CHAPTER IV.

THE LAW PRECEPT DULY SANCTIFIED.

THE doctrine of the chapter just concluded supersedes, it will be observed, all those compensational contrivances for the saving of God’s justice, which have been the labor of theology under this head of atonement; showing how justice and mercy are factors in God’s plan working safely together, and are complementary in part to each other by reason of the antagonism of their functions; showing also how, by this same qualified antagonism, the order of God’s plan is made sure, and his ends of government accomplished. This I believe to be the doctrine of scripture and, of course, to be true. Still it is a kind of truth that requires time and reflection, and is not likely to approve itself generally at once. Having therefore given it forth to work suggestively, and finally to approve itself, I consent to waive it, and go on with my argument, by another course that is separate and is no way dependent on it.

Holding now in view the same particular apprehensions of damage, from the introduction of forgiveness and free justification, that were mentioned in the close of the third chapter, I propose, in this and the two following 297chapters, to go over them in order, and show that the said grounds of apprehended damage do not exist; or that, if they might exist, they are adequately provided against. I do not say that they are provided against by any strictly compensative arrangements, though I shall bring forward and specify things which others may take as compensatory, in respect to law and justice, if they choose.

We shall be discussing, in these chapters, what many take for the whole subject; viz., the ground of forgiveness; but as this, in the view I am giving, is no real subject at all, I do not propose the matter to be investigated in that form. I propose rather to inquire what is the working of forgiveness itself, as accomplished by the Moral Power of Christ in his Sacrifice? It appears to be supposed that forgiveness is a mere letting go of the guilty, just as a man who has been injured by another lets him go, consentingly, without further blame. But there is this very immense difference, if we will not be deceived by the most superficial notion possible, between our letting go of an adversary and God’s, that, while our adversary is wholly quit of our impeachment, God’s is really bound fast in the chains of justice and penal causation, and held as fixedly in their fires, after he is let go, as before. Merely telling him that he is forgiven signifies nothing, even though it be by a voice from heaven. He must be forgiven, the forgiveness must be executed, by an inward change that takes him out of his bondages, and the hell of penal causations loosed by his sin, and brings him forth into the liberties of 298love and adoption. This will be effected by the grace of Christ in his vicarious sacrifice., And then the question follows, how the forgiveness, the real deliverance accomplished by him, may consist with the precept, and the enforcements of law, and the rectoral justice of God? No ground of forgiveness is wanted; but only that the forgiveness itself be executed in a way to save all the great interests of eternal authority and government.

The first named ground of apprehension is, that the law precept may seem to be loosely held and fall into practical dishonor. Do we then make void the law through faith? God forbid; yea we establish the law.

I turn the question here, as regards the precept of the law, upon the particular word honor; partly because it is historical, being a favorite word of The sacrifice saves the honors of the law precept. Anselm for such uses; and partly because there is no other word so appropriate. Sin dishonors the law, breaks it down, tramples it in customary contempt, raises a feeling of disrespect in mankind strong enough to be itself called the law of this world. Hence the necessity of punishment, which is that self-asserting act of God, in its behalf, by which he invests it with honor. For it must be remembered here, that we are not looking for some scheme of penal substitution, compensation, satisfaction, but are, in fact, discussing the great question how it is that God forgives; or, what is the same, accomplishes the restoration of fallen character? Where it is coming out, that he gets a great part of this power, not by his 299mere love and suffering patience and divine sympathy in Christ, but also in part by the invigoration of law and its moral impressions. A very small matter it will be in this view, that he manages to just save the law by some judicial compensation—he does infinitely more, he intensifies and deepens the impression of law, to such a degree that it comes out reenacted, as it were, to be fulfilled in a higher key of observance.

To make this very important fact apparent, attention is called to four distinct points of view, in which Christ, by his sacrifice, magnifies, if I should not rather say glorifies, the precept of the law.

