Church of Christ. It seems incredible that such Jewish blind- ness should exist at this day in the Christian Church.
Others, even the great mass of nominal Christians, imagine that the attending of the house of God and the Lord's supper, together with common honesty, is sufficient to procure us acceptance with God ; or that, if a little more be wanting, the merits of Christ will turn the scale.
Others, who come nearer to the Judaizing Christians of old, maintain, that though our hope is certainly in the Lord Jesus Christ, yet some works of ours are necessary to make his merits effectual for our salvation. This is a principle so gene- rally avowed, that to controvert it would be called by many an unchristian heresy.
But (not to notice the two former opinions, which need only to be stated, and they will carry their own condemnation along with them,) this more specious principle is in reality founded on an ignorance of both Law and Gospel. For,
1. The moral law was not, any more than the ceremonial, given with a view to j ustify men : it was given rather to con- demn them, and, as a ministration of death, to shut them up that they might receive life by the Gospel s.
2. It is impossible that any man can be saved by his obe- dience to the law, because the law requires perfect obedience; which never has been, nor ever can be, rendered to it by fallen man h.
3. To blend our obedience to the law with the merits of Christ, is to establish a ground for boasting; which it is the main scope and tendency of the Gospel to destroy1.
4. Such an union of our works with the faith of Christ is declared to be an utter " subversion of men's souls k," and a superseding of all that Christ has done or suffered for us1.
Here then the question, whether as debated formerly, or as existing at this horn*, is fairly stated.]
We now come to, II. The apostolic decision of it —
And here we will view,
1. The Apostle Peter's judgment respecting it — [After the point had been long debated, St. Peter rose to give his opinion. His argument was extremely plain and sim- ple. He reminded the Church, that the Lord Jesus had given to him the keys of the Gospel kingdom, and had commissioned him to open that kingdom both to Jews and Gentiles. To the Jews he had opened it on the day of Pentecost ; and to the
e 2 Cor. iii. 7,9. Gal. iii. 21—24. h Gal. iii. 10.
> Rom. iii. 27. Eph, ii. 8, 9. u ver. 24.
1 Gal. v. 2 — 1.