01/01/2025
God permitted the lapse and fall of mankind, that they may come to him as needy creatures, and take all out of his hands. Man’s great error, which occasioned his fall, was that he would live alone apart from God, be sufficient to his own happiness. We greedily caught at that word, Ye shall be as gods,’ Gen. iii. 5. The meaning was, not in a blessed conformity, but a cursed self-sufficiency. Man would be his own god, desired to have his stock in his own hands, and would be no more at God’s finding: Gen. iii. 22, The man is become as one of us,’ to live as an independent being. Well, then, to cure this, God would reduce him to an utter necessity, that he might bring him to an entire dependence, and might come as a beggarly indigent creature, expecting all from God, putting no confidence in his own righteousness for his justification, nor natural power and strength for sanctification:
Manton, Thomas. An Exposition of Psalm 119 (p. 1216). Titus Books. Kindle Edition.