CHAPTER IV.

HOW CHRIST IS MADE USE OF FOR JUSTIFICATION AS A WAY.

What Christ hath done to purchase, procure, and bring about our justification before God, is mentioned already, viz.  That he stood in the room of sinners, engaging for them as their cautioner, undertaking, and at length paying down the ransom; becoming sin, or a sacrifice for sin, and a curse for them, and so laying down his life a ransom to satisfy divine justice; and this he hath made known in the gospel, calling sinners to an accepting of him as their only Mediator, and to a resting upon him for life and salvation; and withal, working up such, as belong to the election of grace, to an actual closing with him upon the conditions of the covenant, and to an accepting of him, believing in him, and resting upon him, as satisfied with, and acquiescing in that sovereign way of salvation and justification through a crucified Mediator.

Now, for such as would make use of Christ as the way to the Father in the point of justification, those things are requisite; to which we shall only premise this word of caution, That we judge not the want of these requisites a ground to exempt any, that heareth the gospel, from the obligation to believe and rest upon Christ as he is offered in the gospel.

1.  There must be a conviction of sin and misery.  A conviction of original guilt, whereby we are banished out of God’s presence and favour, and are in a state of enmity and death, are come short of the glory of God, Rom. iii. 23; becoming dead or under the sentence of death, through the offence of one, Rom. v. 15; being made sinners by one man’s disobedience, verse 19, and therefore under the reigning power of death, verse 17, and under that judgment that came upon all men to condemnation, verse 18.  And of original innate wickedness, whereby the heart is filled with enmity against God, and is a hater of him and all his ways, standing in full opposition to him and to his holy laws; loving to contradict and resist him in all his actings; despising and undervaluing all his condescensions of love; obstinately refusing his goodness and offers of mercy; and peremptorily persisting in rebellion and heart-opposition; not only not accepting his kindness and offers of mercy, but contemning them, trampling them under foot as embittered against him.  As also, there must be a conviction of our actual transgressions, whereby we have corrupted our ways yet more, run farther away from God, brought on more wrath upon our souls, according to that sentence of the law, “Cursed is everyone that abideth not in all things that are written in the law to do them,” Deut. xxvii. 26.  Gal. iii. 10.  What way this conviction is begun and carried on in the soul, and to what measure it must come, I cannot now stand to explain; only, in short, know, That upon whatever occasion it be begun, whether by a word carried home to the heart by the finger of God, or by some