V. The Cross The Great Confessional
In the days of our fathers Christian belief was
more solid within the Church than it is now; and the defending and expounding
of Christianity, more especially the defending of it, had to concern itself
with outsiders - outside the Church, and outside Christianity very often.
Today our difficulties have changed; and a great part of our exposition must
keep in view the fact that some of the most dangerous challenges of
Christianity are found amongst those who claim the Christian name. There are
those who have a very real reverence for the character of Jesus Christ, and
they can speak, and do speak, quite sincerely, with great devotion and warmth
and beauty, about Christ, and about many of the ideas that are associated with
apostolic Christianity. All the same, they are strongly and sometimes even
violently, antagonistic to that redemption which is the very center of the
Christian faith; and they make denials and challenges which are bound to tell
upon the existence of that faith before many generations are over. We do not
take the true measure of the situation unless we realize that the thing which
is at stake at this moment is something that will not affect the present
generation, but is sure to affect two or three generations hence. Those who
are concerned about Christianity on the largest scale today are concerned with
what may be its position and its prospects then. The ideas at the center of
the Christian faith are too large, too deep and subtle, to show their effects
in one age; and the challenge of them does not show its effect in one
generation or even in two. Individuals, society, and the Church, indeed, are
able to go on, externally almost unaffected, by the way that they have upon
them from the past; and it is only within the range of several generations that
the destruction of truths with such a comprehensive range as those of
Christianity takes effect. Therefore it is part of the duty of the Church, in
certain sections and on certain occasions, to be less concerned about the
effect of the Gospel upon the individual immediately, or on the present age,
and to look ahead to what may be the result of certain changes in the future.
God sets watchmen in Zion who have to keep their eye on the horizon; and it is
only a drunken army that could scout their warning. We are not only bound to
attend to the needs and interests of the present generation; we are trustees
for a long future, as well as a long past. Therefore it is quite necessary
that the Church should give very particular attention to these central and
fundamental points whose influence, perhaps, is not so promptly prized, and
whose destruction would not be so mightily felt at once, but would certainly
become apparent in the days and decades ahead.
That is why one feels bound to invite attention,
and to press attention, upon points concerning which it may very easily be
said, "These are matters that do not concern my faith and my piety; I can
afford to let these things alone." Perhaps A, B, and C can, and X, Y, and Z
can; but the Christian Church cannot afford to let these things alone. The
Church carries the individual amid much failure of his faith; there is a
vicarious faith; but what is to carry the Church if its faith fail? Remove
concern from these things, and the effect of the collective message of the
Church to the great world becomes undermined. Then the world must look
somewhere else than to the Church for that which is to save it. That is some
apology for dwelling upon points which many people would say were simply
theological and were outside the interest of the individual Christian.
Theology simply means thinking in centuries. Religion tells on the present,
but theology tells on the religion of the future and the race.
Moreover, there are always natures among
Christian people who refuse, and properly refuse, to remain satisfied with
superficial experiences or current views of their faith. They are bound by the
spirit that moves within them - by the kind of temperament God has given them
they are bound to penetrate to the heart, to the depths of things. Their work
does not immediately pay; and while they grind in their mill the Philistines
mock and the libertines jeer. But it would be a great misfortune if the whole
of the work of the Church were measured by the standard which is so necessary
in the world - the standard of what will immediately pay, or promptly tell. It
is, of course, a great thing to go back upon the history of Christianity, and
to point out to ourselves and to our people the great things that Christianity
has done in the course of history. But you cannot rest Christianity upon that.
You can only rest Christianity upon Christ Himself, and His living presence in
the New Humanity. You can put the matter in this way. You can ask, On what
did the Christianity rest of those who believed in the very first years of the
Church's life? They had no results of Christianity before them. They had no
history of the Church before them. They had not the glorious story of
Christian philanthropy before them, nor the magnificent expansion of Christian
doctrine, nor the enormous influence of the Christian Church and its effect
upon the course of the world's history. On what did they rest their faith?
