Him That Worketh Not

Third Sermon on a Pauline Text

TO HIM THAT WORKETH NOT,
B VT BELIEVETH ON HIM THA T
JUSTIFIETH THE UNGODLY,
HIS FAITH IS COUNTED FOB
RIGHTEOUSNESS. — Rom. iv. 5.

EVERY great science, every great art, every great doctrine and discipline, has its own special terminology; its own technical terms, as we call them. Every new discovery, every new invention, every new doctrine and development of doctrine, demands a new name to describe it, to contain it, and to convey it. Now, though it is quite true that this word ’ work is one of our most familiar words, at the same time, when the Apostle takes that word up into his great evangelical vocabulary, he straightway fills that familiar word of ours full with all the fulness of his own inward and spiritual meaning. He fills it full with such new and such deep meanings, that it takes us all our days to get this one word of his well into our so inexperienced and so unspiritual minds.

To work, in the ordinary and everyday sense of that word, is just to do this and that with our hands. It is to dig, and dress, and keep a garden.

It is to plough, and sow, and reap a field. It is to found, and build, and furnish a house. As the fourth commandment has it: Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work. But there is a whole world of work that is not comprehended in the fourth commandment. Master, said one in the Gospel, which is the great commandment of the law? Jesus said to him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind, and thy neighbour as thyself. Now that is the commandment, and that is the work, which the Apostle is continually treating of, and not the six days’ work of the fourth commandment. The grand commandment of love embraces not only all that we do both Sabbath-day and week-day, but much more all that we think both Sabbath-day and week-day, and all that we feel, and all that we desire, and all that we long after. To work, in the Apostle’s employment of the word, is every beat of our heart, and every tone of our voice, and every glance of our eye; it is every sigh of ours and every smile. All we are, and all we have, and all we do, must be wholly given up to God and our neighbour, just as God gives up Himself and our neighbour to us. For God is love, and love is the fulfilling of all God’s holy law.

Now, that being so, is it not a very startling thing that the Apostle should say here what he does say? Should say that to him that worketh not: that is to say, to him who loves neither God nor his neighbour aright, such and such great blessings are offered to him, and are indeed pressed upon him? What does the Apostle mean? One thing is certain, he cannot mean what, at first sight, he seems to mean. He cannot mean that the man who does not endeavour with all his might to love and serve both God and his neighbour, can ever stand accepted before God. No. But he has the mind of Christ and the message of God to us when he says authoritatively and conclusively: To him that worketh not; that is to say, to him who cannot work; to him who, as God is his witness, would work if he were only able; to him who agonises day and night to do this work of works, and who has for ever given up agonising after anything else; to him who sets God and his neighbour before him in everything; but the things he would fain do, both to God and his neighbour, he cannot attain to them; with all his sweat, and with all his tears, and with all his prayers, he cannot attain to them so as to come near performing them. He works his fingers to the bone; he bows his back to the burden; but with it all, and after it all, at the end of every day he lays down his day’s work toward God and his neighbour, not only not done, but much further from being done than it was when he took it up. Oh, wretched man that he is! who shall deliver him from the body of this death? For we know that whatsoever the law saith, it saith to them that are under the law, that every mouth may be stopped, and all the world may become guilty before God.

But what is this that is here preached from God to every man whose mouth is so stopped? What is this new thing ’ believing,“* to which such great blessings are everywhere promised? Well, the very first step of all believing to everlasting life is to believe what is written in the New Testament concerning Jesus Christ. At the same time, I may believe every word that Matthew and Mark and Luke and John ever write about Jesus of Nazareth, just as I believe what Plutarch and Tacitus write about Julius Caesar, and yet be no better. That is to say, I may believe my New Testament with what our divines are wont to call an historic faith. Nay, I might even have actually stood on Calvary, and might have seen with my own eyes Jesus Christ on the Cross, and all the time not gone down to my house justified. To be justified by faith I must go on to believe that God hath set forth His Son to be a propitiation for sin, through faith in His blood, and I must place all my faith in His blood, as if He had come and had died on the Cross for me alone. As Walter Marshall has it: ‘The former of these acts of believing doth not immediately unite us to Christ, because it termineth only on the gospel. Yet it is a saving act, so far as it goes, because it instructeth and inclineth and disposeth the soul to the latter act, whereby Christ Himself is immediately received into the heart. He that believeth the New Testament with hearty love and liking, as the most excellent truth, will certainly, with the like heartiness, believe on Christ for his salvation.”* And thus, true saving faith, once rooted in any man’s heart, will, under the hand of the Holy Ghost, grow up to the full assurance of faith, as we see it in such great examples of full assurance as Abraham, the father of the faithful in the Old Testament, and Paul himself, the great preacher and pattern of faith in the New Testament.

