Did you hear that thunder?The one true God is a speaking God. He communicates with the creatures He has made, in a way that is both accurate and clear. These days, His message is contained in the Scriptures of the Old and New Testament, but in earlier times, He would sometimes actually speak from heaven, in an audible voice speaking understandable words. On one occasion, when Jesus was praying in the hearing of a crowd of people, God the Father replied to His prayer directly. Jesus said, “Father, glorify thy name,” and the Father replied, “I have both glorified it, and will glorify it again.” It was unmistakeable. But plenty of the bystanders misheard and mistook. “The people therefore that stood by, and heard it, said that it thundered; others said, An angel spoke to him” (John 12:28–29). What could possibly explain the confusion? The words were audible, the message was clear, yet somehow they couldn’t figure out what they’d even heard. Samuel Rutherford used this incident to make the point that we hear what we want to hear. When our wills are antagonistic to God, even our senses are biased away from perceiving God’s message to us. The opinions we form, which we like to think are rational and evidence-based, are shaped in advance by our wishful inclinations, and these, unless grace changes us, are wishes to be left to carry on without anything to do with God at all. In the following updated extract, Rutherford shows how the human tendency to dismiss the gospel as incomprehensible and irrelevant is not because of any defect in the gospel or God’s communication of it, but because of our sinful desire not to be bothered by it.The people had various opinions about the Father’s answer from heaven. Some said it was thunder. Doesn’t any ignoramus and the most simple idiot know thunder when he hears it?! This shows us how ignorant we are of God, and of the gospel way. Consider what was this voice of God from heaven to Christ. It was the gospel, and it was a clear expression of the communion between Christ and his Father. But what God means is unknown to us. Some say that the gospel is a thunder, and a work of nature, a mere imagination and a dream. Yet these are all false, and they do not agree one with another.
The gospel is the will of God from heaven, yet it is a riddle, a parable not understood (Matt. 13:14; 1 Cor. 14:21; Isa. 29:11–12). “For the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness” (1 Cor. 1:18).
Without grace, they don’t understand the gospelThe understanding is a dark lantern, which has some light inside it, but sends out none at all to apprehend things any distance away [a dark lantern was a hand-held lantern which had a shutter to stop its light shining out]. As the will is iron-hard against heaven, so it is soft as wax to receive the impressions of the flesh, if Christ does not draw aside the curtain of the flesh to let you see the glory of the gospel. Otherwise, God speaks, and Samuel says, “Eli, here I am; you called me.” To the woman of Samaria, Jacob was greater than Christ, and Jacob’s well was as good as the water of life.
Just like the communion between Christ the Son and the Father, the communion between Christ and the soul is a roll of thunder, a work of nature, or anything at all to the natural man. God speaking to the heart is a mystery to him. The Jews say among themselves, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” (John 6:52). With great difficulty, according to their imagination of a bodily eating. Esteeming Christ more highly than other beloveds is a mystery even to the saints, to the extent that they are natural. It’s a strange question for professors of the gospel to ask, “What more is in Christ than in other well-beloveds?” yet that is what they say in Canticles 5:9.
The natural understanding is the most whorish thing in the world. There is a wide variety of imaginary gods. “According to the number of thy cities were thy gods, O Judah” (Jer. 2:29). “They have made them molten images of their silver, and idols according to their own understanding” (Hos. 13:2). Even in the search for truth, the understanding is a rash, precipitate, and unquiet thing. Like a silkworm, it first makes a work of many threads, and then lies fettered and entangled in what came out of its own bowels. The mind spins and weaves lies out of itself, and fancies and dreams, and then expends itself on these, and so creates its own chains and fetters.
But in the matters of God, the mind runs mad, here, there and anywhere. In gospel knowledge it turns frantic, and when it comes to move and act within the sphere of supernatural truths, it only laughs and messes around till it comes out again. If Christ preached is foolishness, then Christ Himself must be a fool, even to the Greeks, the most excellent intellects in the world (1 Cor. 1:22–23). The gospel can only come within the brain of a natural man as a notional fancy, a chimera (1 Cor. 2:14). Indeed, when the greatest intellects came to natural theology, the borders of divine truth, to look on the outside of divinity and contemplate and behold God in His works, they didn’t know what to make of Him (Rom. 1:23). Some thought God to be a dainty bird of paradise. No, said other great thinkers, He is a four-footed beast. No, said others, He is a creeping thing. The most eminent of them, even head of learning among them, said He was a corruptible man.
