There are things, good and evil, which never mingle with one another, but always keep in their own company. On the one hand, faith and confidence are inseparable companions, and on the other, unbelief and mysticism are always found in the same fog of confusion.
Truth
Faith never takes counsel with what one feels or thinks or concludes, nor does it make one’s own state its object, because no object suits faith but the truth, which is Christ, an Object outside of oneself. Christ, not God, is said to be the truth, because “the truth” is that which is told of something else. It is only in Man that God makes Himself seen and known; therefore, Christ is said to be the truth as to God. He is “the image of the invisible God,” for it is only in Christ that God can be really known. Therefore, faith and confidence are always on the same high level with the truth — truth that now displays “the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ,” that is, the expression of God’s satisfaction in the work which has recovered sinners for Himself. The believer is now not only “made meet for the light,” according to the glory of Christ’s own nature, but suited for Him to have His delights in companionship with recovered man, in a way that such intimacies between God and man in innocence never could have been known.
Craving Satisfaction
Unbelief seeks to find something within ourselves to reason from and looks to get from God a testimony to one’s own state, instead of the testimony He always delights to give of His blessed Son. Hence, incredulity and mysticism are always on the same low level, in search of meeting the need elsewhere than by “the truth as it is in Jesus” — craving for a satisfaction, never in this way to be possessed or enjoyed. When we are often talking of our own happiness, it is a sure sign that happiness is the object, instead of Christ.
An Object Outside Ourselves
Faith feeds upon an object outside of oneself, which is the truth — God’s precious Christ, who satisfies fully, deeply, infinitely, while unbelief seeks an object for complacency within, which comes to mysticism, or something in man making him to be always craving and never fully satisfied. Thus we have a test by which we may always distinguish between truth and mysticism.
We read in Galatians of “faith which worketh by love” (Gal. 5:6). Allow me to ask, whose love? Surely it is the love which never grows cold, which is Christ’s, not ours. “We love because He has first loved us.” The new man, living by faith in this Object set before him and acting on him, becomes the intelligent expression of the love he feeds upon, but the instant the eye has for its object anything other than Christ for him, such as Christ in him for his state, faith becomes inactive, because Christ the true object of faith is displaced. When a man focuses on his progress, his holiness, or his testimony (although these cannot go on unless Christ, which forms his state, be in him), faith becomes inactive.
A Purified Heart
We are told in Acts 15 that God purifies the heart by faith (v. 9), but a state founded on the evidence of anything we find in ourselves does not purify the heart, for even that which is wrought in us by the Holy Spirit, which we can be pleased with, is not an object for faith. The new life cannot live on itself; it must have a positive object outside of itself to sustain its own nature. In every case of a moral creature, that which is objective is the source of the subjective state. Our hearts, therefore, are being purified by faith which conducts us into the heart of God, beholds His unveiled “glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ,” and feeds upon its object as its own.
Faith, Not Feeling
In Romans 10:17 (JND), we read that “faith then is by a report, but the report by God’s Word.” It is a relief to be taken away from self altogether, feelings and all, for the report is God’s testimony concerning His Son (1 John 5:6-12). It is not my believing anything because I feel it, but believing everything that God says, because God says it. Thus, what God is and says produces, sustains and energizes faith. The result is divine confidence, for when faith is active in the soul, one loves goodness, not in oneself, but in Another, and appropriates that which one loves, namely, a wonderful character of goodness in Christ, which meets one’s own want of it. Unbelief, on the other hand, is always mystical in its love of goodness, for the mischief of it is that, although it loves goodness, yet it loves it in itself — in the creature, instead of in Christ. Because of this, nothing is appropriated by the drawings of faith from an external Object, and all its imaginary goodness is only a more subtle species of self.
Christ and the Holy Spirit
How sad that saints should make their own state their object, instead of Christ ministered to us by the Holy Spirit! Some dear saints are seeking, for self, what they call “the gold promised to Laodicea,” some seek to be a testimony, while others look for devotedness and holiness for self, not seeing that self never has and never can cross the Jordan at all. When anything, no matter what, becomes an object for self, it is a sure sign that Christ has never been taken instead of self, and thus saints get enveloped in clouds of mystical piety, instead of being in the enjoyment of the truth of God.
How much better it is, as another has said, to have Christ — to walk with Him and after Him, to have communion with the Father and the Son, to walk in unfeigned obedience and lowliness, and to allow the Spirit of God to form us, through grace, more and more into His image.
H. H. McCarthy, adapted