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LETTER II. IMPORTANCE OF A TRUE SYSTEM
IN my last I endeavoured to show the importance of system: in this I shall attempt to show the importance of a true system; and to prove that truth itself, by being displaced from those connexions which it occupies in the Scriptures, may be perverted, and prove injurious to those that hold it. No system can be supposed to be wholly erroneous; but if a considerable part of it be false, the whole will be vitiated, and that which is true will be divested of its salutary influence. "If ye be circumcised," said the apostle to the Galatians, "Christ shall profit you nothing." As one truth, thoroughly imbibed, will lead to a hundred more, so will one error. False doctrine will eat as doth a gangrene, which, though it may seem to be confined to one part of the body, infects the whole mass, and, if not extracted, must issue in death.
If one put on the profession of Christianity without cordially believing it, it will not sit easy upon him; his heart will not be in it: and if, at the same time, he live in the indulgence of secret vice, he will soon feel it necessary to new-model his religious opinions. It degrades him, even in his own esteem, to be a hypocrite, avowing one thing and practising another. In order to be easy, therefore, it becomes necessary for him to have a new creed, that he may answer the reproaches of his conscience, and it may be those of his acquaintance, by the assumption that his ideas are changed. He begins by doubting; and having by criminal indulgence effaced all sense of the holiness of God from his mind, he thinks of him only in respect of what he calls his goodness, which he hopes will induce him to connive at his frailties. With thoughts like these, of God and of sin, he will soon find himself in possession of a system. A new field of thought opens to his mind, in which he finds very little need of Christ, and becomes, in his own eyes, a being of consequence. Such, or nearly such, was the process of those who perished, "because they received not the love of the truth that they might be saved. And for this cause God sent them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie: that they all might be damned, who believed not the truth, but had pleasure in unrighteousness." But, passing these delusive systems, truth itself, if viewed out of its Scriptural connexions, is vitiated and injurious. The members of our bodies are no otherwise beneficial than as they occupy the places in which the Creator has fixed them. If the foot were in the place of the hand, or the ear of the eye, instead of being useful, they would each be injurious; and the same is true of a preposterous view of Scripture doctrines. The Jews, in the time of our Saviour, professed the same creed, in the main, as their forefathers; they reckoned themselves to believe Moses; but, holding with Moses to the exclusion of Christ, their faith was rendered void. "If ye believed Moses," said our Lord, "ye would believe me; for he wrote of me." Thus it is with us: if we hold the law of Moses to the exclusion of Christ, or any otherwise than as subservient to the gospel, or Christ and the gospel to the exclusion of the law of Moses, neither the one nor the other will profit us.
To illustrate and confirm these observations, I shall select, for examples, three of the leading doctrines of the gospel; namely, election, the atonement, and the influence of the Holy Spirit.
