and in the midst of our sins, before they are come to the full, and
sometimes in the beginning of an evil habit, be so fierce in His
anger, what can we imagine it to be in that day when the wicked are
to drink the dregs of that horrid potion, and count over all the
particulars of their whole treasure of wrath? "This is the day of
wrath, and God shall reveal, or bring forth, His righteous judgments."
The expression is taken from Deut. xxxii., 34: "Is not this laid up in
store with me, and sealed up among my treasures? I will restore it in
the day of vengeance, for the Lord shall judge His people, and repent
Himself for His servants." For so did the Lybian lion that was brought
up under discipline, and taught to endure blows, and eat the meat
of order and regular provision, and to suffer gentle usages and
the familiarities of societies; but once He brake out into His own
wildness, and killed two Roman boys; but those that forage in the
Lybian mountains tread down and devour all that they meet or master;
and when they have fasted two days, lay up an anger great as is their
appetite, and bring certain death to all that can be overcome. God is
pleased to compare himself to a lion; and though in this life He hath
confined Himself with promises and gracious emanations of an infinite
goodness, and limits himself by conditions and covenants, and suffers
Himself to be overcome by prayers, and Himself hath invented ways of
atonement and expiation; yet when He is provoked by our unhandsome and
unworthy actions, He makes sudden breaches, and tears some of us in
pieces, and of others He breaks their bones or affrights their hopes
and secular gaieties, and fills their house with mourning and cypress,
and groans and death. But when this Lion of the tribe of Judah shall
appear upon His own mountain, the mountain of the Lord, in His natural
dress of majesty, and that justice shall have her chain and golden
fetters taken off, then justice shall strike, and mercy shall hold her
hands; she shall strike sore strokes, and pity shall not break the
blow; and God shall account with us by minutes, and for words, and for
thoughts, and then He shall be severe to mark what is done amiss;
and that justice may reign entirely, God shall open the wicked man's
treasure, and tell the sums, and weigh grains and scruples. Said Philo
upon the place of Deuteronomy before quoted: As there are treasures of
good things, and God has crowns and scepters in store for His saints
and servants, and coronets for martyrs, and rosaries for virgins, and
vials full of prayers, and bottles full of tears, and a register of
sighs and penitential groans, so God hath a treasure of wrath and
fury, of scourges and scorpions, and then shall be produced the shame
of lust, and the malice of envy, and the groans of the opprest, and
the persecutions of the saints, and the cares of covetousness, and
the troubles of ambition, and the insolencies of traitors, and the
violence of rebels, and the rage of anger, and the uneasiness of
impatience, and the restlessness of unlawful desires; and by this time
the monsters and diseases will be numerous and intolerable, when God's
heavy hand shall press the _sanies_ and the intolerableness, the
obliquity and the unreasonableness, the amazement and the disorder,
the smart and the sorrow, the guilt and the punishment, out from all
our sins, and pour them into one chalice, and mingle them with an
infinite wrath, and make the wicked drink of all the vengeance, and
force it down their unwilling throats with the violence of devils and
accurst spirits.
We may guess at the severity of the Judge by the lesser strokes of
that judgment which He is pleased to send upon sinners in this world,
to make them afraid of the horrible pains of doomsday--I mean the
torments of an unquiet conscience, the amazement and confusions
of some sins and some persons. For I have sometimes seen persons
surprised in a base action, and taken in the circumstances of crafty
theft and secret injustices, before their excuse was ready. They
have changed their color, their speech hath faltered, their tongue
stammered, their eyes did wander and fix nowhere, till shame made
them sink into their hollow eye-pits to retreat from the images and
circumstances of discovery; their wits are lost, their reason useless,
the whole order of their soul is decomposed, and they neither see, nor
feel, nor think, as they used to do, but they are broken into disorder
by a stroke of damnation and a lesser stripe of hell; but then if you
come to observe a guilty and a base murderer, a condemned traitor,
and see him harassed first by an evil conscience, and then pulled in
pieces by the hangman's hooks, or broken upon sorrows and the wheel,
we may then guess (as well as we can in this life) what the pains
of that day shall be to accurst souls. But those we shall consider
afterward in their proper scene; now only we are to estimate the
severity of our Judge by the intolerableness of an evil conscience;
if guilt will make a man despair--and despair will make a man mad,
confounded, and dissolved in all the regions of his senses and more
noble faculties, that he shall neither feel, nor hear, nor see
anything but specters and illusions, devils and frightful dreams, and
hear noises, and shriek fearfully, and look pale and distracted, like
a hopeless man from the horrors and confusions of a lost battle, upon
which all his hopes did stand--then the wicked must at the day of
judgment expect strange things and fearful, and such which now no
language can express, and then no patience can endure. Then only it
can truly be said that he is inflexible and inexorable. No prayers
then can move Him, no groans can cause Him to pity thee; therefore
pity thyself in time, that when the Judge comes thou mayest be one of
the sons of everlasting mercy, to whom pity belongs as part of thine
inheritance, for all else shall without any remorse (except His own)
be condemned by the horrible sentence.
