justification of sinners--in simply forgiving men or pronouncing them
righteous, irrespective of what they are in themselves at the moment,
if only they will take God at His word--three points have to be borne
in mind. First, that the mere offer of forgiveness is put in the
forefront because this readiness on our part to be treated as helpless
sinners is the annihilation of the one great obstacle to our
reconciliation with God--the proud independence which led the Jews, and
has led men since their day, to resent being dealt with by mere mercy,
and to want to justify themselves. If the Christian character is to
grow aright, it must have its root in an utter acknowledgement that we
owe to God our power even to make a beginning in His service: that we
can run the way of His commandments, because, and only because, He by
His own act has set our hearts at liberty.
Just as I am, without one plea
But that Thy blood was shed for me,
And that Thou bidst me come to Thee,
O Lamb of God, I come!
{141}
To many really good Christians this sort of language has come to have
an unreal sound because they have been surfeited with it, and because
it has been associated with a very one-sided Christianity. But, for
all that, the moral necessity remains that we should dig out of its
last refuges the claim of human independence, if the Christian
character is to grow healthily. In other words, the only root of
Christian thankfulness and progress is the recognition that our
spiritual life rests at its basis on a pure act of the divine bounty in
accomplishing our redemption from sin and giving us the forgiveness of
all our sins.
Secondly, it must be borne in mind that our forgiveness through the
sacrifice is only the first step towards fellowship with God. It is
only the removal of the preliminary obstacle which guilt had raised
against actual admittance into the life of God. The language of the
New Testament refuses to allow us to separate the forgiveness of our
sins from our admission into the 'body of Christ' by baptism[13], or,
in other words, our incorporation into the life of the redeemed people,
the new Israel. For the faith {142} which accepts forgiveness is the
same identical quality which corresponds with all the later movement of
the new life. God's free gift of grace is not forgiveness only, but
forgiveness and new life; it is 'forgiveness of sins and an inheritance
among them that are sanctified by faith that is in Christ[14].' St.
Paul does not contemplate, or contemplates only to repudiate, a faith
which accepts forgiveness and stops there--indifferent to actual
holiness or baptismal incorporation. For it would be no real faith at
all. The preliminary justification or acquittal is simply and solely
to serve as a basis for the life of consecration and glory. The stages
of justification and sanctification are separable in idea but not in
fact. The refusal to proceed from the threshold of the acquittal into
the palace of the new life would expel even from the threshold; even as
the failure of the unthankful servant to behave as one should behave
who has been excused the debt he could not pay, cancelled all his
acquittal and left him with the weight of the old debt rolled back upon
him to his destruction.
Lastly, and in one word, it must never be left out of sight that even
the initial movement of {143} faith, the taking Christ at His word and
believing His promises, involves the element of moral allegiance. His
gracious person and character attract even while the boon is being
accepted, and a new motive enters into life. Justifying faith at its
very root is a faith which yields allegiance to its object.
ii.
To a Jew, and to almost all races when St. Paul wrote, the idea of an
expiatory sacrifice for sin seemed natural and obvious. But for the
special Christian doctrine of expiation the basis is to be found in the
memorable chapter liii of the 'later Isaiah.' That great prophet of
the captivity is assuring Israel of their restoration to their own
land. This restoration is to follow on the due punishment of her
sins--'She hath received of the Lord's hands double for all her sins.'
And the restored people is to be, before all else, a righteous
people--'all righteous'--a people of God's favour, because they are
living according to God. But there is so much sin still remaining in
them as to make it necessary that the new life of the recovered people
should be based on a great act of {144} propitiation. The Righteous
Servant of Jehovah, who is, at starting, the idealized people itself,
but who comes to be represented as an individual acting for the people
while repudiated by them, offers his life a willing sacrifice for their
sins. The chastisement of their iniquities falls on him, and he
accepts the burden, and is obedient unto death. Dying he makes his
soul a guilt offering: and, living through death exalted and powerful,
he becomes an intercessor accepted with God, the head of a new seed
whom he 'justifies' before God by the intimate knowledge of God's mind
and character which in his voluntary humiliation he has won. This
wonderful prophetic picture represents a vast advance in moral teaching
on what had gone before. It is not only that the self-sacrifice of a
perfect human will is substituted for the animal victims to which the
enlightened conscience of God's people already refused to allow any
real efficacy; but also that the idea of propitiation is put in a
context where it is made plain that it can only be the prelude to a
state of actual righteousness in those who are to be justified by it.
