Which things also we speak, not in the words which man’s wisdom teacheth.
The true evangelical preacher speaks
I. Under the influence of the Holy Spirit.
1. He has received the Spirit.
2. Is instructed by the Spirit.
3. Speaks with the demonstration of the Spirit.
II. After careful study of God’s Word. Comparing, selecting, with much humility and prayer.
III. He cannot, therefore, accommodate himself to the wisdom of this world--
1. Either by modifying his doctrine to please worldly men--
2. Or adopting a worldly method of address. (J. Lyth, D. D.)
The illumination of the Holy Spirit
To teach, to enlighten, and to illuminate, have equivalent meanings.
I. Its need. The natural condition of the mind is spiritual darkness: hence illumination is necessary to the apprehension of spiritual things (Luk_11:36; 1Co_2:9-14; Eph_1:18).
II. Its author. It is ascribed to each person of the Trinity.
1. God (2Co_4:6).
2. The Son (Joh_1:9; 1Co_4:5).
3. The Holy Spirit (Joh_14:26).
III. Its instrument. The revealed Word of God (Psa_119:105).
IV. Its agency. The ministry of reconciliation. Preaching may awake men to their need of spiritual illumination (Eph_3:9).
V. How obtained.
1. By the careful reading of the Word.
2. By prayer (Psa_119:18). (L. O. Thompson.)
The dispensation of spiritual truth
I. How spiritual things are to be dispensed.
1. Not according to human rules.
2. But under the teaching of the Spirit.
3. In conformity with the Word of God.
II. By whom they are to be dispensed.
1. Not by unconverted men, for they cannot understand them.
2. But by those who are spiritual, who are indifferent to the judgment of man, and have the mind of Christ. (J. Lyth, D. D.)
Comparing spiritual things with spiritual.
Various meanings have been attached to this expression.
I. Adapting spiritual words to spiritual things, and not language incongruous, as we should be doing if we spoke thethings of God in words taught by human wisdom. But the apostle has already said this in effect, and according to this view there is a play on the word “spiritual” which is not in his manner; for “spiritual words” can only mean words taught by the Spirit (Eph_5:19), but “spiritual things” must mean things that reveal God.
II. Adapting spiritual things to spiritual men. But this is the direct opposite of what Paul declares, that spiritual men understand spiritual things, so that no adaptation of them to their capacity is needed.
III. Interpreting spiritual things to spiritual men. But it is only in reference to dreams and visions that the word
óõãêñé́íù
means “to interpret,” and that with few exceptions in the LXX. In no passage are the things of God represented as dreams to be interpreted, or allegories of which the apostles have the key.
IV. Interpreting spiritual things by spiritual words is open to the same objection.
V. Proving the truth of spiritual things (whether Old Testament types or the teaching of the Spirit) by the demonstration of the Spirit. But the word does not elsewhere signify “to prove.”
VI. Comparing spiritual things with spiritual is satisfactory. Christianity is a Divine wisdom. But this means from the side of teacher and of learner that revealed truths are combined so as to form a consistent and well-proportioned system of truth in their correlation. The higher Christian training resembles Plato’s criterion of dialectical power, the faculty to see the relation of the sciences to one another and to true being. (Principal Edwards.)
The Spirit’s work
The Holy Spirit is the source and standard of all spiritual things. Wherever found, in heaven or in earth, in time or eternity, they all come first from the Spirit of Life. In the New Testament sense, spiritual things are just the things of God; does that convey any thought to you? These are altogether different things from those we have been born into, live in, and take to so naturally. This is our misery, that we are antagonistic to the things of the spiritual world. No one had so much of God’s Spirit as our Lord; and there is nothing so suited to receive the Spirit as the soul of man. No spirit was more receptive than Christ’s. His heart was full of the Holy Ghost; and His words and works were less from Him than from the Spirit. The next best example of the Holy Ghost’s workmanship is the Bible. All parts are not equally full of Him; Job is not so full as John, nor Ruth as Romans; but he who is most spiritual will dwell most in those parts which reveal most of the mind of the Spirit of God. The Old Testament is penetrated with the Spirit even in its most secular and legal parts; and the spiritual mind can find spiritual meaning even in its laws, ordinances and ceremonies. But as Christ was most spirit-filled, so the New Testament is richer, and those hooks are most to be prized which hold most to New Testament doctrines. A preacher should be much in the New Testament, and if he is led into the Old he should always take the New back with him. His people have not a thousand years to spend in discovering its meaning, and it is not fair to keep them always in the elements, to the retarding of spiritual growth. Could you tell why you are a member of your Church, or are you ashamed to tell the reason? Did spiritual reasons take you there, and are spiritual results coming from the change? There is nothing we do on earth so spiritual and which demands so much spirituality as prayer. (A. Whyte, D. D.)
