Nick Roark's Blog, page 14

“The Candle that lighted the sun and the moon was blown out” by Samuel Rutherford

“Mount Calvary, since God laid the first stone of it, did never bear such a weight as when the Lord of Glory was hanging upon a tree there—

O! it was made a fair tree when such an Apple grew on it!

It was a green orchard! It was our summer, but death’s winter!

Darkness was in all Judea when our Lord suffered.

And why? Because the Candle that lighted the sun and the moon was blown out.

The Godhead was eclipsed; and the world’s eye was put out.

He took away the sun with Him, as it were, to another world, when He that was the world’s sun was put out.

When He went out of the earth, the sun would not stay behind Him.

Sun, what ails thee? ‘I have not will to shine when my Lord is going to another world.’

As if the sun had said to Jesus, ‘Lord, if Thou be going to another world, take me with You.'”

–Samuel Rutherford, Fourteen Communion Sermons, ed. Andrew A. Bonar, Second Edition (Glasgow: Charles Glass & Co., 1877), 286-287.

“There was more than a tree upon His back” by Samuel Rutherford

“Jesus cried with a loud voice, with such a shout as never before went to heaven.

The Son, crying to the Father, shouting with tears and strong cries, “Father, Father, God’s mercy!”

O what a cry would all believers have made in hell, if Christ had not cried.

Ye had been always crying.

But O what a conflict was there! God weeping, God sobbing!

Never was there such a conflict in heaven, and earth, either before, or shall be after.

Angels might have quaked, if they be capable of such passion.

They might have said, “Alas! What ails our dear Lord and Master to cry so hideously?”

Christ was harassed and torn on a piece of tree!

He who takes up the isles of the sea as a little thing; yea, He who can take up heaven and earth with a touch of His little finger!

He who can weigh the mountains in a balance!

O what a onset was it to Christ’s back and thighs!

No wonder; there was more than a tree upon His back.

The curse of the law of God was above the tree.

And that was heavier than ten thousand mountains of iron.”

–Samuel Rutherford, Fourteen Communion Sermons, ed. Andrew A. Bonar, Second Edition (Glasgow: Charles Glass & Co., 1877), 285–288.

“All the mercies that are in His own heart” by Thomas Goodwin

“In respect of their variety, God’s mercies are manifold mercies. Riches lie in a variety.

In Ezekiel 27:12, Tyre is said to have a multitude of all kinds of riches. Now as God hath a multitude of mercies, so He hath a multitude of all kinds of mercies.

Therefore you shall find in the Scripture that mercy still runs in the plural, not only to note out that they are many, but that they are manifold, there is variety of them.

Romans 12:1, ‘I beseech you by the mercies of God.’

In Nehemiah 9:19, 27, a chapter wherein God and man striveth, as it were, whether God’s mercies or man’s sin should outvie one another, there is mention made of the manifoldness of His mercies.

And in Isaiah 63:7, there is ‘the multitude of His loving-kindnesses,’ which are there called the ‘praises of the Lord,’ because they are His glory.

As our hearts and the devil are the father of variety of sins, so God is the father of variety of mercies, and they are as so many children to Him which He begets.

And there is no sin or misery but God hath a mercy for it, and He hath a multitude of mercies of every kind too; even like an apothecary that hath an abundance of drugs of all sorts for all kind of diseases.

As there is no disease but God hath made a remedy for it, so there is no misery but God hath mercy for it.

He hath found out a remedy for sin, the hardest thing to cure of all things else, and therefore He hath provided a remedy for all other misery.

And as there are variety of miseries which the creature is subject unto, so He hath in Himself a shop, a treasury of all sorts of mercies, divided into several promises in the Scripture, which are but as so many boxes of this treasure, the caskets of variety of mercies.

If thy heart be hard, His mercies are tender.

If thy heart be dead, He hath mercy to quicken it, as Psalm 119 hath it again and again.

If thou be sick, He hath mercy to heal thee.

If thou be sinful, He hath mercies to sanctify and cleanse thee.

As large and as various as are our wants, so large and various are His mercies.

So as we may come boldly to find grace and mercy to help us in time of need, a mercy for every need, as the Apostle speaks.

All the mercies that are in His own heart He hath transplanted them into several beds, as I may so express it, in the garden of the promises, where they grow, and He hath abundance of variety of them, suited to all the variety of the diseases of the soul.”

