, by his redemption, he could fully
reveal himself to man. The best he could do for man by
creation was to make him in his own image—sinless and
pure. This he did. But man must be put upon a trial of
sinless obedience. He was so put. But upon a trial of sin¬
less obedience, the best that the Creator could do was to leave
his integrity to the issue of sinless obedience. One act of
disobedience must be fatal under a legal issue. It was so,
in so far as a legal obedience constituted the law of trial.
He could not have lived a moment after his act of disobe¬
dience, if it had not been for the underlying provision of
Sermon on II Timothy, i. 9, 10. 33
mercy, which was given us in Christ Jesus, before the world
began. Upon this security man was made, and if you will
place it right, permitted to fall—for if he had not been made
he could not have fallen. But he was made, and in this
sense, permitted to fall, because his fall was not necessarily
his ruin, God having in himself provided a ransom. With
God's foreknowledge of events, I am sure he would not have
created man if it had not been that in his purpose man was
redeemed before he was made. So that he was not only well
made, but safely made. Adam fell within the provisions of
eternal redemption. Wherefore, the lightning blast of unap-
peased justice was mercifully turned aside. The old dream
of ignorance, that redemption, as a scheme, was extemporized
in the Godhead after the fall, and its more hateful twin-sis¬
ter, that everything relating to man was not only foreseen,
but fore-ordained—even the fall of Adam—that the Almighty
might show his free love in his chosen ones, and make vessels
of Wrath of others, on whom the battery of his justice might
discharge its bolts of vengeance, just to prove that God did
possess an attribute of justice, may now be buried together
unwept, and we will unfurl our banner of Jehovah's won¬
derful works, under a sky of azure brightness. Even the
mystery of evil and God shall cease to be a ghost of such
unseemly mien. If God did his best for man when he made
him, there is no fault here. To this all sane minds assent.
If he made him, knowing he would fall, and in this sense
permitted his fall, knowing he could do better by him in
redemption than in creation, and therefore persisted in his
purpose to create man, it only enhances our reason to wonder
and adore. That God could and did do better for us in
redemption than he did or could do in creation, is the sub¬
stance and the sum of St. Paul's inspired argument, as set
out in Romans, v., clear through from the first verse. This
is a portion of New Testament Scripture, perfectly unique
in its object. It is especially designed to show, that, consider
the evils accruing from the fall as we may within the lines
of truth, it is nevertheless true, that the blessings levied on
Christ in his undertakings for us, far exceed the evils in the
benefits which redemption confers upon us, and more especial-
c
34 Sermon on II Timothy, i. 9, 10.
ly in the point of view now under consideration. Paul says :
" The offence was by one to condemnation, but the free gift
is of many offences unto justification." It must not be over¬
looked in this text, that the words " by one " dees not mean
by one man as referring to Adam, but one offence—that under
the Adamic law the judgment was to condemnation for one
offence—that it must be so; while under the free gift an
economy that originated within the freedom of Almighty
love and compassion, the right to justify believers for Christ's
sake, could be available even after many offences.
Many thoughts naturally arise as we pass over this en¬
chanted ground, such as, am I and my children better off
than we would have been under the chances in the Adamic
state and condition of life? For myself, I answer, we are
better off. My reason assures me conceiving my God, that
if this were not true, we would either never have been created
at all in Adam, or else Adam would have positively perished
in his sin, and we would have perished in seminal uncon¬
sciousness in him. God's letting our race run is proof enough
to me that we lost nothing in the way of safety. So long
and so far as all known results, involving in them man's best
interest, were in the hands of our Creator, and subject to the
will of his good pleasure, nothing was allowed as a part-
incidental to the eternal purpose of the Father, through
Jesus Christ, but what was in the outworking of this eternal
purpose for man's good. But it must be distinctly noted
that sin, as sin, brought man no good. The benefit that has
arisen is all due to the exuberance of goodness which was
laid up for us in the merit of the free gift. Sin was not in
in any sense the cause of our promotion, through redemp¬
tion, above the privileges of creation, but it was, in God's
provision for us, the occasion. The story of man's creation
and fall has been complicated with issues very impertinent
to them, until some persons have simply assumed that all was
right, and that they would see and be satisfied when judgment
light had cleared the sky of their visions, so as to justify
the ways of God to man. Much of this bewildered state of
mind arose from an erroneous conception of Adam's relation
to his race—supposing he had proved true to the order of his
Sermon on II Timothy, i. 9, 10. 35
creation—in considering him as the federal head, not simply
of his race, but of their allegiance, to such an extent as that
his obedience would have guaranteed the safety of his race.