But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God,… because they are spiritually discerned.--
St. Paul’s trichotomy
This may be roughly compared to a cathedral: the body corresponds to the nave, the spirit to the chancel, the soul, which divides and unites the body and the spirit, to the transept, which divides and unites the nave and the chancel. The cathedral is one consecrated building with three main compartments, and man is one person in three natures, all consecrated in baptism to the Triune God. Furthermore, the human spirit is the highest and noblest of the three natures, and akin to the Divine, and therefore that which is immediately controlled by the Holy Spirit, who through it acts upon the soul, and through the soul upon the body. In like manner the chancel is the highest and holiest compartment of the cathedral, in which also is the altar or table of the Divine Presence. This illustration must not be pressed, but it may serve to smooth the way for some apprehension of the difficult question of man’s trichotomy. A psychical man, the mere soul-man--animalis (Vulgate) from anima, not animosus “full of spirit from animus--isone in whom the psyche, or lower principle of life dominates. He moves not in the sphere of Divine light and truth, but in the world of sense. If he is intellectual, he delights in a mental activity purely human, and exerted on objects merely mundane, and is attracted by worldly philosophies that fail utterly to lead the mind up to the high truth of God. The mental side of the psychic man comes to view in this text; the intellectual rather than the ethical, not to the exclusion however of the latter, for between the moral and the mental there is a mutual relation and interaction. In this homo animalis the higher principle of life, the human spirit illuminated and quickened intellectually and morally, does not dominate, has no activity, is dormant. He is one, as St. Jude says, “not having [in his own consciousness] spirit.” Such a one does not receive, indeed cannot admit into--that which he has not--a prepared spirit anything that is of the Spirit of God. He is psychic, not pneumatic: how can heentertain truths that are purely pneumatic? They are an absurdity to him. His habits of mind, modes and centres of thought, aims in life, lust of fame, pride of intellect, are all soul-like and sensuous, all of the cosmos and to the cosmos. Thus he is simply incompetent to apprehend what is extra mundane and supernal; indeed, he is not in a position to do so, for there must always be a correlation and mutual congruity between that which perceives and that which is perceived. Wherefore spiritual truths are “foolishness unto him,” because they are spiritually estimated, i.e., are tested and sifted by a process spiritual in the court of the human spirit, enlightened by the Divine, and there subjected to an anacrisis, or preliminary scrutiny ere they are admitted. (Canon Evans.)
The natural man
I. His character described. Assumes three phases:
1. The prejudiced, who oppose the truth.
2. The indifferent, who do not trouble about it.
3. The unenlightened, who cannot understand it.
II. His sad condition. Naturally without--
1. Knowledge.
2. Concern.
3. Hope. (J. Lyth, D. D.)
The natural man
I. Here are two objects set before us.
1. The natural man in contrast with the spiritual man. Note Paul’s classification.
(1) The carnal man “lives after the flesh.” His whole nature is the servant of sin.
(2) In the natural man the ethical element may be predominant. He may be a man of culture, sympathy, and a believer in the objective facts and formal sanctities of religion; and yet so long as he is only all that, he “cannot discern the things of the spirit.”
(3) The spiritual man is such by virtue of a new creation. He has “put off the old man and his deeds.”
2. “The things of the spirit.”
(1) They are spiritual things. Religion deals with supernatural objects--God, Christ, the Holy Spirit, &c. These are spiritually discerned. There are windows in the soul of the spiritual man through which he looks into the mystery of invisible worlds. “The Spirit searched,” &c. “God hath revealed them unto us by His Spirit.”
(2) They are revealed to faith. They occupy a sphere and deal with realities which “eye hath not seen,” &c. They are emphasised as “the things of God,” they are the product and expression of His thought. We have no faculties by which to apprehend a Being whose attributes are infinity and eternity. But what cannot be discerned may be revealed. That is what has taken place, and the verifying power of this revelation is a spiritual discernment, a faculty of faith, inwrought by the Spirit in the soul; and “the eyes of the understanding being enlightened,” we “know what is,” &c.
(3) They become real in the consciousness of the believing man, who is translated into a new order of being, is born again. God and the soul touch.
II. Some illustrations of the apostle’s teaching.
1. There is a class of outward things which we can only know by the senses. There is no rainbow to the blind man, no music to the deaf. So it is with the things of the spirit.
