Spurgeon’s Sense 🆕

“I will put enmity between thee and the woman.” satan counted on man’s descendants being his confederates, but God would break up this covenant with hell, and raise up a seed which should war against the satanic power. Thus we have here God’s first declaration that He will set up a rival kingdom to oppose the tyranny of sin and satan, and that He will create in the hearts of a chosen seed an enmity against evil, so that they shall fight against it, and with many a struggle and pain shall overcome the prince of darkness. The divine Spirit has abundantly achieved this purpose of the Lord, combating the fallen angel by a glorious Man: making man to be satan’s foe and conqueror. Henceforth the woman was to hate evil, and doubtless she did so. She had abundant cause for so doing, and as often as she thought of him, it would be with infinite regret that she could have listened to his deceitful talk. The woman’s seed has also evermore had enmity against the evil one. I mean not the carnal seed, for Paul tells us, ‘They which are the children of the flesh, these are not the children of God: but the children of the promise are counted for the seed.’ The carnal seed are not meant, but the spiritual seed, even Christ Jesus and those who are in Him. Wherever you meet these, they hate the serpent with a perfect hatred.”

Brethren in Christ Jesus, may I solemnly ask you now to put your souls into the scales for a few minutes by way of self-examination. What can you and I say with regard to our lives since we have known the Lord? Have we lived unto Christ? Dare we take the Apostle Paul’s motto— “For me to live is Christ, to die is gain?” Oh, beloved, it is not what we have done, so much as with what object we have done it; for every way of a man is right in his own eyes, but the Lord weigheth the heart. Have we in our hearts longed to serve him? “Oh,” I hear one say, “it was little I could do, sir; I was poor; I could not give him gold; I was uneducated, I could not give him words.” Ah, my brethren, it is possible that what you have been able to do may be more acceptable than what some others have done, if you can say “I did not desire mine own honour. I was content to be humble, to be obscure, to be unknown, and to be forgotten, if I might but lift him up and praise him in my little sphere, and make him glorious among men.” I fear, beloved brethren, that some of us do but little for Christ even outwardly, and I blush to confess that in that little which we do there is so much that is spoiled by our looking after self. Have we not sometimes prayed at the prayer-meeting with the view of being thought gifted men! Have we not joined a church that we might be a little better thought of? May we not have laboured more abundantly that there might be the whisper about— “So-and-so is a flourishing Christian, a useful man?” Do we not compliment ourselves thus— “Well, people think very highly of me; they say so-and-so, and it must be all right?” Are we not smuggling over the frontier some of the merchandise of pride? It has been lately remarked, and not before it was necessary, that this is an age in which the word pride means what it never meant before. You hear gentlemen on the platform say, “I am proud;” you hear the minister himself when speaking of something that has been done for him, “I am proud.” The words, “I am proud,” do not mean any hurt now, because we have forgotten that pride in any shape and in every shape is detestable in the eyes of God. We talk of a decent pride. I saw a good young woman the other day— I dare say she is here this morning— and she told me she could not come now on a Sunday because her clothes were getting so bad, and she said, “I thought it was decent pride to stop away.” And I said, “No, my sister, no pride is decent.” I saw her last Sabbath day standing down there, and I have no doubt she enjoyed what was said as well in her cotton dress as she would have done if she could have worn her silk one. All pride is indecent. A few Sundays ago, when we had the mourning for Prince Albert, some people could not go to church because the dress-makers had been so busy that they could not get their black things ready, and it was called decent pride which kept them at home, but I say again it was indecent pride— indecent pride such as the Lord God of Hosts abhors. We must have done with these prides, but yet I do fear that pride has so mixed with all we have done, and so stained our best acts, that we have reason to cry out this morning, “All our righteousnesses are as filthy rags; Lord have mercy upon us, for Jesu’s sake.”