Spurgeon: September PM
* 09/25/PM
"Who of God is made unto us wisdom."
--1 Corinthians 1:30
Man's intellect seeks after rest, and by nature seeks it
apart from the Lord Jesus Christ. Men of education are apt,
even when converted, to look upon the simplicities of the cross
of Christ with an eye too little reverent and loving. They are
snared in the old net in which the Grecians were taken, and have
a hankering to mix philosophy with revelation. The temptation
with a man of refined thought and high education is to depart
from the simple truth of Christ crucified, and to invent, as the
term is, a more intellectual doctrine. This led the early
Christian churches into Gnosticism, and bewitched them with all
sorts of heresies. This is the root of Neology, and the other
fine things which in days gone by were so fashionable in
Germany, and are now so ensnaring to certain classes of divines.
Whoever you are, good reader, and whatever your education may
be, if you be the Lord's, be assured you will find no rest in
philosophizing divinity. You may receive this dogma of one great
thinker, or that dream of another profound reasoner, but what
the chaff is to the wheat, that will these be to the pure word
of God. All that reason, when best guided, can find out is but
the A B C of truth, and even that lacks certainty, while in
Christ Jesus there is treasured up all the fulness of wisdom and
knowledge. All attempts on the part of Christians to be content
with systems such as Unitarian and Broad-church thinkers would
approve of, must fail; true heirs of heaven must come back to
the grandly simple reality which makes the ploughboy's eye flash
with joy, and glads the pious pauper's heart--"Jesus Christ came
into the world to save sinners." Jesus satisfies the most
elevated intellect when He is believingly received, but apart
from Him the mind of the regenerate discovers no rest. "The fear
of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge." "A good
understanding have all they that do His commandments."