"I Found that Ancient Christian To Be a Good Man, But a Stranger to Much Combat with the Devil"

by Alexander Whyte

Sermon: I Found that Ancient Christian
To Be a Good Man, But a Stranger to Much Combat with the Devil

by Alexander Whyte
Bunyan Himself as Seen in His Grace Abounding,
Bunyan Characters Fourth
Series, pp.62-71

Young Bunyan was far more fortunate with the ancient women of his acquaintance then he was with the ancient men. The three or four ancient women who sat one day at a door in the sun and talked together in young Bunyan's hearing about the things of God were nothing less than so many mothers in Israel to this fatherless and motherless lad. But this ancient Christian man gave young Bunyan but cold comfort when he told him all his anxious and sorrowful story. He was a good man, Bunyan admits, but he had not gone very deep into his own heart, nor had the tempter troubled him very much either about his heart or his life. For some reason or other the enemy of human souls did not give much attention to this ancient Christian. And thus it was that the old man had no understanding whatever of young Bunyan's much-tried and much-tempted case. When he was consulted the stupid old creature gave it as his decided opinion that the young tinker had already committed the unpardonable sin, and so was past hope. Bunyan does not say it in as many words, but I feel sure that he knocked at the door of some of those ancient and much-experienced women on his weary way home that dark day.

Compared with those three or four ancient women, and compared even with this young inquirer, that ancient Christian man had lived a sheltered, a peaceful, and an easy life. Ancient, as by this time he was; and neophyte, as Bunyan still was; Bunyan's depreciatory description of himself at that period does not need to be much altered to make it exactly applicable to his old friend. For if this ancient Christian had indeed been born again, the thought of that did not much occupy the old man's mind. Neither knew he aught of the treachery and the deceitfulness of his own heart. And as for his secret thoughts, he took no notice of them at all. The truth is, born again as he undoubtedly was, and old man as he now was, the shell was still on his ancient head, he was still but a babe at the breast.

Now you will stop me at this point and will say to me that such a stupid old creature as that could not surely be a really Christian man at all. But don't be so severe. Don't be so exacting in your demands on old Christian men. Don't be so ready to excommunicate and to reprobate old men or young men either who may not have had all the length and breadth and height and depth of your spiritual experience. Young Bunyan was not so harsh in his judgments as you are. It is true that this ancient Christian man was as blind as any Bedfordshire mole to all Bunyan's extraordinary experiences. But Bunyan never so much as once suggests that the innocent old man was other than a true Christian according to his type and according to his attainments. At the same time, he feels bound to admit that this ancient and not untrue Christian was a total stranger to anything that could be called a combat with the devil and with the sin of his own heart. Now, how are we to account for the existence of that man, and of so many men like him among ourselves also? Especially when we see that some other men's hearts and lives among us are all combat together. All combat together, and without a single day's discharge all their life from this fearful inward war.

Well to begin with, the commander of an army selects and allots and places his soldiers as pleases himself. He appoints his men their duties, and their dangers, and their opportunities, as seems good, and wise, and safe, in his own eyes. And thus it is that some soldiers are always set in the hottest front of the hottest battle, while some other soldiers are always to be found in the rear, till they are rather so many camp-followers than real soldiers. Some so-called soldiers never rise above being raw recruits all their days, while some others are always at the head of some forlorn hope or other, somewhere or other. Some so-called soldiers are so many drawing-room ornaments rather than real soldiers: they are always to be seen on a street parade before a crowd of admiring boys; while some other soldiers are not fit to be seen with their torn uniforms, and their gaping wounds, and their clotted blood, and their broken swords. And so is it in the army of Jesus Christ the Captain of our salvation. Let some of His good soldiers be described in one sentence of a fine book about them: 'Who through faith subdued kingdoms,' we read, 'wrought righteousness, obtained promises, stopped the mouths of lions, quenched the violence of fire, out of weakness were made strong, waxed valiant in fight, turned to flight the armies of the aliens; others were tortured not accepting deliverance, they were stoned, they were sawn asunder, were tempted, were slain with the sword; being destitute, afflicted, tormented; of whom the world was not worthy.' John Bunyan was always far more at home with such torn and dismembered heroes as these, than he was with that ancient Christian in Bedford who had never been half a mile away from his own chimney corner.

