“But the Spirit of the Lord departed from Saul…”
1 Sam. 16:14
“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? why art thou so far from helping me, and from the words of my roaring?”
Ps. 22:1
“And the Lord said, ‘Simon, Simon, behold, Satan hath desired to have you, that he may sift you as wheat: But I have prayed for thee, that thy faith fail not…'”
Lk. 22:31-32
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Subsection
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Order of Contents
Articles 4
Books 2
Quote 1
Of Christ 4
Rutherford’s Assertions
Latin 1
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Articles
1500’s
Musculus, Wolfgang – Common Places of the Christian Religion (1560; London, 1563)
‘Desperation’ 461.a
How many sorts of desperation there be 461.a
Which be the causes of desperation 461.b
How noisome and pernicious desperation is 462.b
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1700’s
à Brakel, Wilhelmus – The Christian’s Reasonable Service, vol. 4 ed. Joel Beeke, tr. Bartel Elshout Buy (1700; RHB, 1992/1999)
ch. 91, ‘Spiritual Desertion’, pp. 171-93
ch. 97, ‘Spiritual Darkness [in believers]’, pp. 259-65
ch. 98, ‘Spiritual Deadness [in believers]’, pp. 265-75
a Brakel (1635-1711) was a contemporary of Voet and Witsius and a major representative of the Dutch Further Reformation.
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Books
1600’s
Voet, Gisbert & Johannes Hoornbeeck – Spiritual Desertion tr. Vriend & Boonstra (Baker Academic, 2003) 165 pp. ToC
Symonds, Joseph – The Case & Cure of a Deserted Soul
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Quote
1600’s
William Pemble
Vindiciæ gratiæ. = A Plea for Grace, More especially the Grace of Faith… (London: 1627), pp. 154-55
“Now to shut up all touching this point of man’s liberty in resisting the grace of God, the sum of all is this: Before true conversion all unregenerate persons do resist the gracious means and preparations to their conversion, the reprobate finally, the elect for a time, till grace become victorious in their perfect sanctification. In this their first conversion or regeneration the elect are no way active either to work it or to hinder it.
After their conversion in the doing of all good works, immanent or transient, they resist not so far as they are spiritual; they cannot but resist so far as they are carnal. And though in time of temptation and spiritual desertion the flesh do not only resist but also prevail, to the hinderance of many particular gracious actions, yet for those main and principal acts of faith, repentance, love of God, hatred of evil, etc. the Spirit is infallibly victorious both to do them after the first conversion and also finally to persevere in doing of them.”
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On the Father’s Desertion of Christ
Article
1600’s
Turretin, Francis – 14. ‘Did Christ suffer only corporeal punishments for us in the body or in the soul, but only as to its lower and sensitive part? Or did He in truth also bear the spiritual and infernal punishments of sin themselves (in the superior as well as in the inferior part) properly in Himself and from a sense of God’s wrath? We deny the former and affirm the latter against the papists.’ in Institutes of Elenctic Theology, tr. George M. Giger, ed. James Dennison Jr. (1679–1685; P&R, 1994), vol. 2, 13th Topic, pp. 352-56
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Rutherford’s Positions
Christ Dying & Drawing Sinners to Himself (London: 1647), pp. 3-6 & 13-14
On the Soul-Trouble of Christ
Position 1. This holy soul thus troubled was like the earth before the Fall, out of which grew roses without thorns, or thistles, before it was cursed. Christ’s anger, his sorrow, were flowers that smelled of heaven, and not of sin: All his affections of fear, sorrow, sadness, hope, joy, love, desire, were like a fountain of liquid and melted silver, of which the banks, the head-spring, are all as clear from dross, as pure crystal: such a fountain can cast out no clay, no mud, no dirt. When his affections did rise and swell in their acts, every drop of the fountain was sinless, perfumed and adorned with grace…
Position 2. Christ’s affections were rational; reason starts up before fear: reason and affection did not out-run one another.
Position 3. Undeniably grace did so accompany nature that He could not fear more than the object required.
Position 4. Christ had now and always moral peace, or the grace of peace, as peace is opposed to culpable raging of conscience.
