"Salvation is of the LORD." -Jonah 2:9

"For the L ORD of hosts ha th purposed, and who shall disannul it ? and His hand is stretched out, and who can turn it back?" -I SAIAH 14:27 [KJV] To say that God is sovereign is to declare that He is the Almighty, the Possessor of all power in heaven and earth so that none can defeat His counsels, thwart His purpose, or resist His will. Whatever takes place in time is but the outworking of that which He has decreed in eternity. The sovereignty of the God of Scripture is absolute, irresistible and infinite! We insist that God does as He pleases, only as He pleases, always as He pleases! "But our God is in the heavens: He ha th done what so ever He ha th pleased" [ P SALM 115: 3] ! " Whatsoever the LORD pleased, that did He in heaven, and in earth, in the seas, and all deep places " [ P SALM 135:6 ] ! "And all the inhabitants of the earth are reputed as nothing: and He doeth according to His will in the army of heaven, ...

THE DOCTRINE OF PREDETERMINATION 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, who 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 in paradise; and "ye are as gods" says the same tempter to her apostate sons. One would be apt to think that a suggestion so demonstrably false and flattering, a suggestion the very reverse of what we feel to be our state, a suggestion alike contrary to 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 h...

"For H e hath made H im to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in H im." - II CORINTHIANS 5:21 [KJV] Our blessed Lord offered Himself for sin; that is, that He might put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself— "Who H is own self bare our sins in H is own body on the tree" [I PETER 2:24 ] . It was absolutely necessary either that the sinner should suffer in his own person, or in that of a substitute. Jesus became this Substitute; He stood virtually in the sinner's place, and endured in His holy body and soul the punishment due to Him; for He "was numbered with the transgressors." He thus, by the shedding of His most precious blood, opened in His sacred body a fountain for all sin and all uncleanness [ZECHARIAH 13:1 ] .   The cross was the place on which this sacrifice was offered; for as the blood of the slain lamb was poured out at the foot of the altar, sprinkled upon its horns, and b...