Clever men have exhibited their talent and courage by calling it
"heathenish"; and others have undertaken to apologise for St. Paul by
describing this objection as "modern." I cannot understand how any one
should feel entitled either to flout the Apostle on this matter, or to
take him under his patronage. If any one ever had the sense to
distinguish between what is real and unreal in regard to God, between
what is true and false spiritually, it was he; even with Ritschl on
one side and Schmiedel on the other he is not dwarfed, and may be
permitted to speak for himself. The wrath of God, the condemnation of
God resting on the sinful world, are not, whatever speculative
theologians may think, unreal things: neither do they belong only to
ancient times. They are the most real things of which human nature has
any knowledge till it receives the reconciliation. They are as real as
a bad conscience; as real as misery, impotence, and despair. And it is
the glory of the Gospel, as St. Paul understood it, that it deals with
them as real. It does not tell men that they are illusions, and that
only their own groundless fear and distrust have ever stood between
them and God. It tells them that God has dealt seriously with these
serious things for their removal, that awful as they are He has put
them away by an awful demonstration of His love; it tells them that
God has made peace at an infinite cost, and that the priceless peace
is now freely offered to them.
When St. Paul says that God has given him the ministry of
reconciliation, he means that he is a preacher of this peace. He
ministers reconciliation to the world. His work has no doubt a
hortatory side, as we shall see, but that side is secondary. It is not
the main part of his vocation to tell men to make their peace with
God, but to tell them that God has made peace with the world. At
bottom, the Gospel is not good advice, but good news. All the good
advice it gives is summed up in this--Receive the good news. But if
the good news be taken away; if we cannot say, God has made peace, God
has dealt seriously with His condemnation of sin, so that it no longer
stands in the way of your return to Him; if we cannot say, Here _is_
the reconciliation, receive it,--then for man's actual state we have
no Gospel at all.
In the nineteenth verse St. Paul explains more fully the way in which
he is looking at the subject:[53] "to wit, that God was in Christ
reconciling the world to Himself, not reckoning unto them their
trespasses, and having committed unto us the word of reconciliation."
The English Authorised Version puts a comma at Christ: "God was in
Christ, reconciling the world to Himself." It is safe to say that "God
was in Christ" is a sentence which neither St. Paul nor any other New
Testament writer could have conceived; the "was" and the "reconciling"
must be taken together, and "in Christ" is practically equivalent to
"through Christ" in the previous verse--God was by means of Christ
reconciling the world to Himself. "Reconciling," of course, must be
taken in the sense already explained. The sentence does not mean that
God was trying to convert men, or to prevail with them to lay aside
their enmity, but that He was disposing of everything that on His part
made peace impossible. When Christ's work was done, the reconciliation
of the world was accomplished. When men were called to receive it,
they were called to a relation to God; not in which they would no more
be against Him--though that is included--but in which they would no
more have Him against them (Hofmann). There would be no condemnation
thenceforth to those who were in Christ Jesus.
The connexion of the words "not reckoning unto them their trespasses,
and having committed unto us the word of reconciliation," is rather
difficult. The last clause certainly refers to something which took
place after the work of reconciliation had been wrought; Paul was
commissioned to tell the story of it. It seems most probable that the
other is co-ordinate with this, so that both are in a sense the
evidence for the main proposition. It is as if he had said: "God was
by means of Christ establishing friendly relations between the world
and Himself, as appears from this, that He does not reckon their
trespasses unto them,[54] and has made us preachers of His grace." The
very universality of the expression--reconciling a world to
Himself--is consistent only with an objective reconciliation. It
cannot mean that God was overcoming the world's enmity (though that is
the ulterior object) it means that God was putting away His own
condemnation and wrath. When this was done, He could send, and did
send, men to declare that it was done; and among these men, none had a
profounder appreciation of what God had wrought, and what he himself
had to declare as God's glad tidings, than the Apostle Paul.
