Habitual Unbelief

We have deslgnedlj’ left to the last the sin, folly and crime of unbelief, partly because this great sin lies at the basis of every other, partly because it is the one sin that damns the soul, and partly because its removal means the relief of all other forms of spiritual difficulty. If there were no unbelief, there would be no unsubdued sin, no unanswered prayer, and no persistent darkness. And yet the majority of people rank unbelief among the venial rather than the mortal sins; they apologise for it as at least a very trifling form of offence against God, and some even think of it as in some sense rather attractive because it implies humility of soul, the sense of one’s own unworthiness. Many cannot claim God’s promises because of such self-abasement. Qne of the master snares of the devil is to inspire a mock humility in the place of a true humility. For while it is presumption to believe when God has not spoken, or to hope when He has not given us ground for hope, it is equally presumption not to believe when He has spoken, and not to hope when He gives a promise.

First of all the key-text of this whole subject is Heb. iii. 12, “Take heed, brethren, lest there be in any of you an evil heart of unbelief, in departing from the living God.” The word unbelief carries quite a different sense from disbelief. Disbelief is properly a denial of truth; belief is the acceptance of truth; unbelief is the failure to lay hold upon truth. One who does not at all disbelieve, may be in everything unbelieving. I am quite aware that the word disbelieve is not found in either Testament, and that the word unbelief as translated is often, in the Original, the equivalent of disbelief. But in the majority of cases unbelief does not carry the idea of denial of truths and in at least one passage the distinction is manifestly drawn — 1 Tim. v. 8 — where the Apostle says of a certain offender against God that “he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel,” which is not a clear translation, for the firt word is emphatic, and the second is a weaker word. It might be translated, “hath denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever,” that is, he is a disbeliever, and has practically said, “It is not so.” He has affirmed the thing not to be true; therefore he is worse than one that does not deny that it is true, but fails to make it available to himself. A very important distinction. Three different men may have one offer of blessing. One does not believe there is anything in it, that there is any real blessing offered. He is a disbeliever. Another believes that there is a blessing offered, but does not accept it for himself. He is an unbeliever. The third believes that there is a blessing offered, and he is bound to have it. That is a believer. You are to judge which you are.

There are two very strongly contrasted facts. The first is, as has been intimated that man makes so little of the sin and crime of unbelief; and the second is, that God makes so much of it. It is one instance of the striking difference between God’s judgment and man’s judgment of things. The only way to show this is to examine the main passages of Scripture in which unbelief is brought to our attention, consecutively from Genesis to Revelation. Turn, first of all, to Exodus xvii. The people have come out of Egypt and hgy arrived at the wilderness of Sin — a typical place for an exhibition of the crime of unbelief — and they pitch in Rephidim. There is no water to drink, and now the people chide with Moses, and complain and murmur against the Lord, and even find fault with having been brought out of Egypt to die in the wilderness with thirst. You remember how the Lord interposes to supply them with water from the smitten rock. Here is the remarkable verse, the 7th — the key to all that follows in the Bible — “And he called the name of the place Massah,” which means temptation “and Meribah,” which means provocation or, better still, exasperation, ‘• because of the chiding of the children of Israel, and because they tempted the Lord.” Notice, what was the temptation? The temptation was that God should forsake His people. What was the provocation? It was that God should destroy His people. Keep these two thoughts before you: the unbelief tempted God, on the one side, entirely to withdraw from His people, and, on the other side, finally to destroy them. What a terrific sin and crime unbelief must be when it tempts God and provokes God to such an extreme as that!

Notice, also, for it is most important: In what did this particular crim§ of unbelief.

on this occasion, consist? They provoked and tempted the Lord, saying, “Is the Lord among us, or not?” That was as much as saying, *’ Is the Lord dead, or is He living? He has promised to go with us from Egypt to Canaan; is He true to His word? or is He a liar? is He an immutable God? or is He a changeable God? “At one time, when a great anti-slavery orator in America, in the crisis of affairs, was finding fault with God for allowing slavery to be continued in America so long, a poor old coloured slave rose in the meeting and said, “Mr. Douglas, answer me this question: Do you think that God is dead?” A singular rebuke from a poor, ignorant coloured woman. She was enduring slavery with the confidence that God was not dead and that a time of retribution and deliverance would come. And here the children of Israel, just brought out of Egypt, with a strong hand and mighty arm, with tremendous judgments on the Egyptians, and deliverances for themselves, no more than got to Rephidim than they said, “Is the Lord among us or not?”

