Galatians 5:6 For in Jesus Christ neither circumcision avails any thing, nor uncircumcision; but faith which works by love. I. View, then, the GRANDEUR OF FAITH as the great collective act, in which all the powers of the soul are alike embarked. If God, in the beginning, by the constitution which He gave to man, made him a creature of law, if it can be shown that man fell from his original holiness in the free exercise of all the powers by which he was characterized a responsible being, then it follows that the gospel, as a remedy, must, in all its provisions, recognize this fundamental fact. The whole work of salvation has been already achieved by One from the bosom of the Father, acting as our substitute under the law, satisfying the claims of justice, and rendering obedience to the precepts. Where, then, if we do not work out the righteousness by which we are saved, comes into play our agency? What has man to do in this matter of personal salvation? Where does God place the test of our responsibility and freedom? Exactly at this point: Not in working out a righteousness, not in making atonement for sin, but in accepting the righteousness which is already provided — by cleaving to the Saviour whom the gospel presents to us as our Redeemer. Therefore, with the highest philosophy, do the Scriptures say, "He that believeth shall be saved; he that believeth not shall be damned." I ask you, now, to notice how completely, in the simplest exercise of faith, every faculty of the human soul is brought into action. There is the understanding, which must employ itself upon the propositions of Scripture in order to perceive what they say. There is the judgment and reason, which must meditate upon what is contained in these statements, in order to see whether they constitute a sound basis for a sinner's hope. Here are the affections, all brought into exercise when we behold the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ, and feel that He is, to us, "the chiefest among ten thousand and the one altogether lovely." Here is the will, putting forth its determinate act of choice when it accepts the Lord Jesus Christ, and accepts His work; and, in this very act of acceptance, distinctly and consciously repudiates every other ground of trust-exclaiming, with the apostle, "I desire to be found in Him, not having mine own righteousness, which is of the law, but that which is through the faith of Christ, the righteousness which is of God by faith." Nay, even the subordinate faculties of the human soul, such as the imagination, and the fancy, and the taste, all are brought into exercise in order that the great facts of the gospel may be presented before the mind as realities which it can touch and apprehend. Even the faith which is but as a grain of mustard seed, over which you and I weep in the closet because it is so feeble, when you come to analyze it in its constituent parts, is found to have drawn upon the whole contents of your spiritual being. It has occupied the understanding, it has employed the conscience, it has drawn out the affections, it has exercised the will; so that not one single power in man has remained dormant in that faith by which we cling to the Lord Jesus Christ. We hear the eulogy pronounced every day upon the achievements of intellect. Men spread out their philosophies before us, and we follow the painful steps with which they have proceeded from the first premise to the most distant conclusion. We walk with the scientists, who seem to have wrested from the hand of the Creator the keys of His own universe, and with bold adventure have roamed through its wide domains, opening its secret cabinets and unlocking their treasures to our gaze. And as these high achievements of science and of philosophy are held up before us, we are filled with astonishment and pride. God forbid that I should lack in sympathy with these grand movements of the human mind! But they are the exercise of only one power of our nature, even at the best. They reveal man in the towering reach of his intellect, which is bound to expand throughout the eternal ages, growing larger in its grasp and holding within its embrace the great truths of eternity and of God. By so much as I hope hereafter to see in heaven the boundless glory of Jehovah, and to spread out all my intellect in the contemplation of what is sublime and beautiful in God, am I forbidden this day to utter one word of disparagement upon the proofs of man's gigantic understanding. But I turn to faith, which equally exercises this intellect, which draws out all the affections of the soul and the immense power of the will; which presents man before me in the full complement of his powers; which reveals me to myself in the superb integrity of my nature — and I feel that if, through grace, I have been able to exercise this faith in the gospel of Jesus Christ, I have put forth an act which has brought out the totality of my being, which has expressed all the constituents of my nature, and which, therefore, in its essential glory, immeasurably transcends all other acts within the compass of the human soul. Under this aspect of it, then, I ask you to look at faith — as the great collective act of the soul, in which a man embarks all the constituent faculties of his being. II. Faith is the full and final CONVEYANCE OF THE SOUL TO THE LORD JESUS as His possession for ever. So that the first act of faith, by which we cleave to Jesus Christ, contains potentially within itself every subsequent act. Just as the seed implicitly contains the whole plant which is evolved from it, so all other acts of faith, until the hour when faith shall lose itself in sight, are contained within this first conveyance of the soul over to the Lord Jesus Christ. For, my hearer — God help you to understand it! ten myriads of times, in sins of desire and of thought and of deed, you have, with your own signature, endorsed the original apostasy in the garden of Eden and underwritten it for yourself. All your days, by personal transgression, you have assumed that guilt as your own. But now comes the hour when the connection with the first Adam is to be broken, when, as far as in us lies, we openly and publicly recant all our sin, and say to the second Adam, who stands upon the ruins of the first covenant and fulfils all of its forfeited conditions, "As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord." My hearer! is there no power in such an act? and must there not be a Divine virtue in the principle which enables you to perform it — when you can thus cut the connection with all preceding sin, and with him who by his fall precipitated you beneath the curse, disavowing all the transactions of the past, and giving yourselves over in an everlasting covenant to Him who is your Redeemer? III. View faith as the GERMINAL GRACE, out of which the whole experience of the Christian is developed — the root of