Part 210

Once more. A true beholding of the LAMB of GOD, implies such a beholding him, as will transform us into his divine likeness. This will be the effect of our seeing him as he is in heaven; and this, in its degree, will always be the consequence of our beholding him with an eye of a true and lively faith on earth. When _Moses_ came down from mount _Horeb_, where he had been conversing with GOD, we are told, that his face shone; and if we have been upon the mount of ordinances beholding by faith the blessed LAMB of GOD, though our faces will not shine, yet our hearts will be moulded into his blessed image. This is what the Apostle _Paul_ terms, in one place, “Being transformed by the renewing of our minds;” and in another, “Passing from glory to glory, even by the Spirit of the LORD.” All manifestations, of whatever kind or degree, if not attended with this transforming and truly sanctifying influence, are unprofitable, delusive, or merely imaginary. _Balaam_ could call himself the man whose eyes were open, and the man who had seen the visions of the Almighty, and yet he was a poor worldling all the while. He loved the wages of unrighteousness, though forced by GOD not to receive them. Hence we may easily and rationally account for the falling away of some, and it may be the final apostacy of many others, who in the late religious stir, (as some are pleased to call it) seemed to be uncommonly gifted, and to be lifted up, as it were, to the third heaven. Satan being sensible that the Holy Spirit of GOD was working a great work upon the earth, turns himself into an angel of light, introduces his extraordinaries, and thereby mimics GOD’s true work now, as the magicians were once permitted to mimic the real miracles of _Moses_ formerly. Such counterfeits, those who are not ignorant of Satan’s devices, ought from time to time to add all diligence to search out and detect; but after the utmost caution imaginable, I believe we shall find the saying of a very zealous Reformer (who thought, at his first coming out, that he should convert the whole world) to be too true, viz. “That old Satan will be, in many cases, too hard for young _Melancthon_.” Satan is an old practitioner, and we, comparatively speaking, but novices; and therefore no wonder, that we sometimes mistake his extraordinaries, for the powerful operations of the Holy Spirit; or look upon those, at least for a while, who are only stony-ground hearers, and have received the word with joy, as though they were truly converted to, and had by a living, soul-transforming faith, beheld the LAMB of GOD. Such mistakes may serve to make us more cautious. But to condemn a work in the lump, as merely delusive and diabolical, or roundly to affirm, that all the pretended subjects of it have taken up only with an ideal CHRIST, because some have mistaken imaginations for the true spiritual manifestation of GOD’s love to their hearts, discovers such an ignorance of scripture, of Satan’s devices, and the accounts given us of past revivals in all ages, that if one did not know the dreadful blindness of a bigotted sectarian zeal, and what a proneness there is in the best of men, to condemn every thing that doth not come just in their own way, we should think it morally impossible that good men should run such lengths as some have done of late, in censuring what I think may be called, amidst all the infirmities and weaknesses that have attended it, A great and glorious work of a GOD.