the account of that goodness, and employing God’s benefits in a
drudgery for our lusts. This is a treachery to his goodness, to make
his benefits serve for an end quite contrary to that for which {b323}
he sent them. As if God had been plentiful in his blessings, to hire
them to be more fierce in their rebellions, and fed them to no other
purpose, but that they might more strongly kick against him; this is
the fruit which corrupt nature produceth. Thus the Egyptians, who had
so fertile a country, prove unthankful to the Creator, by adoring the
meanest creatures, and putting the sceptre of the Monarch of the world
into the hands of the sottishest and cruellest beasts. And the Romans
multiply their idols, as God multiplied their victories. This is also
the complaint of God concerning Israel: “She did not know that I gave
her corn, and wine, and oil, and multiplied her silver and gold, which
they prepared for Baal” (Hos. ii. 8). They ungratefully employed the
blessings of God in the worship of an idol against the will of the
Donor. So in Hos. x. 1; “According to the multitude of his fruit,
he hath increased the altars; according to the goodness of his land,
they have made goodly images.” They followed their own inventions
with the strength of my outward blessings; as their wealth increased,
they increased the ornaments of their images; so that what were before
of wood and stone, they advanced to gold and silver. And the like
complaint you may see Ezek. 16, 17. Thus,
[1.] The benefits of God are abused to pride, when men standing upon
a higher ground of outward prosperity, vaunt it loftily above their
neighbors; the common fault of those that enjoy a worldly sunshine,
which the apostle observes in his direction to Timothy; “Charge them
that are rich in this world, that they be not high‑minded” (1 Tim. vi.
17). It is an ill use of Divine blessings to be filled by them with
pride and wind. Also,
[2.] When men abuse plenty to ease; because they have abundance, spend
their time in idleness, and make no other use of Divine benefits than
to trifle away their time, and be utterly useless to the world.
[3.] When they also abuse peace and other blessing to security; as
they which would not believe the threatenings of judgment, and the
storm coming from a far country, because the Lord was in Sion, and her
King in her; “Is not the Lord in Sion, is not her King in her” (Jer.
viii. 19)? thinking they might continue their progress in their sin,
because they had the temple, the seat of the Divine glory, Sion, and
the promise of an everlasting kingdom to David; abusing the promise
of God to presumption and security, and turning the grace of God into
wantonness.
[4.] Again, when they abuse the bounty of God to sensuality and
luxury, misemploying the provisions God gives them, in resolving to
live like beasts, when by a good improvement of them, they might attain
the life of angels. Thus is the light of the sun abused to conduct them,
and the fruits of the earth abused to enable them to their prodigious
debauchery: as we do, saith one, with the Thames, which brings us in
provision, and we soil it with our rubbish.[989] The more God sows his
gifts, the more we sow our cockle and darnel. Thus we make our outward
happiness the most unhappy part of our lives, and by the strength
of Divine blessings, exceed all laws of reason and religion too. How
unworthy a carriage is this, to use the expressions {b324} of Divine
goodness as occasions of a greater outrage and affront of him; when we
stab his honor by those instruments he puts into our hands to glorify
him! as if a favorite should turn that sword into the bowels of his
prince, wherewith he knighted him; and a servant, enriched by a lord,
should hire by that wealth, murderers to take away his life! How
brutish is it, the more God courts us with his blessings, the more
to spurn at him with our feet; like the mule that lifts up his heel
against the dam, as soon as ever it hath sucked her! We never beat God
out of our hearts, but by his own gifts; he receives no blows from men,
but by those instruments he gave them to promote their happiness. While
man is an enjoyer, he makes God a loser, by his own blessings; inflames
his rebellion by those benefits which should kindle his love; and runs
from him by the strength of those favors which should endear the donor
to him: “Do you thus requite the Lord, O foolish people, and unwise?”
is the expostulation (Deut. xxxii. 6). Divine goodness appears in the
complaint of the abuse of it, in giving them titles below their crime,
and complaining more of their being unfaithful to their own interest,
than enemies to his glory: “foolish and unwise” in neglecting their own
happiness; a charge below the crime, which deserved to be “abominable,
ungrateful people to a prodigy.” All this carriage towards God, is as
if a man should knock the chirurgeon on the head, as soon as he hath
set and bound up his dislocated members. So God compares the ungrateful
behavior of the Israelites against him: “Though I have bound and
strengthened their arms, yet do they imagine mischief against me” (Hos.
vii. 15): a metaphor taken from a chirurgeon that applies corroborating
plasters to a broken limb.
