FAITH’S SURE FOUNDATION – Charles Spurgeon
FAITH’S SURE FOUNDATION
“He that believes on Him shall not be confounded.” – 1 Peter 2:6.
My sermon last Sabbath morning [#1428, The True Position of the Witness Within] focused on the true position of the witness within. I tried to show that the guarantee and ground of our belief in Christ for eternal life is the witness that God Himself has borne concerning His Son. It is not our feelings or experiences, but the testimony of God that should serve as the foundation for our belief. I made an effort to present this doctrine clearly, and I have been greatly delighted to see that the blessing of God has made it effective. I have met with five young men, each of whom said, “If this believing in Christ because God has set Him forth and borne witness to Him is truly the way of salvation, then we are saved, and we come forward to declare that we are on the Lord’s side.”
When a fisherman fills his basket in one place, he is happy to fish there again. Thus, close to the previous subject, I cast my lines a second time. I do so with the hope that those who have been brought to Christ may be established in their current faith and may see more clearly what the basis of their salvation is. As I explained last Sabbath morning why they should believe, today I will address what they should believe.
We will focus not so much on the reason for believing, but on the object of faith—the facts to be received and the person to be trusted. We saw the Lord God laying the foundation upon which faith must rest; now we shall consider the foundation itself. The passage before us is a favorite quotation with the apostles. If you turn to the Epistle to the Romans, you will find Paul quoting it repeatedly. The last verse of the ninth chapter says, “Whoever believes on Him shall not be ashamed.” In the 11th verse of the 10th chapter, he repeats this quotation. It is taken from Isaiah 28:16, where it is written, “Therefore thus says the Lord God, behold, I lay in Zion for a foundation a stone, a tried stone, a precious cornerstone, a sure foundation. He that believes shall not make haste,” which Paul interprets as “shall not be ashamed,” and Peter renders as “shall not be confounded.”
From the variations in these translations, we get a few different shades of meaning, but all essentially amount to the same thing. That must be an important part of God’s Word which even the Holy Spirit Himself has quoted so often. The Spirit is prolific in thought and always able to create new ideas. He abounds in language and cannot be straitened for expression. Yet, He quotes Himself in these instances, which means no other expression would be more suitable. This sentence seemed, to the divine author, to be so full, so complete, and so powerful that He repeated it often.
Let us now reflect on the phrase, “He that believes on Him shall not be confounded.” I. First of all, this morning, I shall consider THE FOUNDATION OF THE BELIEVER’S FAITH, which is the central theme of our discussion. “He that believes on Him.” The foundation of the believer’s faith is Christ Jesus Himself. The believer accepts doctrine because Christ has taught it, but the foundation of his confidence is not the doctrine itself; it is a person—“He that believes on Him.”
The Lord Jesus Himself, as the Son of God, is the object of our faith. It is upon Him that we lean. The apostle does not say in the Epistle to Timothy, “I know what I have believed,” though that would be true. He says, “I know whom I have believed, and I am persuaded that He is able to keep that which I have committed to Him.” The faith that saves the soul is confidence in a person—reliance upon one who will certainly accomplish the salvation of those who trust Him.
But in what sense are we to believe in Jesus Christ? Under what aspects does the believer rest in Christ? I reply, first, as God’s appointed Savior of men. Observe how the text runs in Isaiah: “Behold I lay in Zion a sure foundation.” We trust in Christ Jesus because God has set Him forth as the propitiation for sin. When sin first entered the world, God, in tender mercy, gave our parents the first promise concerning the seed of the woman who would bruise the serpent’s head. We believe Jesus of Nazareth to be that seed, and we trust in Him to bruise the serpent’s head on our behalf.
