Twenty sermons preached at Oxford before His Majesty, and elsewhere

2. When thou hast made thy self such a Black Soul, such a Dunghill, such a Sty, then God must be gone, he cannot endure to dwell there: It stands not with his honour, and with the purity of his nature to dwell in such a polluted heart, there must now be a divorce: Holiness becomes his House for ever. His delight is in the Saints, Psal. 93.5. Psal. 16.3. Rev. 15.3. He is King of the Saints, he will not be in a Sty: When thou hast thus polluted and defiled thy soul, God and thou must presently part: God puts thee off, and thou puttest God off too, We read in that place before alleged, Eph. 2.12. that before they knew Christ, they were without God in the world, &c. Atheists, [Greek or Hebrew]. And in cap. 4. v. 18. Having their understanding darkened, and being alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them. The presence of God is the life of our souls; and we having through sin and ignorance banished God, we become strangers until the time of our ingrafting into Christ; we are aliens from the life of God: whereupon comes a mutual kind of abhorring one another. God abhors us, and we vile and filthy wretches abhor God again. There is enmity betwixt God and us, and between all that belongs to God, and all that belongs to us. There's an enmity betwixt God and us, and observe the expression of it, Levit. 26.15. If you shall despise my statutes, or if your souls shall abhor my judgments, so that you will not do my commandments, &c. See here how we begin to abhor God, and then for judgment on such persons, v. 30. My soul shall abhor you. We are not behind hand with God in this abhorring, Zach. 11.8. My soul loathed them, and their soul abhorred me. When we begin to abhor God, Gods soul also abhors us. When a man hath such a polluted soul, he becomes [Greek or Hebrew], a hater of God, and hated of him. When thou hast such a stinking soul, God must needs loath it as a most loathsome thing; and so thou art not behind God neither. Thy filthiness makes God abhor thee, and thou abhorrest him. [Greek or Hebrew], haters of God is one of the titles of natural men drenched in sin,