Galatians 2:21 I do not frustrate the grace of God: for if righteousness come by the law, then Christ is dead in vain. While in the case of two mutinous seamen who, having long resisted every effort on the part of the captain to reform them, have at last, through their continued intemperance, fallen overboard, one grasps the rope thrown out by his master's mercy, and is saved, while the other rejects it, or depends on his own efforts and is drowned; has the former ground to boast that he is his own saviour? There was assuredly more mad wilfulness in his hardened companion who refused the proffered aid; but the recklessness of the latter imparts no merit to the former. While the one can ascribe his deliverence to nothing in himself "moving" his captain "thereunto," but solely to his master's compassion, the other had equal mercy shown to him, but his destruction was entirely his own doing. When the prodigal returned would his sense of the entire freeness of his father's goodness and of his own absolute demerit have been at all diminished by learning that another brother who had run the same course of riot as himself refused to cast himself into those arms by which he himself had been so warmly welcomed? Would the greater obduracy and in. fatuated perverseness of his brother extenuate, in the pardoned son's eyes, his own guilt, or lead him less to ascribe his own forgiveness to free unmerited grace? (Principal Forbes.) Parallel Verses KJV: I do not frustrate the grace of God: for if righteousness come by the law, then Christ is dead in vain. |
    |