Quote 3789

Justification takes place by works and by faith—by the works of Christ and by our faith.

Justification Faith Alone

God loves all in some ways, and God loves some in all ways.

J.I. Packer

If hatred of sin is necessary to God, then penal justice is equally necessary because the hatred of sin is the constant will of punishing it.

Sin Justice

To know that God knows everything about me and yet loves me is indeed my ultimate consolation.

R.C. Sproul

Whether the Scriptures have a fourfold sense: literal, allegorical, anagogical and tropological. We deny against the papists.

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A godly man weeps sometimes out of the sense of God's love. Gold is the finest and most solid of all the metals, yet is soonest melted with the fire. Gracious hearts, which are golden hearts, are the soonest melted into tears by the fire of God's love.

Thomas Watson

Love is the only attribute which God hath acted to the utmost. We have never seen the utmost of His power, what God can do, but we have seen the utmost of His love: He hath found a ransom for lost souls (Job 33:24).

Matthew Mead

Those who are always contending and disputing, rather than seeking to edify in love, do harm to the church. The truth needs no wrangling, but a firm and humble assertion.

Truth Church

When the apostle says that 'faith is by hearing' (Rom. 10:17), he does indeed give us to understand that the ministry of the church ought to come in as the ordinary means of producing faith in adults. He does not teach, however, that the church is clearer and better known than the Scriptures.

Church Scripture

Good works are required as the means and way for possessing salvation. Even though they don't contribute anything to the acquisition of our salvation, they are necessary to the obtainment of it. No one can be saved without them.

Good Works Salvation

We do not deny that the church has many functions in relation to the Scriptures. She is: (1) the keeper of the oracles of God to whom they are committed and who preserves the authentic tables of the covenant of grace with the greatest fidelity, like a notary (Rom. 3:2); (2) the guide, to point out the Scriptures and lead us to them (Is. 30:21); (3) the defender, to vindicate and defend them by separating the genuine books from the spurious, in which sense she may be called the ground of the truth (1 Tim. 3:15*); (4) the herald who sets forth and promulgates them (2 Cor. 5:19; Rom. 10:16); (5) the interpreter inquiring into the unfolding of the true sense. But all these imply a ministerial only and not a magisterial power.

Church

The reading and contemplation of the Scriptures is enjoined upon men of all languages, therefore the translation of it into the native tongues is necessary. Since men speak different languages and are not all familiar with those two in which it was first written, it cannot be understood by them unless translated; it comes as the same thing to say nothing at all and to say what nobody can understand. But here it happens by the wonderful grace of God that the division of tongues (which formerly was the sign of a curse) becomes now the proof of a heavenly blessing. What was introduced to destroy Babel is now used to build up the mystical Zion.

Bible Translation

It was not necessary for the apostles to write a catechism so as to deliver their doctrines professedly. It was enough for them to hand down to us those doctrines in accordance with which all symbolical books and catechisms might be constructed. If they did not formally write a catechism, they did materially leave us either in the gospels or in the epistles those things by which we can be clearly taught the principles of religion (katécheisthai).

Catechism Systematic Theology

If theology takes some things from other systems, it is not as an inferior from superiors, but as an superior from inferiors (as a mistress freely using her handmaids). Theology does not so much take from others, as presupposes certain previously known things upon which it builds revelation.

Institutes of Elenctic Theology

Theology Theological Study

That God is the object of theology is evident both from the very name (theologias and theosebeias), and from Scripture which recognizes no other principal object.

Institutes of Elenctic Theology

Theology Theological Study

Thus that all things are discussed in theology either because they deal with God himself or have a relation (schesin) to him as the first principle and ultimate end.

Institutes of Elenctic Theology

Theology Theological Study

But the divine dayspring from on high is adored, Christ the Lord, who is our sun and shield; the sun of every blessing, asserting the glory of religion; the shield of the most safe protection, affording an invincible and inexpugnable guard to liberty.

Christ

There is tremendous relief in knowing his love to me is utterly realistic, based at every point on prior knowledge of the worst about me, so that no discovery can disillusion him about me.

J.I. Packer

It is the love of Christ, i. e. his love to us which passes knowledge. It is infinite; not only because it inheres in an infinite subject, but because the condescension and sufferings to which it led, and the blessings which it secures for its objects, are beyond our comprehension. This love of Christ, though it surpasses the power of our understanding to comprehend, is still a subject of experimental knowledge. We may know how excellent, how wonderful, how free, how disinterested, how long-suffering, how manifold and constant, it is, and that it is infinite. And this is the highest and most sanctifying of all knowledge. Those who thus know the love of Christ towards them, purify themselves even as he is pure.

Charles Hodge

The difficulty of passages does not imply a manifold intention of God, but some ambiguity in the words or weakness of our intellect.

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Scripture Interpretation

The question is not whether there is only one conception in the sense of the Scriptures, for we grant that often there are many conceptions of one and the same sense (but subordinate and answering to each other especially in the composite sense which embraces type and antitype). The question is whether there may be many diverse and non-subordinated senses of the same passage

That the Scriptures have only one sense is evident: (I) from the unity of truth—because truth is only one and simple and therefore cannot admit many senses without becoming uncertain and ambiguous; (2) from the unity of form— because there is only one essential form of any one thing (now the sense is the form of the Scriptures); (3) from the perspicuity of the Scriptures, which cannot allow various foreign and diverse senses.

We thus think that only one true and genuine sense belongs to the Scriptures. That sense may be twofold: either simple or compound. Simple and historical is that which contains the declaration of one thing without any other signification; as the precepts, the doctrines and the histories. And this again is twofold, either proper and grammatical or figurative and tropical; proper, arising from the proper words; tropical, from figurative words.

In regard to use, the moral is the end of the others, while the others are subservient to the moral.

A Clear and Simple Treatise on the Lord’s Supper