I’m thankful there is a glossary at the back of this collection of Samuel Rutherford’s letters. The English language has changed a bit over hundreds of years, so certain words have gone in and out of fashion over that time. One is horologue. A horologue is another name for a watch or any device that keeps time. In a sermon preached before the House of Lords, Rutherford once spoke of how God began time’s horologue at creation. In a letter to Lady Gaitgirth, he exhorts her to fix her eyes on Christ, reserving her first love for him, and enduring to the end. He then compares the saints and their struggle with sin on this earth to old rusty horologues.

All the saints, because of sin, are like old rusty horologues, that must be taken down, and the wheels scoured and mended, and set up again in better case than before. Sin hath rusted both soul and body: our dear Lord by death taketh us down to scour the wheels of both, and to purge us perfectly from the root and remainder of sin; and we shall be set up in better case than before. Then pluck up your heart; heaven is yours! and that is a word which few can say.

In one sense I disagree with Rutherford here. After all, as Paul says, if anyone is in Christ he is a new creation. (2 Cor 5:17). And yet we’re still in these bodies, as Paul also laments in Romans 7: “Wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death.” So which is it? That’s the tension we live in now as saints who have yet to be fully delivered from sin. We have been united to Christ who is the firstborn from the dead and we get to enjoy some of that resurrection life now. But anyone who is over 40 knows and feels the inevitable decline in their bodies, the creakiness and weariness, the pain and the weakness that no diet or workout regiment can cure. This is the result of sin and Rutherford rightly compares it to rust.

Truly we are old rusty horologues. Christ has definitively cleansed us once for all (see Hebrews 10:14!), delivering us from the penalty and power of sin. But sin is still there. It is still present in this world and in our bodies. But praise God that he lovingly and continually “takes us down” as Rutherford says, scouring and mending us, faithfully willing and working in us as we work out our own salvation. (See Phil 2:12-13)

One day we will be free from this rust, receiving perfect glorified bodies. But until then let us also pluck up heart! Our destination is sure, for Christ has paid for it with his own precious blood.