Hence the idea of the foreknowledge of his fall seems to im¬
plicate the wisdom of the Creator. But the whole concep¬
tion is false, and of course can lead only to wrong conclusions.
He was not the federal head of a scheme of salvation. No
such meritorious value could have been given to creature
obedience. If children had been born to Adam, in the time
of his sinless obedience, they would have been exactly like
himself. Their moral status could have been no better.
Therefore, as he could sin and fall, so could they. And as
we have already shown, under the Adamic dispensation, one
offence must have been fatal. It is, therefore, only modest
reverence to say, that the Father's eternal purpose, through
his Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, was predicated on his fore¬
knowledge of man's fall, and that to make man at all, except
npon the foundation of eternal redemption in the counsels of
the Godhead, was only to make him for the doom of death.
At such an act reason would be confounded. We, therefore,
believe man would never have been made but upon this
foundation, and not upon this, but that his condition could
be made so much safer by redemption than it could be by
creation. All the reasons that moved the Almighty to create
man we do not pretend to know; we do, however, recognize
enough of them to fill our souls with adoring love, God is
too good to be willing to engross all the bliss of himself
among angels, especially as its highest joy could only be
known to souls redeemed at the instance of infinite love and
mercy. The idea that man was made not absolutely lower
than the angels, but for a little while lower than the angels,
fills my idea of God's grand motive movement in man's cre¬
ation and eternal redemption. If the redeemed sons of men
will outrank angels when the cycles, which are to precede the
everlasting coronation of God the Redeemer, have'run, how
can any notes except those sounded from the octave of creating
wisdom and goodness, ever equal those set to the music of
redeeming grace and dying love ? Or, how can the costume
of angels, however beautiful and bright, compare with the
36 Sermon on II Timothy, i. 9, 10.
robes of the saints washed in the blood of the Lamb? In¬
deed, the very fact that man was made redeemable in the
pan and purpose of God, while angels were not so made, settles
my mind quietly in the belief that his present humiliation, in
being for a little while lower than the angels, is only because
while his progenitorship in the order of God's purpose lasts,
animal life was a necessity, which is below angelic life. But
when we become as the angels of God in our final style of
life—mortality having put on immortality—having been pur¬
chased by the blood of Christ, we may, and I believe will,
outrank angels. But oh my soul! what a thought it is, that
my mortality shall put on, yes, put on, immortality. But I
hear the command : "Be still, and know that I am God."
But after all, I hear some one say—if one soul should ever
suffer in hell the agonies of woe, as they are portrayed in
Scripture, would it not have been better that all bliss enjoyed
by the saints should have failed by default on the part of the
Creator? There is in such a thought a fearful approach to
that profanity which contemns the wisdom and the justice of
God; and our answer is, that if after all the outlay of mercy,
and the cost of making heaven more certain through redemp¬
tion, than it could have been made by creation—that if, after
constructing a scheme of mercy, which, while it does not
allow of sin as a privilege, does provide pardon for fein, and
has instituted in heaven an advocacy, not of sin, but of sin¬
ners, whose all-prevailing plea delays punishment and offers
pardon, and God even entreats sinners to accept it—that if,
after all this, the sinner dies, the issue of eternal death is
forced upon God's consequent will, for it is doubtful whether,
under this economy, any sinner is ever cut off until in some
way he has passed out of the pale of this economy. It is
not likely that sinners are cut down and hurried into judg¬
ment, while yet their right to believe and be saved was unfor-
feited. But the inquiry is, why should God deny eternal
happiness to his saints, who long for it and are embracing
his promises, either by refusing them being, or in any other
way, because some of the race would chose death in the error
of their way? And our answer is, that the whole revelation
of God's will is that sinners may be saved, and that the con-
Sermon on II Timothy, i. 9, 10. 37
ditions are as easy as they could be made and moral govern¬
ment be maintained, and that the genius of the economy is,
that sinners can only be lost because they would not be saved
upon the terms of salvation offered them. They become
neglecters of this great salvation, and no one can neglect any
thing unless the thing neglected could have been done, and
ought to have been done.