That upon which they rested their faith must be that upon which we rest our
faith when we come to a real crisis, and are driven into a real corner. It
thus becomes necessary to go into the deep things of God as they are revealed
to us by the Holy Spirit, through His inspired apostles, in Christ and His
Cross.
From what I have said you will be prepared to
hear me state that reconciliation is effected by the representative sacrifice
of Christ crucified; by Christ crucified as the representative of God on the
one hand and of Humanity, or the Church, on the other hand. Also it was by
Christ crucified in connection with the divine judgment. Judgment is a far
greater idea than sacrifice. For you see great sacrifices made for silly or
mischievous causes, sacrifices which show no insight whatever into the moral
order or the divine sanctity. Now this sacrifice of Christ, when you connect
it with the idea of judgment, must in some form or other be described as a
penal sacrifice. Round that word penal there rages a great deal of
controversy. And I am using the word with some reserve, because there are
forms of interpreting it which do the idea injustice. The sacrifice of Christ
was a penal sacrifice. In what sense is that so? We can begin by clearing the
ground, by asking, In what sense is it not true that the sacrifice of Christ
was penal? Well, it cannot be true in the sense that God punished Christ.
That is an absolutely unthinkable thing. How could God punish Him in whom He
was always well pleased? The two things are a contradiction in terms. And it
cannot be true in the sense that Christ was in our stead in such a way as to
exclude and exempt us. The sacrifice of Christ, then, was penal not in the
sense of God so punishing Christ that there is left us only religious
enjoyment, but in this sense. There is a penalty and curse for sin; and Christ
consented to enter that region. Christ entered voluntarily into the pain and
horror which is sin's penalty from God. Christ, by the deep intimacy of His
sympathy with men, entered deeply into the blight and judgment which was
entailed by man's sin and which must be entailed by man's sin if God is a holy
and therefore a judging God. It is impossible for us to say that God was angry
with Christ; but still Christ entered the wrath of God, understanding that
phrase as I endeavoured to explain it yesterday. He entered the penumbra of
judgment, and from it He confessed in free action, He praised and justified by
act, before the world, and on the scale of all the world, the holiness of God.
You can therefore say that although Christ was not punished by God, He bore
God's penalty upon sin. That penalty was not lifted even when the Son of God
passed through. Is there not a real distinction between the two statements?
To say that Christ was punished by God who was always well pleased with Him is
an outrageous thing. Calvin himself repudiates the idea. But we may say that
Christ did, at the depth of that great act of self-identification with us when
He became man, He did enter the sphere of sin's penalty and the horror of sin's
curse, in order that, from the very midst and depth of it, His confession and
praise of God's holiness might rise like a spring of fresh water at the bottom
of the bitter sea, and sweeten all. He justified God in His judgment and
wrath. He justified God in this thing.
So the act of Christ had this twofold aspect.