This is the point we reach in ver. 20: "We are ambassadors therefore
on behalf of Christ, as though God were intreating you by us; we
beseech you, on behalf of Christ, be ye reconciled to God." The
Apostle has just told us that all is of God, but all is at the same
time "in Christ," or "through Christ." Hence it is on Christ's behalf
he comes forward; it is the furtherance of Christ's interests he has
at heart. Nay, it is that same interest which is at the heart of the
Father, who desires now to glorify the Son; so that when Paul appeals
to men on Christ's behalf it is as though God Himself entreated them.
Most expositors notice the amazing contrast between πρεσβεύομεν ("we
are ambassadors") and δεόμεθα ("we beseech you"). The ambassador, as a
rule, stands upon his dignity; he maintains the greatness of the
person whom he represents. But Paul in this lowly passionate entreaty
is not false to his Master; he is preaching the Gospel in the spirit
of the Gospel; he shows that he has really learned of Christ; the very
conception of the ambassador descending to entreaty is, as Calvin
says, an incomparable commendation of the grace of Christ. One can
imagine how Saul the Pharisee would have spoken on God's behalf; with
what rigour, what austerity, what unbending, uncompromising assurance.
But old things have passed away; behold, they have become new. This
single verse illumines, as by a lightning flash, the new world into
which the Gospel has translated Paul, the new man it has made of him.
The fire that burned in Christ's heart has caught hold in his; his
soul is tremulous with passion; he is conscious of the grandeur of his
calling, yet there is nothing that he would not do to win men for his
message. It would go to his heart like a sword if he had to take up
the old lament, "Who hath believed our report?" In his dignity as
Christ's ambassador and as the mouthpiece of God, in his humility, in
his passionate earnestness, in the urgency and directness of his
appeal, St. Paul is the supreme type and example of the Christian
minister. In the passage before us he presents the appeal of the
Gospel in its simplest form: wherever he stands before men on Christ's
behalf his prayer is, "Be ye reconciled unto God." And once more we
must insist on the apostolic import of these words. It is the
misleading _nuance_ of "reconcile" in English that makes so many take
them as if they meant, "Lay aside your enmity to God; cease to regard
Him with distrust, hatred, and fear"; in other words, "Show yourselves
His friends." In St. Paul's lips they cannot possibly mean anything
but, "Accept _His_ offered friendship; enter into that peace which He
has made for the world through the death of His Son; believe that He
has at infinite cost put away all that on His part stood between you
and peace; _receive_ the reconciliation."
The Received Text and the Authorised Version attach the twenty-first
verse to this exhortation by γὰρ ("for"): "For Him who knew no sin He
made _to be_ sin on our behalf." The "for" is spurious, and though it
is not inept the sentence gains greatly in impressiveness by its
omission. The Apostle does not point out the connexion for us: in
simply declaring the manner in which God reconciled the world to
Himself--the process by which, the cost at which, He made peace--he
leaves us to feel how vast is the boon which is offered to us in the
Gospel, how tremendous the responsibility of rejecting it. To refuse
"the reconciliation" is to contemn the death in which the Sinless One
was made sin on our behalf.
This wonderful sentence is the inspired commentary on the statement
of ver. 15--"One died for all." It takes us into the very heart of the
Apostolic Gospel. Just because it does so, it has always been felt to
be of critical importance, alike by those who welcome and by those who
reject it; it condenses and concentrates in itself the attraction of
Christ and the offence of Christ. It is a counsel of despair to evade
it. It is not the puzzle of the New Testament, but the ultimate
solution of all puzzles; it is not an irrational quantity that has to
be eliminated or explained away, but the key-stone of the whole system
of apostolic thought. It is not a blank obscurity in revelation, a
spot of impenetrable blackness; it is the focus in which the
reconciling love of God burns with the purest and intensest flame; it
is the fountain light of all day, the master light of all seeing, in
the Christian revelation. Let us look at it more closely.
