ETERNAL FAITHFULNESS UNAFFECTED BY HUMAN UNBELIEF.

$ermon

DELIVERED BY

C. H. SPURGEON,

AT THE METROPOLITAN TABERNACLE, NEWINGTON.

"If we believe not, yet he abideth faithful: he cannot deny himself." 2 Timothy ii. 13. THIS is one of the five faithful sayings which the apostle mentions. All those faithful sayings are weighty and important. I suppose that they may have come into the possession of the church by having been uttered by some of those prophets who were raised up to cherish the infancy of the church, such as Agabus, and the daughters of Philip, and others. These may have been some of their more remarkable sayings which laid hold upon the minds of good men, were quoted by the preachers and teachers, and so became current throughout the church. Such golden sayings were minted into proverbs, and passed from hand to hand, enriching all who received them: to the saints they became "familiar in their mouths as household words," and were specially named faithful or true sayings. No doubt the apostle Paul gave his endorsement to many of these holy proverbs, but five of them he has encased in the amber of inspiration, and handed down for our special note. Perhaps it may interest you to notice them as they occur. The first one, the best one, probably, is in the First Epistle of Timothy, first chapter, and the fiftenth verse, "This is a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners; of whom I am chief." I can suppose that the good news was frequently conveyed by humble-minded Christians to the outside world in that short and compact form-"Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners," so that it was commonly known to be a saying among Christians. It was the way in which those who could not preach a sermon, and, perhaps, could scarcely compose a sentence for themselves, learned the pith and marrow of the gospel, and had it by them in a concise and simple form for instructing others. Converts were in the habit of telling this to their heathen friends and acquaintances wherever they went, that so they No. 1,453.

might know what Jesus Christ had come to do, and might be led to believe on his name. The next faithful or true saying is in the First Epistle of Timothy, the third chapter, and the first verse. "This is a true saying, If a man desire the office of a bishop, he desireth a good work." Any man who desireth to oversee the church of God, and to be in the midst of the people as a shepherd, desireth a good work. He will bring upon himself great anxiety, labour, and travail, but the work is honourable, and has so large a spiritual reward that a man is wise to choose it, and to give his whole life to it. Another of these faithful sayings will be found in the First Epistle of Timothy, the fourth chapter, and the eighth verse, for so the words run, "For bodily exercise profiteth little but godliness is profitable unto all things, having promise of the life that now is, and of that which is to come. This is a faithful saying and worthy of all acceptation. For therefore we both labour and suffer reproach, because we trust in the living God, who is the Saviour of all men, specially of those that believe." Godliness hath the profit of this life and the next, and therefore godly men are content to suffer, because they expect and do receive an abundant blessing as the result thereof at the hands of God. Such a proverb as this was greatly needed in persecuting times, and it is valuable still in these greedy days, when men find godliness a hindrance to their hasty snatching at wealth, and therefore turn aside unto ways of dishonesty and falschood. The next is the one which constitutes our text. We will not, therefore, read it again till we come to handle it. But the fifth is in Titus, the third chapter, and the eighth verse, "This is a faithful saying, and these things I will that thou affirm constantly, that they which have believed in God might be careful to maintain good works. These things are good and profitable unto men." That those who believe in Jesus should manifest the holy character of their faith by their lives is another one of these faithful sayings, which comes with all the greater force from Paul because he above all men was free from any suspicion of legality, or the putting of human merit into the place of the grace of God which is received by faith.

And now, coming to the faithful saying before us, it may not strike you at first, but scholarly men have observed that the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth verses assume the form of a hymn. The Hebrew hymns were written in parallelisms, not, of course, in rhymes; and these three verses are thought to have been one of the oldest of Christian hymns. “It is a faithful saying:

For if we be dead with him, we shall also live with him:

If we suffer, we shall also reign with him:

If we deny him, he also will deny us:

If we believe not, yet he abideth faithful:
He cannot deny himself."

This is a miniature psalm-one of those psalms and hymns and spiritual songs with which the saints of God were wont to edify one another.

I am sure this last part of this brief hymn is well worthy to be regarded as a faithful saying among ourselves. Brethren, we may often mention it; we may frequently quote it; we may roll it under our tongue as a sweet morsel; we may pass it from one to another as a classic saying of Christian wisdom-"If we believe not, yet he abideth faithful: he cannot deny himself."

