Chapter 6 – Problem
Not only was it God’s intention to harden Pharaoh’s heart so that he should not obey His command, but He plainly declared, “In very deed for this cause have I raised you up: for to show in you My power, and that My name may be declared throughout all the earth” (Exo. 9:16). The connection in which that solemn verse is quoted in Romans 9:17 makes it unmistakably plain that God ordained this haughty monarch should be an everlasting monument of His severity. Here then we behold the Ruler of this world dealing with men-for as previously pointed out Pharaoh was representative of a large class-dealing with them about what concerns their highest interests, their weal or their woe throughout eternity and all the while-not intending their happiness, not determining to confer the grace which would enable them to comply with His will-yet issuing commands to them, denouncing threatenings, working signs and wonders before them, enduring them with much longsuffering while they added sin to sin and ripened for destruction. Yet let it be remembered that there was nothing which hindered Pharaoh from obeying save his own depravity. Whatever objection may be brought against the Gospel calling upon the non-elect to repent and believe may with equal propriety be brought against the whole procedure of God with Pharaoh.
As we have discussed, in their Articles of Faith the hyper-Calvinists declare, “We deny duty-faith and duty-repentance-these terms signifying that it is every man’s duty to spiritually and savingly repent and believe” Those who belong to this school of theology insist that it would be just as sensible to visit our cemeteries and call upon the occupants of its graves to come forth as to exhort those who are dead in trespasses and sins to throw down the weapons of their warfare and be reconciled to God. But such reasoning is puerile, for there is a vast and vital difference between a spiritually-dead soul and a lifeless body. The soul of Adam became the subject of penal and spiritual death, nevertheless it retained all its natural powers. Adam did not lose all knowledge, or become incapable of volition, nor did the operations of conscience cease within him. He was still a rational being, a moral agent, a responsible creature; though he could no longer think or will, love or hate, in conformity to the Law of Righteousness.
Far otherwise is it with physical dissolution. When the body dies it becomes as inactive, unintelligent and unfeeling as a piece of unorganized matter. A lifeless body has no responsibility, but a spiritually-dead soul is accountable to God. A corpse in the cemetery will not “despise and reject” Christ (Isaiah 53:3), will not “resist the Spirit” (Acts 7:51), will not disobey the Gospel (2 Thessalonians 1:8); but the sinner can and does do these very things, and is justly condemned for the same. Are we, then, suggesting that fallen man is not “dead in trespasses and sins”? No indeed, but we do insist that those solemn words be rightly interpreted and that no false conclusions be drawn from them. Because the soul has been deranged by sin, because all its operations are unholy, it is rightly said to be in a state of spiritual death, for it no more fulfills the purpose of its being than does a dead body.
The Fall of man with its resultant spiritual death, did not dissolve our relation to God as the Creator, nor did it exempt us from His authority. But it did forfeit His favor and suspended that communion with Him by which alone could be preserved that moral excellency with which the soul was originally endowed. Instead of attempting to draw analogies between spiritual and physical death and deriving inferences therefrom, we must stick very closely to the Scriptures and regulate all our thoughts thereby. God’s Word says, “You has He quickened who were dead in trespasses and sins, wherein in times past you walked” (Ephesians 2:1, 2). Thus the spiritual death of the sinner is a state of active opposition against God-a state for which he is responsible, the guilt and enormity of which the preacher should ever press upon him. If it be asked, Why speak of a state of active opposition against God as a being dead in sins? the answer is, because in Scripture “death” does not mean cessation of being, but a condition of separation and alienation from God (Ephesians 4:18).
