Preface | Table of Contents | Chapter 2
All possible goodness that can be named or is nameless was in God from all eternity and must to all eternity be inseparable from Him; it can be nowhere but where God is. Therefore, before God created anything, it was certainly true that there was only One that was good. It is just the same truth that after God has created innumerable hosts of blessed, holy and heavenly beings there is only One that is good and that is God.
All that can be called goodness, holiness, divine tempers, heavenly affections etc. in the creatures are no more their own or the growth of their created powers than they were their own before they were created. But all that is called divine goodness and virtue in the creature is nothing more than the one goodness of God manifesting a birth and discovery of itself in the creature as its created nature is fitted to receive. This is the unalterable state between God and the creature. Goodness for ever and ever can only belong to God as essential to Him and inseparable from Him as His own unity.
God could not make the creature to be great and glorious in itself. To do this would be to create beings that were independent of Him. "The heavens," said David, "declare the glory of God." No creature, any more than the heavens, can declare any other glory than that of God. One might as well say that the firmament shows forth its own handiwork, as the holy divine or heavenly creature shows forth its own natural power.
All that is divine, great, glorious and happy in the Spirit's tempers, operations and enjoyments within the creature is only the greatness, glory, majesty and blessedness of God dwelling in it. From here it gives forth various births of His own triune life, light and love in and through the manifold forms and capacities of the creature to receive them. It is here that we may infallibly see the true ground and nature of all true religion and when and how we may fulfill all our religious duty to God. The creature's true religion is its rendering to God all that is God's. This is its true, continual acknowledgment of all that it is, has and enjoys in and from God. This is the one true religion of all intelligent creatures, whether in heaven or on earth. Since they all have only one and the same relation to God, so in their several births, states or offices they all have only one and the same true religion or right behavior towards God.
Now the one relation that is the ground of all true religion is one and the same between God and all intelligent creatures. This relation is found in a total unalterable dependence upon God, an immediate continual receiving of every kind and degree of goodness, blessing and happiness that ever was or can be found in them from God alone. The highest angel has nothing of its own that it can offer unto God; no more light, love, purity, perfection and glorious hallelujahs that spring from itself or its own powers, than the poorest creature upon earth. Could the angel see a spark of wisdom goodness or excellence as coming from or belonging to itself, its place in heaven would be lost as sure as Lucifer lost his. But they are ever abiding flames of pure love always ascending up to and uniting with God because the wisdom, the power, the glory, the majesty, the love and goodness of God alone is all that they see and feel and know, either within or without themselves. Songs of praise to their heavenly Father are their ravishing delight, because they see and know and feel that it is the breath and Spirit of their heavenly Father that sings and rejoices in them. Their adoration in Spirit and in truth never ceases because they never cease to acknowledge the ALL of God-the ALL of God in the whole creation. This is the one religion of heaven and nothing else is the truth of religion on earth.
The matter, therefore plainly, comes to this: nothing can do or be the good of religion to the intelligent creature, except the power and presence of God really and essentially living and working in it. This is the unchangeable nature of that goodness and blessedness that is to be had from our religion. Of all necessity the creature must have all its religious goodness wholly and solely from God's immediate operation, as it had its first goodness at its creation. It is as impossible for the creature to help itself to what is good and blessed in religion by any contrivance, reasoning or working as it is to create itself by its own natural powers. For after its creation, the creature can no more take anything to itself that belongs to God than it could take before it was created. And if truth forces us to hold that the natural powers of the creature could only come from the one power of God, the same truth should surely the more so force us to confess that what comforts, enlightens, blesses, gives peace, joy, goodness and rest to its natural powers can be had in no other way nor by any other thing but from God's immediate holy operation.
Now, the reason why no work of religion, except what is begun, continued and carried on by the living operation of God in the creature, can have any truth goodness or divine blessing in it, is because nothing can in truth seek God but what comes from God. Nothing can in truth find God as its good, except what has the nature of God living in it. Like can only rejoice in like. Therefore, no religious service of the creature can have any truth, goodness, or blessing in it, except what is done in the creature in, through and by a principle and power of the divine nature begotten and breathing forth in it all holy tempers, affections and adorations.
It is in vain to think that there is a middle way and that rational divines have found it out, as Dr. Warburton has done, who though denying immediate continual inspiration, allows that the Spirit's "ordinary influence occasionally assists the faithful." (Sermons vol. i.)
Now this "middle way" has neither scripture nor sense in it, for an occasional influence or concurrence is as absurd as an "occasional" God. For an occasional influence of the Spirit upon us supposes an occasional absence of the Spirit from us. There could be no such thing unless God was sometimes with us and sometimes not, sometimes doing us good as the inward God of our life and sometimes doing us no good at all by leaving us to be good from ourselves. Occasional influence necessarily implies all this blasphemous absurdity. Again this middle way of an occasional influence and assistance, necessarily supposes that there is something of man's own that is good. If this was the case, the Holy Spirit of God neither would nor could assist or cooperate with it. If there was anything good in man for God to assist and cooperate with besides the Seed of His own divine nature or His own Word of life striving to bruise the serpent's nature within us, it could not be true that there is only one that is good and that is God. And were there any goodness in creatures either in heaven or on earth except the one goodness of the divine nature living, working and manifesting itself in them, as its created instruments, then good creatures both in heaven and on earth would have something else to adore besides God. Goodness, be it where it will, is adorable for itself, because it is goodness.