On the one hand it was God offering, and on the other hand it was man
confessing. Now, what was it that Christ chiefly confessed? I hope you have
read McLeod Campbell on the Atonement. Every minister ought to know that book,
and know it well. But there is one criticism to be made upon the great, fine,
holy book. And it is this. It speaks too much, perhaps, about Christ
confessing human sin, about Christ becoming the Priest and Confessor before God
of human sin and exposing it to God's judgment. The horror of the Cross
expresses the repentance of the race before a holy God for its sin. But
considerable difficulties arise in that connection, and critics were not slow
to point them out. How could Christ in any real sense confess a sin, even a
racial sin, with whose guilt He had nothing in common? Now that is rather a
serious criticism if the confession of sin were the first charge upon either
Christ or us, if the confession of human sin were the chief thing that God
wanted or Christ did I think it is certainly a defect in that great book that
it fixes our attention too much upon Christ's vicarious confession of human
sin. The same criticism applies to another very fine book, that by the
late Canon Moberly, or Christ Church, "Atonement and Personality." I once had
the privilege of meeting Canon Moberly in discussion on this subject, and
ventured to point out that defect in his theory, and I was relieved to find
that on the occasion the same criticism was also made by Bishop Gore. But we
get out of the difficulty, in part at least, if we recognize that the great
work of Christ, while certainly it did confess human sin, was yet not to
confess that, but to confess something greater, namely God's holiness in His
judgment upon sin. His confession, indeed, was not in so many words, but in a
far more mighty way, by act and deed of life and death. The great confession
is not by word of mouth - it is by the life, in the sense, not of mere conduct,
but in the great personal sense in which life contains conduct and transcends
death. Christ confessed not merely human sin - which in a certain sense,
indeed, He could not do - but He confessed God's holiness in reacting mortally
against human sin, in cursing human sin, in judging it to its very death. He
stood in the midst of human sin full of love to man, such love as enabled Him
to identify Himself in the most profound, sympathetic way with the evil race;
fuller still of love to the God whose name He was hallowing; and, as with one
mouth, as if the whole race confessed through Him, as with one soul, as though
the whole race at last did justice to God through His soul, He lifted up His
face unto God and said, "Thou art holy in all Thy judgments, even in this
judgment which turns not aside even from Me, but strikes the sinful spot if
even I stand on it." The dereliction upon the Cross, the sense of love's
desertion by love, was Christ's practical confession of the holy God's
repulsion of sin. He accepted the divine situation - the situation of the race
before God. By God's will He did so. By His own free consent He did so.
Remember the distinction between God's changeless love and God's varying
treatment of the soul. God made Him sin, treated Him as if He were sin; He did
not view Him as sinful. That is quite another matter. God made Him to be sin -
it does not say He made Him sinful. God lovingly treated Him as human sin, and
with His consent judged human sin in Him and on Him. Personal guilt Christ
could never confess. There is that in guilt which can only be confessed by
the guilty. "I did it." That kind of confession Christ could never make.
That is the part of the confession that we make, and we cannot make it
effectually until we are in union with Christ and His great lone work of
perfectly and practically confessing the holiness of God. There is a racial
confession that can only be made by the holy; and there is a personal
confession that can only be made by the guilty. That latter, I say, is a
confession Christ could never make. In that respect Christ did not die, and
did not suffer, did not confess, in our stead. We alone, the guilty, can make
that confession; but we cannot make it with Christian effect without the Cross
and the confession there. We say then not only "I did this," but "I am guilty
before the holiness confessed in the Cross." The grand sin is not to sin
against the law but against the Cross. The sin of sins is not transgression,
but unfaith.
So also of holiness, there is a confession of
holiness which can only be made by God, the Holy. If God's holiness was to be
fully confessed, in act and deed, in life, and death, and love transcending
both, it can only be done by Godhead itself.
Therefore we press the words to their fullness
of meaning: "God was in Christ reconciling," not reconciling through Christ,
but actually present as Christ reconciling, doing in Christ His own work of
reconciliation. It was done by Godhead itself, and not by the Son alone. The
old theologians were right when they insisted that the work of redemption was
the work of the whole Trinity - Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; as we express it
when we baptize into the new life of reconcilement in the threefold name. The
holiness of God was confessed in man by Christ, and this holy confession of
Christ's is the source of the truest confession of our sin that we can make.
Our saving confession is not merely "I did so and so," but "I did it against a
holy, saving God." "I have sinned against heaven and in thy sight," sinned
before infinite holiness and forgiving grace. God could not forgive until man
confessed, and confessed not only his own sin but confessed still more - God's
holiness in the judgment of sin. The confession also had to be made in life
and action, as the sin was done. That is to say, it had to be made religiously
and not theologically, by an experience and not an utterance. A verbal
confession, however sincere, could not fully own an actual sin. If we sin by
deed we must so confess. It is made thus religiously, spiritually,
experimentally, practically by Jesus Christ's life, its crown of death, and His
life eternal. The more sinful man is, the less can he thus confess either his
own sin or God's holiness. Therefore God did it in man by a love which was as
great as it was holy, by an infinite love. That is to say, by a love which was
as closely and sympathetically identified with man as it was identified with
the power of the holy God.
