033. REVELATION OF RIGHTEOUS JUDGMENT

REVELATION OF RIGHTEOUS JUDGMENT As the historical Christ was the manifestation of Him who had been ever working as the revealer of God in human history, so the cross of Christ was the historical manifestation and proclamation of the age-long suffering of the Son of God. It was the concrete exhibition of the holiness that required, and of the love that provided, man’s redemption. Those six hours of pain could never have procured our salvation if they had not been a revelation of eternal facts in the being of God. The heart of God and the meaning of all previous history were then unveiled. The whole evolution of humanity was there depicted in its essential elements, on the one hand the sin and condemnation of the race, on the other hand the grace and suffering of him who was its life and salvation. As he who hung upon the cross was God, manifest in the flesh, so the suffering of the cross was God’s suffering for sin, manifest in the flesh. The evolution of humanity since the first sin has been a constant revelation of the righteous judgment of God. The natural law which inflicts disease and pain and death upon the sinner and upon his posterity after him is only the biological expression of God’s judicial sentence upon iniquity. In the natural course of evolution punishment follows sin, as the cartwheel follows the ox. And this would be the end of it if individualism were the whole truth. Mere individualism brings only suffering and death. But there is a deeper truth than mere individualism, and I now bring this truth to the elucidation of the doctrine of atonement as I previously brought it to elucidate the fall. Once more I remind you that Jesus Christ, the revealer of God, is the life of the race. If he is one with the race, then our sufferings and sorrows become his; he takes upon him our guilt and responsibility; God’s judgment upon our transgression falls upon him. Since we are by nature joined to him and the tides of his natural life flow into us, he who is the life of the race cannot separate himself from us even in our condemnation and death. The atonement of Christ seems foolishness to the socalled philosopher only because he regards it as an external, arbitrary, mechanical transfer of guilt and penalty. Guilt and penalty, he says, are individual and personal, and cannot be thus transferred. There is no justice, he says, in punishing one for the sins of another, and especially in punishing the innocent for the sins of the guilty. But Christ’s atonement rests upon a fact of life, which he has not taken account of. We are not simply individuals. We have community with one another, and with Him who created us. More pertinently still, he has community with us, and nothing that belongs to us is foreign to him. He has not committed our sin, but he is so connected with us that he must share the burdens and the sufferings, the shame and the penalty, which sin brings upon us. Not late in human history did he vicariously take our sins upon him, but from the very instant of the fall. The imputation of our sins to him is the result of his natural union with us. Because he is one with us he has been our substitute from the beginning,—indeed, so inseparable are his fortunes from ours that the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews can say that through the eternal Spirit he offered himself without spot to God. So a view of the larger Christ enables us to see that the atonement is the very wisdom of God. Christ is not simply the being who lived three and thirty years in Palestine, and his atonement is not simply a six hours’ suffering upon the cross. Christ is the upholder of the universe, the life and light of man. His cross is but the concentration and summing up of the work of centuries. Can we quarrel with the doctrine of substitution, when we see that this substitution is but the sharing of our griefs and sorrows by him whose very life pulsates in our veins? Can we object to being saved by another, when we find that he is not another, but one vitally connected with us? It is only our false individualism that prevents us from seeing the wisdom of God in the atonement, and that false individualism is the result of sin. Christ’s cross breaks down that self-isolation, and brings us again into sympathy and union with our Saviour, and so with all mankind. This suffering for sin which Christ endured is the suffering of penal inflictions in our stead, for all suffering is penal in the sense that its existence is due to sin, and that it is the expression of God’s moral revulsion from iniquity, the revelation of his self-vindicating holiness. Do you say that Christ was personally pure, and therefore could not suffer penalty? I answer, that precisely because he was personally pure, he could suffer penalty. The frozen limb cannot feel, just because it is frozen. When it begins to thaw, and life courses through its veins, then there is pain. Christ was the only live and healthy member of a dead humanity. He was the heart from which humanity drew its life-blood. He could suffer for sin, as we who are dead in trespasses and sins could not. But the sorrows of the heart brought life to the members. Christ has delivered us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us. In him we are reconciled to God. He can bring us to God, because he is himself God, the incarnate, atoning, indwelling God. He is the principle of evolution, the upholder and conductor of the world-process, and the culmination and goal of that evolutionary process is the bringing back of humanity in him to God.