It occurs as part of the answer to the question, not--How is Israel to
escape punishment? but, How is Israel to {145} become the really
righteous nation, living in the likeness of God?
In the later books of the Maccabees we have this idea of the expiatory
sacrifice and intercession of the ideal Israelite still retained, but
degraded, probably under Greek influences. 'And I, as my brethren,'
says the Maccabean martyr, 'give up both body and soul for the laws of
our fathers, calling upon God that he may speedily become gracious to
the nation ... and that in me and my brethren may be stayed the wrath
of the Almighty, which hath been justly brought upon our whole
race[15].' 'Be propitious to my race,' prays Eleazar, in another
Alexandrian version of the story, 'being satisfied with our punishment
on their behalf. Make my blood a propitiation for them, and receive my
life as a substitute for theirs[16].' These passages are on a lower
moral level than Isaiah's, because in them the prominent idea of
propitiation is that it is a means of procuring from God exemption from
further punishment, not a step to the restoration to holiness. The
idea both of what God desires and of what man desires is lower. And
indeed all conceptions of propitiation may be distinguished into true
{146} or false, according as righteousness or exemption from punishment
is the end which is specially in view.
Thus when we pass on into the New Testament we find in Caiaphas'
saying, 'It is expedient for you that one man should die for the
people, and that the whole nation perish not[17],' the typical
expression of the quite immoral notion[18] of the forcible sacrifice of
an innocent person in order to exempt a guilty race from punishment.
In our Lord's teaching, on the other hand, we find the doctrine of
atonement raised to its highest moral power. As the Forerunner had
revived the teaching of the later Isaiah by pointing to Him as 'the
Lamb of God who taketh away (i.e. taketh up and expiateth) the sin of
the world[19],' so Christ Himself spoke unmistakeably of the new
covenant which He came to inaugurate, as to be based upon the
sacrificial offering of His body and the outpouring of His blood[20]:
spoke also of 'the remission of sins' as the benefit to be expected
{147} from His expiation. But no teacher in the world ever made it so
plain that God can be satisfied with nothing that any other can do for
us--with nothing but actual likeness to Him in ourselves. No teacher
ever made it so plain that what we are to desire is not to be let off
punishment, but to be actually freed from sin. He left no room for
doubt that only by following His steps, even to the cross and surrender
of our lives, can we share His fellowship. The very life which is
offered in sacrifice to lay the foundation of the new covenant is a
life or spirit which we are to share. We are to eat and drink His
sacrificed flesh and blood--the blood which is the life--and so to be
one with Him and He with us. He sacrificed Himself, in other words, in
order to make possible, through His life and Spirit, a new covenanted
society, in which men should have perfect fellowship with God and with
one another. He did not reject the idea of a propitiation won for man
by His vicarious sacrifice--the truth is far from that--but He keeps it
in inseparable connexion with the life which is to be based upon it;
and in the eucharist He brought back the idea of sacrifice to what had
been its starting-point in all primitive usages. 'The one point,' says
{148} Professor Robertson-Smith, 'that comes out clear and strong (from
the examination of ancient sacrificial customs), is that the
fundamental idea of ancient sacrifice is sacramental communion, and
that all atoning rites are ultimately to be regarded as owing their
efficacy to a communication of divine life to the worshipper, and to
the establishment or confirmation of a living bond between them and
their God[21].'
