Counterfeit miracles / by Benjamin B. Warfield.

  • Warfield, Benjamin Breckinridge, 1851-1921.
Date:
1918
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Counterfeit miracles / by Benjamin B. Warfield. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    ing sin, and therefore indwelling sin to struggle against, continues through life. We have not yet obtained, and we are not yet made perfect. It is little that we continue also physically weak, liable to disease, and certain to die. For the removal of these physical evils, too, provision is made in the atonement. But the benefit here too is not received all at once. For us, as in the broader sphere of the world’s salvation, death is the last enemy to be conquered. Though the redeemed of the Lord and no longer under the dominion of sin, the results of sin remain with us: inwardly we are corrupt, outwardly we are the prey of weakness and dis¬ ease and death. We shall not escape from either in this life. Who is there that sins not? And who is there that does not suffer and die? But ultimately we are relieved from both. Of indwelling corruption when our sanctifica¬ tion is completed and, having been made holy, we depart, which is far better, to be with the Lord, the Holy One. Of outward weaknesses, at that redemption of the body which, while here below, we only, groaning and travailing in pain, wait for in its due season—that is, at the resurrection, when death shall be swallowed up in victory. This is the teach¬ ing of the Bible; and this is what Christ illustrated when He healed the sick in His ministry on earth that men might see, as in an object-lesson, that provision was made in His substitutionary work for the relief of every human ill. There is included in this, however, no promise that this relief is to be realized in its completeness all at once, or in this earthly life. Our Lord never permitted it for a mo¬ ment to be imagined that the salvation He brought was fundamentally for this life. His was emphatically an other- world religion. He constantly pointed to the beyond, and bade men find their true home, to set their hopes, and to place their aspirations, there. But, we are asked, are there not to be prelibations here? Is there no “intermediate work of healing and re¬ covery for the body” here as there is “a vast intermediate