Hallelujah means ‘Praise ye Jehovah’ or, as it is frequently rendered in our Bibles, ‘Praise ye the Lord’. Hallelujah stands at the beginning of ten of the psalms (106, 111-113, 135, 146-150), for which reason they are called ‘The Hallelujah Psalms’. It is the privilege of ‘the Redeemed of the Lord’ to ‘praise the Lord’. He is a wonderful Saviour, worthy of our praise. He has done all things well. 

The sanctification of a sinner is God’s work. No one will ever glory before God for their obedience to the law or good works. Those who lay the duty of sanctification on a believer, to be accomplished under the law, have missed the central lesson. It is Christ Himself ‘who of God is made unto us wisdom and righteousness, and sanctification and redemption’. 

In coming to the world to save sinners our Lord Jesus Christ was not spared humiliation, contradiction of sinners, cruel suffering or the loss of divine fellowship with His Father. He was given as our Substitute and delivered up in our behalf to bear our sins, endure our punishment and die in our place. Substitutionary atonement is a central gospel truth and the Lord Jesus died as our Substitute. The price of our salvation was paid by Christ and our Redeemer bore our grief and carried our sorrow in His own body on the tree. 

Saul of Tarsus was a formidable enemy of the church of Jesus Christ and of the doctrine of free grace. He despised Christ as the way of salvation and he cherished the law as a means of righteousness. When we first meet Saul he is debating and reasoning with the followers of Jesus. He was convinced they were merely simple, deceived fools whose convictions would soon evaporate under his searching arguments and the weight of centuries of Jewish tradition. The trouble was these disciples of Christ were slippery debaters and Saul soon learned to his shame that he was neither able to deny the wisdom of their testimony nor resist the Spirit by which they spoke. 

I was many years a professing Christian before I ever encountered the phrase ‘The Doctrines of Grace’. When I did hear the term and was introduced to the teaching I was appalled at the ‘doctrines’ the phrase encompassed. They seemed to contradict just about everything of the Christian faith I had been taught. Fancying myself a trainee student in the Lord’s school, I was busy learning how to argue against Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons and how to debate with atheists and argue with agnostics. Little had I realised there was such folly within the camp I thought myself a part of.

Today, there seem to be very few people who will simply acknowledge that all our righteousness must be in Christ, and from Christ, because outside of Christ we have no righteousness at all. This is the clear teaching of the Scriptures. Many of us give assent to the doctrine of total depravity but continue to harbour strange notions of there being yet something good within us. Sure, we are totally depraved, but we are not as bad as we could be! Hmm. How does that work?