085. As For Paul's Epistles, I Could Not Away With Them.

LXXXV ‘As For Paul’s Epistles, I Could Not Away With Them.’ THE time had been when Paul would have hated his own Epistles with a far more deadly hatred than ever John Bunyan hated them. The time had been with the Apostle himself when he was far more ignorant of the corruptions of his heart than ever John Bunyan was, and when he hated the very mention of the name of Jesus Christ far more than ever John Bunyan hated it. But where sin abounded, grace did much more abound. Till, when the scales fell from off Paul’s eyes, and when God revealed His Son in Paul, there then began a series of Epistles to the very Churches that Paul had persecuted to prison and to death: a series of Epistles the like of which the world has never seen, nor will ever see, to the end of time. What a man was Paul — ‘if he was a man!’ as was said in the early Church concerning him. And what a work was Paul given of God to do! Humanly speaking, but for Paul and his Epistles, both the Son of God, and His redeeming work, would have remained to this day an all but hidden mystery to us and to all the world. But as God would have it, when Jesus Christ was elected and predestinated to His redeeming work, Paul also was elected and predestinated to his apostolic work, after and alongside of Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ was elected and predestinated to do a work that He alone could do; and at the same time Paul was elected and predestinated to preach Jesus Christ and His work of salvation from sin as no other man could have preached it. ‘Sun, and moon, and stars, and passages of Shakespeare, and the last greater than the first’ — that has been given as a supreme example of the rhetorical figure called hyperbole. But there is no hyperbole in this: Sun, and moon, and stars, and passages of Paul, and the last out of all sight greater than the first. Such passages as this: — ‘The Church of God, which He hath purchased with His own blood.’ And this, ‘Being justified freely by His grace.’ And this: ‘To him that worketh not, but believeth.’ And this: ‘Who was delivered for our offences.’ And this: ‘Of Him are ye in Christ Jesus.’ And this: ‘I am crucified with Christ.’ And this: ‘In whom we have redemption through His blood.’ And this: ‘For it pleased the Father that in Him should all fullness dwell.’ And this: ‘And ye are complete in Him.’ And this: ‘This is a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am chief.’ But the truth is, as Hazlitt says of Burke, the only adequate examples of Paul are all that he ever wrote. Read therefore, all that Paul ever wrote; and like Luther you will read him sixty times, and every time with new wonder and new praise, and you will read less and less every other writer. The true glory of Paul’s Epistles stands in this: He takes of the deepest things of God and of Christ and reveals them to us as no one else has ever revealed them. ‘The Gospels,’ says an Egyptian Father, ‘supply the wool, but the Epistles weave the dress.’ That is to say, it is Paul’s Epistles that set forth in all its fullness the complete and the final purpose of God in all that we see taking place in Matthew, and in Mark, and in Luke, and in John. In the four Gospels we see Jesus Christ born, and baptized, and tempted; we hear Him preaching also, so far as His hearers were able to bear it; and then we see Him taken by His enemies, and bound, and tried, and condemned and crucified. But it is Paul alone who comes and takes us down into the divine heart of all that. It is Paul alone who fully preaches out of all that the pardon of all our sin, our peace with God, our holiness of heart and life, and the life everlasting. That was all wrapped up in the four Gospels but was not as yet aright revealed. Yes: the four Evangelists supply him abundantly with the wool, but it is Paul alone who places the warp and the woof in his apostolic loom till both he and all his believing readers can say, ‘I put on His righteousness and it clothed me: it was to me for a robe and for a diadem.’ Matthew has his Gospel, says Paul, and Mark has his Gospel, and both Luke and John have their Gospels, but better than them all and above them all I have ‘my Gospel.’ In his holy pride, and rising up to the full height of his holy calling, the Apostle says to us:

‘For I certify you, brethren, that the Gospel which I preached to you is not after men. For I neither received it of men, neither was I taught it, but by the revelation of Jesus Christ. For it pleased God, who separated me from my mother’s womb, and called me by His grace, to reveal His Son in me, that I might preach Him among the heathen: immediately I conferred not with flesh and blood: neither went I up to Jerusalem to them that were apostles before me.’

Now, with all that, listen to John Bunyan’s deliberate and true testimony concerning himself at one time.