As time went on, promises were multiplied, and Jesus was revealed in various types and figures, always as the Messiah—one whom God would send to undo the mischief of the fall, remove the guilt of sin, deliver ruined souls, and give them to partake of the mercy of God. All these promises and prophecies are fulfilled in Jesus Christ, the Son of God. Therefore, we rest in Him. Since God appointed Him as our Savior, we accept Him as such. Since He comes authorized and empowered from the court of heaven to be the ambassador of peace, we joyfully receive Him and find peace with God. We are glad to see the marks and seals upon Him, by which God the Father has certified Him to be His beloved Son, in whom He is well-pleased. We believe the apostolic witness, as stated by John: “We have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the world.” This is the foundation of our confidence.
We also believe in the Lord Jesus because of the excellence of His person. As I mentioned earlier, our faith is in a person, and we trust Christ to save us because we see Him as perfectly suited by the nature and constitution of His person to be the Savior of mankind. It was necessary that the Savior be a man. A man had broken the law, and only a man could keep it. By the sin of a man, we became subject to punishment, and only by the penal sufferings of a man could the law be vindicated.
We rejoice that the Son of God became a partaker of flesh and blood and came under the law. Born of a virgin, He grew up like other children and lived with His parents until His public ministry. “The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory.” He labored, He suffered, and He died among us. He was truly a man, but without sin—perfect in every way. Thus, He was able to fulfill the perfect law of God on our behalf. We see Jesus as our next of kin, the perfect man, and the second Adam of our race.
Yet we are even more confident because we see that His manhood is in union with deity. We subscribe to the ancient confession, “He is very God of very God.” We believe Him to be “God over all, blessed forever.” He is “Immanuel, God with us,” and we each say, “My Lord and my God.” We perceive that His deity adds infinite merit to His humanity, making His suffering and death fully sufficient to redeem the vast multitude of believers.
There is, therefore, something substantial to rest upon. We can trust Him who is “the true God and eternal life.” He is divinely strong yet compassionately human. He exists eternally as God, yet is capable of death because He took on human flesh. His nature gives us every reason to confide in Him. Jesus is worthy of all our confidence, and it is only natural for us, as believers, to rest in such a Savior—one who can, with one hand, touch the Godhead and, with the other, embrace our humanity.
We trust Jesus because we see Him as God-ordained and perfectly constituted to accomplish our redemption. Another reason for our reliance on Christ is that He has actually finished the work of our redemption. There were two things that needed to be done: the keeping of the law on our behalf, which He fulfilled to the utmost, and the suffering for our sin, which He also accomplished.
His life and character are flawless. There is no fault in our Beloved. His righteousness is perfect, and He presents this righteousness to God on our behalf. When the Lord imputes that righteousness to us, we experience the blessedness of having righteousness without works.
Moreover, we see our Lord suffering for our sins. In Gethsemane, every drop of blood pleads with us to trust Him. We can certainly trust in the merit of His work, for it began with the holy Son of God suffering sorrow even unto death. As He was mocked and beaten, He bore our shame, proving that we can trust in the merits of His substitutionary suffering. And when He hung on the cross, we see His body broken for us. His agony assures us of His ability to save. “It is finished” means that every accusation is silenced, and we are freed from the bondage of sin.
Finally, we have even greater reason to place our faith in Him because He is no longer dead. Christ, our living Savior, ever lives to complete the work of our salvation. As our High Priest, He entered heaven as our forerunner, where He continues to plead for us. He has entered heaven in our name, securing our place there. Meanwhile, He works through His Spirit to preserve us, ensuring that we are presented faultless before Him. “Wherefore He is able also to save them to the uttermost that come unto God by Him, seeing He ever lives to make intercession for them.”
In conclusion, our faith rests on the fact that God has set forth Christ to save us. Christ is, by His constitution and person, fit to accomplish our redemption. He has already accomplished this through His life and death, and He lives to secure the result of His work. For these reasons, we trust ourselves to the Redeemer, believing that He will save us from our sins. Into His hands we commit our spirits, trusting that He is faithful to complete what He has started.
II. Secondly, let us consider THE MANNER OF THIS BELIEVING. How do we believe in Jesus Christ? The verse before us is connected to the idea of building. “Wherefore also it is contained in the Scriptures, Behold, I lay in Sion a chief cornerstone, elect, precious: and he that believes on Him shall not be confounded.”
