The Sergeant was altogether too busy to “go sick,” but he had a severe cold which threatened to develop into serious illness if neglected. So the landlady where he was billeted undertook a little doctoring, and gave him a simple remedy. The next morning the following conversation took place.
“You are better, Sergeant. That medicine has done you good.”
“Yes, it has. You see I had faith in it, and there’s a lot of virtue in faith. If I hadn’t believed in it, it wouldn’t have done me good.”
“I would rather say, Sergeant, that the virtue is in the object of faith, not in the faith itself. You might believe in it, but if I had given you a wrong medicine, it would have done you harm, not good.”
He looked astonished, but stood to his statement. “Well, I believe faith has a lot to do with it,” he said.
And many think like him, on a far more important subject than a dose of medicine. “It does not matter what a man believes providing he is sincere,” they say and that about the eternal destiny of their never-dying soul. Faith in a lie does not make it a truth, any more than a glass of deadly poison would have cured the sergeant’s cold, had it been given him instead of the medicine.
But is it not written “Being justified by faith”? “By grace are ye saved through faith”? “Be not afraid: only believe”? It is; yet faith is not the Justifier, nor the Saviour, nor the procuring cause! The landlady was right; the virtue lies in the Object of faith, not in the faith itself. “Have faith in God.” Certainly. “Without faith it is impossible to please Him, for he that cometh to God must believe that He is, and that He is a Rewarder of them that diligently seek Him.” But your faith, my reader, will only do for your soul what the sergeant’s faith did for his body—it will cause you to take the remedy. The virtue lay in the medicine; it cured the cold, but his faith in the landlady led him to take that which she offered him. Had he doubted her, or thought the medicine quackery, he might have refused to drink it, and so it could have done him no good; but the moment he swallowed it, the remedy began to work the cure. And so faith in God and His word leads a sinner to apply to himself the remedy offered him in that word forgiveness of sins, justification from all things; peace with God; access into His presence even now, and the certainty of being with Him in the glory for all eternity. But Christ alone is the Object of faith God-given faith. And all the virtue resides in Him. He is the Justifier; He is the Saviour; He is the procuring cause.
The Son of God has come sent by the Father, into this sin-stained world, sent to be the Saviour, sent to put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself. That Sacrifice has been offered; that offering has been accepted. The fire of God’s holy wrath and indignation against sin has fallen—fallen on the head of that holy, spotless Victim, and has wrung from His lips the fearful cry “My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?” He and His work that finished work on Calvary is the “procuring cause” of God’s loving favor being righteously toward the sinner now; it and it alone is the ground on which God can be just and the Justifier of him that believeth in Jesus, while faith is but the hand that grasps what God so freely offers by Jesus.
Virtue in faith! No. But vice wrong, awful wrong in unbelief. Unbelief in the God that made man! Unbelief in the word of Him Who cannot lie! Listen! Talk no more of the virtue of faith, but consider the other side “He that believeth not God hath MADE HIM a LIAR, because he hath not believed in the record that God gave of His Son; and this is the record that God hath given to us eternal life, and this life is in His Son. He that hath the Son hath life, and he that hath not the Son of God hath not life.”
T.