example how \vc should come armed into the field against tliem ; for Christ could with one beam shot from his Deity (if he had pleased to exert it) have as easily laid the bold fiend prostrate at his foot, as afterward he did them that came to attack him ; but he chose rather to conceal the majesty of his Divinity, and let Satan come up closer to him, that so he might confound him with the word, and thereby give a proof of that sword of his saints, which he was to leave them for their defence against the same enemy. The devil is set out by the leviathan, Isa. xxvii. 1 : him God threatens to punish with his strong sword; alluding to that great fish, the whale, which fears no fish like the sword-fish, by whom this great devourer of all other fish is so often killed; for, receiving one prick from his sword, he hasteneth to the shore, and beats himself against it till he dies. Thus the devil, the great devourer of souls, who sports himself in the sea of this world, as the leviathan in the waters, and swallows the greatest part of mankind without any power to make resistance against him, is himself vanquished by the word. When he hath to do with a saint armed with this sword, and in- structed how to use this weapon, he then, and not till then, meets his match.
CHAPTER XVI.
THE FOURTH AND LAST ENEMV THE CHRISTIAN ENGAGETH, MADE UP OF MANY TROOPS OF AFFLICTIONS, TOGETHER WITH HIS VICTORY OVER THEM, OBTAINED BY THIS SWORD OF THE WORD,
A FOURTH enemy that meets the Christian, is an army made up of many bands of aftlictions, both outward and inward ; sometimes one, sometimes another, assailing him ; yea, often a whole body of them pouring their shot together upon him. This was Paul's case: 'Without were fightings, within were fears,' 2 Cor. vii. 5. He endured a great fight of external afflictions and buff'etings within his own bosom, at once. And that is sad indeed, when a city is on fire within, at the same time that an enemy is battering its walls without. Yet this is often the condition of the best saints, to have both the rod on their backs, and rebukes from God in their spirits, at once, Psa. xxxix. 11 : ' When thou with rebukes dost correct man for iniquity, thou makest his beauty to consume away like a moth.' God sometimes corrects with outward crosses, but smiles with inward manifestations, and then he whips them, as I may say, with a rose- mary-rod,— the one sweetens and alleviates the other. At another time he sends a cross, and encloseth a frown in it. He whips with outward affliction, and, as an angry father, every lash he gives his child, tells him, this is for that fault, and that for this, which exceedingly adds to the smart of the correction, and is the very knot on the whip, to see his Father so much displeased with him : and when the poor Christian lies under the hand of an afflicting God, or under the rebukes of a frowning God, Satan will not be long from the Christian, or wanting to throw his salt and vinegar into the wounds that God hath made in his flesh or spirit, thereby to increase his anguish and to lead him farther into temptation, if he can have his will. Indeed, God often sends so many troops of various afflictions to quarter upon some one Christian, that it puts him hard to it to bid them all welcome and entertain them with patience ; yea, it would pose any one (that knows not what service the word of God doth the Christian, and the supplies it brings him in,) to conceive how his spirit and his faith should be kept from being eaten up and swallowed into despair by them. But the word of God bears all the charge he is at : this is his counsellor and comforter. David tells us his heart had died within him but for it, Psa. cxix. 92 : ' Unless thy law had been my delight, I should then have perished in my affliction.' The wf)rd was his spiritual Abishag, from which his soul got all its warmth ; all the world's enjoyments heaped on him would have left him cold at heart, if this had not lain in his bosom to bring him to a kindly heat of inward peace and comfort : ver. 50, of the same psalm, ' This is my comfort in my affliction, for thy word hath quickened me.' Not the crown in hope, (for some think it was not on his head when this psalm was penned,) but the word in his heart, to which he was beholden for his comfort. A word of promise is more necessary at such a time to a poor soul than warm clothes are to the body in cold weather. When Adam was thrust naked out of Paradise into the cold blast of a miserable world, where, from his own guilty conscience within and crosses without, he
^g4i AND THE SAVORD OF THE SPIRIT.