So we have arrived at this. The great
confession was made not alone in the precise hour of Christ's death, although
it was consummated there. It had to be made in life and act, and not in a mere
feeling or statement; and for this purpose death must be organically one with
the whole life. You cannot sever the death of Christ from the life of Christ.
When you think of the self-emptying which brought Christ to earth, His whole
life here was a living death. The death of Christ must be organic with His
whole personal life and action. And that means not only His earthly life
previous to the Cross, but His whole celestial life from the beginning, and to
this hour, and to all eternity. The death of Christ is the central point of
eternity as well as of human history. His own eternal life revolves on it.
And we shall never be so good and holy at any point, even in eternity, that we
shall not look into the Cross of Christ as the center of all our hope in earth
or heaven. It is Christ that works out His own redemption and reconciliation,
from God's right hand, throughout the course of history. I would gather that
up in one phrase. Christ is the perpetual providence of His own salvation.
Christ, acting through His Spirit, is the eternal providence of His own
salvation. The apostles never separated reconciliation in any age from the
Cross and blood of Jesus Christ. If ever we do that (and many are doing it
today) we throw the New Testament overboard. The bane of so much that claims
to be more spiritual religion at the present day is that it simply jettisons
the New Testament, and with it historic Christianity. The extreme critics,
people that live upon monism and immanence, rationalist religion and spiritual
impressionism, are people who are deliberately throwing overboard the New
Testament as a whole, deeply as they prize it in parts. They say that the
apostolic views and interpretations of Christ's work may have been all very
well for people who knew no better than men did at so early a period, but we
are now a long way beyond that, and we must re-edit the New Testament theology,
especially as to Christ's death. I keep urging, whatever we do let us do it
frankly, let us do it with our eyes open and with eyes competent to take the
measure of what we are doing. The trying thing is that tremendous
renunciations should be blandly made, without, apparently, any sense of their
appalling dimensions, and of the huge thing that is being so ignorantly done.
(See note at the end of this lecture.)
The apostles, I say, never separated
reconciliation from the Cross and the blood of Jesus Christ. The historic
Church has never done so, with all its divisions. And what the Cross meant for
the apostles as Jews, with their history and education, was something like
this. If you go back to the Old Testament, you find that the whole kingdom of
God and destiny of man turns on the treatment of sin. And either the sin was
atoned or the sinner was punished. But there were some sins that never could
be atoned for, what are described as sins with a high hand, presumptuous sins,
deliberate, defiant sins, as distinct from sins of ignorance or weakness, when
a man so identified himself with his sin that he became inseparable from it.
The man guilty of them was put outside the camp, his communication was cut with
the saved community of Israel. He was committed to the outer darkness. There
remained only punishment and death. The punishment was expulsion from the
covenant, and so from life. And as there is little about immortality in the
Old Testament, it was death for good and all. But in the Cross of Christ there
is no sin excluded from atonement. I know of course what you are thinking
about - the sin against the Holy Ghost. That is far too large a subject to
enter on. I can only say that I am not keeping it out of my survey. And I
repeat, there is no sin excluded from atonement. Death as punishment of sin
was absorbed in Christ's sacrifice. Such was its atoning work that the
judgment due to all mankind was absorbed, and the sin of sins now was fixed
refusal of that Grace. The Cross bought up all other debts, so to say.
To return to my old point. The objection to
speaking of Christ's death as penalty is two-fold. God could not punish One
with whom He was always well pleased. Consequently Christ could not suffer
punishment in the true sense of the word without having a guilty conscience.
