December 11

He that hath not the Son of God hath not life.—1 John 5:12.

A HIGH, noble, intellectual, pure, spiritual, blessed life, was the most precious gift with which God originally endowed his creature man. But this precious gift man forfeited by his sin. Death is now his inheritance under the curse which his transgression incurred. This dreadful forfeiture can only be retrieved by faith in the Son of God. For since the fall the life of man is treasured up in him, the one Mediator between God and man, and who gave himself a ransom for all. "In this was manifested the love of God toward us, because that God sent his only-begotten Son into the world, that we might live through him." It is plain then that those who have not the Son of God have not life. Deplorable indeed is the condition of such.

As all the creatures in the world, so man especially has in him a twofold desire: a desire of perfection, and a desire of perpetuity; a desire to advance, and a desire to preserve his being. Now then till a man's soul, after many rovings and inquisitions, has at last fixed itself upon some such good thing, as has compass enough to satiate and replenish the vastness of these two desires; impossible it is for that soul, though otherwise filled with a confluence of all the glory, wealth, wisdom, learning, and curiosity of Solomon himself, to have solid contentment enough to withstand the fears of the smallest danger, or to outface the accusations of the smallest sin.

Now then let us suppose that any good things of this world, without the life of Christ, were able to satisfy one of these two desires, to perfect and advance our natures: though indeed it be far otherwise, since without Christ, they are all like a stone in a serpent's head, or a pearl in an oyster; not our perfections, but our diseases. I may boldly say, that as long as a man is out of Christ, he were better be a beggar or an idiot, than to be the steward of riches, honors, learning, and wisdom, which should have been improved to the glory of him that gave them, and yet be able to give up, at that great day of accounts, no other reckoning unto God but this: "Thy riches have been the authors of my covetousness and oppression; thy honors, the steps of my haughtiness and ambition; thy learning and wisdom, the fuel of my pride." But now I say, suppose that nature could receive any true advancement by these things; yet alas! when a man shall begin to think with himself, May not God this night take me away, like the fool in the gospel, from all these things, or all these things from me? May I not, nay must I not within these few years, instead of mine honor, be laid under men's feet? Instead of purple and scarlet, be clothed with rottenness? Instead of my luxuries and delicacies, become myself the food of worms? Is not the poor soul in my bosom an immortal soul? must I not have a being, as long as there is a God who is able to support it? And will not my bags and titles, my pleasures and preferments, my learning and natural endowments, every thing save my sins, and my adversaries, and mine own conscience, forsake me, when I once enter into that immortality? When a man, I say, shall begin to summon his heart to such sad accounts as these, how will his face gather blackness, and his knees tremble, and his heart be even damped and blasted with amazement, in the midst of all the vanities and lies of this present world!

What a fearful thing is it for an eternal soul to have nothing between it and eternal misery to rest upon, but that which will moulder away and crumble into dust under it, and so leave it alone to sink into bottomless calamity! O beloved, when men shall have passed many millions of years in another world, which no millions of years can shorten or diminish; what accession of comfort can then come to those glorious joys, which we shall be filled with in heaven? or what diminution or mitigation of that insupportable anguish, which without ease or end, must be suffered in hell, by the remembrance of those few hours of transitory contentments, which we have here, not without the mixture of much sorrow and alloy, enjoyed? What relish, think you, hath Dives now left him of all his delicacies, or Esau of his pottage? What pleasure hath the rich fool of his full barns, or the young man of his great possessions? What delight hath Jezebel in her paint, or Ahab in the vineyard, purchased with innocent blood of him that owned it? How much policy hath Ahithophel, or how much pomp hath Herod, or how much rhetoric hath Tertullus left, to escape or to bribe the torments which, out of Christ, they must for ever suffer? O how infinitely doth it concern the soul of every man to find this life of Christ to rest upon, which will never forsake him till it bring him to that day of redemption, wherein he shall be filled with blessedness, infinitely proportionable to the most vast and enlarged capacities of the creature!