Who Then Can Be Saved?

Jesus told his disciples that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God. The disciples cried out, “who then can be saved?” The response is no one! No man can work to earn his salvation. But the sweet blood of Jesus Christ is more efficacious than all the work that a man can do. Thomas Watson, in his Treatise on the Holy Eucharist, comments:

If we had offered up millions of holocausts and sacrifices, if we had wept rivers of tears, this could never have appeased an angry Deity. Only Christ’s blood ingratiates us into God’s favor and makes Him look upon us with a smiling aspect. When Christ died, the veil of the temple was rent. This was not without a mystery, to show that through Christ’s blood the veil of our sins is rent which interposed between God and us.

 

What Do You Think of This Book?

How much do we love the Word of God? How much do we conform our lives to the teaching of the Scriptures by faith? The Scriptures speak a lot of our attitude toward the Word of God and we must be faithful in loving the Scriptures as much as the Scriptures require of us!

O! How love I thy law, it is my meditation all the day!

How thankful we should be that we have the pure Word of God reliably translated into our Mother Tongue! To the multitudes of Jesus’ day Christ said, Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, but to us He can exclaim: Ye may read what God hath said. This is a wondrous and inestimable privilege- purchased by the blood shedding of many of our forefathers- that the Holy Scriptures are no longer confined to the learned and the abbot of the monastery. They are accessible to the unlearned and the poor, everywhere in simple English. But such a privilege carries with it, my reader, a solemn responsibility. What use are we making of this precious treasure? Do we search it daily as did the noble Bareans? Are we nourishing our souls thereby? Is our conduct governed by its teaching? Is not, double guilt lies at our door. -Arthur Pink

 

The Sufficiency of Scripture in Sola Scriptura

I have finished a paper that I have been working on for 4 months on the doctrine of Sola Scriptura. This doctrine is abused in many ways, and has been since the time of the Reformation when the doctrine was fully developed (I say ‘fully’ because the doctrine is in the Scriptures as early as the Torah.). There are three ways that it is historically abused:

• A doctrine cannot be required to be believed that is not EXPLICITLY found in Scripture.
• Nothing can be done without the warrant of Scripture. (We can’t sit in chairs during worship- where is that in the Bible?)
• Traditions and Creeds of the Church are not important because the Bible is all that matters.

This third abuse is discussed by Allister McGrath and he does a good job of showing that sola scriptura does not negate our traditions, as long as they are supported by the Word of God.

“A number of points bring out the importance of the sola scriptura principle. First, the Reformers insisted that the authority of the popes, counsels, and theologians is subordinate to that of Scripture. This is not necessarily to say that they have no authority… the Reformers allowed certain councils and theologians of the patristic era genuine authority in matters of doctrine. It is to say however, that such authority is derived from Scripture, and is thus subordinate to Scripture. Luther tends to defend the sola scriptura principle by emphasizing the confusion and incoherence of medieval theology, whereas Calvin and Melanchthon argue that the best catholic theology supports their view on the priority of Scripture.”

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Allister E. McGrath, Reformation Thought, (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1994), 145.