Thomas Erskine

Erskine on why God bothered to create us
All wise people have long known that there are few things better to do on a Friday night than sit down with a cup of tea and read some Erskine:

‘God created man that he might be a partaker in His own holiness, as the only right and blessed state possible for him. If I truly apprehend this if I truly apprehend that righteousness and blessedness are one and the same thing, and just the very thing I most need I shall rejoice to know that God desires my righteousness; and if I further know that He will never cease to desire it and to insist upon it, and that all His dealings with me are for this one end, then I can have an entire confidence in Him, as desiring for me the very thing I desire for myself. I shall feel that I am perfectly safe in His hand, that I could not be so safe in any other hand; for that, as He desires the best thing for me, so He alone knows and can use the best means of accomplishing it in me’. – William Hanna, ed., Letters of Thomas Erskine of Linlathen (Edinburgh: David Douglas, 1884), 428-9.

The Triumph of God’s Love in Jesus Christ

‘Christ, the gift of God’s present forgiving love to every man and woman, is the door through which alone we can enter into our provision of hope. Until we know the love of our Father’s heart to us, as manifested in Christ, the future must always be to us at best a dark and doubtful wilderness. But when we know that all that we have conceived of our Father’s love, is as nothing to the reality – that he is indeed love itself – a love passing knowledge – a shoreless, boundless, bottomless ocean-fountain of love, of holy, sin-hating, sin-destroying love, which longs over us that we should be filled with itself – and be by it delivered from the power of evil – then, indeed, we are saved by hope, for we know that love must triumph and fulfill all its counsel’. Thomas Erskine, The Brazen Serpent; or, Life Coming Through Death (Edinburgh: David Douglas, 1879), 122.