Evening, September 25, edited from Spurgeon’s Morning and Evening

“Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God.” — 1 Corinthians 1:30

Man’s intellect seeks after rest, and by nature seeks it apart from the Lord Jesus Christ. Men of education, even when converted, are apt to look upon the simplicity of the cross of Christ without much of a reverent and loving eye. They are snared in the old net in which the Greeks were taken, and have a yearning to mix philosophy with revelation. A man of refined thought and high education is often tempted to depart from the simple truth of Christ crucified, and to invent a more “intellectual” doctrine. This led the early Christian churches into Gnosticism, and entranced them with all sorts of heresies. This is the root of rationalism, and the other “fine” things which were years ago so fashionable in Germany, and are now so are ensnaring to certain classes of ministers. Whoever you are, good reader, and whatever your education may be, be assured you will find no rest in philosophizing divinity — if you are the Lord’s. You may receive this doctrine of one “great thinker,” or that dream of another “profound reasoner,” but these are to the pure word of God what the chaff is to the wheat. Even when best guided, all that reason can find out is just the ABC’s of truth — and even that lacks certainty — while in Christ Jesus there is treasured up all the fullness of wisdom and knowledge. All attempts on the part of Christians to be content with those systems that Unitarian and other liberal church thinkers would approve of must fail; true heirs of heaven must come back to the grandly simple reality which makes the day laborer’s eye flash with joy, and gladdens the devout pauper’s heart:  “Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners.” Jesus satisfies the most elevated intellect when he is believed and received, but apart from him the mind of the reborn discovers no rest. “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge.” “A good understanding have all those that do his commandments.”