CHAPTER XXIII.

Practical Effects of Doctrine of Divinity of Christ’s Sufferings—Deepens Views of Sin—Exalts Justice of God—His Love—Magnifies Value of Soul—Affords sure Foundation of Christian Confidence—Elevates Views of Atonement.

WE shall doubtless be accused of attempting to disturb one of the ancient landmarks of Christian faith. That this attempt is not a wanton innovation, may have appeared from the preceding pages. Yet farther to vindicate and illustrate our discussion, it will be useful, at the hazard of some seeming, though not real repetition, to state succinctly the respective and opposing bearings of the prevalent theory, and of that which we advocate, upon some of the cardinal points of our, holy religion. It will thence become manifest that our views are as salutary in practice as they are well founded in scriptural authority.

First. The development of the stupendous truth that the eternal Son, “manifest in the flesh,” suffered and died in his own ethereal essence, for the redemption of the world, unfolds to our apprehension new and more appalling exhibitions of the potency and turpitude of sin than are presented by the prevalent theory. If we have confidence in the wisdom of an earthly physician, we are best taught the extremity of a physical malady by learning the extremity of the means to which he is driven for its cure. Should he find himself obliged, by efforts beyond mortal endurance, to sacrifice his own life for the life of his patient, it would be an affecting demonstration, not only of his matchless compassion, but also of the inveterate malignancy of the disease, which he could not otherwise assuage.

There is a principle of evil in the universe second only to Omnipotence in its fearful power. It once, with exulting hopes of success, unfurled its standard of rebellion in the very capitol of the empire of Jehovah, within the sound of the thunders of his almighty throne, drawing after it one third part of the bright intelligences of heaven. To check this principle of evil, and confine it within secure limits, without infringing the freedom of creature volition and action, requires from infinite wisdom, perhaps its highest development. This evil principle is not less blighting than it is potent. It has converted our terrestrial Eden into a howling wilderness. It is the creator and eternal preserver of its own indwelling hell. Sin's own unchanging laws, engraven on tablets which time cannot moulder, have immutably ordained that every creature of this or any other world, who transgresses, must bid adieu to bliss, unless there be a renovation of his moral nature. He will forever carry within him the undying worm. His own breast must be the everlasting receptacle and feeder of the quenchless, yet unconsuming fire. He cannot escape it by flight:

“For within him hell

He brings, and round about him, nor from hell

One step, no more than from himself, can fly

By change of place.”

These awful yet salutary truths are best brought home to the soul by a close meditation, not only on the visible death of expiation at Calvary, but also, and beyond measure more especially, on the spiritual crucifixion of the only-begotten, the eternal Son of the Highest. How fearfully deleterious must be that wide-spread principle of evil, the mere local development of which required, as a preliminary to its pardon, such an atoning sacrifice! How frightful must have been the virulence of that moral malady, which could only be cured by the blood of God!

Secondly. We would not, by limiting the expiatory sufferings to the manhood of Christ, detract, as the prevalent theory unspeakably detracts, from the sublime exhibition of the justice of the God, manifested in the great work of redemption, and portrayed with such ineffable simplicity, pathos, and power in the Sacred Oracles. The execution of the scriptural scheme of the atonement, whose vicarious victim was the Architect of the worlds, elicited a development of the inflexible justice of the Godhead, new and “strange” in the annals of eternity. Compared with it, the expulsion of the third part of heaven from their blessed abodes; compared with it, the impassable ramparts of hell, and its adamantine vaults, and quenchless fires, and ceaseless wailings, might pass without special wonder, we would almost say, as pertaining to the ordinary administration of the system of penal jurisprudence, ordained by a wise and righteous God for the government of his boundless empire.

But if permitted to behold a scene, perhaps too sacred for creature vision, how must the hierarchies of heaven have stood aghast, as the Ancient of Days, arrayed in the most awful habiliments of avenging Omnipotence, drew forth from its long repose his own almighty sword—the sharpest weapon in the armory of the Godhead—to smite—as a God alone could smite, and with an effect which a God alone could endure—the beloved and unresisting fellow of his everlasting reign! Let not the dwellers upon the earth be taught to regard this sublimest of scriptural delineations as magnificent imagery alone, fitly evolved by Oriental metaphor. To suppose that the Lord of Hosts awakened his slumbering sword—slumbering, perhaps, from the earliest eternity—to smite the mere frail humanity of him who was cradled in the manger, would be to sink, in mortal estimation, this stupendous scene in the annals of the Godhead from the infinite down to the finite.