The idea of the non-creation of man, as a less evil than
the damnation of even one soul, becomes grave only when
we settle the time and circumstances of the device of man's
redemption. If the purpose to redeem was devised after
man fell, and his stock was corrupted, and in the purpose to
redeem, it was by bargain—or if it will be less offensive, by
covenant—agreed that redemption should be made infallibly
efficacious to some by effectual calling in time, while others
already corrupted by the fall of their federal head, and
although as innocent as to agency in their depravity as the
chosen ones, but yet were left to sweep on to their ruin on
the impetuous current of inherited depravity, unchecked by
the restraint of saving grace, on the plea that they were
made no worse by the effectual calling of the elect—I say if
this was the plan of redemption, the question of non-crea¬
tion would assume very grave aspects. If, in the eternal
purpose of God to create man, and his eternal fore-knowledge
of man's fall, he purposely left the device of redemption an
open issue until man had fallen and corrupted his race, and,
then coming in with redeeming favor, chose to himself in Christ
as many as he would, and passed the remainder by, as doomed
to ruin, not by divine appointment in man's origin, but by
the law of fatality in man's fall, then, indeed, it would seem
as if non-creation would have been the exercise of the great¬
est goodness. But it is enough to say, that it was morally
impossible for God ever to have put into motion a system of
rational moral responsibility, the foreknown results of which
must be the damnation of millions of souls, in order to make
way for the Creator to show what he could do by the exer¬
cise of sovereign grace in saving whom he would. It must
not be overlooked that I use these terms in their Calvinistic
sense. Such notions of God are really shocking to reason,
38 Sermon on II Timothy, i. 9, 10.
and appalling to common sense. If it had necessarily cost
the damnation of one soul to afford an opportunity to save
all the rest, my opinion is, creation would have gone by de¬
fault. But the views of the divine will and good pleasure
of the Creator, as herein set forth, namely : that man was
created upon the foundation of redemption, so that man was
redeemed in the purpose of the Creator in his seed state, and
the otherwise inevitable ruin of the race prevented, answers
every important inquiry concerniug man's creation. It shows
that the great love wherewith God loved our race, not only
prompted him to create man in his own image and likeness,
but to provide a scheme in his gracious counsels of mercy
whereby man, when fallen and corrupted, might be renewed
in the image of righteousness and true holiness, adding there¬
unto the glorious margin of mercy's enlarged favor—pardon,
even after many offences. So that in our present relation to
God, ruin is only a necessity with him when we have refused
his offered mercy unto our own ruin, and an inevitable issue
with us when we have chosen death in the error of our own
ways. Bear with me, when I say, God has done so well for
us, and by us, as to make it certain that our damnation, if to
hell we will go, is only a reluctant alternative for the main¬
tenance of eternal justice. Who has not listened with melted
heart to the last throb of divine pity when he hears its dissolv¬
ing moan, " how shall I give thee up, Ephraim ?" Sinners can
go to hell, but if they will not be saved, because they cannot
be saved in their sins—for this is their bar—let them not ask
any more, whether it would not have been more clever in
God (excuse the word) to have denied his children the beatific
visions of heaven and of himself by non-creation, than to
have created man a moral free agent, and condemned those
who loved darkness rather than light, after they had worked
out their damnation with greediness, to suffer the wages of
their sinning, which they were forewarned would be death.
It is not worth while for sinners to deny it. They do, under
the circumstances, go to hell by choice, in that they so much
prefer sin to holiness that they voluntarily pursue it, with
constant premonitions of conscience that the way they walk
in is the way to hell.
Sermon on II Timothy, i. 9, 10. 39
It is due to my glorious theory to say, that God has done
everything that wisdom and goodness could do to assure
us of his readiness to save man, in his easy and whole¬
some transfer of Adam, and all his race in him, from vio¬
lated law to free grace, in the wisely graduated scale of
judgment, whereby he has made the merit of Christ's death
available even to the honest heathen, without the blessing of
his written law, who is nevertheless made a law unto himself,
and to the idiot, who, although deprived of a sound mind,
and even of mind itself, is nevertheless invested with a liv¬
ing soul, with the salvation of which Christ has charged
himself, and to the millions of our race who die in infancy, of
all conditions of our race, they being effectually and uncondi¬
tionally saved through Christ—u for of such is the kingdom
of God "—and the words " of such " are both emphatic and
special. When I think that soul, as it exists in infant bodies,
is soul immortal and bought with blood, with the security of
being blood-washed if called hence—that these souls are all
full blown as souls in the separate state—that the soul of an
infant from the jungles of Africa will open in heaven in as
full immortal bloom as the soul of an infant from the palaces
of Europe, my soul cries out, " Thou art worthy, oh Lord,
to receive honor and glory and power, for thou hast created
all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created."