I. He restores men to the precept. If there were no instituted law, none but the law before government, there would be no doubt of this. But the instituted Christ restores to the precept. law goes by enforcement, and is honored because of the enforcement; how then can it be honored in a loss of the same, that is in forgiveness? Because, I answer, the subject forgiven is restored to all precept; not to the Right or Precept Absolute only, but impliedly to all the statutes of God’s instituted government, for the application and the enforced sanction of that. No matter then if the forgiven soul is taken clean by the sanctions, to think only of precept. All the more and not the less does he honor it, that he is brought into a love of it, and of God by whom it is enforced, such that his obedience becomes an inspiration. We may even say that he is released from the law wherein he was held; but we only mean 300that the righteousness of the law is fulfilled in him, by the free assent of his liberty, outrunning all enforcement, If then Christ restores to such a noble conformity, raising the whole stature of life and quality of being in them that are restored, how can it be said that the precept of the law is made void or put in dishonor? Is it any more dishonored, or made void, in the case of such as are not, and will not be, restored? Has any remission been extended to them? Just contrary to that, they are going to be made responsible in fact and in strict justice, for their contempt and rejection, not of the precept only but of the great mercy tendered them, to help their recovery into it.

On the whole, there appears to be no single point where any loss of honor can be imagined, as far as the precept is concerned. Christ beholds it from the first moment onward, doing nothing and wanting nothing, in all the immense travail of his incarnate ministry and death, but to commend the Righteousness and Beauty of it, and regain lost men to that homage which is at once their own blessedness and its everlasting honor.

II. Christ honors the precept, not only in what he does for our sake, in restoring us to it and forgiving us in it, but quite as much in what he does Christ reasserts and establishes the law itself. for its sake, to restore and save it also. For how shall he so magnify the law, as by setting it on high, enthroning it in love, organizing in it a kingdom worthy of its breadth, beneficence, dignity, and all-encompassing order? We 301often magnify Christ’s work as being a work of salvation for men, because it is in this view that it makes an appeal so persuasive to human feeling; but there is nothing he would spurn himself, with a more total disallowance, than the thought of a salvation gotten up for men, one side of the grand, everlasting law, in which God’s empire stands. We greatly mistake, if we think that Christ is doing every thing here, as prosecuting a suit before human feeling, and to bring human souls out of trouble; he wants to bring them into righteousness; and that again, not for their sakes only, but a great deal more for righteousness’ sake; to heal the elemental war, and settle everlasting order, in that good law which is the inherent principle of order.

What meaning there may be in this ought, henceforth, to be never a secret to our American people. In our four years of dreadful civil war, what immense sacrifices of blood and treasure have we made; refusing to be weakened by sorrow, or shaken by discouragement, or even to be slackened by unexpected years of delay. Failure was prophesied on every hand; compositions were proposed without number. Yet nothing could meet our feeling but to save the integrity of our institutions, and forever establish the broken order of the law. All the stress of our gigantic effort hinged on this and this alone. No composition could be endured, or even thought of, that did not settle us in obedience, and pacify us in the sovereignty of law; and, to the more rational of us, nothing appeared to lay a sufficiently firm basis of order, but the clearance somehow 302of that which has been the mockery of our principles. and the ferment even, from the first, of our discord. The victory we sighed for, and the salvation we sought, were summed up in the victory and salvation of law. Failing in this every thing would be lost. Succeeding in this all sacrifice was cheap, even that of our first-born.

What now do we see in the sacrifice of Christ, but that he, only in a vastly higher and more grandly heroic devotion of his life, is doing all for the violated honor and broken sovereignty of law. He proposes, indeed, to be a Saviour to men; but the gist of the salvation, both to us and to him, is that heaven’s original order is to be restored in us, and made solid and glorious, in the crowning of God’s instituted government forever. Every thing that we see therefore, in the incarnate life and suffering death, is God magnifying the honors of his law by the stress of his own stupendous sacrifice. Such an amount of feeling, put into the governmental order, commends it to our feeling; and also turns our feeling into awe before it. The law is raised as precept, in this manner, to a new pitch of honor, and the power of impression given to it, by the vicarious sacrifice and more than mortal heroism of Jesus, is the principal cause of that immense progress in moral sensibility and opinion, that distinguishes the Christian populations of the world. What they so much feel and have coming in upon their moral sensibility, in ways so piercing, is the law of duty, glorified by suffering and the visibly divine sacrifice of the cross.