If we follow this metaphor, it suggests that faith is like a stone placed upon a foundation. Faith is not about being a loose stone tossed about. Instead, it is about resting upon Christ, the precious cornerstone. Our souls must rest upon Him completely, casting all our cares upon Him. Faith is leaning upon Christ—relying on Him for our salvation. We do not rely on ourselves but on the sure foundation that is Christ Jesus.
I have known brethren who have built up a pretty little wooden platform of their own experience. Some of them have built it so high that they talk about being perfect, or very near it. These wooden structures shake with a little extra weight, making people tremble. Get down upon the Rock. Stand on terra firma. Rest on the everlasting love of Jesus, and you will be safe. Take care to lie flat on the promise, get as low as you can, and grasp the Rock. Lie flat on Christ as a stone lies on the foundation, for that is the proper and natural position of all the living stones that are built up in Him.
The stone laid on the foundation comes closer to that foundation every day. “To whom coming,” says Peter, “as unto a living stone.” When a house is finished, there still goes on a measure of settlement, and you are glad if it settles all in one piece. Every day the stone is brought, by its own weight, a little closer to the foundation. May every day’s pressure bring you and me closer to Christ. Oh, that the pressure of our joys and griefs may press us nearer to our Lord!
A well-built stone gets to be one with the foundation. In the old Roman walls, the mortar seems to be as hard as the stones, and the whole is like one piece. You must blow it to atoms before you can get the wall away. So it is with the true believer—he rests upon his Lord until he grows up into Him, until he is one with Jesus by a living union, so that you scarcely know where the foundation ends and where the building begins. The believer becomes all in Christ, even as Christ is all in all to him.
I hardly know any illustration that would better explain faith. It is none of mine, you see; it is taken from the text itself. The Lord help you to lie upon Christ for all that concerns your eternal interests. “But,” says one, “I thought I had to do something for my own salvation?” Does the stone do anything to maintain its position beyond lying in its place? Your strength is to sit still. Rest in the Lord and wait patiently for Him, for your expectation is from Him.
There is plenty for you to do for your Lord, to show your love to Him and to glorify His name. But you cannot add to the foundation of your confidence, nor should you dream of doing so. How could you improve what your Lord declares to be finished? Is not His work all-sufficient? Do you want to move the foundation? Does it not stand fast forever? Lean on it steadily, and let this be your chief concern.
O poor fainting believer, the more you can lean upon Jesus, the better He will be pleased. “Lean hard,” He cries, “and prove your love to Me.” Trust Jesus for everything, and trust Him at all times. Trust Him in life, in death, and for eternity, and you shall not be ashamed or confounded, world without end.
III. We have, thirdly, to consider THE EVIL WHICH WILL NEVER COME UPON THE MAN WHO BELIEVES ON JESUS. The text says, “He shall not be confounded,” and the meaning of it is, first, that he shall never be disappointed. All that Christ has promised to be, He will be to those who trust Him. If the Father set forth Christ to save the believing sinner, depend upon it, He will be as good as His Father’s word. He does not begin to build and then leave off from lack of means. He will keep the believer. He will support the believer. He will perfect the believer.
You shall never have to say of Christ at last, “Well, there is much good in Him, but not so much as I expected.” You will never have to lament, “Alas, I placed too implicit a reliance upon the Christ of God, and I am deceived.” No, never! But on the contrary, you will exclaim with the Queen of Sheba, “The half has not been told me.” Even inspiration itself could not tell us, so that we could fully understand it, how sweet, how excellent, how sure, how full our Lord is. We know His love, but yet it “passes knowledge.”
When you know more of your Lord, you will say, “I wish I had never doubted Him, for I never had a cause. Oh, that I had trusted Him more fully, for He has never disappointed me, but far exceeded my largest hopes.” In consequence of our not being disappointed in our hope, we shall never be ashamed of having indulged it. Alas! Some Christians are at times ashamed to acknowledge their Master, but that is not what is meant in the text. What is intended here is the grand truth that they shall never have any cause to be ashamed of Jesus upon whom they believe.
