111. Temptations, When We Meet Them At First, Are As The Lion That Roared Upon Samson. But If We...

CXI ‘Temptations, When We Meet Them At First, Are As The Lion That Roared Upon Samson. But If We Overcome Them, The Next Time We See Them, We Shall Find A Nest Of Honey Within Them.’ IN the preface to Grace Abounding John Bunyan dedicates that great book to his spiritual children.

‘I have sent you enclosed a drop of that honey which I have taken out of the carcase of a lion. I have eaten thereof myself also, and am much refreshed thereby. Temptations, when we meet them at first, are as the lion that roared upon Samson; but when we overcome them, the next time we see them, we shall find a nest of honey within them. The Philistines understand me not.’ And so on, all through that wonderful preface to that wonderful book.

Now when we go on to read that wonderful book itself we soon find that the temptations of its author were temptations of no ordinary kind. They were very far from being temptations of that coarse and common kind into which we would have expected to see young Bunyan falling, when we consider his birth, and his upbringing, and his tinker and his soldier life. So inward indeed, so spiritual and so evangelical even, were John Bunyan’s temptations all through his wonderful life that the most of us are much too philistine fully to understand either him or them. For there is nothing in which the most of us are more philistine than just in the true understanding of inward and spiritual and evangelical temptations.

‘Temptations, when we meet them at first, are as the lion that roared upon Samson.’ Now you all know from your childhood the Bible story of Samson and the lion. You all remember how Samson went down, and his father and his mother to Timnath; and, behold, a young lion roared against him. And how the Spirit of the Lord came upon Samson mightily, till he rent the lion as if it had been a kid, and he had nothing in his hand. And when some time after Samson returned to the place to look at the carcase of the lion, behold! there was a swarm of bees and a nest of honey in the carcase of the lion. And Samson took of the honey in his hands, and went on eating, and he came to his father and mother, and he gave them, and they did eat. But he told them not that he had taken the honey out of the carcase of the lion. That is the substance of the old Bible story. And then the classical preface to Grace Abounding contains John Bunyan’s spiritual interpretation and personal application of that same old Bible story.

Now to John Bunyan and to all Bunyan-like men among us the roar of Samson’s lion is never out of their ears all their days on earth. Like Samson’s road to Timnath, some men’s roads all through this life lie alongside of the lions’ dens and up among the mountains of the leopards. To some men every step of their earthly life is just another new temptation. They are no sooner delivered out of one temptation than they suddenly fall into another and a worse. Till their whole earthly lifetime is one long snare to them, one long warfare, one long watching, one long weariness, one long waiting for the deliverance of death.

During a solitary walk along the hillside above the village of Durinish one day last September, all the way as I walked I was thinking about my own unceasing and ever-increasing temptations. Now as God would have it there had been a whole night of the densest sea-fog from the Atlantic, and the wet spray stood in millions of shining gems all over the spiders’ webs that were woven all over the broom, and the bracken, and the bushes of whin, and the bushes of heather. Had I not seen the scene with my own eyes I could not have believed it. The whole hillside was absolutely covered from top to bottom with spiders’ webs past all counting up. All the spiders in Scotland seemed to me to have conspired together to weave their webs and to spread their snares all over that Durinish hillside that day. To the casual and innocent-minded passer-by the whole hillside would have seemed simply splendid with its brilliant network of sparkling silver. But the very brilliancy of the scene only made that hillside all the more horrible and diabolical to me, as I thought of the bloodthirsty devil that lay watching for the silly flies at the hidden heart of every silvery web. It was a Saturday forenoon, and it would have been well worth a week-end ticket to some of you just to have stood beside me for a few moments, and to have seen with your own eyes that satanic hillside that September forenoon. For myself, I shall never forget the sight. I see it at this moment as I stand here. A thousand times that sight has risen up before my eyes since I came home. If our Lord had been passing that hillside that forenoon He would have stopped His walk, and looking at the spiders’ webs He would have said to His disciples: Such is the kingdom of Satan! Which when the twelve had seen and had laid to heart they would have been exceedingly amazed, and would have said: Who, then, can be saved? When He would have answered them: With men this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.

