ON PERSONAL ELECTION AND THE INVITATIONS OF THE GOSPEL. (Continued from Vol. 1, page 322.) HAVING endeavoured to shew in two former papers, that personal election, and the invitations of the gospel to all men, are facts alike stated in the Scriptures, and as all Scriptures given by inspiration of God, is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, and instruction in righteousness; that the man of God may be perfect, thoroughly furnished unto all good works; let us now inquire what profit may be derived from the facts above stated. The doctrine of personal election is one of the most profitable in Scripture, when rightly understood, but one of the most unprofitable and pernicious when misapprehended. It has, however, been most unhappily misunderstood, and most falsely represented. In this gracious deed the sovereign God of love has been held up to view as a respecter of persons,-as a spiritual tyrant,-as a merciless Moloch,-and as making men to damn them; and many such hard things have been said of the God of all grace, on this subject, as are sufficient to make the ears of all who hear them tingle. But personal election, rightly understood, is the very reverse of all this; and, next to the gift of Christ himself, is the highest proof that the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ delights in mercy; for, without election, there would not have been a single soul saved. The amount of election is this:-That God, in his sovereign grace, has resolved to save an innumerable multitude, out of every nation, and kindred, and people and tongue, who would all have, without exception, otherwise perished. The election of grace is, therefore, a deed of sovereign love, of the same nature which moved God to send his Son to save sinners; but such is the blindness of mind, the hardness of heart, the love of sin, and the hatred of holiness, in every sinner, that although the death of Christ has opened the door of mercy to all, yet none of them, left to themselves, will come for salvation, though invited and entreated. They will still remain as before, far from God, far from righteousness, without God, without Christ, and without hope in the world, unless God, in his sovereign mercy, make them willing to come, by working in them both to will and to do of his own good pleasure, and the work of faith with power. Equity and sovereignty, though perfectly distinct, are frequently confounded. The legitimate prerogative of sovereignty is the privilege of conferring favours; not the power of committing injustice. In the one case, the king is limited by law, and sits as a judge, when he is bound to dispense equal justice to all, without respect of persons. In the other case, he reigns as a sovereign, conferring his favours on whom he will. As a judge, God has no respect of persons; but if, as a sovereign, he be chargeable with having respect of persons, because he confers more favours on one person than on another, he is the greatest respecter of persons in the universe, for all the inequalities in providence and grace are the results of the exercise of his sovereignty. În every free country like our own, the king has, by the constitution, granted him a sovereign power, by which he can, without assigning reasons, commute or remit the penalty of a capital crime. In doing so to any one or more malefactors, who are all equally and righteously condemned to die, he is seldom blamed, but frequently praised for his clemency; and shall the righteous Ruler of the universe be blamed for the exercise of a power which we ourselves put into the hands of an earthly king? Sovereignty is as essential to God as any other attribute of his nature; and every attempt to rob him of this is a puny endeavour to wrest from his omnipotent hand the reins of his gracious government, and, by dethroning him, put ourselves in his place. The exercise of this sovereignty in the election of grace, is therefore an infallible proof of his delight in mercy, and is a glorious manifestation of his character as the God of love. Why God did not choose all the children of men, as vessels of his mercy, is among the arcana of things unrevealed, and belong to him, not to us. Where God has had no tongue to speak, we should have no ear to hear. Ratiocination on such subjects, step by step, uniformly leads us back to the origin of evil, where we always feel we can get no farther, and then we come to a dead stand. We return again and again to the same fruitless enquiries, and, after running the same round of reasoning, we always reach the same impassable point, with the same mortifying results. He who could have prevented the entrance of evil into his holy universe, can alone inform us why he permitted it; but he has not done so. He who could have taken on himself the nature of fallen angels, and not that of fallen men, can alone inform us why he did not do so: but he has not told us; and he who could have saved all the children of men as well as the election of grace, can alone tell us why he has not done so; but on this he is silent. Revelation was not given to inform us how or why evil was permitted to enter against the will of the holy and omnipotent Ruler of the universe, but to tell us how we may be delivered from it by Jesus Christ, who, by his once offering for sin, has abolished death, and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel. Let us keep these great facts of the gospel close to our eye, and we shall the more easily lose sight of all our theological difficulties, which may arise either out of the limitation of our faculties, or the limitation of our revelation, or from both. God can fully comprehend, and perfectly reconcile them all with each other, but we are not God, but men; and blinded, fallen, sinful men; though, in the pride of our hearts, and under the fascinating influence of the first fatal temptation, we may affect to be as gods. There are many things which we now admit, and cannot but admit if we admit the Bible to be a divine revelation, but which things we can neither comprehend