Notice, also, the provocation? This was a want of water; and two of the greatest miracles already performed on their behalf had been miracles with water. When they went over the Red Sea, God piled up the waters as a wall, and then He let down the wall on the pursuing Egyptians. And when His people came to Marah, where the water was bitter and they could not drink, He showed them a tree which, being dipped in the waters, turned them to sweet, refreshing draughts. Yet they forgot all about His deliverances. When they come to the third trouble about water, all the memory of the previous dealings of God was cast into oblivion and they said, ‘’ Is the Lord among us or not?”

Turn now to Num. xiv. There we are just at the crisis of affairs. The people have come to Kadesh-Barnea, so far on the borders of the land of promise that to this day we are not quite sure whether it was not inside the limits of the land. God had brought them out to bring them in. They were not at the starting-point now; they were rather at the goal; and, if they had been believing, they might have entered at once into possession of that land, and saved themselves the other thirty-nine years of journey in the wilderness, and leaving their own carcases by the wilderness way. They sent spies into the land, and the spies all came back and told the same story, that it was an attractive land flowing with milk and honey, where the giant Anakim dwelt, with their walled cities and chariots of iron. It is sometimes said that ten spies brought a false report, and two spies a true report. That is a mistake. They all brought the same report, so far as the land was concerned; but that in which Caleb and Joshua differed from the other spies was this: they besought the people in faith to go up and possess the land, to take sides with God and defy those foes; and the other ten admitted the fertility of the land, but advised them not to attempt to cope with the giants. And because Caleb and Joshua had not only set an example of belief in God, but urged all others to believe, the people were going to stone them to death and would have done so, but for the Voice that spoke out of the Pillar of Cloud. Look at what unbelief can do. Not only did it prompt the people to rebel against God, and refuse His promised possession, and halt on the very borders of the land, to which He had brought them with such wonderful interposition; but it made them ready to stone those that urged them to the career and conduct of faith. A most marvellous exhibition! Now see what God says: “Because all those men which have seen My glory, and My miracles which I did in Egypt and in the wilderness, have tempted Me now these ten times, and have not hearkened to My voice; surely they shall not see the land which I sware unto their fathers, neither shall any of them that provoked Me see it; but My servant Caleb, because he had another spirit with him, and hath followed Me fully, him will I bring into the land, whereunto he went.”

Not only did his seed possess the land, but the inheritance of Caleb was the very stronghold of the Anakim; and when he was past eighty years of age, he still retained his original and pristine youthful vigour to drive out those Anakim and take possession of their fortress. Most remarkable! But every other man that came out of Egypt, of an age bearing arms, but these two, fell in the wilderness, so that the entire wilderness way was lined with a double row of graves, from Sinai to the Jordan. If you will calculate the number of deaths in the wilderness, you will see that they would be sufficient to line that way on both sides with corpses; and all because of the sin and folly, insult and outrage of unbelief. The “ten times” is not simply a chance number used by way of completeness. This is the tenth occasion on which the people had tempted and provoked God — at the Red Sea in fear of the foe; at Marah

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as to the bitter water; in the wilderness o Sin as to food; in the gathering of manna on the Sabbath — which they were forbidden to do — because they did not believe in the providence of God; at Rephidim in their complaint of the lack of water; at Sinai in setting up a calf as a kind of visible object of worship; in the cursing by the son of Shelomith, recorded in Lev. xxlv.; in their lusting for flesh at Kibroth-hattaavah (the grave of lust); in the report of Aaron and Miriam against Moses; and in the panic at Kadesh-Barnea.

Turn now to Isa. vii. 9. It is only a sentence, but it belongs to the history of this tremendous crime of unbelief. Isaiah is bidden to say to Ahaz, on behalf of God, “If ye will not believe, surely ye shall not be established.” One hundred and thirty years after this, Jehosophat said this to Judah and the inhabitants of Jerusalem at a crisis of peril; only that he used the positive form instead of the negative. He said, “Believe, and ye shall be established”; Isaiah had said, “If ye will not believe, surely ye shall not be established.” Whenever God sets a particular text in the Bible in a peculiar and unique form of rhythm or rhyme, or a play upon words, or something of that kind, He means that it shall stand out conspicuous. This verse is not translatable from the Hebrew; it has a rhythm and a rhyme about it that cannot be easily reproduced. I have tried to reproduce it, but with very little success, in this little couplet:

“If in God ye do not confide,
Surely in power ye shall not abide.”

