Tastes Differ
“The heart of him that hath understanding seeketh knowledge: but the mouth of fools
feedeth on foolishness. Folly is joy to him that is destitute of wisdom.” — xv. 14, 21. “It is joy to the just to do judgment” — xxL 15.
differ widely. Water is the element of one creature, and air the element of another. The same material is to this poison, and to that food. Each species differs in nature from all others; and Nature will have her own way.
Among men, viewed in their spiritual relations, there is a similar variety of tastes and pleasures. There is first the grand generic difference between the old man and the new. The change of nature is radical, and the change of appetite consequently complete; what things were gain to me, these I count loss, — so true was the observation of the heathen as to the effect of the gospel preached by the apostles. The world to Saul of Tarsus was turned upside down from the moment that he met the Lord in the way, and as a lost sinner accepted pardon through the blood of the cross. After that moment his tastes were not only changed; they were absolutely reversed. What he had formerly chased as
gam.
he now loathed as loss.
Besides the first and chief distinction between the dead and the living, many subordinate varieties appear, shading imperceptibly away into each other, according as good or evil preponderates in the character. The best way to know a man is to observe what gives him pleasure. A good man may once or many times be betrayed into foolish words or deeds, but the indulgence makes him miserable. Folly, like Ezekiel’s roll, was sweet in his mouth, but left a lasting bitterness behind. Fools, on the contrary, feed on foolishness; it is pleasant to their taste at the time, and they ruminate with relish on it afterwards. Two persons of opposite spiritual tastes may be detected for once in the same act of evil; but they do not walk abreast in the same life-course. Sin becomes bitter to the taste of the renewed, and he puts it away with loathing; but the corrupt, who has never known a change, counts the morsel sweet, and continues to roll it under his tongue. Two young men, of nearly equal age, and both the sons of God-fearing parents, were seen to enter together a theatre at a late hour in a large city. They sat. together, and looked and listened with equal attention. The one was enjoying the spectacle and the mirth; the other was silently enduring an unspeakable wretchedness. The name of God and the hopes of the godly were employed there to season the otherwise vapid mirth of the hollow-hearted crowd. One youth, through the Saviour’s sovereign grace, had, in a distant solitude, acquired other tastes, and the profanity of the play rasped rudely against them. He felt as if the words of the actors and the answering laugh of the spectators were tearing his flesh. He breathed freely when, with the retiring crowd, he reached the street again. It was his first experience of a theatre, and his last. It is a precious thing to get from the Lord, as Paul got, a new relish and a new estimate of things. This appetite for other joys, if exercised and kept keen, goes far to save you from defilement, even when you are suddenly brought into contact with evil; as certain kinds of leaves refuse to be wet, and though plunged into water come out of it dry.
The gratification of appetite is pleasant. This law of nature bears witness that God is good. Food and drink are necessary to the maintenance of life. If, as a general rule, the act of taking them were painful, the duty would be neglected, and the race would become extinct. The Author of our being has made the performance sure by making it delightful. The pain of hunger is an officer of the executive under the supreme government of Heaven, ever on the watch, compelling living creatures to give the body its necessary support. This beneficent law, like all the other good things of God, is perverted by the fallen: this truth of God is profanely turned into a lie by the corrupt appetites of men. Appetite, and the pleasure of indulging it, is still a great force when it is turned in the wrong direction. That which among God’s works is mighty to save life, is in Satan’s hand mighty to destroy it. When the taste is depraved, the pleasantness of the poison supplies a power like gravitation, silently dragging down the slave with ever-increasing speed into the bottomless pit. If folly were not joy to the fool, he might soon be induced to forsake it. Nothing will produce a new life but a new nature.
The soul has an appetite, and needs food as well as the body, In this department too the tastes are various, and there is a corresponding variety in the provided supply. Fools feed on foolishness, and like it: they have no relish for more solid food. On the other hand, “it is joy to the just to do judgment.” The Just One relished the doing of the Father’s will as his meat and drink. Christians grow like Christ: those who hope in his mercy learn to fall in with his tastes. If we saw a hungry human being turning away from the finest of the wheat, and by choice satisfying himself with the husks that swine do eat, we should shudder in presence of the prodigy; we should weep over the low estate into which one of our kind had fallen. Such a perversion of the bodily appetite is rare — perhaps altogether unknown: but a greater derangement of the spiritual taste is not only possible in certain cases; it is the common condition of men.