O! what did not John mean when he said to his disciples :
" Behold the Lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the
world"—the deadly sin of Adam, under which the world
must have perished, but that God had a Lamb—a Lamb for
sacrifice—who took away the sin of the world.
Be not astounded when I say man's fall was, through riches
of grace, made man's fortune, for which reason the sin of
unbelief is the fatal sin, just as common sense tells every
man it ought to be. The love of Christ constraineth us, is
the test motive in religion. When this fails to be the motive
power to duty in man, it must be because his heart of love
is morally rotten to its core. Christ, our Lord, for his great
love, wherewith he loved us, seized upon the occasion of the
fall to enter into incarnate fellowship with man, that by
death he might destroy him that had the power of death,
40 Sermon on II Timothy, i. 9, 10.
and deliver us, his involved captives, and still more by this
scheme of mercy and salvation, he enlarged our chance for
life eternal, as a million is against one. Now, therefore, let
me ask you in soberness of mind, with all these facts before
you, if you were about to be ushered into life, upon a trial
term, and could be allowed to choose between a trial of
Adamic kind and chance and one upon the basis of our re¬
demption, would you not prefer the latter ? Not that you
might have a chance to sin, but because if you did chance to
sin, you might have a chance of pardon. If this is the
sense of your conscience, it is because it is the safety of your
soul. Let it be ever uppermost in your minds, that you are
not your own, but are bought with a price—a price which
not only eclipses all other jewels used for the ransom of cap¬
tives, but absolutely negatives every thing valuable in the
markets of earth, when considered in relation to the ransom
of souls. They could be bought off from death only by
divine blood. This the Son of God freely paid down for our
souls.
I see enough in all of this to satisfy me that the worth of
man, in the sight of God, surpasses all human thought. It
was so great that God, to save him, would invest the capital
of his Son's eternal merit in the purchase of his soul from
the necessity of destruction. We say, from the necessity of
destruction, for we see not how sudden vengeance could
have been averted one moment after man's revolt, but for the
eternal merit of God's everlasting Son, already provided in
the eternal purpose of the Father, through the Son. But in
this we see how God was in Christ reconciling the world unto
himself, not imputing our trespasses unto us, for we could
not have borne them, but imputing them to Christ, on whom,
as a propitiatory sacrifice, he laid the iniquity of us all. But
this reconciling of the world unto himself is the main idea.
This was the desideratum. And this was fully and squarely
met in the atoning sacrifice of Christ. Suffering as our sub¬
stitute, and suffering by divine substitution, he became the
end of the law for righteousness to every one that believeth,
establishing an economy of satisfaction, wherein God could
be just, and the justifier of every one that believeth. Hear
Sermon on II Timothy, i. 9, 10.
41
me, ye sinners, purchased by blood divine, Christ is indeed
the end of the law for you, if you believe; but if not, ye
are in the hands of the law as insolvent debtors, and must be
hopelessly imprisoned. Herein we see how inestimable is
the privilege of having our faith in Christ as the end of the
law for righteousness for us, counted to us for righteousness.
"We could not be forgiven at the expense of the law, but we
can be freely forgiven for Christ's sake, when we believe in
him as having paid the debt due to justice for us, and look
for pardon, in as far as merit is concerned, on Christ's account
alone. Such is the faith that can be counted to a believer
for righteousness. It is not a figment of fancy, but a consti¬
tutional title to the right of pardon in Christ Jesus.
And now, after our search for the truth as it is in Jesus,
and as we hope not in vain, let us call up again the words of
our text, at least in order to show that in all of our wide range
of discussion we have been moving close around the staple
. ideas in the text, which are, negatively, that we were neith¬
er called nor saved according to ourworks; but, positively,
that we are called and saved according to God's own purpose
and grace, which was given us in Christ Jesus, before the world
began. What a stupendous conception! The Creator would
not launch this world, and man on board, until he had cast
its anchor in Christ. But for this we would have been lost.