nor reconcile, for we know but in part. The period may arrive in eternity, or it may not, when we shall be able to reconcile the permitted entrance of sin and misery, with the unsullied holiness and boundless benevolence of the divine character, when we may be able to reconcile God's foreknowledge with man's responsibility, and God's eternal decrees with man's free agency; and when we may be able to reconcile God's electing love and special grace, with the honesty of his gospel invitations, and his declared willingness that all men should be saved. Here is a trinity in moral science as much beyond our present comprehensions as is the Trinity of the Godhead in Christian theology, and those who never felt their difficulties here, never studied them. Our duty is to believe implicitly whatever God reveals, and to leave him in peaceful possession of his own secrets, waiting the additional light which eternity may throw on subjects unrevealed in time. In a word,-God has revealed the glorious fact, and, to himself, the glorifying fact, that, to the praise of the glory of his grace, he has chosen to salvation a countless number, who would otherwise have eternally perished; but he has not revealed why he did not save all. He has, however, revealed it as his will с that all men should be saved, and come to a knowledge of the truth. For this purpose he invites all men to come for salvation, through the atonement of his Son, in which he is perfectly satisfied as a sacrifice for sin, and he asks for nothing more. Every man, then, who hears the gospel, is required to believe; every man who believes it shall be saved; and every man who is saved was chosen to this salvation from the beginning, that he might be holy and without blame before God in love. (To be continned.) OBSERVATIONS ON HEB. ix. 26-28. [In our last volume, page 297, we gave an illustration of these verses; the following paper, however, gives a different view of the subject in some very important particulars; and on that ground we present it to our readers, leaving them to form their own judg ment.-ED.] WHAT an important task does the Scripture expositor impose upon himself, and what vast consequences attend the right and true exposition of the divine mind and purpose contained in the writings of truth! The Bible as we have it, being a translation from other languages than our own, necessarily differs from it in its manner of expressing thoughts and truths, which are thus made to receive a kind of mould and form different to what we are accustomed to in these days. When Scripture translators and Scripture expositors have not carefully recognized the internal truth to be expressed, as well as the cast of that expression in which that truth is moulded, it is impossible to convey to another mind the veri-semblance of the divine mind revealed in the Scriptures. And doubtless this is one of many causes which now exist for the same truth being so differently understood by spiritually enlightened minds. And for as much as it is a subtile, and not easily seen cause, is often entirely overlooked. Thus for example,-It was to Jews that the oracles of God were anciently committed. We know that everything that constituted these men Jews was peculiar in its character and form; hence the revelations made to them by the divine oracles, to be understood by them in the degree intended, were necessarily cast in the same peculiar mould in which they themselves had been cast. So that, as truly to understand the Scriptures, we must not only understand the words of inspiration, but we must have our minds embued with the thoughts, and these in the forms in which they were originally presented to the Jewish mind: while, being Gentile Christians, we must realize in the mind, the thoughts, feelings, position, expectations, no less than the idomatic structure of the Jews. In short we must in all things put ourselves as much as possible in the place of the ancient Jews, before we can fully understand the Scriptures of truth. Besides being sufficiently supplied with educational requirements, and with the unction from on high, the expositor must be free from prejudice, that bane of truth; he must have no regard to the teachings of sects, or the dogmas of party, he must look alone for truth, give it in its own thoughts, and only adorned with its own dress. These thoughts have been suggested by contemplating the almost innumerable variety of opinions which exist amongst intelligent Christians upon any given part of the divine will; shaping as they must do their general senti - ments and opinions upon religious subjects, and will not form an inappropriate introduction to the consideration of a passage of Scripture which, like others, has been most variously understood. Heb. ix. 27, 28:- What is the particular topic of discourse of which these words form a part? A reference to the preceding context will shew that the Apostle is contrasting the typical priesthood of Aaron with the antitypical priesthood of Christ, the worldly, fleshly priesthood, with the priesthood of Melchizedec, the order of the first born. And not only of the priesthood, but he shows that all the services and implements of the Jerusalem temple, which, serving for the time then present, were but figures of the true tabernacle, which the Lord pitched, and not man, and were then ready to vanish away, and give place to that antitypical worship introduced by the Melchizedeo high priest. It was to illustrate this general design that the Apostle introduced the verses under consideration; and the elucidation of them must therefore be such as will subserve this general object, else it will be foreign to the subject. We will try to reach its meaning. In verse 27, of the common version of our Bible, the article is not prefixed to "men," as the sense of the passage, as well as the original text requires :"And as it is appointed unto the men once to die," &c., referring to verse 25 for the precise connection, where in some versions, for the words, "the high priest entereth," &c., we have "the