A Few Other Jacobs Gems...

[Said to self: Man, this Jacobs is one insightful Lutheran! Why not share with others the fruit of today's study? And so...]

God called other beings into existence in order to communicate to them His own goodness and happiness. In communicating these gifts, He manifests His glory to the highest degree. (43)

The Son of God was, therefore, the model according to which man was created. (48)

Happy and holy as man was when created, there were within him possibilites for the infinite development of all that the divine image included. The reflection of the Infinite within the finite implied that the finite should ever approach more nearly to the perfection of the Infinite. The image of God in Adam was only the feeblest germ of what was to proceed from it. (49)

If angels or men ultimately attain a state of perfection, in which they are removed from the possibility of doing otherwise, or being otherwise than God desires, such impeccability is not an original endowment, but is the fruit and reward of effort and struggle. The holiness in which men and angels were created was an undeveloped holiness, viz., a potential, but not an absolute impeccability. (54)

The sum total of humanity was in the first pair. By their obedience, the race would have risen above the possibility of a fall. By their disobedience, the whole race fell with them into the state of sin. (55)

The union of God with man was man's life, as first created; the sunderance of God from man by man's apostasy and sin was his death. For what the soul is to the body, that God is to the soul. Man had turned from God, and involuntarily lost God, and could not regain Him, until God would Himself re-enter into a communion of life and love with man. (56)

Redemption is no afterthoguht in God's mind, simply for the purpose of counteracting and thwarting what He either could not or would not prevent. (64)

The world was created, in order that, in Redemption, it might be the theatre for the display of God's love. (65)

What is lost in Adam is far more than regained in Christ. (65)

...man was created, in order, by the appropriation of Redemption, through a long continued conflict with sin, to attain among God's countless creatures and highest intelligences, the very next place to the throne of God Himself....to share eternally the blessedness and glory of God's own nature. (65)

While man is helpless to deliver himself, or to prepare himself for divine grace, or even to respond to this grace as it approaches him, and thus his acceptance of God's grace comes from new powers which grace has brought, nevertheless, the freedom of the will is preserved in man's ability to resist God's grace. All man's help must thus come from God; all his ruin comes from himself. (67)

Every child is born a child of wrath and a child of grace. It is a child of wrath, since by inheritance its state is that of spiritual death. It is a child of grace, in so far as it has been comprised in the Scheme of Redemption, and the love and mercy of God that devised that scheme go forth in efforts for the application to it of this Redemption. It remains a child of wrath so far as the efforts of divine grace to aid it are defeated by the perverse resistance of its will. It become a child of grace, not only potentially, but in reality, when divine grace overcomes the natural resistance of its will, and it submits to God; the state of regeneration succeeding that of spiritual death. (67,68)