Still Christ's sacrifice of propitiation, to which we contribute
nothing, in which we do not share, remains a necessary prelude to the
establishment of the new life. It is in virtue of this that we are
justified and accepted and allowed to start afresh. This fact the New
Testament in general takes for granted, and offers no explanation of
it; as indeed the human heart has in general accepted the benefit in
all thankfulness and asked no questions. But the speculative modern
intellect has found a difficulty in the matter--in the matter at least
as commonly represented--and we have noticed that a suggestion of
explanation is made by St. Paul in this passage. God had long gone on
'passing over' sin all over the world in loving forbearance, bearing
with all men's sinfulness, {149} till they had thoroughly learnt the
lesson of their own need of God and inability to save themselves. But
this very forbearance rendered God's character liable to complete
misunderstanding. He might have been supposed to be kind indeed, but
indifferent to sin. 'These things hast thou done and I kept silence:
thou thoughtest that I was altogether such an one as thyself[22].'
Thus the severity manifested in the claim of the 'righteous Father'
upon the Son of Man, His claim of an obedience unto the shedding of His
blood, and the ready response to His claim on the part of the Son of
Man gladly rendering up His life in homage to the Father--these taken
together, the claim of the Father and the sacrifice of the Son,
vindicated within the area of the Christian faith the true character of
God, and forced the believer in Jesus to hold the severity and the love
in their inseparable unity as making up the divine righteousness.
Does not this thought open at least an intelligible vista into the
mystery of the Atonement? Christ is the Son of Man. He is to
inaugurate the true manhood. But first He must deal with the manhood
that has gone {150} astray, and make an act of reparation to the Father
for all the outrage that our sins have done Him. Thus in contrast to
all our self-pleasing, self-indulgence, self-excusing, in contrast to
all our clamorous insolence towards God and indifference to His laws,
we behold the Son of Man recognizing the Father's strict requirements,
and lifting before His eyes, in the name of the manhood which He
represents, the great reparation of an unshrinking obedience and
loyalty unto death. The Father spared not His only Son the natural
consequences of obedience in a world of sin. The Son spared not
Himself, but shed His blood--the 'blood which is the life'--at the
Father's will. This is the one full, perfect, and sufficient
sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world.
It is the sacrifice offered in the power of nothing less than 'eternal
spirit.' Henceforth, then, no man can come to God in faith in Jesus,
in the faith which even at its root is moral allegiance, and think
lightly either of God's holiness or of his own or others' sin. God
forgives him his sin, but it cost Him much to forgive it. The Cross is
the measure of the antipathy between God and sin.
And it is well to notice how the great {151} thought of this passage is
made intelligible to the ordinary English reader again, only by the
Revised Version. In the old Bible the word signifying 'passing over'
of sins is translated 'remission'--the very thing with which it is in
fact contrasted. It is not an exaggeration to say that, in this and
very many places of the epistles, the Revised Version for the first
time renders the thought of the apostles again intelligible to the
English reader. And if the Revised Version is not popular, as the
booksellers tell us it is not, this is, I fear, only a sign that the
majority of English Christians do not really care to _understand_ the
meaning of the message with which, as a matter of words, they are so
familiar.
iii.
