Checks of conscience.
Which checks of conscience we find even in God’s own dear people, as is most admirably opened in the fifth of Canticles, in those sad, drowsy, and unkind passages of the spouse, in her answer to the knocks and calls of the Lord Jesus; which God’s people, in all their awakenings, acknowledge how slightly they have listened to the checks of their own consciences. This the answerer pleaseth to call sinning against his conscience, for which he may lawfully be persecuted: to wit, for sinning against his conscience.
Which conclusion—though painted over with the vermilion of mistaken scripture, and that old dream of Jew and Gentile that the crown of Jesus will consist of outward material gold, and his sword be made of iron or steel, executing judgment in his church and kingdom by corporal punishment—I hope, by the assistance of the Lord Jesus, to manifest it to be the overturning and rooting up the very foundations and roots of all true Christianity, and absolutely denying the Lord Jesus, the great anointed, to be yet come in the flesh.
CHAP. XV.
This will appear, if we examine the two last queries of this place of Titus; to wit,
First. What this admonition is?
Secondly. What is the rejection here intended? Reject him.
First, then, Titus, unto whom this epistle and these directions were written, and in him to all that succeed him in the like work of the gospel to the world’s end, was no minister of the civil state, armed with the majesty and terror of a material sword, who might for offences against the civil state inflict punishments upon the bodies of men by imprisonments, whippings, fines, banishment, death. Titus was a minister of the gospel, or glad tidings, armed only with the spiritual sword of the word of God, and [with] such spiritual weapons as (yet) through God were mighty to the casting down of strongholds, yea, every high thought of the highest head and heart in the world, 2 Cor. x. 4.
What is the first and second admonition. What the rejecting of the heretic was. Corporal killing in the law, typing out spiritual killing, by excommunication, in the gospel.
Therefore, these first and second admonitions were not civil or corporal punishments on men’s persons or purses, which courts of men may lawfully inflict upon malefactors; but they were the reprehensions, convictions, exhortations, and persuasions of the word of the eternal God, charged home to the conscience in the name and presence of the Lord Jesus, in the midst of the church. Which being despised and not hearkened to, in the last place follows rejection; which is not a cutting off by heading, hanging, burning, &c., or an expelling of the country and coasts; neither [of] which (no, nor any lesser civil punishment) Titus, nor the church at Crete, had any power to exercise. But it was that dreadful cutting off from that visible head and body, Christ Jesus and his church; that purging out of the old leaven from the lump of the saints; the putting away of the evil and wicked person from the holy land and commonwealth of God’s Israel, 1 Cor. v. [6, 7.][102] Where it is observable, that the same word used by Moses for putting a malefactor to death, in typical Israel, by sword, stoning, &c., Deut. xiii. 5, is here used by Paul for the spiritual killing, or cutting off by excommunication, 1 Cor. v. 13, Put away that evil person, &c.