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What love and tender mercy it was in Christ to be so troubled in soul for us
Position 1. Self is precious, when free of sin, and withal self-happy. Christ was both free of sin and self-happy; what then could have made Him stir his foot out of heaven, so excellent a land, and come under the pain of a troubled soul, except free, strong and vehement love that was a bottomless river, unpatient of banks? Infinite goodness makes love to swell without itself, Jn. 15:13.
Position 2. Had Christ seen, when He was to engage his soul in the pains of the Second Death, that the expense in giving out should be great and the income small, and no more than He had before, we might value his love more… But there’s no lack in love; the love of Christ was not private, nor mercenary.
Position 3. It is much that nothing without Christ moved Him to this engagement.
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Latin Articles
Voet, Gisbert
Syllabus of Theological Problems (Utrecht, 1643), pt. 1, section 2, tract 2 Abbr.
Of Just Before the Passion, & of the Agony of Christ
Of the Prayer in Agony
Select Theological Disputations (Utrecht: Waesberg, 1655), vol. 2
9. ‘Of the Agony & Desertion of Christ, Lk. 22:41-45; Mt. 27:46’, pp. 164-72
10. ‘Of the Same, Appendix on Sweating Blood’, pp. 172-88
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Rutherford’s Assertions about Desertions
Christ Dying & Drawing Sinners to Himself (London: 1647)
pp. 43-60
Assertion 1. Conscience, being a mass of knowledge, and if there be any oil to give light, it’s here: it’s then likest itself when it most bears witness of well and ill-doing.
Assertion 2. Therefore often the time of some extreme desertion and soul-trouble is when Christ has been in the soul with a full, high spring-tide of divine manifestations of Himself. And if we consider the efficient cause of desertion, which is God’s wise dispensation: when Paul has been in the third heaven, on an hyperbole, a great excess of revelations, God thinks then good to exercise him with a messenger of Satan, which by the weakness and spiritual infirmity he was under, wanted not a desertion, less or more, whatever the messenger was, as it seems to be fleshly lust after a spiritual vision.
Assertion 3. Desertion comes under these considerations: 1. As it’s a cross and a punishment of sin; 2. As a trial from mere divine dispensation: 3. As it’s a sin on our part, full of sinful misrepresentations of Christ.
Assertion 4. Desertions on the Lord’s part are so often mere trials as we may not think they are greatest sinners who are most deserted. Desertion smells more of Heaven and of Christ deserted for our sins, than of any other thing.
Assertion 5. Saddest desertions are more incident to the godly than to the wicked and natural men, as some moth is most ordinary in excellent timber and a worm rather in a fair rose than in a thorne or thistle.
Assertion 6. Why some of the saints are carried to Abraham‘s bosom and to heaven in Christ‘s bosom, and for the most, feast upon sweet manifestations all the way, and others are oftener in the hell of soul-trouble than in any other condition, is amongst the depths of holy sovereignty.
Assertion 7. In consideration of desertions, as actively they come from God, and passively they are received in us, and consecutively, or by abused resultance are our sins, they have sundry and diverse causes.
1. Sorrow for the withdrawing sense and influence of Christ‘s love, as formally a dissertion-passive in us, is not sinful, except sorrow, which is a luxuriant and too indulgent passion, exceed measure.
2. To murmur and impatiently to so sorrow, as if God had forgotten to be mercifull, is sinful sorrow.
Assertion 8. Sometimes:
2. God’s immediate lashes on the soul is the occasion of our sinful misjudging of God.
3. Darkeness and night are blind judges of coulors; in desertion it’s night on the soul; and imaginations are strongest and biggest in the darkeness.
4. Satan can drink up at one draught a grieving and sorrowing spirit, 2 Cor. 2:7, and he has access to the fancy and out-works of the soul of the child of God, so he can enlarge the species to a double bigness.
5. Even the love of a saint to Christ under a hard dispensation is sick with jealousy and travails in birth with fancied suspicions of Christ’s love. Our love is swayed with misgivings; it’s full of cares and fears and doubtings, because it’s not always edged with heavenly wisdom. It takes life from sense and felt embracings, from presence and reciprocation of warmness from Christ’s bowels: and when face answers not face, and Christ’s love does not eccho and resound to our love, then it faints.
