8. Faith comes to us through hearing, when we believe that the teachings divinely revealed to us are true and when we trust in God’s promises. Faith is the beginning of human salvation, and the foundation and root of all justification. Without faith, it is impossible to please God and to come into the company of his children. Our justification takes place through faith, hope, and goodwill. Unless hope and goodwill are added to faith, it is dead rather than living and does not unite us to Christ.

We need to cooperate in this process. We have the power to move either closer to or farther away from [Christ]; if we did not, nothing could be granted to us, because we would be like a lifeless body.

Our openness to being justified renews us; this renewal takes place as Christ’s merit is applied to us, as the result of our own cooperation. Therefore we get credit for the works that we do; yet because they are done as a result of grace and through the Holy Spirit, and because Christ alone has earned merit, the rewards God gives us are his own gifts within us. Therefore none of us can attribute anything of merit to ourselves.

65. Brief Analysis

The only kind of salvation people believe in today is an instantaneous salvation as a result of direct mercy. They say that a verbal statement of faith alone and a confidence expressed by the lungs takes care of everything we need in the way of salvation. There is no need for goodwill (even though in actuality goodwill is what allows verbal faith to become real faith, and allows confidence expressed by the lungs to become confidence felt at heart). If you remove the idea of a cooperation that we undertake seemingly on our own through our exercise of goodwill, then this cooperation that spontaneously and automatically follows faith becomes “a passive activity,” which is a meaningless expression. What more, then, would we need than the following brief, direct statement: “Save me, O God, for the sake of the suffering of your Son. He washed away my sins with his own blood and is bringing me as a pure, just, and holy person before your throne”? If we had not made a statement like this before, even in our final hour before dying it would serve to initiate our justification.

Section 340 in the work Divine Providence, published in Amsterdam in 1764, shows, however, that the concept of instantaneous salvation by direct mercy is the flying fiery serpent in the church today, that it is destroying the religion, that it gives people an unwarranted feeling of security, and that it blames God for our damnation.