I never met with a person so thoroughly under the power of mere religiousness as a woman I visited last week, and whose case I desire to bring before the readers of “Things New and Old” — its connection with that recorded in the June number will be obvious.
It was in a lonely cottage, far away from town and village, that this woman lived, and where I spent nearly an hour with her; she was free in conversation, and apparently candid and sincere, but teeming with legality. All her aim seemed to be to ward off Christ, as the salvation which God is extending to poor sinners — His free gift to faith. She was a poor, unlettered woman, and afflicted in body too; but so readily did she meet the truth put before her, with her own thoughts about it, that I felt Satan to be as really instigating her as ever he had instigated Eve to make the truth of God into a lie. She fenced with the truth most cunningly, and I felt afterward that it was the deepest lesson I had learned for years, as to the reality of 2 Corinthians 4:3, 4, 63But if our gospel be hid, it is hid to them that are lost: 4In whom the god of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine unto them. (2 Corinthians 4:3‑4)
6For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. (2 Corinthians 4:6). What a terrible and real thing is the power of Satan, which only the power of the Holy Ghost can cope with! How blessed for us to know that, “Greater is he that is in you, than he that is in the world!”
“Faith, too, that trusts the blood through grace,
From that same love we gain,
Else, sweetly as it suits our case,
The gift had been in vain.”
For a good while I pressed upon her God’s abounding love in Christ, but she was “not good enough” for that; I told her it was much more likely that she did not yet feel herself bad enough, that God’s grace met poor sinners just as they were, and that down here in a sinful world, just where they were Christ came, as God’s gift. She said she knew that, but she knew also, that she “must seek Him.” I told her she had no seeking to do, for Christ was the Seeker, that if salvation depended on her seeking, she was in a poor case; that He had come to do all the seeking Himself that He seeks and saves the lost, and is “found of them who sought Him not, is made manifest unto them that asked not after Him.” I told her that if she were famished for food, and I brought a loaf of bread into her cottage and set it before her, she must surely see that it would be strange infatuation if, instead of at once partaking of my bounty, for which she was perishing, she was to tell me she must first seek for it.
But she would not have this illustration, she said that was a mere human thing of the world, and religion was very different. I showed her it was precisely the sort of illustration the Lord Himself used in John 6, that He there showed He was the true bread, given of the Father from heaven, and that it did not say, “Except ye seek,” but ‘except ye eat, ye have no life in you.” Faith, said I, lays hold of Christ, God’s gift, apprehends it, partakes of it, eats it, drinks it, and this is eternal life. Thus, by simply believing in Jesus, the full and blessed salvation which God had wrought, becomes mine at once and for eternity. She replied that she always had believed in Jesus, but she knew that saying that would do her no good till she got her “heart changed,” and she was doing all she could; she prayed the Lord to help her every day, she was sure.
I asked her if she could tell me any case in which Christ or His apostles directed any poor sinner to get his heart changed, or to do all he could, or to pray to the Lord to help him. She was much struck with this, and smiling in derision said, Well, if sinners should not pray, she thought nobody should, and if they did not, she could not tell how they were to be saved; that they were told to ask and to knock, and she thought that was the way she was to be saved, and she always should think so.
I showed her that this was not the gospel; and again I put before her the glad tidings of the finished work of Christ, the simple gospel of an accomplished salvation, wrought of God in the Person of Christ, God’s gift, and now announced to every creature for the acceptance of faith; that God had spoken of this so plainly, that “the wayfaring men, though fools, need not err therein.” I repeated some of the gospel declarations but she discarded them as being only words. I told her that God saved poor sinners by such words, that we are begotten again by the word of truth, that the Lord Jesus used such words to Nicodemus and to the woman of Samaria; and in the cases of the Philippian jailor and Cornelius, the Holy Ghost inspired the apostles to speak words by which they were saved. And in Rom. 10 we read, “The word is nigh thee, even in thy mouth,” &c, verses 8, 9, 10. That Christ was the living Word, of which the written word spake, that there could not really be faith in the word of God without salvation; that where souls were really conscious of the burden of sin, really in earnest for salvation, they took God at His word, and found Him to the joy and deliverance of their souls. I asked her if she were indeed in earnest; she replied that she was, but was waiting, hoping, to be more so. I again put Christ before her as everything at once, but only to be again set aside by her thoughts and her doings.
I then spoke to her very solemnly, and said it was evident she was resolved to have anything but Christ, that all she seemed bent upon was to repel Him, and that she only heard of Him to reject Him again and again; that I believed her to be thoroughly under the power of Satan, and in a dreadful condition of soul, for she professed to be in earnest for salvation, while mocking God, and making Him a liar. I said Satan would let her go on thinking, and seeking, and doing, and waiting, as long as she liked; and while she was resolved upon doing without Christ, in her efforts to be saved in her own way, Satan would let her go on praying also; that although she appeared to be flattering herself with the thought that these things were in some way meritorious and acceptable, unless her thinkings gave place to what God had said, and her doings to what God had done — she would assuredly become the prey of him, whose willing servant she appeared to be, for “the wages of sin is death.” This only elicited another derisive smile, and I left her not less astonished than grieved, for I had heard a good account of her from the lady who accompanied me, and hoped to have found a heart prepared for the word of life.
Oh! how blessed is it then to pour into the open wounds of a sin-stricken soul, the wine and the oil — the precious blood of Jesus, in the unction of the Holy Ghost. But how sad! how solemn! how afflicting, to behold a poor sinner caught in the meshes of Satan’s weaving, and yet clinging with the utmost tenacity to every thread which, binds him.
Will the readers of “Things New and Old,” who have faith for it, ask the Lord to deliver this poor woman from the power of Satan, and give her the blessed knowledge of Jesus, as “God’s unspeakable gift?”
W. R.