Gospel-love, heart-purity, and the flourishing of the righteous being the last sermon of the…

And they thought again to discourage the professors: yea, they thought not only to discourage them in matters of truth, of faith and worship; but they thought to turn them quite aside; to make them renounce it, to forsake it, to apostatize, to backslide, to deny the faith. This is the thing which they have had in their eye, in all the pressures which they have laid upon the people of God from one time to another, to strip them of their faith, and to strip them of the truth; to break them in the things of God. Now I say, this is their Counsel. And mark what the Scripture saith, There is no wisdom, nor counsel against the Lord. They thought to hinder them in all these things, to suppress the truth, to discourage the professors of the truth, and to cause them to turn ⟨p. 113⟩away, and to deny the truth. But they have failed in it: for they multiplied, and the truth multiplied; and they flourished more by the weights and burdens that were upon their backs. So that we may say in this case, as the Prophet Isaiah, Chap. 44. 25. That the Lord turns the Counsels of the wicked backward. Turneth wise men backward: that is, their wisdom which they have been exercising, that hath produced a quite contrary effect to what they intended: they thought to hinder the truth; and they have been rather a furtherance to it, as Pauls word is in the first of the Philippians. These things have happened to the furtherance of the Gospel, which they thought should have ruined the Gospel. And this indeed is so notorious, that the enemies of the Gospel have been forced many times to acknowledge, and to confess it with grief, That the righteous have flourished like Palm-trees. In Exod. 1. 12. when it ⟨p. 114⟩is said, the more they afflicted them, the more they multiplied and grew. And what follows? And they, that is, the Egyptians, were grieved because of the children of Israel. We see we cannot bring them down: their Counsels went quite backward. And you have the like in John 12. 19. The Pharisees when they had done all that they could to hinder the peoples receiving of Jesus Christ, they said among themselves, Perceive ye how ye prevail nothing? Behold, the world is gone after him. You see they were fain to make an acknowledgement of this thing their own selves. We have been labouring to stop the progress of this man, but we find it quite otherwise; we prevail nothing at all.