The Word of God and The Hypocrite

A real gem from a real Puritan. There is an almost ironic intermixture of fear and love of the Word of God that God has granted His people which renders a peaceable joy.

Now a hypocrite may be brought to fear and tremble at the Word of God, but he never loves it. First, fear and love do not join together in them. They fear God’s Word, but they hate it. They wish that there were no such Word of God, and that it was not so strict and holy as it is. And that’s as much as to say that God were not so holy, which is as much to say, “I wish there were no God at all.” And yet a wicked heart is so in love with his lusts that, rather than that he should not have his lusts, he would have no God at all.

There’s many of you who will not tremble at God’s Word, but you will tremble at the fear of any loss. You will tremble at men, though not at the Word of God. But a true, gracious trembling at God’s Word strengthens the heart against other fears. And so it was with David in Psalm 119…

-Jeremiah Burroughs (1599-1646), from Gospel Fear; pages 34, 36

Affliction To Be Chosen Over Sin

All men are afraid of afflictions and troubled at affliction, but where’s the man or woman that fears sin and flies from it as from a serpent, and is troubled at sin more than any affliction? That there is more vile in sin than in affliction, in general (I suppose), is granted by all. None dare deny it; but, because they do not see how this is, they do not have convincing arguments to bring this truth to their souls with power…. Their is more evil in sin than in outward trouble in the world; more evil in sin than in all the miseries and torments of hell itself.  

Suppose that God should bring any of you to the brink of that bottomless gulf and open it to you, and there you should see those damned creatures sweltering under the wrath of the infinite God, and there you should hear the dreadful and hideous cries and shrieks of those who are under such soul-amazing and soul-sinking torments through the wrath of the Almighty. Yet, I say, there is more evil in one sinful thought than there is in all these everlasting burnings,…. Yet the truth is, that if it should come into competition whether we would endure all the torments that are in hell to all eternity rather than to commit one sin, I say, if our spirits were as they should be, we would rather be willing to endure all these torments than commit the least sin.

-Jeremiah Burroughs, The Evil of Evils, Soli Deo Gloria Pub.