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CHAPTER XIV.

REPENTANCE TOWARD GOD.

I. 1. Connection between Repentance and Faith.-2. Faith competent only to restored sinners.-3. Repentance competent only to believing sinners.-4. New Obedience: Relation of Faith and Repentance thereto.-5. Life, Righteousness, Repentance: Relations between them.-II. 1. The Knowledge of Good and Evil in Man: Relation thereof to his Fall and Recovery.-2. Moral Judgments and Feeling: Effect of Regeneration.—3. Indissoluble connection between our Moral Judgments and Feeling: Effects of Divine Grace.-4. Relation of the Moral Nature of Man to the Spiritual System of the Scriptures; and to that of Atheism.— 5. Self-condemnation of the Natural Conscience: Sense of Blameworthiness of the Renewed Conscience: Standard of each.-6. Healthfulness of Conscience-Divine Grace-Repentance.-III. 1. The Law of God: Relation of the Natural Man thereto.-2. The Satisfaction of Christ: His Relation therein to Sinners: theirs to him through Faith and Repentance.-3. Acts of the Penitent Soul: Grief and Hatred for Sin: Turning from it unto God: Purpose of New Obedience.4. States of the Penitent Soul: Sense of the true Nature of Sin: Apprehension of the Mercy of God in Christ.-5. Intimate Nature of Repentance: Definition of it.-IV. 1. Perpetual Necessity of Repentance.-2. Great Peculiarity of Repentance.-3. Love and Faithfulness of Christ.-4. Wide Connection, Simplicity, and Certainty of the Doctrine taught.

I. 1. THE sacred Scriptures continually unite Repentance toward God and Faith toward the Lord Jesus Christ. And in one of the most affecting incidents of his wonderful ministry, the great Apostle of the Gentiles told the Elders of the Church at Ephesus, that they had personal knowledge from his first coming into Asia, that he had kept back nothing that was profitable, because he had testified continually these two truths, which in a manner sum up the Gospel.' Saving Faith-Repentance unto Life: the very terms that qualify them, show their indissoluble union.

2. In his perfect state man was perfectly bound to believe God, and was far more capable of doing so than in his fallen state. Nevertheless, no idea can be formed of man in his perfect state, which presents him to us as capable of exercising what the 1 1 Acts, xx. 18-21.

Scriptures intend by Saving Faith. Because this is a state of soul peculiar to man, both after he has fallen and been restored: and in it, the cause, the nature, and the manner both of that fall and that restoration, are involved. The Saviour of believing sinners is the very cause, and the quickener and comforter of penitent sinners is the very agent, and the divine word by which believing and penitent sinners are begotten again is the very instrument, which make the whole matter at once intelligible and real and without the whole of which it is neither possible nor intelligible.

3. All this is equally true of Repentance, as of Faith. That also, in its very nature and in every complete view which it is possible to take of it, is a state of soul peculiar to a sinner who has both fallen and been restored. As Faith is concerned chiefly with the cause and the manner of the recovery, so Repentance is concerned chiefly with the malady itself and the means and progress of the recovery. Christ and salvation are the great objects of the believing soul: God and our sins are the great objects of the penitent soul. It is perfectly obvious that a soul which was never lost and therefore never had need of a Saviour, never could exercise Saving Faith in Christ; and equally so, that a soul never dead in trespasses and sins could never turn from sin or unto God, with Repentance unto Life. And so the Lord plainly said, I am not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.' And, so also, Repentance unto Life is every way impossible under the Covenant of Works. Impossible if that covenant were perfectly fulfilled by us; because, in that case, we already had life by obedience, and had no sin to repent of. Impossible after we have broken that covenant, because its condition was not repentance but obedience, which condition being broken, the covenant was at an end as a means of life; and, moreover, even if it could have remained as a covenant of life after its breach, it contained no remedy for transgression but punishment, and in its very nature could contain no other.

4. The Covenants of Works and Grace are the most impressive form in which God gives expression to the counsel of his will concerning man. It is through them especially that he makes manifest his infinite goodness, under all the forms in which it is most distinctly exhibited towards man. The will of God, in

