1. Believing the Scriptures
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Believing the Scriptures1
For as yet they knew not the scripture, that he must rise again from the dead.
—John 20:9
The rest of the disciples did not believe these Scriptures that foretold of Christ’s resurrection from the dead. Can it be possible that there can be a scholar in Christ’s school who has not learned his lesson that Christ taught him? Can it be that any who have heard Christ Himself make so many preachings of His resurrection would not believe, for all that? Aye, you may see the proof of it here.
The doctrine that arises from this is clear: that it is neither the means nor hearing Christ as a man preach out of His own mouth that will do the turn2 and bring us to God and make us understand spiritual things. Preaching, indeed, is God’s means that He has appointed for that end and the way that He ordains for bringing in souls to Him. But when all is done, it is not the only means of bringing us to Him. The special thing is that which is spoken by our Savior Himself, that wind that “bloweth where it listeth,” and no man knows “whence it cometh, and whither it goeth” (John 3:8). We may preach to you until our head breaks and our breasts burst; aye, we may preach to you until doomsday, and yet that will not do the turn unless the inward calling of the Spirit is joined with it. For an outward sound to the ear is one thing, and Christ’s loosing all knots and removing all impediments another thing. Christ Himself said while He was in the flesh, “No man can come to me, except the Father…draw him” (John 6:44). Christ is speaking in that place to those who had the outward means, and yet, He says, it is not a strange thing that they do not come to Him, even though they have the means, because they lack the Father’s draught3 to draw them to Him. The scribes often heard Christ preach, and yet for all that, they consented to the slaying of the Lord of glory (1 Cor. 2:8).
Christ is preached there both to the Jew and to the Gentile, and yet, for all that, to the Jew He is a stumbling block, and to the Greek, the preaching of Christ is foolishness. We have much to do when the Lord’s Word is preached to pray to Him that He would join His Spirit and His wind with His Word. Aye, all of our own means or those of others are nothing without that being joined. It is in vain for us to rise early and lie down late and eat the bread of sorrow all day, if the Lord does not give the assistance of His Spirit to the means that we use.
And again, we may learn from this that arms of men are not the thing that will save us if the Lord Himself does not watch over the camp. God keeps evermore the issue and the event of all things in His own hand. And this serves to teach us not to trust in means of any sort, whether it be inward or outward matters. We should not trust in man or in weapons or any second causes whatsoever, but only in the Lord Himself, who is the only strength of His people. And so learn to overlook second causes when you look that way, and look no lower than heaven, to Him who sits there and guides and overrules all battles in the world and all things else, and will let it be seen in the end salvation—salvation, even His salvation to all those who trust in Him.
1. Quaint Sermons, 71–73.
2. do the turn: perform the work
3. draught: pulling motion or action