vantage against professors; if you take it, it will be your ruin.

(2.) Consider this, if the righteous be scarcely saved, where will you and such as you, bitter scoffers, neglecters of ordinances, haters of the power of godliness, and the purity of religion, appear? You whose pride and folly, or whose formality, lukewarmness, and superstition, whose company and society, whose ways and daily walking, proclaim you to be wholly strangers to this concernment of believers? I say, what will be your lot and portion?

(3.) Consider how useless you are in this world. You bring no glory to God, but dishonour; and whereas by any outward acts, you may suppose you do good sometimes to men; know that you do more hurt every day, than you do good all your lives. How many are by you ensnared into hell! How many hardened! How many destroyed by living in formality or profaneness!

SERMON XXV.

PROVIDENTIAL CHANGES, AN ARGUMENT FOR

UNIVERSAL HOLINESS.

Seeing then that all these things shall be dissolved, what manner of persone ought ye to be in all holy conversation and godliness?—2 PET. iii. 11.

THAT this second epistle was written unto the same persons to whom the former was directed, the apostle himself informs us, chap. iii. 1. Who they were to whom the first was directed, he declares fully, 1 Epist. i. 1, 2. 'Peter an apostle of Jesus Christ, to the strangers scattered throughout Pontius, Galatia,' &c.

'Strangers' are taken two ways: First, In a large, general, and spiritual sense. So all believers are said to be strangers and pilgrims in this world, because they are not of the world, but they look for another country, another city, another house, whose framer and builder is God. Secondly, In a proper, natural sense; for those who abide or dwell in a land that is not their own, wherein they have not right of inheritance with the natives and citizens of it. In this sense, the patriarchs were strangers in the land of Canaan, before it came to be the possession of their posterity: and the children of Israel were strangers four hundred years in the land of Egypt.

Now though the persons to whom the apostle wrote, were strangers in the first sense, pilgrims whose conversation and country was in heaven, yet they were no more so than all other believers in the world; so that there was no just cause of saluting them peculiarly under that style and title, were there not some other special reason of that appellation. They were therefore also strangers in the latter sense, persons who had no inheritance in the place of their abode, that were not the free and privileged natives of the country where they dwelt and inhabited; that is, they were Jews scattered abroad in those parts of the world.

The people of Israel in those days were under various distributions and appellations. First, They were the natives of Jerusalem, and the parts adjacent; and these were in the gospel peculiarly called Jews. You have it often mentioned, that in our Saviour's discourse with them, the Jews answered so and so; that is, the natives of Jerusalem, and places adjoining. Secondly, Those who inhabited the seacoasts of the country, whom the others much despised, and called them, from the place of their habitation, as if they had been men of another nation, 'Galileans.' Thirdly, Those who lived in several dispersions up and down the world among other nations. Of these there were two chief sorts: (1.) Those who lived in some parts of Europe, in Asia the less, also at Alexandria, and other Greek colonies. These are in the Scripture sometimes called Greeks, Acts xvii. and elsewhere, commonly termed Hellenists, because they used the Greek language, and the Greek Bible then in use. (2.) Those who lived in the greater Asia, in and about Babylon; as also in the countries here enumerated by the apostle: the Jews converted to the faith, that lived scatteredly up and down in those parts of Asia.

Peter being in a special manner designed by the Holy Ghost the apostle of the circumcision, and being now at Babylon in the discharge of his apostolical office and duty, 1 Epist. v. 13. and being now nigh unto death, which he also knew, 2 Epist. i. 14. and not perhaps having time to pass through, and personally visit these scattered believers; he wrote unto them these two epistles, partly about the main and important truths of the gospel, and partly about their own particular and immediate concernment, as to the temptations and afflictions wherewith they were exercised.