III. Christ adds authority and honor to the law-precept, as being, in his own person, the incarnation of it. In itself, what we call law is impersonal, He is himself the incarnation of the precept. a cold mandatory of abstraction. Its authority, as such, is the conviction it is able to produce of its own imperative right. An additional honor and authority is given it also, when God reaffirms it, and from the point of his invisible majesty, assumes the maintenance of it. A certain authority is gained for it also by impressive circumstance, when it is delivered from the thundering and smoking mountain top. By the cold intimidation of such a pronouncement, it even becomes appalling; it makes the people quake and shiver. Still the coldness and the stern decretive majesty partly benumb conviction. To have its full authority felt, it must be brought nigh in its true geniality and warmth, as a gift to the higher nature of souls; exactly as it is, when it is incarnated and made personal in Christ, addressing human conviction by his human voice. For Christ is not, as many seem to fancy, a mere half-character of God incarnate, a kind of incarnate weakness in the figure of a love-principle, separated from every thing else in God’s greatness, necessary to the tonic vigor of love. Being the incarnation of God, the full round character of God as he is must be included—authority, justice, purity, truth, forgiveness, gentleness, suffering love, all excellence. All these, in fact, belong to God’s character, and they are here brought nigh, brought into concrete expression, thus to be entered, by Christ, as a complete moral 304power, into souls, They work all together, in his charities, in his miracles, in his doctrine, in his death, resurgent with him, as it were, when he rises and goes up on high, there to assume the kingdom with him and to judge the worlds. Hence the remarkable authority that is felt to be somehow embodied in him, even from the first. There is really more of authority for the precept of law, in the fifth chapter of Matthew, than there is in the whole five books of Moses; nay, there is more in his simple beatitudes themselves. For moral ideas and the claims of duty under God, are brought specially nigh, when spoken thus, out of human feeling, to the living sensibility. and conscious want of human hearts. Scarcely necessary was it for him to add, that no jot or tittle of the law should fail; still less, when the mysterious authority of his manner and person were always enforcing the same impression. He spake with authority, they said, and not as the Scribes; “never man spake like this man.” His simple definition, or summation of law—“Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it. Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself”—seemed, to the captious scribe, a kind of second giving of the law, so divinely impressive was the manner, and he durst not question farther. Nothing could be more natural; for, in his person, not the love only, but the law, nay, the instituted government of God itself is incarnated and become a person, It is seen when he is looked upon, heard when he 305speaks. What then shall be so felt as the authority of his manner? How else shall law, too, get a presence so majestic in the world, as when it thus becomes the good, great King of promise—Immanuel—Messiah? But these are all inferior and scarcely more than accessory arguments; the principal remains to be added which is this—

IV. The almost inconceivable honor Christ confers on the law precept, in the fact that his incarnation, life, and death upon the cross—all that I have His life and death are his obedience to law. included in his vicarious sacrifice—are the fruit of his own free homage and eternally acknowledged obligation to the law; in one word his deific obedience.

I have spoken of the law before government, the eternal absolute law of right. Under it, and by it, as existing in logical order before God’s perfections, even they, as we found reason to believe, have their spring. It was not necessary here to go into any very elaborate argument; for it can not escape the discovery of any one, that if God has moral perfections of any kind, they must have a standard law, and obtain their quality of merit, by their fulfillment of that law. Of course there is no precedence of time in the law, as compared with the date of God’s perfections, but there must be a precedence of order, and the law must be obligatory in that precedence. But we come now to a matter which, to most minds, will be more remote and more difficult; viz., to the fact, that God has not only a character ever 306lastingly perfected in right, but that, by the same law, he is held to a suffering goodness for his enemies, even to that particular work in time, which we call the vicarious sacrifice of Christ. Christ was, in this view, under obligation to be the redeemer he was; and fulfilling that obligation, he conferred an honor on the law fulfilled, such as could not be conferred by any stringency of justice laid upon the race itself. A point so remote from many, and yet of so great consequence, requires to be more carefully established.

