Christ JESUS - our Rock, Fortress & Deliverer


“Great is the LORD, and greatly to be praised; and His greatness is unsearchable. ...I will speak of the glorious honor of Thy majesty, and of Thy wondrous works. And men shall speak of the might of Thy terrible acts: and I will declare Thy greatness.” -145th Psalm


When I consider the absolute independency of God and the necessary total dependence of all created things on Him, their first cause, I cannot help standing astonished at the pride of impotent, degenerate man. He is so prone to consider himself as a being possessed of sovereign freedom and invested with a power of self-salvation, able, he imagines, to counteract the designs even of infinite wisdom and to defeat the agency of Omnipotence itself. “Ye shall be as gods,” said the tempter to Eve (Genesis 3:5); and “ye are as gods” says the same tempter to her apostate sons.

One would be apt to think that a suggestion so obviously false and flattering, a suggestion the very opposite of what we feel to be our state, a suggestion contrary to both Scripture and reason, to fact and experience, could never meet with the smallest degree of credit. And yet, because it so exactly coincides with the natural haughtiness of the human heart, men not only admit, but even relish the deception and are fondly inclined to believe that the father of lies does, in this instance at least, speak truth.

The Scripture doctrine of predetermination lays the axe to the very root of this delusion. It assures us that all things are of God; that all our times and all events are in His hand.
 

-Gospel report by preacher Augustus Toplady (1740–1778 A.D.)



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