The Hope of our Salvation

“For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus.” 1 Timothy 2:5

That he is God, is the very foundation of his salvation; for it is his eternal Godhead that gives virtue, efficacy, and dignity to all that as man he did and suffered for his chosen people. If he were not God, God and man in one glorious Person, what hope would there be for our guilty souls? Could his blood atone for our sins, unless Deity gave it efficacy? Could his righteousness justify our persons, unless Deity imparted merit and value to all the doings and sufferings of his humanity? Could his loving heart sympathise with and deliver us, unless “as God over all,” he saw and knew all that passes within us, and had all power, as well as all compassion, to exert on our behalf?

We are continually in circumstances where no man can do us the least good, and where we cannot help or deliver ourselves; we are in snares, and cannot break them; we are in temptations, and cannot deliver ourselves out of them; we are in trouble, and cannot comfort ourselves; are wandering sheep, and cannot find the way back to the fold; we are continually roving after idols, and hewing out “broken cisterns,” and cannot return to “the fountain of living waters.” How suitable, then, and sweet it is, to those who are thus exercised, to see that there is a gracious Immanuel at the right hand of the Father, whose heart is filled with love, and whose bowels move with compassion; who has shed his own precious blood that they might live; who has wrought out a glorious righteousness, and “is able to save unto the uttermost all that come unto God by him.”

Joseph Charles Philpot (1802-1869)