That comes near to it. Or

“Surely, if ye will not believe
Neither blessing shall ye receive.”

There is som.ething very striking in the Hebrew of this passage that shows God means it shall stand out in this prophecy of Isaiah as a permanent lesson to His Church, that an unbelieving soul forfeits blessing, and makes confirmation in holiness, and a further knowledge and enjoyment of God’s presence, impossible.

Let us go back to Psa. lxxviii. This psalm is called Asaph’s parable; that is to say it treats the entire history, from Egypt to Canaan, as a parable designed to teach a great lesson. The whole of that career is reviewed, and the main emphasis of this entire psalm is on this temptation, this provocation, this forgetfulness of God, this not believing God, this not remembering God, which constitute such atrocious treatment of Him. You will find, for instance, four times in this psalm, “They provoked the Most High “; three times,” They tempted Him “; once, “They grieved Him’’; and over and over again such expressions occur as these: “They believed not God,” “They trusted not in His salvation,” “They tempted and provoked the Most High God,” “They provoked Him to anger with their high places, and moved Him to jealousy with their graven images.” Read the psalm, and interpret in the light of this parable the whole story that occupies Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy — four books of the Old Testament given to this amazing exhibition of persistent and habitual unbelief toward God, until, under Joshua, they entered into the land of promise, still to repeat their crime and sin of unbelief, until they were finally rejected. Notice in the heart of the psalm that most significant expression (v. 44) “Yea, they turned back, and tempted God, and limited the Holy One of Israel.’’ You say” There can be no limitation of Omnipotence.” Surely there can be. There are two spheres of power — one the physical, and the other the moral. In the physical sphere nothing is needed but energy. But in the moral sphere everything depends upon co-operation. God can do anything in the physical sphere that lies within the bounds of physical power, because He has omnipotent energy. But God, in the moral sphere, can do nothing that is not consistent with the co-operation of His moral subjects.* We must look at this; it is most important. If I go along the etreet and see a man lying in the gutter, dead drunk, I can by purely physical energy lift him up and carry him home. But I cannot, by physical energy, make that drunkard a sober man, a total abstainer. There has to come in moral suasion and persuasion, the influence of moral force; there must be co-operation. And so Fenelon used to say — and it is a philosophic saying — ‘* In matters of morals, force is a mistake. Force can never persuade. The only thing that force can do is to compel, and that makes hypocrites.” It is a remarkable saying, and I pray you, remember it. In the moral sphere of power there must always be co-operation: God scorns to treat human beings as machines. He never made an intelligent being that had not power to sin if he chose; otherwise obedience would

A coloured preacher thus explained election: “Breddren. de Lord, He vote fur ye, and de Debbil, he vote agin ye, and when you vote wid de Lord, dat’s election.”

be mechanical, artificial, compulsory. The very fact that sin has entered the universe, in the angelic and human realms, shows that both angels and men were made in the image of God, with the capacity for independent moral action. It is a tremendous thought that even God Himself cannot control my moral frame, or constrain my moral choice. He cannot prevent me from defying Him and denying Him. He would not exercise His power in such directions, if He could, and He could not if He would. Is it not an awful fact that there are some matters in which we may limit God? and in so far as we limit Him, we limit ourselves. “Jesus could do no mighty works in Nazareth,” where He was brought up, “because of their unbelief.” Until you can get out of your way the mountain of unbelief in your own soul, you cannot remove the mountain of unbelief in others who reject your xMaster. You have got to get the unbelief out of your own soul first, and then you can do mighty works for God.

Turn to Luke i. Here is recorded one of the most strikimj cases of unbelief in the whole New Testament. It belongs in the historic line of thought and study on unbelief. Zacharias was a remarkable man — one of the few of whom it is written that he was “righteous before God, walking in all the commandments and ordinances of the Lord blameless.” He is wearing the very robes of a priest; he is before the altar of incense, which stood for prayer and supplication, and acceptable offering and worship. Right there in the administration of the duties of his course, in the peculiar and consecrated garments of his priestly office, while engaged in the solemn service of the offering up of incense, God sends to him His own glorious angel, not only to tell him that his prayer is heard, and that Elizabeth shall bear a son, but to make unmistakable His message by giving him in the three verses that follow, an outline of the entire career of John the Baptist. And yet, Zacharias, the priest, the praying man, in the office of his course, notwithstanding his righteousness and blamelessness before God, has the arrogance and impudence to ask, “Whereby shall I know this?” as if there were needed any confirmatory sign of God’s emphatic promise when announced to him under these circumstances. Then there came upon him a typical judgment. He was, no doubt, from that moment a deaf-mute — not only speechless, but deaf, for you will observe, in the next chapter,

