Tuesday, January 31, 2012

Puritan Wisdom

On Hebrews 1:8-9

“The danger that there is unto men unskilled and unexercised in the word of truth, when, without advice, assistance, or direction of others who are able to guide them and instruct their inquiry after the mind of God, they hastily embrace opinions which it may be some one text or other doth seemingly give countenance unto.  By this means do men run themselves into the forementioned danger every day, especially where any seducing spirit applies himself unto them with swelling words of vanity, boasting of some misunderstood word or other.  Thus have we seen multitudes led, by some general expression, in two or three particular places in Scripture, into an opinion about a general redemption of all mankind and every individual thereof; when, if they had been wise, and able to have searched those other scriptures innumerable setting forth the eternal love of God to his elect his purpose to save them by Jesus Christ, the natural and end of his oblation and ransom, and compared them with others, they would have understood the vanity of their hasty conceptions” – John Owen, Epistle to the Hebrews, volume 3, 188-189.

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