112. 3. Given that this is impossible, it is an imaginary faith to believe that Christ’s righteousness or merit is assigned to or transferred into us. In §110 above, the point was made that we are all assigned blame for the evil or else credit for the goodness to which we have devoted ourselves. This makes it clear that if this concept of “assigning” is taken to mean the transfer and incorporation of one person’s goodness into another person, it is imaginary thinking.

In our world rewards are in one sense transferable by people. A benefit that is owed to parents can be reassigned to their children; a favor that is owed to a client can be redirected to the client’s friends. The good qualities and actions that earned the reward, though, cannot be transferred into these other people’s souls; the reward can only outwardly be attached to people.

No such reassignment of benefit is possible in regard to people’s spiritual lives. Spiritual life has to be planted in us. As mentioned just above [§111], if it is not planted in us as a result of our living by the Lord’s commandments, we stay involved in the evil we were born with. Before spiritual life is planted in us, nothing good can affect us. As soon as any goodness touches us it immediately either rebounds and bounces off us like a rubber ball hitting a rock or else is swallowed up like a diamond thrown in a swamp.

People who have not been reformed are like a panther or a horned owl in spirit; they can be compared to brambles and stinging nettles. People who have been regenerated, though, are like a sheep or a dove; they can be compared to olive trees and grapevines. Please consider, if you will, how panther-people could possibly be converted into sheep-people, or horned owls into doves, or brambles into olive trees, or stinging nettles into grapevines, through any assignment of divine righteousness, if “assignment” here means any kind of transfer. Is it not true that in order for that conversion to take place, the predatory nature of the panther and the horned owl and the damaging nature of the brambles and the stinging nettles would first have to be removed and something truly human and harmless implanted in their place? The Lord in fact teaches in John 15:1– 7 how this transformation occurs.

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.