Chapter 8 | Table of Contents | Chapter 10

The scriptures are an infallible history or relation of what the Holy Spirit is and does and works in true believers. They are also an infallible direction as to how we are to seek, wait and trust in His good power over us. But then the scriptures themselves, though thus true and infallible in these reports and instructions about the Holy Spirit, can go no further than to be a true history. They cannot give to the reader the possession, the sensibility and enjoyment of what they relate. This is plain not only from the nature of a written history or instruction, but from the express words of our Lord saying, "Except a man be born again of the Spirit he cannot see or enter into the kingdom of God." Therefore, the new birth from above or of the Spirit is alone what gives true knowledge and perception of the kingdom of God. History may relate truths enough about it, but the kingdom of God, being nothing else but the power and presence of God dwelling and ruling in our souls, can only manifest itself in man in nothing but to the new birth. Everything else in man is deaf, dumb and blind to the kingdom of God. But when what died in Adam is made alive again by the quickening Spirit from above, this is the birth that came at first from God and made man a partaker of the divine nature, knowing and enjoying the kingdom of God.

"I am the way the truth and the life," says Christ. This record of scripture is true, but what a delusion for a man to think that he knows and finds this to be true and that Christ is all this benefit and blessing to him, because he assents, consents and contends for the truth of those words. This is impossible. The new birth is here again the only power of entrance. Everything else knocks at the door in vain. "I know you not," says Christ to everything but the new birth. "I am the way the truth and the life." This tells us neither more nor less than if Christ had said, "I am the kingdom of God into which nothing can enter but what is born of the Spirit."

Here again we see in the highest degree of certainty the absolute necessity of immediate divine inspiration through every part of the Christian life. For if a birth of the Spirit alone that can enter into or receive the kingdom of God come amongst men, that birth alone can find Christ to be the way, the truth and the life, then a continual life or breathing of the Spirit in us must be as necessary as the first birth of the Spirit. For a birth of the Spirit is only to make a beginning of a life of the Spirit. Birth only happens to bring forth life. If therefore the life of the Spirit continues not, the birth is lost and the cessation of its breathing in us is nothing else but death again to the kingdom of God, that is, to everything that is or can be godly. Therefore, the immediate, continual inspiration of the Spirit as the only possible power and preservation of a godly life, stands upon the same ground and is as absolutely necessary to salvation as the new birth.

Take away this power and working life of the Spirit from being the one life of all that is done in the church and then, though it be ever so outwardly glorious in its extent or ever so full of learned members, it can be nothing else in the sight of God, but the wise Greeks and the carnal Jews becoming a body of water-baptized Christians. For no one can be in a better state than this. The wisdom of the Greek and the carnality of the Jew must have the whole government of him until he is born of and led by the Spirit of God. This Spirit life alone is the kingdom of God and everything else is the kingdom of this world in which Satan is declared to be the prince. Poor miserable man that strives with all the sophistry of human wit to be delivered from the immediate, continual operation and governance of the Spirit of God, not considering that where God is not, there is the devil and where the Spirit rules not, all that remains is the work of the flesh, even if nothing be talked about but spiritual and Christian matters. I say talked about, for the best ability of the natural man can go no further than talk and notions and opinions about scripture words and facts. In these he may be a great critic, an acute logician, a powerful orator and know everything of scripture, except the Spirit and the truth.

It is impossible to be denied that all scripture assures us that the things of the Spirit of God are and must to the end of the world be foolishness to the natural man. It is to be lamented that from one end of learned Christendom to the other, nothing is thought of as the true and proper means of attaining divine knowledge except what every natural, selfish, proud, envious, false vain-glorious, worldly man can do. Where is that divinity student who thinks, or was ever taught to think, of partaking of the light of the gospel by any other way than by doing with the scriptures what he does with pagan writers, whether poets, orators or comedians, viz., exercise his logic, rhetoric and critical skill in descanting upon them? This done, he is thought by himself and often by others to have a sufficiency of divine apostolic knowledge. What wonder therefore if it should sometimes happen that the very same vain, corrupt, puffing literature that raises one man to be a poet-laureate should set another in a divinity chair?

How is it that the logical, critical, learned Deist comes by his infidelity? By the same help of the same good powers of the natural man as many a learned Christian comes to know embrace and contend for the faith of the gospel? Drop the power and reality of divine inspiration, and then all is dropped that can set the believer above or give him any godly difference from the infidel. The Christian's faith has no goodness in it, but that it comes from above, born of the Spirit. Likewise, the Deist's infidelity has no badness in it, except that it comes from below, is born of the will of the flesh and the will of men, and rejects the necessity of being born again out of the corruption of fallen nature. The Christian therefore that rejects, reproaches and writes against the necessity of immediate divine inspiration, pleads the whole cause of infidelity. He confirms the ground on which it stands and has nothing to prove the goodness of his own Christianity, but what equally proves to the Deist the goodness of his infidelity.