They shall never be driven to confess that they made a mistake in trusting Him and are, therefore, ashamed at having been so miserably duped. No, no, the most childlike confidence in God in Christ Jesus is nothing more than He deserves. Credulity towards Jesus is the purest reason. You are always most prudent when you cast away all caution and throw yourself upon Jesus, sink or swim. It can never be prudent to doubt Him who is “the truth,” but it is always the highest wisdom to place all in His hands, and leave it there for time and eternity.
To risk all with Jesus is to end all risk. Our hymn says:
“Venture on Him, venture wholly;
Let no other trust intrude.”
But, indeed, there is no venturing in it. It is safe as the throne of the Eternal. May the Holy Spirit lead you to make a speedy trial of it.
And then comes the next rendering—you shall never be confounded. When a man gets to be ashamed of his hope because he is disappointed in it, he casts about for another anchorage, and not knowing where to look, he is in a troubled state and greatly perplexed. If the Lord Jesus Christ were to fall through, my brethren, what should we do? It is a supposition which we need not indulge, but if He is not true, there remains no other person in whom we may confide.
There are many religions on the face of the earth, but not one of them bears as much comparison with our holy faith as a candle to the sun. They are all hollow mockeries, offering nothing which can satisfy a hungry heart. Lord, to whom should we go if we should turn from You? Where could we fly? If wisdom is not in You, where shall we search for it? “The depth says, It is not in me: and the sea says, It is not with me.”
There remains no hiding place for man if this cleft of the rock is closed, no ransom from wrath if this redemption price is null and void. No, Jesus, we shall not be confounded, for we shall never be disappointed in You, nor made ashamed of our hope! According to Isaiah’s version, we shall not be obliged to make haste; we shall not be driven to our wit’s end and hurried to and fro. We shall not hurry and worry, fret and fume, trying this and trying that, running from pillar to post to seek a hope.
But he that believes shall be quiet, calm, collected, assured, and confident. He awaits the future with equanimity as he endures the present with patience. Beloved, see what a blessed promise this is to those of you who believe on Jesus. Now, the times of our special danger of being confounded are many, but in none of these shall we be confounded. Let us just turn them over in our minds.
There are times when a man’s sins all come up before him like exceedingly great armies. It is a mighty easy thing to think that you believe in Christ when you are not conscious of any great sin, but true faith is not confounded even when it groans under a grievous sense of sin, conscious that it is the chief of sinners. No, though sin rolled over the believer’s head, he would still believe, as David did when he cried, “My iniquities are gone over my head.”
Have you never had times in which all the ghosts of your dead and buried sins rise again and come marching upon you, armed to the teeth? If you have never experienced such a visitation, I hope you may, for it is good for us to be driven to our Lord Jesus by distress of soul. All your thoughts, words, and deeds, your bad tempers, and rebellions against God—suppose they were all to rise at once, what would become of you? Why, even then, my brethren, “He that believes on Him shall not be confounded”—not even by a sense of horrible sin, for after he has seen the whole horde of his sins march by, he cries, “They are all gone into the tomb where Jesus slept. The blood of Jesus has cleansed me from them. The depths have covered them, there is not one of them left, and they sank like lead in the mighty waters, for God has cast them all unto the depths of the sea.”
He that believes on the pardoning Savior shall not be confounded, though all his sins should accuse him at once.
The unbelieving world labors to create confusion. The gentlemen of the higher criticism, the scientific discoverers, the possessors of boastful culture, and all the other braggers of this marvelously enlightened 19th century are up in arms against the believers in Jesus. When I think of how this century has been befooled by its statesmen and philosophers, I, for one, feel little reverence for it. Perhaps it has the most light, but it has not the best eyes.
Well, let all this wisdom of the world assail us! Let proud pretenders point their fingers at us and say, “You trust in Christ. You rely upon Jesus of Nazareth alone for your salvation. You are old-fashioned and as much out of place as the extinct animals would be if they could come back again.”
