Attributes of God by Charnock (Available from Amazon or free on the internet, here for example) - Continue Chapter 11 (A discourse upon the holiness of God) by reading up to the paragraph beginning 'Use 2. The second use is for comfort' This attribute frowns upon lapsed nature, but smiles in the restorations made by the gospel.'
Thus God's holiness informs us:
(i) how great and how frequent is the contempt of this eminent perfection in the Deity;
(ii) how great is our fall from God, and how distant we are from him;
(iii) that all unholiness is vile and opposite to the nature of God;
(iv) that sin cannot escape a due punishment;
(v) that there is a necessity of the satisfaction of the holiness of God by some sufficient mediator;
(vi) that there is no justification of a sinner by anything in himself;
(vii) that if holiness be a glorious perfection of the divine nature, then the deity of Christ might be argued from hence;
(viii) that God is fully fit for the government of the world;
(ix) that the Christian religion is of a divine extraction.
What grabbed me
Particularly this subpoint: 'The holiness of God is injured in charging our sin upon God. Nothing is more natural to men, than to seek excuses for their sin, and transfer it from themselves to the next at hand, and rather than fail, shift it upon God himself; and if they can bring God into a society with them in sin, they will hug themselves in a security that God cannot punish that guilt wherein he is a partner. Adam's children are not of a different disposition from Adam himself, who, after he was arraigned and brought to his trial, boggles not at flinging his dirt in the face of God, his Creator, and accuseth him as if he had given him the woman, not to be his help, but his ruin (Gen. iii. 12);' And the man said, The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat'. He never supplicates for pardon, nor seeks a remedy, but reflects his crime upon God: Had I been alone, as I was first created, I had not eaten; but the woman, whom I received as a special gift from thee, hath proved my tempter and my bane. When man could not be like God in knowledge, he endeavoured to make God like him in his crime; and when his ambition failed of equalizing himself with God, he did, with an insolence too common to corrupted nature, attempt, by the imputation of his sin, to equal the Divinity with himself.'
It is an awful thing to blame God for our sin. And the scary thing is we do it far too easily.
Conclude Chapter 11 (A discourse upon the holiness of God).
Now it's your turn
Please post your own notes and thoughts in the comments section below.
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