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how they did not speak to him, but communicated with him through a writing-tablet; which shows that he was a deaf-mute, stone deaf and absolutely unable to speak even in a whisper. What does that suggest? That unbelief shuts your ear to God, and shuts your mouth to men. The prevalence of unbelief on your part may make you deaf to further communication from God, and absolutely worthless in your testimony to men — a paralysis of your hearing, and a paralysis of your tongue. There are scores of disciples to-day who cannot hear plainly what God speaks, because of a habitual unbelief, and their testimony also has been wrecked. They have nothing to say; they cannot witness, “God has done this for me,” because they have not put Him to the test; they have no testimony for their sorrowing and distressed fellow human beings, because of their own position of unbelief before God. Turn to Heb. iii. 7 — iv. 11. This whole section of this Epistle is a New Testament review, a parable of that same desert journey treated in Psa. lxxviii. Never study that story in Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, without putting over alongside of it this remarkable passage in Hebrews. God has given us here an inspired explanation, interpretation, and application of the whole story of the Israelites in the desert. Here again we meet these two awful words referred to already in Exodus xvii., temptation and provocation, over and over again. “Some, when they had heard, did provoke “; “Take heed, lest there be in any of you an evil heart of unbelief, in departing from the living God’*; ‘’To-day, if ye will hear His voice, harden not your hearts, as in the provocation,” Study the whole passage, and see how we are taught here, that all those men who left their carcases in the wilderness fell simply through unbelief; and you may leave your carcases in the wilderness if you do not give up the crime and sin of your unbelief. It does not say that you will be finally lost. You may get into heaven as by a back door; hilt your present rest in this life, for which, I believe, Canaan stands — spiritual liberty and fertility, constant communion with God, abiding in His presence, victory over the enemy — all these things, together with “the peace of God that passeth all understanding,” you may permanently forfeit, so far as your present life is concerned, simply by the crime of unbelief.

Turn to Heb. vi. 6: “Seeing they crucify to themselves the Son of God afresh, and put Him to an open shame.” Compare Heb. X. 29: “Who hath trodden under foot the Son of God, and hath counted the blood of the covenant, wherewith He was sanctified, an unholy thing, and hath done despite unto the Spirit of grace.” Both of these passages are essentially an arraignment of unbelief, in that highest form of crime of which unbelief is capable. This demands most careful attention, lest we fail to realize the awful criminality of unbelief.

There are three things that unbelief makes void. First, it makes void the Word of God. It were as well that God had not spoken to you and emphasised His promises by such universal terms and such repetitious forms of statement, if you do not believe His promises and take and appropriate them as the basis of your faith and life. This is just as plain as it can be. Of what use are all the thousands of years of preparation of this Bible, if God’s Word does not become to you personally the basis of your whole trust and conduct!

Then unbelief also makes void the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. God gave His only Son a sacrifice for the world, He gave all He had, He gave at infinite cost, for an infinite ransom was paid. If you reject Jesus Christ, or fail to make Him your Saviour, it is for you as though God had not given Christ, and Christ had not died. This stupendous sacrifice on the part of God you are virtually flinging away as nothing. We can never appreciate the tremendous guilt of unbelief if we do not see that thus it crucifies the Son of God afresh. That is to say, it is as though you crucified Him for nothing, and put Him to an open shame without any reward for His sufferings; and, instead of sprinkling the blood on each side of the door-post, and above the head, as your protection, you are pouring it out on the threshold and trampling it under foot; instead of taking shelter under it, you are treating it with contempt. What an arraignment of unbelief.

More than this, you are doing despite to the Spirit of grace. There was a probation oilaw, God said to Adam, “This do and thou shalt live.” But Adam failed in his probation of law, and the chance of such probation for ever passed away from the human race. There can never be a second probation of law, for law must always regard you as a transgressor. God therefore gave a new probation of grace. He put His Son before you on the Cross and said, “You have only to believe in Him, and your sins shall not be mentioned to you.”

