Q. “W. S.” 1. Why does God require a person to act so as to gain possession of that which the person needs to possess first, so as to enable him so to act? See John 5:4040And ye will not come to me, that ye might have life. (John 5:40), Isaiah 42:1818Hear, ye deaf; and look, ye blind, that ye may see. (Isaiah 42:18).
A. Because of the twofold or duplex condition of the Christian at the present time. If you look on high he is seated in the heavenly places in Christ. If you look at him as on earth still, he has to run to obtain all, and has nothing as yet in actual possession which he has, of course, by faith. Thus he possesses everlasting life in Christ, as a present thing, by faith. Yet he is so to walk that he may have present “fruit unto holiness, and in the end everlasting life,” if he looked onward, as Paul exhorts Timothy to “lay hold on eternal life, whereunto thou art also called.” He has to lay hold on what he possessed already. Many passages of Scripture speak thus. Whenever the responsibility of a Christian is treated of, such exhortations are given. When grace is the subject, it shows that it flows from God.
So with sinners. God’s sovereign power in quickening a dead soul to life must never be set over against the sinner’s responsibility to receive the grace of God and obey His voice. Men often try to set the one against the other, in order to evade or reason away the responsibility. But you will generally find that they attach responsibility to power, or the want of it in man, not to that to which God attaches it — to man’s will. The Lord, addressing sinners, says — “Ye will not come unto me that ye might have life”; not, ye cannot. Yet, speaking abstractedly, He also says — “No one can come to me except the Father which hath sent me draw him.” Ask a man who speaks of having no power to come to Christ, if he has the will — the desire — and you will soon test where he is.
This applies in such passages as, “Hear ye deaf, and look ye blind that ye may see” (Isa. 42:1818Hear, ye deaf; and look, ye blind, that ye may see. (Isaiah 42:18)). Besides, the prophet is speaking in figurative language of moral blindness and deafness, not physical.
Hearing is by the word of God. God carries it into the conscience thus; as also He does by the channel of the sight of the eye in reading, and the like. I heard once of a deaf person blessing God that hearing was by the Word of God, who could only hear it, so to speak, by reading it. But God found an inlet for it into his conscience, which is the only door of entrance for the word of God into the soul in its quickening power.