75. Brief Analysis

See §73 above for the point that Matthew 24 presents the Lord’s predictions and descriptions of the successive states of decline and corruption the Christian church would go through. As this chapter in Matthew continues, there is a mention of false prophets yet to come who will bring on an abomination of desolation (Matthew 24:11, 15). That chapter speaks of “a great affliction such as has never existed since the world began until now and will never exist again” (Matthew 24:21). Clearly, then, a “great affliction,” both here and elsewhere in the Word, means an attack by falsities against truth until no genuine truth drawn from the Word, no truth that has not been falsified and completely ruined, remains.

This has happened because the churches have not acknowledged that God’s unity in trinity and trinity in unity exist in one person rather than in three persons. As a result they have based their church on a mental picture of three gods, but an oral confession of one God. By doing this they have separated themselves so far from the Lord that they have completely lost the idea of any divinity in his human manifestation (see Revelation Unveiled 294). Yet the Lord in his human manifestation is the divine truth itself and the divine light itself, as he himself teaches comprehensively in his Word. This is why there is such a great affliction today. As we will see in what follows [§§79– 81], this affliction has been caused primarily by the churches’ teachings that whether we possess faith (as the churches define it) or not is the sole thing that determines whether we are justified and assigned Christ’s merit.

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.