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And so He pretermits your offences. Rom. HL 25 (marg). What is pretermission? It is more than remission. Pretermission is passing by, through Divine forebarance. You siiij God passes your sin by. You sin again, and in ten thousand forms. He passes them all by, He puts them behind His back, for the time, to see how you are going to deal with His Son. This is your probation of grace. If you accept His Son, He never returns to those sins; they are swallowed up in oblivion by virtue of the atoning blood. But, if you reject His Son, He is compelled, as governmental Judge, to take up everyone of those sins that He has pretermitted for the time being, and deal with them in legal justice, giving every transgression its just recompense of reward; and ending up by dealing with you for that greatest of sins, the rejection of Christ, with the offer of pardon — the rejection of the Atonement.

And so, unbelief not only crucifies the Son of God afresh, and puts Him to an open shame, trampling under foot the blood that should have been put on the door-posts on each side, and over head; but it makes the dispensation of grace by the Holy Ghost absolutely void, nay, worse than void; for the grace that, instead of saying, “This do and thou shalt live,” says, “This believe, and thou shalt live,” goes for nothing, and worse than nothing, only adding to the condemnation of the transgressor. It needs the tongue of an angel to do justice to this theme. But it is an awful fact that men consider unbelief a trifling sin against God, while it is the one damning sin, the one sin that, if persisted in, has no forgiveness, because it forfeits forgiveness and rejects the Atonement.

We are now prepared to understand why, in Rev. xxi. 8, we find, in that fearful catalogue of sin and crime against God, unbelief put alongside of the most flagrant iniquity: “But the fearful, and unbelieving, and the abominable, and murderers, and whoremongers, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars, shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone: which is the second death.” Observe, and do not forget it! — the same condemnation that awaits the abominable — the murderers, the whoremongers, the sorcerers, the idolaters, is reserved also for the unbeUeving Do not ever think of unbelief as a trivial sin when God puts it in such an awful category of crime.

Let us review this terrible indictment and argument. Unbelief limits the power of God, and limits the power of man; unbelief paralyses testimony, and makes us deaf to the voice of God; unbelief is a permanent forfeiture of blessing, as when Esau bartered his birthright for a mess of pottage, and could not get back what he had sold, at any price whatever. You may lose your life’s opportunities and privileges, and even God cannot give them back; for He cannot restore the lost hour, the wasted year, the mis-spent life. What unbelief has forfeited, no power can give back. He may restore the years that the palmer-worm, the locust, the canker-worm, and the caterpillar have destroyed, by an extra-abundant harvest to the famished land; but He can never give such compensating abundance to the famished life of an unbelieving soul. If you have lost your time of sowing, you cannot make up for it in your time of reaping; if you have lost your chance of confiding and trusting, you cannot make up for it in the repentance of a dying bed. God gives life, with all its capacities, talents, opportunities and privileges, for service. If it is investedfor self, it can never be got back to invest for God; if it is lost through unbelief, it can never be got back by a final act of faith.

The question is, What are you going to do with your life? Unbelief virtually makes void the Word of God, the Sacrifice of Christ, and the dispensation and work of the Holy Ghost; and therefore unbelief is represented in the Bible, as the one and only thing that exasperates God. That is not too strong a word with which to translate the original. Exasperation means to rub into roughness. The original is a remarkable word, which can hardly be translated by any other term. The idea is that the very grace of God is perverted into opposition and roughness by an unbelieving soul; that even infinite forbearance has a limit, and this limit is reached in unbelief. God is not so much exasperated by the transgression of every command of the Decalogue, as He is by the one form of sin found in the rejection of His promises in the Word, of His sacrifice in His Son, and of His pleading and tenderness in His Spirit.

There is but one thing to do with unbelief, for ever abandon it! Whatever else you do, solemnly covenant with God that you will believe His Word, trust His Son, yield to His Spirit; that you will step out upon His promises, and dare to venture something for His sake, without regard to feeling; and with single-hearted resting upon His immutable Word. The French translation of Hebrews X. 23, is —” He who hath made a promise can keep His promise:’ To do that is faith! Do not look at surroundings, do not ask for signs or wait for further evidence, but walk right out on the Divine promise — trust it absolutely, for the subduing of sin, for the answering of prayer, for the dispersion of darkness; and the triumph of faith will also be the victory over sin, the triumph of prayer, the emergence of the soul out of darkness into the conscious light of God!