If therefore any degree of goodness belonged to the creature it ought to have a share of that same adoration that is paid to the Creator [This is exactly the nature of why Satan fell. See Isaiah 14: 12-15]. Therefore, we believe that nothing godly can be alive in us, but what has all its life from the Spirit of God, living and breathing in us, if to look solely to it and depend wholly upon it, both for the beginning and growth of every thought and desire that can be holy and good in us. If this be proud, rank fanaticism then it must be the same fanaticism to own but one God. For he that owns more goodness than one, owns more gods than one. And he that believes he can have any good in himself, but the one goodness of God manifesting itself in him and through him, owns more goodness than that of the One. But if it be true that God and goodness cannot be divided, then it must be a truth for ever and ever that so much of good so much of God must be in the creature.
And here lies the true unchangeable distinction between God and nature and the natural creature. Nature and creature are only for the outward manifestation of the inward, invisible, unapproachable powers of God. They can rise no higher nor be anything else in themselves, but temples, habitations or instruments in which the supernatural God can and does manifest Himself in various degrees. He brings forth creatures to be good with His own goodness, to love and adore Him with His own Spirit of love, forever singing praises to the divine nature as they partake of it. This is the religion of divine inspiration that being interpreted is Immanuel or God within us.
Everything short of this is short of that religion that worships God in spirit and in truth. And every religious trust or confidence in anything but the divine operation within us is, but a sort of image worship that, though it may deny the form, retains the power thereof in the heart. And he that places any religious safety in theological decisions, scholastic points in particular doctrines and opinions that must be held about the scripture words of "faith," "justification," "sanctification," "election," and "reprobation," departs from the true worship of the living God within him and sets up an idol of notions to be worshiped, if not instead of, along with Him.
I believe it may be taken for a certain truth that every society of Christians whose religion stands upon this ground, however ardent laborious and good their zeal may seem to be in such matters, in spite of all, sooner or later it will be found that nature is at the bottom and that a selfish, earthly, overbearing pride in their own definitions and doctrines of words will by degrees creep up to the same height and become that same fleshly wisdom doing those very same things which they exclaim against in popes, cardinals and Jesuits. Nor can it possibly be otherwise. For a letter-learned zeal has but one nature wherever it is, and it can only do for Christians what it did for the Jews. As it anciently brought forth scribes, Pharisees, hypocrites and crucifiers of Christ, it afterwards brought forth heresies, schisms, popes, papal decrees, images, anathemas, and transubstantiations. So in Protestant countries it will be doing the same thing only with other materials. Images of wood and clay will only be given up for images of doctrines-grace, works, imputed sin, imputed righteousness, election and reprobation. These will have their Synods of Dort as truly evangelical as any Council of Trent.
This must be the case of all fallen Christendom. As was with popish, so it is with Protestant until single men and churches know, confess and firmly adhere to this one scripture truth which the blessed Boehme [Jakob Boehme, a German Christian mystic that lived from 1575 to 1624] prefixed as a motto to most of his epistles: "That our salvation is in the life of Jesus Christ in us." This alone was the divine perfection of man before he fell and will be his perfection when he is one with Christ in heavenly places. Everything besides this or that is not solely aiming at and essentially leading to it, is but mere Babel in all sects and divisions of Christians living to themselves and their own old man under a seeming holiness of Christian strife and contention about scripture works.
All men or churches not placing all in the life, light and guidance of the Holy Spirit of Christ, but pretending to act in the name and for the glory of God from opinions which their logic and learning have collected from scripture words or from what a Calvin, an Arminius, a Socinus or some smaller name has told them to be right or wrong, all such are but where the apostles were when it was said of them, "there was a strife among them who should be the greatest." And how much, so ever they may say and boast of their great zeal for truth and the only glory of God, their own open notorious behavior towards one another is proof enough that the great strife amongst them is which shall be the greatest sect or have the largest number of followers. This strife is from the same root and just as useful to Christianity as that of the carnal apostles who fought over who should be the greatest. It is not the numbers of men or kingdoms professing Christianity that is the glory of Christ's church, but numbers redeemed from the death of Adam into His marvelous life! In whatever nation Christianity is meant to be or sought after by the profession of the gospel (other than a new heavenly life through the mediatorial nature and Spirit of the eternal Son of God, born into the fallen soul), wherever this spirituality of the gospel-redemption is denied or overlooked, there the spirit of self, of Satanic and worldly subtlety will be in both church and priest and supreme power in all that is called religion.
Preface | Table of Contents | Chapter 2
to top