097. The Enmity That Is In Me To God.

XCVII ‘The Enmity That Is In Me To God.’

CALVIN says that the first table of the law, spiritually considered, holds by far the higher rank of the two; but the second table, he says, is far better adapted for making a scrutiny into our sinful hearts. And Stier takes the same view when he says that the second table is far better fitted than the first to carry conviction to our coarse-grained consciences. Now since that is so, let us commence to-night with our enmity to our neighbours. And when conviction is carried home to our evil hearts in the matter of our enmity to our neighbours, then after that we shall the better come to the far more spiritual scrutiny of our enmity to God. But to begin with, what exactly is this evil thing here called enmity? Enmity is estrangement. It is alienation. It is dislike. It is antipathy. It is animosity. It is ill-will. It is deep hostility of heart. As the saying is, it is to be at daggers-drawn with a man. Now, let us take those synonyms of enmity, and let us boldly and honestly make use of them for a somewhat thorough scrutiny of ourselves in this sad matter of enmity.

Well, then, who and what man is he from whom we are so estranged and so alienated? Let us name him to ourselves. From having been at one time good friends, or at least from having been at one time innocent and welldisposed neighbours, why are we now so estranged and so alienated? What was the original cause of this sinful estrangement and alienation? What was it in him, if it was in him? But more likely, what was it in us? A good and honest heart always begins a scrutiny like this with suspecting itself. My brethren, you will make yourselves good and honest hearts just by the way you set yourselves to find out in yourselves the whole cause of your sinful estrangement and alienation from so-and-so, naming him to yourselves as you commence your scrutiny of yourselves concerning him.

Again, why do you so bitterly dislike so-and-so? What is it in him that makes you so to dislike him? Is there really anything in him fully to account for your bitter feelings towards him? Make sure that it is not something in yourself. Is your dislike of him wholly honourable and creditable to you; or is it wholly the reverse? Imagine to yourself something that would turn your dislike to him into liking for him. Tell yourself what it is that would wholly turn your heart round to him. And that will throw a great light on yourself, and on your self-seeking heart.

Again, against what man do you harbour a secret and a rancorous ill-will? Put your finger on the name of the man concerning whom you like to hear evil tidings; on the name of the man concerning whom you hate to hear any good. How has that horrible state of mind arisen within you? Explain to yourself why it is that you have sunk to such a depth of wickedness as that. And at that point play the man. Look in your own evil face and tell yourself to your face that you have found yourself out. Say to yourself that you are that most hateful thing on the whole earth, a malicious-minded man. Cut open and spread out the black inside of your heart before God, and give Him no rest as long as an atom of that black heart dwells within you. Tell Jesus Christ in secret and unceasing prayer that since His name and His office are what they are, it is His proper and promised business to kill and cast out the devil who harbours and burrows and spits hell-fire in your heart. And tell Him that you look to Him to do it. And to do it as quickly as possible, lest you die a devil yourself.

Then again, why have you nursed and suckled and secretly fed your illwill till you could kill such and such a man? Aye, and would do it too if you were not such a coward. You have not the courage of your evil feelings else you would dispatch him on his way home some dark night. As it is it would make you the best of company at the breakfast table tomorrow morning if you read in the paper that some other enemy of his had done your work for you. But among the weapons of civilisation cowards employ an anonymous pen where brave men employ an open dagger. Whether you go to that depth with yourselves or no, that was the way John Calvin scrutinised himself concerning his neighbour. And especially concerning his neighbour in the sixth and ninth commandments. Now you are all sound Calvinists in the doctrines of election, and redemption, and the final perseverance of the saints. Up then and be sound Calvinists henceforth in your scrutiny of yourselves, in your detection of yourselves, in your detestation of yourselves, and in your condemnation of yourselves. ‘Condemn yourselves,’ said Calvin’s master, ‘and God will justify you. But cover yourselves up, and excuse yourselves, and defend yourselves, and God will expose and condemn you, and that without appeal.’ In still further scrutiny of our enmity to our neighbour, take our ecclesiastical divisions and alienations. Now, do I love and honour and wish well to the ministers and the members of other churches, as I wish well to those of my own church? Or do I grieve over their prosperity, and does it rejoice my heart to hear of their adversity? Let every one of us scrutinise himself and then honestly answer that. Our Lord’s last prayer was offered to His Father concerning those rancorous animosities and hatreds and mutual persecutions which He foresaw would so lacerate the Church which is His body. Now how do you stand toward that great prayer of His? And is your heart and life advancing or frustrating that intercession of His? Does any minister, especially, deny this enmity? Then he is not a good heathen yet, not to say a good Christian. For even the ministers of heathendom all examined themselves and said to themselves, Know thyself. Calvin also had many a sore scrutiny of himself in respect of the church divisions of his day. And since we are among churches, how do you feel toward those men who have left your church and gone over to another church? But perhaps your hearts are too lukewarm to your own church to care very much about who comes to it or who leaves it. Only there are others among us who have the temptations that always accompany a real love and a real loyalty to their own church. Ministers, especially. Why, a minister will remember the people who deserted him and his ministry thirty, forty years ago. The wound those deserters gave to his proud heart is not healed to this day. And again on the other hand, the minister who receives those deserters with such effusiveness and with such open arms never has a thought to spare for the solace of his brother whose loss has been his gain. And I do not know that a minister’s elation of heart when he receives such deserters is one whit less sinful in the sight of God than is his neighbour’s enmity of heart at him and at them. Let a minister in prosperity as well as in adversity severely scrutinise himself. But you are not ministers, and you cannot be expected to understand or to sympathise with all their special temptations. But you are tradesmen, and shopkeepers, and lawyers, and advocates, and schoolmasters, and so on. And the same proud and selfish heart beats out its enmities in your bosom as in your minister’s bosom. And you also must learn to make your daily temptations in your shop and in your office so many calls and so many opportunities for a scrutiny of yourselves. Resentful merchants will remember the customers who left their shop with quite as long a memory as ministers will remember their ungrateful and run-away people. You will see shopkeepers scowling at you on the street and in the church after ten, after twenty years.