But though Walter Marshall is preaching Paul’s gospel when he makes the saving act of faith to terminate on Christ and in His blood, at the same time, in this text, as so often in other texts, the Apostle carries up our faith beyond even Christ, and beyond even His blood, and rests our faith ultimately and finally on God the Father. In the Apostle’s soteriology our salvation takes its first rise in the love and the grace of the Father, and then both the Son and the Spirit perform each their proper part in carrying out the Father’s will. And thus it is that in this great text Paul runs our faith up to God the Father Himself, and instructs us to make our approach to Him alone as the ‘justifier of the ungodly.’ But we greatly stagger at that name of God, as at so many other of His names. When we first hear this immoral doctrine, the justification of the ungodly, we will not have it. In the interests of truth and righteousness, and for the honour of God, we will not listen to it. That the ungodly should be justified, and the ungodly alone — far be it from us to believe such antinomian teaching I We can understand the godly being justified, or even the partly godly and the partly ungodly; but not the utterly ungodly. But so it is. In the gospel this is one of the many mysteries of godliness, that God justifieth the ungodly, and the ungodly alone; and that as ungodly, and always as ungodly. The more ungodly indeed any man is, the more fit and eligible he is for justification. It was the godliness of the Pharisee that was his ruin. And it was the utter absence of all godliness in the publican that made it possible to send him to his house justified. And so is it in this temple to-day also. Show me the man among you who feels himself to be the most ungodly man in the whole congregation. Show me the man who feels himself to be absolutely made of sin, like David and Paul, and I will show you the man who is the ripest of you all for his free and full justification; and who, if he will only add to his utter ungodliness the faith of the text, will go down to his house established in that peace of conscience which passes all understanding.

This doctrine of justification by faith is like one of the doctrines of the old manuscripts. The more difiicult to receive any offered reading of an old manuscript, the more unlikely to be true, the harder the lection, the more the scholars trust it, and take it, and incorporate it. Now there is nothing off’ered to us in the whole region of salvation so hard to receive, and believe, and hold by, as just the doctrine of the text. The Jews would not have it; they stoned Paul because he preached it. The whole apostleship itself was up in arms against him because of it. They condemned it as an antinomian doctrine, and they denounced him who preached it. But it held the field, and it will more and more hold the field wherever it is preached in faith, and prayer, and alongside of a holy life, as Paul preached it, and as Luther, and Hooker, and Bunyan, and Marshall, and all the Puritans, and Chalmers, and all his sons, preached it in Scotland. ‘I should be glad to know,’ wrote Luther to Spentein, an Augustinian monk, ’ what is the state of your soul. When you and I were living together we were both in the greatest of all errors: seeking to stand before God on the ground of our own works. I am still struggling against that fatal error, and have not even yet entirely triumphed over it. O, my dear brother, learn to know Jesus Christ, and Him crucified. Beware of pretending to such purity as no longer to confess thyself the chief of sinners. If our labours, and obediences, and afflictions, could have given peace to the conscience, why should Christ have died on the cross? You will never find true peace till you find it and keep it in this: that Christ takes all your sins upon Himself, and bestows all His righteousness on you.’ And when the Reformation had brought back the pulpit of England to the Epistle to the Romans, and to the article of a standing or falling Church, Richard Hooker preached thus in his immortal sermon on Justification. I feel as if I could never repeat the passage too often, — ‘Christ hath merited righteousness for as many as are found in Him.

And in Him God findeth us if we be believers. For by believing we are incorporated into Christ. Then, although in ourselves we be altogether sinful and unrighteous, yet even the man who is in himself impious, full of iniquity, full of sin; him being found in Christ through faith, and having his sins in hatred through repentance — him God behold eth with a gracious eye, and accepteth him in Jesus Christ, as perfectly righteous as if he had fulfilled all that is commanded in the holy law of God — shall I say accepteth him as more perfectly righteous than if himself had fulfilled the whole law? I must take heed what I say; but the Apostle saith, “God hath made Him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him! *” Let it be counted folly, or phrenzy, or fury, or whatsoever; it is our wisdom and our comfort. We care for no knowledge in the world but this: that man hath sinned and God hath suffered: that God hath made Himself the sin of men, and that men are made the righteousness of God.’