I protest that if all the sages of the world were to utter one thundering sarcasm, if they concentrated all their scorn into one universal sneer of contempt, I do not think it would now affect me the turn of a hair, so sure am I that my Lord will justify my confidence. “I know whom I have believed” and I know also that my Lord Jesus Christ “sits above the floods. The Lord sits King forever.”
“Why do the heathen rage and the people imagine a vain thing?” He can save me, and I trust Him to perform all that concerns me. Faith in Jesus can be justified before a synagogue of scholars. It deserves the respect of a parliament of philosophers. To trust the incarnate Son of God, whose advent into this world is a fact better proved by history than any other that was ever on record—to trust oneself upon His atoning sacrifice is the most reasonable thing that a man can do. There is nothing illogical about it, nothing which demands apology.
We fling back in the teeth of the scoffers the charge of unreasoning dogmatism—ours is the most reasonable of all beliefs. O you mighty thinkers and skeptics, you are more credulous than we are. We may seem fools to you, but we are not judged by your judgment. You shall see your own folly when He comes, whose name is Faithful and True—when He comes to reign as King of kings and Lord of lords.
He that believes on Him shall not be confounded by human wisdom, for God has long ago confounded it and turned it into foolishness. But the world has done more than sneer. It has imitated Cain and sought to slay the faithful.
The enemies of the gospel have raged fiercely against the church of God. What opportunities has God given to them to conquer if they could! Christ has seemed to say, “Come on, world, here are My poor disciples whom you despise, come and see if you can conquer them! I give you a fair opportunity. There is the Coliseum, heap up tier upon tier of men and women with your cruel eyes and savage hearts. Bring out the saints. Cry, ‘Christians to the lions!’”
There they stand. The lions are loose upon them. Do they cry for mercy and treacherously deny Christ? They are feeble men and women. Do they recant and leave their Master? Not they. They die as bravely as ever a soldier fell in battle.
The enemy resolves to try them with torture, with rack, rod, and fire. Let us see what will come of it. Blandina shall be tossed upon the horns of bulls and then placed in a hot iron chair. Does her womanly nature flinch? Ah, no, she is more than a conqueror.
They try every kind of torment with the saints, but they fail in every case. Remember Marcus Arethusa, smeared with honey and a hive of bees put upon him? Yet never for a single moment did he relent. Every form of possible cruelty has, in later persecutions, been tried by Rome’s infernal inquisition, but believers have not been confounded.
Fiends in human form have glutted themselves with blood until they have turned away from Christian destruction as from a hopeless task. They saw that they could not overcome the true people of God, for “He that believes on Him shall not be confounded.”
They tried persecution in this land in the days of Queen Mary, but their defeat was self-evident. Weavers and farmers defied bishops and cardinals and held their own. Even women laughed to scorn the wretched sophistries of their tormentors. Tompkins trusted in God and stood firm when Bonner held his hand in the candle flame and equally well did he play the man at the stake.
What notable stories Foxe has preserved for us of how the saints of the Lord clapped their burning hands and cried, “None but Christ!” while the flames were devouring them. The enemy could not confound them. If persecution should revive, we shall again conquer, for “He that believes on Him shall not be confounded.” We cannot strike our adversaries, but by bearing their blows we shall, like the anvil, break the hammers. As it has been until now, so shall it be until the end—we shall not be ashamed of our hope.
Well, but there will come other troubles to Christians besides these, and in them they shall not be confounded. They will be tried by the flesh; natural desires will break forth into vehement lusts, and corruptions will seek to cast them down. Will believers then perish? No. He that believes in Christ shall conquer himself and overcome his easily besetting sins.
There will come losses and crosses, business trials and domestic bereavements. What then? He shall not be confounded. His Lord will sustain him under every tribulation. At last, death will come to us. They will wipe the cold sweat from our brows, and we shall gasp for breath, but we shall not be confounded then. We may not be able to shout, “Victory!” We may be too weak for triumphant hymns, but with our last breath, we will lisp the precious name.