all repentance, obedience, love, and worship. Thus I meet the shallow criticism which men sometimes make against the gospel, when they say, "We turn to one Scripture which declares, 'Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved;' and we turn to another Scripture which proclaims, 'Repent and be converted for the remission of sins.'" They ask of what value is that system which, in the very terms of salvation, is found so contradictory? Faith and repentance are but the two poles of one and the same truth. As there can be no faith which does not involve repentance as its immediate consequence, so there can be no repentance which has not been preceded by the faith of which it was born: and the difference between the two is simply in the order of thought in which you choose to contemplate them. When you shall presently go out of this building, every step down those aisles toward the door carries you just so much away from your pew: but as egress from the building is before the mind as the object to be attained, the motion toward the door, in the order of thought, precedes the motion from the pew; yet every inch that lessens the distance from the one increases just so much the distance from the other. The two are necessarily reciprocal. Then the faith which accepts the Lord Jesus Christ, accepts Him in all of His offices. Thus, faith is seen to be the germ, first of our repentance, then of our obedience, and then of that supreme love which we have to God when we love Him with all the heart and with all the soul and with all the strength and with all the mind. And if faith be, as I have sought to represent, the full conveyance of the soul to Christ as His possession, then is it in itself a complete and sublime devotion; and becomes the germ of that positive worship which we render to God upon His throne here upon earth and hereafter in heaven. IV. See the grandeur of faith as it is the human correlative, and the human measure, of the ATONEMENT OF JESUS CHRIST. Here, again, as I put into these cold words a thought that burns like fire, I tremble at the presumption. The obedience of Jesus Christ is the measure of God's holiness. And you find that there is a human measure and a human correspondent to this atonement of the Redeemer itself. For when our faith embraces it — when our faith looks upon the blood of Christ, and upon the obedience of Christ, and upon the sufferings and upon the cross of Christ — when, with all the power that belongs to thought, with all the pathos that belongs to feeling, with all the energy that belongs to will, man brings out his whole nature and grasps that atonement, and draws it up to him, and lays it over against his own guilty conscience, and rests in life and in eternity upon its blessed provisions — you have the best expression that earth can give of its estimate of the glory that lies in obedience to the law. I cannot afford to disparage that faith which thus, in its excursions, travels over the atonement of the adorable Redeemer; which is itself the measure of the infinite justice of God, and takes the dimensions of the boundless glory of Jehovah. V. In the last place, I signalize the grandeur of faith, in that it is the PERFECTION OF REASON. Philosophers are wont to glory in the prowess of human reason. Let me illustrate this, most simply, from the science of mathematics. If I say that the three angles of a triangle are equal to two right-angles, I by no means state a truth that is intuitive, but one that is demonstrable. But, then, how do I demonstrate it? By proving that the things which are equal to the same thing are equal to one another. Through the demonstration I carry the mind back, step by step, until it is landed in one of those original and necessary cognitions. And yet the mathematician will smile, with the most self-complacent disdain, upon the very principle which gives him the postulate upon which his reasoning depends. Now, consistency is a jewel; and when you undertake to flout faith, you must go clean through and strike at all these beliefs. When a man tramples upon this principle of faith, which demands the acceptance of the Saviour, I debar him from the possibility of reasoning on any subject under the sun. If the human reason starts from what it is obliged to accept; if, in all the after process, it is obliged to remand its conclusions to that elementary trust from which it in the first instance departed, in order to verify them — if you are obliged, for example, to believe in the principle of causality; if you are obliged to believe in the fact of your personal indentity; if you are obliged, by the necessity of your mental constitution, to believe in the reality of the external world, and to rely upon the evidence and the testimony of sense which underlies all the demonstrations of our proud physical science; if you are compelled, by the same necessity, to rely upon memory, which hangs together all the links of every chain of reasoning through which you are carried — I say, just in proportion as you reason with power to conclusions that are satisfactory, the verification of those conclusions is found in the elementary beliefs which you accept simply and alone with the trust of faith; and I interdict you, by this known fact, from undertaking to despise or contemn it. The man of intellect, who is proud of his power of thought, is the very last under the broad heavens to despise the principle of faith, which gives him his postulates, and the tests by which his conclusions are verified. One other suggestion, and then I am done with this point; which is, that if we start from faith, and if all the time we are going back to faith to verify every course of reasoning, it would seem that when we have accomplished the grand circuit, and know all things that are knowable, and have proved all things that are demonstrable — it seems to me in perfect analogy with man's mental constitution and with God's high prerogatives, that He should open to us the infinite beyond the finite; that we should rise at last beyond nature up to God; that we should ascend, at last, above these mortal shores to the immortal; that we should have power, by this principle of faith, to take possession of another world, grander, larger, more glorious than all these myriads of worlds which dot the immensity of space; and that, by and by, when we shall have illustrated all the triumphs of science, we shall be able to put the climax upon all this by the higher triumphs of a grander faith. God is infinite, lying beyond the sphere of human thought. Can He ever be known except through revelation? Could we ever understand Him, except by the power of faith? (B. M. Palmer, D. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: For in Jesus Christ neither circumcision availeth any thing, nor uncircumcision; but faith which worketh by love. |
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