In handling it at this time I would divide it into two folded parts. The first double portion is, the sad possibility, with the consoling assurance. "If we believe not,"-sad possibility: "yet he abideth faithful,"consoling assurance. The second part of our subject is the glorious impossibility, and the sweet inference that we may draw from it. The glorious impossibility is,-"He cannot deny himself," and the inference we draw from it is the obverse or converse of our text-If we believe, he abideth faithful: he cannot deny himself.

I. To begin, then, with THE SAD POSSIBILITY, AND THE CONSOLING ASSURANCE "If we believe not, yet he abideth faithful."

I must take the sad possibility first,-"if we believe not," and I shall read this expression as though, first of all, it concerned the world in general, for I think it may so be fairly read. If we believe not-if mankind believe not, if the race believe not, if the various classes of men believe not-yet he abideth faithful. The rulers believe not, and there are some that make this a very great point. They said concerning Jesus, "Have any of the rulers believed on him?" If Lord So-and-so hears the preacher there must be something in what he says. Englishmen are wonderfully impressed with the judgment of a duke or an earl, and even with that of titled folk of lower degree. If any of the rulers believe in him, who among worshippers of rank would raise a question? Is it published under authority? Do the great ones subscribe to it? "Oh, then," says one, "it must be good, and it must be true." Now, I venture to say that all history proves that the truth has very seldom been accepted by the rulers of this world, and that for the most part the poorest of the poor have been more able to perceive the truth than the greatest of the great have ever been. There would have been no Christianity in the world at the present moment if it had not found a shelter in workshops and in cottages. It has flourished amongst the despised poor when it has been scouted by the great ones of the earth. Well, sirs, if we believe not-that is, if our greatest men, if our senators and magistrates, princes and potentates, believe not-it does not affect the truth of God in the smallest conceivable degree-" yet he abideth faithful."

Many, however, think it more important to know on which side the leaders of thought are enlisted, and there are certain persons who are not elected to that particular office by popular vote, who nevertheless take it upon themselves to consider that they are dictators in the republic of opinion. They are advanced men and far ahead of the old school of divines. Some of us think that they are advancing in the direction of going backwards, and that they are putting ignorant guess-work into the room of proved doctrine and solid, experimental, Scriptural teaching. Still, as in their own opinion they are our superiors, and pioneer the way of progress, we will for a moment think of them as such. Now, in our Lord's day, the advanced thinkers were not on his side at all; they were all against him, and after he had departed, the gravest peril of the church of God arose from the advanced thought of the period. The Gnostics, and other Grecian thinkers, came forward, and they threw their philosophica mud into the pure stream of the gospel till there was no plain statement which was not rendered mythical, mystical, confused, and clouded, so that only the initiated could possibly understand it. The gospel of Jesus

Christ was meant to be the plainest truth that ever shone upon the sons of men. It was meant to be legible in its own light by the young, the unlearned, and the simple; but the advanced thinkers took the gospel, and twisted it, coloured it, adorned it, and bedaubed it till by the time it came through their various processes you would not have known it to be the same thing at all; and, in fact, Paul said that it was not the same thing, for he called it "another gospel," and then he corrected himself, and said it was not another: "But there be some," said he, "that trouble you." However, we need not care because of these wise men, for if they believe not, but becloud the gospel, yet God abideth faithful. If over there in the groves where Socrates and Plato gathered disciples by their philosophy, if over there, I say, there should not be found a single philosopher who believes in God, so much the worse for the philosophers, but it does not affect the gospel or our faith in it: if they believe not, he abideth faithful. If Paul at the Areopagus gets no sympathy except from two or three, and in fact they have only asked him there to "hear what this babbler saith," and though they all as they go home say that Paul is beside himself, and mad, and a setter forth of strange gods, yet Paul is right, and the Lord abideth faithful.

