Chastisement—Now and Afterward

Spurgeon opens by carefully separating chastisement from atonement — affliction can never remove a single spot of guilt (only Christ's blood can do that) and never purges the pollution of sin by itself (only the blood and Spirit do that) — but argues that the Holy Spirit does use trials as his refining furnace to weaken and destroy the power of indwelling sin, making the Christian's worst experiences the very instrument of his greatest growth. He then works through why affliction always seems grievous rather than joyous in the present moment — our fears exaggerate, our unbelief darkens, our ignorance fills the air with false omens, our love of ease makes us cry out before the knife has barely touched the skin, and we are judging the surgery from the table rather than from the recovery room — before insisting that all this is "only seeming," since faith lifts the black mask from the face of trouble and discovers the angel beneath, singing that there is not a drop of divine wrath in any trial, that it is all sent in love, and that light afflictions working eternal weight of glory are the most lopsided exchange in the universe. He closes with the text's word "afterward" as the believer's great word of hope — the fruit is not immediate, the benefit rarely comes while still in the furnace but comes richly afterward, and only to those who are genuinely "exercised" by their afflictions (stepping into the trainer's ring rather than running away or turning to stone) — while turning "nevertheless afterward" into a warning for the unconverted, urging them to look with a telescope past their present comfort, youth, and wealth to the scene coming: the open book, the burning eyes of the Judge, and the sentence that will make all present ease feel like the cruelest trick ever played on a soul that trusted the wrong things.Sermon delivered by Charles Spurgeon on September 6, 1863.