"I Learned from the Apostle How to Compare Spiritual Things with Spiritual"

Sy gVERY truly original writer has had to

4 faa’ create his own vocabulary. Every ‘ So truly great and every truly original writer has made such new discoveries in truth, or he has taken such new and original views of some old truth, or he has had such new and original experiences of life that he has been compelled to construct a new language for himself in order that he might somewhat adequately set forth to his readers his great discoveries and his great experiences.

Now no greater nor more original writer has ever lived than the Apostle Paul. Take Paul’s great natural powers, and then take the great revelations that were made to him, and then take his own unparalleled experiences, and Paul stands alone among all the great and original men who have ever opened a mouth to speak to us or have taken up a pen to write to us. No other writer or preacher has ever had such new things and such deep things to deal with, and accordingly it is not at all to be wondered at that he has a terminology in all his epistles that is both absolutely new and absolutely his own. The Apostle was raised up to be the author of an absolutely new theology and an absolutely new anthropology and an absolutely new philosophy and an absolutely new ethic, and all that compelled him to be the creator of an absolutely new vocabulary. Incomparably rich as the Greek language was in its philosophical and ethical and literary terms, at the same time when Paul took up his pen to write to his converts in Corinth concerning their Divine Redeemer and concerning the intellectual and spiritual riches of their redemption, he was compelled to employ, not the words which man’s wisdom teacheth, but the words which the Holy Spirit teacheth, comparing spiritual things with spiritual.

Now there is no single word in the whole of the Apostle’s vocabulary that has undergone such a deepening and such an exalting and such an enriching process as just this word ‘ spiritual’ in the text. Paul did not literally coin this word spiritual. He found it already in existence in his Greek dictionary and he was quite familiar with it in the best Greek literature. He did not actually create this word spiritual but he did better. For he took it up and rescued it from all its physical and even from all its philosophical associations, and he exalted it and ennobled it and glorified it and made it one of the deepest and sweetest most holy and most heavenly words in all our New Testament terminology. Before Paul so took up and so transfigured this word it merely meant the immaterial soul or spirit of man as distinguished from his material body. But in his transforming hands the word was at once lifted up above all its former associations till it became ever after one of the noblest and sweetest of all the words belonging to the Spirit of God and to His spiritual world. Says Jonathan Edwards in his great chapter on this subject: ‘ Spiritual in Paul is no longer used to denote anything connected with the soul or spirit of man. In Paul qualities are not said to be spiritual because they have their seat in the soul and not in the body. But it is solely with relation to the Holy Spirit, the Third Person in the Godhead, that either persons or things are termed spiritual in Paul. The Holy Spirit is the substantive,’ says that great writer, ‘from which Paul forms and fills up his great adjective spiritual. Christian men,’ Edwards adds, ‘ are described by Paul as spiritual men because they are born of the Spirit of God, and because the Spirit of God dwells and works within them.’

Prima Spirituaia was a theological expression much made use of by the deep old divines. They described God the Father and God the Son and God the Holy Ghost, when viewed in their divine holiness, as the Prima Spirtruatta — that is to say the Three Divine Persons are the first and they are the best of all Spiritual Existences. In the Three Divine Persons we have spirituality in summo gradu as those old masters in Israel said. So transcendent is the Divine spirituality, said those masterly men, that we cannot attain to think aright about it, not to speak of comparing ourselves with it even at our spiritually best. But when God the Son humbled Himself and became the Son of Man, by that stupendous descent He brought down the Divine spirituality somewhat to our level, so to speak. ‘Till we can now both intelligently and reverently compare ourselves with Him, incomparably as He is above us. We can now measure ourselves, so to speak, over against Him, immeasurably as He will always excel us in His spirituality as in everything else. For as John has it: ‘The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the Only-Begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth. And of His fulness have all we received, and grace for grace.’ That is to say, we have received grace somewhat corresponding to His grace till we can now in some not untrue sense compare our graces with His graces. Look then at some of His incarnation graces. As the evangelical prophet has them, ‘ The Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon Him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge, and of the fear of the Lord. And righteousness shall be the girdle of His loins, and faithfulness the girdle of His reins. As He said of Himself in the synagogue at Nazareth: ‘The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because He hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; He hath sent me to heal the broken-hearted: to preach deliverance to the captives and the recovering of sight to the blind, and to set at liberty them that are bruised.’ And then all His after-life on earth was one long and unbroken revelation of the profound spirituality of His heart and His character. Till one who had been with Him from the beginning, and had walked with Him and watched Him every day, was able to stake his life on this testimony concerning his Master, that ‘ He did no sin, neither was guile found in His mouth. Who, when He was reviled reviled not again; when He suffered He threatened not: but committed Himself to Him that judgeth righteously.” And this life went on with Him till all the fruits of the Spirit were found in all their richness and ripeness in Him — that is to say all love, and all joy, and all peace, and all long-suffering, and all gentleness, and all goodness, and all faith, and all meekness, and all temperance of every kind. In short all those spiritual things in which we are able to compare ourselves with Him. Now with us, as with Shepard, how do we compare in all these things with Him who is our example and our standard? When we are reviled, what do we do? When men accuse us falsely, what do we do? When we suffer wrongfully, what do we do? Do we love and wish well to the man who is our enemy?

Are we peacemakers in our churches and in our families and in our civil communities? And what about our meekness and our humility which were our Lord’s special and favourite graces? Let us lay our lives alongside of our Lord’s life, and so compare ourselves with Him till we become spiritual with His spirituality, and thus everlastingly blessed with His everlasting blessedness.