2. The senses bring in their report of things, but they know nothing of the science or philosophy of things. This is the work of trained intellect.
(1) To the ordinary man nature looks like a jumble of accidents; to the scientific there is a place for everything and everything is in its place, from the atom to the sun. To ninety men out of a hundred the pebble, or bit of coal or chalk, is merely a thing for use; to the trained eye it is a revelation of cycles of duration, in which now vanished dynasties of animated beings sported. Nature is a book of hieroglyphics which only science can interpret--it is scientifically discerned.
(2) Look at the Bible, at the seemingly discordant but really concatenated departments of revealed truth. But the Bible as a harmonious whole only yields itself up to the discipline and culture of the student.
3. Another class of realities we can know only as they come through experience. They are, in the strictest sense, “spiritual things(verse 11).
(1) The things of a man--his joys, hopes, fears, griefs, &c.
what man can know these, save the spirit of a man that is in him? Language is a system of signs for the expression of “unknown things”; but there are things of which it can be neither the sign nor the expression Thoughts lie deeper than speech, feelings than thoughts: consciousness the deepest of all, is the only witness of what passes in the mysterious world of mind. Sin, remorse, &c., have no sign and can never be interpreted but by the reality which calls them forth.
(2) So the things of God can be known only by the consciousness created by the Spirit of God. Coleridge speaks of a philosophical consciousness lying behind the ordinary consciousness before he can be a philosopher. To know what the reality of life is, we must live, not dissect it. To feel the bitterness of sin we must repent, not speculate about it. To taste the sweetness and power of Christ’s forgiveness we must believe in Christ, not just catalogue or canonise His virtues. These things belong to the “new name written, which no man knoweth,” &c.
(3) Hence the reason why so many unspiritual though gifted minds miss the entrance to the kingdom of God. They are “natural men” and “cannot discern,” &c. They are as blind men groping in the dark. Let us be consistent. I, as a non-scientific Christian, am warned off the ground of scientific induction as a territory on which I have no factor of investigation. My religion is not the organ of physical discovery. Very well: the scientist is warned off the ground of spiritual consciousness as a territory on which he is equally at fault. Conclusion: Note--
1. The limit which these considerations set to the possibilities of mental culture, and the rebuke which they administer to the audacity and irreverence of the unsanctified intellect.
2. The need of regeneration.
3. “If any man will do God’s will he shall know of the doctrine.(J. Burton.)
The natural man
I. His character.
1. Earthly.
2. Sensual.
3. Devilish.
II. His spiritual obliquity.
1. Moral. “He receiveth not.”
2. Intellectual. “He cannot know.”
III. His hopeless condition without Divine help. The things of God--
1. Are foolishness to him.
2. Must be spiritually discerned. (J. Lyth, D. D.)
A natural man’s ignorance of spiritual things
I. The character of the unrenewed man.
1. He follows the dictates of his own appetites.
2. He is under the control of his passions.
3. Being chiefly occupied about the perishing things of this world, he is dead to a future state.
4. Though man too much resembles the animal in many things, yet in this he differs widely from every other creature--he will be responsible for his conduct at the judgment-seat of Christ. Whatever be the sinner’s moral inability, his natural powers qualify him to serve God; and it is sin only that prevents him from using those natural powers in a manner in which he would please God. While the natural powers remain, though the inclination be absent, his accountability is continued. “We say, God actually treats the want of disposition, not as an excuse, but as a sin; and we take it for granted that what God does is right, whether we can comprehend it or not. Howbeit, in this case, it happens that with the testimonies of God accord those of conscience and common sense. Every man’s conscience ‘finds fault’ with him for the evils which he commits willingly, or of choice; and, instead of making any allowance for any previous aversion, nothing more is necessary to rivet the charge. And with respect to the common sense of mankind in their treatment of one another, what judge, or what jury, ever took into consideration the previous aversion of a traitor or a murderer, with a view to the diminishing of his guilt?”
II. The dispositions of the sinner’s mind towards God. He does not receive the things of the Spirit.
1. What the Spirit reveals. These things are found in the Holy Scriptures, which are the “lively oracles of God.” If the Spirit had made known a plan of salvation which had flattered the pride of the human heart, his testimony would have been cheerfully received.
