Volume Five of Goodwin’s works is devoted to Christology. This volume includes numerous treatises on Christ’s twin acts of mediation and reconciliation. Goodwin also writes at length about the connection between the redemptive work of Jesus and the Old Testament sacrificial system.
“That union with Christ is the first fundamental thing of justification, and sanctification, and all. Christ first takes us, and then sends his Spirit. He apprehends us first. It is not my being regenerate that puts me into a right of all those privileges, but it is Christ takes me, and then gives me his Spirit, faith, holiness, &c. It is through our union with Christ, and the perfect holiness of his nature, to whom we are united, that we partake of the privileges of the covenant of grace.” (Page 350)
“Wherefore his wisdom, as a middle attribute, steps in, and interposeth as a means of mediation between them both, and undertakes to compound the business, and to accommodate all, so as both shall have their desire and aims, their full demonstration and accomplishment.” (Page 16)
“And by all this you see that our salvation was in sure hands, even afore the world was; for God and Christ had engaged themselves by covenant each to other for us, the one to die, the other to accept it for us.” (Page 33)
“Though Christ did it out of love to us, yet chiefly for his Father’s entreaty and command, and out of love to him. So” (Page 25)
“the knowledge of the eternal transactions of God the Father for man’s salvation is the highest of their attainments” (Page 7)
He speaks the intimacies of things from an inward sense and feeling of them in his own heart, to the particular cases and experiences of others.
—James Barron