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| Men are Not Saved by Good Works, Nor by the Free Determination of Their Own Will, But by the Grace of God Through Faith.
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Chapter 30.—Men are Not
Saved by Good Works, Nor by the Free Determination of Their Own
Will, But by the Grace of God Through Faith.
But this part of the human race to
which God has promised pardon and a share in His eternal kingdom,
can they be restored through the merit of their own works? God
forbid. For what good work can a lost man perform, except so far as
he has been delivered from perdition? Can they do anything by the
free determination of their own will? Again I say, God forbid. For
it was by the evil use of his free-will that man destroyed both it
and himself. For, as a man who kills himself must, of course, be
alive when he kills himself, but after he has killed himself ceases
to live, and cannot restore himself to life; so, when man by his
own free-will sinned, then sin being victorious over him, the
freedom of his will was lost. “For of whom a man is overcome, of
the same is he brought in bondage.”1126
This is the judgment of the
Apostle Peter. And as it is certainly true, what kind of liberty, I
ask, can the bond-slave possess, except when it pleases him to sin?
For he is freely in bondage who does with pleasure the will of his
master. Accordingly, he who is the servant of sin is free to sin.
And hence he will not be free to do right, until, being freed from
sin, he shall begin to be the servant of righteousness. And this is
true liberty, for he has pleasure in the righteous deed; and it is
at the same time a holy bondage, for he is obedient to the will of
God. But whence comes this liberty to do right to the man who is in
bondage and sold under sin, except he be redeemed by Him who has
said, “If the Son shall make you free, ye shall be free
indeed?”1127
And before
this redemption is wrought in a man, when he is not yet free to do
what is right, how can he talk of the freedom of his will and his
good works, except he be inflated by that foolish pride of boasting
which the apostle restrains when he says, “By grace are ye saved,
through faith.”1128
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