They turned futile, foggy, reasonless, and stark nothing in their finer discourses and reasonings, in weighing and balancing things. The frame of the heart of man is only evil (Gen. 6:5). I know their imaginations, says the Lord, like the imaginings of the potter designing his earthen pots, that be in the heart, mind, and head of men. Many vain patterns are in our heads, just as there is a variety of pots, bottles, and earthen vessels in the potter’s house, but they are evil, wicked, and only evil from the womb. But especially, how many devices and new patterns of religions and gods are in the heart of men? How many sundry opinions of Christ are in people’s brains? Some said he was John the Baptist, some Elias, and others Jeremiah (Matt. 16:14).
Without grace, they don’t like the gospelThe love and affections are most whorish, light, and wanton. No one god is the natural man’s God. It may be maintained that an unrenewed man does not have one predominant sin, but, indefinitely, sin is his king; and however many sins he has, that’s how many kings (Rom. 5:14; Rom. 6.7–12).
It’s true, pride, covetousness, or some particular sins may come to the throne by turns, as either complexion, strength of corrupt nature, or times bear sway. As Satan is not divided against Satan, so no natural man will be a martyr for a false god, or a predominant lust, in opposition to another known false god, though all may oppose the gospel. The Lord complains of the heart “that playeth the harlot with many lovers” (Jer. 3:1). Heaven and saving grace are indivisible. No one is half in heaven, half in hell. Almost a Christian is no Christian. When Adam fell from the one God, he fell into many inventions, not just one (Eccles. 7:29).
Without grace, they always choose the wrong interpretationPeople think that the supernatural ways of God are just a rumble of thunder in the air, which is a most natural work, merely the ebbing and flowing of the spirit in either natural joy or melancholy, naturally following the complexion of the body. It is grace that puts a right sense on the works of God, as on the Word of God. We are no less heterodox in mis-interpreting the works of God than in putting false and unsound senses on the Word of God. When emerods plague the Philistines, they wonder whether it was chance, or the God of Israel. Moses works miracles, the magicians work miracles, and the Egyptians doubt whether their false god, or the living God that made the heaven and the earth, has wrought the miracles.
When God and nature both work, the natural man, or even saints, to the extent that they are still natural, betake themselves to the nearest god. Sickness comes, and the natural man says, “Neglect of the body, health, the moon, humours, the air, cold weather did it.” He doesn’t look to God. And the believer, guilty of a breach of the sixth commandment in neglecting second causes and in needless hurting the body, doesn’t look at this at all, but foists it all on God working only in a spiritual dispensation. He considers only the dispensation in God, not sin in himself.
Or, mercies grow invisibly, and we don’t see them. We are ready to sleep when mercies are offered. When Christ knocks in love, we are in bed (Cant. 5). Judgements speak in the dark, but we don’t hear. To hear the Lord’s rods, and who hath appointed it, is what the man of wisdom does (Mic. 6:9). There is an orthodox wisdom and will, just as there is an orthodox faith. The will, as well as the mind, can frame syllogisms; every unrenewed man has a faith of his own in the bottom of his will. Some are willingly ignorant (2 Pet. 3); some through deceit refuse to know the Lord (Jer. 9); whereas lusts put out reason, and take the chair. Lust hath powerful logic against Christ; a fleshly mind, vainly puffed up, is a badge of bastard intelligence, which out-reasons all the gospel. O but grace is quick-eyed, sharp, and a clever thing, to see God veiled under the curtain of flesh; to see Christ and heaven through words, and the gospel pregnant with so great a salvation.
The truth about Christ is a blessingLittle wonder that there are divisions about Christ. Some regard the Lord speaking from heaven as thunder; others, as an angel. Christ is the most disputed thing in the world. There are five religions (Matt. 16:13–14), and a range of opinions about Christ. The scribes and Pharisees had many different opinions, and only one in ten of them is the right way. Many said Christ is a prophet (John 7:40); others said this is the Christ (v.41); others no because Christ wouldn’t come out of Galilee (v.41), and there was a division among them (v.43). Christ is for a sign that shall be spoken against (Luke 2:34). Amongst Christs sufferings was that He sustained the contradiction of sinners (Heb. 12:3.) There is only one heaven, and one way to heaven; and there is only one hell, but there are thousands of ways to hell. From one point to another, you can draw only one straight line; but you may draw ten thousand crooked and circular lines. The truth is one, and very narrow; the lie is broad, and very fertile.
It’s a blessed thing to find the wisdom to hit on Christ, and adhere to Him. There are some gamblers and cheats who lie in wait to deceive the simple (Eph. 4:14). They roll the dice for heaven, and they can roll you anything on the dice, whether one, or seven. Resign yourselves therefore, in this plethora of false religions, to Christ, to be led to heaven.
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