Divine Wisdom, as Seen in the Nature of the Gospel
“But the wisdom that is from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, and easy to be entreated, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality, and without hypocrisy.” — James iii. 17.
When men were groping for wisdom on the earth, God sent wisdom from above. From everlasting this wisdom was with God, but his delights were with the sons of men. In the fulness of time he came, — God manifested in the flesh. He dwelt among ns, and we beheld his glory. He fills a believing heart with his presence, and will yet fill with his presence a renovated world, as sunlight fills the day.
This text, so plain and pregnant in itself, may and should be viewed in two aspects, corresponding and yet distinct, like the type and the printed page, or the seal and the image which it leaves upon the wax. The wisdom that is from above is, in one aspect, the salvation of God, and, in another, the character of a Christian. For the one you look to the Scriptures; for the other, to a believer’s life. Alike the mould which God has sent from heaven, and the new life which it forms on earth, are pure and peaceable, gentle and easy to be entreated, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality and without hypocrisy. All these features may be found objectively in true religion, and subjectively in true Christians. On either side the twofold truth admits and demands a separate investigation.
First,
The wisdom that is from above is, Revealed Truth, — the gospel of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.
Of this wisdom the text gives a remarkable series of distinct yet associated characteristics. In the construction of the original the attribute of purity is, by a special form of phraseology, separated from the rest as emphatically the first, and to it all the rest bear the relation of secondary and subordinate. In the actual examination of the passage, however, adopting an arrangement suggested partly by the meaning and partly by the form of the expressions, we shall class the whole series of eight separate attributes in four successive pairs. This method will contribute to the convenience, without impairing the accuracy of the illustration.
I. First pure, then peaceable.
II. Gentle, and easy to be entreated.
III. FuD. of mercy and good fruits.
lY. Without partiality, and without hypocrisy.
When God reveals himself to the lost, these are the characteristic features of the manifestation. It is in all respects the opposite of another wisdom which is. “earthly’’ in its origin; ‘’sensual, devilish” in its nature and effects. The double halo of glories which James beheld encircling the salvation of God, will shine with a yet brighter radiance if we permit them to lean, while we look, against the dark ground of miscellaneous impurities with which all earth-born superstitions teem.
I. Kevealed truth — the wisdom that is from above — is “first pure, then peaceable,” These two constitute a pair; they are connected by a link of peculiar significance and power. When the cry is raised on earth that its Maker is approaching, — when the criminals know by the rustling of his robe at the door of their prison that the Judge is near, the question, Is it peace? agitates their breasts and trembles on their tongues. The guilty desire peace, but dare not expect it. In prospect of the meeting, conscience, darkened but not dead, is shut up between the dread alternatives: If it be pure it cannot be peaceable, and if it be peaceable it cannot be pure. If, in dealing with the sinful, the Holy One should recede from his demand of purity, he might proclaim peace; but if he proclaim peace, he must be content to dwell with sin. Such are the forces that tear a human heart, ignorant as yet of the gospel, when the footsteps of the Judge are heard approaching. Nature and reason can neither find nor make a door of hope. The man is not able to believe that God will be pleased with sin, and therefore dare not hope that he will be at peace with sinners. The moral efiect of this pressure, as long as it remains alone, is altogether evil. In the absence of hope, anticipation of punishment does not produce reformation. The force of this fear goes, not to cast sin out of his life in order that the man may be fit company for God, but to cast God out of his memory, in order that the man may live at peace in his sin.
The wisdom that comes from above resolves this difficulty. It shows- how God may dwell with man, and yet not sacrifice his purity; how man may dwell with God, and yet not lose his peace. It is first pure, and then peaceable. It neither tarnishes divine holiness, nor crushes human hope. It guards first the righteousness of the Judge; thereafter and therewith it obtains the pardon of the criminal. Here is light on the darkness; but it is light from heaven. The world by its own wisdom never knew God thus.