6. Unbelief is a special cause of soul-trouble.
1. In bodily diseases pain does not create itself, but sinful, passive desertion does create itself.
2. Our second misgiving from unbelief is in believing our state, Ps. 31:22, ‘I said in my haste, I am cut off from before thine eyes.’ ‘I am none of Christ’s,’ is a too ordinary mistake; as ‘He is changed, and not mine’ often goes before. We often find more fault, and first blame in Christ, if not only ere we see our own provocations.
3. From unbelief issues the misjudging of our own actions: ‘I do no good; or if I do, it’s not bene, on the right motives and for the right end, the good that I do.’ The antecedent is true, but not the consequence: There is a cloud in our fairest sun, and clay in our water, but because good works are not our Savior’s, it’s no good ground to say, they have no influence in the way of our salvation and they are not waymarks in our journey; because they are no part of the ransom that bought heaven.
It’s a great point of wisdom:
1. to know how far forth our spiritual walking may be a seed of comfort; we may easily err on either hand.
2. The logic would be humble; ‘Lord I am not haughty, therefore, I am comforted in Thee.’ Paul says, well, ‘I know nothing by myself, yet am I not hereby justified;’ we would not build a tower on a molehill.
3. From our sinful walking, we may draw grounds of godly sorrow, yet not grounds of unbelief; faith and godly sorrow are consistent together.
4. It’s not safe to argue that we are not in Christ, from the wants adhering to our sincere performances. While we slander our selves, we may slander the Spirit of God.
5. The measure of our obedience cannot be a warrant to counter-argue Christ, as want [lack] is no warrant to stand far off from Christ: no more than it’s good logic to flee from the fire because you are cold, or to be at odds with gold because you are needy and poor; poverty may conclude a sailing with low sails, and humility, but not unbelief; your want of all things, should not empty rich Jesus Christ.
7. Absence of Christ misapprehended through unbelief occasions soul-trouble.
1. In which there is something which evidences saving grace in the troubled soul, as is aforesaid. For the want of the thing loved cannot but here be a gracious torment to the lover. The Spouse is sick and dies when she wants Him whom her soul loves, Cant. 2:5; 5:6, 8… But to be anxiously troubled in an unbelieving manner is the sinful soul-trouble. Why does the soul doubt of Christ’s winter more than of his summer?
2. We should take on us to steward and husband the kisses and embracements of Christ better than He can do Himself, and should quarrel because the Lord has not thought fit to make heirs and minors that are yet under non-age masters and lords of their own young heaven; this were not a good world for us.
3. And consider that Christ goes not behind the mountain or hides Himself upon mere hazard, but [for] so weighty reasons, that:
1. love may be sharpened through absence; that the house may be adorned with new hangings;
2. and Christ’s bed made green;
3. that care may be had, when He rests in his love, not to stir up nor awake the beloved until He please, that the high tides and rich feasts of Christ’s love, after sad and heavy desertions, may heighten the worth and esteem of Christ;
4. that faith and love may with more of the violence of ven, lay hold on Christ, after long seeking, and not part with Him on so easy terms, Cant. 3:1-4;
5. that we may know what weakeness is in our own clay legs under desertion and how we are to walk on Christ’s legs, which are pillars of marble set on sockets of gold;
6. that absence and presence, the frownings and smilings of Christ may be to the saints the little images of Hell and Heaven, and broken men may read their debts in Christ’s countbook of free grace, with tears in their eyes and songs of praise in their mouth;
7. that we may be in high love and sick for absent Christ;
8. and may be at the pains through thick and thin to seek Him;
9. And learn to live less by sense and more by faith, and resolve to die believing;
10. and be charitable of Christ absent and kiss his veil when we can see no more;
11. and be upon our watchtower and know what of the night;
12. and observe a soul-communion with God,
13. which the Spirit of the world cannot do.
4. No thing does more aloud cry the softness and baseness of our nature than our impatiency under sad dispensations when we are positively resolved upon this that God loves us, yet because of a cloud over our sun and one scruple of gall in our joy, to lodge a new opinion that Christ is changed in another God and that his love does plot and contrive our destruction, argues a weak and soon shaken faith.
