The grand distinction of Christianity is that it makes its appeal to faith, and upon that rests the promise of salvation.
2. But this is the scandal of men. If we hold any truth by reason, perception, or on evidence what need of holding by faith? And if we hold it without such evidence what is belief, but a surrender of our proper intelligence?
3. It is proposed to show how it is that we, as intelligent beings, are called to believe, and how, as sinners, we can in the nature of things, be saved only as we believe. This text sets us at the point when seeing and believing are brought together as not united; in Joh_6:40 they are united.
4. It stands on the face of the language
(1) That faith is not sight but something so different that we may see and not believe;
(2) That sight does not include faith or supersede the necessity of it, for after sight faith is expected;
(3) That sight is supposed to furnish a ground for faith, and involving guilt when faith is not exercised. Let us look at three kinds of faith.
I. Take the case of SIGHT. It has been a great question how it is we perceive objects. Berkeley denied that we saw them at all. The persons who saw Christ had only certain pictures cast in the back of the eye which were mere subjective impressions. How then do we bridge the gulf between sensations and their objects; how it is that having a true picture in the back of the eye we make it a tree. Some deny the possibility of any solution; but the best solutions conceive the soul to take these forms as more than objects perceived, that we complete sensation or issue it in perception by assigning reality to the distant object. What is this but the exercise of a sense faith. We thus see by faith.
II. Take that FAITH WHICH, after perception is completed, ASSIGNS TRUTH TO THE THINGS SEEN, and takes them to be historic verities. Thus after Christ had been seen in the facts of His life, it became a question what to make of those facts--whether there could have been conspiracy or self-imposition in the miracles. The mere seeing of a wonder never concludes the mind of the spectator. How many testify to having seen the most fantastic wonders, and yet they very commonly conclude by saying they know not what to make of them, doubting whether sleight of hand, ventriloquism, etc., may not account for them. The evidence to one who saw Christ was as perfect as it could be; but all that can be said is that a given impression has been made, and that impression is practically nought till an act of intellectual assent is added. Then the impression becomes to the mind a real and historical fact, a sentence of credit passed.
III. We come now to CHRISTIAN FAITH. This begins just where the last-named faith ends. That decided the greatest fact of history, viz., that Christ actually was. But what is now wanted and justified and even required by the facts of His life is a faith that goes beyond the mere evidence of proportional verities, viz., the faith of a transaction; and Christian faith is the act of trust by which one being, a sinner, commits herself to another Being, a Saviour. In this faith
1. Everything is presupposed that makes the act intelligent and rational. That Christ was what He declared Himself to be and can do what He offered to do, and that we can commit ourselves to Him.
2. The matters included in this act are the surrender of our mere self care, the ceasing to live from our own point of separated will, a complete admission of the mind of Christ, a consenting to live as infolded in His spirit.
3. Great results will follow.
(1) The believer will be as one possessed by Christ, created anew in Christ Jesus.
(2) New evidence will be created. As in trying a physician new evidence is obtained from the successful management of the disease, so the soul that trusts itself to Christ knows Him with a new kind of knowledge; has the witness in himself.
Lessons.
1. The mistake is here corrected that the gospel is a theorem to be thought out and not a new premiss of fact communicated by God to be received of men in all the threefold gradations of faith.
2. We discover that the requirement of faith, as a condition of salvation, is not arbitrary but essential for deliverance from sin. What we want is God, to be united to Him and thus to be quickened, raised, made partakers of the Divine Nature.
3. We perceive that mere impressions can never amount to faith, inasmuch as it is the commitment of our being to the Being of Christ our Saviour.
4. It is plain that what is wanted in the Christian world is more faith. We dabble too much in reason. We shall never recover the true apostolic energy without it. (H. Bushnell, D. D.)
Christ the true bread must be both seen and appropriated
Christians grow weak because they let their meat and drink stand by them. It is not the flesh in the pot, but the flesh in the stomach, that gives nourishment. It is not the drink in the vessel, but the drink taken down, that revives. Stir up spiritual hunger, and that will make you feed heartily on Christ. Eat and drink Christ by meditation, eat and drink Him by application. Let your faith draw in Christ in every ordinance. Keep your spiritual meals as constantly as you do your other meals. Your eating will help you to a stomach. Satisfaction and hunger are mutual helps one to another. Eating and drinking other meat takes away the appetite, but it increaseth the spiritual appetite. Fixed times of spiritual feeding every day are marvellous profitable. When you have prayed, call your heart to account what it hath taken in of Christ. When you have been reading, ask it what nourishment it hath received from the word. When the Lord’s Supper is over, inquire what refreshment is received. Put yourselves forward to frequent, constant, actual feeding. It is a pity such precious meat and drink should stand in corners when the soul hath so much need of it. (Ralph Robinson.)
Christian faith
If a man comes to a banker with a letter of credit from some other banker, that letter may be read and seen to be a real letter. The signature also may be approved, and the credit of the drawing party honoured by the other, as being wholly reliable. So far what is done is merely opinionative or notional, and there is no transactional faith. And yet there is a good preparation for this; just that is done which makes it intelligent. When the receiving party, therefore, accepts the letter, and entrust himself actually to the drawing party in so much money, there is the real act of faith, an act which answers to the operative, or transactional faith of the disciple. Another and perhaps better illustration may be taken from the patient or sick person as related to his physician. He sends for a physician, just because he has been led to have a certain favourable opinion of his faithfulness and capacity. But the suffering him to feel his pulse, investigate his symptoms, and tell the diagnosis of his disease, imports nothing. It is only the committing of his being and life to this other being, consenting to receive and take his medicines, that imports a real faith, the faith of a transaction. In the same manner Christian faith is the faith of a transaction. It is not the committing of one’s thought, in assent to any proposition, but the trusting of one’s being to a being, there to be rested, kept, guided, moulded, governed, and possessed for ever. (H. Bushnell, D. D.)