The metaphor of 'redemption' and the metaphor of 'propitiation'
complete and check one another. As in the parables it is only the
exact point of comparison between the earthly and the heavenly which
can be pressed for the spiritual lesson, so it is with these
metaphorical words, which are in fact parables compressed. The word
'redemption' is meant to suggest a price paid by God, or by Christ, for
our being {152} made free; it is the price of the Son's death. He
'gives His life a ransom for many.' The word 'propitiation' again is
meant to suggest that the offering of the life in sacrifice was the
means to win for us forgiveness from God. So far, both metaphorical
words have their clear and harmonious meaning. But in old days the
metaphor of redemption was worked out by Origen and others beyond the
exact point of the original suggestion. The price, they argued, must
have been paid to the enemy who held us captive; i.e. Christ's life was
offered as a price to the devil in order that his claim might be
satisfied and we might be justly set free. But this extension of the
scope of the metaphor is wholly alien to the New Testament. On the
other hand, the idea of propitiation has suggested at many periods the
horrible notion that the Son wrung from the angry Father the pardon
which He was unwilling to give. Such a notion is again wholly alien to
the New Testament. But in fact the two metaphors are mutually
corrective; and each tends to exclude the misuse of the other. The
idea that Christ offered anything to the devil is corrected by the
notion inherent in the phrase 'propitiation (of the Father).' What the
Son offered was a sacrifice {153} directed to the Father only. On the
other hand, the idea that the mind of the Father needed to be changed
towards us, is corrected by the suggestion inherent in the other
metaphor of redemption; for it is He who, because He loved us, gave up
His own Son to buy us out of the slavery of sin. Each metaphor
suggests a single idea--each complementary of the other, and corrective
of its misuse--and both combine to tell us of the one inseparable love
of the Father and the Son, uniting in a sacrificial act which is
ascribed to both, to redeem us from the tyranny of sin and to set the
pardoning love free to work upon us, without obscuring the true
hatefulness of sin or the true character of God.
If, especially recently, the doctrine of the atonement[23] has involved
intellectual difficulty, on the other hand it has proved itself, as the
popular Christian literature of all ages sufficiently shows, widely and
deeply welcome to the human heart. This wide welcome which it has
received shows that it contains a deep truth. And from this point of
view, from the point of view of our practical spiritual needs, we do
well to meditate {154} much and deeply upon this doctrine. We can
depend upon it, that if we are to go on patiently doing good in a world
like this, so full of disappointments and anxieties and moral failures
and torturing scruples, we must have peace at the heart. And this is
what the really evangelical doctrine is capable of giving us. It bids
us continually look out of ourselves up to God, and assures us that His
love, manifested in the sacrifice of His Son, is there continually,
unchangeably. It is there, waiting till first we turn to Him, to give
us the assurance of entire absolution and admission into the divine
fellowship, wholly irrespective of what we have been or done; and it is
there continually, however often we fall, with the same large and
liberal hand to pour out continual forgivenesses, and never wearies of
restoring us again and again to the solid foundation of the peace and
grace which are by Jesus Christ. We are not meant to be miserably
anxious or morbidly introspective. We must confess our sins, and that
with exactness, without self-sparing, without self-excusing, in utter
humility and truth; but 'if we confess our sins, he is faithful and
just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all
unrighteousness.'
[1] Jer. xiii. 33.
[2] Except the sins which slew Him.
[3] I have combined this passage with the illustrative passages in St.
Paul's speeches to the heathen. Acts xiv. 16: 'Who in the generations
gone by suffered all the nations to walk in their own ways.' Acts
xvii. 30: 'The times of ignorance God overlooked (winked at); but now
he commandeth men that they should all everywhere repent.' Wisd. xl.
23: 'Thou overlookest (winkest at) the sins of men to the end they may
repent.'
[4] This paragraph gives distinctness to a somewhat latent thought in
vers. 25, 26. But I feel convinced that this, and nothing else, is the
thought.
[5] Verses 5, 25, 26.
[6] Rom. iii. 22.
[7] Phil. iii. 9.
[8] 2 Cor. v. 21.
[9] Rom. ix. 31.
[10] Rom. ii. 5.
[11] Cf. 1 John i. 9: 'Faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins.'
[12] Joseph, the 'righteous' man in Matt. i. 19, is kindly. But his
kindliness has still the elements of moral severity. And it must be
remembered that in Rom. v. 7 'righteous' is still put in contrast to
'good.'
[13] See Acts ii. 38: 'Be baptized ... unto the remission of your
sins.' xxii. 16: 'Be baptized and wash away thy sins.'
[14] Acts xxvi. 18, i.e. forgiveness and fellowship in the consecrated
body, the new Israel; cf. xx. 33.
[15] 2 Macc. vii. 37.
[16] 4 Macc. vi. 28, 29.
[17] John xi. 50.
[18] None the less immoral as Caiaphas intended it, because, as St.
