remove mountains: By faith Enoch was translated: The saints shall judge the world: The works that I do, he shall do; and greater works than these shall he do, because I go unto my Father." And, oh, His love both is, and equals, the love of God. Now in all these things we are called to follow Him who hath led the way, obtained the power, removed the hindrance; Him who by becoming flesh, and in it acting faith, hath made flesh to agree in comparison with God; Him who always gave thanks to his Father for his clean hands and pure heart. And it is the will of the Father and of the Son that the Holy Ghost should make us also well pleasing. But the Pharisee, who desireth to have a treasure of his own, desireth not to be like God. And because his conscience telleth him that he cannot rival God, he turneth from comparing himself with God, which should make him humbly proved, to comparing himself with man, which causeth him complacently to repose. Yet this liar, too, worshippeth God; yea, thanketh God; for he saith, "I thank thee, Lord, that I am not as other men are," in those very days in which men shall be "unthankful!" And why? just because he hath the form of godliness, denying the power thereof. Mark it, denying the power thereof.-Seek ye, then, the power: be not deceived by the form: expose it, try it, denounce it, weep salt tears over it, condemn it by the power. Give no heed to the thanks given by Antichrist to the true God, save to wrestle for the deliverance of poor souls from the snare. And, again, abstain not from thanksgiving, for there lieth another net of the fowler. Men who dread the Pharisee, nor refuse to acknowledge what God hath done for them; they refuse to thank God for that wherein they are like him, lest it be vain-glorious. They deny that they are like him at all, they are so vile: yet they rebel when reproved of sin. Nay, they deny that it is possible to be like God. They deny that God by the Gospel intends it; and they say instead, that God intends us to walk as saints, without walking like him. In short, they make holiness a dif ferent thing from the word of God: they make the end of the Gospel a different thing from holiness, and so make the Lamb of God the abettor of sin. They deny the office of the Holy Ghost, which is to make us truly, properly, and really partakers of the Divine nature. They deny his work, by saying that nothing we do is holy. And now they are on the point of denying Himself. Woe is me for the daughter of our people; For her priests do murder her; they do cut her off from her Bridegroom; they so forbid her the light of her God's countenance. They tell her not to confide in God, which is presumption; but to confide in her works, as proofs that she is confiding in God. Then they tell her that she can do no works which are holy at all. And so they first bid her lean upon another thing than her Beloved; and then drive her to despair by taking that other thing away. Now be warned, ye who walk in the ways of the Lord. Acknowledge that "Christ is the end of the law for righteousness;" that the righteousness of the law ought to be as truly fulfilled in us by the Spirit of Christ, as Christ by that Spirit fulfilled it for us. Acknowledge that God hath likened you to him; deny not his work. And while the Pharisee, to his own praise, maketh of his sins a ground why he should thank God with a lie for not making him like others; forget not ye alway to thank him, making of the works which ye have wrought in God a ground on which ye shall thank God in truth that ye are like himself. While ye acknowledge this likeness, confess your unlikeness too, knowing that he is faithful and just to forgive it, and to cleanse you for the time to come. Be true to God and man: call that holy or unholy, wherever it lie, which he so calls; giving thanks for the one, confessing and abhorring the other; and ye shall grow up into the Head, to the praise of his grace and truth. But so walketh not the angel of Laodicea. And therefore the Lord, who in love spares not, and setteth us an example not to bear sin in our brother, else we hate him, thus telleth this angel the truth. Which truth is this, Thou art THE wretched and miserable, the poor, and blind, and naked one. This is a contrast indeed. Here learn ye the difference between what a man seemeth to be, and what Christ, who is the truth, and knoweth the Father, seeth the many truly to be. And cease, oh cease, if you would escape from the snare of the fowler, to talk jealously of Christ as the only way to the Father, and yet to deny him as the only Truth and the only Life; thus making him the only way to what you may find any where else. I tell you, in God's name and stead, that every thing not in Christ is a lie-a lie in the true sense of a lie; a lie in the sight of God, who is the