It was the rising of the sun that morning that revealed to me those thousands on thousands of glistering snares. But for the sunlight falling on the hillside, and but for the subject of my morning meditation, I would have wholly missed seeing that never-to-be-forgotten spectacle, and I would never have read to myself or to you that so impressive parable. If I had not been musing all that morning on matters of eternally vital importance to you and to me, and if the sun had not by that time been high in the heavens, I would have stumbled on like any idle-minded holiday maker, and would never have seen so much as a single one of those thousands of death-spreading spiders’ snares. And so it is, I said to myself, with the thousands of Satan’s death-spreading snares in the case of every human soul. Satan’s accursed snares are woven and woven over and over every inch of every human soul. But those snares of Satan are wholly invisible till the sun rises and till the soul awakens to a life of watching and praying and believing. But when, by the special grace of God to any of us, we are so awakened, then this whole city in which we dwell becomes to us a second Durinish hillside, and you and I become those dismembered flies whose blood-sucked wings and legs I saw dangling in the wind all up and down among those glistering spiders’ webs. The streets and the squares of Edinburgh, our own houses, and our own churches even, all are that doleful hillside over again to every man who is not a stark philistine. Nay to every man who is not a stark philistine his own soul is that doleful hillside. For the very body which his soul inhabits is all set over with snares for his soul. The very table also at which he eats and drinks, the very chair on which he sits, and the very bed on which he sleeps. The close pursuer’s busy hands do plant Snares in thy substance: snares attend thy want;

Snares in thy credit, snares in thy disgrace;

Snares in thy high estate, snares in thy base;

Snares tuck thy bed, and snares attend thy board;

Snares watch thy thoughts, and snares attend thy word;

Snares in thy quiet, snares in thy commotion;

Snares in thy diet, snares in thy devotion;

Snares lurk in thy resolves, snares in thy doubt;

Snares lurk within thy heart, and snares without;

Snares are above thy head, and snares beneath;

Snares in thy sickness, snares are in thy death…

Skill, bugle, poison, steed, bow, raiment pale, Decoys, snares, nets, shafts, dogs — make up the tale. By far the worst of all John Bunyan’s temptations, so he himself tells us, was to question the being of God, and the truth of His Gospel. And some of you have had your own worst temptations in that same so fatal direction. But by persevering in secret prayer, and by constant and exclusive reading of your Bible and other devotional and experimental books, and by continuing to do the will of God all through your darkness, you came at last to ‘know the doctrine,’ as Christ said you would. Aye and to know the doctrine with a certitude that nothing shall ever any more shake in your case. That is what Bunyan in his own sweet style calls a nest of honey taken out of the carcase of a lion. For an assault of unbelief in God and in His Gospel is the lion of all lions, and her roar is the roar of all roars. But then the sweetness and the strength that dropped into your heart when your faith in God came back to you, that was to you like Samson’s honey and his honeycomb.

