Ruminations and Ramifications

God has dealt with it

- May I then draw near to God and not die?
- May I draw near and live?
- May I come to Him who hateth sin, and yet find that the sin which he hateth is no barrier to my coming, no reason for my being shut out from His presence as an unclean thing?
- May I renew my lost fellowship with Him who made me, and made me for Himself?
- May I worship in His holy place, with safety to myself, and without dishonour to Him?

These are the questions with which God has dealt, and dealt with so as to ensure a blessed answer to them all; an answer which will satisfy our own troubled consciences as well as the holy law of God. His answer is final, and it is effectual. He will give no other; nor will He deal with these questions in any other way than He has done. He has introduced them into His courts of law, that there they may be finally adjusted; and out of these courts into which God has taken them who can withdraw them? Or what end would be served by such a withdrawal on our part? Would it make the settlement more easy, more pleasant, more sure? It would not. It would augment the uncertainty, and make the perplexity absolutely hopeless.

Yet the tendency of modern thought and modern theology is to refuse the judicial settlement of these questions, and to withdraw them from the courts into which God has introduced them. And extra-judicial adjustment is attempted; man declining to admit such a guilt as would bring him within the grasp of law, and refusing to acknowledge sin to be of such a nature as to require a criminal process in solemn court; yet admitting the necessity or desirableness of the removal of the sore evil under which humanity is felt to be labouring, and under which, if unremoved, it must long ere dissolve.

-- Horatius Bonar
The Everlasting Righteousness pp8-9

Labels: Bonar

posted by Marcian @ 9:28 AM