Truth; though the whole world of men and devils preach to you that it is an axiom. Be it esteemed an axiom at the foundation of all things seen, it is a lie still, and all things seen are without a basis in God: for is it not written, "we walk by faith, and not by sight;" by faith," the evidence of things not seen?" The world passeth away, and the fashion thereof, but the things that are unseen are eternal: "The Word of the Lord abideth for ever." Christ is the Word; He giveth the only account of the true God to the creatures. Every thing is of God or of the devil, and all here is of the latter. Therefore, as ye would escape, and follow the Lamb, count all sin which ye cannot count faith. Puzzle not yourselves with casuistry. Walk with God; for with Him alone remaineth the fountain of light, and in that ye shall see light, and know whither ye go. These words are for your learning: the angel is still chastened, not let alone of God, and therefore not to be let alone of man; but if ever there was a true church on the very verge of being without God, this Laodicean church is THE church marked out by the Lord's finger as single in surpassing wretchedness. Why, what are the characters given to her? Almost exactly those of mankind by nature; of mankind as Christ found them, and loved them; as we his people find them, and are called to love them, and do love them; for are they not all hungry, thirsty, strangers, naked, sick, and in prison? (Matt. xxv. 44.) Seem they what they may, are they not so in the judgment of Christ the Truth? Now Laodicea shall be wretched, for she shall rise from her surfeit on Antichrist (Job xli. 6), to howl for those miseries which faithlessness alone has caused her to endure; as it is written, James v. 1, "Go to now, ye rich men; weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you." She shall be miserable; for "if in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable" (1 Cor. xv. 19); and she shall not only have gorged herself with things present, but come short of the first resurrection, and fallen into the judgments of the Lord, by the especial sin of having hoped in Christ for this life only, for this age only. She shall be poor just in proportion to the extent of her failure to become rich in partaking of her Lord's God-honouring poverty (2 Cor. viii. 9); for, as God and man think opposite ways, God saith to Smyrna, "Thy poverty, but thou art rich;" but to Laodicea, "Thou sayest I am rich, but I know thee to be poor." And it is written, for all who are not poor in spirit—that is, all whom the Spirit of Christ hath not impoverished by making them rich towards God-all, in short, who have a store of wealth, health, fame, talent, learning, prudence, industry, honesty, amiable affections, good works, faith, any thing which is their own, and not in God: "How hardly shall they that have possessions enter into the kingdom of God" (Matt. v. 3; Luke xviii. 24). She shall be blind-alas! how near to apostasy !-blind as the Pharisee who hath already cleansed the outside by no cleansing from within (Matt. xxiii. 26); who saith, I see, and whose sin remaineth (John ix, 41); blind as the barren who have forgotten the blood of Jesus (2 Pet. i. 9); blind as he that hateth his brother: for her sole question shall be, What have I need of? (1 John ii. 11.)—Finally, she shall be naked: not merely uncovered, but discovered: covered with that which shall drop off before the Lord-with the shroud of her own pretensions -not with light (which maketh manifest) as a glorious garment, in the sight of Him before whom all things are naked (Heb. iv. 13). She shall be naked as he whose shame shall be seen, by his not watching and keeping his garments of righteousness, in the day when all left on the earth who worship not the beast shall be slain (Rev. xvi. 15, xix. 8, xiv. 13): naked as they who, through slowness of heart, refusing to be clothed upon with their house from heaven, and to have mortality swallowed up of life by translation, shall therefore be found naked (2 Cor. v. 2); neither hid in the day of the Lord's anger, nor hid in that of Satan's (Zeph. ii. 3; Rev. xii. 12). And all this is charged against the angel. The Lord keep our feet from the snare! The Lord sprinkle us with the blood of the Lamb all the day long, that, being without fault before him, we may have mouths without guile, and so confess unto salvation in the day when we shall not all sleep, but shall all be changed! Yet the The counsel given by our Lord to this angel is two-foldnamely, to purchase from him tried gold and white garments, and to anoint his eyes with eye-salve. The gold, the garments, and the eye-salve, are all alike of free grace, for they all pertain to life and godliness: and in Christ we have all things pertaining to life and godliness, and to every