If the bearing of punishment were the whole of Christ's work, there was
something in that way which He did not and could not do - He could not bear the
penalty of remorse. But the whole of His work, was not the bearing of
punishment; it was not the acceptance of suffering. It was the recognition and
justification of it, the "homologation" of God's judgment and God's holiness in
it.
The death and suffering of Christ was something
very much more than suffering - it was atoning action. At various stages in
the history of the Church - not the Roman Catholic Church only but
Protestantism also - exaggerated stress has been laid upon the sufferings of
Christ. But it is not a case of what He suffered but what He did. Christ's
suffering was so divine a thing because He freely transmitted it into a great
act. It was suffering accepted and transfigured by holy obedience under the
conditions of curse and blight which sin and brought upon man according to the
holiness of God. The suffering was a sacrifice to God's holiness. In so far
it was penalty. But the atoning thing was not its amount or acuteness, but its
obedience, its sanctity.
There are pathetic ways of thinking about Christ
regard Him too much as a mere individual before God. They do not satisfy if
Christ's relation with man was a racial one and He represented Humanity.
Especially they do not hold good if that relationship was no mere blood
relationship, natural relationship, but a supernatural relationship - blood
relationship only in the mystic Christian sense. We are blood relations of
Christ, but not in the natural sense of that term, only in the supernatural
sense, as those who are related to Him in His blood, in His death, and in His
Spirit. The value of Christ's unity and sympathy with us was not simply that
He was continuous with the race at its head. It was not a relation of
identity. The race was not prolonged into Him. The value consists in
that life-act of self-identification by which Christ the eternal Son of
God became man. We hear much about Christ's essential identity with the human
race. That is not true in the sense in which other great men, like
Shakespeare, for instance, were identical with the human race, gathering up in
consummation its natural genius. Christ's identity was not natural or created
identity, but the self-identification of the Creator. Everything turns upon
this - whether Christ was a created being, however grand, or whether He was of
increate Godhead.
As Head of the human race by this voluntary
self-identification with it, Christ took the curse and judgment, which did not
belong to Himself as sinless. And what He owned was not so much the depth of
our misery as the depth of our guilt; and He did it sympathetically, by the
moral sympathy possible only to the holy. Nor did He simply take the full
measure of our guilt. His owning it means very much more than that His moral
perceptions were so deep and piercing that He could measure our guilt as a
bystander of acute moral penetration could. He carried it in His own moral
experience as only divine sympathy could. And in dumb action He spread it out
as it is before God. He felt sin and its horror as only the holy could as God
did. We learn in our measure to do that when we escape from the indifference
of our egotism and come under His Cross and near His heart; we learn to do as
Christ did as we enter into living union with Christ. And we then rise above
purity - for purity is only shamed by sin - we rise to holiness, which is
burdened with sin and all its load. How much more than pure Christ was! How
much fuller of meaning is such a word as "holy" or "holiness" than either
"pure" or "purity". Purity is shamed by human sin. Holiness carries it as a
load, and carries it to its destruction. In the great desertion Christ could
not feel Himself a sinner whom God rejects. For the sinner cannot carry sin;
he collapses under it. Christ felt Himself treated as the sin which God
Recognizes and repels by His very holiness. It covered and hid Him from God.
He was made sin (not sinful, as I say). The holiness of God becomes our
salvation not by slackness of demand but by completeness of judgment; not
because He relaxes His demand, not because He spends less condemnation on sin,
lets us off or lets sin off, or lets Christ off ("spared not"); but because in
Christ judgment becomes finished and final, because none but a holy Christ
could spread sin out in all its sinfulness for thorough judgment. I have a way
of putting it which startles some of my friends. The last judgment is past.
It took place on Christ's Cross. What we talk about as the last judgment is
simply the working out of Christ's Cross in detail. The final judgment, the
absolute judgment, the crucial judgment for the race took place in principle on
the Cross of Christ. Sin has been judged finally there. All judgment is given
to the Son in virtue of His Cross. All other debts are bought up there.