It is sad to think how men run to what they like, with as little forethought and as great impetuosity as swollen rivers rush towards the sea. In the main the taste of the renewed leads them to the food which will sustain and invigorate the health of the soul; but even they need to watch and pray, lest they enter into temptation. He will not be a thriving, growing Christian, who partakes freely of joys as they come, on the right hand and on the left. Even a healthful man, if he is wise, will observe carefully the nature of his food, and watch the effects of each kind. If he discovers that any species, though pleasant at the time, hurts his health afterwards, he will carefully abstain from the tempting morsel. You may prove to him that it is not poison, — that it will not take away his life: that is not enough: if it is hurtful to his health, he will abandon it. Alas! the children of this world are wiser in their generation than the children of light. Men who, on the whole, value their spiritual life the most, lightly expose its health to injuries against which they would resolutely defend their bodies. If a man should eat unwholesome food from day to day, the mischief would soon become palpable both to himself and his neighbours: he would feel his own feebleness, and others would stare at him as a walking skeleton. But when the spiritual life is exposed to the action of a slow poison, the emaciation of the soul is a thing not so easily felt by the patient, and not so easily seen by his neighbours. It is written of Ephrairn in a time of spiritual decay, “Gray hairs are here and there upon him, yet he knoweth it not” (Hos. vii. 9). Ah! if the soul’s health and sickness were visible like those of the body, the old question, “Why art thou, being the king’s son, lean from day to day1?” would be appropriately addressed now to many of the royal family of heaven. The answer, if truly given, would in most cases be, They feed too much on foolishness, and do not satisfy themselves with that which was meat and drink to their Master.
In dealing with men for their reformation, they who do not begin at the beginning lose all their labour. If you assume that human nature is already good, and only needs to be helped forward to higher degrees of virtue, you miss the mark, and gain nothing. You are fishing with a bait for which the fishes have no taste: they do not like it, and will not take it. The corrupt are not naturally alarmed at their own corruption, and eager to leap into holiness.
You may have seen creatures living in the rankest material corruption, and shuddered to think that life of any kind should be imprisoned in such a horrid place. The instinct of compassion for wretchedness is stirred within you; but a second thought lays it to rest again. These worms do not loathe that which is at once their dwelling and their food. It is their nature: it is their life to be there. These worms, to your taste so loathsome, are not ashamed of their condition, and have no desire to leave it. Although an opportunity is offered, they do not hasten to escape into cleanness, and wipe themselves from their filth. Such is moral corruption, and the life therein, if it is left to itself. The tenants of the mire do not grow ashamed or weary of it: they have been bred in it, and it is their delight. Sinners are not, of their own motion, weary and ashamed of sin: they do not desire to escape out of it. Although all intelligent beings, who are not themselves in the mire, look on with inexpressible disgust, whether they be the angels who never fell, or the saints who have been lifted up, those who are, and have always been in it, love their condition, and would not leave it. If in compassion for living creatures crawling in material filth, you should benevolently pick them out one by one, and lay them in clean dry beds, you would become their tormentor by taking them out of their element. Such, to the spiritually impure, God’s word is felt to be: the unclean do not hail it as a deliverer. This is the most fearful feature of our case. It is not like that of a man who has fallen into the water, and instantly struggles to escape with all the energy of his being: sin is the element of the sinful. The cure is not another place, but a new nature.
Mahomet manifested great shrewdness in the conception of his paradise. If he mistook the kingdom of God, he comprehended well the appetites of men: he promised his followers as a heaven the fullest gratification of all their desires. But what if a foundation of eternal truth be found lying beneath all these abominations! The prophet’s followers have a right principle in their hands, although, by turning it upside down, they make it the most destructive of errors. It is true that heaven will give unbridled scope to all the appetites of all its inmates. There will be no crucifying of the flesh there: no man will have his taste thwarted, or his supply stinted there. Mahomet is right, in as far as he says that in heaven every entrant will have all his passions gratified to the full. The difference lies in this: they expect that heaven’s joys will be made to suit human appetites; we know that the tastes of the saved will be purified into perfect conformity with the joys that are at God’s right hand. In heaven, indeed, there is no foolishness to feed upon; but there are no fools to desire it. Heaven denies no pleasure, and yet provides nothing impure. All the evil desires are left behind, and all the good are gratified.
It is time that we who seek that better country should be forgetting past attainments, and reaching forth after newer and higher measures of holiness: “Grow in grace.”. The night is far spent; the day is at hand; be ye also ready. There will be no crucifying of the flesh in heaven; it must be crucified now. The old man must be put off with his deeds and his desires; and for this salvation work, “now is the appointed time.” Those who do not on this side of life’s boundary -line acquire a taste for holiness, will not on the other side get an entrance into heaven. “To them that look for Him, He shall appear:” they who look now in the opposite direction shall not then behold His face in peace.
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•Before honour is humility.” — xv. 33.