Consider and make due account then, of the fact, that the eternal law of right, which we can not well deny is the basis of God’s perfections, and of all The Law is Love and Love is Vicarious Sacrifice. law human and divine, is only another conception of the law of love; and that, as the righteousness of God fulfills the Right, so it is declared that “God is Love,” as being another equally valid conception of his eternal perfections. The two principles, right and love, appear to exactly measure each other. One is the law absolute, or ideal, commanding the soul, even if it were to exist in solitude; the other is the law relational, grounded on the sense of relationship to other beings, who may be socially affected by our acts. Thus every one who will be and do right, in the large and complete sense of the principle, will as certainly love all beings, whether God or men, whether friends or enemies, whether deserving or unworthy, with whom he finds himself in relation. The law of love appears to be, in some sense, a law of. revelation, as the law of right is not. And yet the 307law of love is just as truly grounded in nature, commands the assent of natural conviction just as invincibly, when it is once stated. The only reason why it is not propounded universally as a principle of natural morality, is that the close relationality of it is cross to our humanly selfish habit. We can talk of being right, and are willing to think of that as a duty, because we can put a lower, merely conventional, and market sense on the word, that accommodates our self-approbation; but we shrink from the law of love, and do not propose it in our schemes of ethics, because we do not consciously recognize and practically own the brotherhood of other beings. In a certain philanthropic and romantic way, we do it, but to have the law drawn close enough to put us under bonds of concern for them, and even of suffering and sacrifice for their sake, is not a kind of standard that we naturally propose. Very admirable and truly great is the example, when it is fulfilled; we are even quite melted in the tenderness it excites; but the goodness is too nearly superlative, the standard too high, and we look for some other in some lower key.

But this will not be the manner of God. Love to him is Right and Right to him is Love. And, as certainly as he is in this law of love, he Christ fulfills eternal obligation. will suffer the pains of love, he will go beyond all terms of mere justice or desert, yield up resentments, pass by wrongs already suffered, put himself in a way to receive the wrongs and bear the violence even of personal enemies, if he can hope to do 308them good with no counterbalancing injury. In a word, he will so insert himself into the miseries, and even into the guilt of their state, as to have them as a burden on his feeling, contriving, by whatever method, at whatever expense, to bring them relief. All this in eternal obligation. We do not commonly speak of God as a being under obligation, because, being transgressors ourselves, we associate some idea of constraint and even fear with obligation; yet what are God’s moral perfections, but his mind’s free homage to binding principles? And if the principles are not good enough to bind, what is the merit of their observance? God is of course amenable to no law, as prescribed by a superior—enough that he is freely, gloriously, amenable to law, in its own self-asserting majesty; that which, like himself, is eternal, that which he “possessed in the beginning of his way, before his works of old.” Perhaps it is better not to say that he is under law, lest we associate some constraint, or limitation, but that he is in it, has it for the spring of his character and counsel, and so of his beatitude for ever. Even as Hooker eloquently says—“that law which hath been of God and with God everlastingly”—“it is laid up in the bosom of God.”

God then does not make the law of love, or impose it upon us by his own mere will. It is with him as an eternal, necessary, immutable, law, existing in logical order before his will, and commanding, in the right of its own excellence, his will and life. This being given, all his plans, decrees, creations, and executory statutes 309are built to it, as the heavens by the eternal laws of geometry. And so, all government being cast in this mold, God is united to creatures, creatures to God and to each other, by this one common term, which interprets and unifies all. Were there any being, whether Creator, or creature, who had a different kind of law, prescribing a different kind of virtue, he would be unintelligible to the others, and practically unrelated to them. And his virtue, call it by what ever epithets of distinction, could not even pass the audit of a common respect and praise.