The solemn and humbling fact that fallen man is quite incapable of anything spiritually good or of turning unto God is clearly revealed and insisted on in His Word (John 6:44; 2 Corinthians 3:5, etc.), yet the majority of professing Christians have ever rejected it. But it is important to observe that the grounds and reasons on which it has been opposed by Romanists and Arminians are not Scriptural ones. They do not allege that there is any specific statement of Holy Writ which directly contradicts it: they do not affirm that any passage can be produced from the Word which expressly tells us that fallen man has the power of will to do anything spiritually good, or is able by his own strength to turn unto God, or prepare himself so to do. Instead, they are obliged to fall back upon a process of reasoning, making inferences and deductions from certain general principles which the Scriptures sanction. That there is a vast difference in point of certainty between these two things will at once be apparent.
The principal objection which is made against the doctrine of fallen man’s inability is drawn from the supposed inconsistency between it and the hortatory principle which runs all through Scripture. It is pointed out that commands and exhortations are addressed to the descendants of Adam, that they are manifestly responsible to comply therewith, that they incur guilt by failure to obey. And then the conclusion is drawn that, therefore these commandments would never have been given, that such responsibility could not belong to man, and such guilt could not be incurred, unless they were able to will and to do the things commanded. Thus their whole argument rests not upon anything actually stated in Scripture, but upon certain notions respecting the reason why God issued these commands and exhortations, and the ground upon which moral responsibility rests.
In like manner we find the hyper-Calvinists pursuing an identical course in their rejection of the hortatory principle. Though at the opposite pole in doctrine-for they contend for the spiritual impotence of fallen man-yet they make common cause with the Arminians in resorting to a process of reasoning. They cannot produce a single passage from God’s Word which declares that the unregenerate must not be urged to perform spiritual duties. They cannot point to any occasion on which the Savior Himself warned His Apostles against such a procedure, no, not even when He commissioned them to go forth and preach His Gospel. They cannot discover a word from Paul cautioning either Timothy or Titus to be extremely careful when addressing the unsaved lest they leave their hearers with the impression that their case was far from being a desperate one.
Not only are these hyper-Calvinists unable to produce one verse of Scripture containing such prohibitions or warnings as we have mentioned above, but they are faced with scores of passages both in the Old and the New Testament which show unmistakably that the servants of God in Biblical times followed the very opposite course to that advocated by these nineteenth and twentieth century theorists. Neither the Prophets, the Savior, nor His Apostles shaped their policy by the state of their hearers: they did not accommodate their message according to the spiritual impotency of sinners, but plainly enforced the just requirements of a holy God. How, then, do these men dispose of all those passages which argue directly against them? By what is called (in our Law-courts) a process of “special pleading.” To quote again their Articles of Faith. These men say:
“We believe that it would be unsafe, from the brief records we have of the way in which the Apostles, under the immediate direction of the Lord, addressed their hearers in certain special cases and circumstances, to derive absolute and universal rules for ministerial addresses in the present day under widely-different circumstances.” Thus do they naively attempt to neutralize and set aside the practice of our Lord and of His Apostles. It is very much like the course followed by the Pharisees, who drew up their own rules and regulations, binding them upon the people, against which Christ preferred the solemn charge of “making the Word of God of none effect through your tradition” (Mark 7:13). The “We believe it would be unsafe” of these religious dictators is lighter than chaff when weighed against the authority of Holy Writ. If God’s servants today are not to be regulated by the recorded examples of their Master and His Apostles, where shall they turn for guidance?
And why do the framers of these Articles of Faith consider it “unsafe” to follow the precedents furnished by the Gospels and the Acts? Their next Article supplies answer: “Therefore, that for ministers in the present day to address unconverted persons, or indiscriminately all in a mixed congregation, calling upon them to savingly repent, believe, and receive Christ, or perform any other acts dependent upon the new-creative power of the Holy Spirit, is, on the one hand, to imply creature power, and, on the other, to deny the doctrine of special redemption.” Here they come out into the open and show their true colors, as mere reasoners. They object to indiscriminate exhortations because they cannot see the consistency of such a policy with other doctrines. Just as the Arminians reject the truth of fallen man’s moral impotency because they are unable to reconcile it with the hortatory principle, so Antinomians throw overboard human responsibility, because they deem it out of harmony with the spiritual helplessness of the sinner.
