I’m participating in Tim Challies’ Reading the Classics Together program again. The book is Redemption Accomplished and Applied by John Murray, and this week’s reading is the first chapter of Part 2: The Order of Application. (Tim’s summary of this chapter.)

We’ve skipped over the conclusion of the Part 1, which was a little piece warning against making what Christ did on the cross analogous to any human experience. “[P]erish the presumption,” Murray writes, “that dares to speak of our Gethsemanes and Calvaries!”

There is no analogy….There is no reproduction or parallel in the experience of archangels or of the greatest saints. The faintest parallel would crush the holiest of men and the mightiest of the angelic hosts.

And so we conclude the part of this book dealing with the accomplishment of the atonement and move on to the application of the atonement. This first chapter explains the application of redemption is “a series of acts and processes,” each with it’s own function and purpose, and these acts come to us in a certain order.

Murray begins by establishing from scripture that there is an order to the application of redemption and then moves on to settling exactly what that order is. In giving us an order of salvation, he first uses Romans 8:30, where three acts of God’s application of redemption are given to us in this order: calling, justification, glorification. This provides us with a framework to build on.

We move, then, to the relationship of faith to justification. Murray spends more space on this than I would have anticipated, since it seems a settled question to me. (I don’t hear much argument about whether faith precedes justification or justification precedes faith. Do you?) But I’d forgotten that some of the Hardshell Baptists on the Baptist Board I used to frequent believed that the elect were justified in eternity, and I suspect it is this particular teaching that Murray has in mind in his argument that scripture teaches that justification comes by the instrument of faith.

Once this question is resolved, Murray moves quickly to establish the rest of the order. He will, I think, spend more time on the reasons for this order as he deals with the individual acts in the following chapters. Here is the order gives us, and the order for the chapters on the application of redemption that follow this one: calling, regeneration, faith and repentance, justification, adoption, sanctification, perseverance, and glorification.

Glossary for Part 2, Chapter 1

• niggardly: stingy; skimpy.