The

Yes, and I venture to enlarge this thought a little more. If the rulers do not believe, and if the philosophical minds do not believe, and if in addition to this public opinion, so called, rejects it, yet the gospel is still the same eternal truth. Public opinion is not the test and gauge of truth, for it has continually altered, and it will continue to alter. aggregate thinking of fallible men is less than nothing when set against the one solitary mind of God, who is infallible, as he reveals it to us by the Holy Ghost in the words of truth in the Scriptures. But some think that the old gospel cannot be right, because, you see, everybody says that it is out of date and wrong. That is one reason for being the more sure that it is right, for the world lieth in the wicked one, and its judgment is under his sway. What are multitudes when they are all under the influence of the father of lies? The grandest majority in the world. is a minority of one when that man is on God's side. Count heads, do you? Well, count by the millions, if you like, but I shall rather weigh than count; and if I speak the truth of God, I have more weight on my side than can be found in a million who believe not. I wish we all partook of the spirit of Athanasius when he said, defending the deity of his great Master, "I, Athanasius, against the world." You must learn to stand alone. When you know that you have a grip of revealed truth you may not set all the judgments of men in comparison with the eternal and infallible judgment of the mighty God. No, though we believe not, that is, the mass of us and nations of us, "yet he abideth faithful: he cannot deny himself."

I want to ask your thoughtful attention to one consideration here. Have you not often heard it said that ministers ought to be abreast of the times, that theology should be always toned and varied so as to suit the advanced thought of the wonderful period in which we live? And as this is a time when infidelity appears to be in the very air, we are told that we ought to sympathize with it very earnestly and heartily, for it is a form of struggling for the light which we ought to encourage. Now, this is another sort of talk from what I hear from the apostle Paul. He

has no sympathy with it. He put his foot on it. "Let God be true and every man a liar "-that is the style in which he speaks. As to going in to study the philosophies in order to tune the gospel to their note, he says, "I determined not to know anything among you save Jesus Christ and him crucified." When he finds that this style of doctrine does not please the Jew, and that it is to him a stumbling-block, and that it does not please the Greek, but makes him sneer and call it foolishness, does the apostle, therefore, say, "Come hither, dear Jewish friend. I have a way of putting this which will show you that I do not quite mean what you thought I did. I used the word "cross" in a certain sense not at all objectionable to Judaism"? Does he gently whisper, "Come to me, my learned Greek friend, and I will show you that your philosophers and I mean the same thing"? Not a bit of it; but he stands fast and firm to Christ crucified and salvation by his blood, as, by God's grace, I trust we are resolved to do. Though we believe not-that is, though the whole world believe not-yet God's gospel is not to be altered to suit human whims and fancies, but in all its angularity and singularity, in all its divine authority, unpared, uncut, wrought out as a whole, it is still to be proclaimed, for "he abideth faithful: he cannot deny himself."

Now, having spoken of our text as referring to the world in general, it is, perhaps, a more sorrowful business to look at it as referring to the visible church in particular. The apostle says, "Though we believe not," and surely he must mean the visible church of God.

And does the church of God ever fall into such a state that we may say of it, "It believes not"? Yes, the visible church has many and many a time fearfully turned aside. Go back for a type of it to the wilderness. The children of Israel were brought up out of Egypt with a high hand and an outstretched arm, and they were fed in the wilderness with angels' food, and made to drink of water from the rock; but they were continually doubting their God.

"Now they believe his word

While rocks with rivers flow;

Anon with sin they grieve the Lord,

And judgments lay them low."

But what happened? Did God depart from his purpose to give the land that flowed with milk and honey to the seed of Abraham? Did he break up the covenant and grow weary of it? No; but Abraham's seed inherited the land, and they dwelt therein every man under his own vine and fig-tree. Though the visible people of God rejected him full often, so that for their unbelief they died in the wilderness, yet he remained faithful: he did not, he could not, deny himself. Well, now, it comes to pass sometimes, according to this type, that the visible church of God apostatizes from the truth of God. The doctrines of grace, the truths of the gospel are obscured, beclouded, scarcely preached, preached with gaudy words, or hid behind ceremonies and rites, and all sorts of things. And what happens? Are the foundation truths removed? Is the eternal verity reversed? Has God recalled his promise? Oh no. "He abideth faithful: he cannot deny himself."

Alas! the church of God seems to lose sometimes her faith in prayer. Her pleading assemblies become scant. Her prayer for men's conversion