Before the sinner ever moved toward God, God purposed grace in Christ.
There is a particular form of spiritual anxiety that arises when a person begins to suspect that their salvation depends on what they did in the beginning.
Questions like: Was my faith strong enough, or sincere enough? Did I repent of enough sin, or was I under a sufficient amount of conviction?
Once such questions begin to govern the conscience, conversion itself can become an object of constant reconstruction, so that the believer repeatedly searches his memory in the hope of locating some moment in time or a place that will finally assure him that everything began as it should have.
The difficulty is not that such questions are entirely meaningless, since Scripture certainly speaks of true and false faith and the necessity of genuine repentance. The true difficulty happens when troubled conscience begins to treat its movement toward Christ as the foundation upon which the reality of salvation finally rests.
If salvation begins with the sinner’s movement toward God, then the conscience must finally determine whether that movement was adequate; if, however, salvation begins in the gracious purpose of God in Christ, then the believer may learn to rest not in the strength of his first act, but in the mercy of the God who purposed Christ before the world began.
Grace Begins in God
When Fisher turns to the covenant of grace, he does not first describe the sinner’s preparation, awakening, repentance, or faith, but takes us instead into the eternal purpose of God.
He describes the gospel as the joyful tidings that God, to whom all things are eternally present, “purposed before all time” the sending of his Son, then promised him in time, and finally performed that promise in the fullness of time.1
The initiative belongs to God because the gracious purpose precedes the sinner altogether. Before any sinner sought mercy, mercy had been purposed in Christ.
This is one of the deepest comforts contained in the doctrine of God’s eternal purpose. God is not reactive in the sense that he waits upon the sinner and then adjusts his disposition accordingly. Rather, the acts of God in history proceed from the gracious counsel of God, so that what is accomplished in Christ is the historical execution of a mercy that did not originate in us.
Fisher presents the Father as requiring from Christ what fallen sinners themselves would owe, and he describes the Son as the One who willingly undertakes their cause. To put this into language that is easily understood, he states that Christ, “from everlasting struck hands with God” as the sinner’s Surety, assuming the obligation to satisfy what the sinner could not satisfy and to bear what the sinner could not bear.2
The category of suretyship is essential because it prevents us from reducing Christ to the one who merely makes salvation possible while leaving the decisive accomplishment to the sinner. A surety does not simply provide the debtor with a more manageable payment; the surety answers for the obligation itself. Fisher therefore insists that Christ became liable for what his people owed, because in becoming their Surety he undertook their cause as his own.
Thomas Boston presses the same point when he observes that God not only accepts satisfaction from a Surety rather than demanding it from us, but provides the Surety himself and freely gives all things for his sake.3
Faith Does Not Create Grace
Faith is necessary because faith receives Christ.
The sinner is not justified on account of an eternal purpose considered apart from union with Christ, nor does the Marrow teach a justification possessed irrespective of faith. Fisher repeatedly directs the sinner to receive and rest upon the Christ freely presented in the gospel.
What must be denied is that faith constitutes the originating cause of grace, as though God’s gracious purpose awaited the sinner’s believing before it could take effect. The hand receives the gift, but the hand does not originate the gift, determine its value, or move the giver to provide it.
Boston warns that taking the view of faith coming first can cause distressed consciences to become entangled in endless inquiries concerning the being, kind, measure, and degree of such qualifications, with the result that the sinner remains occupied with examining whether he is fit to come rather than actually coming.4
Troubled believers frequently assume that their lack of assurance must arise from the weakness of their faith, and therefore conclude that the solution is to examine their believing until they can discover something impressive enough to quiet the conscience.
The strength of faith and the ground of faith must never be confused. Faith may be weak, but Christ remains infinitely sufficient and entirely steadfast.
The trembling sinner and the assured saint do not possess two different Saviors proportioned to the strength of their believing. The sufficiency of Christ is not measured by the intensity of the believer’s apprehension of him, because Christ’s righteousness possesses its value from his person and work, not from the quality of the act by which we receive him.
The anxious conscience must learn to distinguish between the imperfection of faith and the perfection of Christ. My faith may fluctuate, but Christ’s righteousness does not fluctuate. My sense of acceptance may grow dim, but Christ’s obedience does not become less complete. My repentance may remain painfully imperfect, but Christ’s satisfaction does not thereby become deficient.
The believer’s hope rests upon an accomplished righteousness outside himself, received through faith but never constituted by the quality of that faith.
Fisher, in line with this, writes that justification is “freely by his grace, through the redemption that is in Jesus Christ.”5
The adverb freely must be allowed to do its evangelical work. We are not accepted because our faith is admirable, because our repentance is sufficient, or because our conversion story displays an ideal amount of sincerity.
We are accepted because Christ has redeemed, Christ has obeyed, Christ has satisfied, and Christ is received by faith as the One in whom righteousness and life are found.
God Was Not Improvising
There is another layer of comfort contained in the doctrine of eternal purpose; God was not improvising when he saved his people.
The fall did not place God in a situation for which He was left scrambling for what to do. The sending of Christ belongs to the eternal purpose of God, which means that redemption in history reveals rather than creates the gracious will of God toward sinners in Christ.
The anxious sinner does not need to climb into eternity in order to know whether God is gracious. He needs to look to Christ. The eternal purpose comforts us not because it gives us access to God’s secret will apart from the gospel, but because it tells us that the Christ revealed in the gospel is not an improvised remedy or a tentative offer. He is the One whom God purposed, promised, sent, and accepted as the Surety and Mediator of his people.
Before the sinner ever moved toward God, God purposed grace in Christ, and therefore the believer’s hope does not rest upon the strength of his first move but upon the eternal mercy of God revealed and accomplished in the Surety.
The first decisive movement in salvation was never yours, because grace was already in Christ before you were, and the Christ whom you receive by faith is the Christ whom God purposed, promised, sent, and gave for sinners.
The eternal purpose of God makes the gospel more certain, because it teaches us that Christ is not God’s response but the expression of his gracious will.
For more on Christ as the sinner’s Surety and the eternal purpose of grace, you can listen to Marrowcast episode 6 and subscribe at Marrowcast.com
Edward Fisher, The Marrow of Modern Divinity, with notes by Thomas Boston (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication, 1850), 39.
Ibid., 40.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid., 41.