2. What the Spirit imparts. Man, as a fallen creature, requires something done in him as well as for him. How much soever men may boast of their reason, their intellect, and their discernment, they must be Divinely illuminated before they can rightly understand the things which the Spirit either reveals or imparts. The natural man does not believe this. If you were to examine the opinions of a very large majority of those who are called Christians, they are either careless about the renovation of their own hearts, or they reject the doctrine altogether as a useless, unmeaning dogma. They fancy themselves virtuous and good, and that they are capable of making some amends for their disobedience of the law of God; they think that they will at some future time do some good thing that they may inherit eternal life, though their conscience often reproves them, after their best efforts, till they are ready to believe themselves but unprofitable servants.
3. What the Spirit requires. He requires of all men “to turn from darkness to light, from the power of sin and Satan unto God.” The animal man may love his sin and persist in committing it, but this he cannot do with impunity, for God will bring him into judgment! There is a method by which that sin can be forgiven, its dominion destroyed, and its love eradicated from the soul; and that is by the atonement of Christ. If he refuse this means of repentance and sanctification he must die in his sins; there remains no other sacrifice for sins. The Spirit requires that men should receive Christ. All the information which He imparts to the mind concerning the purity, spirituality, and extent of the holy law of God; every conception which He enables the mind to form of the holiness of God, exhibited in that law; and all the humbling convictions which He produces upon the soul in a state of penitence, are intended by the Holy Spirit to prepare the sinner for the reception of Christ as a suitable and all-sufficient Saviour. The natural man does not receive these “things of the Spirit of God.” He does not believethem. He calls them the words of God; but it is the language of the lip, not of the heart.
III. The reason which the apostle assigns. “They are foolishness unto him.” What dreadful havoc sin has made of the human soul l What haughty conduct towards God! How proud, how ignorant, and how unfeeling is the heart of man! This revelation was given to him for his instruction, to correct his errors and to remove his ignorance. After the divinity of this revelation had been fully and rationally ascertained, it was the duty of this rational being to submit to its teaching and decisions, without hesitation, thankful that God would condescend to instruct the undeserving and the sinner. The Spirit has revealed the infinite perfections of the Deity, so far as that revelation was connected with man’s duty and happiness, in a manner likely to excite him to fear, venerate, love, and worship Him as the ever-blessed God. What the Spirit has revealed must limit his inquiries and check his presumption. Let him regard what the Spirit of the Lord declares in His Word, and seek an experimental knowledge of those “heavenly blessings” which are provided in the new covenant for the penitent and believing. He does not understand them because they are “spiritually discerned.” But the Spirit can and will restore the spiritual faculty if he will ask Him. Let him not call them “foolishness”; for the preparation of them was the highest manifestation of the wisdom and love of God. His not perceiving them is not to be considered as a reason why they are not good in themselves and suited to relieve his misery. This is to be traced to his want of spiritual vision, “for sin has blinded his mind! (Wm. Jones.)
The natural man blind to the things of the Spirit of God
Set a man down on one of the jutting crags of the Andes, and with the shadows of midnight or the scarf of a morning mist hanging around him he sees nothing of the shaggy fantastic grandeur with which he is environed. He stands on one of the “altar thrones” of creation, with the sweep of the firmament above him, and the jewelled earth beneath him; but until the sunshine sifts its radiance on his sightless eyeballs, darkness confused and confusing shuts him in on every side. So with the spirit world in its relation to the natural man. That world envelopes him like an atmosphere or sea of life, touching him at every avenue of soul and sense with its glory; but the perceptive faculty is wanting and he cannot behold it. The flashing skies are dark to his closed eyes. Neither can the dark mind see God. (J. Burton.)
The ignorance of the natural man
I. Explain the truth affirmed.
1. Who is the natural man?
2. What are the things he cannot receive nor know?
3. Whence his incapacity?
II. Confirm it.
1. It was so in our Lord’s day.
2. In the times of the apostles.
3. Is so now.
III. Improve it. Learn--
1. To appreciate Divine knowledge.
2. How to seek it.
3. How to employ it. (J. Lyth, D. D.)
Natural or spiritual
The apostle knows of only two classes of men--natural and spiritual. Under “natural,” he includes all who are not partakers of the Spirit of God, no matter how excellent they may be. On the other hand, all into whom the Spirit of God has come he calls spiritual men.
I. The natural man receives not the things of the Spirit of God, but counts them foolish.
1. Some oppose them violently, and do their best to put down such folly.
2. A greater proportion secretly despise and condemn. They dare say that religion is a good thing for old women, &c., but utterly repudiate it as a thing worthy the attention of wise men.
3. The great mass are indifferent. “For forms of faith let graceless zealots fight, he can’t be wrong whose life is in the right.”