Alas, alas, what is man? Why, as God Himself tells us, “Truly, every man at his best estate is altogether vanity” (Psalm 39:5). No wonder, then, that He bids us, “Cease you from man, whose breath is in his nostrils: for wherein is he to be accounted of?” (Isaiah 2:22). Yes, “Cease you from man”-religious man as much as irreligious man: cease from placing any confidence in or dependency upon him, especially in connection with spiritual and Divine matters, for we cannot afford to be misdirected therein. Then what must I do? asks the bewildered reader. Weigh everything you hear or read in the balances of the Sanctuary: test it diligently by Holy Writ: “Prove all things, hold fast that which is good” (1 Thessalonians 5:21). And what is the servant of Christ to do? Why, execute the commission his Master has given him, declare all the counsel of God (not mangled bits of it), and leave the Lord to harmonize what may seen contradictory to him-just as Abraham proceeded to obediently slay Isaac, even though he was quite incapable of harmonizing God’s command with His promise that “in Isaac shall your seed be called.”
It will occasion no surprise to most of our readers when we tell them that those ministers who are debarred from calling upon the unsaved to repent and believe the Gospel are also exceedingly slack in exhorting professing Christians. The Divine commandments are almost entirely absent from their ministry. They preach much upon doctrine, much upon experience, but deportment receives the very scantiest notice. It is not too much to say that they seem to be utterly afraid of the very word duty. They preach soundly and blessedly upon the obedience which Christ rendered unto God on behalf of His people, but they say next to nothing of that obedience which the Lord requires from those He has redeemed. They give many comforting addresses from God’s promises, but they are woefully remiss in delivering searching messages upon His precepts. If anyone thinks this charge is unfair, let him pick up a volume of sermons by any of these men and see if he can find a single sermon on one of the precepts.
As an example of what we have just complained of we will quote at some length from a series of “Meditations on the Preceptive Part of the Word of God” by J. C. Philpot, which appeared in “the Gospel Standard” of 1865. Let it be duly noted that these were not the casual and careless utterances of the pulpit, but the deliberate and studied products of his pen. In his first article upon the Preceptive Part of the Word of God, Mr. Philpot said: “It is a branch of Divine revelation which, without wishing to speak harshly or censoriously, has in our judgment been sadly perverted by many on the one hand, and we must say almost as sadly neglected, if not altogether ignored and passed by, by many on the other . . . It is almost become a tradition in some churches professing the doctrines of grace to disregard the precepts and pass them by in a kind of general silence” (people. 63: 319). Sadly true was this declaration, for the charge preferred characterized by far the greater part of his own ministry, and applied to the preachers in his own denomination. That Mr. Philpot was fully aware of this sad state of affairs is clear from the following:
“Consider this point, you ministers, who Lord’s Day after Lord’s Day preach nothing but doctrine, doctrine, doctrine; and ask yourselves whether the same Holy Spirit who revealed the first three chapters of the Epistle to the Ephesians did not also reveal the last three? Is not the whole Epistle equally inspired, a part of that Scripture of which we read, ‘All Scripture is given by inspiration of God and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, that the man of God may be perfect, thoroughly furnished unto all good works’ (2 Timothy 3:16, 17)? How, then, can you be ‘a man of God perfect’ (that is, complete as a minister) and ‘thoroughly furnished unto all good works,’ if you willfully neglect any part of that Scripture which God has given to be profitable to you, and to others by you? . . . Can it be right, can it be safe, can it be Scriptural, to treat all this fullness and weight of precept with no more attention than an obsolete Act of Parliament?” (people. 94, 95, 97).
