CHAPTER XVIII.

Scriptural Passages ascribing Blessedness to the Deity—-If they are more than Doxologies, they imply no Incapacity to sustain Voluntary Suffering—-Divine Beatitude progressive—- Joy set before” “ the Author and Finisher of our Faith”@7—-Holiness and happiness, though twin sisters, may be severed for a time.

THE scriptural passages ascribing blessedness to the Deity will, doubtless, be invoked in favour of his impassibility. The following are samples of these passages: “,Blessed be the most high God.” —-Genesis, 14xiv. 20. “ Blessed be the Lord God of Israel foreveri- and ever.”—-1 l Chronicles, 16xvi. 36. “ Blessed be the Lord God of Israel from everlasting to everlasting.”—-Psalm 41xli. 13. “ Blessed be the Lord forever more.”—-Psalm 89lxxxix. 52. “,,Blessed be the King of Israel, that cometh in the name of the Lord.”—-Johbn, 12xii. 13. “ And worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed forever.”—-Romans, 1i. 25. “ Of whom, as concerning the flesh, Christ came, who is over all, God blessed forever.”—-Romans, 9ix. 5. “,Until the appearing of our Lord Jesus Christ; which in his times he shall show, who is the blessed and only Potentate.”—-1 l Timothy, 6vi. 15. We believe these passages to be rather doxologies than declarations of doctrine; rather asceriptions of praise and thanksgiving to the Deity than averments of his infinite beatitude. So thought MacKnight, the learned annotator on the apostolic epistles. The passage which seems to approach nearer than, perhaps, any other in the whole Bible, to a declaration of the unchanging felicity of the Godhead from everlasting to everlasting, is that which we have just transcribed from the first chapter of Romans, where it is said that the heathen “ worshipped a,ind served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed forever.” The learned annotator on the epistles, in his commentary on this passage, though himself a firm adherent of the prevalent theory, rendered the passage thus: “66 Worsh@ipped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is to be praised forever.”* But if any of the passages are to be regarded as declarations of the divine blessedness, they contain no affirmation or intimation that the beatitude of the Deity is fixed by a law paramount to his own volttition, so that a person of the Trinity has not capacity to become a voluntary sufferer.

*MacKnight on the Epistles, vol. 1. p. 149.

The ascriptions of blessedness in Scripture were often applied to Christ. It was of Christ that the apostle declared, “ Who is over all, God blessed forever.” It was of Jesus Christ that he again declared, “ Who is the blessed and only Potentate.” These asceriptions were applicable as well to his manhood as to his Godhead. They reached and pervaded both of his united natures. The united being , the whole Christ of the Bible, was styled “

* MacKnight on the Epistles, vol. i. p. 149.

the blessed and only Potentate.” "The whole Christ was denominated, “God blessed forever.” And yet this same united Being had just passed through the most terrible furnace of suffering ever lighted up on earth. If the ascriptions implied declarations of unchanged beatitude, and reached the past as well as the coming eternity, then Christ suffered not. His passion was but Oriental imagery. It was Christ, termed in the passage from the twelfth chapter of John “ the King of Israel,” on whom the epithet “blessed” was bestowed as he was entering Jerusalem to be crucified. If the passage was intended, not as a@ a mere hosanna, but a declaration of Christ’s”s beatitude, it must have meant a beatitude of which he was capable of “emptying himself,” when required by the good of the universe and the glory of the Godhead; for in a few hours afterward he voluntarily paid, by his own unimaginable sufferinags, the price of a worlrd’s”s redemption.

No direct affirmations of Scripture were neces. sary to demonstrate the beatitude of God. It results from the infinitude of his perfections. A Being of infinite power, knowledge, wisdom, holiness, justice, and goodness, has within himself infinite resources of felicity. But the felicity of the Deity is subject to his volition. He is not fated to the same unchangeable condition of blessedness whether he wills it or not. His beatitude is, like his glory, rather the emanation of his combined attributes than a distinct attribute of itself. Of his beattitude, as well as of his glory, the uncreated Son was capable of divesting himself for a time when he became a terrestrial sojourner in the flesh. His infinite power, and knowledge, and wisdom, and holiness, and justice, and goodness remained unchanged. But his glory and his beatitude he voluntarily cast aside for a brief season, that he might resume them again in increased and everlasting effulgence and perfection.