That demonstration of infinite justice which forms the prominent and august feature of the atonement consists in the awful truth that God the Father “spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all.” And ever mark the mighty terms “his own Son!” The theory of earth, which virtually holds that the eternal Son was spared; that the unspared one of the Father was but the human son of Mary; that the eternal Son suffered no more to redeem our fallen race than he did in their creation, robs the atonement of all its magnificence. Let it not be alleged that God the Father “spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all,” and thus satisfied the plenitude of the declaration of the Holy Ghost, when, for a space brief compared with eternity, he allowed him to depart from the celestial courts, and to dwell on earth in a tabernacle of clay, carrying, however, with him the undiminished beatitude of the Godhead, in the same way as an earthly father may be said to spare not his own son, but to deliver him up, when he sends him from the domestic hearth, to sojourn for a season in foreign climes! We would not willingly impute to the prevalent theory so irreverent a prostration of the majesty of the atonement.

Thirdly. Nor would we derogate, as the prevalent theory immeasurably derogates, from the infinite love displayed by the triune God in the redemption of the world. Let it never be forgotten that the sending of his well-beloved Son by the infinite Father to be the ransom of our fallen race, and the voluntary acceptance of that terrible mission by the infinite Son, and the contributory agency of the Holy Ghost to render the mission efficacious, are everywhere represented in Scripture as the concentration and sublimation of the ineffable love of the united Godhead; compared with which the displays of divine goodness, in the variegated works of creation, sink, as it were, into comparative unimportance. It was a distant and twilight glimpse of this sublime development of infinite love that awakened to such unearthly harmony the consecrated harps of the prophets and inspired patriarchs of old. It was a clearer view of this stupendous miracle of grace, unmatched even by the Godhead, that ever and anon roused the profoundly argumentative Paul to such bursts of holy rhapsody. It was this view, melting the heart of the beloved disciple, which prompted that simplest, that most touching, that most comprehensive and expressive of scriptural sentences, “God is love.”

And do all these sublime indications of Scripture point, indeed, to nothing but the simple fact that the second person of the Trinity, by the mandate of the Father and his own volition, condescendingly and graciously came into the world, to occupy for a time, in all the perfection of infinite beatitude, the “body” that was prepared for him, and then to return, untouched by suffering, to his celestial home, and there receive the rapturous and cheap-earned gratulations of heaven on his having just created, from a moral chaos, a new spiritual world, more glorious than any of those which, at the beginning of time, had roused the swelling anthem of the “morning stars?” Such is not the scriptural picture of the love of the Godhead displayed in the redemption of the world.

Fourthly. If we may justly conclude that the second person of the Trinity, clothed in flesh, suffered and died for the redemption of the human soul, not in his manhood alone, but also in his divinity, the conclusion will impart new and ineffable value to the immaterial, breathing, living, immortal principle within us. Seneca, the heathen philosopher, termed the soul a “little god cased in flesh.” The Bible imparts to it a rank higher than was ever imagined in the dreams of pagan mythology. God formed material man “of the dust of the ground;” but he “breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul.” The soul of man, then, is an emanation of the Deity. It is a spirit kindred to the ethereal essence of its almighty Creator. Christ, while on earth, interrogatively declared that it would be a losing contract for a man to barter, for the whole world, his own soul. This theoretic proposition, like other abstract truths, even of the Bible, is best brought home to the heart by practical elucidation. If we would see it thus illustrated by its divine Author, let us stand beside his viewless cross, and, in contemplating his unseen spiritual and divine sufferings for its ransom, learn at what price the soul was rated in the celestial exchequer.

Would man become familiar with the distant bodies of the material heavens, he should borrow of science its glorious instrument of discovery, which will enable him to walk

“Abroad through nature, to the range

Of planets, suns, and adamantine spheres,

Wheeling unshaken through the void immense”

The science of sacred truth, too, has its telescope; and if we would gain still clearer views of the value of the breathing immortality within us, let us, through that consecrated medium of vision, fix our steadfast and wondering gaze on the onward flight of a single soul through the ages of its eternity. It must sink “a goblin damned,” or rise a spirit of bliss. In the rank soil of the world of blasphemy, it will, in successive ages, swell to a mammoth of guilt; or, in the pure atmosphere of heaven, it will, in its upward progress, brighten into an archangel, ministering before the throne of God. The prospective omniscience of the infinite Son, standing by the grave of a world “dead in trespasses and sins” beheld its countless perishing souls, of value too precious to be ascertained, save by the arithmetic of heaven. He pitied—he redeemed; he redeemed by the immolation of himself. Great was the price; greater, in the estimate of infinite love, was the redemption purchased.