That all may think themselves concerned in this consideration, let us
remember that even the righteous and most innocent shall pass through
a severe trial. Many of the ancients explicated this severity by the
fire of conflagration, which say they shall purify those souls at the
day of judgment, which in this life have built upon the foundation
(hay and stubble) works of folly and false opinions, states of
imperfection. So St. Augustine's doctrine was: "The great fire at
doomsday shall throw some into the portion of the left hand, and
others shall be purified and represented on the right." And the
same is affirmed by Origen and Lactantius; and St. Hilary thus
expostulates: "Since we are to give account for every idle word, shall
we long for the day of judgment, wherein we must, every one of us,
pass that unwearied fire in which those grievous punishments for
expiating the soul from sins must be endured; for to such as have been
baptized with the Holy Ghost it remaineth that they be consummated
with the fire of judgment." And St. Ambrose adds: "That if any be as
Peter or as John, they are baptized with this fire, and he that is
purged here had need to be purged there again. Let him also purify us,
that every one of us being burned with that flaming sword, not burned
up or consumed, we may enter into Paradise, and give thanks unto the
Lord who hath brought us into a place of refreshment." This opinion of
theirs is, in the main of it, very uncertain; relying upon the sense
of some obscure place of Scripture is only apt to represent the
great severity of the Judge at that day, and it hath in it this only
certainty, that even the most innocent person hath great need of
mercy, and he that hath the greatest cause of confidence, altho he
runs to no rocks to hide him, yet he runs to the protection of the
cross, and hides himself under the shadow of the divine mercies: and
he that shall receive the absolution of the blest sentence shall
also suffer the terrors of the day, and the fearful circumstances of
Christ's coming. The effect of this consideration is this: That if the
righteous scarcely be saved, where shall the wicked and the sinner
appear? And if St. Paul, whose conscience accused him not, yet durst
not be too confident, because he was not hereby justified, but might
be found faulty by the severer judgment of his Lord, how shall we
appear, with all our crimes and evil habits round about us? If there
be need of much mercy to the servants and friends of the Judge, then
His enemies shall not be able to stand upright in judgment.
Let us next consider the circumstances of our appearing and his
sentence; and first I consider that men at the day of judgment that
belong not to the portion of life, shall have three sorts of accusers:
1. Christ Himself, who is their judge; 2. Their own conscience, whom
they have injured and blotted with characters of death and foul
dishonor; 3. The devil, their enemy, whom they served.
Christ shall be their accuser, not only upon the stock of those direct
injuries (which I before reckoned) of crucifying the Lord of
Life, once and again, etc., but upon the titles of contempt and
unworthiness, of unkindness and ingratitude; and the accusation will
be nothing else but a plain representation of those artifices and
assistances, those bonds and invitations, those constrainings and
importunities, which our dear Lord used to us to make it almost
impossible to lie in sin, and necessary to be saved. For it will, it
must needs be, a fearful exprobration of our unworthiness, when the
Judge Himself shall bear witness against us that the wisdom of God
Himself was strangely employed in bringing us safely to felicity. I
shall draw a short scheme which, altho it must needs be infinitely
short, of what God hath done for us, yet it will be enough to shame
us. God did not only give His Son for an example, and the Son gave
Himself for a price for us, but both gave the Holy Spirit to assist
us in mighty graces, for the verifications of faith, and the
entertainments of hope, and the increase and perseverance of charity.