It is not simply that in the Cross of Christ all
punishment was shown to be corrective. A favorite theme on the part of many of
those who challenge the apostolic position about the death of Christ is that it
was only the crowning exposition of the great principle that all punishment is
really corrective and education. We cannot say that. There is plenty of
punishment that hardens and hardens. That is why we are obliged to leave such
questions as universal restoration unsolved. Even when we recognize the
absolute power of God's salvation, we also recognize that it is in the power of
the human soul to harden itself until it become shrunk into such a tough and
irreducible mass as it seems the very grace of God could do nothing with.
Certainly there are people here, in this life, who become so tough in their sin
that the grace of God is in vain. And I am not sure that among those who are
toughest are not some who are much comforted by their religion. You can do
something with a hardened sinner. He can be broken to pieces. But I do not
know what you can do with a viscous saint, with those who are wrapped in the
wool, soaked in the comfort of their religion, and tanned to leather, soft and
tough as a glove, by its bitterest baptisms. I once used an expression of
these people which was somewhat criticized. I called them "moral tabbies." Is
there anything more comfortable, and selfish, and hopeless than a really
accomplished tabby? When religion becomes perverted to be a means of mere
comfort and dense self-satisfaction, it becomes an integument so tough that
even the grace of God cannot get through it, or a substance so flaccid that it
cannot be handled.
I find it convenient, you observe, to
distinguish between punishment and penalty. A man who loses his life in the
fire-damp, where he is looking for the victims of an accident, pays the penalty
of sacrifice, but he does not receive its punishment. And I think it useful to
speak of Christ as taking the penalty of sin, while I refuse to speak of His
taking its punishment. I would avoid every word that would suggest that He was
punished in connection with His salvation. It robs the whole act of ethical
value to say so. Penalty is made to honor God in the Cross of Christ, and thus
it becomes a blessing to us. Not that our punishment is turned to good account
in its subjective results upon us, but that Christ's judgment has objective
value to the honor of God's holiness. He turned the penalty He endured into
sacrifice He offered. And the sacrifice He offered was the judgment He
accepted. His passive suffering became active obedience, and obedience to a
holy doom. He did not steel His face to the suffering He had to endure, as
though it were a fate to which He had to set His teeth and go through it in a
stoic way. He never regarded it as a mere infliction. For Him, whoever
inflicted it, it was the holiest thing in all the world - it was the will and
judgment of God. All the Old Testament told Him that the Kingdom of God could
never come without the prior judgment of God; and He was prepared to force that
judgment in His impatience for the Kingdom. * He answered the judgment of God
with a grand affirmative act. The willing acceptance of final judgment was for
Jesus the means presented by God for effecting human reconciliation and the
Divine Kingdom. The essence of all sacrifice, which is self-surrender to God,
was lifted out of the Old Testament garb of symbolism, and was made a moral
reality in Christ's holy obedience. In the Old Testament we have the lamb and
the various other things brought for offering; but where did their essential
value lie? In the obedience of the offerer; in the fact that those
institutions were given and prescribed by holy God, however their details were
due to man. And the presentation of the victim was valuable, not because of
anything in the victim, but because of the obedience and surrender of the will
with which the offerer presented it. This is the bearing of sin - the holy
bearing of its judgment. This is the taking of sin away - the acknowledgment
of judgment as holy, wise, and good, and its conversion into blessing; the
absorption and conversion of judgment into confession and praise, the removal
of that guilt which stood between God and man's reconciliation - the robbing
sin of its power to prevent communion with God.
I should, therefore, express the difference
between the old view and the new by saying that one emphasizes substitutionary
expiation and the other emphasizes solidary reparation, consisting of due
acknowledgment of God's holiness, and the honoring of that and not of His
honor.
Now let me pass as I close today to two or three
points I want specially to emphasize.