This eternal conception and purpose in the Godhead required,
and in due time received, its demonstration. Hence, in the
last verse of our text we are told that Christ, in whom we
were recognized as designed beneficiaries, from the midst of
his eternal years, was now made manifest in his own proper
person, and proved himself to be the one intended in the
Father's purpose and grace; that in his triumphant achieve¬
ments he abolished death and brought life and immortality
to light through the Gospel. O, ye sons of men, talk no
more of your^victories won by life. Here is the crowning
glory of victories. Our Immanuel conquered when he fell—
conquered because no man took his life, he laid it down of
himself, and when he had won all that was to be accomplished
in the land of death, he arose at the instance of his own
almighty will, aud death hauled down his ghastly flag of
42 Sermon on II Timothy, i. 9, 10.
unrivalled dominion, and the grave that had long been an
admitted statute of limitation to human life, was illuminated
with the bright bow of promise, that all who sleep in the
dust shall awake, and that the grave, that had been considered
the sealed cavern of lost loved ones, was hereafter to be
dressed and kept, throughout all civilized lands where the
lamp of life is burning, as a precious urn, wherein is laid up
dust too precious to be lost, as is the debris of fallen monu¬
ments and broken statutes. The redemption of the body, as
is evident, is the grand ultimatum of Christ's resurrection.
When he arose, the sceptre of death was wrested from his
reluctant grasp, and his total abolition left only as a ques¬
tion of time. We must receive the full import of the words
" abolished death." Christ, in his resurrection, did become the
first fruits of them that slept?. Enoch and Elijah had been
translated as an indication of life in another sphere. They
also symbolized the end of those who may be alive upon the
earth, when the dead in Christ first arise, and the living are
caught up in a cloud, to meet the Lord in the air, where our
spiritual crystalization shall come off in the twinkling of
an eye. But the bars of death were never riven asunder by
the gush of resurrection life and power, until Christ arose
from the dead. He arose to die no more. I tell you, my
immortal companions, Christ meant much when he said, "I
am the resurrection." His resurrection was the assurance of
his being the first begotten of the Father. Upon his rising
from the dead, on the third day, he had rested his claim to
being the Son of God. His enemies themselves seemed to
feel that unless they could disprove his self-resurrection,
their denial of his being the Son of God was effectually frus¬
trated, and they themselves convicted of a wanton outrage
upon spotless innocence, the truth of which had been wrung
from Pilate's conscience, no doubt by divine justice. But to
die for sins not his own was the motive of his incarnation.
He made himself to be a sin-offering for us. To this end he
was born, and for this end came he unto this hour. This
was his own account of this crucifixion scene.
He died for our offences, but arose again for our justifica¬
tion. And so important was his resurrection, in this scheme
Sermon on II Timothy, i. 9, 10. 43
of human salvation given to us in Christ Jesus, before the
world began, that St. Paul says, upon its truth rests the
validity of our faith. Hence the risen Saviour continued his
intercourse with his disciples for forty days after his resur¬
rection, until by many infallible signs he had proved himself
to be the same whom they had seen crucified and buried, and
to whose actual death his enemies themselves had testified,
as proof of which to break his legs was unnecessary. How
wonderfully has God, in his own silent but unmistakeable
way, maintained inviolate the truth of prophecy—the spirit
of prophecy being the witness of Jesus. Prophecy had said
not one of his bones were to be broken, and here in the hands
of his enemies, enemies, too, engaged in breaking the legs of
crucified malefactors, and themselves rating Christ as a male¬
factor, God, who works all things in this wonderful category
after the counsel of his own will, caused these enemies to re¬
frain from the breaking of Christ's legs at the instance of their
own judgment, thereby maintaining the integrity of prophecy,
and adding to the proof of his actual resurrection, in that
the guards of the crucified had themselves testified to Christ's
positive death, so that they could not countervail the truth
of his resurrection by alleging that he had feigned himself to
be dead when he was really alive; so wonderfully did God
work out his eternal purposes through Christ Jesus.