Many country clowns and city loungers have taken the King's shilling who will never all their days really earn it. They have just passed the standard for height and weight and scarcely that; their eyes and their ears and their teeth and the beating of their hearts have barely got their certificate. You will sometimes see an undersized, ill-knit, narrow-chested, wax-complexioned stripling wearing the King's uniform, till you cannot help wondering how he ever passed his examination, and what the King's army is to make of him. And the sight of him calls to mind many so-called soldiers of Jesus Christ among us. They will, no doubt, be of some use, sometime and somewhere; but it will not be in much combat with the devil and with their own hearts that they will ever win their spurs. The old enemy altogether ignores them. He absolutely despises them. He leaves them all their days in an unbroken peace, while he sets on some other men with all his hellish fury, and that too without ceasing. 'Fight neither with small nor great, save only with the King of Israel,' said the King of Syria. And these are sometimes the devil's exact orders to his soldiers also. 'Fight you to the death with that dangerous young tinker,' said the devil, pointing to young John Bunyan. 'Bring me his head in a charger, and I will give you an increase of rations, and a red-ribbon for your shoulder-knot.' Now, after hearing that, if any of you have the curiosity to know how that combat went on and how it ended in the case of John Bunyan, you may read all that in his fine chapters on Greatheart and Standfast, as also in his Grace Abounding and in his Holy War. Alexander the Great had always under his pillow, both in the palace and in the field, a small silver casket which contained nothing but his lifelong copy of Homer. And all of you who are always in the high places of the field have, I warrant you, the Psalms, and the Romans, and the Revelation, and the Grace Abounding always within reach of your camp-bed. But on the other hand, there are many ancient Christians among us who never once slept with their clothes on and their sword beside them all their days. And when you speak to them about having their Homers within reach they do not know what you are saying: they never spent a shilling on a Homer all their days. 'Add to this,' says M. Bremond in his masterly and most delightful book, The Mystery of Newman, 'add to this, a multitude of good people resign themselves to a life without any combat in it at all. They are not bad Christians; but they are satisfied with a cold and dry religion. The spiritual battles of the soul do not trouble them.' And then he quotes this passage from the great preacher himself: 'They are most excellent men, in their way, but they do not walk in a lofty path. There is nothing at all unearthly about them. They do not take time to contemplate, and to prepare for, the world to come. They do not wait on God all the day. They weary of watching for Him. They do not feel that they are in a world with a height above it, and with a depth beneath it. They have no difficulties in their religion; they think everything plain and easy.' In short, they are total strangers, as John Bunyan would say, to much combat with the devil, and with the sinfulness of their own hearts.