They that watch us shall know by our serenity that a Christian does not die but only melts away into everlasting life. O beloved, we shall never be confounded, even amid the grandeurs of eternity. We shall pass into the next state, and after a while, the trumpet shall sound, and these bodies shall rise. We shall stand amidst the countless throng on that august day for which all other days were made.
While other men who have other foundations to rest upon shall cry to the rocks to hide them, we shall stand calmly and quietly, adoring our Lord, the Judge. It will be a solemn day, even for us. We shall not be able to see the rocks splitting and stars falling, and creation itself passing away, without deep solemnity. Yet assuredly, the words of our hymn are true:
“Bold shall I stand in that great day,
For who anything to my charge shall lay?
While through His blood, absolved I am
From sin’s tremendous curse and shame?”
We will tell the Father in that day that we have rested on the salvation which He appointed, that we have confided in His own dear Son, and that we believed that the blood of Jesus did make atonement for our sin. We shall not find that He disowns His promise.
Oh, if that foundation could fail us, how ashamed and confounded should we be! I do not know, but I sometimes seem to think that if the gospel could possibly be a mistake, we should have the consolation of being able to say, “Great God, it was through love of You and trust in You that we fell into this error.” And we should at least have as good a plea as the self-righteous can offer. But it shall not be so; our foundation cannot fail us. We shall not be confounded.
The two immutable things in which it is impossible for God to lie are our strong consolation.
Now I close by saying that the reason we know we can never be confounded is just this: because the testimony we have received is true. It is God’s testimony. There cannot be a lie in that. Next, the person on whom we lean is true. There can be no falsehood in Christ Jesus, nor failure in Him. The Savior in whom we trust is almighty. He cannot possibly be defeated or too heavily loaded. The declarations of the Word of God in which we trust are infallible and immutable. They cannot be altered one jot or tittle.
The Father of Lights is without variableness, and Jesus Christ is “the same yesterday, today, and forever.” No believer in Christ can ever be confounded—mark this word—till the godhead itself shall be deified. I put it strongly. Until God the Father can break His Word, He cannot destroy a soul that believes in His Son. And if He were to break His Word (the mere supposition borders on blasphemy), then He would no longer be God, since truth is essential to deity. Until Christ Himself shall fail, He cannot refuse to save one that trusts in Him.
And if He were to fail, it would prove that He was not omnipotent and could not, therefore, be God. And if the Spirit of God, which has worked us to the same thing, even to this day, were after all to deny His own witness and suffer the new life which is in us to die out, then He is not the almighty, indwelling Quickener and Comforter of former days.
No, beloved, everything hangs upon divine fidelity. If believers are lost, God loses more than they do, for He loses His honor, His character for truthfulness, and the glory of His name is tarnished. If I am a sheep and I am lost, I am certainly a great loser, but then I am not my own, but belong to the Great Shepherd, and He has lost me and so is also a loser.
If I am a member of Christ’s body and I am lost, I am certainly a great loser, but my Head is a loser too, for henceforth His body is incomplete. The church is the fullness of Christ, “the fullness of Him that fills all in all,” and I venture to say it, Jesus Christ were not a perfect Christ if He lost the very least and meanest of those who put their trust in Him.
It would be hell’s boast against Him to all eternity that He could not keep His own. If the devil could get a believer in hell, what a noise he would make about him! “Jesus of Nazareth, here is one of Your own. One who trusted in You and yet he is in hell. You kept the strong because they kept themselves, but You could not keep the weak, and therefore here is one, lost, lost forever.”
How would hellish malice exult if such an occasion for scorn were given. But it shall never be. Because Jesus lives, we also shall live and shall not be confounded. Let us rest in our Lord’s faithfulness and accept the pledges of His eternal affection:
“His honor is engaged to save
The meanest of His sheep!
All that His heavenly Father gave,
His hands securely keep.
Nor death nor hell shall ever remove
His favorites from His breast—
In the dear bosom of His love
They must forever rest.”
Amen and amen.
—Charles Spurgeon