Lux Lucet

About ten years ago a friend of mine gave me a copy of Horatius Bonar’s The everlasting Righteousness.  To say this book effected a big change in my life would be an understatement.  In addition to furthering my understanding of justification by faith alone, the central principle of Christianity, it also served as my introduction to Scripturalism, since the edition I read was published by The Trinity Foundation. 

It’s been a few years since I’ve read The Everlasting Righteousness, and reading it again seemed like a good antidote to the NT Wright/Justification by Faith (but not by Faith Alone) nonsense going on at ETS.  So I sat down with the book tonight and didn’t make it far before I found a gem of a paragraph in the book’s preface.  Here it is in full,

The doctrine of another’s righteousness reckoned to us for justification before God is one of the links that knit together the first and the sixteenth centuries, the Apostles and the Reformers.  The creeds of the Reformation overleap fifteen centuries and land us at once in the Epistle to the Romans.  Judicial and moral cleansing was what man needed.  In that epistle we have both the imputed and imparted righteousness – not the one without the other; both together, and inseparable, but each in its own order, the former the root or foundation of the latter.       

The imputed righteousness of another, Jesus Christ, is the only saving hope for fallen sinners.  Of course the world in its “wisdom”  hates and rejects this truth.  But for the believer it is a tree of life.