The application of redemption

But this is not all, nor yet enough, to make us to attain §2a right sight of our Sins, unless the Lord put a new Light into our minds, within, as we have the Light of the Law, and Counsel of God shining without unto us; otherwise the Law may be, and will be a clasped Book, and a dead Letter; we shall see little in it, or receive little from it. So Paul, Rom. 7. 9. I was alive without the Law once, but when the Commandment came, sin revived. Without the Law, how could that be, since he was an Hebrew of the Hebrews, of the Tribe of Benjamin, trained up at the feet of Gamaliel? a Doctor of the Law, professed it, and practised it, according to the most exact Sect of the Pharisees, as he speaks? But the meaning is, that he was without the power of it, and the spiritual life, and lively efficacy of the Law. It was a dead and a killing Letter. Look what the sense of the words, or some evidence of Reason or Arguments could hold out to a Natural Understanding; the bark, and shell, and outside of such directions, he took and entertained. But the Spiritualness of the Law, For the Law is Spiritual, says Paul, and that spiritual and lively power of Conviction and Direction, it puts forth upon the souls of the Saints, who are subject to it, and ⟨p. 39⟩therefore indeed receive the work of it. This Paul once in the time of his unregeneracy was destitute of, and then he was alive; that is, in his own overweening, and self-deluded conceit, he concluded himself to be a living Christian, to have the power and truth of Grace, and to live the life of it. So that it's possible, nay it's ordinary, and nothing more usual, than for men to be without the Law, when they have the Law; to be without the Life of it, while they have the Letter of it; to be without the Law as a Sovereign Rule to their Lives, while they take upon them the profession of it; to be without the Spiritualness of the Law, and so to miss the end of it that is closing with God, as our last end, and chief good, which is the sap, the pith and substance of the Law, though they have the appearance of the practice of it, (And if they miss the end of the Law at which it aims, and unto which it tends, they must needs fall short of the Wisdom and Counsel, and Spiritual efficacy of the Law, which should direct them) So in 2 Chron. 19. 3