JUSTIFICATION

JUSTIFICATION

The MS. has come and I see the wisdom of your remarks. I am justified through Christ, and then I am in Christ. If my sins had not been borne by Christ, and if the man who had offended had not been judicially removed in the eye of God, He could not set me in the justification for which He was raised. Though it be only a clearing, yet it must be a clearing suited to God, and the clearance in which Christ is. My identity remains; once the responsible man under judgment, now clear of it all, justified by God, and I am in Christ. The blessed God approaches the convert in all the value of Christ, for He only can fully estimate how He gave Himself for us. We very gradually indeed enter into this estimate, or rather into the nature of it; but as we do, we deepen in the sense that God can meet us with a measure of acceptance that as yet we know but little of, and this increases as we come nearer to Him.

Have you seen a tract by ————? Poor man! he evidently does not know the grace of God beyond the earthly saint. He refers to the two goats (Leviticus 16), but never alludes to the bullock, which is the type of our acceptance. He neither sees how God has removed, on His own side, in ^[p. 161] the cross, to His infinite satisfaction, all the distance and offence incurred by man; nor does he see that God, being just, now compels the sinner to know His grace, and that He can bring him out of his misery and ruin into His own presence in the very acceptance of Christ. It distresses me to see such a departure from the gospel of the glory of Christ.