Daily Inspiration Quote by Samuel Rutherford

Rutherford’s line swings a wrecking ball at spiritual arithmetic. He stacks up “millions,” “hells,” and “sinners” not because he’s impressed by human depravity, but because he wants the number to fail. The phrase “cannot come near” is the tell: it’s not that sin is small; it’s that the measuring tool is wrong. Against “infinite grace,” even the most lurid, multiplied catalogue of guilt becomes mathematically irrelevant. The rhetoric humiliates the anxious conscience that keeps trying to pay down an unpayable debt, as if salvation were a ledger and God a bookkeeper.

The intent is pastoral and polemical at once. Rutherford, a 17th-century Scottish Presbyterian writing in the heat of Britain’s religious wars and personal suffering, is defending a Reformed vision of grace that originates in God’s initiative rather than human improvement. “Hells of sinners” conjures both the inner hell of conviction and the doctrinal hell of judgment, then refuses to let either have the last word. It’s a deliberate overstatement meant to de-fang despair and to undercut the pride hidden inside self-condemnation: the ego that assumes its sin is so exceptional it can out-muscle mercy.

Subtext: stop treating guilt as a form of humility. Rutherford’s “infinite” doesn’t flatter sinners; it dethrones them. In a culture of intense self-scrutiny and public moral tallying, the line insists the decisive fact is not the scale of human failure, but the extravagance of the remedy.