The law is connatural to him; his domestic, his old acquaintance came into the world with him, and hath grown up with him from his infancy. It was implanted in his heart by nature, is his own reason; he can never shake it off or part with it. It is his familiar, his friend, that cleaves to him as the flesh to the bone; so that they who have not the law written cannot but show forth the work of the law, Rom. ii. 14, 15, and that because the law itself is inbred to them. And all the faculties of the soul are at peace with it, in subjection to it. It is the bond and liganent of their union, harmony, and correspondency among themselves, in all their moral actings. It gives life, order, motion to them all.

Now, the gospel, That comes to control this sentence of the law, and to relieve the sinner from it, is foreign to his nature, a strange thing to him, a thing he hath no acquaintance or familiarity with; it hath not been bred up with him; nor is there any thing in him to side with it, to make a party for it, or to plead in its behalf.
John Owen | Comments on Psalm 130:4 | Works of John Owen 6.389–390 (HT: Inwoo Lee).

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Post authored by:

• Inwoo Lee

  

  Inwoo Lee (BA, UCSD) earned his MA (Historical Theology) in 2020 from Westminster Seminary California and is author of “Righteous Before God: William Perkins’ Doctrine of Justification in Elizabethan England” (MA Thesis, Westminster Seminary California, 2020). He lives in the Great Seoul area, in South Korea with his wife Holly.

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