Without the new birth and immediate continual divine inspiration, the difference between the Christian and the infidel is quite lost. Whether the uninspired unregenerate son of Adam is in the church or out of the church, he is still that child of this world, a fallen Adam and a mere natural man to whom the things of the Spirit of God are and must be foolishness. A full proof of this no more need be seen, than what you cannot help seeing. The same shining virtues and the same glaring vices are common to them both. For if the Christian is not made such by the Spirit of God, continually inspiring and working in him, then he has only a Christianity of his own making. He can only have such appearances of virtues and will and reality of vices as his natural self wants to have. Even if he renounces what is called natural religion as much as he will, unless he is a new born and divinely inspired Christian, he must live and die in all his natural corruption.

Through all scripture nothing else is aimed at or intended for man as his Christianity, but the divine life, nor anything hinted at as having the least power to raise or beget it, but the holy, life-giving Spirit of God. How gross therefore is that blindness, that someone reading the gospel and the history of gospel Christians cannot see these two fundamental truths; (1) "That nothing is divine knowledge in man but the divine life" and (2) "That the divine life is nothing else but a birth of the divine nature within him."

If this truth is lost or given up, vain learning and a worldly spirit are in possession of the gospel-book, setting up kingdoms of strife and division. For what end? Why? That the unity of the church may not be lost. Multiply systems of empty notions and opinions for what? Why is it that words and forms may do for the church today, which to the first church of Christ's own forming could only be done by being born of the Spirit?

Hence the scripture-scholar is looked upon as having divine knowledge of its matters when he is as ready at chapter and verse as the critic is at every page of Cicero. And nothing is looked upon as defective in divinity knowledge, but such supposed mistakes of the genius of the Hebrew or Greek letter, just as the sublime students of the immortal words of a Milton or a Shakespeare charge as blunders upon one another.

Now to call such scripture skill divine knowledge is just as solid and judicious as if a man was said or thought to know what St. John knew, because he could say his whole gospel and epistles by heart without missing a word of them. A literal knowledge of scripture is like having all scripture in the memory and is so far from being a divine perception of the things spoken, that the most vicious, wicked scholar in the world may attain to the highest perfection in it. Divine knowledge and wickedness of life are so inconsistent that they are mutual death and destruction to one another. Where the one is alive, the other must be dead. Judas Iscariot knew Jesus Christ and all that he said and did up to His crucifixion. He knew what it was to be at the Lord's table and to partake of His supper of bread and wine. It may be said with much more truth that he knew nothing of all this and had no better knowledge of it than Pontius Pilate had.

Now, all knowledge of Christ except what is from divine inspiration or the new birth is as poor and profitless as Judas' knowledge was. It may say to Christ as he did, "Hail master" [and betray Him with a kiss], but no one can call Jesus Lord but by the Holy Spirit. This empty letter-learned knowledge, which the natural man can as easily have of the sacred scripture and religious matters as of any other books or human affairs, being taken for divine knowledge, has spread such darkness and delusion all over Christendom as may be reckoned as no less than a general apostasy from the gospel state of divine illumination. For the gospel state is in its whole nature nothing, but one light and that is the Lamb of God. It has only one life and that is by the Spirit of God. Whatever is not of and from this Light and governed by this Spirit, call it by what high name you will, is no more a part of the gospel state, nor will have a better end than what enters into the mouth and corrupts in the belly.

That one Light and Spirit that was only One from all eternity, before angels or any heavenly beings were created, must to all eternity be that one and only Light and Spirit by which angels or men can ever have any union or communion with God. Every other light is the same light that gives beasts their sense and subtlety. Every other spirit is what gives to flesh and blood all its lusts and appetites. Nothing else but the loss of the one Light and Spirit of God turned an order of angels into devils. Nothing but the loss of that same Light and Spirit took from the divine Adam his first crown of paradisiacal glory, stripped him more naked than the beasts and left him a prey to devils and in the jaws of eternal death.

What therefore can have the least share of power towards man's redemption, but the light and Spirit of God, making again a birth of themselves in him as they did in his first glorious creation? Or what can possibly begin or bring forth this return of his first lost birth, but solely what is done by this eternal Light and Spirit. Hence, the gospel state is affirmed by our Lord to be a kingdom of heaven at hand or come among men, because it has the nature of no worldly thing or creaturely power. It serves no worldly ends, can be helped by no worldly power, receives nothing from man but man's full denial of himself, stands upon nothing that is finite or transitory, has no existence except the working power of God that created and upholds heaven and earth, and is a kingdom of God become man and a kingdom of men united to God, through a continual immediate divine illumination. What scripture of the New Testament can you read that does not prove this to be the gospel state, a kingdom of God into which none can enter but by being born of the Spirit? None can continue to be alive in it except by being led by the Spirit in which not a thought or desire or action can be allowed to have any part in it, but as it is a fruit of the Spirit?

"Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven." What is God's kingdom in heaven, but the manifestation of what God is and what he does in His heavenly creatures? How is His will done there, but by His Holy Spirit which is the life, the power and mover of all that live in it? We daily read this prayer, we extol it under the name of the Lord's Prayer, and then (for the sake of orthodoxy) preach and write against all that is prayed for in it. Nothing but a continual, essential, immediate, divine illumination can do what we pray may be done. For where can God's kingdom be come, but where every other power except His is at an end and driven out of it? How can only His will be done, but where the Spirit that wills in God, wills in the creature as well?