Salvation, Simplicity of the Way of – Charles Spurgeon

DOES it not seem to you to be inconsistent with the character of the God of nature that he should have instituted a plan of salvation so singularly complicated and theatrical as that which is now-a-days taught us by priests? Nature is simple: her grandeur lies in her simplicity. If you walk in the fields of our own happy land, or climb the lofty ranges of the Alps, you are delighted with the beautiful simplicity of nature, in which there is an utter absence of everything meretricious, showy, and theatrical. Everything has a practical design, and even the colors of the flowers, which are not without intent and design, enable the plant to drink in certain rays of light which shall best satisfy its need. There is nothing in nature for mere display; but you step inside a place of worship dedicated to salvation by ceremonies, and I am persuaded that your taste will be outraged, if that taste has been formed upon the model of nature. Frequently, on the Continent, I turned with loathing from gaudily decorated churches, daubed with paint, smothered with gilt, and bedizened with pictures, dolls, and all sorts of baby prettinesses; I turned aside from them, muttering, “If your God accepts such rubbish as this he is no God to me; the God of you rolling cloud and crashing thunder, you foaming billow and towering rock, is the God whom I adore. Too sublime, too noble, too great-minded to take delight in your genuflections, and stage-play devotions.” When I beheld processions with banners, and crosses, and smoking censers, and saw men who claimed to be sent of God, and yet dress themselves like Tom fools, I did not care for their God, but reckoned that he was some heathenish idol whom I counted it my glory as a man to scoff at and to despise. Do not fall into the notion that the God of nature is different from the God of grace. He who wrote the book of nature wrote the book of revelation, and writes the book of experience within the human heart. Do not therefore choose a way of salvation utterly at variance with the divine character.