Travels prevented a post on Machen Day (July 28), which also solved the dilemma of whether to post on the Lord’s Day (July 28). But in honor of Machen’s birth, a selection from What is Faith? (1925):
The gospel does not abrogate God’s law, but it makes men love it with all their hearts.
How is it with us? The law of God stands over us; we have offended against it in thought, word and deed; its. majestic “letter” pronounces a sentence of death against our sin. Shall we obtain a specious security by ignoring God’s law, and by taking refuge in an easier law of our own devising? Or shall the Lord Jesus, as He is offered to us in the gospel, wipe out the sentence of condemnation that was against us, and shall the Holy Spirit write God’s law in our heart, and make us doers of the law and not hearers only? So and only so will the great text be applied to us: “The letter killeth, but the Spirit giveth life.”
The alternative that underlies this verse, then, and that becomes explicit in Galatians also, is not an alternative between an external or ceremonial religion and what men would now call (by a misuse of the New Testament word) a “spiritual” religion, important though that alternative no doubt is; but it is an alternative between a religion of merit and a religion of grace. The Epistle to the Galatians is directed just as much against the modern notion of “salvation by character” or salvation by “making Christ Master” in the life or salvation by a mere attempt to put into practice “the
principles of Jesus,” as it is directed against the Jewish ceremonialists of long ago: for what the Apostle is concerned to deny is any intrusion of human merit into-the work by which salvation is obtained. That work, according to the Epistle to the Galatians and according to the whole New Testament, is the work of God and of God alone.At this point appears the full poignancy of the great Epistle with which we have been dealing. Paul is not merely arguing that a man is justified by faith so much no doubt his opponents, the Judaizers, admitted but he is arguing that a man is justified by faith alone. What the Judaizers said was not that a man is justified by works; but that he is justified by faith and works exactly the thing that is being taught by the Roman Catholic Church today. No doubt they admitted that it was necessary for a man to have faith in. Christ in order, to be saved: but they held that it was also necessary for him to keep the law the best he could; salvation, according to them, was not by faith alone and not by works alone but by faith and works together. A man’s obedience to the law of God, they held, was not, indeed, sufficient for salvation; but it was necessary; and it became sufficient when it was supplemented by Christ.
Against this compromising solution of the problem, the Apostle insists upon a sharp alternative: a man may be saved by works (if he keeps the law perfectly), or he may be saved by faith; but he cannot possibly be f’saved by faith and works together. Christ, according to Paul, will do everything or nothing; if righteousness is in slightest measure obtained by our obedience to the law, then Christ died in vain; if we trust in slightest measure in our own good works, then we have turned away from grace and Christ profiteth us nothing. (192-93)
Old Life 