God, we must observe in the first place, is the subject. "All" is of
him in the work of reconciliation, and this above all, that He made
the Sinless One to be sin. I have read a book on the Atonement which
quoted this sentence three times, or rather misquoted it, never once
recognising that an action of God is involved. But without this, there
is no coherence in the Apostle's thoughts at all. Without this, there
would be no explanation of reconciliation as God's work. God
reconciled the world to Himself--made peace into which the world might
enter--in making Christ sin on its behalf. What precisely this means
we shall inquire further on; but it is essential to remember, whatever
it mean, that God is the doer of it.
Observe next the description of Christ--"Him that knew no sin." The
Greek negative (μὴ), as Schmiedel remarks, implies that this is
regarded as the verdict of some one else than the writer. It was
Christ's own verdict upon Himself. He whose words search our very
hearts, and bring to light unsuspected seeds of badness, never Himself
betrays the faintest consciousness of guilt. He challenges His enemies
directly: "Which of you convinceth Me of sin?" It is the verdict of
all sincere human souls, as uttered by the soldier who watched His
cross--"Truly this was a righteous man." It is the verdict even of the
great enemy who assailed Him again and again, and found nothing in
Him, and whose agents recognised Him as the Holy One of God. Above
all, it is the verdict of God. He was the beloved Son, in whom the
Father was well pleased. For three-and-thirty years, in daily contact
with the world and its sins, Christ lived and yet knew no sin. To His
will and conscience it was a foreign thing. What infinite worth that
sinless life possessed in God's sight! When He looked down to earth it
was the one absolutely precious thing. Filled full of righteousness,
absolutely well-pleasing in His eyes, it was worth more to God than
all the world beside.
Now, God reconciled the world to Himself--He made a peace which could
be proclaimed and offered to the world--when, all sinless as Christ
was, He made Him to be sin on our behalf. What does this mean? Not,
exactly, that He made Him a sin-offering on our behalf. The expression
for a sin-offering is distinct (περὶ ἁμαρτίας), and the parallelism
with δικαιοσύνη in the next clause forbids that reference here. The
sin-offering of the Old Testament can at most have pointed towards and
dimly suggested so tremendous an utterance as this; and the
profoundest word of the New Testament cannot be adequately interpreted
by anything in the Old. When St. Paul says, "Him that knew no sin God
made sin," he must mean that in Christ on His cross, by divine
appointment, the extremest opposites met and became one--incarnate
righteousness and the sin of the world. The sin is laid by God on the
Sinless One; its doom is laid on Him; His death is the execution of
the divine sentence upon it. When He dies, He has put away sin; it no
longer stands, as it once stood, between God and the world. On the
contrary, God has made peace by this great transaction; He has wrought
out reconciliation; and its ministers can go everywhere with this
awful appeal: "Receive the reconciliation; Him who knew no sin God
hath made sin on our behalf, and there is henceforth no condemnation
to them that are in Christ."
No one who has felt the power of this appeal will be very anxious to
defend the Apostolic Gospel from the charges which are sometimes made
against it. When he is told that it is impossible for the doom of sin
to fall on the Sinless One, and that even if it were conceivable it
would be frightfully immoral, he is not disquieted. He recognises in
the moral contradictions of this text the surest sign that the secret
of the Atonement is revealed in it: he feels that God's work of
reconciliation necessarily involves such an identification of
sinlessness and sin. He knows that there is an appalling side to sin,
and he is ready to believe that there is an appalling side to
redemption also--a side the most distant sight of which makes the
proudest heart quail, and stops every mouth before God. He knows that
the salvation which he needs must be one in which God's mercy comes
_through_, and not _over_, His judgment; and this is the redemption
which is in Christ Jesus. But without becoming controversial on a
subject on which more than on any other the temper of controversy is
unseemly, reference may be made to the commonest form of objection to
the apostolic doctrine, in the sincere hope that some one who has
stumbled at that doctrine may see it more truly. The objection I refer
to discredits propitiation in the alleged interest of the love of God.