9th. We contemn the goodness of God, in ascribing our benefits to other
causes than Divine goodness. Thus Israel ascribed her felicity, plenty,
and success, to her idols, as “rewards which her lovers had given her”
(Hos. ii. 5, 12). And this charge Daniel brought home upon Belshazzar:
“Thou hast praised the gods of silver, and gold, and brass, and iron;
and the God in whose hand is thy breath, and whose are all thy ways,
hast thou not glorified” (Dan. v. 23). The God who hath given success
to the arms of thy ancestors, and conveyed by their hands so large
a dominion to thee, thou hast not honored in the same rank with the
sordidest of thy idols. It is the same case, when we own him not as
the author of any success in our affairs, but by an overweaning conceit
of our own sagacity, applaud and admire ourselves, and overlook the
hand that conducted us, and brought our endeavors to a good issue.
We eclipse the glory of Divine goodness, by setting the crown that is
due to it upon the head of our own industry; a sacrilege worse than
Belshazzar’s drinking of wine with his lords and concubines in the
sacred vessels pilfered from the temple; as in that place of Daniel.
This was the proud vaunt of the Assyrian conqueror, for which God
threatens to punish the fruit of his stout heart: “By the strength of
my hand, I have done it, and by my wisdom; for I am prudent;” and, “I
have removed the bounds of the people, and have robbed their treasures;”
and, “I have put down the inhabitants like a valiant man” (Isa. x.
12‒14). Not a word of Divine goodness and assistance in all this, but
applauding {b325} his own courage and conduct. This is a robbing of
God, to set up ourselves, and making Divine goodness a footstool, to
ascend into his throne. And as it is unjust, so it is ridiculous, to
ascribe to ourselves, or instruments, the chief honor of any work; as
ridiculous as if a soldier, after a victory, should erect an altar to
the honor of his sword; or an artificer offer sacrifices to the tools
whereby he completed some excellent and useful invention: a practice
that every rational man would disdain, where he should see it. It is
a discarding any thoughts of the goodness of God, when we imagine,
that we chiefly owe anything in this world to our own industry or wit,
to friends or means, as though Divine goodness did not open its hand
to interest itself in our affairs, support our ability, direct our
counsels, and mingle itself with anything we do. God is the principal
author of any advantage that accrues to us, of any wise resolution we
fix upon, or any proper way we take to compass it; no man can be wise
in opposition to God, act wisely, or well without him; his goodness
inspires men with generous and magnificent counsels, and furnisheth
them with fit and proportionable means; when he withdraws his hand,
men’s heads grow foolish, and their hands feeble; folly and weakness
drop upon them, as darkness upon the world upon the removal of the sun;
it is an abuse of Divine goodness not to own it, but erect an idol in
its place. Ezra was of another mind when he ascribed to the good hand
of God the “providing ministers for the temple,” and not to his own
care and diligence (chap. viii. 18); and Nehemiah, the “success he had
with the king” in the behalf of his nation, and not solely to his favor
with the prince, or the arts he used to please him (chap. ii. 8).
2. The second information is this: If God be so good, it is a
certain argument that man is fallen from his original state. It is the
complaint of man, sometimes, that other creatures have more of earthly
happiness than men have; live freer from cares and trouble, and are not
racked with that solicitousness and anxiety as man is: have not such
distempers to embitter their lives. It is a good ground for man to look
into himself, and consider whether he hath not, some ways or other,
disobliged God more than other creatures can possibly do. We often
find that the creatures men have need of in this state, do not answer
the expectation of man: “Cursed be the ground for thy sake” (Gen. iii.
17). A fruitful land is made barren; thorns and thistles triumph upon
the face of the earth, instead of good fruit. Is it likely that that
goodness, which is as infinite as his power, and knows no more limits
than his Almightiness, should imprint so many scars upon the world, if
he had not been heinously provoked by some miscarriage of his creature?