Then again, to come to another side of your awful life of temptation: in the case of some of you that is. You are sometimes so fixed and fastened down inside such a perfect network and woven web of trials and temptations as to make your daily life all but absolutely unbearable by you. Some man that you hate in your heart, some man that is an incessant and a wearing-out temptation and snare to you, is fastened down at the very heart of your life. He lives in the same house with you. Or his house is next door to you. Or his house or his office or his shop is straight across the street from your house or your office or your shop. And so tortured are you in your heart with that man’s simple neighbourhood that you often think of going to live in another part of the town so as to get him out of your sight. Nay you have sometimes thought of spending the rest of your days in another country altogether. You sometimes wish in your misery that either he were in his grave or that you were in yours. Nobody would believe the terrible trial that man is to you. Nobody will ever know what a snare that man is to your soul. Nobody — but your minister. Nobody will ever guess at your terrible torture but that solitary traveller among the spiders’ webs of Durinish that awful September forenoon. It was of you that he was thinking when the sun came out and the whole hillside became so full of personal and pastoral lessons to him. Only one man on earth, and one Man in heaven, for one moment understands and sympathises with your fearful sufferings. But they both understand your case; yes, down to the deepest and the darkest bottom of it. I have told you something about your minister. John Bunyan shall tell you something about his High Priest and yours. ‘Christ Himself was tempted to blaspheme His Father,’ says Bunyan. ‘He was tempted to fall down and worship the very devil. Nay, he was tempted, like you, to take His own life.’ But long before those recorded temptations of His, you are invited to imagine His year in and year out of temptations, so like your own that you alone can imagine them or believe them possible. His year after year of temptations and trials in the carpenter’s shop all day, and then every morning and every night at His mother’s fireside, beside all His unbelieving and unsympathising brothers and sisters. He was in all points tempted like as you and I are. A whole forest of lions roared on Jesus Christ day and night for thirty years. But He forgot it all as often as He again ate the honey that lay hid for Him also in every overcome temptation. Pray you and endure you like Him, and you will eat honey like Him.

‘If you pray for an enemy and an injurious and an offensive man, and speak good concerning him, and continue to do him good, it will end in your actually loving him,’ so says William Law to us, and he had tried that way of it, and had taken the honey out of it that he shares with us in his so victorious books. Try much more prayer on your so offensive and injurious neighbour; try much more prayer and much more good neighbourhood as God gives you your opportunity; and some day soon you will find a great nest of honey opened up next door to you aye, opened up in the very house beside you. And so on, through all the lions, and through all the spiders, and through all the men, and through all the devils that are now ensnaring your soul, and are roaring upon your soul every day and every hour of your earthly life.

You are in downright desperation some Sabbath morning. And you stumble into some open church, as Hannah stumbled up to Shiloh. And you hear a prayer offered or a sermon delivered, the like of which you never heard before. And it goes straight home to your broken heart. It takes away your breath. You feel as if your whole secret case had somehow been all discovered to that commanding preacher. Already you are not so desperate and so near drowning yourself as you were all last night. You are not so awfully alone on your bed in hell as you were all last night. A strength and a sweetness straight down from heaven entered your broken heart that never-to-be-forgotten Sabbath morning. You have always dated your deliverance from death and your newness of life from that miraculous Sabbath morning. For it was both a birthday and an espousal day and a true marriage day to your lost soul. A true Samson, if ever there was one, shared his nest of honey with you that Sabbath morning. But, though you found him out, and told him something of what his sermon had done for your soul, I feel sure he has never told you where he got his sermon. He has never told you out of what temptations of his he took his sermon, nor what it cost him before he preached it.

‘And Samson took thereof in his hands, and went on eating, and came to his father and mother, and he gave to them, and they did eat.’ But Samson never told them that he had taken all that honey out of the carcase of a dead lion that had at one time roared upon him.

I have seen as much as that some prodigal son who is all but ready for the Dean Bridge will stop me in the dark lane behind the church on my way home to-night, and will say to me:

‘Sir,’ he will say, ‘I am that blood-sucked fool that you saw dangling among those spiders’ webs by the wayside! Temptations, you said, to some men become a nest of honey. My temptations have become to me, for years past, nothing but dust and ashes in my mouth, and I have drunk nothing but blood and tears.’

Some thirty years ago I took home a prodigal son from the same dark lane, who is now in his Father’s house, where all tears are wiped from off all eyes. But before he was received home in heaven he lived long enough on earth to find his sweet nest of honey not only in all his overcome temptations, but even more, in those temptations that he did not overcome, but that at one time had overcome him. And on many a communion day in this same house of God I have heard him singing with all his heart and soul after the table this thanksgiving psalm:

‘Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me bless his Holy Name, who forgiveth all thine iniquities, who healeth all thy diseases, who redeemeth thy life from destruction, and who crowneth thee with lovingkindness and tender mercies. Yes, truly, bless the Lord, O my soul!’