II. There is nothing whatever in the things themselves to justify such an estimation. You do not know what you say when you declare that the gospel of Christ is absurd. It is generally pretty safe to ask a man who rails at the Bible, “Did you ever read it?” These learned gentlemen are like those critics who, when they meet with a new volume, take the knife and cut the first page, smell it, and then condemn or praise. The mightiest intellects confess that the truths of this book are above their highest flights. Even Newton said there were depths here which no mortal could fathom. As these things of the Spirit of God are wise and profound, so they are most important, and if not received, it is not because they are uncongenial with our necessities. There are some speculations which a man need not enter upon, but the doctrines of God teach you your relationship to your Maker; your condition before Him; how He can be just to man, and yet be gracious; how you can approach Him, and become His child; how you may be conformed to His image, and made a partaker of His glory.
III. The reason for the rejection of the gospel.
1. Want of taste. You have sometimes seen an artist standing before a splendid picture. “What a fine conception!” says he, “I could stand a week and admire that.” Some bumpkin, however, says, “It looks to me to be an old decayed piece of canvas that wants cleaning.” Then leaving the gallery, he notices on the wall outside a picture of an elephant standing on his head, and a clown performing in some circus, and he says, “That’s more to my taste.” Just so is it with the natural man. Give him some work of fiction--a daub upon the wall--and he is satisfied. But he has no taste for the things of God.
2. Want of organs. Just as a blind man cannot appreciate a landscape nor a deaf man music; so the natural man lacking the eye and ear of faith cannot appreciate the beauties and music of the gospel.
3. Want of nature. The brute cannot appreciate the studies of the astronomer because he lacks an intellectual nature; and so the mere man of intellect cannot appreciate the things of the Spirit because he lacks a spiritual nature.
IV. The practical truths which flow from this great though sorrowful fact.
1. The absolute necessity for regeneration, or the work of the Spirit. You may educate a nature up to its highest point, but you cannot educate an old nature into a new one. You may educate a horse, but you cannot educate it into a man. You may by your own efforts make yourselves the best of natural men, but still at your very best there is a division wide as eternity between you and the regenerate man. And no man can help us out of such a nature into a state of grace. “Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.”
2. If any of us have received the things of the Spirit, we ought to look upon that as comfortable evidence that we have been born again. (C. H. Spurgeon.)
Man’s mortal inability to understand the things of the Spirit
Note--
I. Some of those sublime and interesting truths which the natural man does not receive.
1. The equity and goodness of the law of God, and the evil and desert of every transgression of it.
2. The suitableness and excellency of the method of redemption by Jesus Christ.
3. The necessity of union to Christ by faith as the source of holiness and strength.
4. The necessity of reconciliation to God and conformity to the Divine image to all true happiness both here and hereafter.
II. The alarming extent to which this want of spiritual discernment prevails, and the inadequacy of the highest advantages to communicate it.
1. We see some men endowed with great strength of mind, and their natural powers much improved by a liberal education, but they do not receive the things of the Spirit of God.
2. We observe other men who have great discernment and assiduity in the concerns of this life, and who discover a particular tact in the management of business, and considerable ability in improving the advantages afforded them of amassing wealth, but they receive not the things of the Spirit of God.
3. We see other persons favoured with the advantages of a religious education, but they have not received the things of the Spirit of God.
4. Some men have an undoubted conviction of the truth of the gospel, and their passions are occasionally moved with its important discoveries. Still, except a Divine change takes place in the heart, they do not receive the things of the Spirit of God.
III. The important reflection which the subject suggests.
1. That the disaffection of man to God is not accidental, or the result of some circumstances in which he is placed, but is an evil principle, natural to the whole species, and the consequence of the fall.
2. The great gratitude we owe to God for the gospel of His Son, as a discovery of enlightening and renewing grace, as well as of pardoning mercy.
3. The indispensable necessity of Divine influence in general, and in respect to our own personal experience in particular.
4. The importance of accompanying the means of grace with humble and earnest prayer. (Essex Congregational Remembrancer.)
Spiritual discernment
Not only have excellent photographs of the heavenly bodies been obtained, and an absolutely accurate picture of the skies obtained for permanent examination, but it has been found that the camera reveals stars invisible even with the aid of the most powerful telescope in existence. This is due to the fact that the camera is able by continued exposure to obtain an image of an object which may be so faint that a shorter exposure would give no image. This, of course, is a power the eye does not possess. It is equivalent to being able to see plainly by long gazing what cannot be seen at all by a brief inspection. A notable instance of this power is seen in photographs of the Pleiades, the group of stars mentioned in Job_36:31. Here a nebula is shown in the photograph which the eye cannot perceive in the sky, but which undoubtedly exists. Astronomers believe in the revelations of the camera, though they are not confirmed by actual observation. Their example may be commended to men who reject the inspired revelation of the Bible, and refuse to exercise faith when they areasked to accept spiritual truth not perceptible to the senses. (New York Sun.)
