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A complete body of divinity in two hundred and fifty expository lectures on the…A compleat body of divinity in two hundred and fifty expository lectures on the…
A complete body of divinity in two hundred and fifty expository lectures on the Assembly's Shorter catechism wherein the doctrines of the Christian religion are unfolded, their truth confirmed, their excellence displayed, their usefulness improved; contrary errors & vices refuted & exposed, objections answered, controversies settled, cases of conscience resolved; and a great light thereby reflected on the present age. / By the Reverend & learned Samuel Willard, M.A. late Pastor of the South Church in Boston, and vice-president of Harvard College in Cambridge, in New-England. ; Prefaced by the pastors of the same church. ; [Six lines of Scripture texts]A compleat body of divinity in two hundred and fifty expository lectures on the Assembly's Shorter catechism wherein the doctrines of the Christian religion are unfolded, their truth confirm'd, their excellence display'd, their usefulness improv'd; contrary errors & vices refuted & expos'd, objections answer'd, controversies settled, cases of conscience resolv'd; and a great light thereby reflected on the present age. / By the Reverend & learned Samuel Willard, M.A. late Pastor of the South Church in Boston, and vice-president of Harvard College in Cambridge, in New-England. ; Prefac'd by the pastors of the same church. ; [Six lines of Scripture texts]
printed by B. Green and S. Kneeland for B. Eliot and D. Henchman, 1726
AN EXPOSITION OF THE ASSEMBLY's SHORTER CATECHISM: IN Two Hundred a… › Sermon 10 (Question 2 cont.)
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.
[3.] WE must distinguish between the nature of the things asserted, and the manner of the asserting of them. There are many things spoken of in Scripture, which are altogether above the comprehension of a created understanding to grasp them in: and therefore no wonder if after all our enquiry into the Word of God, we are forced to confess ourselves to be at a loss about them: and yet these things are so laid down as plainly to intimate what is intended, & that without any Obscurity. Nothing more plain than that the Scripture asserts, that there is one God in three Persons; that the second Person in the Trinity should assume the nature of man, and of two natures constitute but one person. That believers are by faith united to Christ, and by him to God. And a great many more like things are fully and clearly there laid down: but how these things are, is beyond our reach to know, as exceeding the reach of a created capacity and is therefore no argument that it is dark and obscure; it is not the words that are ambiguous, but the things are too big for us to imbibe: Hence that, Exod. 34.18.
[4.] THE many mistakes, errors, false opinions which men have drawn from misunderstood & perverted Scriptures, is no argument necessarily to prove their obscurity. It must indeed be either in the Scriptures, or the men: if I understand not what another saith, the fault must be in him or me. Now there is a great deal of reason to be given why the Scriptures may be plain; and yet men not understand, or misunderstand them. For, 1. AS to the literal and historical sense of Scriptures. Tho' there be a faculty in man to know the Grammar & Logic of those discourses, yet there are carnal reasonings in us, backed with the natural enmity we bear against Divine Truth, which puts us upon wresting and perverting them, so as to accommodate them to our false principles and corrupt lusts; because we would bring all to speak according to our vain minds. And that is the reason Peter gives of some of Pauls writings being so hard. 2 Pet. 3.16, 17. —Things hard,—which they that are unlearned & unble wrest. 2. AS to the spiritual understanding of these things, no wonder if natural men receive it not from the Scriptures, who have no spiritual faculty to receive it withal. Natural men therefore