SO eager is the Apostle that his readers shall take off from his page at least this assurance, that what they are in Christ Jesus and all that they shall become they owe to God and to God alone. It was He, he tells us, who made Christ, the sinless One, to be sin for us; it was He who reconciled us with Himself through Christ; it is of Him that we are new creatures in Christ. In the whole saving process we supply nothing but the sinners to be saved, and the consequent activities induced in us by the saving process, as, in accordance with our nature, we move as we are moved upon. It surely belongs to the most astonishing curiosities of exposition, then, that in the face of this abounding emphasis upon the sole efficiency of God in salvation, there should be found those who insist that, according to Paul’s teaching, the decisive act in salvation is supplied by an action of the human will. See, we are told, the Apostle in this very context beseeches his readers not to permit the grace of God to come to them in vain, but to be reconciled to God. Does not this imply that all that God has done lies without us, and it belongs to us, in our sovereign freedom, to give it validity each for his own person? We need not pause to point out that the inference thus so confidently drawn is explicitly contradicted a score of times elsewhere by the Apostle, who consistently represents it as “of God” that men differ in their spiritual endowments; and declares that no one has the least advantage over another which he has not received from above, and therefore cannot glory in it as if it were of his own production—that, in a word, in the matter of spiritual standing, it is not of him that willeth nor of him that runneth, but of God that showeth mercy. Nor need we pause to point out that there is a great difference, which we dare not neglect in a matter like the present, between an exhortation to action in accordance with the really moving force, and exhortation to action designed to set this force in motion. When this same Apostle exhorts us to work out our own salvation with fear and trembling, “for it is God who is working in you both the willing and the doing for His good pleasure,” we certainly cannot infer that our salvation so hangs upon our own will that God’s ever-giving waits upon our act; the contrary is openly asserted—that our act rests rather on His ever-giving; it is He that works our very willing as well as our doing. Similarly it can scarcely be inferred from Paul’s exhortation to us “to be reconciled with God.” That reconciliation with God so depends on the unmoved action of our own free will that all of God’s action looking to our salvation must wait upon it. Apart from all this, it would seem to be enough to observe that no inference of this kind can set aside Paul’s explicit and emphatic ascription here of this very reconciliation to God. For it is precisely our reconciliation which Paul ascribes to God with what seems almost excessive energy of emphasis:—”All these things are of God, who it was that reconciled us with Himself through Jesus Christ.” “It was God who, in Christ, was reconciling the world with Himself.” When, immediately after this strong assertion of the divine production of reconciliation, he entreats his readers to be reconciled with God, the one most certain thing of all is that he does not mean to imply that their reconciliation is so in their own hands that the act of God waits upon their act. And this becomes the more evident when we observe that even in this exhortation itself the verb is thrown into the passive voice, and points therefore not to something which we are to do, but to something which we are to suffer. The exhortation, in other words, is not that we should “reconcile ourselves” to God, but that we should assume an attitude consonant with the reconciliation which God has wrought with respect to us. That is to say, we have a conception here which ranges perfectly with that other exhortation which we have already illustratively adduced: that we should work out our own salvation, knowing it is God who is working in us both the willing and the doing. It is an exhortation to consonant, not to determining activity.—Prof. Warfield, Princeton Theological Seminary. When mortals take up a religion of their own accord they generally lay it down again at their pleasure, and what begins in natural free-will invariably ends in disappointment or apostacy. But when the Holy Spirit takes hold of the sinner’s conscience by His powerful influence, He never leaves His work unfinished, for that which begins in free grace shall end in everlasting glory. The covenant, the promise and the honour of God, all stand pledged to perfect the work of grace when it is once begun.—Joseph Irons.