WHO shall tell the mischief which has been done in the world, the dishonor done to God and His Christ, the misery brought to many of His dear children, and the ruin to souls by a false gospel? The following instance is but the sample of too many:
An earnest Christian lady, perhaps still living, once mentioned to a brother in Christ the case of a man in her “district” in London, in whom she was greatly interested—an infidel shoemaker.
On going to see him, the visitor found that the man had (as usual) “many and weighty difficulties” against the inspiration of the Scriptures.
“Well, what are they?” asked his visitor.
“Let us have them one by one.” And so they were presented. The result so far may be anticipated by those that know the power, the exact (because divine) consistency, the marvelous adaptedness of the Bible to meet every “difficulty.”
The infidel was not one of those who make pretensions to the intellectual superiority so loudly claimed by his class, and he advanced his “objections” with the air of one who distrusted them himself, acknowledging at last that he had got them all out of a book, which he produced from under his workbench, and which was found, and proved to him, to be like all works of the kind, —full of misrepresentation, falsehood, and statements founded on gross ignorance.
Instead of struggling to maintain his ground, the man seemed to find relief, and even gratification, in the demolition of the infidel author’s false “facts” and reasonings, and at the close of the interview, begged his visitor to come again as soon as possible.
He did so, and then the truth came out.
The man was not really what he seemed, viz., an infidel. “Why then, did he pretend to be?” you will ask; well, you shall hear.
He had once been a village Sunday school teacher, and a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ!
He told his visitor, with tears in his eyes, that he still remembered the happy hours he had spent in his earlier days, surrounded by his class, or leading his little flock to the chapel he attended. But in an evil hour he came to London to lodge with, and work for an ungodly master.
He was but a young man then, just out of his apprenticeship, and his master compelled him to work on the Lord’s Day. To resist his master’s unjust and ungodly demands would, he knew, cost him his situation, and as a stranger in London, he thought there would be nothing before him but destitution.
“I hadn’t faith, sir,” he said. “I couldn’t trust the Lord. And so,” he continued, “I did as master wanted me to, though I was miserable, and did it with a bad conscience I felt I was sinning against light and knowledge; yet I went on with it.”
One day I went to hear a preacher, and he told us that if a believer fell into sin, he was lost, and would surely be damned, unless he could “repent and believe the gospel” all over again, the same as he did at the first. And if he couldn’t feel the same sorrow for sin, the same groaning and tears he had once gone through, it was a proof that God had given him up and left him forever.
Such were some of the statements which this so-called minister of the gospel of the grace of God. made in this poor man’s hearing, and now mark the result.
“I went home that night, sir, and tried hard to rouse up the same feeling of repentance I had when I was first converted, but I couldn’t do it anyhow, and I believed God had left me to myself. I was afraid to go to sleep, and sat on my bed with my back to the wall to keep myself awake, for I thought if I fell asleep I should open my eyes in hell. For three weeks I went on in this manner, only getting a little sleep when I was sitting among the men in the shop, for somehow I felt safer there, though I don’t know why I should. That’s all the sleep I got for three weeks, and what I went through, night after night, I can never tell you.”
Just think of that, dear reader, think what this poor young man must have suffered during those three terrible weeks, alone all night in his chamber, in darkness, weariness, solitude, and despair! It must have been (as he expressed it) “a foretaste of hell,” indeed! And this was one of the fruits of a false gospel; yet only one, for more followed.
“I felt the Bible was against me, sir, and so I tried to give up the Bible and make myself an infidel” (the true secret of all forms of infidelity and atheism, although from widely different causes).
“The men helped me on in it, for most of them were infidels, and took it by turns to read books of that sort, while the others did the work for him that read, as they do in other shops. But, somehow, I couldn’t quite fall in with it, though I tried hard to, and have been trying ever since; and that’s a good many years ago now. I think I had nearly got to it when you came the other day. I told that lady as has called on me so often, that I was an infidel and didn’t want to read her tracts.
My wife reads ’em; but what’s the use of ’em to a man who knows the Bible is against him, and that God has given him up?”
The poor fellow asked this question with a calmness that would have astounded his visitor, but that he reflected it was, and had been, the settled conviction of many years, for he was middle-aged now, and it was when a young man that a false gospel had turned him aside.
If there were any feeling at all expressed in the poor man’s manner, it was not one of dread, he had gone through all that; it was not despair, he had made up his mind to all consequences long since; it was rather a feeling of indignation against God for having given him up.
Again, I say, think of that; think of the dishonor done to God by a false gospel.
“The God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ,” represented by a false gospel as having less pity, less compassion than you or I, dear reader, would have had on a poor young man, little more than a boy, helpless in the toils of the adversary.
The visitor’s first business, of course, was to show this poor fellow, that believers are NOT UNDER LAW BUT UNDER GRACE. “We are dead to the law by the body of Christ;” that just as a man, sentenced to be “hanged by the neck until he is dead,” and executed by the law under which he was sentenced, is forever freed from the law, so the believer having already suffered. the full penalty of the law, in the Person of his precious substitute, is forever freed from the law that had condemned him; that therefore he, even he who had so grievously gone astray from his God, from his loving Father—gone unto “a far country,” spent all that he had., and fed on the husks of infidelity, had not the condemnation of a judge to fear; but had a Father’s heart to come back to, a Father who had missed him, and loved him still through all his sinful wanderings.
The poor man left off work, leaned his worn face on his elbow, and listened in wonder, wonder at himself, his blindness, his folly, his iniquity in so fearfully misjudging the God of all grace; and when his visitor went on to show him further, that he that believeth “HATH everlasting life, and SHALL NOT come into condemnation, but is passed from death unto life,” that “neither death nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from THE LOVE OF GOD which is in Christ Jesus our Lord;” the man was overwhelmed, and the visitor retreated and left him with God.
On calling again next morning, he found his friend rejoicing in the Lord. “I didn’t do another stitch after you left, sir, and I didn’t sleep all night. My joy was so great, that my wife thought I was beside myself.”
From that time, he made it his business, as soon as his day’s work was done, to go in the evening among his shopmates and former infidel companions, and talk to them as the Lord enabled him. In this way God was glorified, His word exalted, His Christ magnified, and not a little work cut out for the shoemaker’s visitor. He got introduced to places (‘shops’ as they were called), where perhaps twenty men sat round the room at work, with, as is commonly the case in such manufactories, one man, who was looked up to as a leader, and able to meet any “parson” who might have the temerity to intrude.
The dear man’s simple testimony stirred up the adversary of course, but God owned it.
To destroy that which had almost destroyed him was the shoemaker’s delight—to tell of Christ, his privilege and his joy.
Nor did he confine his labors to infidels.
Every door in his locality was opened to the district visitor above mentioned, and she found her way wonderfully smoothed by his honest testimony and earnest but quiet zeal. One thing he told his friend was very touching. It was that all through the weary years in which he tried to forget God, to ignore the truth of His word, to blind his own eyes, and to become an infidel, there was one passage of Scripture (probably that used at his conversion) which never left him, and always hindered him from becoming quite a skeptic. He could not shake it off; it was in his ear, and in his heart when that heart was at its hardest. It was Christ that followed him in all his wanderings, as the Rock followed Israel in the wilderness, its sweet waters ever telling as they flowed of a love that knows no weariness; the Spirit of Christ evermore whispering in his ear the word that at the first had brought him to God.
He had misjudged Him most bitterly, but He would not let him go: His love still followed, nay, “went before to search out a resting place” for him, and found it at last, in spite of all the evil done in his soul by A FALSE GOSPEL.
J. K. L.