To the same effect, he declared again. “To despise, then, the precept, to call it legal and burdensome, is to despise not man, but God, who has given unto us His Holy Spirit in the inspired Scriptures for our faith and obedience . . . Nothing more detects hypocrites, purges out loose professors, and fans away that chaff and dust which now so thickly covers our barn floors than an experimental handling of the precept. A dry doctrinal ministry disturbs no consciences. The loosest professors may sit under it, nay, be highly delighted with it, for it gives them a hope, if not a dead confidence, that salvation being wholly of grace they shall be saved whatever be their walk of life. But the experimental handling of the precept cuts down all this and exposes their hypocrisy and deception” (people. 320, 325).
In developing his theme, Mr. Philpot rightly began by treating of “Its Importance,” and this at considerable length. First, he called attention to “its bulk” or the large place given to precepts in the Word. “The amount of precept in the Epistles, measured only by the test of quantity would surprise a person whose attention had not been directed to that point, if he would but carefully examine it. But it is sad to see how little the Scriptures are read among us with that intelligent attention, that careful and prayerful studiousness, that earnest desire to understand, believe, and experimentally realize their Divine meaning, which they demand and deserve, and which the Word of God compares to seeking as for silver, and searching as for hid treasure” (Proverbs 2:4)-how much less are the Scriptures read today than they were seventy-five years ago!
Next, he pointed out that, “were there no precepts in the New Testament we should be without an inspired rule of life, without an authoritative guide for our walk and conduct before the Church and the world . . . . But mark what would be the consequence if the preceptive part of the New Testament were taken out of its pages as so much useless matter. It would be like going on board of a ship bound on a long and perilous voyage, and taking out of her just before she sailed, all her charts, her compass, her sextants, her sounding line, her chronometer; in a word, all the instruments of navigation needful for her safely crossing the sea, or even leaving her port” (p. 98). He disposed of the quibble that, “If there were no precepts, the Church would still have the Holy Spirit to guide her” by saying, “If God has mercifully and graciously given us rules and directions whereby to walk, let us thankfully accept them, not question and cavil how far we could have done without them” (p. 99).
Under his third reason for showing the importance of the Precepts, are some weighty remarks from which we select the following. “Without a special revelation of the precepts in the Word of Truth we should not know what was the will of God as regards all spiritual and practical obedience, so, without it as our guide and rule, we should not be able to live to His glory . . . Be it, then, observed, and ever borne in mind that, as the glory of God is the end of all our obedience, it must be an obedience according to His own prescribed rule and pattern. In this point lies all the distinction between the obedience of a Christian to the glory of God and the self-imposed obedience of a Pharisee to the glory of self . . . Thus we see that if there were no precepts as our guiding rule, we could not live to the glory of God, or yield to Him an acceptable obedience; and for this simple reason, that we should not know how to do so. We might wish to do so; we might attempt to do so; but we should and must fail” (people. 111-113).
This section on the importance of the Precepts was ended by pointing out: “On its fulfillment turns the main test of distinction between the believer and the unbeliever, between the manifested vessel of mercy and the vessel of wrath fitted to destruction.” At the close of this division he said, “Take one more test from the Lord’s own lips. Read the solemn conclusion of the Sermon on the Mount-that grand code of Christian precepts.” After quoting Matthew 7:24-27 he asks, “What is the Lord’s own test of distinction between the wise man who builds on the rock, and the foolish man who builds on the sand? The rock, of course, is Christ, as the sand is self. But the test, the mark, the evidence, the proof of the two builders and the two buildings is the hearing of Christ’s sayings and doing them, or the hearing of Christ’s sayings and doing them not. We may twist and wriggle under such a text, and try all manner of explanations to parry off its keen, cutting edge; we may fly to arguments and deductions drawn from the doctrines of grace to shelter ourselves from its heavy stroke, and seek to prove that the Lord was there preaching the Law and not the Gospel, and that as we are saved by Christ’s blood and righteousness, and not by our own obedience or our good works, either before or after calling, all such tests and all such texts are inapplicable to our state as believers. But after all our questionings and caviling, our nice and subtle arguments to quiet conscience and patch up a false peace, there the word of the Lord stands” (p. 115).
