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THE BAR OF JUSTICE

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Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Oct 26, 1869

FromReview and Herald, Vol. 34, No. 18.

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THE BAR OF JUSTICE.

By Ryle

Reader, settle it down in your mind that there can be no peace with God, unless you feel that you are justified by Christ. You must know what has become of your sins. You must have a reasonable hope that they are forgiven and put away. You must have the witness of your conscience that you are reckoned not guilty before God. Without this, it is vain to talk of peace. You have nothing but the shadow and imitation of it. “There is no peace, saith my God, to the wicked.”
Did you ever hear the sound of the trumpets which are blown before the judges as they come into a city to open the court? Did you ever reflect how different are the feelings which these trumpets awaken in the minds of different men? The innocent man, who has no cause to be tried, hears them unmoved. They proclaim no terrors to him. He listens and looks on quietly, and is not afraid. But often there is some poor wretch waiting his trial in a silent cell, to whom those trumpets are a knell of despair. They tell him that the day of trial is at hand. Yet a little time, and he will stand at the bar of justice, and hear witness after witness telling the story of his misdeeds. Yet a little time, and all will be over—the trial, the verdict, and the sentence—and there will remain nothing for him but punishment and disgrace. No wonder the prisoner's heart beats when he hears that trumpet's sound.
Reader, there is a day fast coming when all who are not justified shall despair in like manner. The voice of the Archangel and the trump of God shall scatter to the winds the false peace which now buoys up many a soul. The day of Judgment shall convince thousands of self-willed people too late, that it needs something more than a few beautiful ideas about God's love and mercy, to reconcile a man to his Maker, and to deliver his guilty soul from hell. No peace shall prove solid, substantial and unbroken, in that awful day, but the peace which is built on justification by the blood of Christ, and comes from faith in him.—Ryle.