God gave to us a new nature, He put another principle into us, a third
part of a perfective constitution; we have the spirit put into us, to
be a part of us, as properly to produce actions of a holy life, as the
soul of man in the body does produce the natural. God hath exalted
human nature, and made it in the person of Jesus Christ, to sit above
the highest seat of angels, and the angels are made ministering
spirits, ever since their Lord became our brother. Christ hath by a
miraculous sacrament given us His body to eat and His blood to drink;
He made ways that we may become all one with Him. He hath given us an
easy religion, and hath established our future felicity upon natural
and pleasant conditions, and we are to be happy hereafter if we suffer
God to make us happy here; and things are so ordered that a man must
take more pains to perish than to be happy. God hath found out rare
ways to make our prayers acceptable, our weak petitions, the desires
of our imperfect souls, to prevail mightily with God, and to lay a
holy violence and an undeniable necessity upon Himself; and God will
deny us nothing but when we ask of Him to do us ill offices, to give
us poisons and dangers, and evil nourishment, and temptations; and He
that hath given such mighty power to the prayers of His servants, yet
will not be moved by those potent and mighty prayers to do any good
man an evil turn, or to grant him one mischief--in that only God can
deny us. But in all things else God hath made all the excellent things
in heaven and earth to join toward the holy and fortunate effects;
for He that appointed an angel to present the prayers of saints,
and Christ makes intercession for us, and the Holy Spirit makes
intercession for us with groans unutterable, and all the holy men in
the world pray for all and for every one, and God hath instructed us
with scriptures, and precedents, and collateral and direct assistances
to pray, and He encouraged us with divers excellent promises, and
parables, and examples, and teaches us what to pray, and how, and
gives one promise to public prayer, and another to private prayer, and
to both the blessing of being heard.
Add to this account that God did heap blessings upon us without order,
infinitely, perpetually, and in all instances, when we needed and when
we needed not. He heard us when we prayed, giving us all, and giving
us more, than we desired. He desired that we should ask, and yet He
hath also prevented our desires. He watched for us, and at His own
charge sent a whole order of men whose employment is to minister to
our souls; and if all this had not been enough, He had given us more
also. He promised heaven to our obedience, a province for a dish of
water, a kingdom for a prayer, satisfaction for desiring it, grace
for receiving, and more grace for accepting and using the first.
He invited us with gracious words and perfect entertainments; He
threatened horrible things to us if we would not be happy; He hath
made strange necessities for us, making our very repentance to be a
conjugation of holy actions, and holy times, and a long succession;
He hath taken away all excuses from us; He hath called us from
temptation; He bears our charges; He is always beforehand with us in
every act of favor, and perpetually slow in striking, and His arrows
are unfeathered; and He is so long, first, in drawing His sword, and
another long while in whetting it, and yet longer in lifting His hand
to strike, that before the blow comes the man hath repented long,
unless he be a fool and impudent; and then God is so glad of an excuse
to lay His anger aside, that certainly, if after all this, we refuse
life and glory, there is no more to be said; this plain story will
condemn us; but the story is very much longer; and, as our conscience
will represent all our sins to us, so the Judge will represent all His
Father's kindnesses, as Nathan did to David, when he was to make the
justice of the divine sentence appear against him. Then it shall
be remembered that the joys of every day's piety would have been a
greater pleasure every night than the remembrance of every night's sin
could have been in the morning; that every night the trouble and labor
of the day's virtue would have been as much passed and turned to as
the pleasure of that day's sin, but that they would be infinitely
distinguished by the effects. The offering ourselves to God every
morning, and the thanksgiving to God every night, hope and fear, shame
and desire, the honor of leaving a fair name behind us, and the shame
of dying like a fool,--everything indeed in the world is made to be an
argument and an inducement to us to invite us to come to God and be
saved; and therefore when this, and infinitely more shall by the Judge
be exhibited in sad remembrances, there needs no other sentence; we
shall condemn ourselves with a hasty shame and a fearful confusion,
to see how good God hath been to us, and how base we have been to
ourselves. Thus Moses is said to accuse the Jews; and thus also He
that does accuse, is said to condemn, as Verres was by Cicero, and
Claudia by Domitius her accuser, and the world of impenitent persons
by the men of Nineveh, and all by Christ, their Judge. I represent
the horror of this circumstance to consist in this, besides the
reasonableness of the judgment, and the certainty of the condemnation,
it can not but be an argument of an intolerable despair to perishing
souls, when He that was our advocate all our life, shall, in the day
of that appearing, be our Accuser and our Judge, a party against us,
an injured person in the day of His power and of His wrath, doing
execution upon all His own foolish and malicious enemies.