Alas that such cogent arguments have had such little weight and that the Precepts have been so sinfully neglected by the denomination which Mr. Philpot did so much to build up.
We have quoted from a series of “Meditations on the Preceptive Part of the Word of God” from the pen of the late J. C. Philpot, in which he showed at length the “Importance” of this branch of the Truth. He called attention to “its bulk” or the large place given to precepts in the Scriptures; he pointed out that if we had them not, “we should be without an inspired rule of life, without an authoritative guide for our walk and conduct,” and therefore “should not be able to live to God’s glory.” He also showed that “on its fulfillment turns the main test of distinction between the believer and the unbeliever.” It would indeed be a grand thing if present-day preachers in the “Gospel Standard” branch of the Baptist churches (and their brethren in the U.S.A. who are known as Primitive Baptists) could be induced to give careful attention to such weighty considerations, and act on them. It has long been our conviction that the repudiation of the Moral Law as the believer’s rule of life and the sinful ignoring of the Divine precepts in the pulpit, have contributed more than anything else unto the terribly low condition to which these denominations have been reduced.
Some time ago we expressed this conviction to a friend in America who belongs to the hyper-Calvinists, and he replied by saving, “I will take to heart what you wrote me concerning the Primitive Baptists as regards the general attitude of their churches to not preaching and insisting on the observance of Gospel precepts: it is causing an awful dearth in the churches.” That Mr. Philpot himself was conscious of this grievous neglect in his day is clear from his “Address to Our Spiritual Readers” in January, 1865, when he said, “Where is the preceptive part of the Gospel brought forward and insisted upon as we find it in the Epistles of the New Testament? And are not churches as faulty, in some of these respects, as ministers? How many of our Baptist churches can ‘suffer the Word of exhortation’ (Hebrews 13:22)? What an outcry there would be of ‘legality’ if any minister of truth were to exhort husbands, wives, children, masters and servants, severally and specially as Paul exhorts them!” (p. 8). What a tragic state of affairs! What sort of “churches” are they which will not suffer an essential and copious part of God’s Word!
Later in these same “Meditations” Mr. Philpot said: “How anyone who calls himself a believer in Christ Jesus can think lightly of knowing and doing the will of God, is indeed a mystery. But this all must do who ignore the precepts, think lightly of them, and neglect them. It is almost become a tradition in some churches, professing the doctrines of grace, to disregard the precepts and pass them by in a kind of general silence, and thus in a sense they ‘have made the Commandments of God of none effect by their tradition’ ” (p. 319). Yet there was no need to tone down his indictment and minimize the gravity of such a sin by saying those guilty of the same “in a sense have made the Commandments of God of none effect,” for this is the very thing that they have done, so that their preachers are positively afraid to deliver an hortatory sermon lest they be frowned upon.
As to how far his own almost entire silence on the Precepts influenced and intimidated other ministers, only that Day will show. Mr. Philpot gave a twofold explanation of his lamentable failure at this point. “But are there no reasons for this omission? Surely there are, or it would not be so general. Have we not ourselves been guilty here? We freely confess our fault this day, and perhaps we have but to look into our own breast to find why others have been faulty too. Now we confess that for some years after we had received the love of the truth we did not clearly or fully see the connection of the precepts with the doctrines of grace and the experience of the saints. We saw, what was obvious enough, that the precepts occupied a large and prominent place in the New Testament, and as such we received it. But two difficulties seemed to stand in the way of its cordial and hearty reception, and a right view of its beauty and blessedness as a part of Divine revelation. These were, 1, the sinfulness; 2, the inability of the creature, and of ourselves in particular. The consciousness of utter inability to perform the precepts made it as if too inaccessible to the hand to reach it; the holiness of the precept made it as if too pure for the hand to touch it.