"We do not need," the objectors say, "to propitiate an angry God. This
is a piece of heathenism, of which a Christian ought to be ashamed. It
is a libel on the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, whose name
is love, and who waits to be gracious." What are we to say to such
words, which are uttered as boldly as if there were no possible reply,
or rather as if the Apostles had never written, or had been
narrow-minded unreceptive souls, who had not only failed to understand
their Master, but had taught with amazing perversity the very opposite
of what He taught on the most essential of all points--the nature of
God and His relation to sinful men? We must say this. It is quite true
that we have not to propitiate an offended God: the very fact upon
which the Gospel proceeds is that we _cannot_ do any such thing. But
it is not true that no propitiation is needed. As truly as guilt is a
real thing, as truly as God's condemnation of sin is a real thing, a
propitiation is needed. And it is here, I think, that those who make
the objection referred to part company, not only with St. Paul, but
with all the Apostles. God is love, they say, and therefore He does
not require a propitiation. God is love, say the Apostles, and
therefore He provides a propitiation. Which of these doctrines appeals
best to the conscience? Which of them gives reality, and contents, and
substance, to the love of God? Is it not the apostolic doctrine? Does
not the other cut out and cast away that very thing which made the
soul of God's love to Paul and John? "Herein is love, not that we
loved God, but that _He loved us, and sent His Son to be the
propitiation for our sins." "God commendeth His love toward us, in
that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.... Him that knew
no sin He made to be sin on our behalf."_ That is how they spoke in
the beginning of the Gospel, and so let us speak. Nobody has any right
to borrow the words "God is love" from an apostle, and then to put
them in circulation after carefully emptying them of their apostolic
import. Still less has any one a right to use them as an argument
against the very thing in which the Apostles placed their meaning. But
this is what they do who appeal to love against propitiation. To take
the condemnation out of the Cross is to take the nerve out of the
Gospel; it will cease to hold men's hearts with its original power
when the reconciliation which is preached through it contains the
mercy, but not the judgment of God. Its whole virtue, its consistency
with God's character, its aptness to man's need, its real dimensions
as a revelation of love, depend ultimately on this, that mercy comes
to us in it through judgment.
In the last words of the passage the Apostle tells us the object of
this great interposition of God: "He made Christ to be sin on our
behalf, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him." Our
condemnation is made His; it is accepted, exhausted, annihilated, on
His cross; and when we receive the reconciliation--when we humble
ourselves to be forgiven and restored at this infinite cost--there is
no longer condemnation for us: we are justified by our faith, and have
peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. This is what is meant
by becoming the righteousness of God in Him. It is not, as the very
next sentence suggests, all that is included in the Christian
salvation, but it is all that the words themselves contain. "_In Him_"
has all promise in it, as well as the present possession of
reconciliation, with which the Christian life begins; but it is this
present possession, and not the promise involved in it, which St. Paul
describes as the righteousness of God. In Christ, that Christ who died
for us, and in Him in virtue of that death which by exhausting
condemnation put away sin, we are accepted in God's sight.
FOOTNOTES:
[53] This seems to be the force of ὡς: it is a violent supposition
that it means "since," or "for," and that ὅτι is a marginal
interpretation of it which has crept into the text.
[54] This makes λογιζόμενος a true present, not an imperfect
participle. It quite dislocates the sentence if it is co-ordinated
with καταλλάσσων, and not with θέμενος.
XVII
_THE SIGNS OF AN APOSTLE_
"And working together _with Him_ we intreat also that ye receive
not the grace of God in vain (for He saith,
At an acceptable time I hearkened unto thee,
And in a day of salvation did I succour thee:
behold, now is the acceptable time; behold, now is the day of
salvation): giving no occasion of stumbling in anything, that our
ministration be not blamed; but in everything commending
ourselves, as ministers of God, in much patience, in afflictions,
in necessities, in distresses, in stripes, in imprisonments, in
tumults, in labours, in watchings, in fastings; in pureness, in
knowledge, in long-suffering, in kindness, in the Holy Ghost, in
love unfeigned, in the word of truth, in the power of God; by the
armour of righteousness on the right hand and on the left, by
glory and dishonour, by evil report and good report; as deceivers,
and _yet_ true; as unknown, and yet well known; as dying, and
behold, we live; as chastened, and not killed; as sorrowful, yet
alway rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing,
and _yet_ possessing all things.