Our conscience shall be our accuser. But this signifies but these two
things: First, That we shall be condemned for the evils that we have
done and shall then remember, God by His power wiping away the dust
from the tables of our memory, and taking off the consideration and
the voluntary neglect and rude shufflings of our cases of conscience.
For then we shall see things as they are, the evil circumstances and
the crooked intentions, the adherent unhandsomeness and the direct
crimes; for all things are laid up safely, and tho we draw a curtain
of cobweb over them, and a few fig-leaves before our shame, yet God
shall draw away the curtain, and forgetfulness shall be no more,
because, with a taper in the hand of God, all the corners of our
nastiness shall be discovered. And, secondly, it signifies this also,
that not only the justice of God shall be confest by us in our own
shame and condemnation, but the evil of the sentence shall be received
into us, to melt our bowels and to break our heart in pieces within
us, because we are the authors of our own death, and our own inhuman
hands have torn our souls in pieces. Thus far the horrors are great,
and when evil men consider it, it is certain they must be afraid to
die. Even they that have lived well, have some sad considerations, and
the tremblings of humility, and suspicion of themselves. I remember
St. Cyprian tells of a good man who in his agony of death saw a
fantasm of a noble and angelical shape, who, frowning and angry, said
to him: "Ye can not endure sickness, ye are troubled at the evils of
the world, and yet you are loath to die and to be quit of them;
what shall I do to you?" Altho this is apt to represent every man's
condition more or less, yet, concerning persons of wicked lives,
it hath in it too many sad degrees of truth; they are impatient of
sorrow, and justly fearful of death, because they know not how to
comfort themselves in the evil accidents of their lives; and their
conscience is too polluted to take death for sanctuary, and to hope
to have amends made to their condition by the sentence of the day of
judgment. Evil and sad is their condition who can not be contented
here nor blest hereafter, whose life is their misery and their
conscience is their enemy, whose grave is their prison and death their
undoing, and the sentence of doomsday the beginning of an intolerable
condition.
The third sort of accusers are the devils, and they will do it with
malicious and evil purposes. The prince of the devils hath Diabolus
for one of his chiefest appellatives. The accuser of the brethren
he is by his profest malice and employment; and therefore God, who
delights that His mercy should triumph and His goodness prevail over
all the malice of men and devils, hath appointed one whose office is
to reprove the accuser and to resist the enemy, and to be a defender
of their cause who belong to God. The Holy Spirit is a defender; the
evil spirit is the accuser; and they that in this life belong to one
or the other, shall in the same proportion be treated at the day of
judgment. The devil shall accuse the brethren, that is, the saints
and servants of God, and shall tell concerning their follies and
infirmities, the sins of their youth and weakness of their age, the
imperfect grace and the long schedule of omissions of duty, their
scruples and their fears, their diffidences and pusillanimity, and all
those things which themselves by strict examination find themselves
guilty of and have confest all their shame and the matter of their
sorrows, their evil intentions and their little plots, their carnal
confidences and too fond adherences of the things of this world, their
indulgence and easiness of government, their wilder joys and freer
meals, their loss of time and their too forward and apt compliances,
their trifling arrests and little peevishnesses, the mixtures of the
world with the thing of the Spirit, and all the incidences of
humanity he will bring forth and aggravate them by circumstances of
ingratitude, and the breach of promise, and the evacuating all their
holy purposes, and breaking their resolutions, and rifling their vows,
and all these things, being drawn into an entire representment, and
the bills clogged by numbers, will make the best man in the world seem
foul and unhandsome, and stained with the characters of death and evil
dishonor. But for these there is appointed a defender. The Holy Spirit
that maketh intercession for us shall then also interpose, and against
all these things shall oppose the passion of our blest Lord, and upon
all their defects shall cast the robe of righteousness; and the sins
of their youth shall not prevail so much as the repentance of their
age, and their omissions be excused by probable intervening causes,
