Chapter 5. Two Cases of Conscience resolved
Chapter 5.
Two Cases of Conscience resolved BUT here are two cases to be put.
CASE 1. Whether a regenerate person may not serve God with weariness?
Ans. 1. Yes; but this delight in God is not wholly extinct. This lassitude and weariness in a child of God may arise from the in-being of corruption, Rom 7.24. It is not from the grace that is in him, but the sin — just as Peter's sinking on the water was not from his faith but his fear. Yet I still say, a regenerate person's will is for God, Rom
7.15. Paul found sometimes an indisposition to good, Rom 7.23. Yet at the same time he professes a complacency in God, "I delight in the law of God, in the inner man," verse 22. One may delight in music, or in any recreation; yet through the weariness of his body, he may be dulled for the present, and indisposed to it. A Christian may love
God's law, even though sometimes, the clog of the flesh weighing him down, he finds his former vigour and agility remitted.
Ans. 2. This faintness and weariness in a regenerate person is not habitual; it is not his constant temper. When the water ebbs a while it is low water, but there is soon a spring-tide again. It is sometimes low water in a Christian's soul. He finds an indisposition and irksomeness to that which is good, but in a while there is a springtide of affection, and the soul is carried full sail in holy duties. It is with a Christian as it is with a man who is distempered: when he is sick, he doesn't take that delight in his food which he did formerly; indeed, sometimes the very sight of it offends him. But when he is well, he falls to his food again with delight and appetite. So it is when the soul is distempered through sadness and melancholy: it doesn't find that delight in word and prayer as it did formerly. But when the soul returns to its healthful temper again, now it has the same delectability and cheerfulness in God's service as before.
Ans. 3. This weariness in a regenerate person is involuntary. He is troubled by it; he doesn't hug his disease, but mourns under it. He is
weary of his weariness. When he finds a heaviness in duty, he goes heavily under that heaviness. He prays, weeps, wrestles, uses all means to regain that alacrity in God's service that he usually has.
David, when his chariot wheels were pulled off, and he drove on heavily in religion, how often he prayed for quickening grace! 20 (Psa
119) When the saints have found their hearts fainting, their affections flagging, and a strange kind of lethargy seizing them, they are never at rest till they have recovered themselves, and have arrived at that freedom and delight in God which they once sensed.
CASE 2. Whether a hypocrite may not serve God with delight?
Ans. I answer, he may; Herod heard John the Baptist gladly, Mat 6.20. And those who fasted for strife and debate, "delighted to know
God's ways," Isa, 58.2. A hypocrite may, out of some flashy hopes of heaven, show a delight in goodness. Yet it is not such a delight as is found in the regenerate, for his delight is carnal. A man may be carnal while he is doing spiritual things: It is not the holiness and strictness in religion that the hypocrite delights in, but something else. He delights in prayer, but it is the showing of gifts that he looks at, rather than the exercise of grace. He delights in hearing, but it is not the spirituality of the word that he delights in; not the savour of knowledge, 2Cor 2.14, but the lustre. When he goes to the word preached, it is so that he may feast his fancy, rather than better his heart — as if a man were to go to an apothecary's shop for a pill, only to see its gilding, not the operative virtue. The hypocrite goes to the word to see what gilding is in a sermon, and what may delight the intellect. Hypocrites come to the word as one comes into a garden, to pluck some fine flower to smell, not as a child comes to the breast for nutriment. This is curiosity rather than piety.
Such were those in Eze 33.32: You "are to them like a very lovely song of someone who has a pleasant voice, and can play well on an instrument." The prophet being eloquent, and having a pleasing delivery, they were greatly taken with it, and it was as sweet to them as a refrain of music. But it was not the spirituality of the matter they liked so well, as the melody of the voice. It was a sharp, yet seasonable reproof of Chrysostom to his audience, "This is what," he
says, "is likely to undo your souls: you hear your ministers like so many minstrels, to please the ear, not to pierce the conscience." You see, a hypocrite's delight in religion is carnal. It is not to be nourished in the words of faith which he minds, but the eloquence of speech, the rareness of notion, the quickness of fancy, the smoothness of style. He strives only to pluck from the tree of knowledge. Alas, poor man, you may have the star-light of knowledge, and yet it may be night in your soul.