The Forgiveness of Sin: Illustrated in a Practical Exposition of Psalm 130 by John Owen

 

The Forgiveness of Sin: Illustrated in a Practical Exposition of Psalm 130 by John Owen

https://books.google.com/books?id=zN0OAAAAIAAJ&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false

It has been speculated that this work by John Owen is intentionally or unintentionally semi-autobiographical. In a biography of Owen by Andrew Thomson it states:

Some influence is no doubt to be ascribed to the discouraging outward circumstances in which his uncle’s conduct had placed him, in deepening the gloom of those shadows which now cast themselves across his spirit; but the chief spring of his distress lay deeper, — in his perplexities and anxieties about his state with God. For years he had been under the power of religious principle, but he had not yet been borne into the region of settled peace; and at times the terrors of the Lord seemed still to compass him about. We have no means of ascertaining with certainty what were the causes of these dreadful conflicts in Owen’s mind; whether an overwhelming sense of the holiness and rectitude of God; or perverse speculations about the secret purposes of God, when he should have been reposing in his revealed truths and all embracing calls; or a self-righteous introversion of his thoughts upon himself, when he should have been standing in the full sun-light of the cross; or more mysterious deeps of anguish than any of these; — but we are disposed to think that his noble treatise on the “Forgiveness of Sin,” written many years afterwards, is in a great degree the effect as well as the record of what he suffered now. Nothing is more certain than that some of the most precious treasures in our religious literature have thus come forth from the seven-times-heated furnace of mental suffering. The wondrous colloquies of Luther, in his “Introduction to the Galatians,” reflect the conflicts of his own mighty spirit with unbelief; the “Pilgrim’s Progress” is in no small degree the mental autobiography of Bunyan; and there is strong internal evidence that Owen’s “Exposition of the 130th Psalm” — which is as full of Christian experience as of rich theology, and contains some of the noblest passages that Owen ever penned — is to a great extent the unconscious transcript of his present wanderings, and perplexities, and final deliverances. [bold added by me- AP]