Now, the deepest of the Apostles gives us the whole explanation of all that superficiality and shallowness in one word of his, when he says that the law of God had never once really entered the minds and the hearts and the imaginations and the consciences of those self-complacent men. With the greatest of the Apostles everything turns on the entrance or the non-entrance of God's holy law. Speaking for himself, the whole difference between Saul the Pharisee, and Paul the greatest of God's saints, was simply this, that the holy law of God had now pierced to the dividing asunder of his soul and his spirit, and of his joints and his marrow: the holy law of God, in every commandment of it, was now a discerner of every thought and every intent of Paul's half-sanctified heart. And the whole difference between this stupid old man and the future author of the Grace Abounding was the same thing, the law had entered the young man's heart to all its depth, whereas it had scarcely so much as grazed the surface of the old man's skin. As our great Highland preachers were wont to say, there had never been any real 'law-work' in that ancient man's heart; while, on the other hand, every paragraph of poor Bunyan's autobiography brings out some new combat of his with the devil and with his own inward evil. Some new combat about sin and about the forgiveness of sin. Some new combat about faith, both as it justifies the ungodly and as it sanctifies the godly. Some new combat about the Bible, and about the Apocrypha; everlasting combats indeed. Bunyan, all his days, was the King of Israel over again. You would have thought that the prince of darkness had no man in all England in his evil eye in those days but the future author of the Pilgrim's Progress, and the Holy War, and the Grace Abounding. Whereas Bunyan's ancient friend was as innocent of all those combats as any of yourselves. I say yourselves: for there are crowds of this ancient Christian's spiritual off-spring among yourselves. Speak to them about the entrance of the law, and they will go about saying that you do not preach the Gospel. Speak to them about the exceeding sinfulness of heart-sin, and you might as well speak to them in Hebrew. Speak in their hearing about the depth and the difficulty of this or that divine truth; or speak in their hearing about the discoveries made by the Scripture scholarship of our day, and they will advertise you far and near for an infidel. 'Here, therefore, I had but cold comfort; but, talking a little more with him, I found him, though a good man, a stranger to much combat of any kind.' In Paul's all-explaining words, the law of truth and love and holiness had got little or no entrance into his ancient head and heart.

Now, young Bunyan's great mistake, which he here writes out for our warning was this, that he took his intricate case to the wrong counselor. He should have sought out some of those ancient women of Bedford into whose sinful hearts the holy law of God was entering deeper and deeper every day, and they would soon have resolved his whole case for him. 'A soldier who has been in the wars can best tell another soldier how to fight,' says Jacob Behmen in his Way to Christ. Now if any of you have like John Bunyan been early chosen and enlisted and appointed to enter on a life-long combat with the devil and with your own heart, take good care what counselor you consult about that mater. And especially take good care what preachers you sit under and what authors you read. There are plenty of good men and able men and learned men in our pulpits today; but you will get but cold comfort from the best and the ablest of them unless, like John Bunyan and you, they are in a constant and an increasing combat themselves with John Bunyan's enemy and yours. But even if your combat is appointed you in a place where you have no choice of preachers, you can always choose your authors. Luther would be a first-rate author for you, if you could lay you hands on him, and Jacob Behmen, Luther's great disciple. But thank God you do not need to go outside your own tongue to read abundantly the same wonderful workings of the Spirit of God. For in your own richest of tongues, you have the immortal and inexhaustible Bunyan himself, and you have his great contemporaries - such as Baxter, and Owen, and Goodwin, and Sibbs in England; and Rutherford, and Brea, and Halyburton in Scotland; and after them Boston, and Chalmers, and M'Cheyne, and many more. 'O, but we have heard to weariness all these old-fashioned names and obsolete men!' you will say to me. 'Are you never to recommend to us some of the up-to-date authors!' you will say to me. So the slovens, and the camp-followers, and the cowards, and the deserters no doubt said to the great soldier who had never anything newer than Homer under his pillow. But our Homeric books are not run upon in Mudie's or in the Times bookstore. Only things called books, that sell by their thousands today, and line our trunks tomorrow. And hence our ignorance, and our cowardice, and our continual desertions from the great combats of the soul.

Take a closing word to the point out of Luther, that great combatant of the devil. He is speaking to the young preachers of his day. 'No,' he says, 'I did not learn to preach Christ all at once. It was my temptations and my corruptions that best prepared me for my pulpit. The devil has been my best professor of exegetical and experimental divinity. Before that great schoolmaster took me in hand, I was a sucking child and not a grown man. It was my combats with sin and with Satan that made me a true minister of the New Testament. It is always a great grace to me, and to my people, for me to be able to say to them: I know this text to be true! I know it for certain to be true! Without incessant combat, and pain, and sweat, and blood, no ignorant stripling of a student ever yet became a powerful preacher.' So says one of the most powerful preachers that ever entered the Pauline pulpit.

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