man He is the gift of God; so that the command to purchase the two former cannot, when compared with the command to use the latter, imply that the angel has an equivalent to give for the former. distinction cannot be vain, and is plainly this, that the gold and the garments are yet to be got from Christ, while the eye-salve is already given among those gifts which he gave unto men when he ascended on high (Eph. iv. 8). Whence it appears that the unction of the eyes is the means of purchasing the gold and garments. Its character as an unction shews it to be part of that unction with the oil of gladness, which Jesus at his resurrection received, in being then made Christ as well as Lord (Acts ii. 36). The intention of the unction, that which Christ performed when he anointed the eyes of the blind man (John ix. 6), is, that the angel may see; in other words, that the church may see-for if the angel be in the light, the church will be in it too; and it is because our shepherds are in darkness, that the sheep of this land wander on the mountains (Ezek. xxxiv). But, although sight be the effect of applying the eye-salve, it is by curing the disease or soreness of the eyes that the eye-salve restores the sight. That soreness, I believe, will be the fruit of sorrow and weeping: for the κολλύριον, or κολλυριον, is a medicament intended to heal the eyes; and the injunction is addressed, not to one who never saw, but to one who had become blind, and whom God was about to chasten in love. The eye is said to be dim by reason of sorrow, and consumed with grief (Job xvii. 7; Psal. vi. 7). They that tarry long at the wine (as they who drink with them that are drunken in the night) shall have redness of eyes (Prov. xxiii. 29). But in the day when Jesus the King shall be as a covert from the tempest, the eyes of them that see shall not be dim (Isai. xxxii. 3). Laodicea shall esteem herself exactly what she is not. "In vain is the net spread in the sight of any bird" (Prov. i. 17); but except she see, she shall be taken. Her eye shall be that which hath never seen the things that God hath prepared (1 Cor. ii. 9); that unsingle eye which keepeth the body dark (Matt. vi. 22), and belongeth not to those watchmen who shall see eye to eye (Isai. lii. 8; Job xlii. 5). She shall have turned from the light-giving commandment (Psal. xix. 8). The gifts of mammon shall have blinded her eyes (Deut. xvi. 19). And so the Lord exhorteth her not to do despite unto the Spirit of grace, not to resist the Holy Ghost, not to refuse the light: He telleth her to look, that so the net of the fowler may be spread for her in vain: He telleth her to look-mark it; not merely to hear, but to look-that, the Sun of Righteousness being manifest, it may be pleasant for her eyes to behold Him (Eccles. xi. 7); that she may see and denounce the apocalypse of the beast, even to the death; that she may see Jesus of Nazareth revealed in the air, and confess him, even unto the death; that she may know this word of promise to them who shall not have followed Enoch, "Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord, from henceforth: yea, saith the Spirit, that they (not they who worship the beast, ver. 11) may rest from their labours, and their works do follow them" (Rev. xiv. 13); that she may see, as Elisha when he saw Elijah go up by a whirlwind into heaven, and thereby got a double portion of his spirit (2 Kings ii. 11)—for as the sons of the prophets sought Elijah and found him not (2 Kings ii. 17), so they shall seek us, and shall not find us; but the saints that are left shall be strengthened by the knowledge of that translation in which they shall not have shared.-Finally, he telleth her, that though, because of her refusal to escape from Sodom when God called unto Philadelphia "Come up hither," she is to pass through a fiery trial during the hour of the beast, so that her eyes shall be consumed with grief; yet she is not to despair, not to leave her eyes unhealed, not to let that grief prevent her instruction in the way of her God, but just to anoint her eyes, and to learn obedience by the things that she suffers for God saith unto her, "Whom I love, I rebuke and chasten; be zealous therefore, and repent." Now this stirring up of the Holy Ghost in Laodicea is that which will enable her to purchase the gold and the garments. These do not regard the translation of the saints, for that shall then be past; yet they directly regard the day that shall be revealed by fire, and just constitute the remainder of the blessing of Jacob. Esau, or Edom, represents the Gentile church, despising its birthright, hasting away into apostasy, forsaking the covenant, until it provoke the Lord to give it up to that abandonment, and so to seal it as apostate. Jacob represents all those who despise not : |