The Spirit’s Application of the Atonement
This Unity is further seen in the fact that the Holy Ghost administered every blessing as the special application of the Atonement.
1. As to Himself in His relation to the Finished Work of Christ. He is the Keeper of the mysteries of the cross ; as our Lord said He shall take of Mine (John 16:15). The accomplished redemption is His treasury, out of the inexhaustible fulness of which we all receive at His hands. He is at once the Administrator of its external blessings, the Agent in imparting its internal, and the Witness of both. It is not meant that He dispenses all the provisions of the Covenant at once. But the Communion of the Holy Ghost (2 Cor 13:14) is the common enjoyment of the grace of Christ imparted as the result of the Father’s love in redemption. To receive the Atonement is to receive its various blessings, at least in their beginnings, at once. Justification is the reversal of a sentence at the bar; Adoption is at the same moment the reversal of a sentence that excluded from the inheritance of the Divine family; but neither can be received apart from the renewal of the soul into the new life of God and its Sanctification to His service. And all these acts are simultaneous benefits of one and the same Grace in Christ. They are all the personal application of the one sacrificial obedience to the faith inwrought by the Spirit Himself. He reveals and attests the forgiveness of sins, He reveals and inwardly persuades of the adoption of sons, and He seals the believer for God: all these at one and the same moment. And all these acts of witness He continues ever as the abiding personal seal of interest in the great redemption.
2. It is quite consistent with this that there is an order of thought, thought which demands a distinction among these blessings. They belong to different relations: they are not homogeneous. Justification is perfectly distinct from adoption: the former is pronounced by the Judge, the latter by the Father. Regeneration belongs to another category: the new and filial life, though a free gift accompanying justification, is most intimately connected with adoption, which is the adoption of sons (Gal 4:5). It is congruous both with reason and with Scripture to say that the regenerate children are as such adopted; and that the adopted must needs be regenerate. It is hardly reconcilable with either that the witnessing Spirit of adoption is, by that witness, the Agent of regeneration. Though the testifying Spirit is the inworking Spirit, the two operations are distinct. The love enkindled in the soul when the Divine love is shed abroad is the firstborn fruit of the Spirit (Gal 5:22) of life, not the instrument of effecting it. Life is deeper even than love. And, finally, sanctification belongs to an entirely distinct order of thought from regeneration. Regeneration is not sanctification begun, in any other sense than justification is; nor is sanctification regeneration continued in any other sense than it is continued righteousness. In fact it involves an altogether independent idea: that of the consecration of the soul, justified and regenerate, to God. But of this more hereafter.
— William Burt Pope, A Compendium of Christian Theology: Analytical Outlines of a Course of Theological Study, Biblical, Dogmatic, Historical, Volume 2, pp. 393-94. (This is from the second volume of Pope’s 3-volume systematic theology. The full 3-volume systematic theology can be accessed here.)
