A57982:494
The trial & triumph of faithThe tryal & triumph of faith
The trial & triumph of faith: or, An exposition of the history of Christs dispossessing of the daughter of the woman of Canaan Delivered in sermons; in which are opened, the victory of faith; the condition of those that are tempted; the excellency of Jesus Christ and free-grace; and some special grounds and principles of libertinism and antinomian errors, discovered by Samuel Rutherfurd, professor of divinity in the University of St. Andrews. Published by authority.The tryal & triumph of faith: or, An exposition of the history of Christs dispossessing of the daughter of the woman of Canaan Delivered in sermons; in which are opened, the victory of faith; the condition of those that are tempted; the excellency of Jesus Christ and free-grace; and some speciall grounds and principles of libertinisme and antinomian errors, discovered by Samuel Rutherfurd, professor of divinity in the University of St. Andrews. Published by authority.
London: printed by John Field, 1652
Modern spelling is a reading aid: the words are the author’s, only the spelling is modernized. Original shows the page as printed, with the transcription marks.
Should we suppose that there were in Christ but this one attribute of tender compassion toward his own tempted ones, it should make him altogether lovely to us:1 for the motion of tender mercy in Christ, upon the supposition of Free-love that he died for his own, is natural, he having taken a mans heart to Heaven with him, and borrowed nature from us as our compassionate High-Priest, he cannot but pity; mercy acteth as a natural agent in him. Now suppose we that the mother were eternal, and her child eternal, but eternally weak; compassion should eternally flow from the mother to the child; suppose a fair rose to grow eternally, and the Summer Sun to shine near it eternally, and life and sap to keep it vigorous eternally, it should cast out a sweet smell, and offer its beauty to the eyes and senses eternally. In Jesus Christ the heart and tender bowels of the sweetest, mildest, and most compassionate ⟨p. 393⟩nature of man, that God can possibly form, hath met with eternal and infinite mercy in God Christ, and to say nothing that mercy in Christ man hath been putting forth the sweet smelling acts of love, without tiring, summer, and winter, night and day, these sixteen hundred years, and that even now while you read this, he is casting out acts of love and mercy; an eternal High Priest could do no other thing for ever, but compassionate his own redeemed flesh. Mercy chooseth a lover freely, Jacob, not Esau; this man, not that man; the fool, not the wise man; the beggar, not the Prince: the servant, not the master: but having once made choice, it worketh necessarily and eternally. Christs love hath no vacation, no cessation: but when he tempteth, smiteth, afflicteth, trieth, Love and tender mercy worketh in the dark. Josephs bowels were upon action, and busy when his Brethren saw no such thing, even when he was accusing them as spies, and dealing roughly with them. When the sword of the Lord, drunken, swelled, and fatted with blood, is now raging in the three Kingdoms: mercy in our High Priest and his bowels are rolled within him, though we cannot see Christs inner side. It is like the place, Hebrews 4.15. is but an allusive Exposition of the rolled and moved bowels of GOD, Jeremiah 31.20. CHRIST is,2