–Thomas Goodwin, The Works of Thomas Goodwin, Volume 2 (Grand Rapids, MI: Reformation Heritage, 1861/2006), 2: 187-188. Goodwin is commenting on Ephesians 2:4-6.

“Christ loves you better than His life” by Samuel Rutherford

“Christ loves you better than His life, for He gave away His life to get your love.

He spared neither cost nor expense.

Christ, who was without sin, gave Himself a ransom for you, sinners.

His Father laid a cross on Him. He bought you with His Father’s curse!

Was not that a dear wife to Him? Then let Christ be dear to you.

What a sight was innocent and harmless Jesus when He stood before the Governor, and had not one word to say!

They laid thieves’ bands on our Saviour’s hands, that had never stolen, that had never shed blood.

Bands bound His hands, but love, mercy, and grace bound His tender heart with stronger bands and cords, to loose us out of the bands of sin.

He cried in the Spirit, “Father, bind Me, and loose them; slay Me, and save them. All their ill be upon Me.”

So be it, dear Jesus!

Christ cried with a loud voice in death, “Father, into Thy hands I commend My Spirit.”

Then our Lord died; because it was His will.

Death could not bind Him, but love to His wife bound Him.

Love is stronger than death; nay, love was as strong as Christ.

The law was weak now, for Christ satisfied it; and now it has no power over you.

Ye are in Christ; and He is a better Master than the law.

Change not with any Master again.

Follow Him all the way to heaven.”

–Samuel Rutherford, Fourteen Communion Sermons, ed. Andrew A. Bonar, Second Edition (Glasgow: Charles Glass & Co., 1877), 285–286.

“Marriage most like a crucifixion” by C.S. Lewis

“We must go back to our Bibles. The husband is the head of the wife just in so far as he is to her what Christ is to the Church.

He is to love her as Christ loved the Church—read on—and give his life for her (Eph. 5:25).

This headship, then, is most fully embodied not in the husband we should all wish to be but in him whose marriage is most like a crucifixion; whose wife receives most and gives least, is most unworthy of him, is—in her own mere nature—least lovable.

For the Church has no beauty but what the Bride-groom gives her; he does not find, but makes her, lovely.

The chrism of this terrible coronation is to be seen not in the joys of any man’s marriage but in its sorrows, in the sickness and sufferings of a good wife or the faults of a bad one, in his unwearying (never paraded) care or his inexhaustible forgiveness: forgiveness, not acquiescence.

As Christ sees in the flawed, proud, fanatical or lukewarm Church on earth that Bride who will one day be without spot or wrinkle, and labours to produce the latter, so the husband whose headship is Christ-like (and he is allowed no other sort) never despairs.”

–C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (New York: Mariner, 1960/2012), 105-106.

“O grace! O amazing grace!” by John Bunyan

“First, of God’s carriage to man.

He comes to him while he is in his sins, in his blood; He comes to him now, not in the heat and fire of His jealousy, but ‘in the cool of the day,‘ in unspeakable gentleness, mercy, pity, and bowels of love; not in clothing Himself with vengeance, but in a way of entreaty, and meekly beseecheth the sinner to be reconciled unto Him (2 Cor 5:19-20).

It is expected among men that he which giveth the offence should be the first in seeking peace; but, sinner, betwixt God and man it is not so; not that we loved God, not that we chose God; but “God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto Himself, not imputing their trespasses unto them.”

God is the first that seeketh peace; and, as I said, in a way of entreaty He bids his ministers pray you in Christ’s stead; “as though God did beseech you by us, we pray you, in Christ’s stead, be ye reconciled to God.”

O sinner, wilt thou not open? Behold, God the Father and his Son Jesus Christ stand both at the door of thy heart, beseeching there for favour from thee, that thou wilt be reconciled to them, with promise, if thou wilt comply, to forgive thee all thy sins.

O grace! O amazing grace! To see a prince entreat a beggar to receive an alms would be a strange sight; to see a king entreat the traitor to accept of mercy would be a stranger sight than that!

But to see God entreat a sinner, to hear Christ say, “I stand at the door and knock,” with a heart full and a heaven full of grace to bestow upon him that opens, this is such a sight as dazzles the eyes of angels.

What sayest thou now, sinner? Is not this God rich in mercy? Hath not this God great love for sinners?