Had the second person of the Trinity peremptorily declined to suffer when his suffering was prompted by the affections of his own benignant heart, sanctioned by his own unerring wisdom, and approved in the council of the Godhead, none on earth can gbe sure that his bliss might not have sustained a greater diminution from the absence than it has from the endurance of suffering” thus prompted, sanctioned, and approved., The a4ggrepgate of earthly happiness is measured by the span of human life; the aggregate of divine felicity is weighed in the balances of eternity. None on earth can say that the brief suffering of the second person of the Trinity in the flesh has not augmented the totalit@Iffy of his beatitude, when tested by the arithmetic of heaven. Had he reposed unmoved on his throne, and beheld, afar off, the smoke of the torment of the apostate pair, and of the countless generations of th eir descendants, ascending being up forever and ever, how can human reason venture to decide that, in the flight of endless ages, the eternity of his bliss might not have suffered more than it will have suffered from his mournful,. but short earthly pilgrimage?

Reasoning pride has no grounds for concluding that the compassionate heart of our divine Redeemer might not have yearned unceasingly over the undistinguished perdition of a whole race, created by his own hands, in his own similitude, and seduced from unsuspecting innocence by the matchless wiles of one who had before beguiled from allegiance the third part of heaven. The ascending smoke would have been at once the memorial of a world destroyed, and the waving banner of his triumphant foe. Now has his divine and expiatory suffering bound that foe in everlasting chains, and proffered to every son and daughter of that world destroyed the healing and saving blood of his own most precious salvation. Now will the benignancy of infinite love forever overflow, and the pillars of infinite justice stand firm and sure as the foundations of the universe.

We believe that the beatitude “ of -the, Deity is progressive. Progression seems to be a governing principle, pervading the intellectualiminl, el ectual universe. Its As principle, pervading the int I” r e.

display in man is palpable. Doubtless it pervades the angelic hosts. Why should it not reach the beatitude even of him who made progressive man in his own “image,” and after his own “,likeness ?” We learn that the bliss of heaven is enhanced by the repentance of a single sinner on earth. Who will venture to presume that this enhancement of blessedness ascends not even to those who fill the celestial throne? That the glory of God is progressive, is a clear deduction from his own Holy Word. His beatitude is a sister emanation from the Godhead. Why, then, if one of the sacred sisters is found to be progressive, should the other be supposed to be stationary?

Ere his creative power was first put forth, the triune God must have existed, the centre of his own untenanted eternity, in blest but solitary majesty. Worlds as yet were not, nor men nor angels; chaos filled the universal space. In the fulness of circling ages, the heavens were formed, perhaps the first—-born of creation. Then earth, sun, stellar orbs, and doubtless systems unknown to telescopic vision, sprung into being, with all their countless dwellers. The chorus of "“ the morning stars” was heard, I and the shouting “sons of God” returned their rapturous response. And think you that the benignant heart of the Creator, justly styled “ the Sensorium of the universe”*"@- received no augmentation of bliss from the transports of his exulting creation? We view him not as the “ cheerless and abstract Di”vini”ty” sometimes represented in “ academic theology.”" * t His is the infinite ocean of beatitude, capable nevertheless of receiving, without change of its identity, new accessions of delight from the gladdening streams which flow from perhaps every province, save one, of his boundless empire.

*Ante page 53.

*Ante page 52.

It is a heaven-taught conclusion that the creations of God have enhanced his bliss. He beheld with satisfaction the wonders of his six” days’” lab hour, and repeatedly pronounced them to be very good.,--Genesis,, 1i. 10, 12, 18, 21, 25, 31. In thee

* Ante page 53 f Ante page 52.

sublimest of all the Psalms, which uninspired man could no more have composed than he could have formed a world, the royal David exclaimed, “ The Lord shall rejoice in his works.”--Psalms, 104eiv. 31. And the voice of later prophecy thus burst forth into rhapsody as it laboured to express his delight in the Church, “ which he hath purchased with his own blood.” “ The Lord thy God in the midst of thee is mighty; he will save, he will rejoice over thee with joy; he will rest in his love, he will joy over thee with singing.”--Zephaniah, 3iii. 17.

We believe it deducible from Scripture, not only that the divine blessedness is progressive, but also that the beatitude of the uncreated Son will, in the reckoning of eternity, be immeasurably enhanced by his mediatorial sufferings and triumph. “ Look ing unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith, who, for the joy that was set before him, enelidured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God.”--Hebretqpws, @,s, 12xii. 2. This passage was, doubtless, applied to the redeeming man. We believe it to have been still more emphatically applied to the redeeming God., It was predicated of Jesus, that august Being who, in himself, uniiited a terrestrial atom to celestial infinity. It was predicated of him without limitation or exception. Its terms comprehended his divine ,as well as his human nature.