5. I deny not but seeming wrath and Christ‘s intercepting of messengers of love, and flamings of hell‘s fury on the soul, are prodigious-like comets glimmering over a trembling conscience; and that it’s much to keep orthodox, sound and precious thoughts of Christ when the Christian is not himself; yet when the child miles about in a round, to say the earth runs about in a circle or to think the shore or the rock sails from the ship that carries you, when the ship moves and the shore stands still, are but signs of a weak-headed and green sailor.
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pp. 82-94
“Hence these considerations for easing the afflicted conscience of a weak child of God:”
Assertion 1. The soul labouring under doubts whether God be his Father is to hold off two rocks: either confiding or resting on duties, or neglecting of duties.
Assertion 2. What, advise you then a deserted soul to go on in duties? and seek righteousnesse in himself? By no means; to seek righteousness in himself, that is highest pride: but will you call it pride for a starving man to beg? Is it self-denial for such a one to be stark dumb and to pray none in his famishing condition for food?
Assertion 3. Another counsel is: force not a lawsuit, seek not, buy not a plea against Christ. Conscience, a tender piece under jealousies, says, ‘O He loveth not me; Christ has forgotten me;’ Join not in such a quarrel with conscience. Have not cold and low thoughts of Christ’s love to you because He is out of sight: He is not out of languor of love for you.
Assertion 4. Unbelief is a witch, an enchantress and covers Christ’s face with a veil of hatred, wrath, displeasure. Examine what grounds of reason you have to misbelieve or break with Christ; say, He had broken with you, yet because you know it not, for suspicion, lose not such a friend as Christ, if you get never more of Him you may swear and vow to take to hell with you (if so He deale with you) the pawns and love-tokens you once received that they may be witnesses what Christ is and may be the remnants, seeds and leavings of the high esteem you once had of Him.
Assertion 5. A time Christ must have to go and come, and therefore must be waited on. We give the sea hours to ebb and flow and the moon days to decrease and grow full; and the winter-sun and the summer-sun months to go away and return; and whether we will or no, God and nature take their time and ask us no leave.
Assertion 6. And though you were in Hell and He in heaven, He is worthy to be waited on; the first warm smile of a new return is sufficient to recompence all sorrow in his absence, to say nothing of everlasting huggings and embracings.
Assertion 7. Nor is this a good reason [to deny that good works are a ground of assurance]: I find sin rottenness, and so a deserved curse in all my works of sanctification; therefore why should I make them any bottom for assurance?
Assertion 8. To press duties out of a principle of faith is to press Christ upon souls, nor can the seeing of beams and light in the air, or of wine-grapes on the tree, be a denying of the sun to be in the firmanent or of life and sap to be in the vine-tree: to see and feel in ourselves grapes and fruits of righteousness, except we make the grace of Christ a bastard and misfather it, is no darkening of Christ and free grace, 1 Cor. 15:9-10.
Assertion 9. There is a great difficulty, yea an impossibility, when the Lord hides Himself and goes behind the mountain, to command the flowing and emanations of free grace.
1. Because desertion were not desertion if it were under the dominion of our free-will. For desertion as a punishment of sin cannot be in the free-will of him that is punished; every punishment as such is contrary to the will of the punished: and desertion as an act of free dispensation for trial must be a work of omnipotent dominion.
2. As in works of nature and art, so is it here, that God may be seen in both… Do not some rise early and go late to bed, eat the bread of sorrow; yet the armed souldier of God, extreme poverty, breaks in upon the house? Do not watchmen wake all the night, yet the city is surprised and taken in the dawning, because the Lord keeps not the city? The Lord does all this to show that He is the supreme and absolute Lord of all second causes. Why, but He has as eminent and independent a Lordship in the acts of his free departure and returns in the sense of his love.
3. The sense of Christ which is wanting in desertion cannot be enforced by persuasion, no more than you can by words persuade the deaf to hear.