Nay, further, that thou mayest not have any ground to doubt that all this is but complementing, thou hast also here declared that God hath made his Christ “to be sin for us, who knew no sin, that we might be made the righteousness of God in him.”

If God would have stuck at anything, he would have stuck at the death of his Son; but he “delivered him up for us” freely; “how shall he not with him also freely give us all things?” (Rom 8:32).”

–John Bunyan, “Saved By Grace, in The Works of John Bunyan, Volume 1 (Carlisle, PA: Banner of Truth, 1692/1991), 1: 350.

“Your sins, all of them, are wiped out” by C.S. Lewis

“As a literary historian, I am perfectly convinced that whatever else the Gospels are they are not legends. I have read a great deal of legend and I am quite clear that they are not the same sort of thing.

They are not artistic enough to be legends. From an imaginative point of view they are clumsy, they don’t work up to things properly. Most of the life of Jesus is totally unknown to us, as is the life of anyone else who lived at that time, and no people building up a legend would allow that to be so.

Apart from bits of the Platonic dialogues, there are no conversations that I know of in ancient literature like the Fourth Gospel. There is nothing, even in modern literature, until about a hundred years ago when the realistic novel came into existence.

In the story of the woman taken in adultery we are told Christ bent down and scribbled in the dust with His finger. Nothing comes of this. No one has ever based any doctrine on it.

And the art of inventing little irrelevant details to make an imaginary scene more convincing is a purely modern art. Surely the only explanation of this passage is that the thing really happened? The author put it in simply because he had seen it.

Then we come to the strangest story of all, the story of the Resurrection. It is very necessary to get the story clear. I heard a man say, ‘The importance of the Resurrection is that it gives evidence of survival, evidence that the human personality survives death.’

On that view what happened to Christ would be what had always happened to all men, the difference being that in Christ’s case we were privileged to see it happening. This is certainly not what the earliest Christian writers thought.

Something perfectly new in the history of the Universe had happened. Christ had defeated death. The door which had always been locked had for the very first time been forced open.

This is something quite distinct from mere ghost-survival. I don’t mean that they disbelieved in ghost-survival. On the contrary, they believed in it so firmly that, on more than one occasion, Christ had had to assure them that He was not a ghost.

The point is that while believing in survival they yet regarded the Resurrection as something totally different and new. The Resurrection narratives are not a picture of survival after death; they record how a totally new mode of being has arisen in the Universe.

Something new had appeared in the Universe: as new as the first coming of organic life. This Man, after death, does not get divided into ‘ghost’ and ‘corpse’. A new mode of being has arisen. That is the story. What are we going to make of it?

The question is, I suppose, whether any hypothesis covers the facts so well as the Christian hypothesis. That hypothesis is that God has come down into the created universe, down to manhood—and come up again, pulling it up with Him.

The alternative hypothesis is not legend, nor exaggeration, nor the apparitions of a ghost. It is either lunacy or lies. Unless one can take the second alternative (and I can’t) one turns to the Christian theory.

‘What are we to make of Christ?’ There is no question of what we can make of Him, it is entirely a question of what He intends to make of us. You must accept or reject the story.

The things He says are very different from what any other teacher has said. Others say, ‘This is the truth about the Universe. This is the way you ought to go,’ but He says, ‘I am the Truth, and the Way, and the Life.’

He says, ‘No man can reach absolute reality, except through Me. Try to retain your own life and you will be inevitably ruined. Give yourself away and you will be saved.’

He says:

‘If you are ashamed of Me, if, when you hear this call, you turn the other way, I also will look the other way when I come again as God without disguise. If anything whatever is keeping you from God and from Me, whatever it is, throw it away. If it is your eye, pull it out. If it is your hand, cut it off. If you put yourself first you will be last. Come to Me everyone who is carrying a heavy load, I will set that right. Your sins, all of them, are wiped out, I can do that. I am Re-birth, I am Life. Eat Me, drink Me, I am your Food. And finally, do not be afraid, I have overcome the whole Universe.’

That is the issue.”

–C.S. Lewis, “What Are We to Make of Jesus Christ? ” in God in the Dock, ed. Walter Hooper (New York: HarperOne, 1994), 169-171.

“Jesus Christ was never more cheerful in all His life on earth than when He was going to lay down His life” by John Bunyan

“The love of Christ appears to be wonderful by the death He died: In that He died, in that He died such a death.

