I BEGIN with the weapon itself, ' The sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.' I shall first hold forth the sword naked, and then ])nt it again into the sheath, to handle it under the metaphor of a sword. There is a twofold word of God. First, A substantial, or subsisting word, and that is the Son of God, John i. 1 : ' The Word was with God, and the Word was God.' Rev. xix. 13, ' And he was clothed with a vesture dipped in blood, and his name is called The Word of Ciod.' This is spoken of a })erson, and he no other than Christ, the Son of God. But he is not the word of God in the text. The Spirit is rather Christ's sword, than Christ the sword of the Spirit: see ver. 15, of the aforenamed chapter, — ' Out of his mouth goeth a sharp sword, that with it he should smite the nations.' Secondly, There is a declarative word of God, and this is manifold, according to the divers ways and manners whereby the Lord hath been pleased to declare his mind to the sons of men. At first, while the earth was thinly sown with people, and the age of man so voluminous as to contain many centuries of years, God delivered his mind by dreams and visions, with such-like inunediate revelations, unto faitliful witnesses, who might instruct others of their generation therein, and transmit the knowledge of the same to after ages : they living so long, that three holy men were able, from the death of .\dam, to preserve the purity of religion by certain traditions, till within a few years of the Israelites' going down to Egypt. For as the reverend and learned pen calculates the chronology, Methuselah lived above two hundred years with Adam, and from him might receive the will of God revealed to him. Shem lived almost an himdred years with Methuselah, and Shem was alive to the fiftieth year of Isaac's age, who died but a few years before Israel's going into Egypt. Thus long did God forbear to commit his will to writing, because, it passing through so few, and those trusty hands, it might safely be preserved. But when the age of man's life was so contracted, that from eight and nine hundred years (the then ordinary duration of it) it shrunk into but so many tens, as it was in Moses's time, Psa. xc. ; and when the people of God grew from a few persons to a multitude in Egypt, and those corrupted with idolatry; (iod, intending at their deliverance from thence to form them into a common- wealth, thovight it fit (for the preventing of corruption in his worship, and degeneracy in their lives) that they should have a written law to be as a public standard to direct them in both. And accordingly he wrote the Ten Com- mandments with his own finger on tables of stone ; and connnanded Moses to write the other words he heard from him on the mount. Exodus xxxiv. 27 ; yet so, that he still continued to signify his will by extraordinary revelations to his church, and also to enlarge this first edition of his written word according to the necessity of the times : reserving the canon of sacred writ to be finished by Christ, the great Doctor of the church, who completed the same, and by the apostles, his public notaries, consigned it to the use of his church to the end of the world ; yea, a curse from Christ's mouth cleaves to him that shall add to, or take from the same. Rev. xxii. 18, 19. So that now, all those ways whereby God directly made known his mind to his people, are resolved into one of the Scriptures, which we are to receive as the undoubted word of God, containing in it a perfect rule of faith and life, and to expect no other revelation of his mind to us, which is the meaning of Heb. i. 1, ' God, who at sundry times, and in divers manners, spake in times past unto the fathers by the projihets, hath in these last days spoken to us by his Son.' Therefore called ' the last days,' because that we are to look for no other revelation of God's will. And, there- fore, for ever let us abhor that ])lasphemy of Joachim, Abbas, Wigelians, and others that have fallen into the same frenzy with them, who dream of a three- fold doctrine flowing from the three Persons of the Sacred Trinity: the 'law' fr(jm the Father, the ' gospel ' from the Son, which we have in the New Testa- ment, and a third from the Spirit, whicli they call uvancjellum etemnim ; whereas tlie Sj)irit of God himself, by whom the Scriptures were indicted, calls the doc- trine in it, 'The everlasting gospel,' Rev. xiv. 6. Thus much to shew what is here meant by the word of God. From whence the doctrine follows.
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AND THE SWORD OF TilE SPIRIT.
CHAPTER III.
THE DIVINITY OF THE SCRIPTURE SHEWN, AND THE SUFFICIENCY OF ITS OWN TESTIMONY TO PROVE THE SAME.