Charles Spurgeon on who by reason of use have their
senses exercised to discern both good and evil from his sermon on Hebrews
5:14, Strong Meat
But then our text tells us that they have had their senses exercised. The soul has senses as well as the body. Men who have had their senses exercised know how to choose between good and evil. Now, what are these senses? Well, there are our spiritual eyes. When the babe first sees it has little idea of distances. I suppose that to a babe’s eyes everything appears as a flat surface. It is the result of after-experience which enables the man to know that such a thing is so many yards off, and that another is so many miles distant. Travellers, who go to Switzerland for the first time, soon discover that they have not had their eyes exercised. You think that you can reach the peak of yonder mountain in half-an-hour. There is the top of yonder rock; you dream that a boy might fly his kite to the summit, but it shall take you hours to climb there, and weary limbs alone can bear you to the dizzy height. At a distance, young travellers scarcely know which is mountain and which is cloud. All this is the result of not having the eyes exercised upon such glorious objects. It is just precisely so in spiritual things, unless Christians have their eyes exercised. I hope, dear friends, you know what it is to see Christ; your eyes, by faith, have looked upon the King in his beauty. You know what it is, too, to see self; you have looked into the depravity of your own heart, and have been amazed. Your eyes have seen the rising and the falling of many deceptions. Your eyes have been tried in waiting for God in many a dark night, or in beholding him in the midst of many a bright Providence. Thus your eyes have been exercised. Now, when a doctrine is put before you, a strong doctrine, you look at it and say—“Ah! Yes; my eye of faith tells me from what I have seen before that that is healthy food upon which I may feed.” But if you detect something in it that is too high, or too low, you at once say—“No, that won’t do for me,” and you put it by. Hence it is that the man, the eye of whose faith has been tried with bright visions and dark revelations, is qualified to discern between good and evil in those great mysteries which would be too high for unexercised believers. Then there is the ear. We hear it said of some that they have no ear for music. We sometimes hear it said of others that they have an ear for music, and they can tell when people are singing half a note amiss. How shocked they would sometimes be with some of you who will persist in running away from our good leader, and getting a whole note amiss! But there are some who cannot tell one note from another. So is it in spiritual things, “Blessed are the people that know the joyful sound,” but many do not know the difference between the joyful sound and that which is half a note lower. Why, dear friends, when a Christian is well taught, he knows when a note goes too high, and he says— “No, no, no; that jars;” or when it goes too low he says— “No, that is out of tune.” He wants to have the keynote of the Gospel constantly before him, and any divergence from the grand old tune of orthodoxy, which he has learned from the Word of God, at once makes him feel wretched. He has a fine, keen, discerning ear; he can tell at once any mistake, and is not to be led astray by it. Hence it is that such persons are fit to hear the solid doctrines of the gospel preached, because they have listened to the voice of God. They have heard the charms of evil, and have despised them; they have heard the conversation of educated saints, they have been taught in the ways of the Lord, and knowing, therefore, the difference between this and that, they can discern between good and evil, and are not to be led astray. Happy is he whose ear is well tuned to discern both good and evil. Then, dear friends, comes the nose, the intention of which sense is to smell things afar off. True Christians have smelt the fragrance of Christ’s fellowship. “While the king sitteth at his table, my spikenard sendeth forth the smell thereof.” Advanced Christians know the fragrance of heaven. The angels have brought them bundles of myrrh from the other side the stream; they have had their nostrils exercised, and you know the nostrils are of very essential use in reference to food. The nostrils can soon detect decay or that spiciness which the crafty trader employs to conceal it. There are certain persons whose ministry is putrid, but they lay on thickly very excellent spice about the safety of the believer, and the joy and peace that there are in Christ, that the putridity is somewhat checked, and some Christian people eat the nauseous morsels, forgetting, or not knowing what they really are, because of the sweet savouriness and flavour in which the whole is wrapped up. But our nostrils are given us on purpose to detect the craft and mischief of designing men; and the spiritual nostril that has been made to perceive the difference between the righteous and the wicked, will soon be able to perceive what is true food and what is carrion. Then, you know, there is the taste; and this sense needs educating, too. Some men have no taste; to them flavour is no luxury. There are many who have no taste spiritually. Give them a cup of mingle-mangle— “perhapses,” “ifs,” “buts,” “peradventures,” creature-willings, and creature-doings, and if it is only warm they will drink it down and say, “Oh! how delightful!” If you give them a cup, on the other hand, that is full of divine purposes, precious promises, and sure mercies of David; if you will only flavour it with a good style of oratory, they will drink that sweet potion too and relish it. The two things may contradict each other flatly, but these people have no discernment— they have not had their senses exercised. But those of you who have been made to taste the sweets of covenant grace, you, especially, who have eaten his flesh and drunk his blood, and you, too, who have been made to drink the wormwood and the gall till your mouth knows every flavour, from the bitterness of death up to the glory of immortality, you may taste the strong meat without any fear, for your senses are exercised. Lastly, there is the sense of touch, and you know, how in some men, ' this has been developed to a very high degree; how men who are deficient in sight, for instance, have acquired by touch the knowledge which would, if they had not been blind, have been derived from their eyes. So believers have been made to touch the hem of Jesu’s garment. They have exercised the sense of feeling by joy, by rapture, perhaps by doubt and by fear, and their touch has become so acute, so keen, that, though their eyes were shut, as soon as they touch a doctrine they would know what was of God and what of man.