The subject of the passage is farther distinguished as,, “the Author and Finisher of our faith.” The human son of the Virgin was not the author of our faith; nor was he alone its finisher. The Author of our faith was the redeeming God. He became its Author by the covenant of redemption between him and the Father, ere the worlds were formed. Its finisher was the redeeming God and the redeeming man united; the God enacting the infinite, the man the finite part. It is impossible that Inspiration, unmindful of the predominating, the almost absorbing agency of the God, should have clothed the human son of the Virgin with the exclusive title of “ the Author and Finisher of our faith!” He had no agenceyv in its authorship; he had not then himself come into being; he was only an humble adjunct in its consummation. Yet it was “the Author and Finisher of our faith” who had “66the joy”@l set befo&f6re him. The conclusion is inevitable that “61 the joy” must have been “ set before” the redeeming God as well as the redeeming man.

What was “,the joy that was set before” “,the Author and Finisher of our faith,” the Bible has not informed us distinctly; we learn, however, that it was to be a new accession of “joy;”7 an augmentation of pre-existent beatitude. It was a “66joy”99 of magnitude Sufficient to move a God. It was a “joy” for which the Creator as well as the cCreature “endured the cross, despising the shame.” A chief element in this Sacred “46joy” of the redeeming God is, doubtless, the hapd piniiess of the sons and daughters of salvation. They were destined to be eternal prisoners in the dungeons of despair; he transformed them into rejoicing saints around the throne of the Most High. Their happiness, purchased by his sufferings, is, no doubt, reflected back upon himself in unimaginable refulgence.

“The quality of mniercy is not strained. Iit is twice blessed:

It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.”

If this is true of an earthly philanthropist, how much deeper must be its truth when applied to the great Philanthropist of heaven! We may judge of his “joy” in the salvation of the redeemed, from his pity for their lost estate. His pity and his “joy” are alike beyond the comprehension of the cherubim and the seraphim. He views with complacency the material universe formed by his word; he regards with ineffable delight the moral creation brought into being by “ the travail of his soul ;” pleasant to his hearing is the music of the circling spheres; rapturous to his heart is the anthem of praise and thanksgiving which ascends forever and ever from the mighty congregation of his redeemed children. Gethsemane and Calvary have yielded the brightest crown of glory to Him who “wears on his head many crowns.” They have poured into his divine bosom a new river of “joy,” “clear as crystal,” deep as the foundations of his throne, lasting as his eternity.

The prevalent theory confidently infers the unchangeable beatitude of the eternal Son, as a self-evident and necessary conclusion from his immutable holiness. This conclusio n is said to be one of the intuitive perceptions of the theory. We admit that righteousness and happiness are indeed twin sisters, and that the pious mind must, from its views of divine justice, infebr the impoossibility of their permanent severance. But it cannot with truth infer that Omnipotence may not disjoin the twin sisters for a time, when their temporary severance is prompted by infinite wisdom and infin”i ite love. Scriptural history overrules such inference. The human son of the Virgin was at once the holiest and most afflicted of the children of humanity. In him holiness and suffering were com mingled from the manger cradle to the granite tomb. Holiness is, indeed, without sins of its own; but it may, and has vicariously borne the sins of others. If it suffered in the sinless man, why may it not have suffered in the pure essence of the indwelling God? The efficacious element in redeeming pain must needs be the holiness of the sufferer. It is a self-evident truism, that the substituted agonies of a sinful being could not have redeemed the world.

Nor is the prevalent theory more correct in its suggestion, that, if the eternal Word suffered, his voluntary endurance, impelled by his own gracious and irrepressible emotions, must have been to him not grievous but joyous; and that, therefore, the very name of suffering, when applied to his spontaneous, triumphant, and exulting self-immolation, must have been -@lswal.lowed up in that of transport. This suggestion amounts to the proposition, that, what is pain in a sinful being, would be changed into joy, if voluntarily and piously endured by a being of perfect holiness. Test the proposition by applying -it to Mary’s”s human son. His endurance was not by compulsion; he was not a passive machliine; he was a voluntary martyr; his submission to the terrible cup was free, according to his finite capacity, as that of the indwelling God. If, amidst his seeming sufferings, he suffered not in fact because he was pure; if, what would else have been the pains of Gethsemane and of Calvaryv, were transformed into raptures by his overcoming holiness, then the passion of Christ’s”s humanity was but a delusive fiction;--then was there a transmutation into truth of the primitive heresy that the apparent agony of the redeeming man was but a pageant in the drama of salvation.