The Positive Vanity of Our Thoughts to Evil

The Positive Vanity of Our Thoughts to Evil (1) The vanity of them discovers itself in that which Christ calls “foolishness” (Mar 7:22), that is, the kind of thoughts that madmen have. This foolishness is seen in the unsettled wantonness, the wavering of the mind in thinking. Solomon 6 says the “eyes of a fool are in the ends of the earth” (Pro 17:24), they run up and down from one end of the earth to the other, shooting and streaming. And though the mind of man is truly nimble and able to run from one end of the earth to the other, that being its strength and excellence, yet God would have this strength and nimbleness put to a steady directing of our thoughts toward His glory, our own salvation, the good of others, etc. He gave our minds nimbleness to turn away from evil even the first appearance of it. As we are to walk in God’s ways, so every single thought, like every action, is a step and ought to be a steady one. “Make straight paths for your feet” (Heb 12:13), turn not to the right or to the left until we come to the journey’s end of that business we are supposed to be thinking of. But our thoughts, at best, are like wanton spaniels, they indeed go after their master and come to their journey’s end with him, but they run after every bird, they wildly pursue every flock of sheep they see. This unsteadiness is from the curse on the mind of man, like Cain who was driven “from the presence of the Lord,” (Gen 4:16) our minds are vagabonds, our eyes are in the end of the earth. This foolishness is also seen in the independence of our thoughts—they often hang together like ropes of sand. We see this in dreams. But not only then, for when we are awake, even when we set ourselves to be most serious, how often our thoughts jingle and run backward! As wanton boys sometimes scribble broken words which make no sense, so our thoughts sometimes are—and if you could but read over what you have thought, as you can what you have written, you would find as much nonsense in your thoughts as you will find in madmen’s speeches. This madness, this distemper is in the mind since the Fall (though it may not appear in our words), so much so that if notes were taken of our multitude of thoughts, we would find our thoughts to be so vagrant that we would wonder how they came in, from where they came, and where they were attempting to go. But God does all things in weight, in number and measure, and so His image in us will also do, so far as it is renewed. Because our thoughts are unsettled, and because they are so independent of one another, our thoughts often have no issue, gain no perfection. We wilder2 away our time in thinking of nothing. As Seneca3 said of men’s lives, that they are like ships tossed up and down at sea, so it may be said that our thoughts have tossed much but sailed nowhere. (2) But on the contrary, if any strong lust or violent passion is up, then our thoughts are all too fixed and intent—they run in so far on sinful objects that they cannot be pulled out again, or even diverted. This is another vanity. For our thoughts and our understanding part was ordered to moderate, allay, and cool, to take off our passions when they are running over—they are to rule and govern them. But now our thoughts are themselves subjected to our affections, they are like fuel put under our lusts, they make them boil the more. And although our thoughts do at first stir up our fears, joys, desires, etc., yet these once stirred up come to chain and fix and hold our thoughts to those objects, so that we cannot loosen them again. That is why Christ said to His disciples, “Why are ye troubled, and why do thoughts arise in your hearts” (Luk 24:38)? For disturbances in the affections cause thoughts to ascend like fumes and vapors. If a passion of fear is upon us, how it does conjure up multitudes of ghostly thoughts that we cannot cause to go down again! They haunt us; they follow us up and down wherever we go; we are pursued by our own thoughts: “thine heart shall meditate [on] terror” (Isa 33:18). So when sorrow is upon us, how it does make us study the cross that has been put upon us (which would be an ease to the mind to forget). But a man’s passions make his thoughts study it, to say it by heart, over and over again. So when love and desire are up, whatever the thing may be that has attracted us (it may be preferment, praise, beauty, riches), it sets our hearts to work to search the thing from top to toe, to make it amiable to us. So when joy is up, we look and look at the thing we rejoice in; we read it over and over; we mark every little bit of it; we do not forget. Yes, we are so inordinate in it that we often cannot sleep for thinking of it. “The abundance of the rich will not suffer him to sleep” for the multitude of thoughts in his head (Ecc 5:12), Solomon writes of the man who is covetous. How the thoughts of the Belshazzars and the Nebuchadnezzars of the world do trouble the world! As in Proverbs 4:16, “They sleep not except they have done mischief.” If their desires remain unsatisfied, they disturb their thoughts, like naughty children crying and crying. These