There is one quotation which I wanted to make at
a particular point and did not. The Reformers are still on the whole, the
maters of the great verities of experience in connection with the work of
Christ. They had an amazing insight into the morbid psychology of the
conscience. They did understand what sin meant, and they said this - the
sinner, beginning with indifference, must keep flying from God until he
actually hate God as a persecutor, unless he grasp the pursuit as God's mercy.
Indifference could not stop at indifference, but goes on through aversion to
hate. Even if a man die indifferent in this life, he comes into circumstances
where he ceases to be indifferent. If we believe about a future at all, it
will be impossible for an indifferent man to remain indifferent when he has
passed on there. Indifference is an unstable position. It changes either
upward or downward - downward into antagonism, into deadly hate against God,
something Satanic; or upwards it passes into acceptance of God's mercy by
faith, and all its blossom and fruit, its joy and peace in the Holy Ghost. The
Reformers were perfectly right. It is only our dull experience and
preoccupied vision which prevent us seeing that it is so.
Then I should like to call attention to this
value in such a cross. It is only the judgment sacrifice of the Son of God
that assures the sinner of the deep changelessness of grace. Forgiving is not
forgetting. Popular theology too often tends to pacify us by reducing the
offense. But the Reformers put the matter quite otherwise in saying that a
justifying faith only goes with a full sense of guilt. You cannot get a full,
justifying faith without a full sense and confession of guilt. We always have
mistrust in the background of our own self-extenuations. When conscience
begins to work and you begin to extenuate, when you try your hand earnestly at
justifying yourself to yourself, you have some idea of how much more vast must
be God's justification of you before Himself. You cannot cease to ask what
charge conscience has against you. Then you magnify that to God's charge. If
your heart condemn you, His condemnation is greater than that of your
condemning heart. Do you consider His conscience? His conscience has to be
pacified as well as His heart indulged. And if His conscience be not met, ours
is not sure. Has His conscience been met? Conscience has always mistrust in
the background if grace is mere remission. Mere remission of sin does not
satisfy even us. If conscience witnesses, against our extenuations, to the
holy majesty of moral claim, is it to be less severe and less changeless than
the claim of God Himself? Conscience has in trust God's law and its majesty,
which must be made good, as mere remission does not make it. Suppose I
transgress and I hear the message of grace, does it tell me the accusing,
irrepressible demand of conscience, the haunting fear of judgment, was an
illusion? It is doing me very ill service if it does. True, there is now no
condemnation for faith; but if the message of grace ever teaches us that the
judgment of conscience is exaggeration, is illusion, it is not the true grace
of God. If a message of grace tell us there was and is no judgment any more,
and that God has simply put judgment on one side and has not exercised it, that
cannot be the true grace of God. Surely the grace of God cannot stultify our
human conscience like that! So we are haunted by mistrust, unless conscience
be drowned in a haze of heart. We have always the feeling and fear that there
is judgment to follow. How may I be sure that I may take the grace of God
seriously and finally, how be sure that I have complete salvation, that I may
entirely trust it through the worst my conscience may say? Only thus, that God
is the Reconciler, that He reconciles in Christ's Cross that the judgment of
sin was there for good and all. We are judged now by the Cross, and by the
Cross we stand or fall. The great sin is not something we do, but it is
refusing to make ourselves right with God in Christ's Cross. We are judged in
the end by our relation to the Cross of Christ. It is the principle of our
moral world. All judgment is committed to that Son. We stand before God at
last according as we are owned by Christ. We are confessed by Him according to
our confession of Him. Nemesis on us is hallowed as a part of the judgment on
Him to whose death we are joined. There is no such thorough assertion of God's
holy, loving law anywhere as there, where in the Cross it was given its own,
and was perfected in judgment in Him who became a curse for us. His prayer for
His murderers, or the closing sigh of victory in the midst of that judgment,
vouches for ever to this, that it is the same holy will which judges man's
wickedness and also loves us and gives His Son for a propitiation for us. Only
that holiness which is changeless in its judgment could be changeless also in
grace. His grace was so little to be foiled that He graciously took His own
judgment. Thus the severity of conscience becomes the certainty of
salvation.
