Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 85:340 (Oct 1928)
Article: The Doctrine Of Justification By Faith And The Old Testament
Author: Gerrit H. Hospers

BSac 85:340 (Oct 1928) p. 435

The Doctrine Of Justification By Faith And The Old Testament

Gerrit H. Hospers

The Reformed Church has always believed that God has given but a single revelation, and that this, owing to His divine perfections, must necessarily be self-consistent. The record of this revelation is the Word of God, and it consists of the Old and New Testaments. How authoritative the Old Testament is appears from the fact that this Testament received the endorsement of the Savior and of His Apostles as inspired: the New Testament was then only coming into existence. All this being the inspired Word of God, it must follow that all of it is of one piece, of one mind: contradiction between any of its parts cannot obtain. There is indeed a development in the clearness of the matters revealed, but no contradiction in what there is. And we can find in the Old Testament the traces, some of them plain enough, of all the doctrines which in the New Testament have reached their highest expression. This certainly applies to the matters of sin and of salvation in which man is so vitally concerned and which weighed so heavily on the heart of God.

And indeed for this very purpose God gave His revelation to man in order to acquaint him with God’s character, with His will and with His acts as He designed to restore the broken relation caused by sin. There is only one way of salvation, and we must be prepared to find it in the Old Testament as well as in the New. Consistent thinkers have so seen it as appears from this passage in Calvin’s Institutes: “In the same passage Augustine, with great shrewdness, remarks, that from the beginning of the world the sons of promise, the divinely regenerated, who, through faith working by love obeyed the commandments, belonged to the New Testament; entertaining the hope not of carnal, earthly, temporal, but of spiritual, heavenly and eternal blessings; believing especially in a Mediator, by whom they doubted not both that the Spirit was ad-

BSac 85:340 (Oct 1928) p. 436

ministered to them, enabling them to do good, and pardon imparted as often as they sinned” (Inst. 11.11,10; p. 537).

I.

Since the days of the Reformation peculiar stress has always been laid on the doctrine of Justification by Faith. This is according to Scripture. The New Testament insists that it is not by works of righteousness which we have done, but that we are saved through the merits of our Savior, this received as a free gift, and the changed relation verified in good works. Hence good works are not the procuring cause of salvation but they are the natural and necessary result of the new life.

It is agreed that sin came in with the fall of man, and its consequences have been the ...