I have been reading Calvin’s sermons on Job while being away. His staggering main point is extraordinary. After we have experienced God’s blessings, kindness, and many provisions, we grow accustomed to them. We expect them, and then, when difficulties, struggles or afflictions come, we accuse God, we question God as to why he has taken away what we previously enjoyed by grace. How vile we can be. All that we have received has come to us from our good God, and should he take it all away, it is because he is being good to us. It is that last point that is so crucial to grasp. This is what Job expressed. The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away, blessed be the name of the Lord. May we say the same no matter what comes our way.
Hell is Truth
Here is a marvelous quote from J C Ryle about the rich man in Hades.
“There is no infidelity, skepticism or unbelief after death. Hell is truth known too late.”
J. C. Ryle
Love For Neighbor
Calvin points out in his Institutes and commentaries this remarkable truth about praying for others.
“Therefore our prayers are bound always to seek to express themselves in intercession for all mankind, but especially for the whole Church, not only in this generation, but in generations to come. To make intercession of men is the most powerful and practical way in which we can express our love for them.”
Grace Without
This is one of the most important truths for a believer to grasp. Thomas Boston puts it like this: “The great stay of the believer is not the grace of God within him; that is a well whose streams sometimes run dry; but it is the grace of God without him, the grace that is in Jesus Christ, which is an ever-flowing fountain, to which the believer can never come amiss.”
(Thomas Boston, Human nature in its Four-Fold State, p. 312)
Prayer
Calvin says in his Institutes that “whatever we need and whatever we lack is in God and in our Lord Jesus Christ.”
(Inst. III. xx. 1, p. 850)
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