“Thus, if passed by, it was not from contempt, but reverence: if not handled, it was not from willful neglect, but from not properly seeing its place in the Gospel of the grace of God . . . Thus there was a going to the opposite extreme; and to avoid one evil, there was not a falling into, but too near an approach to the other. Repelled and almost disgusted by the way in which Arminians, moderate Calvinists, and the whole race of man-made preachers handled the invitations and precepts of the Gospel, handing them out to dead men to act upon, and perform, there was a shrinking from any confederacy with such doings and dealings” (people. 65-67). It is very likely that the Day will show there were as many “man-made” preachers among the ultra-Calvinists as among the Arminians and moderate Calvinists. In the words we have italicized in the above quotations the real reason for Mr. Philpot’s shelving of the Divine precepts is betrayed: proud reason was at work, refusing to receive as a little child what seemed to him inconsistent with other things in the Word. Nor was Mr. P. by any means alone in this, for he was merely following in the steps of Mr. Gadsby, and of Mr. Huntington before him-a path much trodden, before and since by Antinomians.
What difference does it make whether or not we can “clearly or fully see the connection of the precepts with the doctrines of grace and the experience of the saints”? Is the intellectual perspicuity of the preacher to be that which governs him in picking and choosing from the Word of God? Is his theological bias to decide which branches of Truth he should handle and which he should ignore? Is he to discard the Moral Law because he is unable to see how its requirements are in perfect accord with the contents of the Gospel? Shall he jettison all the Old Testament types because he cannot perceive they now have any value, seeing the Substance is come? Is he to be silent upon the eternal punishment of the wicked because he cannot reconcile such a thing with the everlasting mercy of God? The bounden duty of every Divinely-called minister is to declare “all the Counsel of God,” no matter how much of it he fails to comprehend, and to keep back “nothing that is profitable” for his hearers, no matter how they may rebel against it.
Towards the end of his “Meditations” Mr. Philpot intimated one other reason some ministers are likely to shelve the exhortations of Holy Writ. “Besides which, look at the inconsistency of a man preaching the precepts who himself does not practice it, nor even know under what power and influence it should be performed. Consider the contradiction of a covetous man preaching up liberality; or a worldly professor inculcating, ‘Love not the world’; of an unforgiving persecutor admonishing to forgiveness; of a light, trifling preacher, full of jests and jokes and foolish anecdotes, exhorting young men (much more gray-haired ministers) to be sober-minded, for all to put away foolish talking and jesting, and that their speech should be always seasoned with salt, that it may minister grace unto the hearer. Such men instinctively feel that their hearers would despise, and that justly, such preaching and such preachers. They, therefore, quietly drop, not only the precept itself, as condemning their own conduct, but all attention to it, and ignore it just as much as if it had neither part nor place in the Word of Truth. And as many, if not most, of such men’s hearers are in precisely the same state, as unwilling to hear the precept enforced and as unable to bear it as their ministers, need we wonder that there should be a silent compact between the pulpit and the pew that the subject should never be introduced at all, and that all mention of it or allusion to it should be considered legal and inconsistent with the doctrines of grace? The consequences of this silent compact may be easily read in the state of many churches professing doctrinal truth-that they are flooded with carnal professors, who think no more of the precepts of the Gospel than of an old almanac, and that even among those who are partakers of the grace of life, vital godliness is, for the most part, at a very low ebb” (p. 323).
That there is some force in the above remarks every true servant of Christ will readily allow, but that they furnish the slightest extenuation for dereliction of duty, no godly man will admit for a moment. One of the most painful trials experienced by a godly minister is the consciousness he has of his utter unworthiness for such a high and honorable calling, his personal unfitness to handle the holy things of God, so that he is frequently constrained to cry with the Prophet, “Woe is me! for I am undone: because I am a man of unclean lips” (Isaiah 6:5). None but He who knows the heart is aware of how often the servant of God walks down the pulpit-steps feeling that the message he has just delivered condemns himself, and instead of making for the entrance of the building to greet the retiring worshipers with a smiling face and a handshake (as the custom now is in so many places) he wants to retire to the vestry and there hang his head in shame before his Master.