thoughts, which most men think are free, often prove the greatest enslavers and tormenters in the earth to their owners. They hinder sleep, the nurse of nature—they eat out the heart that bred them; they weary the spirits. A man cannot lay them aside as he does his coat. When men die, these follow them to hell and torment them even worse there. Your thoughts are the greatest executioners there, even the worm that never dies (Mat 9:44). (3) The vanity of the mind appears in curiosity. There is a longing and itching to be fed with and to know the things that do not concern us at all; there is a delight in thinking of them. Take a trial of this in scholars, whose chief work lies in this shop: How many precious thoughts are spent in curiosity! There is a curiosity of knowledge, as appears by those the apostle often rebukes, that can be called “oppositions of falsely-named science”—curiosities of knowledge, “those things which he hath not seen” (Col 2:18). In Colossians 2 and 1 Timothy 4:7, he calls such issues of men’s brains “old wives’ fables,” because, as fables please old wives, so these please their minds. This itch which they have in them makes them like a woman with child; they long after things they do not have; they are not contented with what the place or the time affords; no, they must have some unheard-of rarity, something far-fetched, something which may not even be possible to have. So men, not contenting themselves with the wonders of God which He discovers in the depth of His word and works, will launch out into 2 wilder – to cause to lose the way. 3 Seneca, Lucius Annaeus (c. 4 BC-AD 65) also Seneca the Younger – Roman philosopher, statesman, and orator; Rome’s leading intellectual of his day 7 another sea, another world of their own making. There they sail with pleasure, as many of the schoolmen 4 did in some of their speculations, spending their precious minds, framing curious webs out of their own bowels, like a spider. Take the matter of reading, for many have leisure and ability to read much. They should ballast their heart with the Word of God; they should take in those precious words, that precious wisdom, in order to profit themselves and others. They should be building up their own souls, but what do their curious fancies carry them to? What are they versed in? Why, they know playbooks; they know romances, all the curious needlework of idle brains; they load their heads with “apes and peacocks feathers,” instead of pearls and precious stones. As Solomon said, “The heart of him that has understanding seeketh knowledge; but the mouth of fools feedeth on foolishness” (Pro 15:14). Foolish discourses please their eyes and ears; these are the purveyors of food for their thoughts—like chameleons are said to do, men live on air and wind. Leaving this sort, we find others who out of mere curiosity listen for all the news that flies up and down the world; they skim off all the froth that floats in foolish men’s mouths. They please themselves only with talking, thinking, and hearing it. Not all are to be condemned in this. Some can make good use of it, as Nehemiah did when he inquired how things went at Jerusalem—he wanted to rejoice with God’s people, to mourn and pray with them, to know how to fashion his prayers. But that curious itch which is in many, who merely want to please their fancies, who are delighted with new things (even if they do not concern them), is to be condemned. Such the Athenians were (Act 17:21). Some men long all week until they have events and issues; they make it a part of the happiness of their lives to study the state more than they do their own hearts, or even their own proper businesses. Yet these do not lay to heart the miseries of the church of Christ, nor do they help them with their prayers. There are those who are curious to know the secrets of other men, secrets which would do them no good. These study men’s actions and ends, not to reform them or do them good, but to know them and to think and muse about them with pleasure. This is curiosity, properly a vanity of the thinking power. It is truly a great sin when much of men’s most pleasing thoughts are spent on things that do not concern them. The things that we ought to know, those which concern us, are enough to take up all our thoughts—we would not have any to spare. Thoughts are precious things, they are the immediate fruits and buds of an immortal nature. God has given us power to coin thoughts, lay them out in things that concern our own good, our own neighbor’s good, and His own glory. And if we do not spend them on these things, it is the greatest waste in the world. Examine the corn you put in the grinder, for God should have His share of all. “He that deviseth to do evil shall be called a mischievous person” (Pro 24:8), i.e., a master of wicked thoughts. It is not the one who does a wicked thing, but also the one who plots it, who aggravates the sinful action by his thoughts, for “the thought of foolishness is sin” (Pro 24:9), and a combination and conspiracy of wicked thoughts is much more. (4) There is still a worse vanity than this, one that is intimated in Romans 