Spiritual discernment
I. There is nothing here which is not acknowledged and insisted on in every-day life. There are things that are only instrumentally discerned.
1. Here is a large brilliant diamond, and you pronounce it tobe without fault; but the lapidary gives you a magnifying glass of great power, and bids you look at the centre of the stone; and there sure enough you see a black spot. The lapidary says the naked eye can neither receive it nor know it because it is microscopically discerned. And nobody arises to say, “Sir, you have introduced a painful mystery into human thought and inquiry.” People are rather glad thata medium has been supplied by which the hidden truth may be brought to light.
2. Yonder are two shining surfaces, and you say there must be a great fire there. The scientist who overhears you, however, says, “One of those surfaces has nolight at all.” “But can’t I believe my own eyes?” “No,” he says, “just look through this instrument--the polariscope--and now you see that the one surface was primary light and the other but reflected. The naked eye can neither receive nor know it because it is polariscopically discerned. And you thank him for the information.”
3. Yonder are two men who have undertaken a mineral survey. One is a mineralogist, the other a man who believes that if he cannot find things out with his naked eyes and fingers that nothing can or shall be found out. The former walks slowly over the ground holding in his hand a little crystal box, watching the instrument within. Presently the needle dips, and he says, “There is iron here.” Can you see it, touch it? No. But the scientific man digs for iron and finds it, and then turns round to hear what the other has to say, and remarks, “The senses cannot receive or know it, for it is magnetically discerned,” and then receives the confidence he deserves.
4. Look at this ruddy-faced boy. You cannot walk out with him, but he challenges you to leap a five-barred gate; and you say, “What a vigorous lad! There will be a long life and a happy one.” A physician, however, drops in on your return, and hearing your verdict, applies an instrument to the region of the boy’s heart, and then, taking you aside, says, “He will never see five-and-twenty. He has had rheumatic fever and contracted valvular affection of the heart.” The untrained ear can neither receive it nor know it because it is stethoscopically discerned. Now in all these things we confess our need of instruments. Suppose that everything were taken away that cannot be discovered or read by the naked eye! Shut up the heavens, for astronomy must go; cover up the fields, for botany tells little to the naked eye. All science indeed would be impoverished and degraded. Yet the man who cannot read his own mother’s letter without an eyeglass insists upon reading the infinite and eternal God by his unassisted powers.
5. The same principle holds good in spheres where instruments are not required.
(1) Here are two men listening to the same piece of music. The one is inspired, enraptured, and says, “I would this might go on for ever.” The other says, “I wonder when they will be done.” The best ear cannot receive these things or know them, for they are musically discerned. The one man would be tormented if one note were the thousandth part of a shade wrong; but all the notes might be wrong so far as the other man knew.
(2) Here are two men looking at the same picture. The one is chained to the spot; the other, with a thick shilling catalogue, does not see much in that, and hastens on to something that has superficies, no matter what thesuperficies may be: only let it be extensive enough. Paint for such men with a broom,
II. The application of these things is to the things of God as accessible to the spirit of man. There are blind minds as well as blind eyes. “Except a man be born again he cannot see.”
1. As ministers, therefore, we are not to be discouraged because some people cannot understand us. There will always be men to whom the best preaching will be foolishness, because they have not the spiritual faculty.
2. Do we wish for this discernment? “If ye being evil,” &c. “If any man lack wisdom,” &c. (J. Parker, D. D.)
Spiritual insight in possible to unspiritual men
1. No painter was ever yet so unwise as to submit his work to the criticism of a committee of blind men, however learned such men might have been in history, logic, or law. Igor has any company of blind men assumed to sit in judgment upon Murillo, Raphael, or Titian; still less that they have fallen to raving because their censorship in art had not been accepted as final. The men in the Patent Office in Washington, who examine the thousand models that yearly come to them, are men who have an eye for machinery. Men who did not know a wheelbarrow from a spinning-wheel could scarcely get an appointment to such a place. In general it matters not how much a man may know nor how keen his power of discernment in some other line of human thought or knowledge, men give little heed to his talk unless he has capacity and culture in the very things of which he assumes to be a critic and a judge.
