><>..."Who of God is made unto us wisdom."...><>
- 1 Corinthians 1:30
Man's intellect seeks after rest, and by nature seeks it apart from the Lord
Jesus Christ. Men of education are apt, even when converted, to look upon
the simplicities of the cross of Christ with an eye too little reverent and
loving. They are snared in the old net in which the Grecians were taken, and
have a hankering to mix philosophy with revelation.
The temptation with a man of refined thought and high education is to depart
from the simple truth of Christ crucified, and to invent, as the term is, a more
intellectual doctrine. This led the early Christian churches into Gnosticism,
and bewitched them with all sorts of heresies. This is the root of Neology,
and the other fine things which in days gone by were so fashionable in
Germany, and are now so ensnaring to certain classes of divines.
Whoever you are, good reader, and whatever your education may be, if you
be the Lord's, be assured you will find no rest in philosophizing divinity. You
may receive this dogma of one great thinker, or that dream of another
profound reasoner, but what the chaff is to the wheat, that will these be to
the pure word of God. All that reason, when best guided, can find out is but
the A B C of truth, and even that lacks certainty, while in Christ Jesus there
is treasured up all the fulness of wisdom and knowledge.
All attempts on the part of Christians to be content with systems such as
Unitarian and Broad-church thinkers would approve of, must fail; true heirs of
heaven must come back to the grandly simple reality which makes the
ploughboy's eye flash with joy, and gladens the pious pauper's heart-"Jesus
Christ came into the world to save sinners." Jesus satisfies the most
elevated intellect when he is believingly received, but apart from him the
mind of the regenerate discovers no rest. "The fear of the Lord is the
beginning of knowledge. " "A good understanding have all they that do his
commandments. "
Charles Spurgeon |