It is no easy task for one who feels the Lord has hid His face from him to discourse on the blessedness of communion with the Beloved. It is no easy task for one who is bowed down from a sense of the plague of his own heart to preach upon the duty of delighting ourselves in the Lord and rejoicing in Him evermore. Each man has his own besetting sin to mourn over, and it is no easy matter for one who is conscientious to stand up and denounce that particular evil and exhort unto the opposite virtue. Hypocrisy is particularly hateful to an honest soul, yet to bid others to perform what one knows he is not himself doing, certainly seems a being guilty of two-facedness. Nevertheless, we must not lower God’s standard to meet human frailties nor omit either what we cannot understand or fail to practice. It is at the heart God looks, and if that beats true to Him with a genuine desire to please Him, He accepts the will for the deed.
The duty of the preacher is clear. “Cry aloud, spare not, lift up your voice like a trumpet, and show My people their transgression” (Isaiah 58:1)-no matter how unpopular it may make him. “You therefore gird up your loins, and arise, and speak unto them all that I command you: be not dismayed at their faces, lest I confound you before them” (Jeremiah 1:17): yes, “all,” not simply those parts which we think we understand. “Speak unto all the cities of Judah which come to worship in the LORD’S house, all the words that I command you to speak unto them; diminish not a word” (Jeremiah 26:2)-woe be unto him who deliberately omits what is unpalatable unto himself or his hearers. “Tell them, thus says the LORD: whether they will hear, or whether they will forbear” (Ezekiel 3:11): faithfully preach the whole counsel of God and leave “results” to Him. “Go unto Nineveh, that great city, and preach unto it the preaching that I bid you” (Jonah 3:2), and take to heart the judgment which came upon that Prophet because he refused to call upon the unregenerate to repent.
Most of our readers will not be surprised to hear that among much which is excellent in the articles from which we have quoted, Mr. Philpot was guilty of a grave error concerning the Gospel precepts by blankly denying that they applied to the unregenerate. In his second main division, “The Nature of the Precepts,” under the “letter” of it, he deals with “the persons to whom the precept is addressed,” and says, “These are believers, and believers only. The world has nothing to do with the precepts of the Gospel, they are not addressed to it or meant for it. This will be evident from a moment’s consideration. Where do we chiefly find the precepts of the New Testament? In the Epistles. What are the Epistles? Inspired letters written to churches or Christian individuals . . . But what an important consequence flows from this simple fact, that spiritual precepts are only for spiritual men, and therefore that to take the precepts and force them upon carnal men is to abuse them” (p. 117).
But many will not deem it to be so “evident from a moment’s consideration” that the world has nothing to do with the Gospel precepts. First, they will wonder why the whole of the Old Testament is so naively ignored. Are there not hundreds of spiritual precepts found in it? Were they addressed only to spiritual persons? We think not. Further, do we “chiefly find the precepts of the New Testament in the Epistles”? Though it be allowed that the majority of them are in the Epistles, nevertheless, there are dozens more recorded in the Gospels and the Acts-and they were not by any means restricted to spiritual men. Did the Son of God err in bidding the unregenerate to repent and believe the Gospel? Did the Spirit-filled and controlled Apostles make a serious blunder in indiscriminately calling upon the multitude to perform spiritual acts? And where is there a word in the New Testament which declares that their example was not to be followed by later ministers of the Word? We require someone vested with a far higher authority than that asserted by Messrs. Huntington, Gadsby and Philpot to assure us that such is not the case.
