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VER. 12-14. | EPISTLE TO THE HEBREWS. 117
of our fathers, hath glorified his Son Jesus; whom ye delivered up, and denied him in the presence of Pilate, when he was determined to let him go. But ye denied the Holy One and the Just, and de- sired a murderer to be granted unto you, and killed the Prince of life, whom God hath raised from the dead.” Still they direct them to the man whom they saw, and knew, and dealt wickedly and in- juriously withal. And this man, he tells them, this Christ, must be received in the heavens “ until the restitution of all things,” when he shall come again, verses 19-21. So himself lays this as the foun-
- dation of all his preaching, John viii. 24, “If,” saith he, “ ye believe not that Iam he, ye shall die in your sins,’—‘That I, Jesus of Nazareth, that speak unto you, and converse with you, am the Mes- siah, the Saviour of the world, you shall die and perish for ever- more. This, I say, is one, and one of the first fundamental principles of the gospel; and I shall a little manifest how wnbelief dislikes this principle, and by that dislike prevails with men unto an apostasy from the gospel itself.
I might insist upon the great instance hereof in the nation of the Jews, unto whom he was sent first and in an especial manner; but I have done this at large in the first part of our Prolegomena unto this work, whereunto I refer the reader. Only we may mind him how this was fore-expressed concerning them by the prophet Isaiah, chap. liii. 2, “ He hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him.” They could not see or discern any thing in him for which they should receive him, or be- lieve in him, as to the end for which he was sent of God. As Hiram, king of Tyre, when he saw the cities which Solomon had given him, they displeased him, and he called them “ Cabul,” and so he rejected them, 1 Kings ix. 13; so did the Jews, when they came to see the Lord Christ, they were displeased with him, and reproaching him with many opprobrious terms, utterly rejected him; under the power of which unbelief they yet reject him. I might also insist on the pagans of old, who derided the crucified God of the Christians; but I will leave them under the conquest which the gospel obtained against them. Mention also might be made of the Gnostics, and other ancient heretics, with their endless genealogies and fables, making him to be only an appearance of a man; and though himself said he was a man, and his friends said he was a man, and God him- self said he was a man, and that he “sent forth his Son, made of a woman, made under the law,” though he lived and died a man, yet they would not acknowledge him soto be. But these are long since gone off the stage, although we have yet to do with their offspring under several forms and shapes. The popish figment also of tran- substantiation, springing from the same root, utterly overthrowing the human nature of Christ, and our salvation wrought therein,
118 AN EXPOSITION OF THE [CHAP, III.
might be on this account remarked. And so also might the imagi- nation of the Mennonites, who will not grant that the man of whom we speak took flesh of the substance of the virgin, but that his flesh was spiritual, as they speak, brought from heaven, and only passing through the womb of the Virgin, that he might appear to be a man. And so said some of old; concerning whom Tertullian says, that ac- cording to their opinion, “ Maria non filium gestabat in utero, sed hospitem,’—“ Mary bare not her son in her womb, but a guest.” For they utterly dislike it, that one partaker of flesh and blood like our- selves should be this Son of God. And therefore this figment, which overthrows the covenant of God with Abraham, and all the promises of the Messiah, that he should be of his seed, and of the seed of David, at once rejecting the whole Old Testament, and turning the stories of the genealogy of Christ, recorded to manifest the faithful- ness of God in his promises, into fables, must be exalted in the room and place of that truth which is so fully, so frequently asserted in the gospel, and which is the prime foundation of all our profession. All these oppositions unto and apostasies from the gospel sprang from this especial cause, or the dislike of unbelief against this principle of the mystery of its doctrine. But I shall particularly instance in two sorts of persons, that are of nearer concernment unto us than any of these :—
And the first is of them whom they call Quakers. It is strange to think into how many forms and shapes they have turned them- selves to darken the counsel of God in this matter, and to hide their own apprehension from the light. At their beginning in the world they made (many of them) no scruple plainly to affirm, that all that is spoken concerning Christ was a mere dispensation of God, and an appearance of the Light; but as for such a man as we have described, they had no regard of him. This at first served their turns, and they intended no more by Christ but that which they call the Light of God within them. But what shall we say unto these things? If all the testimonies that we have given unto “the man Christ Jesus,” if all that is spoken of him in the gospel, all that he did, all that he suffered, what he now doth in heaven by intercession, what he shall do at the day of judgment, all that is required of us towards him, in faith, love, and obedience, be not enough to prove him a real indi- vidual man, we may certainly be all of us in a mistake as to what we ourselves are in this world,—we may be all dispensations, who have hitherto taken ourselves to be the sons and daughters of men, But it is some while since they seem to have forsaken this imagina- tion, being driven from it by the common expostulations of every ordinary Christian, “ What do you think of Jesus that died at Jeru- salem?” They have begun in words to acknowledge his person, but yet continue strangely to obscure their thoughts concerning him, and