PetriFB
Advanced Member
Member # 4979
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posted
http://koti.phnet.fi/elohim/foolish_virgin3
Salvation is a gift. Firstly, that the salvation is a gift, indicates to us clearly, that this matter can not include any acts or conditions. For if we should pay later for a gift or to do acts to get it, so it wouldn’t be any more a question of the gift, but more of the merit. The gift must so receive as such or else it can't receive at all. There is not any intermediate form between these two matters.
Salvation is grace. In other words if salvation is even partly the result of man’s efforts, it is no longer a question of grace, but the way of the merits. We can be saved either by acts or by grace, but not simultaneously by both matters – these matters exclude always each other. Saving by grace is however to us only alternative, because we are so defective.
Even though the Bible very clearly teaches saving alone through faith, so some people may in any case contradict and say, that to salvation is required also acts. For they can say, that the acts are necessary to salvation, because the Bible so often speaks about the law and acts. In the same way they may in this context mention the letter of Jacob.
However, we must understand, that whenever the Bible speaks about acts, they are acts, which have been affected by faith, so that the mind and the will of man must first have been lightened by faith and after it come acts. For faith is never consequence of the acts, in other words the acts can't bear faith, but faith, which affects in the innermost of man, can bring about acts. Faith is thus always first, in other words faith is the foundation on which is built, or like a locomotive which pull coaches, which come automatically after the locomotive.
At the same time it, faith, is like a tree, which produces its own kinds of fruits. This tree, in other words justifying faith, can be also existing before fruits in other words acts, but if the tree however is of the right kind, it produces certainly at the right time also good fruits, because it belongs to its essence.
Posts: 162 | From: Finland | Registered: Aug 2005
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