Let us rejoice, brethren, that the Spirit of inspiration, which
is the Spirit of truth itself, appointed to guide us into all
truth, has assured us that the manifestation of Christ as being
risen from the dead of forty days' continuance, amounted to
an infallible sign. We have not followed a cunningly devised
fable, but what makes known to us the power and coming of
our Lord Jesus Christ, as his disciples were notified at the
time of his ascension. They saw him ascend, because he had
really descended, of which his ascension was known to be
infallible proof. In his valedictory prayer, contained in
John xvii., he prayed that when the work he came to do on
earth was done, his Father would restore him to the glory he
had with him before the world began. No more could be
conferred, no less given. He was as really the Son of God
before the world began, in the relations of the Godhead and
44 Sermon on II Timothy, i. 9, 10.
its eternal counsels and purposes, as when born in Bethlehem
of Judea or crucified on Mount Calvary; and until our faith
lays hold on God, as God, we shall be dwarfs in the sphere
of faith. All this muttering heard from Unitarians, discard¬
ing the Godship of Christ, because the Son cannot be as old
as the Father, is simply puerile. It is a proud attempt to
reduce the immensity and the eternity of the Godhead to the
compass of human reason, while the immensity and eternity
of the Godhead constitute the occasion for faith. Deny the
eternity of the Sonship and you deny the reality of the God¬
head. But the eternal power made manifest in creation is
coupled with the Godhead, so that there is either no eternal
power back to which we are to trace creation, or else there is
eternal Godhead, and if eternal Godhead, there is what we
mean by eternal Sonship. I confess to unmitigated fears,
that no one espousing the Unitarian faith in the daylight of
revelation, can be saved. I have called it faith out of cour¬
tesy. It is, however, only opinion. I maintain that what is
meant as faith in the New Testament is only exercisable in
God. Christ never exacted faith in himself except as the
Son of God, and said to Peter, after the curse of the fruitless
fig tree, when he saw it dried up from its root in twenty-four
hours, and of course saw the evidence of miraculous power,
"have faith in God." He referred to himself. And it is
said that without faith it is impossible to please God, and
that he that comes to him must believe that he is, which
means, as the structure of the words clearly show, is God.
It is good logic, good philosophy, and sound theology, when
I say, that faith cannot exist or exercise any part in human
salvation except it be in Christ, as God, our Redeemer. What
is meant by faith cannot be employed towards anything
because of the high opinion we may entertain of it. It can
only exist in a case where, for our salvation, we rely in im¬
plicit confidence in a promise of good vouchsafed to us on
account of mercy merited for us, in order that we might be
saved through faith, without any merit in our works. Such
faith a Unitarian does not have, nay worse, cannot have.
It is enough for us believers to be assured that if we be¬
lieve Jesus died and rose again, then those that sleep in Jesus
Sermon on II Timothy, i. 9, 10. 45
will God bring with him. This bringing to light of life and
immortality is wonderfully suggestive to us. It preaches
bodily immortality, to my mind. If man had maintained
his sinless state, I suppose he would have undergone my idea
of spiritual crystalization, and been transplanted to his angelic
sphere at the instance of his Creator's will. But as it is so
God foresaw it, and in his eternal counsels provided against
all the evils consequent upon a legal adjudication. In these
provisions was included the redemption of our bodies, and
the guarantee of it was given in the resurrection of Christ,
as the first fruits of them that slept in the sleep of death.
So the grave is not so dreary and dreamless as weeping despair
had agreed to. The clouds of despair that once hung in murky
envelope over every grave, now were rolled up like a cur¬
tain, and became luminous with the light that brought life
and immortality into full view. And now we solace our¬
selves with the faith that these vile bodies, at times rather
loathsome with secretions vile in spite of our ablutions and
costly cosmetics, vile to humiliation, will be fashioned like
unto Christ's glorified body, according to the mighty power
whereby he is able to subdue all unto himself. Fear not, my
brethren, the work is great; but God is our Almighty under¬
taker, and he giveth a body as it pleaseth him—but to every
seed his own body. We shall not lose our identity nor change
our order in the mighty changes of the resurrection revolu¬
tion. We shall, however, lose all the social bonds of our
present fervent attachments, and put on the angelic costume
and association. There will be no family recognitions upon
any such sympathies as the foolish ones of mere animal sense
seem to look for, and, for myself, I am afraid of them and
of their religion. There is much said in Revelation upon
the raptures of the glorified saints, but I do not recollect an
instance in which one note sounded from these heavenly
harps, celebrated one joy fed by former social relations. No,
my brethren, those of us glorified together will find our solace
in being members of the family of the redeemed. All that
was earthly and animal, while we were for a little while lower
than the angels, will be now forever swallowed up in the
angelic nature. But we will rank above mere angels there-
46 Sermon on II Timothy, i. 9, 10.
after, because while they celebrate their own eternal day with
the acknowledgement of creating goodness, we will sing unto
him that loved us, and washed us from our sins in his own
blood, and under the swell of these notes forever sounding,
angelic tunes will mingle at discount. All other love will
be simply negatived as too insignificant to be celebrated in
heaven, in presence of Jesus, our all in all. Amen.