Daily Inspiration Quote by Thomas Goodwin

Goodwin’s line is a preacher’s way of doing two things at once: enlarging Christ beyond the reach of ordinary counting, and narrowing the path to those riches through a specific map - “this doctrine of the gospel.” The phrase “unsearchable riches” isn’t just pious exaggeration. It’s a polemic against the idea that spiritual life can be reduced to moral improvement, ritual performance, or churchly pedigree. If Christ is truly unsearchable, then you don’t climb to him; you receive him. The scale is meant to crush spiritual self-sufficiency.

The second half turns that grandeur into a directional claim. Calling gospel doctrine “the field” where the treasure is hidden borrows the logic of Matthew 13:44, where a man finds treasure buried in a field and sells everything to buy it. Goodwin is smuggling in a critique of his age’s religious marketplace: the treasure isn’t scattered evenly across all “religion,” nor primarily located in mystical experience or ecclesiastical machinery. It’s concealed, paradoxically, in preaching, catechesis, and the contested propositions of Protestant theology.

That “hidden” matters. It implies the riches are real but not self-advertising. You can stand on the field and miss it; you can hear the words and fail to see the wealth. In the Puritan world Goodwin inhabited - anxious about assurance, allergic to empty ceremony, and locked in battles over what counted as true Christianity - doctrine isn’t dry information. It’s the ordained site of discovery, a spiritual geology where grace sits beneath the surface and only certain kinds of hearing, repentance, and faith actually strike gold.