to your thoughts tliat f should pardon all your iniquities : yoti think, because I am a righteous God, that I will sooner damn a thousand worlds of sinners than asperse my justice and bring my name under the least suspicion of un- righteousness ; and that thought is most true. I woixld indeed damn them over and over again rather than stain the honour of my justice, which is myself. But I declare, yea, again I declare it, and command you, and the greatest sinners on earth, upon pain of damnation, to believe it, that I can be just and yet the justifier of those simiers who believe in Jesus. O what boldness may the believer take at this news ! Methinks I see the soul that was even now pining to death with despair, and plotting upon hell in his thoughts as one already free among the dead, now revive, and grow young again at these tidings, as Jacob when he heard Joseph was ali\;e. What ! is justice (the only enemy I feared, an attribute in God's heart which my thoughts fled from,) now become my friend ? Then cheer up, my soul ! Who shall coiulenm, if God justifies? And how can God himself be against thee, when his very justice acquits thee ?
Section V. — But Satan will not thus leave the soul. Dost thou, poor creature, saith he, believe this strange divinity ? Is it just for God to pardon thee for the satisfaction that another makes? One man commit the murder, and another man that is innocent hanged for it, — call you this just? The law demands the person sinning to be delivered up to justice ; we find no mention of a surety to be allowed by the covenant: ' In the day that thou eatest, thou shalt die.' First, Faith teaches the sold to acquiesce in the declaration that God makes of his own mind. Now, though the threatening at first acquaints us with the sinner's name onl}', yet faith fiiids a gracious relaxation of threatening in the gospel covenant, where, to the believer's everlasting comfort, God promiseth. to accept the sinner's debt at Christ's hand, whom therefore we find arrested upon our action : Isa. liii. 5, ' He was wounded for oin- transgressions, he was bruised for oin- iniquities : the chastisenuMit of our peace Avas upon him ; and with his stripes we are healed.' Here is bottom strong enough for faith to rest on ; and why should we, shallow creatures, dispute gospel truths, to the con- f\ision of our own thoughts, by tliinking to fathom the bottomless depth of God's justice with the short cordage of our reason, Avhich Ave find confused by the meanest piece in Gud's work of creation ? Faith spies a devil in this beautiful serpent, reason, which for its smooth tongue Satan usethon mischievous designs to undermine, in particular this one nu)St sweet and fundamental truth of the gospel, I mean tlie satisfaction of Christ ; and therefore faith protests against the legality of reason's court. What, indeed 5 hath reason to call before her lower bench these mysteries of our faith which are purely supernatural, and so not imder her cognizance ? There are those in this proud age of ours who would wish to go to law, as I may say, with the highest gospel truths before this heathen judge. Reason; whereby they evacuate one great end of the gospel, which is to sacrifice our shallow reason on faith's altar, that so we might give the more signal honoiu- to the truth of God in believing the high mysteries of the gospel upon his naked report of them in the word. Secondly, The believer can clear God as just in receiving the debt at Christ's hand, from the near union which is between Christ and his people. The husband may lawfully be arrested for his wife's debt, because this union is voluntary, and it is to be supposed he did or ought to have considered what her estate was before he contracted so near a relation to -her. A suit may jnstly be commenced against a sin-ety, because it was his own act to engage for the debt. Christ was most free in engaging himself in the sinner's cause. He knew what a sad plight man's nature v/as in ; and he had an absolute freedom in his choice, whether he would leave man to perish, or lend his helping hand towards liis recoveiy ; he had also an absolute power of his own life, which no mere creature hath ; so that it being his own offer, upon his Father's call, to take our nature in marriage, thereby to interest himself in our debt, and for the payment of it to disburse and pour out his own precious blood to death. How dare proud flesh call the justice of God to the bar, and bring his righteousness in tliis transaction into question, for which God promised himself the highest expressions of love and thankfulness at his creature's hand ?
Secondly, 'Faith doth not only bear witness to the justice of God, that he may j^ardon a poor believing sinner, and yet be just, but it sliews that he may
ABOVE ALL, TAKING THE SHIELD OF l-AITH. 5Q3