"Our mouth is open unto you, O Corinthians, our heart is enlarged.
Ye are not straitened in us, but ye are straitened in your own
affections. Now for a recompense in like kind (I speak as unto
_my_ children), be ye also enlarged."--2 COR. vi. 1-13 (R.V.).
The ministry of the Gospel is a ministry of reconciliation; the preacher
of the Gospel is primarily an evangelist. He has to proclaim that
wonderful grace of God which made peace between heaven and earth through
the blood of the Cross, and he has to urge men to receive it. Until this
is done, there is nothing else that he can do. But when sinful men have
welcomed the glad tidings, when they have consented to accept the peace
bought for them with so great a price, when they have endured to be
forgiven and restored to God's favour, not for what they are, nor for
what they are going to be, but solely for what Christ did for them on
the cross, then a new situation is created, and the minister of the
Gospel has a new task. It is to that situation St. Paul addresses
himself here. Recognising the Corinthians as people reconciled to God by
the death of His Son, he entreats them not to receive the grace of God
in vain. He does so, according to our Bibles, as a fellow-worker with
God. This is probably right, though some would take the word as in chap.
i. 24, and make it mean "as fellow-workers with you." But it is more
natural, when we look to what precedes, to think that St. Paul is here
identifying himself with God's interest in the world, and that he speaks
out of the proud consciousness of doing so. "All is of God," in the
great work of redemption; but God does not disdain the sympathetic
co-operation of men whose hearts He has touched.
But what is meant by receiving the grace of God in vain, or to no
purpose? That might be done in an infinite variety of ways, and in
reading the words for edification we naturally grasp at any clue
suggested by our circumstances. An expositor is bound to seek his clue
rather in the circumstances of the Corinthians; and if we have regard
to the general tenor of this Epistle, and especially to such a passage
as chap. xi. 4, we shall find the true interpretation without
difficulty. Paul has explained his Gospel--his proclamation of Jesus
as Universal Redeemer in virtue of His dying the sinner's death, and
as Universal Lord in virtue of His resurrection from the dead--so
explicitly, because he fears lest through the influence of some false
teacher the minds of the Corinthians should be corrupted from the
simplicity that is toward Christ. It would be receiving the grace of
God in vain, if, after receiving those truths concerning Christ which
he had taught them, they were to give up his Gospel for another in
which these truths had no place. This is what he dreads and
deprecates, both in Corinth and Galatia: the precipitate removal from
the grace of Christ to another Gospel which is no Gospel at all, but a
subversion of the truth. This is what he means by receiving the grace
of God in vain.
There are some minds to which this will not be impressive, some to which
it will only be provoking. It will seem irrelevant and pithless to those
who take for granted the finality of the distinction between religion
and theology, or between the theory, as it is called, and the fact of
the Atonement. But for St. Paul, as for all sufficiently earnest and
vigorous minds, there is a point at which these distinctions disappear.
A certain theory is seen to be essential to the fact, a certain theology
to be the constitutive force in the religion. The death of Christ was
what it was to him only because it was capable of a certain
interpretation: his theory of it, if we choose to put it so, gave it its
power over him. The love of Christ constrained him "because he thus
judged"--_i.e._, because he construed it to his intelligence in a way
which showed it to be irresistible. If these interpretations and
constructions are rejected, it must not be in the name of "fact" as
opposed to "theory," but in the name of other interpretations more
adequate and constraining. A fact of which there is absolutely _no_
theory is a fact which is without relation to anything in the
universe--a mere irrelevance in man's mind--a blank incredibility--a
rock in the sky. Paul's "theory" about Christ's death for sin was not to
him an excrescence on the Gospel, or a superfluous appendage to it: it
was itself the Gospel; it was the thing in which the very soul of God's
redeeming love was brought to light; it was the condition under which
the love of Christ became to him a constraining power; to receive it and
then reject it was to receive the grace of God in vain.