and their little escapes shall appear single and in disunion, because
they were always kept asunder by penitential prayers and sighings, and
their seldom returns of sin by their daily watchfulness, and their
often infirmities by the sincerity of their souls, and their scruples
by their zeal, and their passions by their love, and all by the
mercies of God and the sacrifice which their Judge offered and the
Holy Spirit made effective by daily graces and assistances. These,
therefore, infallibly go to the portion of the right hand, because the
Lord our God shall answer for them. But as for the wicked, it is not
so with them; for altho the plain story of their life be to them a
sad condemnation, yet what will be answered when it shall be told
concerning them, that they despised God's mercies, and feared not His
angry judgments; that they regarded not His Word, and loved not
His excellences; that they were not persuaded by the promises nor
affrighted by His threatenings; that they neither would accept His
government nor His blessings; that all the sad stories that ever
happened in both the worlds (in all which Himself did escape till the
day of His death, and was not concerned in them save only that He was
called upon by every one of them, which He ever heard or saw or was
told of, to repentance), that all these were sent to Him in vain? But
can not the accuser truly say to the Judge concerning such persons,
"They were Thine by creation, but mine by their own choice; Thou didst
redeem them indeed, but they sold themselves to me for a trifle, or
for an unsatisfying interest; Thou diedst for them, but they obeyed
my commandments; I gave them nothing, I promised them nothing but the
filthy pleasures of a night, or the joys of madness, or the delights
of a disease; I never hanged upon the cross three long hours for them,
nor endured the labors of a poor life thirty-three years together for
their interest; only when they were Thine by the merit of Thy death,
they quickly became mine by the demerit of their ingratitude; and when
Thou hadst clothed their soul with Thy robe, and adorned them by Thy
graces, we stript them naked as their shame, and only put on a robe of
darkness, and they thought themselves secure and went dancing to
their grave like a drunkard to a fight, or a fly unto a candle; and
therefore they that did partake with us in our faults must divide with
us in our portion and fearful interest." This is a sad story because
it ends in death, and there is nothing to abate or lessen the
calamity. It concerns us therefore to consider in time that he that
tempts us will accuse us, and what he calls pleasant now he shall then
say was nothing, and all the gains that now invite earthly souls and
mean persons to vanity, was nothing but the seeds of folly, and the
harvest in pain and sorrow and shame eternal. But then, since this
horror proceeds upon the account of so many accusers, God hath put it
in our power by a timely accusation of ourselves in the tribunal of
the court Christian, to prevent all the arts of aggravation which at
doomsday shall load foolish and undiscerning souls. He that accuses
himself of his crimes here, means to forsake them, and looks upon them
on all sides, and spies out his deformity, and is taught to hate them,
he is instructed and prayed for, he prevents the anger of God and
defeats the devil's malice, and, by making shame the instrument of
repentance, he takes away the sting, and makes that to be his medicine
which otherwise would be his death: and, concerning this exercise, I
shall only add what the patriarch of Alexandria told an old religious
person in his hermitage. Having asked him what he found in that
desert, he was answered, "Only this, to judge and condemn myself
perpetually; that is the employment of my solitude." The patriarch
answered, "There is no other way." By accusing ourselves we shall make
the devil's malice useless, and our own consciences clear, and be
reconciled to the Judge by the severities of an early repentance, and
then we need to fear no accusers.
BAXTER
MAKING LIGHT OF CHRIST AND SALVATION
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Richard Baxter, was born in 1615, at Rowton, near Shrewsbury, in
England. After surmounting great difficulties in securing an education
for the ministry he was ordained in 1638, in the Church of England,
his first important charge being that of Kidderminster, where he
established his reputation as a powerful evangelical and controversial
preacher. Altho opposed to Cromwell's extreme acts, he became a
chaplain in the army of the Rebellion. His influence was all on the
side of peace, however, and at the Restoration he was appointed
chaplain to Charles II.