Then, again, you will sometimes see Mr. Worldly-wiseman leaving a poor and struggling congregation, and joining a rich and an influential congregation, in the hope of finding a ladder there by the help of which he may climb up to the ambition of his heart. You see through him quite well; everybody sees through him. And you are tempted to despise him and to hate him. But, though he deserves to be despised, you must not dwell too much on his motives and his meanness. For your heart only too easily falls into a state of real enmity towards such men. Place-hunting, and especially in the Church of Christ, is very hateful. But your heart is not a safe home for much hatred. You must watch, and take good care, not to hate any man; no, not even in the interests of religion, nor in the interests of Church purity, nor in any other interest whatsoever. In all this, I may not have come within a thousand miles of my own special enmity, and yours. So unsearchable, so past finding out, is the sinful heart. So endless are the corruptions, and the malignities, and the enmities of the human heart, that it must be left to each spiritually minded man to scrutinise himself without ceasing, making use, as every spiritually minded man will do, of the unceasing calls and opportunities to that scrutiny which his God and Saviour and Sanctifier supplies to him. You will see that all I have done is to point out some of the more outstanding and more glaring instances of enmity, leaving it to each several man to go into his own hidden heart and to scrutinise himself there, by the help of the holy Word of God and the holy Spirit of God.

Now I very much doubt, my brethren, whether any man of us all has sufficient fineness of mind by nature, and sufficient spirituality of mind by grace, to enable him to enter truly and fully on the subject of his own enmity to God. Many who would quite frankly admit their enmity to certain men would honestly and loudly deny that they had any enmity to God. And I do not feel that I am able to-night to enter into all the scriptural proofs and experimental evidences of that universal and awful enmity. The Scriptures are full of the proofs and the evidences of our enmity to God. And what is, to my mind, by far the deepest and the truest theological literature of the Church, both doctrinal and experimental, is also full of it. And what is more to me than all that, my own scrutiny of my own heart over a long and a heart-searching life is full of it. But all that does not make me feel able to-night to enter fully with you on your enmity to God and my enmity to Him. The subject is so dreadful, the fact is so fearful, that the proper handling of it is beyond me tonight. If I entered on it, by my unskilful handling of it, I would be sure to arouse denial and contradiction in some men’s minds, and that would cause more harm to them and to the truth than any good I could hope to do. A man must have that enmity in himself: he must have discovered that enmity deep down and widespread in his own heart, and he must daily lament and bewail its existence in himself, before I could preach with any profit to him about it. I do not say that any of us have such enmity to God as we have to some men; such enmity as that we would destroy Him out of existence if we could. And yet I am not sure. Let each man scrutinise his own heart about that. But no man can possibly deny his deep distaste sometimes, aye oftentimes, for spiritual duties and spiritual exercises; for secret prayer, for secret meditation, for secret self-examination, for secret communion with God, and for the pure spirituality and the pure divinity of all such exercises. And what is all that but distaste, and dislike, and weariness, and averseness, and almost enmity, to God Himself? Now to him who bitterly and with a broken heart feels all that in himself, and who hates his own ungodly and atheistic heart like hell, I will close with one word of encouragement to that man. And I take that word of encouragement out of a great forerunner of his in the depths of the divine life — the little read but invaluable Halyburton.

‘I looked on it,’ says the Professor, ‘as part of my duty to-day to search into my spiritual state. And after earnest application to God for His Holy Spirit, who alone searches the heart of man, I pitched upon this evidence of the progress of His work of grace within me. I found in myself a real and true approbation of the holy law of God, in both its tables, and an approbation of the holiness of God in all His law. I am now satisfied with the holiness and the justice and the spirituality of the law of God. The carnal heart is enmity against God, and is not subject to the law of God, neither, indeed, can be. But, blessed be God, the enmity that I once had to the law of God is now wholly and for ever removed.’ So writes that great man of God in his priceless diary. And till you come to that, take home with you to-night the paragraph of to-night out of John Bunyan. It is paragraph 115. I will read it again:

‘I remember that, one day, as I was travelling into the country, and was musing on the wickedness and blasphemy of my heart, and was considering the enmity that was in me to God, this scripture came to my mind: “He hath made peace by the blood of His Cross.” By which scripture I was made to see, both again, and again, and again, that day, that God and my soul were made friends by this blood. Yea, I saw that the justice of God and my sinful soul could now embrace and kiss each other through this blood. That was a good day to me; I hope I shall not forget it.’