‘Twas strange love in Christ that moved Him to die for us: strange, because not according to the custom of the world. Men do not use, in cool blood, deliberately to come upon the stage or ladder to lay down their lives for others.

But this did Jesus Christ, and that too for such, whose qualification, if it be duly considered, will make this act of His far more amazing, He laid down his life for his enemies (Rom 5), and for those that could not abide Him; yea, for those, even for those that brought Him to the cross: not accidentally, or because it happened so, but knowingly, designedly, (Zech 12:10), He knew it was for those He died, and yet His love led Him to lay down His life for them.

I will add, that those very people for whom He laid down His life, though they by all sorts of carriages did what they could to provoke Him to pray to God His Father that He would send and cut them off by the flaming sword of angels (Matt 26:53), He would not be so provoked but would lay down His life for them!

We never read that Jesus Christ was more cheerful in all His life on earth than when He was going to lay down His life for them: now He thanked God (Luke 22:19), now He sang (Matt 26:30).”

–John Bunyan, “The Saint’s Knowledge of Christ’s Love,in The Works of John Bunyan, Volume 2 (Carlisle, PA: Banner of Truth, 1692/1991), 2: 17.

“Labour not to labour” by Charles Spurgeon

“Though I am a fool, God is my wisdom; though I am nothing at all, God is my All-in-all. This is the way to enter into rest through believing. (Hebrews 4:3)

Let me remind you, beloved, that this rest is perfectly consistent with labour. In Hebrews 4:11, the apostle says, ‘Let us labour therefore to enter into that rest.’

It is an extraordinary injunction, but I think he means, let us labour not to labour.

Our tendency is to try to do something in order to save ourselves; but we must beat that tendency down, and look away from, self to Christ.

Labour to get away from your own labours.

Labour to be clean rid of all self-reliance.

Labour in your prayers never to depend upon your prayers.

Labour in your repentance never to rest upon your repentance.

Labour in your faith not to trust to your faith, but to trust alone to Jesus.

When you begin to rest upon your repentance, and forget the Saviour, away with your repentance.

And when you begin to pray, and you depend upon your prayers, and forget the Lord Jesus, away with your prayers.

When you think you are beginning to grow in grace, and you feel, ‘Now I am somebody,’ away with such spurious growth as that, for you are only being puffed up with pride, and not really growing at all.

Labour not to labour.

Labour to keep down your natural self-righteousness and self-reliance.

Labour to continue where the publican was, and cry, ‘God be merciful to me a sinner.’

Labour to get where Mary was, sitting at the Master’s feet, and learning of him.

Labour not to grow upward in self-esteem, but to grow downward in humiliation, growing continually less, and less, and less in your own estimation, and ever crowning Christ Lord of all.”

–Charles H. Spurgeon, “The Believer’s Present Rest,” in The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit Sermons, vol. 55 (London: Passmore & Alabaster, 1909), 55: 536.

“Christ is love” by John Bunyan

“Love in us, requires, that something pleasing and delightful be in the object loved, at least, so it must appear to the lust and fancy of the person loving, or else love cannot act; for the love that is in us, is not of power to set itself on work, where no allurement is in the thing to be beloved.

Love in us decays, though once never so warm and strongly fixed, if the object falls off, as to its first alluring provocation; or disappointeth our expectation with some unexpected reluctancy to our fancy or our mind.

All this we know to be true from nature, for every one of us are thus; nor can we refuse, or choose as to love, but upon, and after the rate, and the working thus of our passions.

Therefore our love, as we are natural, is weak, unorderly, fails and miscarries, either by being too much or too little; yea, though the thing which is beloved be allowed for an object of love, both by the law of nature and grace.

We therefore must put a vast difference betwixt love, as found in us, and love as found in Christ, and that, both as to the nature, principle, or object of love.

Love in Christ is not love of the same nature, as is love in us; love in him is essential to his being (1 John 4:16); but in us it is not so, as has been already shewed.

God is love; Christ is God; therefore Christ is love, love naturally.

Love therefore is essential to His being. He may as well cease to be, as cease to love.”

–John Bunyan, “The Saint’s Knowledge of Christ’s Love,in The Works of John Bunyan, Volume 2 (Carlisle, PA: Banner of Truth, 1692/1991), 2: 16.