In this manner we are prepared for the conclusion and even brought down close upon it, that Christ came into the world, as the incarnate Word The cross not optional but obligatory. and Saviour of sinners, just because the eternal, necessary law of love made it obligatory in him to be such a Saviour. It is with him even as the apostle represents, when he says—“Bear ye one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ.” It is not commandment that he speaks of, but it is law, that same which rested on the divine nature and which Christ fulfilled in his sacrifice; that same in which he gave himself, for love’s sake, even to death for malefactors and enemies. The essentially vicarious action of the love-principle and the manner in which it makes the want, or woe, or even sin, of others its own personal concern, I have sufficiently shown already,⁴²⁴²Part I., Chapter I. but I find the point so finely conceived by Edwards, that I am tempted here to cite his language; only wishing that 310he could have seen the reach of what he is saying, as affording the only good and right solution of the substitution of Christ, or of the scripture expressions The substitutional action of love perceived by Edwards. concerning it. “A strong exercise of love excites a lively idea of the objects beloved. And a strong exercise of pity excites a lively idea of the misery under which he pities them. Christ’s love and pity fixed the idea of them in his mind, as if he had been really they, and fixed their calamity in his mind as though it had been really his. A very strong and lively love and pity towards the miserable tends to make their case ours; as, in other respects so in this, in particular, as it doth, in an idea, place us in their stead, under their misery, with a most lively, feeling sense of that misery; as it were feeling it for them, actually suffering it in their stead by strong sympathy.”⁴³⁴³Edwards’ Miscellaneous Observations, p. 5. Thus it was that Christ bore his burden as being under the eternal law of love, and so fulfilled it as to make it, in some really impressive sense, his law—“the law of Christ.”

There was no constraint in the obligation, it is true; the more wonderful therefore is the grace of the obedience that is yielded so freely. And of course the obligation, when we thus speak, is not any obligation due to us. We had no claims to lay upon him, any more than our enemy has a claim upon us, that we shall sacrifice our peace, or life, to his benefit. It was simply obligation to the grand, everlasting, essentially vicarious principle of love, an obligation to be gracious, and 311do by his disobedient subjects, since he could well do it, better than they deserve; which if he could not consent to, he must be quite another and less approvable character before the standards of his own perfect mind. There is nothing optional, as many conceive in his sacrifice. He could renounce it, only as he could the honors of his own perfect character. In it he is just as good as he is in obligation to be. If better, then either he is better than he should be, or the law less good than it ought to be. Whereas it is the exact merit, the glory of both, that they punctually meet in the utmost limit of good.

The conception of some such obligation, or obedience to obligation, in the work and sacrifice of Christ, has been more or less nearly approached Anselm and Bellamy. by many. Thus Anselm, while conceiving that Christ undertakes the work at his option, still imagines a kind of obligation post requiring it of God himself. “Does not the reason why God ought to do the things we speak of seem absolute enough, when we consider that the human race, that work of his so very precious, was wholly ruined, and that it was not seemly that the purpose which God had in man should fall to the ground?”⁴⁴⁴⁴Cur Deus Homo, Lib. 1., Cap. iv. Bellamy also conceives that God, in requiring perfect obedience of man as the condition of his well being, even carefully squared his own action by the golden rule, in a way of volunteer allegiance to it, saying, “I did as well by mankind, as I should desire to have been done by myself, had I been 312in their case and they in mine; for when my Son, who is as myself, came to stand in their place, I required the same of him.”⁴⁵⁴⁵Vol. I., p. 259.