Beautiful and glorious is the material universe. Beautiful is our own queen of night; glorious our own king of day. Brilliant are yonder stars that spangle the firmament; surpassingly majestic when we regard them as centres of their own expanding systems, attracting and ruling their own wheeling orbs. But to save all these, the Son of God would not have died; to redeem them all from one vast consuming conflagration, be would not have laid down his most precious life. He could have spoken new suns and systems into being. To impart moral life to a single soul dead in iniquity, he was obliged to die himself. When seen in the scriptural mirror, why will not man learn to appreciate that deathless soul, whose matchless value is so well known in heaven? Why will man, reckless man, madly throw away that inestimable gem, whose ransom cost the death of a God? How could centuries have cherished a theory which, by sinking, without scriptural authority, the redeeming price, would lower, in the estimation of the dwellers upon the earth, the value of their immortal souls?

Fifthly. The sufferings of Christ, in his divinity, afford a foundation for Christian confidence unknown to the prevalent theory. The anxious inquirer after religious truth, from whose eyes the scales have begun to fall, gazes, now at the frightful turpitude of sin, now at the “consuming fire” of Jehovah's wrath. He hears, close behind him, the cry of the avenger of blood. He must reach a city of refuge, or miserably perish. The prevalent theory points him to one. He finds it built of creature sufferings. In vain, at least for the time, is urged the dignity and atoning value imparted to the sufferings by the juxtaposition of indwelling divinity. He searches, without success, for any traces of the theory in Holy Writ. Metaphysical speculation soothes not his sin-tossed spirit. It is an icicle to his soul. He must become an adept in the prevalent theory before he can cast himself, for eternity, on vicarious sufferings less than divine.

Perhaps, gentle reader, you may yourself be an anxious, and, as yet, unbiassed inquirer after religious truth. You may be seeking as for hidden treasure, a sure foundation for the sinner's hope. Turn, then, to the Book of books. Read the concurrent testimony of the blessed Trinity, that its glorious second person, clothed in flesh, endured the infinite burden of the vicarious sufferings to save our perishing world; to save even you, if you will but accept his “great salvation.” Deign to believe the declarations of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, in all their stupendous magnitude. Accept as true, and sincere, and ingenuous, the assurances of the Sacred Three, though pertaining to things incomprehensible to your microscopic vision. Degrade not the atonement of the Godhead, by imagining that its second person suffered by profession and in name only. Change not into figures of speech the plain and simple proclamations which came down from above.

The anxious, fearing, trembling inquirer after gospel truth, bewildered on a sea of doubt and darkness, without a compass or a star, may find, in the sufferings of the divinity of Christ, “an anchor of the soul, both sure and steadfast, and which entereth into that within the veil;” “an anchor” formed in the conclave of the holy Trinity; “sure” as its eternal decrees; “steadfast” as the pillars of its everlasting throne. Christian confidence, founded on the expiatory agonies of the Creator of the worlds, may look down, as from the heaven of heavens on all that this poor earth miscalls “sure and steadfast.” He who has the witness within himself that he is to be partaker in the salvation wrought by the divine sufferings of the dying God, may, from the depths of his grateful, weeping, joyous heart, triumphantly exclaim with the exulting apostle to the Gentiles, “I know whom I have believed, and am persuaded that He is able to keep that which I have committed to him against that day.”

Sixthly. We delight to dwell on the atonement, built of the sufferings and cemented by the blood of God, in all its scriptural magnificence. It is, beyond peradventure, the mightiest effort of almighty power. God spake, and chaos became a universe of moving worlds. He could not speak into being the structure of salvation. Its formation cost him his incarnation, his sufferings, his death. It is the rainbow glory of heaven, concentrating in mild, yet bright effulgence, the mingling and harmonious rays of infinite justice, infinite wisdom, and infinite love. Upon the just proportions, the beautiful simplicity, the exquisite symmetry, the lofty grandeur of this choicest pavilion of the Godhead, the holy curiosity of cherubim and seraphim will be riveted for countless ages after time shall be no more. It will be remembered in hell. Devils will gnash their teeth; but “devils damned” dare not, cannot scoff. Forever must they gaze on this wonder of wonders, this everlasting monument of their Conqueror's triumph, in silent, in speechless despair.

What gives to this structure its transcendent majesty is the divinity of the sufferings of which it was composed. Had not the throes and blood of its suffering, dying, risen God pervaded and formed its constituent elements, it would have been a splendid pageant that might dazzle, but could not satisfy created intelligences. Let not the children of men seek to mar its beauty or dim its glory. It was on earth that its foundations were laid. It is earth that it has redeemed. Let not earth alone, of all the provinces of the universal empire, seek to pluck from this temple of salvation its everlasting cornerstone.