It is in Christ crucified that the two apparent contradictions meet. The promises which by themselves would be inconsistent and mutually destructive, “in him are yea, and in him Amen.” The substitution of Christ for his people is the fulcrum which sustains alike the honour of God and the safety of believing men. The sacrifice of the just for the unjust breached the girdling prison wall of despair which encompassed the human race. Through the opening streamed a light from heaven. It is no longer the dark dilemma: If God be just, heU must be our portion: if we obtain his favour, his righteousness is dishonoured and his heaven defiled. In presence of the Lord our righteousness these difficulties vanish like mist before the rising sun. God preserves his own purity, and yet lifts the lost into his bosom: the guilty get a free pardon, and yet the motives which bind them to obedience, instead of being relaxed, are indefinitely
strengthened. Revelation is first pure and then peaceable: the Revealer is a just God and a Saviour.
II. Revealed truth — the wisdom that is from above — is ^’gentle and easy to be entreated.” This is not the view which springs in nature, and prevails in the world. Fear in the conscience of the guilty, after passing through various degrees of intensity and forms of manifestation, ever tends to culminate in the question, “Shall I give the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?” See the result as it is exhibited in India. The various tribes that inhabit the peninsula do not think that their own gods are “gentle, and easy to be entreated.” The images with which we are all acquainted demonstrate the contrary. These representations of the worshipped are made by the worshippers, not in mockery of an abject superstition, but as an act of devotion to superior beings. These images, faithful translations of human thought into brass and silver, are hideous monsters. They seem to delight in the sufferings of their votaries. They are represented as the shedders of blood; and blood is continually offered on every great emergency to propitiate their favour. The chief gratification of a chief idol is the self-murder of his worshippers under the wheel of the truck that bears his weight.
See there what an unclean conscience in the dark counts the character of God. It is a case in which the primal germ of justice as an attribute of the Supreme has been overlaid and defaced by the incrustation of ages, and not subsequently restored by light from heaven.
Similar results appear in regions where revelation, once triumphant, has been quenched again by superstition. The Papists have veiled the compassionate countenance of Jesus, and taught their dupes that they must apply to more gentle mediators. They do not venture to go directly into the presence of Him who took the little children in his arms. They create for themselves intercessors who will be more easily entreated. Having lost the spiritual conception of the divine compassion, they betake themselves, instead, to the gross experiences of a carnal mind. They substitute a woman’s softness for the gentleness of Christ. There is nothing in the idolatry of the pagan world more dishonouring to the one Mediator between God and man, than the worship of Mary, toward which the Romish hierarchy has for ages been drifting, and in which it has now irrevocably and finally sunk. They crucify Christ afresh who send trembling sinners to lay their aching heads on a kinder breast than his.
When a guilty creature comes in simplicity to God through Christ, it is easier to pour out the heart in the eternal Father’s ear, than to confess to any fellow-sinner. If you get access to the throne of grace through the blood of the Lamb, you will be able to speak wants and weaknesses there, which you dare not confide to a mother.
The wisdom that is from above is gentle; “a bruised reed shall he not break, and the smoking flax shall he not quench,” The wisdom that is from above is easy to be entreated; nay, more, he tenderly entreats you, — “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” Surely the wisdom that bids an anxious inquirer turn from the Son of God our Saviour, and pour his confession into a more tender heart is “earthly, sensual, devilish.”
III. Revealed truth — the wisdom that is from above — is *’ full of mercy and good fruits.“” So far from being in all cases united, these two, in their full dimensions, meet only in the gospel. The administration of a government might be full of mercy, and yet destitute of good fruits: nay, more, the want of good fruit might be directly due to the fulness of mercy. Mercy to the full, — an absolutely unconditional pardon to the guilty, is in human governments inconsistent with the public good. A ruler who empties the jails indiscriminately amid the huzzas of a rabble, cruelly injures the peaceable inhabitants. Bitter are the fruits of his wholesale forgiveness. The best wisdom of men cannot bring these two together; they devour each other as often as the attempt is made. What wisdom from beneath could not do, the wisdom that is from above has done. In the words of Paul: By faith we do not make void, we establish the law. In the gospel of the grace of God, absolute fulness of mercy to the guilty binds the forgiven more firmly to obedience.