But changeless in judgment! Does that mean
exacting the uttermost farthing of penalty, of suffering? Does it mean that in
the hour of His death Christ suffered, compressed into one brief moment, all
the pains of hell which the human race deserved. We cannot think about things
in that way. God does not work by such equivalents. What is required is not
an equivalent penalty, but an adequate confession of His holiness. Let us get
rid of that materialist idea of equivalents. What Christ gave to God was not
an equivalent penalty, but an adequate confession of God's holiness, rising
from amid extreme conditions of sin. God's holiness, then, was so little to be
mocked, that He actually took His own judgment to save it. He spared not His
own Son - His own self. His severity of conscience becomes at the same moment
our security of salvation. And the more conscience preaches the changelessness
of the judging God, the more it preaches the same changelessness in the grace
of Christ.
There is another consequence. Only the eternal
Reconciler, the High Priest, can guarantee us our full redemption. "Take, my
soul, thy full salvation." You cannot do it except you do it in such a Cross.
It is not enough to have in the Cross a great demonstration of God's love, a
forgiveness of the past which leaves us to fend for ourselves in the future Is
my moral power so great after all, then, that, supposing I believe past things
were settled in Christ's Cross, I may now feel I can run in my own strength?
Can I be perfectly confident about meeting temptation? Nay, we must depend
daily upon the continued energy of the crucified and risen One. We must depend
daily upon the action of that same Christ whose action culminated there but did
not end there. His death is as organic with His heavenly life as it was with
His earthly. What is the meaning of His perpetual intercession if it does not
mean that - the exhausted energy of His saving act? It is by His work from
heaven that we appropriate His work upon earth. He guarantees our perfection
as well as our redemption.
The last step. It is only the atoning
reconciliation of a whole world that guarantees the final perfecting of that
world by its Creator. How do we know that creation is going to be perfected?
How do we know that it is to be to the glory of God who made it and called it
good? How do we know the world will not be a failure for God with all but the
group of people saved in an ark of some kind? We only know because we believe
in the reconciliation of the whole world in Christ's Cross. There is a great
deal of pessimism today, much doubt as to whether perfection really remains for
the whole world; and you find people in the burdened West drawn to the
Buddhistic idea of the human soul's extinction. Some Christians content
themselves with individual salvation out of a world which is left in the lurch,
or they are satisfied with personal union with Christ securing their own
future. But the gospel deals with the world of men as a whole. It argues the
restoration of all things, a new heaven and a new earth. It intends the
regeneration of human society as a whole. Christ is the Savior of the world,
who was also the agent of its creation. The Creator has not let His world get
out of hand for good and all. That is to say, our faith is social and communal
in its nature. We must have a social gospel. And this you cannot get upon the
basis of mere individual or sectional salvation. You can only have a social
gospel upon one basis, namely, that Christ saved, reconciled the whole world as
a unity, the whole of society and history. The Object of our faith, Jesus
Christ, is what our fathers used to call a federal Person, a federal Savior, in
a federal act. All humanity is in Him and in His act. It is quite true every
man must believe for himself, but no man can believe by himself or unto
himself. The Christian faith fades away if it is not nourished and built up in
a community, in a Church. And the Church fades away if it do not hold this
faith in trust for the whole world. Each one of us is saved only by the act
and by the Person that saved the whole world.
* See Schweitzer's very remarkable "Quest of the
Historical Jesus" (A. and C. Black) - the last two chapters - where a dogmatic
and atoning motive in Jesus is declared by an advanced critic to have been the
explanation of His death.
This document (last modifiedAugust 06, 1998) from Believerscafe.com
Home | Bible versions | Bible Dictionary | Christian Classics | Christian Articles | Daily Devotions
Sister Projects: Wikichristian | WikiMD
BelieversCafe is a large collection of christian articles with over 40,000 pages
Our sponsors: 