Infinite Goodness could never move Infinite Justice to inflict
punishment upon creatures, if they had not highly merited it; we cannot
think that any creature was blemished with a principle of disturbance,
as it came first out of the hand of God. All things were certainly
settled in a due order and dependence upon one another; nothing could
be ungrateful and unuseful to man by the original law of their creation;
if there had, it had not been goodness, but evil and baseness, that
had created the world. When we see, therefore, the course of nature
overturned, the order {b326} Divine goodness had placed, disturbed;
and the creatures pronounced good and useful to man, employed as
instruments of vengeance against him; we must conclude some horrible
blot upon human nature, and very odious to a God of infinite goodness;
and that this blot was dashed upon man by himself, and his own fault;
for it is repugnant to the infinite goodness of God to put into the
creature a sinning nature, to hurry him into sin, and then punish him
for that which he had impressed upon him. The goodness of God inclines
him to love goodness wherever he finds it; and not to punish any that
have not deserved it by their own crimes. The curse we therefore see
the creatures groan under, the disorders in nature, the frustrating the
expectations of man in the fruits of the earth and plentiful harvests,
the trouble he is continually exposed to in the world, which tedders
down his spirit from more generous employments, shows that man is not
what he was when Divine goodness first erected him; but hath admitted
into his nature something more uncomely in the eye of God; and so
heinous, that it puts his goodness sometimes to a stand, and makes him
lay aside the blessings his hand was filled with, to take up the arms
of vengeance, wherewith to fight against the world. Divine goodness
would have secured his creatures from any such invasions, and never
used those things against man, which he designed in the first frame
for man’s service, were there not some detestable disorder risen in
the nature of man which makes God withhold his liberality and change
the dispensation of his numerous benefits into legions of judgments.
The consideration of the Divine goodness, which is a notion that man
naturally concludes to be inseparable from the Deity, would, to an
unbiassed reason, verify the history of those punishments settled
upon man in the third chapter of Genesis, and make the whole seem more
probable to reason at the first relation. This instruction naturally
flows from the doctrine of Divine goodness: if God be so good, it is
a certain argument that man is fallen from his original state.
3. The third information is this: If God be infinitely good, there
can be no just complaint against God, if men be punished for abusing
his goodness. Man had nothing, nay, it was impossible he could have
anything, from Infinite Goodness to disoblige him, but to engage him.
God never did, nay, never could, draw his sword against man, till man
had slighted him and affronted him by the strength of his own bounty.
It is by this God doth justify his severest proceedings against men,
and very seldom charges them with any else as the matter of their
provocations (Hos. ii. 9): “Therefore will I return, and take away my
corn in the time thereof, and my wine in the season thereof, and will
recover my wool and my flax.” And in Ezek. xvi., after he had drawn out
a bill of complaint against them, and inserted only the abuse of his
benefits, as a justification of what he intended to do; he concludes
(ver. 27), “Behold, therefore, I have stretched out my hand over thee,
and diminished thy ordinary food, and delivered thee unto the will
of them that hate thee.” When men suffer, they suffer justly; they
were not constrained by any violence, or forced by any necessity, nor
provoked by any ill usage, to turn head against God, but broke the
bands of {b327} the strongest obligations and most tender allurements.
What man, what devil, can justly blame God for punishing them, after
they had been so intolerably bold, as to fly in the face of that
goodness that had obliged them, by giving them beings of a higher
elevation than to inferior creatures, and furnishing them with
sufficient strength to continue in their first habitation? Man seems to
have less reason to accuse God of rigor than devils; since, after his
unreasonable revolt, a more express goodness than that which created
him hath solicited him to repentance, courted him by melting promises
and expostulations, added undeniable arguments of bounty, and drawn
out the choicest treasures of heaven, in the gift of his Son, to
prevail over men’s perversity. And yet man, after he might arrive to
the height and happiness of an angel, will be fond of continuing in
the meanness and misery of a devil; and more strongly link himself to
the society of the damned spirits, wherein, by his first rebellion,
he had incorporated himself. Who can blame God for vindicating his own
goodness from such desperate contempts, and the extreme ingratitude of
man? If God be good, it is our happiness to adhere to him; if we depart
from him, we depart from goodness; and if evil happen to us, we cannot
blame God, but ourselves, for our departure.[990] Why are men happy?
because they cleave to God. Why are men miserable? because they recede
from God. It is then our own fault that we are miserable; God cannot be
charged with any injustice if we be miserable, since his goodness gave
means to prevent it, and afterwards added means to recover us from it,
but all despised by us. The doctrine of Divine goodness justifies every
stone laid in the foundation of hell, and every spark in that burning
furnace, since it is for the abuse of infinite goodness that it was
kindled.
4. The fourth information: Here is a certain argument, both for God’s
fitness to govern the world, and his actual government of it.