But there is another version of the obedience of Christ—the same which is indicated in these last words—which requires our attention. Thus The obedience of Christ to the Father, his obedience to law. many, giving to certain words of scripture a meaning favored by their most superficial acceptation, look upon it never as the obedience of God himself to the eternal, necessary law, but as being that of a certain second person, who is somehow other and not God, contributed by him to God for sinners. Obtaining thus a peculiar merit by his suffering obedience, the second person, they conceive, is able to pay the first for the letting go of their punishment. And they quote, as authority for this, all the texts that speak of Christ as being sent, or commanded by the Father, as doing his will, as obedient unto death, for the Father’s reward. As if one person of the Trinity, putting another under command, and sending him into the world to suffer and die for sin, were any permissible account either of the Trinity, or of the suffering. Why must we take hold of words in this manner, without considering at all the conditions of the subject matter? The Father is above, representing the eternal government; the Son is a man below, acting, so far, under and obeying that government. But in another, wholly consistent view, he is, in his human person, the express image and outward type of 313what is most intense and deepest in the character and action of God himself; representing, in what is called his obedience to the Father, the everlasting obedience of the whole divine nature to the ideal, fundamental law. Thus when he testifies—“I came not to do mine own will, but the will of him that sent me”—“as the Father gave me commandment so I do,” he is to be understood just as he is when he says—“the Father is greater than I;” that is, not as declaring his literal inferiority, and his subjection as the eternal Son, or second person, to the Father’s mandates, but as speaking for the human state he is in, and refusing to be made an idol of in his human figure. He is only saying, do not stop at me, and localize God quantitively in me, when he is only in me, as being expressed by me. Let your thought begin at me, and then, counting me one with the Father, in what you have discovered by me, let it travel up and crown itself in him. Having gotten out of me the feeling and character of the God invisible, count that having seen me “ye have seen the Father that sent me;” that, in what I have called my obedience to Him, ye have seen that everlasting obedience to law, which is the essence and soul of his perfections. Let your homage therefore be to Him, as the God above limitation, discovered to your love in and by limitation.

In this manner, Christ is always contriving to carry men’s thoughts above, or up through, his humanity, and forbid their coming to a period of stunted measurement in his human person. He takes the subject state, 314doing and showing every thing in and by that state, and then, referring it back to that unseen sovereign state of which it is the representation. Any other conception of the matter, such as puts the Son literally under the tutelage and authority of the Father, is a superstition put for doctrine, and not any rational belief. God is three in no such sense that he is not one; least of all is he three, in any such sense, that he has relations of authority and subjection in his threeness. The obedience of Christ, then, represents just that which we have seen to be included in God’s moral perfection, or righteousness; viz., the everlasting obedience of his nature to the law of right, or of love. Nay, if we will let our plummet down to the bottom of this great sea, the cross of Jesus represents and reveals the tremendous cross that is hid in the bosom of God’s love and life from eternity.

It is obvious enough that, in such a way of obedience, Christ makes a contribution of honor to the law he obeys, that will do more to enthrone The immense honor paid to the Law by Christ’s obedience. it in our reverence, than all the desecrations of sin have done to pluck it down—more too, than all conceivable punishments, to make it felt and keep it in respect. The grand evil of sin is that it tramples law and brings it into contempt. Many, too, apprehend danger from the full remission of sin, lest it should leave the law trampled and without vindication, and reveal a kind of indifference to it in God, that will be fatal to all due impressions of its authority and sanctity. Here then, 315over against all such damages and apprehended mischiefs of laxity, we now place the momentous, grandly impressive, fact of Christ’s obedience—his obedience unto death—taken as an exhibition of God’s eternal homage to law, and of the cross of sacrifice by which his feeling and will are everlastingly bowed to the burdens of pity and suffering. Even as Christ himself conceives the representative nature of his whole life, when he says—“I have glorified thee on the earth.”