It is evident, from sundry places in the New Testament, what extreme oppositions the believing Jews met withal all the world over from their own countrymen, with and among whom they lived. They in the meantime, no doubt, warned them of the wrath of Christ against them, for their cursed unbelief and persecutions; particularly letting them know, that Christ would come in vengeance ere long, according as he had threatened, to the ruin of his enemies. And because the persecuting Jews all the world over upbraided the believers with the temple and the holy city Jerusalem, their

worship and service instituted of God, which they had defiled; they were given to know, that even all these things also should be destroyed, for their rejection of the Son of God. After some continuance of time, the threatening denounced being not yet accomplished, as is the manner of profane persons and hardened sinners, Eccles. viii. 11. they began to mock and scoff, as if they were all but the vain pretences, or loose, causeless fears of the Christians. That this was the state with them, or shortly would be, the apostle declares in this chapter, ver. 3, 4. Because things continued in the old state without alteration, and judgment was not speedily executed, they scoffed at all the threats about the coming of the Lord, that had been denounced against them. Hereupon the apostle undertakes these three things:

First, He convinces the scoffers of folly by an instance of the like presumption in persons not unlike them, and the dealings of God in a case of the same nature.

Secondly, He instructs believers in the truth of what they had before been told concerning the coming of Christ, and the destruction of ungodly men.

Thirdly, He informs them in the due use and improvement that ought practically to be made of the certainty of this threatening of the coming of Christ.

For the first he minds them, as I said, of the old world, ver. 5, 6. Before the destruction of that world, God sent 'Noah, a preacher of righteousness,' who both in word and deed effectually admonished men of the judgment of God, that was ready to come upon them; but they scoffed at his preaching and practice, in building the ark, and persisted in their security. Now, saith he, 'this they are willingly ignorant of;' it is through the obstinacy and stubbornness of their will, they do not consider it; for otherwise they had the Scripture, and knew the story. There is no ignorance like that, where men's obstinacy and hardness in sin keeps them from a due improvement of what they ought to have improved to its proper purpose. They are to this day willingly ignorant of the flood who live securely in sin, under the denunciation of the judgments of God against sin.

I shall only observe by the way, not to look into the difficulties of these verses, that I be not too long detained from my principal intendment, that the apostle makes a distribu

tion of the world into heaven and earth, and saith, they 'were destroyed with water and perished.' We know that neither the fabric or substance of the one or other was destroyed, but only men that lived on the earth; and the apostle tells us, ver. 7. of the heaven and earth that were then,' and 'were destroyed by water,' distinct from the heavens and the earth that were now,' and 'were to be consumed by fire:' and yet as to the visible fabric of heaven and earth, they were the same both before the flood and in the apostle's time, and continue so to this day; when yet it is certain, that the heavens and earth whereof he speaks, were to be destroyed and consumed by fire in that generation. We must then, for the clearing our foundation, a little consider what the apostle intends by the heavens and the earth in these two places.

1. It is certain, that what the apostle intends by the world, with its heavens and earth, ver. 5, 6. which was destroyed; the same or somewhat of that kind he intends by the heavens and the earth that were to be consumed and destroyed by fire, ver. 7. otherwise there would be no coherence in the stle's discourse, nor any kind of argument, but a mere fallacy of words.

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2. It is certain, that by the flood, the world, or the fabric of heaven and earth, was not destroyed, but only the inhabitants of the world; and therefore the destruction intimated to succeed by fire, is not of the substance of the heavens and the earth, which shall not be consumed until the last day, but of persons or men living in the world.

3. Then we must consider, in what sense men living in the world are said to be the world, and the heavens and earth of it. I shall only insist on one instance to this purpose, among many that may be produced, Isa. li. 15, 16. The time when the work here mentioned of planting the heavens, and laying the foundation of the earth, was performed by God, was when he 'divided the sea,' ver. 15. and gave the law, ver. 16. and said to Zion, Thou art my people ;' that is, when he took the children of Israel out of Egypt, and formed them in the wilderness into a church and state; then he planted the heavens, and laid the foundation of the earth; made the new world; that is, brought forth order, and government, and beauty, from the confusion wherein