The wisdom which is exhibited in the covenant is full of mercy. In general, we are all aware that the Christian dispensation is merciful; but more is written here regarding it. Expressly and specifically it is full of mercy; more there could not be. Perhaps you may remember some period in your experience when you were conscious of a wish that more mercy had been in the gospel than there is, in order that it might cover your case, When a backslider has been a second time brought to a stand, and convictions again begin to pierce him; — when, looking back, and in, and up, he feels that there is not even in the gospel a provision that will allay his fear, he secretly wishes that God were more merciful than the Bible represents him to be. This man deceives himself. He is misled by a name. It is not more of mercy, but less of holiness that he desires to find in the gospel. God could not put more mercy in his covenant, for all his mercy is in it abeady. Woe to us if that which it contains comes short of our need. It is not a wider door of mercy that we want, but a larger liberty to sin.
This divine wisdom is also full of good fruits. The tree is good, its fruits are good, and it bears them abundantly. Time would fail to name or number them. Compare the condition, moral and economical, of a heathen country with the condition of our own, and the difference will represent, approximately, the more palpable of the good fruits which the gospel produces. Even the charities and the refinements of civilized society almost all spring directly from Christianity. The good fruits which the gospel bears for time are great; but greater and better fruits are ripening for use in eternity.
Either attribute is in itself precious; and there is an additional and peculiar interest in the union of the two. If there had not been divine wisdom in the plan, the profusion of mercy would have blasted in the germ all the promises of fruit. The mercy that is free to us was dearly bought by our divine substitute. Justice was satisfied while the guilty were set free. There lies the peculiar feature of the mercy which God gives and sinners get through Christ. It does not encourage the forgiven to continue in sin. Nor is its virtue only negative, doing no harm; it is intensely positive, doing more for actual holiness in the world than any administration of law, or infliction of vengeance could have done. Of two debtors, both forgiven by the same benevolent superior, which will love him most? I suppose he to whom he forgave most? A right answer. Such forgiveness as God bestows in Christ makes the forgiven love the forgiver much; and love is the greatest, the only fulfiUer of the law.
IV. Revealed truth — the wisdom that is from above — is “without partiality, and without hypocrisy.”
In declaring that the wisdom from above cannot be charged with either of these vices, the text evidently proceeds upon an implied contrast with a wisdom from beneath which is deeply tinged with both. We are, indeed, so much accustomed to partiality and hypocrisy in human affairs, that it becomes difficult to lodge in our minds the conception of an offer entirely equal, and an announcement absolutely true. If during a long period of years you have been cheated more or less in every bargain; if all the goods that you purchase turn out on examination to be more or less adulterated; if you find by experience that you never can depend for safety on honesty in another, but always and only on vigilance in yourself, a habit of suspiciousness is engendered which becomes at length a second nature. You smile sadly at professions of honesty, and quietly calculate the loss of the expected deceit. Accustomed in the moral department of human things to a continual state of siege, we have contracted a corresponding habit of suspicion. We lack the tendency, and perhaps the power, to exercise a pure implicit trust. We do not receive the kingdom of God as a little child, openly, instantly, confidingly; we look askance at the offer, as if it were too good to be true, with the suspicion engendered by long experience of a deceitful heart and a deceitful world.
In this state our minds are when proposals are made to us in God’s name on the business of our salvation. The offer comes to a heart on which there is, partly inherent and partly acquired, a bent of universal distrustfulness. How shall we be brought, in very deed and in simplicity, to trust that God is true, although every man should be a liar? It is not enough to be told that such he is. Though one rose from the dead to tell it, we would not, with these deceitful, deceived hearts, believe. A nature cannot be so changed. Except a man be born again he cannot see and receive the kingdom of God in the true little-child fashion. A “living hope’’ would be a precious possession for these cold, suspicious hearts; but unto that blessed hope one must be “begotten again.” “Create in me a clean heart, 0 God, and renew a right spirit within me.” Take away this suspicious heart, and give a tender, trustful one. “Lord, I believe, help thou mine unbelief.”
Setting beauteous, divine truth in front of the opposite and corresponding falsehood, in order that its white garment may more brightly shine, the apostle declares, finally, that the Mediator’s proposal for peace with God is without partiality- — offered alike to all, and without hypocrisy — truly offered to each.
