Encouragement in Christ JESUS, "The LORD our righteousness!"
A wealthy and philanthropic individual visits Algiers and approaches a dungeon in which a wretched captive lies bound with chains and fetters, and strongly secured within walls and doors and bars. He proclaims aloud to the captive that he has brought gold sufficient for a ransom, on condition that the captive will liberate himself from his chains, burst open his prison doors and come forth. 'Alas,' exclaims the wretched man, 'your kindness does not reach my case. Unless your gold can effect my deliverance, it can be of no service to me. To offer it on such terms can do me no good.' Now man by nature is spiritually as unable to believe in Christ, as the Algerian captive is physically unable to break his chains and the prison doors; so that all this boasted sufficiency of the atonement is only an empty offer of salvation on certain terms and conditions; and such an atonement would be much too weak to meet the desperate case of a lost sinner. But how differe