Holiness of God

In every natural man there is an ignorance of the righteousness and holiness of God. I know that in man’s nature there is a knowledge that there is a God, and that this God is a righteous and a just God. The greatest heathens, by the mere light of nature, have arrived at some competent knowledge of this; but the exactness of this righteousness of God, never did any natural man know. They do not know the unspottedness of His righteousness, nor how unsufferable to Him the least impurity is

Would any bold sinners venture to present to God their rottenness and vileness, if they knew God’s righteousness? The righteousness of God is such an awful thing, that no natural man can understand it, but he must presently be confounded

Secondly, every natural man is ignorant of the strictness of the law of God; the severity of God’s law in forbidding every sin, and condemning every sinner, without any respect to any sin, or to any man who commits it. The law of God is an impartial rule of righteousness, that condemns every transgression; and it cannot do otherwise; it is the glory of the law so to do; its strictness makes it judge all sin; and its righteousness makes it judge all sinners; and therefore, when this righteousness of God’s law is once made know, it presently breaks all the confidence in the natural man. “I was alive with out the law once,” says Paul, Romans 7:9, “but when the commandment came, sin revived, and I died.”

How could the apostle say he was without the law? Even in his natural state, I believe Paul was better acquainted with the law at that time, than any here in our own city. Paul was one of the best taught Jews in all that country. He had the law in his mind, hands, and in his memory. He was exceeding zealous for it. He could say, “as touching the law, blameless.” But, --- he only thought so, and when the commandment “came” it made another discovery—it condemned all those things in him that he had never thought to be sin before.

R. Traill

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