2. The elements of our complex nature are many; and a man may be strong in some things and weak in others. Lord Macaulay was almost a blockhead in mathematics. Sir Isaac Newton had hardly patience enough to read the “Paradise Lost” and only asked contemptuously, “What does it prove?” Milton might very likely have asked the same of the “Principia.” Many a great scientist has never been able to distinguish between the highest strains of music and any mere jargon of discordant sounds. Eminent lawyers and judges have been utterly blind to the beauties of the most perfect machinery, and many an inventive genius would have been utterly swamped in the commentaries of Blackstone.
3. Why, then, should it be thought any argument against the reality of spiritual things that here and there a man--with large genius for invention; for oratory; for science; for philosophy; for music; for art--has no appreciation for things unseen and eternal? It weighs less than a feather to him who revels in the demonstrations of geometry to know that hundreds of college students have never fully comprehended a single demonstration I “Poor fellows!” is all he can say, “I pity their obtuseness!” In like manner it weighs less than a milligramme to any Christian believer, whose soul has been illuminated from on high, that Darwin lived and died blind as a bat to all the glories of the spiritual universe. But unlike many another blind man, Darwin did, in a measure, realise his condition. He recognised the fact that his spiritual nature had died out! He calls it “atrophy.” In his boyhood he had a consciously religious nature; in later years it was starved to death! He tells us, also, that in early life he had a poetical nature. That, too, had been famished. His soul had died--“at the top!” Alas! how many another soul has died in the same way! Shall the Christian believer find his faith disturbed because of these great men whose souls have been lopped off? No! He still knows in whom he has believed. A blind man may tell me that he sees nothing in the glory of the evening sunset, or in Raphael’s Transfiguration. “Poor man!” I say, with deepest pity; that’s all. I do not forthwith put out my own eyes, because he has put his out; or, peradventure, may have been born blind. God forbid! I only cherish my eyesight with the more thankfulness and care. When even Humboldt, Darwin, Ingersoll, and Renan tell me that they see nothing of the spiritual and Divine in this revelation of the Divine life and glory of the Christ of God among the sons of men--Abraham, Moses, Isaiah, Daniel, Paul, John, and Luther, Knox, Wesley, Bunyan, and the unnumbered hosts of the Lord Almighty, will still continue to enjoy the seraphic vision and know whom they have believed.
4. A legislator may wisely study the Bible to help him in making laws. The historian may ponder its incomparable histories. The sociologist may turn over its leaves to find the profoundest teachings known to the world in his department. The lover of sublime and beautiful poetry may discover here some of the rarest gems that can be gathered from all the seas and from all the lands. But only the spiritual man can discern within these lids their choicest treasures of spiritual truth, and it would be passing strange if it were otherwise. What would your five-year-old boy think of conic sections, or your ten-months-oldbaby of a treatise on optics? “I wonder what grandfather can find in that old book!--it’s a very dull book to me.” So said a young man just entering college many years ago. But when the Spirit of God had opened his eyes, the young man marvelled no more at the absorption of his grandsire in the study of the old book, and himself lived to revel in its pages more than in all things else. Had sin never come, our vision had been clear. Oh, that every soul might cry out as Bartimeus, “Lord, that I may receive my sight!”
5. “What is the Bible?” Only Christian experience can fit any person to answer that question. I see a cherub of three short years over the way, and I ask, “What is that child?” The analytic chemist will tell me how much oxygen, and hydrogen, and nitrogen, and phosphorus enter into the forty pounds of avoirdupois of that beautiful form. The anatomist will tell me the number of bones and muscles and the names of them all that enter into her perfect body. But you are the child’s mother. And I ask you to tell me what she is. While I speak the angel of death has come, and she lies by your side a corpse. Her sweet face has a heavenly smile upon it, for she has had a vision of the Son of God, who has taken her into His arms. “What is that child?” You need the gift of tongues to tell me. The lips cannot utter it; your tears even can scarcely suggest it. The love of father and mother alone can conceive the answer. “What is the Bible?” Only he who has learned to love the Christ that shines through it can answer that question. And then his answer will grow as he grows, through all his years. He will find more in it as his experience deepens. The only proper test of the gospel of Christ is the trial of it. No soul was ever yet made worse by believing it. No Christian ever yet, as he came near to death, regretted his faith or recanted his trust in Christ. (E. B. Fairfield, D. D.)
