627. These three ideas, faith, imputation and Christ's merit, are a single whole in the present-day church. They can be termed three-in-one, for if one of the three were taken away, present-day theology would fall apart, since this depends upon grasping those three as one, like a long chain hanging from a fixed hook. Thus if either faith, or imputation, or Christ's merit, were to be taken away, everything said about justification, the forgiveness of sins, quickening, renewal, regeneration, sanctification, and about the Gospel, free will, charity and good deeds, in fact even about everlasting life - all this would become like deserted towns or the ruins of a church. And faith itself the standard-bearer would be nothing, and so the whole church would become a desert and a desolation.
These remarks show plainly what is the column upon which the house of God at the present time is based. If it were pulled away, that house would collapse like the building in which were the rulers of the Philistines and as many as three thousand of the people making merry, when Samson pulled down the two columns at once, and they were killed and met their end (judges 16:29). This can be said because I showed in earlier chapters, and will show in the Appendix, that this faith is not the Christian one, since it is not in keeping with the Word; and that the imputation of that faith is an empty idea, because Christ's merit cannot be imputed.
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