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whatever manner it may be made known, must give expression to his infinite nature. When made known in the form of law, that law is a middle term which necessarily embraces, on one side the infinite author of it, and on the other those subject to it and in its own nature it necessarily embraces such sanctions as are appropriate to itself, to its author, and to those subject to it. Otherwise we might call it instruction, advice, or persuasion; but not law. But when the will of God is propounded to us in the form of covenant-and the idea of a reward arises, there is superadded to the majesty, wisdom, power, and goodness of the Infinite Ruler of the universe, the expression of his love, his truth, and his faithfulness. So that not only by the whole glory of God's being, but by all else that is immutable added thereto, his covenants must have way in all they command, in all they threaten, and in all they promise; immutable and irresistible alike in their stipulations and in their sanctions. Wherefore God, willing more abundantly to show unto the heirs of promise the immutability of his counsel, confirmed it by an oath: that by two immutable things, in which it was impossible for God to lie, we might have a strong consolation, who have fled for refuge to lay hold upon the hope set before us: which hope we have as an anchor of the soul, both sure and stedfast, and which entereth into that within the veil: whither the forerunner is for us entered, even Jesus, made a high priest for ever after the order of Melchizedek. Now the Covenant of Grace stipulates for righteousness on condition of Faith and Repentance, and has for its sanction on that side, the promise of eternal life: whence it follows that believing and penitent sinners must be saved, or the highest expression of God's will must fail. On the other hand, the Covenant of Works stipulated for righteousness on condition of obedience at once perfect and personal, and had for its sanction on that side, the threat of eternal death: whence it follows that the disobedient under that covenant can have no refuge in Faith or Repentance, and no hope of escaping perdition. But in every possible relation of a dependent creature to its Creator, righteousness is inconceivable except in connection with obedience: and salvation in sin is the concealed poison which lurks in every system of false religion. In the nature of the case, therefore, a New Obedience is as directly involved in Faith and Repentance,

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· Heb., vi. 17-20.

2 John, iii. 16; Luke, xiii. 3-5.

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Gen., ii. 15-17.

as a New Covenant and a New Creature are. It is through Faith toward Christ that the New Creature is concerned with the cause and manner of this New Obedience: it is through Repentance toward God that the process of perfecting the New Creature therein, is actually carried on in the soul.'

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5. I have explained in another place the great truth, that the life which any righteousness can secure can only be as full and as enduring as the righteousness by which it is obtained; so that we must have an everlasting righteousness if we would have eternal life; and as this everlasting righteousness can be obtained only through the Lord Jesus Christ, so eternal life is attainable only through him. Nay the very name whereby he was predicted from of old was, The Lord our Righteousness. What I then taught was only a corollary from a broader and deeper truth to which we now come. In every spiritual sense Righteousness is the very expression of life-precisely as sin is the very expression of death. Spiritual death-death in sin, is not only a terrible reality, but it is the cause both of the death of the body, and of the eternal death of the soul and body. Spiritual life is not only a glorious reality, but to fallen man the very expression of it both in its nature and its power, is the participation with our Saviour Jesus Christ, in grace and in glory, of the life and the immortality he has brought to light through the Gospel.+ Salvation by grace, which expresses the peculiar form of the spiritual and eternal life bestowed on men by Christ, is, therefore, in the nature of the case, impossible; unless by grace, through Faith and Repentance, we are put in actual, personal, and eternal possession of a righteousness commensurate with the salvation bestowed on us. The very term salvation not only involves the idea of a life which is spiritual and eternal; but also that the holiness of that life is commensurate with its spirituality and its eternity. Hundreds of times the Scriptures use merely the word life, to express all this; as if no other form of human existence was worthy of being called life. So far are the Scriptures from countenancing any idea that salvation and holiness may be separated that even after they have revealed and opened unto us an infinite Righteousness through the Son of God; they dis

1 Psalm cxix. 111, 112.

4 2 Tim., i. 9, 10.

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Jehovah our Righteousness.

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tinctly warn us that if our Faith were to make the law voidnay, if it did not establish the law-it would be a fatal objection to our Faith.' And yet even that righteousness of the law, thus scrupulously respected, is not the righteousness which is through the faith of Christ; the righteousness which is of God by Faith, which they possess who know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of his sufferings, being made conformable unto his death. In all the Scriptures it is the merit of Works and the righteousness of Faith which are contrasted: true righteousness and saving grace are never set in opposition, nor can they be; since the former is always the product of the latter and to fallen men can be the product of nothing else. The difference is immeasurable between saying that no righteousness of the law or of works can save a sinner-and saying that a sinner can be saved without any righteousness at all: and no pest of Christianity has been more insidious than that, which would substitute any thing no matter what-for holiness of heart and life. Except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the Scribes and Pharisees, said our Lord, ye shall in no wise enter into the kingdom of heaven.' Blessed, said he, are the pure in heart: for they shall see God. From which it is a fearful and necessary inference, that without holiness no man shall see the Lord. It is in Christ Jesus the Saviour of the world that everlasting righteousness is provided for lost men. It is through divine grace that this infinite Righteousness is bestowed on penitent sinners. The very highway of the upright is to depart from evil: and Repentance, of a truth, is the King's highway of holiness. This gate, though it be strait-this way, though it be narrow-leadeth unto life. Alas! that there should be few that find it.”

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II.-1. The shock which the fall of man, and the loss of the image of God, produced upon our nature, is not capable of being completely appreciated by us. We have much certain knowledge on the subject revealed to us by God: we have also the means, in our knowledge of ourselves, both in our natural state and in our begun recovery here on earth-of many reasonable conjectures, perhaps some positive certainty-concerning the original condition of our nature. It is precisely in the spot where the

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