Dec 7, 2011

Great Quotes from The Truth of the Cross

2 Min Read

I recently had the opportunity to read through almost all of the books of R.C. Sproul. Along the way I built a collection of some of the best quotes from each one of them. Here are several of the best from The Truth of the Cross.


If anything has been lost from our culture, it is the idea that human beings are privately, personally, individually, ultimately, inexorably accountable to God for their lives.


The prevailing doctrine of justification today is not justification by faith alone. It’s not even justification by good works or by a combination of faith and works. The prevailing notion of justification in Western culture today is justification by death. It’s assumed that all one has to do to be received into the everlasting arms of God is to die.


There are three distinct ways in which human sin is described and communicated biblically—it is called a debt, it is called a state of enmity, and it is called a crime. With these descriptions, the Bible helps us see our sin for the terrible thing it is.


One of the things I’m going to have to give account for on judgment day is the way in which I have wasted my mind in the pursuit of the knowledge of God. How many times have I been too lazy or slothful to apply myself to the fullest possible measure to know God? I have not loved God with all of my mind. If I loved God with all of my mind, there’d never be an impure thought in my head. But that’s not the way my head works.


The point of the Gospel is that imputation is real—God really laid our sins on Christ and really transferred the righteousness of Christ to us. We really possess the righteousness of Jesus Christ by imputation. He is our Savior, not merely because He died, but because He lived a sinless life before He died, as only the Son of God could do.


I wonder whether Jesus was even aware of the nails and the thorns. He was overwhelmed by the outer darkness. On the cross, He was in hell, totally bereft of the grace and the presence of God, utterly separated from all blessedness of the Father. He became a curse for us so that we one day will be able to see the face of God. God turned His back on His Son so that the light of His countenance will fall on us. It’s no wonder Jesus screamed from the depths of His soul.


Some people react against the doctrine of limited atonement because it appears to take away from the greatness of the work of Christ. In reality, it’s the Arminian position that diminishes and devalues the full impact and power of the atonement. The point Calvinists stress is that Christ accomplished what He set out to accomplish, the job the Father had designed for Him to do. God’s sovereign will is not at the whim and mercy of our person and individual responses to it.