Assertion 10. Though means must not be neglected, as praying and waiting on the watchtower for the breathings of renewed assurance, yet as touching the time, manner, way and measure of the speaking of the vision, God‘s absolute dominion is more to be respected here than all the stirrings and motions of the under wheels of prayer, preaching, conference.
Assertion 11. The soul should be argued with and convinced thus: Why will you not give Christ your good leave to tutor and guide you to heaven?
Objection: O but He is sparing in his grace, his love-visits are thin sown, as strawberries in the rock.
Answer: I answer for him: 1. The quantity of grace is a branch of his freedom. 2. Why do you not complain of your sparing improving of two talents, rather than of his niggard giving of one only. He cannot sin against his liberty in his measuring out of grace; you cannot but sin in receiving… 3. Think it mercy he made you not a gray-stone, but a believing saint: And there is no imaginable comparison between his free gifts and your bad deserving.
2. The way of his going and coming should not be quarrelled. The Lord walks here in a liberty of dispensation; a summer sun is heritage to no land.
3. Were assurance always full moon, as Christ‘s faith in his saddest soul-trouble was bank-full sea and full moon, and were our joy ever full, then should the saints’ heaven on earth and their heaven above the visible heavens differ in the accident of place, and happily, in some fewer degrees of glory; but there is a wisdom of God to be reverenced here. The saints in this life are narrow vessels; and such old bottles could not contain the new wine that Christ drinks with his in his Father’s Kingdom, Mt. 17.
Assertion 12. We do not consider that Christ absent has stronger impulsions of love than when present in sense and full assurance: as is clear in that large Song of the high praises of Christ, which is uttered by the Church, Cant. 5.
Assertion 13. Why, but then when the wheels are on moving and the longing after Christ awaked and on foot, we should pray Christ home again and love Him in to his own house and sigh him out of his place from beyond the mountain into the soul again, as the Spouse does, Cant. 3:1-5; if ever He be found when He is sought, it will be now, though time and manner of returning be his own.
Assertion 14. Nor are we to believe that Christ’s love is coy or humorous in absenting Himself, or that He is lordly, high, difficil, inexorable in letting out the sense, the assurance of his love or his presence, as we dream a thousand false opinions of Christ under absence; nor do we consider that security and indulgence to our lusts loses Christ, and therefore it’s just that as we sin in roses, we should sorrow in thorns.
Assertion 15. If the Lord’s hiding Himself be not formally an act of grace, yet intentionally on God’s part it is; as at his return again, He comes with two heavens, and the gold chain sodered is strongest in that link which was broken; and the result of Christ’s return to his garden, Cant. 5:1, is a feast of honey and milk, and refined wines… in the falls of the saints this is seen: David after his fall hearing mercy, feeling God had healed his bones that were broken, Ps. 51.
Assertion 16. Nor is Christ so far departed at any time but you may know the soul He has been in; yea He stands at the side of the sickbed weeping for his pained child; yea your groans pierce his bowels, Jer. 31:20, ‘For since I spoke against him’ (says the Lord) ‘I do earnestly remember him;’ it’s not the less true that the head of a swooning son lies in the bosom and the two arms of Christ, that the weak man believes that he is utterly gone away.
Assertion 17. Nor will Christ more reckon in a legal way for the slips, mis-judgings and love-rovings of a spiritual distemper than a father can whip his child with a rod, because he mis-knows his father and utters words of folly in the height of a fever. Christ must pardon the fancy, and sins of sick love…
Assertion 18. Though hid jewels be no jewels, a lost Christ no Christ to sense, yet is there an invisible and an undiscerned instinct of heaven that hindered the soul to give Christ over.
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Latin Article
1600’s
Voet, Gisbert – ‘Of hope & despair’ in Select Theological Disputations, vol. 4 (Utrecht, 1667), 50. ‘A Syllabus of Questions on the Decalogue’, ‘On the 1st Commandment’, p. 775
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“Ephraim is joined to idols: let him alone.”
Hosea 4:17
“O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them which are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together… and ye would not! Behold, your house is left unto you desolate.”
Mt. 23:37-38
“Return, we beseech thee, O God of hosts: look down from heaven, and behold, and visit this vine, and the vineyard which thy right hand hath planted,
Ps. 80:14-15
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