If the doctrine of election be viewed in those connexions in which it stands in the Scriptures, it will he of great importance in the Christian life. The
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whole difference between the saved and the lost being ascribed to sovereign grace, the pride of man is abased: the believer is taught to feel and acknowledge that by the grace of God he is what he is; and the sinner to apply for mercy, not as being on terms with his Maker, but absolutely at his discretion. It is frequently the last point which a sinner yields to God. To relinquish every claim and ground of hope from his own good endeavours, and fall at the feet of sovereign mercy, requires that he be born of God. If we take our views of this great subject in its connexion with others, I need not say we shall not consider it as founded on any thing good foreseen in us, whether it be faith or good works: this were to exclude the idea of an election of grace; and to admit, if not to establish, boasting. Neither shall we look at the end in such a way as to lose sight of the means. We shall consider it as we do other Divine appointments, not as revealed to us to be a rule of conduct, but to teach us our entire dependence upon God. We are given to believe that, whatever good or evil befalls us, we are thereunto appointed, 1 Thess. iii. 3. The time of our continuance in the world is as much an object of Divine purpose as our eternal destiny: but we do not imagine, on this account, that we shall live though we neither eat nor drink; nor presume that though we leap headlong from a precipice no danger will befall us. Neither does it hinder us from exhorting or persuading others to pursue the way of safety, and to flee from danger. In these things we act the same as if there were no Divine appointments, or as if we believed nothing concerning them; but when we have done all that can be done, the sentiment of an all-disposing Providence recurs to mind, and teaches us that we are still in the hands of God. Such were the views of good men, as recorded in Scripture. They believed the days of man to be appointed, and that he could not pass his bounds; yet, in time of famine, the patriarch Jacob sent to Egypt to buy corn, "that they might live, and not die." Elisha knew of a certainty that Benhadad would die; yet, speaking of him in respect of his disease, he did not scruple to say, "He may recover." The Lord assured Paul, in his perilous voyage, that "there should be no loss of any man's life;" yet, when he saw the ship-men making their escape, he said to the centurion, "Except these abide in the ship, ye cannot be saved."A fleshly mind may ask, "How can these things be?" How can Divine predestination accord with human agency and accountableness? But a truly humble Christian, finding both in his Bible, will believe both, though he may be unable fully to understand their consistency; and he will find in the one a motive to depend entirely on God, and in the other a caution against slothfulness and presumptuous neglect of duty. And thus a Christian minister, if he view the doctrine in its proper connexions, will find nothing in it to hinder the free use of warnings, invitations, and persuasions, either to the converted or the unconverted. Yet he will not ground his hopes of success on the pliability of the human mind, but on the promised grace of God, who (while he prophesies to the dry bones, as he is commanded) is known to inspire them with the breath of life.
Thus it was that the apostle, while in the ninth, tenth, and eleventh chapters of his Epistle to the Romans, he traces the sovereignty of God in calling some from among the Jews, and leaving others to perish in unbelief, never thought of excusing that unbelief, nor felt any scruples in exhorting and warning the subjects of it, nor in praying for their salvation. Even in his preaching to the Gentiles, he kept his eye on them, if by any means he might provoke to emulation those who were his flesh, and might save some of them.
But whatever this doctrine is in itself, yet if viewed out of its connexions,
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or in connexions which do not belong to it, it will become another thing. God's election of the posterity of Abraham was of sovereign favour, and not on account of any excellence in them, natural or moral; in which view it was humbling, and no doubt had a good effect on the godly Israelites. But the Jews in our Saviour’s time turned this their national election into another kind of doctrine, full of flattery towards themselves, and of the most intolerable contempt and malignity towards others. And thus the doctrine of eternal and personal election viewed in a similar light becomes a source of pride, bitterness, sloth, and presumption. Conceive of the love of God as capricious fondness – imagine, because it had no inducement from the goodness of the creature, that therefore it was without reason, only so it was and so it must be – view it, not as a means by which God would assert the sovereignty of his grace, but as an end to which every thing must become subservient – conceive of yourself as a darling of Heaven, a favourite of Providence, for whom Divine interpositions next to miracles are continually occurring – and, instead of being humbled before God as a poor sinner, you will feel like a person who in a dream or a reverie imagines himself a king, takes state to himself, and treats every one about him with distant contempt.
If the doctrine of atonement be viewed in the connexions in which it stands in the sacred Scriptures, it is the lifeblood of the gospel system. Consider it as a method devised by the infinite wisdom of God, by which he might honour his own name by dispensing mercy to the unworthy in a way consistent with righteousness, and we shall be furnished with considerations at once the most humiliating and transporting that were ever presented to a creature's mind.
But there are ways of viewing this doctrine which will render it void, and even worse than void. If, for instance, instead of connecting it with the Divinity of Christ, we ascribe its efficacy to Divine appointment, the name may remain, but that will be all. On this principle it was possible that the blood of bulls and of goats should have taken away sin, and that the cup should have passed away from the Saviour without his drinking it. As there would on this principle be no necessity for the death of Christ, so neither could there be any great love displayed by it; and as to its constraining influence, we need not look for it.
