Michael

“I don’t know if I’ve written about this and I haven’t talked about this much, so in a way what I’m about to say is self-condemnatory, but I think it is one of the greatest tragedies of the American evangelical church—and I think in large measure the British evangelical church—that in our focus on how to get saved, we completely lost the sense of what it meant not to be saved, but to be created. And so many Christians grew up with very little appreciation of the idea that we are made as the image of God. And so long as that was true, I think—and I’m not saying it was inevitable—but I think that made it far more likely that the law of God would be detached from the person of God. And then in understanding the whole of Scripture, the imperatives of the gospel would be detached from the indicatives of the gospel.

The truest Reformed faith did not see the teaching of Scripture in the somewhat narrower spectrum of—for example, Martin Luther, or that stage of the reformation. Luther says things are either law or they’re gospel... But it seems to me that in the best Reformed tradition, the story of the Bible is not law and gospel; the story of the Bible is actually—the way I would put it, and I could demonstrate this from the literature—is the grace of creation as the image of God. Now, we use the word grace and we’ve almost defined it in terms of sin. The Reformed fathers didn’t define it in terms of sin. They defined it in terms of God—his graciousness—so that creation is an act of condescension—his relationship with Adam and Eve, making them as his image. We are non-existence that he brings into existence, and he didn’t need to bring them into existence...

The creation of man and woman as the image of God and all that that means is an act of infinite grace. It’s nothingness being brought into creation to be a miniature likeness of God. And so the whole story is one of graciousness and promise implied in the statements that are made—now, that’s another long story. And therefore, in order that the man and the woman would grow and would grow in fulfilling their commission to, as I say, garden the whole earth. They’re given this little garden and they’re to extend it to the end of the earth, which for all I know, might have taken millennia of their family, but probably speedier development of technology than there has actually been. All of this sets our existence within the context of the person of God, the generosity of God, the integrity of God. But then comes the fall. The restoration, therefore... is always a means of answering the question, How does God restore us to what we were originally created to be and then take us on to what we were ultimately destined to be?”
― Sinclair B. Ferguson

“As Jesus was law incarnate, so he was love incarnate, and following his way of self-giving is holiness in its purest and most perfect expression. Hard, harsh, cold-hearted holiness is a contradiction in terms... Without love anything purporting to be holiness is in God's is nothing. In other words, it is a hollow sham.”
― J.I. Packer, Keep in Step with the Spirit: Finding Fullness in Our Walk with God

“Perhaps the strongest statement we can make about the resurrection in this book about the crucifixion is that if Jesus had not been raised from the dead, we would never have heard of him.”
― Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ

“The antinomian principle, that it is needless for a man perfectly justified by faith to endeavor to keep the law and do good works, is a glaring evidence that legality is so ingrained in man's corrupt nature that until a man truly come to Christ by faith, the legal disposition will still be reigning in him. Let him turn himself into what shape or be of what principles he will in religion though he run into antinomianism; he will carry along with him his legal spirit which will always be a slavish and unholy spirit.”
― Thomas Boston, The Marrow of Modern Divinity