Now I do not undertake to show, be it observed, that Christ came into the world, in a plan to set his obedience over against the damages and Compensation enough were compensation wanted. debts of sins; or that he came to fill out any scheme of satisfaction, or compensation. If any thing is wanting to compensate the loss of punishment, it will be enough that the very things suffered and done to make the forgiveness an executed fact, give back greater honors to the law than are lost by the loss of punishment. No, Christ came just because the law he had been in from eternity sent him, and his incarnate appearing was but the necessary outcoming in time of God’s eternal Love. He descended to the lot of men just because he had them in his heart. His object was only to minister. His compassions, even before he came, were tinged all through with sorrowing tenderness. His emotional nature was stung and wounded every day, after he came, by the scenes of wrong and cruelty he was compelled to look upon, the sicknesses, and pains, and deaths, and torments of spiritual disorder to which he ministered. 316The storms of the world’s madness gathered round him in his work, and the inward storms of mental agony rolled heavily over him sometimes in his private hours. But his effort was to simply fulfill such a ministry to lost men as would gain them back to God and eternal life. He strove, in particular, by his teachings, healings, sympathies, and the impressions of his personal suffering, to inaugurate a new and more adequate moral power by his ministry; so to get hold of their moral convictions, so to work on their guiltiness, by the due manifestation of God, and his love, as to even regenerate their character. And doing all this, going even to the cross for love’s sake, in a perfectly simple devotion, what will more certainly follow than that even the law thus gloriously fulfilled in his ministry, is itself raised into power by the honor he confers upon it? Every thing gets a moral power that he touches, or looks upon—the Jordan, that he went down into it; Nazareth, that it saw his childhood; Capernaum, that it heard his first sermon; the waters of Gennessaret, that they floated his boat and settled into peace under his word. Nay, if we could find it, even the rock of the mountain that supported his head in the sleep of his solitary night, would have itself a sacred power from his person. Why not then the law, that which he had with him before the world was, that which he taught so convincingly, that which he fulfilled by so many exhaustive labors, and by sorrowing even unto death?

Grant that here is no contrived compensation to 317law, is it any the less truly compensated, any the less sacred, and honorable, and powerful on a lost world’s feeling, that he has glorified it forever in their sight by his simple obedience? Whatever we may say or think of the matter of judicial compensation, as a purpose to be answered by his death, he could not be ignorant that the highest possible honor would be imparted to the law by his obedience to it; still it does not appear that even this was any principal end of his engagement. His principal end was in the sacrifice itself; viz., in the fulfilling and bringing forth of God’s love to men, and the organizing of God’s kingdom among them, by his glorious, world-transforming power. In this he did not fail, and it is only affirming a very subordinate matter, to say that his power, which came out of the law, came back also upon it, and made it a greater power than either the obedience, or the punishment of all past ages could.

As regards the degree of honor thus conferred by his obedience on the law, two points need especially to be observed. First, that the law fulfilled The very law dishonored organizes the redemption. by his vicarious love and ministry, was exactly the same that our sin had cast off and desecrated—this it was that put the lost world upon his feeling, proved its goodness in his goodness, shaped the beauty of his beauty, travailed for us in his agony, and held him to the obedience even unto death. So the violated law comes back upon us to overwhelm us, by showing us, in Christ, just what goodness was in it. Secondly that, 318in this suffering and sacrifice of Jesus, there was nothing new, but only a new revelation of that which was old as the perfections of God. As a new waking up of feeling in deity, always before impassible, it would be a fact too violent for belief. Contrary to this, it is but the letting out of God’s feeling, that could get no such sufficient vent of evidence before. This same agony and passion heaved in the breast of God’s virtue, even from before the world’s foundations. God was suffering in feeling for the ages to be, even before the evil was. In his counsel of creation he could not think of wrong, and disorder, and pain breaking loose, without being exercised for it according to its nature. There was a losing side of pain, in his goodness, just because it was good; only the loss was never a true loss, because it was eternally repaid by the willingness to lose for love’s sake. The Gethsemane of his compassions kept company with his joys, and the conscious goodness of one was high enough to exalt the conscious bliss of the other. All this now appears, in the specially human facts of Christ and his passion. The law that was being thus sublimely fulfilled, in God’s suffering love from eternity, is only now fulfilled to human view, by the suffering ministry of Jesus. No such revelation was made, or could be, in the field of nature before. Scantily and feebly was it made, so as to just glimmer and nothing more, in the word of the ancient prophets, and the guesses of the ancient saints. Now it is out in the full, revealed in time—God is in the world in love, fulfilling his eternal law Himself, for the saving of its rejectors.