Or if the atonement be considered as a reparation to man for the injury done him by his being connected with his first parents, it is rendered void. Whatever evil we derive from our first parents, while we ourselves choose it, we are no more injured than if we derived it from our immediate parents; and it will no more bear to he pleaded at the last judgment, than it will bear to be alleged by a thief, at an earthly tribunal, that his father had been a thief before him. To argue, therefore, as some have done, that if Christ had not come into the world and given us grace, so as to remove the inability for doing good under which we lay as the descendants of Adam, we should not have been blameworthy for not doing it, is to render grace no more grace, and the atonement a satisfaction to man rather than to God. If man would not have been blameworthy without the gift of Christ and a provision of grace, it would seem a pity that both had not been withheld, and that we had not been left to the justice of our Creator, who surely might be trusted not to punish for that in which we were not in fault.
Or if the doctrine of atonement lead us to entertain degrading notions of the love of God, or to plead an exemption from its preceptive authority, we may be sure it is not the Scripture doctrine of reconciliation. Atonement has respect to justice, and justice to the law, or the revealed will of the sovereign, which has been violated, and its very design is to repair its
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honour. If the law which has been transgressed were unjust, instead of an atonement being required for the breach of it, it ought to have been repealed, and the lawgiver have taken upon himself the disgrace of having enacted it. Every instance of punishment among men is a sort of atonement to the justice of the country, the design of which is to restore the authority of good government, which transgression has impaired. But if the law itself is bad, or the penalty too severe, every sacrifice made to it must be an instance of cruelty. And should a prince of the blood royal, in compassion to the offenders, offer to suffer in their stead, for the purpose of atonement, whatever love it might discover on his part, it were still greater cruelty to accept the offer, even though he might survive his sufferings. The public voice would be, There is no need of any atonement; it will do no honour, but dishonour, to the legislature: and to call the liberation of the convicts an act of grace is to add insult to injury. The law ought not to have been enacted, and, now it is enacted, ought immediately to be repealed. It is easy to see from hence, that, in proportion as the law is depreciated, the gospel is undermined, and both grace and atonement rendered void. It is the law as abused, or as turned into a way of life in opposition to the gospel, (for which it was never given to a fallen creature,) that the sacred Scriptures depreciate it; and not as the revealed will of God, the immutable standard of right and wrong. In this view, the apostle delighted in it; and if we be Christians, we shall delight in it too, and shall not object to be under it as a rule of duty; for no man objects to be governed by laws which he loves.
Finally, If the doctrine of Divine influence be considered in its Scriptural connexions, it will be of essential importance in the Christian life; but if these be lost sight of, it will become injurious.
To say nothing of extraordinary influence, I conceive there is what may be termed an indirect influence of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit, having inspired the prophets and apostles, testified in and by them, and often without effect. "Many years didst thou forbear them, and testifiedst against them, by thy Spirit, in thy prophets, yet would they not give ear." The messages of the prophets being dictated by the Holy Spirit, resistance of them was resistance of him. It was in this way, I conceive, that the Spirit of God strove with the antediluvians, and that unbelievers are said always to have resisted the Holy Spirit. But the Divine influence to which I refer is that by which sinners are renewed and sanctified; concerning which two things require to be kept in view.
