Presbyterian Church -- Sermons; Sermons, English; Theology -- Early works to 1800; Theology -- History -- 17th century
II. If God be a Spirit, then he is invisible, and dwells in light
inaccessible, “which no man hath seen or can see.” Then our poor narrow
minds, that are drowned, as it were, and immersed in bodies of clay, and
in this state of mortality, receive all knowledge by the senses, cannot
frame any notion of his spiritual and abstracted nature. We cannot
conceive what our own soul is, but by some sensible operation flowing from
it, and the height that our knowledge of that noble part of ourselves
amounts to, is but this dark and confused conception that the soul is some
inward principle of life and sense and reason. How then is it possible for
us to conceive aright of the divine nature, as it is in itself, but only
in a dark and general way? We guess at his majesty, by the glorious
emanations of his power and wisdom, and the ways thereof, which he
displays abroad in all the work of his hands, and from all these
concurring testimonies, and evidences of his majesty, we gather this
confused notion of him, that he is the fountain, self independent Being,
the original of these things, and more absolute in the world than the soul
is in the body, the true _Anima mundi_, the very life and the light of
men, and the soul that quickens, moves, and forms all this visible world,
that makes all things visible, and himself is invisible. Therefore it is
that the Lord speaks to us in Scripture of himself, according to our
capacities,—of his face, his right hand, and arm, his throne, his sceptre,
his back parts his anger, his fury, his repentance, his grief, and
sorrow,—none of which are properly in his spiritual, immortal, and
unchangeable nature. But because our dulness and slowness is such in
apprehending things spiritual, it being almost without the sphere and
comprehension of the soul while in the body, which is almost addicted unto
the senses in the body, therefore the Lord accommodates himself unto our
terms and notions, _balbutit nobiscum_,—he, like a kind father, stammers
with his stammering children, speaks to them in their own dialect, but
withal, would have us conceive he is not really such an one, but
infinitely removed in his own being from all these imperfections. So when
you hear of these terms in scripture, O beware of conceiving God to be
such a one as yourselves! But, in these expressions not beseeming his
Majesty, because below him, learn your own ignorance of his glorious
Majesty, your dulness and incapacity to be such as the holy One must come
down as it were in some bodily appearance, ere you can understand any
thing of him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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