Unsanctified men cannot read the Bible to profit
If you bring me a basket full of minerals from California, and I take them and look at them, I shall know that this specimen has gold in it, because I see there little points of yellow gold, but I shall not know what the white and the dark points are that I see. But let a metallurgist look at it, and he will see that it contains not only gold, but silver, and lead, and iron, and he will single them out. To me it is a mere stone, with only here and there a hint of gold, but to him it is a combination of various metals. Now take the Word of God, that is filled with precious stones and metals, and let one instructed in spiritual insight go through it, and he will discover all these treasures; while, if you let a man uninstructed in spiritual insight go through it, he will discover those things that are outside and apparent, but those things that make God and man friends, and that have to do with the immortality of the soul in heaven, escape his notice. No man can know these things unless the Spirit of God has taught him to discern them. (H. W. Beecher.)
The ignorance of the natural man
“Suppose,” says an old divine, “a geometrician should be drawing outlines and figures, and there should come in a silly, ignorant fellow, who, seeing him thus employed, should laugh at him; would the artist, think you, leave off his employment because of his derision? Surely not; for he knows that his laughter is hut the fruit of his ignorance, as not knowing his art, and the ground upon which it goes: and therefore he holds on drawing, though the fellow should hold on laughing.”
The natural man’s view
One may be a diligent student of science and have a large acquaintance with the facts and forces, processes and laws of the physical universe, and yet be insensible to all by which its higher meanings are revealed. The man of this spirit may cultivate his fields with judicious husbandry, but all the harvest goes into the barn, or to market; none is for the soul He may note the season’s circling course, but finds no meaning in their storied succession, save calls to a varied round of toil and use; no pulsings of a life Divine, no ebb and flow of supernal tides, bearing outward the flow of a Divine energy, and then with refluent flood coursing backward to the infinite deeps. He may view the stars, perhaps know their names, orders, distances, and seasons, but catches no glimpse of the Hand that moves them, nor hears the resonances of their silent song. He may climb the mountains, but it is only as tourist, or engineer, not as worshipper, or to find the uplands of God. (J. W. Earnshaw.)
Spiritual discernment impaired
Darwin gives an account of two blind men with whom he was in the habit of conversing for some years. They both told him that “they never remembered having dreamed of visible objects after they became totally blind.” So, when men give themselves to lower and meaner things, the higher and nobler faculties of the soul come in to trouble them less and less. By and by the spiritual and the unseen is to them as though it were not.
The natural versus the spiritual man
Different persons shall stand before that Nature’s wonder of wonders, the mighty cataract of Niagara, and how differently they will regard it and be affected by it! To one it will be simply an immense volume of water rushing down swift rapids and leaping a tremendous precipice, with stunning effect to the observant senses, but with no glory in its gliding, gleaming, plunging mass, and no music or meaning in its rhythmic roar. Another will be mainly impressed with the probable energy of the descending mass, and occupied with the problem of its utilisation. He will measure it according to the principles of hydro-dynamic science, and estimate what engines it would move, what machinery impel, and what work perform, if properly yoked, or what cities it would illumine, if converted into electricity, but find in it no power to draw the soul to God. Another, bringing to it a more aesthetic sensibility, will be impressed with its beauty and grandeur; but the beauty will be soulless, the grandeur only that of physical magnificence. But another shall bring to it a true spiritual sensibility, and to him it will open all its meaning, and become a wondrous revelation of the mighty power, grand designs, and sovereign laws of the infinite Creator, an apocalypse, through Nature transfigured in her own process, of Him who is Nature’s God and soul; and awed into silence, or thrilled with adoring wonder, he will stand as before the Holy of holies of Nature’s vast and solemn temple. The difference of impression and effect appears not only in relation to Nature’s more majestic scenes, but to all, from the greatest and rarest to the lowliest and most common. Dull sensibility passes unheeding, but to a Cowper, a Wordsworth, a Bryant, or a Ruskin, the very heath hath a voice, and the desert shrub becomes aflame with God. And so, too, with those works of art in which God speaks to us as it were by an interpreter. Different persons shall view some masterpiece of painting. To one it will be but a representation of sensible forms, beautiful or unbeautiful as the case may be, and with pleasant or gruesome effect according to the subject. Another shall note its fidelity to nature or history, and feel the charm, life, and dramatic movement of the piece. But another shall catch the very meaning and spirit of the work, and see what the artist has not painted yet could not but represent; could not treat his subject faithfully and not bring into view the great white throne. And so with a poem, a piece of music, or a sermon. One shall catch but the thunder of the sound and sensuous effect. To another it shall have a certain articulate coherence, as it were the voice of an angel, sweet perhaps, perhaps sublime, but its meaning unresolved. While to yet another it shall penetrate the soul as a voice from the unseen, holy, touching responsive chords of spiritual sensibility, and quickening, uplifting, and purifying the very inmost life of the soul. (J. W. Earnshaw.)
