God saves Sinners
We’re studying the doctrines of grace in our Sunday school class this quarter. Yesterday was the first class on the T in “TULIP”- Total Depravity, also know as Total Inability. I was reminded later in the day of this great statement about all the doctrines of grace or -“Calvinism” as it is more contemporarily called by J.I. Packer in “A Quest for Godliness”. Read what the old professor says and exult a bit about your salvation!
“For of Calvinism there is really only one point to be made in the field of soteriology: the point that God saves sinners. God– the Triune Jehovah, Father, Son and Spirit; three Persons working together in sovereign wisdom, power and love to achieve the salvation of a chosen people, the Father electing, the Son fulfilling the Father’s will by redeeming, the Spirit executing the purpose of Father and Son by renewing. Saves-does everything, first to last, that is involved in bringing man from death in sin to life in glory: plans, achieves and communicates redemption, calls and keeps, justifies, sanctifies, glorifies. Sinners-men as God finds them, guilty, vile, helpless, powerless, blind, unable to lift a finger to do God’s will or better their spiritual lot. God saves sinners-and the force of this confession may not be weakened by disrupting the unity of the work of the Trinity, or by dividing the achievement of salvation between God and man and making the decisive part man’s own, or by soft-pedalling the sinner’s inability so as to allow him to share the praise of his salvation with the Saviour. This is the one point of Calvinistic soteriology which the ‘five points’ are concerned to establish and Arminianism in all its forms to deny: namely, that sinners do no save themselves in any sense at all, but that salvation, first and last, whole and entire, past, present, and future, is of the Lord, to whom be glory for ever; amen!”
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