high priests enter," implying the succession of high priests entering once every year into the holiest of all. If this verbal correction should be objected to, it will not alter the meaning of the passage though it be abandoned altogether, as "a succession of persons is often expressed by a collective singular," and, as it is clear from the whole scope and reasoning of the Apostle, that the reference is not made to men generally, as has sometimes been said, but definitely to the men who were appointed to enter into the holy place with the blood of others, even the high priests. Nor can it be possible that the "men" of the text are mankind generally, for their appointment unto death (if such an appointment exists,) will not in any degree supply the type of Christ's death once. There is no similarity, or likeness to be found, yet such a likeness is necessary to constitute the Apostle's typical parallel, for "so Christ was once offered," &c. But this will be more apparent if we consider that to which "the men" were appointed, viz., "to die once." With the priests this death was once every year. But they did not die in the ordinary sense till after a number of years, as the history of individual high priests in the Scriptures show. It is evident therefore that it was not death in the common sense that these men were subjected to. Nor so far as the object of the Apostle is required, did they die as men at all, but as priests; therefore their death was cere. monial, and hence typical. "The priests went always into the first tabernacle accomplishing the service of God, but into the second went the high priest alone, once every year, not without blood." This annual sacrifice completed the whole round of sacrifices and offerings, and, as the functions of the high priest were fulfilled and complete, he died, as symbolised by the victim slain, and his entering into "the holiest of all" to offer for his own sins, and for the errors of the people, and where he remained until, by the acceptance of his sacrifice, he was commissioned to return to the people, who stood without, and "bless them in the name of the Lord." This was the benediction or completing service of the Aaronic worship. The high priest became then ceremonially dead. In Lev. ix. 15-24, we have the prescribed order of the worship of Israel, for ordinary occasions, i.e., on the day of atonement, which let us carry in the mind along with us. Aaron, after having offered the various offerings, at the end, or conclusion, lifted up his hand toward the people, and blessed them, and then came down from offering the sin offering, &c.; and Moses and Aaron having gone into the tabernacle of the congregation "came out and blessed the people, and the glory of the Lord appeared unto all the people. And there came a fire out from before the Lord, and consumed upon the altar, the burnt offering and the fat, which, when all the people saw, they shouted, and fell on their faces." This shout by the people being clearly occasioned by the visible manifestation given them that God had accepted their sacrifices, and thus their sins were blotted out, and this fact indicated the death, or cessation of the high priest's work. The same order was observed on extraordinary occasions, as the bringing of the ark of God into the city of David, 1 Chron. xvi. 1-2; the dedication of the temple, 2 Chron. v. 13, to chap. vi. 3 to 11. It will be noticed in these and other passages that, after the animals had been slain without the camp (Heb. xiii. 11,) for the whole congregation of Israel, the blood was taken in within the veil, by the high priest in his sacred vestments, bearing the names of the children of Israel in the breast plate of judgment upon his heart in the holy place, (Exod. xxviii. 29); after having offered this blood on the altar, before God, after tarrying till it was consumed, he returned to bless the people in the name of the Lord. All this corresponds exactly with the offering made by Jesus the great high priest, who was not after the order of Aaron, but after the order of Melchizedec, when he offered up himself to God a sacrifice for the sins of his people, as fully shown by the Apostle, Heb. vi. 19. It may be remarked that the same order of worship is to be found, Luke i. 8 to 22; and its antitypical parallel, Acts i. 9. But to return to the death of "the men.”—These men ministered before the Lord year after year during a long lifetime. It was therefore impossible to typify the one death of Christ, by them any more than by other men, which is not at all, unless there were some point in the services at which it could be said it was finished, completed, and in consequence of which the priests were to die, or cease to offer, or to make an end of offering, according to their appointment, Lev. xvi. 3-4; and what more fitting point than that at which their sins are cancelled, the worshipper purged, and the purpose of the sacrifice gained? And this is the point of parallel in the verses under consideration, and forms a most fitting type of the death of our high priest once for all. "As it is appointed unto the high priests once (at the end of the services on the great day of atonement), to die (ceremonially), and after this the judgment, &c. What was this judgment? Judgment is too frequently used in the restricted sense of condemnation, whereas its proper signification is the expression of a verdict, or opinion. And this is the sense in the passage under consideration. Judgment in this sense may be either acquittal, or condemnation. To the worshippers who "waited praying without at the time of incense," it was evidently the former, for they "shouted and fell on their faces" when they heard the judgments of God pronounced, (Lev. ix. 24.) For, in expressing this judgment, or verdict, it is said (1 Chron. xvi. 2), after David "had made an end of offering he blessed the people in the name of the Lord." So also Solomon (2 Chron. vi. 3) "blessed the whole congregation of Israel." This was the judgment which the acceptance of the sacrifice, and |