John perceives, a divine truth uttered itself through his lips (John
xi. 51).
[19] John i. 29.
[20] Matt. xxvi. 28; Luke xxii. 19; 1 Cor. xi. 24.
[21] Robertson-Smith, _Religion of the Semites_ (Black, 1889), p. 418.
[22] Ps. l. 21; cf. Eccles. viii. 11.
[23] On some of the difficulties felt about the doctrine of the
Atonement, see app. note D.
{155}
DIVISION II. Sec. 2. CHAPTER IV.
_The true seed of Abraham._
St. Paul has been repudiating the principle of justification by works
of the law. To those with whom he had been brought up, this was in the
highest degree to dishonour the Jewish law, and indeed the principle of
divinely-given law at all. But in the last words of the previous
chapter he refuses to admit this inference. 'God forbid that we should
make law of none effect. Nay, we establish law.'
This idea of the Gospel, rightly understood, establishing the law even
while it superseded it, is with St. Paul a very favourite one, and he
elaborates it in different ways. Sometimes he shows how the function
of the written law, or 'the letter,' is only to awaken the conscience
and make men know their sinfulness. It can give men no help in
corresponding to the moral requirement which it expresses. Having
{156} convicted the conscience of sin, it has done its work, and must
yield its place to a more effective spiritual agency. The letter
killeth, in order that the Spirit may give life to those whom it has
killed. And, on the other hand, the one object of this new spiritual
agency, this life-giving Spirit, is to infuse the power of moral
obedience, which the law could not give, into men's lives, 'that the
requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us who walk after the
Spirit.' In this place, however, St. Paul only alludes to this
argument and in the main adopts another. He shows from the Book of the
Law, that the father of the faithful, himself the typical instance of a
justified man, was justified, not by works which he had done, but
simply because he believed; not upon the basis of any law or covenant,
but as a man simply and not as a circumcised man; and again, that
David, the man after God's own heart, living under the law, would have
us rest our hopes of blessedness, not on our merits as having kept the
law, but simply on the forgiving bounty of divine grace.
Let us inquire, he says, into the case of Abraham, whom we Jews are
proud to own for our national ancestor. What are we to say of him? If
Abraham approached God in virtue {157} of his merits in having kept a
law, and so was accepted by God because of what he had done of himself,
there is something for him to boast of. But this in fact is not his
relation to God according to the scripture at all. There--
'merit lives from man to man,
But not from man, O Lord, to thee.'
The whole initiation is God's. He simply makes a promise of His own
pure goodwill--'Thy seed shall be as the stars of heaven'--and Abraham
simply believed Him; and this, and nothing but this, was 'counted to
him for righteousness[1].' The two suggested relations of Abraham to
God are broadly contrasted and can be generally applied. In the one
case you have a compact between God who imposes, and man who accepts,
an allotted task with a payment attached to its fulfilment. If the man
fulfils it, his payment can be classed as due to him under the compact.
In the other case you have nothing done, no claim alleged, but a pure
act of God, accepting one of our sinful race, as he is, simply because
he takes God at His word. And this is how David also views our
relation to God. You find him[2] opening his mouth to tell {158} us
what sort of man is truly blessed, truly to be congratulated. And he
thinks not of one who claims a reward because of his merit, but of one
who has found no comfort or resource except in penitent confession of
his sins, and whose sins God has forgiven and has consented to treat as
if they did not exist. It is the unmerited act of the divine bounty,
it is God justifying the sinful, which is the source of blessedness
(vers. 1-8).
Now we go back to the case of Abraham to inquire whether the blessing
of divine acceptance was pronounced upon him because he was the head of
the chosen race marked out by circumcision--which was, so to speak, the
first part of the law. No, it was before he was circumcised. The
token of circumcision came afterwards[3], as the seal or external
confirmation of what he had already received simply as a believing man;
so that he might have for his true sons believers, whether
uncircumcised or circumcised, and they might share his acceptance
simply by believing God as he believed Him (vers. 9-12).