ain should travail to bring forth a mouse. Truly
we must conceive, that it must needs be some honourable and high business,
that brought down so high and honourable a person from heaven as the Son
of God. It must be something proportioned to his majesty and his wisdom.
And indeed so it is. There is a great capital enemy against God in the
world, that is sin. This arch-rebel hath drawn man from his subordination
to God, and sown a perpetual discord and enmity between them. This hath
conquered all mankind, and among the rest, even the elect and chosen of
God, those whom God had in his eternal counsel predestinated to life and
salvation. Sin brings all into bondage, and exerciseth the most perfect
tyranny over them that can be imagined, makes men to serve all its
imperious lusts, and then all the wages is death,--it binds them over to
judgment. Now this sedition and rebellion being arisen in the world, and
one of the most noble creatures carried away in this revolt, from
allegiance to the divine majesty, the most holy and wise counsel of heaven
concludes to send the King's Son, to compesce(173) this rebellion, to
reduce men again unto obedience, and destroy that arch traitor, sin, which
his nature most abhors. And for this end the Son of the great King, Jesus
Christ, came down into the world, to deliver captive man, and to condemn
conquering sin. There is no object that God hath so pure and perfect
displeasure at as sin. Therefore he sent to condemn that which he hates
most (and perfectly he hates it)--to condemn sin. And this is expressed as
the errand of his coming, 1 John iii. 5, 8, to "destroy the works of the
devil." All his wicked and hellish plots and contrivances against man, all
that poison of enmity and sin, that out of envy and malice he spued out
upon man, and instilled into his nature, all those works of that prince of
darkness, in enticing man from obedience to rebellion, and tyrannizing
over him since, by the imperious laws of his own lusts, in a word, all
that work that was contrived in hell, to bring poor man down to that same
misery with devils; all that Christ, the only begotten Son of the great
King, came (for this noble business) to destroy it,--that tower which Satan
was building up against heaven, and had laid the foundation of it as low
as hell, this was Christ's business down among men, to destroy that
Babylon, that tower of darkness and confusion, and to build up a tower of
light and life, to which t