(1.) This renders him fit for the government of the world, and gives
him a full title to it. This perfection doth the Psalmist celebrate
throughout the 107th Psalm, where he declares God’s works of providence
(ver. 8, 15, 21, 32). Power without goodness would deface, instead
of preserving; ruin is the fruit of rigor without kindness; but God,
because of his infinite and immutable goodness, cannot do anything
unworthy of himself, and uncomely in itself, or destructive to
any moral goodness in the creature. It is impossible he should do
anything that is base, or act anything but for the best, because he is
essentially and naturally, and, therefore, necessarily good. As a good
tree cannot bring forth bad fruit, so a good God cannot produce evil
acts, no more than a pure beam of the sun can engender so much as a
mite of darkness, or infinite heat produce any particle of cold. As God
is so much light, that he can be no darkness, so he is so much good,
that he can have no evil; and because there is no evil in him, nothing
simply evil can be produced by him. Since he is good by nature, all
evil is against his nature, and God can do nothing against his nature;
it would be a part of impotence in him to will that which is evil; and,
therefore, the misery man {b328} feels, as well as the sin whereby he
deserves that misery, are said to be from himself (Hos. xiii. 9): “O
Israel, thou hast destroyed thyself!” And though God sends judgments
upon the world, we have shown these to be intended for the support and
vindication of his goodness. And Hezekiah judged no otherwise, when,
after the threatening of the devastation of his house, the plundering
his treasures, and captivity of his posterity, he replies, “Good is
the word of the Lord, which thou hast spoken” (Isa. xxxix. 8). God
cannot act anything that is base and cruel, because his goodness is
as infinite as his power, and his power acts nothing but what his
wisdom directs, and his goodness moves him to. Wisdom is the head in
government, omniscience the eye, power the arm, and goodness the heart
and spirit in them, that animates all.
(2.) As goodness renders Him fit to govern the world, so God doth
actually govern the world. Can we understand this perfection aright,
and yet imagine that he is of so morose a disposition as to neglect
the care of his creatures? that his excellency, which was displayed
in framing the world, should withdraw and wrap up itself in his own
bosom, without looking out, and darting itself out in the disposal
of them? Can that which moved him first to erect a world, suffer him
to be unmindful of his own work? Would he design first to display it
in creation, and afterwards obscure the honor of it? That cannot be
entitled an infinite permanent goodness, which should be so indifferent
as to let the creatures tumble together as they please, without any
order, after he had moulded them in his hand. If goodness be diffusive
and communicative of itself, can it consist with the nature of it, to
extend itself to the giving the creatures being, and then withdraw and
contract itself, not caring what becomes of them? It is the nature of
goodness, after it hath communicated itself, to enlarge its channels;
that fountain that springs up in a little hollow part of the earth,
doth in a short progress increase its streams, and widen the passages
through which it runs; it would be a blemish to Divine goodness, if
it did desert what it made, and leave things to wild confusions, which
would be, if a good hand did not manage them, and a good mind preside
over them. This is the lesson intended to us by all his judgments
(Dan. iv. 17), “That the living may know that the Most High rules in
the kingdoms of men.” If he doth not actually govern the world, he must
have devolved it somewhere, either to men or angels; not to men, who
naturally want a goodness and wisdom to govern themselves, much more to
govern others exactly. And, besides the misinterpretations of actions,
they are liable to the want of patience, to bear with the provocations
of the world; since some of the best at one time in the world, and, in
the greatest example of meekness and sweetness, would have kindled a
fire in heaven to have consumed the Samaritans, for no other affront
than a non‑entertainment of their Master and themselves (Luke ix. 54).
Nor hath he committed the disposal of things to angels, either good or
bad; though he useth them as instruments in his government, yet they
are not the principal pilots to steer the world. Bad angels certainly
are not; they would make continual ravages, meditate ruin, never defeat
their own counsels, which they manage by the {b329} wicked as the
instruments in the world, nor fill their spirits with disquiet and
restlessness when they are engaged in some ruinous design, as often
is experienced: nor hath he committed it to the good angels, who,
for aught we know, are not more numerous than the evil ones are;
but besides, we can scarcely think their finite nature capable of so
much goodness, as to bear the innumerable debaucheries, villanies,
blasphemies, vented in one year, one week, one day, one hour,
throughout the world; their zeal for their Creator might well be
supposed to move them to testify their affection to him in a constant
and speedy righting of his injured honor upon the heads of the
offenders. The evil angels have too much cruelty, and would have no
care of justice, but take pleasure in the blood of the most innocent,
as well as the most criminal; and the good angels have too little
tenderness to suffer so many crimes: since the world, therefore,
continues without those floods of judgments, which it daily merits;
since, notwithstanding all the provocations, the order of it is
preserved; it is a testimony that an Infinite Goodness holds the helm
in his hands, and spreads its warm wings over it.