‘The law is spiritual,’ says the Apostle in his great autobiographic chapter, ‘but I am carnal, sold under sin.” Paul had held his head high till the spirituality of God’s law took hold of his heart. But as soon as the spirituality and true holiness of the law entered his heart, in his own words he died. If his head was the highest before no other man’s head ever since has been so low as Paul’s head. All spiritually-minded men, and all men who would fain possess a spiritual mind, should study Paul’s autobiography down to the bottom, and till they see themselves in it as in a glass. We have many autobiographies, first and last, and some of them are more to us than much fine gold. But Paul’s autobiography was the first of its kind and it remains the best of its kind to this day. It is so short. It is so succinct. It is so profound. It is so spiritual. It is so evangelical. And it has saved so many spiritually-minded men in all ages from downright despair. Do not neglect the Apostle’s peerless autobiography but compare your own with it continually; comparing spiritual things with spiritual.

‘I was no longer an infidel, writes John Newton in his Authentic Autobiography. ‘1 heartily renounced all my former profaneness. I was truly sorry for my past life, and I purposed an immediate amendment. Thus, to all appearance, I was a new man. But, alas! I was little aware of the innate evils of my own heart. For I had no apprehension at all of the spirituality, that is to say, the length and the breadth and the height and depth of the law of God. And though I began to inquire after spiritual books, yet having no spiritual discernment, I frequently made a wrong choice in my religious reading. And I was not yet brought in the way of evangelical and spiritual preaching, and what I heard of that kind I understood not.’ Now whole multitudes of men and women in all our churches are exactly like John Newton in this matter of their religious reading. Multitudes have an intellectual and a scholarly and an artistic discernment in the matter of books who have absolutely no spiritual discernment at all in that whole region of things. How few of the religious books of our day would please the Apostle, or even Shepard! Almost any book passes muster among our people for a spiritual book if only it has some quasi-religious words on its title-page and some thin flavour of religiosity hanging about its boards. Now amid such a widespread and disastrous lack of intellectual and spiritual discernment what exactly is a spiritual book? Well, a book is spiritual to please Paul and Shepard and Newton and the deep old divines just in the measure that the Prima Sprriruatia are to be seen in it — that is to say, just in the measure that the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost are in it, and are in it in all their spirituality. And the Father is seen in all His spirituality only when He is seen and rejoiced in as blessing us with all spiritual blessings in heavenly places in Christ Jesus His Son. Blessing us with all such spiritual blessings as our election in Christ to be holy and without blame before God is love, as the spiritually-minded Apostle has it in his so spiritual Epistle to the Ephesians. As also our having our redemption through the blood of Christ and the forgiveness of our sins according to the riches of His grace. And then following the Father’s so spiritual part in our salvation there is the Son’s so spiritual part, and then the so spiritual part of Him from whose Divine Nature and Divine Work we get the word spiritual and all that it connotes and all that it conveys. These are the things that make a book spiritual; spiritual and evangelical. And without these all-essential things a religious book may be widely sold and bought among us; it may be loudly praised and widely read among us; but lacking the Prima Srrriruaria it can never satisfy a reader of real intellectual and spiritual discernment. ‘I frequently made a wrong choice in my religious reading,’ says the future author of that spiritual masterpiece, The Cardiphonia. Indeed, he never made a right choice of a religious book nor could he till he both received and exercised that spiritual discernment in the matter of books which is one of the most enriching of the gifts of the Spirit to the mind and the heart of a mature spiritual man. Pray God the Holy Ghost for that discernment in your buying and in your reading of books, and conscientiously exercise that discernment when you once get it. Do so lest Brutus should rise up in the day of judgment to condemn you. For it is written concerning the great stoic that he never read a book but to make himself a better man. What have you to say to that, O you so-called Christian men and women?

But there is one thing more on which a closing word claims to be said. And that word is this. In what is in some respects the greatest chapter the Apostle Paul ever wrote he lays down this absolute and irreversible law of God that ‘to be carnally minded is death, but to be spiritually minded is life and peace.’ Now, from your own experience you will at once subscribe to the first part of that strong statement. For your own carnal mind has many and many a time been nothing short of death to you. But the second statement must often have staggered and confounded you: this statement, namely, that to be spiritually minded is life and peace. And no wonder that you are so staggered and confounded with that. For the truth is, both to Paul himself and to you, the very opposite has been the indisputable case. Like Paul himself, you had life and peace both with God and with yourself till God’s spiritual law truly entered your mind and your heart. ‘I had not known sin,’ you have said a thousand times in the bitterness of your heart, ‘but by God’s holy law, for I had not known envy and covetousness and a lascivious mind in myself unless God’s holy law had entered and had denounced all these things in me. I was alive, I was light-minded and light-hearted as long as I kept God’s holy law outside of my mind and my heart,’ you say, ‘but when that holy law came home to me, I died.’ That is to say, ever since you saw the heart-searching spirituality and the awful holiness of the law of God you have been in an inward misery that makes you sometimes the very wretchedest of men, Paul and you. Now what can Paul possibly mean when he says that to have such a spiritualised mind is life and peace, when, in his own experience and in yours it is the very opposite? He means this. He means take pure and unopposed spirituality of mind in any man, if such a man could be found, and both life and peace of the most perfect kind will always be found in that man, as surely as such life and peace were always found in Jesus Christ Himself. But neither Paul nor you are as yet that happy man. For in Paul and in you, in the meantime, your hearts remain largely carnal even after your minds have become largely spiritual. You are like those pitiable Galatians, just as Paul was so like them himself.

‘I learned from Paul,’ says Shepard, ‘ what it was to be spiritually-minded, and I learned from him also how to compare spiritual things with spiritual.’