Without the gospel
everything is useless and vain;
without the gospel
we are not Christians;
without the gospel
all wealth is poverty; all wisdom, madness before God; all strength, weakness; and all human justice is under God’s condemnation.
But knowing the gospel we are made
children of God, brethren of Jesus Christ, compatriots of the saints, citizens of the Kingdom of Heaven, heirs of God with Jesus Christ, for whom
The poor are enriched; the weak, strengthened; the fool, wise; sinners, justified; the solitary, comforted; the doubtful, insured; and freed slaves.
The gospel is God’s power for the salvation of all who believe, so all that we can think or desire must be found only in Jesus Christ himself.
Because he’s gone
sold to buy us; arrested to free us; doomed to acquit us.
He was
curse for our blessing; offered by sin for our justification; disfigured to make us beautiful;
He died for our lives so that, for him
Fury becomes sweetness; Anger calms down; Darkness becomes light; fear, reaffirmation; contempt is despised; Debt canceled; work, relieved; sadness became joy; misery, in happiness; Ambushes are revealed; attacks, attacked; violence, rejected; Fighting, fighting; war, at war; revenge, avenged; tormented, tormented; the abyss, engulfed by the abyss; hell, pierced; dead, killed; mortality turned into immortality.
In a word,
mercy swallows all misery; and kindness, all misfortune
Because all these things, which should be the weapons of evil in the battle against us, and the sting of death to pierce us, become trials that we can turn into our advantage.
If we can rejoice with the Apostle, saying, O hell, where is your victory?Oh dead, where’s your sting? This is because, by the Spirit of Christ promised to the eled, it is no longer us who live, but it is Christ who lives in us; and, by the Same Spirit, we sit among those in heaven, so that for us the world no longer matters, even though we still coexist there; but in general, we are satisfied, regardless of country, place, condition, clothes, food and all that stuff.
And then
we are comforted in tribulation, we rejoice in misfortune, we glorify when we are afflicted, we have abundance in poverty, we are heated in nudity, patient among the wicked, living in death.
This is, in short, what we must seek in all Scripture: to truly know Jesus Christ and the infinite riches it contains, which God the Father offers us in him.
Source:? Preface to the New Testament of Ovetan? At Westminster Library of Christian Classic (Vol. XXIII), Calvin: Howary?Westminster John Knox Press, July 79, p. Diverse.
Fragments of Calvin’s preface to the French version of the New Testament (1534) translated by Pierre Robert Olivétan.
Selection and arrangement: Tiago Canuto Baia
Translation: Marcos Vasconcelos