1. Without partiality: — offered alike to all. All the fallen are in need, and all alike. It holds good, morally as well as materially, that there are no high places on the surface of the earth, when it is seen from heaven. It is level as well as low. His own goodness will not admit the best into favour; his own badness will not keep out the worst. Grace, absolutely sovereign and free, is the main principle of the gospel. When it comes to the world it finds there no good, but gives all. It is very difiicult, but altogether necessary, clearly to understand and frankly to accept this feature of the divine plan. It recognises absolutely no difference between one man and another. In our view, indeed, and in our relations one toward another, there are degfrees of good and evil, as there are inequalities on the surface of the earth; but these differences entirely disappear when the eye of the Omniscient searches the hearts and ways of men. Rightly we count and call the sea “level,” although its parts are constantly and convulsively leaping upward; so lies this surging sea of wickedness under the eye of God.
The provisions of the gospel correspond to the condition of mankind. The covenant has been framed according to its author’s view of the world’s need. Mercy is not moulded in this shape for the moral and in that shape for the vicious, but alike for all. No human being is either kept out or taken in, on account of anything peculiar in his heart or his history. Beware of thinking on the one hand that you have a better prospect of being accepted because of something good, or a worse because of something evil in yourself. Christ came to call sinners to repentance; in that character simply you must come. The blood of Jesus cleanseth from all sin; however deeply you are stained, you may come. Whatever the water-flood in Noah’s time may have been, the baptism of wrath that comes on the world for sin covers the highest mountains of its merit. The ark of safety, needed by all alike, is offered alike to all. Those who stand on the highest place will be lost if they remain without; those who stand on the lowest place will be saved if they come in.
2. Without hypocrisy: — truly offered to each. What have we here? Can the Supreme, consistently with his own honour, plead before his creatures, that he is not a hypocrite, making his offer appear more generous than it really is? Yes; such is his long-suffering condescension. All the repetitions of his offer are of this kind — the overflowings of a compassion that is more than full. A God less gracious might have opened a way of escape, and proclaimed it once, and shut it then for ever against all who did not instantly flee. So did not our God. He does not take our first denial, nor our second. He stands at the door and knocks; he pleads with sinners, Why will ye die?
Here is a word of wonderful condescension; the offer of mercy through Christ to sinful men is not an act of hypocrisy. Strange measure of forbearance this! But is it needed? Do men deny or doubt the sincerity of the offer which the Messenger of the covenant has brought to the world? They do. Nor is it here and there a rare example of peculiar wickedness; it is the commonest sin I know. We do not speak this distrust; but we live it. In answer to this dark suspicion of his sincerity which the Omniscient reads in our hearts, the Spirit witnesses through James that the proposals of pardon which the gospel brings are “without hypocrisy.”’
I have seen a dog tried in this fashion: his owner took a full dish of finest human food from the table, as it had been prepared for the family, and set it before him, encouraging him by word and gesture to eat. The sagacious brute shrank back, lay down, refused, and gave many unmistakeable indications that he would be too glad to eat, but he saw clearly it was all a pretence — it was too good for him, and never intended for him — and if he should attempt to taste it, the dish would be snatched away, while he would perhaps receive a blow for daring to take the offer in earnest.
The picture, although its associations are less grave, possesses, in relation to our subject, the one essential quality of trueness. It represents, more exactly than anything I know in nature, the treatment which God’s offer gets from men. We treat the offer as if the offerer were not sincere. The greatness and goodness of the gift are precisely the features which our guilty minds pervert into grounds of suspicion that it is not really meant for us. If it were some crumb, or husk, we might think it suitable, and accept it greedily. If we were permitted to creep in stealthily, to get a bit of bread and shelter among the hired servants, we could believe that the offer was intended to be accepted, and accept it accordingly; but the Father’s bosom, his kiss, his tears, his home, his ring, his feast, his heritage — all this to us, now, and free — this prodigal heart, soaked long in sin, dark, hard, narrow, unhopeful, distrustful, counts it too good to be true. Alas for the pitiful condition of sinful men! — refusing the great salvation, because it is so great that they cannot believe it is really intended to be given free to the unworthy. We have been so accustomed to untrue pretence, both in ourselves and others, that distrust has become our nature. It seems as impossible for our spirit as for our flesh to come again as that of a little child.
All things are possible with God. Look unfco Jesus. He is the resuiTection and the life. Lord, increase our faith. Thy people shall be willing in the day of thy power. Ask, and ye shall receive. Ask, and ye shall receive both the gift of pardon, and the true, willing, trustful heart, that will take it as a little child from a Father’s hand.