13:14, taking thought “to fulfill the lusts” of the flesh—i.e., making projects for it. For thoughts are the caterers for our lusts, they lay in all their provision. In our thoughts we look out for the best markets, the best opportunities for sinning of any kind, the best bargains for our praise, for our ambition, for our riches, etc. For example, does a man want to “get ahead”? Then his thoughts study the art of it, framing the ladder for climbing up, inventing ways to do it—though often they, like Haman, are only building their own gallows (Est 7:9). Or perhaps they want to be rich. Then what do they study? They study all the cheating tricks on the cards, as I may speak. They study all the cunning tricks of the world, all the ways to oppress, to defraud, to go beyond their fellows. They learn to pack things in all their dealing so that they themselves will be the winners, so that all who deal with them will be the losers. “He deviseth wicked devices to destroy the poor with lying words” (Isa 32:7). Does a man want to undermine his opposite, one that stands in his light, who keeps him from getting all the credit? Then he will dig with his thoughts, with his engines in the night. He will dig a pit, as the Scripture says, he will dig deep to hide his counsel, to blow him up in the end. He will learn to hurt him. This is worse than all the former vanities. The more devising there is in sin, the worse it is. That is why the fact about Uriah, not so much that of Bathsheba, is objected against David, because he took thought for it, whereas in the matter of Bathsheba, his thoughts took him (2Sa 11). (5) A fifth kind of vanity in our thoughts appears when we are acting-over sins in our thoughts and imaginations. In this we personate those sinful pleasures by our imagination, because we cannot at present enjoy the reality. So we feign and imagine ourselves to act those sinful practices which we have not opportunity outwardly to perform. Divines call it speculative wickedness. That this performing of wickedness in the imagination is possible is evident to you by your dreams, when, as the prophet says, the imagination makes us believe that “when an hungry man dreameth, and, behold, he eateth; but he awaketh, and his soul is empty” (Isa 29:8). But I do not mean to speak of the power and corruption of it, as in our dreams. It were well if this speculative wickedness were only “in the night.” But corrupt and distempered affections cast men into such dreams in the daytime, when they are awake. To borrow the apostle’s expression, there are “filthy dreamers” (Jude 8) that “defile the flesh”—yes, even when they are awake. For when their lusts are idle, their imagination erects a stage for them, 4 schoolmen – a term for the teachers of philosophy and theology in the Middle Ages. Also known as scholastics, examples would be Thomas Aquinas (1225- 74) and John Duns Scotus (c. 1265-1308). 8 and their thoughts are set to work to entertain their filthy and impure desires with shows and plays of their own making. And so reason and the intention of their minds sit as spectators all the while to view with pleasure, until their thoughts inwardly act over their own unclean desires, their ambitious projects, or whatever else they have a mind to do. Can anyone cast a stone at those who do this (Joh 8:7)? Yea, the heart of man has become as empty as this—so impatient are the desires and lusts when interrupted in their pleasures; so sinful and corrupt are they! (A) They are vain and empty in this, for take note of all the pleasures of sin when they are never so fully, solidly, and really enjoyed—they are then only shadows, a mere outside and figure, as the apostle calls the world. It is the opinion of imagination that casts that varnish of goodness on sinful pleasures, for it is not truly in them. But now this speculative enjoying of them only in imagination (which many men’s hearts take so much pleasure in), the pleasing of ourselves in the bare thoughts and imaginations of sinful acts—this is but a shadow of these shadows. That the soul should, Ixion-like,5 embrace and commit adultery with clouds only, this is a vanity beyond all other vanities. This makes us more vain than any other creature, who though “subject to vanity” (Rom 8:20), yet are not subject to such vanity as this. (B) It argues our desires to be impatient when they are detained from or interrupted from their pleasures. When the soul shall be found to be so greedy that when the heart is barred or held back from those things it desires, when it lacks means for opportunities to act out its lusts, then it will at least enjoy them in imagination, and in the interim set fancy to entertain the mind with empty pictures of them drawn in its own thoughts. (C) In this way they appear also to be exceeding sinful and corrupt. An outward act of sin, as you may know, is but an act of whoredom with the creature when it is really enjoyed. But this committing of adultery in our imaginations is pure incest! When we defile our souls and spirits with these imaginations and likenesses which are conceived in our own fancies, being the children of our own hearts, this is incest!