C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Redemption
Condemned into everlasting redemption for this.
Welcome the hour that may put me where a man cannot take a dollar in exchange for a soul!
Underneath all the arches of Scripture history, throughout the whole grand temple of the Scriptures, these two voices ever echo, man is ruined, man is redeemed.
O, if there be any kind of life most sad, and deepest in the scale of pity, it is the dry, cold impotence of one, who has honestly set to the work of his own self-redemption.
We are made partakers of the redemption purchased by Christ, by the effectual application of it to us by His Holy Spirit.
Christ is redemption only as He actually redeems and delivers our nature from sin. If He is not the law and spring of a new spirit of life, He is nothing. “As many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God,”—as many, no more.
Look, therefore, which way we will, whether at the direct Scriptural statements of death as the penalty of sin, or at the agony of the cross as a means of rescue, or at the joy of the angels of God over a rescue; we see from either that it must be a work of infinite and eternal consequence—the work of redemption.
Is it not an amazing thing, that men shall attempt to investigate the mystery of the redemption, when, at the same time that it is propounded to us as an article of faith solely, we are told that “the very angels have desired to pry into it in vain”?
By Christ’s purchasing redemption, two things are intended, His satisfaction and His merit. All is done by the price that Christ lays down, which does two things: it pays our debt, and so it satisfies; by its intrinsic value, and by the agreement between the Father and the Son it procures our title, and so it merits. The satisfaction of Christ is to free us from misery, and the merit of Christ is to purchase happiness for us.
Upon the present theological computation, ten souls must be lost for one that is saved. At which rate of reckoning, heaven can raise but its cohorts while hell commands its legions. From which sad account it would appear, that, though our Saviour had conquered death by the resurrection, he had not yet been able to overcome sin by the redemption.
As God carries on the work of converting the souls of fallen men through all ages, so He goes on to justify them, to blot out all their sins, and to accept them as righteous in His sight through the righteousness of Christ. He goes on to adopt and receive them from being the children of Satan to be His own children, to carry on the work of His grace which He has begun in them, to comfort them with the consolations of His Spirit, and to bestow upon them, when their bodies die, that eternal glory which is the fruit of Christ’s purchase.