‘Wherefore, falling into some love and liking for religion, I betook me to my Bible, and began to take great pleasure in reading it; but especially the historical parts thereof. For, as for Paul’s Epistles, and suchlike Scriptures, I could not away with them: being as yet but ignorant, either of the corruptions of my nature, or of the want and worth of Jesus Christ to save me.’ But what exactly is this ‘want and worth of Jesus Christ,’ of which John Bunyan was still so ignorant? I do wish that Bunyan had gone to the bottom of all that ‘want and worth’ himself. For, how impressively and how memorably he could have set forth the want and worth of Jesus Christ, first to God, and then to us. But perhaps Bunyan said to himself, Who can come after the King? Who can add one word to that which Paul has written so fully in every Epistle of his? And that is true. For all up and down, in every Epistle of his, Paul exhibits to us what a want Jesus Christ supplied; first to God, and then to us. First to God, when He came to make a full and an everlasting atonement for sin, and thus to set God’s hands free, so to say, to do all that for us which it was in His heart to do. God wanted some one to come to earth to be a propitiation through our faith in His blood, so that He might be just, and at the same time the justifier of him which believeth. I suppose God could have got the worlds created by some other servant of His than His Son; but His Son alone could be an allsufficient sacrifice for sin. God’s want, therefore, was that His Son should do all that He did, in order that He, the Father, might be free and safe to justify the ungodly, which He was determined to do. ‘Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?’ ‘Here am I,’ said His Son, ‘send Me. Lo, I come, in the volume of the Book it is written of Me, I delight to do Thy will; yea, Thy law is within My heart.’ God’s great want of Jesus Christ is past all words of the human mind to contain and to convey. Words fail the Holy Ghost Himself to set that want of the Father fully forth. And, then, there is our want of Jesus Christ to come to save us. Who shall sufficiently put words upon our want? Who shall count up the want and the worth of Jesus Christ to save us who are as full as we can hold of all corruption and abomination? The Son of God puts that to us in His own incomparable way when He demands of us in one place: ‘What shall a man give in exchange for his soul?’ And we reply to that out of the depths of our sin and say to Him, ‘Save me from going down to the pit, for I have found a Ransom. And my Ransom is Thyself, O Thou priceless Son of God!’ And, thus, when it is all finished, both God and man, both angels and saints, shall all unite in this great doxology of indebtedness to Jesus Christ, and shall say: ‘Worthy is the Lamb that was slain to receive power, and riches, and wisdom, and strength, and honour, and glory, and blessing.’ And we who are the saved from among men, and by that time the saved from all our corruptions and all our abominations, we will add this, and will say for ourselves:

‘Unto Him that loved us, and washed us from our sins in His own blood, to Him be glory and dominion for ever and ever. Amen.’

Students of divinity! Happiest and most enviable of all our young men! Paul’s Epistles are the true divinity for you. They contain God’s finest wheat for you. They are full of honey and the honeycomb out of His Rock for you. ‘Study down,’ therefore, Paul’s Epistles, as we are told Thomas Goodwin studied them down. And your love for Paul’s Epistles, and for such expositions of Paul’s Epistles as Luther on the Galatians, and Goodwin on the Ephesians, will be a sure prophecy to you of the power and the fruitfulness of your future preaching. Be you — if you will take a word of advice from me — be you sleepless students day and night of Paul’s Epistles, and of his only true successors: the first Reformers, and the Puritans of England, and the Covenanted Presbyterians of Scotland. Take the deep substance of Paul’s Epistles and put all that deep substance into Newman’s English, or at least into Spurgeon’s English, and that will make you perfect preachers to the best of your future people. For do not doubt but that God who watches what books you read in your student days, and what divinity you delight in, will both own and bless the provision you are already beginning to make for His poor in Zion. At the same time, make up your mind that there will be people in all your congregations who will not away with your preaching of Paul’s gospel. They can make nothing of Paul. Like John Bunyan at one time, they greatly enjoy well-written and well-delivered lectures on the historical parts of the Bible. They praise the preachers whom William Law denounces — the preachers who preach on Euroclydon and on the times when the gospels were writ. And they will let you explore and preach anything you like but the corruptions of their own hearts, and the want and worth of Jesus Christ to save them. But never you mind. Go you on, going deeper and deeper both into Paul and into yourself every returning Sabbath day, and those deserters of your ministry will all return to it when the scales fall off their eyes. Aye, like Paul himself they will return to support and to defend and perchance some of them to occupy the pulpit that at one time they so hated and persecuted and fled from. If they are ordained to eternal life, they will yet be heard repeating Bunyan’s great apostrophe and saying, O blessed Paul! O ever dear and ever blessed Paul! Aye, and to your amazement they will add this: O dear and blessed minister who first taught us to read Paul’s Epistles, and to understand them, and to enjoy them, and to enjoy nothing else like them in all the world. Amen.