From J. C. Philpot's Daily Portions
December 5 "What will you see in the Shulamite? As it were the
company of two armies." Song of Solomon 6:13 Are you not often a mystery to yourself? Warm one moment,
cold the next; abasing yourself one hour, exalting yourself the following;
loving the world, full of it, steeped up to your lips in it today; crying,
groaning, and sighing for a sweet manifestation of the love of God tomorrow;
brought down to nothingness, covered with shame and confusion, on your knees
before you leave your room; filled with pride and self-importance before you
have got down stairs; despising the world, and willing to give it all up for
one taste of the love of Jesus when in solitude; trying to grasp it with
both hands when in business. What a mystery are you! Touched by love, and stung with
enmity; possessing a little wisdom, and a great deal of folly;
earthly-minded, and yet having the affections in heaven; pressing forward,
and lagging behind; full of sloth, and yet taking the kingdom with violence!
And thus the Spirit, by a process which we may feel but
cannot adequately describe, leads us into the mystery of the two natures,
that "company of two armies," perpetually struggling and striving against
each other in the same bosom. So that one man cannot more differ from
another than the same man differs from himself. But do not nature, sense, and reason contradict this? Do
not the wise and prudent deny this? "There must be a progressive advance,"
they say, "in holiness; there must be a gradual amendment of our nature
until at length all sin is rooted out, and we become as perfect as Christ."
But the mystery of the kingdom of heaven is this--that our carnal mind
undergoes no alteration, but maintains a perpetual war with grace--and thus,
the deeper we sink in self-abasement under a sense of our vileness, the
higher we rise in a knowledge of Christ; and the blacker we are in our own
view, the more lovely does Jesus appear.