First, It accords with the Scripture. Is it the work of the Holy Spirit, for example, to illuminate the mind, or to guide us into truth? In order to try whether that which we account light be the effect of Divine teaching, or only a figment of our own imagination, we must bring it to the written word. "To the law and to the testimony: if they speak not according to this word, it is because there is no light in them." The Holy Spirit teaches nothing but what is true, and what was true antecedently to his teaching it, and would have been true though we had never been taught it. Such are the glory of the Divine character, the exceeding sinfulness of sin, our own guilty and lost condition as sinners, and the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. The test of Divine illumination, therefore, is whether that in which we conceive ourselves to be enlightened be a part of Divine truth as revealed in the Scriptures. Further, Is it the work of the Holy Spirit to lead us in the "paths of righteousness?" This also must be tried by the written word. The Holy Spirit leads us into nothing but what is right antecedently to our being led into it, and which would have been so though we had never been led into it. He that teacheth us to profit leadeth us
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"by the way that we should go." The paths in which he leads us for his name's sake are those of righteousness. Such are those of repentance for sin, faith in Christ, love to God and one another, and every species of Christian obedience. One test, therefore, of our being led by the Spirit of God, in any way wherein we walk, is, whether it be a part of the will of God as revealed in the Scriptures. As the Holy Spirit teaches us nothing but what was previously true, so he leads us into nothing but what was previously duty.
Secondly, Divine influence not only accords with the sacred Scriptures, but requires to be introduced in those connexions in which the Scriptures introduce it. We have heard it described as if it were a talent, the use or abuse of which would either issue in our salvation or heighten our guilt. This is true of opportunities and means of grace, or of what is above described as the indirect influence of the Holy Spirit; but not of his special influence. The things done for the Lord's vineyard, concerning which he asks, "What more could I have done?" include the former, and not the latter. The mighty works done in Chorazin, Bethsaida, and Capernaum, relate, not to the special influences of the Spirit on their minds, but to the miracles wrought before their eyes, accompanied as they were by the heavenly doctrine. I do not remember an instance in the sacred Scriptures in which the renewing and sanctifying influences of the Spirit are thus represented. Divine influence has been introduced as an excuse for sin committed previously to our being the subject of it, as if, because it is necessary to any thing truly good being done by us, therefore it must be necessary to its being required of us. But if so, there would have been no complaints of Simon the Pharisee for his want of love to Christ; nor of unbelievers at the last judgment for the same thing; nor would Paul have carried with him so humbling a sense of his sin in having persecuted the church of God, while in unbelief, as to reckon himself the chief of sinners on account of it. The want of Divine influence has been introduced as an apology for negligence and slothfulness in the Christian life. What else do men mean when they speak of this and the other duty as "no further binding upon them than as the Lord shall enable them to discharge it?" If it be so, we have no sin to confess for "not doing that which we ought to have done;" for as far as the Lord enables us to discharge our obligations, we discharge them. The doctrine of Divine influence is introduced in the sacred Scriptures as a motive to activity: "Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God that worketh in you, both to will and to do of his own good pleasure."
Finally, We have often heard this doctrine introduced in the pulpit in such a way as to weaken the force of what has been previously said on behalf of God and righteousness. When the sacred Scriptures speak of the cause of good, they ascribe every thing to God's Holy Spirit. The writers seem to have no fear of going too far. And it is the same with them when they exhort, or warn, or expostulate; they discover no apprehension of going so far as to render void the grace of God. In all their writings, the one never seems to stand in the way of the other; each is allowed its full scope, without any apparent suspicion of inconsistency between them. But is it so with us? If one dares to exhort sinners in the words of Scripture, to "repent and believe the gospel," he presently feels himself upon tender ground; and if he does not recede, yet he must qualify his words, or he will be suspected of disbelieving the work of the Spirit! To prevent this he must needs introduce it, though it be only to blunt the edge of his exhortation – "Repent and believe the gospel I know, indeed, you cannot do this of yourselves; but you can pray for the Holy Spirit to enable you to do it."
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It is right to pray for the Holy Spirit, as well as for every thing else that we need, and to exhort others to do so; and it may be one of the first petitions of a mind returning to good, "Turn thou me, and I shall be turned:" but to introduce it instead of repenting and believing, and as something which a sinner can do, though he cannot do the other, is erroneous and dangerous. ======================= [From Joseph Belcher, The Complete Works of the Rev. Andrew Fuller, Volume I, 1845; rpt. 1988. Document provided by David Oldfield, Post Falls, ID. -- jrd]
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