But there are two objections to be noticed. The first is that which is actually, yet accidentally, stated by Mr Burge, without any conception of its Objected that the obedience was nothing new. applicability to the case here occurring. He says⁴⁶⁴⁶Discourses and Treatises by Dr. Park, p. 475.—“In his divine nature, therefore, he could not have rendered precisely that obedience which man failed to render. Neither can it be supposed that in his divine nature, when he was incarnate, he obeyed the divine law, in any sense different from that in which God obeyed it from eternity. It is not seen, therefore, how Christ’s obedience to the law could manifest God’s regard for holiness, on account of his union of the divine and human natures, any more than if no such union had existed.” Most true it is that he did not obey the law in any sense different from that in which God had obeyed it from eternity. But the inference that nothing is shown by his obedience, more than was shown by the eternal obedience, is just as good as it would be to argue that, manifesting nothing of God’s love in his death, more than was in God’s love before, it is therefore nugatory. The glory of his incarnate mission is precisely this, and in this is the gain of it, that he unbosoms, in time, what love and obedience to law were hid in God’s unseen majesty, or but dimly and feebly shown before.

The second objection referred to is that in such use of the obedience of Christ, conceived to be a simple fulfillment of his obligation, we get no surplus merit to be our righteousness. By a very strange, almost incredible 320mock refinement, the sacrifice of Christ is dissected by the prominent satisfaction theories, just between Objected that, in such use of the obedience, no surplus merit is left for us. the passive and the active, the suffering and the obedience; the suffering being put to our account with justice and called our atonement, and the obedience taken as a positive fulfillment of the law, and assigned to us for a righteousness. I can hardly trust myself to speak of this wretched imposture of science, falsely so called, as it deserves. It is a halving, as it were, of Christ and his sacrifice, that makes both halves alike of non effect. Of what worth is the suffering, taken as mere suffering, with no obedience or moral quality in it? Of what worth, too, is the obedience, considered as having suffered nothing, proved itself by nothing, and even missed the prime attribute of reality? Is God a being who wants suffering by itself, and will have it from no matter whom? Is he a being who can make a righteousness for us quantitatively out of another’s obedience, and be himself pleased with the impossible fiction? O how different a matter is the sublime obedience of Jesus—obedience unto death, death as the seal of obedience—covering the law thus with its original honor and breathing God’s everlasting love into out fallen desecrated nature! This is gospel—possible truth, and good enough and great enough to be true. Whoever turns it, therefore, into wood and hay may be ingenious, but he will have scarcely less to answer for in his doctrine, I seriously fear, than others have in their sin.

Reviewing now the ground over which we have passed, I think it will be seen that Christ has set the law precept in a position of great honor and power, enduing it with such life and majesty, in men’s convictions, as it otherwise never could have had. (1.) He proposes, we have seen, no remission of sins which does not include a full recovery to the law. (2.) All that he does and suffers in his sacrifice, he as truly does for the resanctification of the law as for-our recovery. (3.) In his incarnation, he incarnates the same, and brings it nigh to men’s feelings and convictions, by the personal footing he gains for it in humanity. (4.) He honors it again by his obedience, which is, in fact, a revelation of God’s own everlasting obedience, before the eyes of mankind; the grandest fact of human knowledge. With great confidence then I state the conclusion, that the law precept is safe, established in power, crowned with invincible honor. Whatever may be thought, or apprehended, in respect to the possible damage accruing to God’s law, as regards the matter of enforcement, when the remission of penalty is proclaimed, there can be no misgiving, in respect to the integrity and sanctity of the requirement. Whether there is any proper ground of concern for the loss of the penal enforcements, will be considered in the next chapter.