It is just because there is a half-truth in the contention made by Mr. Philpot in our last quotation that it is the more misleading and dangerous. It is freely allowed that there are many exhortations recorded in the Epistles which are not to be pressed upon unbelievers, yet this is not because unbelievers are unfit subjects to receive spiritual exhortations, but because many of the precepts addressed unto the saints are unsuited to the world. We also readily grant that much harm has been done by those who have failed to distinguish between things which differ radically. For example, Paul’s call to the saints at Philippi, “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling” (2:12) is quite unsuited to those who reject the yoke of Christ. And why so? Not on the ground of the worldling’s spiritual impotency, but because he is not a possessor of any “salvation” to work out. In like manner, it would be useless to bid him “add to your faith virtue, etc,” for he is utterly devoid of the faith there mentioned.
Nevertheless, it is equally important to recognize that there are many exhortations in the Epistles which may justly be pressed upon the unconverted, though, of course they cannot be enforced by the same motives which are there advanced. Surely it is the duty of God’s servant to exhort all to, “abstain from fleshly lusts, which war against the soul,” though he cannot urge the ungodly to do so on the ground that they are “strangers and pilgrims” (1 Peter 2:11). “Fear God, honor the king” (1 Peter 2:17) is just as binding on worldlings as it is on Christians. “Render therefore to all their dues: tribute to whom tribute, custom to whom custom, fear to whom fear, honor to whom honor. Owe no man anything, but to love one another: for he who loves another has fulfilled the law” (Romans 13:7, 8). These also are exhortations found in the Epistles, nevertheless their scope must certainly not be restricted unto the regenerate. To argue that the calling upon the wicked to perform spiritual duties implies their ability to do so, is utterly pointless, for it might as well we objected that Christians themselves should not be exhorted for the same reason, for they have no power of themselves to comply (John 15:5).
The plain fact of the matter is that if the servant of God today has no Divine warrant to call upon the ungodly to forsake their sins and turn to Christ for pardon and peace, then he also has no authority to exhort believers to walk in the paths of righteousness, for they both rest upon the same foundation, namely, the precedents furnished by Holy Writ. The Christian has no more ability of his own to heed the precepts found in the Epistles, than the non-Christian has to obey the calls which are found in the Gospels and the Acts. It is the bounden obligation of those claiming to be called of God to preach, to exhort unbelievers and believers, realizing that it rests entirely in the hands of a sovereign God to make effectual the one or the other, or both. He has no right whatever to pick and choose: his business is to “declare all the counsel of God,” and as Luke 24:47 and Acts 20:21 show, part of that “counsel” is to call upon men to repent.
If the ungodly are not pointedly and authoritatively called unto repentance of their sins and belief of the Gospel, and if on the contrary they are only told that they are unable so to do, then they are encouraged in their impenitency and unbelief. If the Gospel gives such a disproportionate presentation of the Truth that the unconverted are made to feel they are more to be pitied than blamed for their spiritual impotency, then their responsibility is undermined and their conscience is lulled to sleep. Unto the objection that to call upon the unregenerate to turn from the world and come to Christ is to inculcate creature-ability and to feed self-righteousness, we ask, Were Christ and His Spirit-taught Apostles ignorant of this danger? Was it left for the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to make such a discovery? Were men so mightily used of God as Jonathan Edwards, George Whitefield, and C. H. Spurgeon wrong, when, in promiscuously exhorting all their hearers to flee from the wrath to come, they followed the example of John the Baptist and the Son of God?
We realize that many will find little that is edifying in this article, yet we ask them to kindly bear with us, as we feel strongly that quite a number of our readers are in real need of what has been presented. And now to sum up-the principal problem which the moral impotency of the sinner presents to the minds of men is, How can one who is helpless be a suitable subject for exhortations unto action? Instead of seeking to untie this knot, the majority of theologians and preachers have summarily cut it. Arminians have denied that fallen man is totally helpless; Antinomians deny that he should be called upon to repent and believe the Gospel. Only real Calvinists have held firmly to both the inability and the responsibility of the unregenerate.
