To declare, I say, at this time His righteousness.
The Cross a manifestation of the Divine righteousness
I. How. In two ways so closely united that either of them separated would lose its value.
1. By the very fact of Christ’s sacrifice and bloody death. If Paul does not see in this punishment a quantitative equivalent of the treatment which every sinner had incurred, this is what clearly appears from such sayings as 2Co_5:21; Gal_3:13. Now herein precisely consists the manifestation of the righteousness wrought out by the Cross. God is here revealed as one against whom no sinner can revolt without meriting death; and the sinner is here put in his place in the dust as a malefactor worthy of death. Such is the objective manifestation of righteousness.
2. This demonstration, however, would be incomplete without the subjective or moral manifestation which accompanies it. Every sinner might be called to die on the Cross; but no sinner was in a condition to undergo this punishment as Jesus did, accepting it as undeserved. This is what He alone could do in virtue of His holiness (Joh_17:25), The calm and mute resignation with which He allowed Himself to be led to the slaughter, manifested the idea which He Himself formed of the Majesty of God and the judgment He was passing on the sin of the world; from His Cross there rose the most perfect homage rendered to the righteousness of God. In this death the sin of mankind was therefore doubly judged, and the righteousness of God doubly manifested,--by the external fact of this painful and ignominious punishment, and by the inward act of Christ’s conscience, which ratified this dealing of which sin was the object in His Person.
II. But what rendered such a demonstration necessary--because of the tolerance of sins past. For four thousand years the spectacle presented by mankind to the whole moral universe (cf. 1Co_4:9)
was, so to speak, a continual scandal. With the exception of some great examples of judgments, Divine righteousness seemed asleep; men sinned and yet they lived. They sinned on, and yet reached in safety a hoary old age. Where were the wages of sin?It was this relative impunity which rendered a solemn manifestation of righteousness necessary. God judged it essential, on account of the impunity so long enjoyed by these myriads of sinners who succeeded one another on the earth, at length to manifest His righteousness by a striking act; and He did so by realising in the death of Jesus the punishment which each of these sinners would have deserved to undergo. But if it be asked why Paul refers only to sins of the past and not to those of the future, the answer is easy: the righteousness of God once revealed in the sacrifice of the Cross this demonstration remains. Whatever happens, nothing can again efface it from the history of the world, nor from the conscience of mankind. Henceforth all sin must be pardoned or judged. (Prof. Godet.)
That He might be Just, and the Justifier of him which believeth in Jesus.
Justice satisfied
(text, and 1Jn_1:9).
I. How has justice been so satisfied that it no longer stands in the way of God’s justifying the sinner? The one answer to that is, through the substitution of Christ. When man sinned the law demanded his punishment. The first offence was committed by Adam, the representative of the race. When God would punish sin, He thought of the blessed expedient, not of punishing His people, but their representative, the second Adam. He died--“the just for the unjust, that He might bring us to God.” Let us show how fully the law is satisfied. Note--
1. The dignity of the victim. The eternal Son of God condescended to become man; lived a life of suffering, and at last died a death of agony. If you will but think of the wondrous person whom Jesus was, you will see that in His sufferings the law received a greater vindication than it could have done even in the sufferings of the whole race. There is such dignity in the Godhead that all it does is infinite in its merit; and when He stooped to suffer, the law received greater honour than if a whole universe had become a sacrifice.
2. The relationship which Jesus Christ had towards the Great Judge. Brutus was the most inflexible of judges, and knew no distinction of persons. But when he sentenced his own son, we see that he loved his country better than his son, and justice better than either. Now, we say, Brutus is just indeed. Now, if God had condemned each of us one by one, or the whole race in a mass, justice would have been vindicated. But lo! His own Son takes upon Him the sins of the world, and “it pleased the Lord to bruise Him.” Surely, when God smites His Son, only begotten and well-beloved, then justice has all that it could ask; and this Christ freely gave,
3. The agonies of Christ, which He endured in the place of sinners. All I ought to have suffered has been suffered by my substitute. It cannot be that God can smite me now. Justice itself prevents, for when justice once is satisfied it were injustice if it should ask for more. God can be just, and yet the justifier.
II. It is an act of justice on God’s part to forgive on confession of sin. Not that the sinner deserves forgiveness. Sin can never merit anything but punishment. Not that God is bound from any necessity of His nature to forgive everyone that repents, because repentance has not in itself sufficient to merit forgiveness. Yet it is true that, because God is just, He must forgive every sinner who confesses his sin. Because--
1. He has promised to do so; and a God who could break His promise were unjust. Every word which God utters shall be fulfilled. Go, then, to God with--“Lord, Thou hast said, ‘He that confesseth his sin, and forsaketh it, shall find mercy.’ I confess my sin, and I forsake it; Lord, give me mercy!” Don’t doubt but that God will give it you. You have His own pledge in your hand.
2. Man has been induced to act upon it; and therefore, this becomes a double bond upon the justice of God. God has said, “If we confess our sins and trust in Christ, we shall have mercy.” You have done it on the faith of the promise. Do you imagine when God has brought you through much pain of mind to repent and rely on Christ He will afterwards tell you He did not mean what He said? It cannot be. Suppose you said to a man, “Give up your situation and take a house near me, and I will employ you.” Suppose he does it, and you then say, “I am glad for your own sake that you have left your master, still I will not take you.” He would reply, “I gave up my situation on the faith of your promise, and now you break it.” Ah! but this never can be said of God.
3. Christ died on purpose to secure pardon for every seeking soul. And do you suppose that the Father will rob Him of that which He has bought so dearly?
III. The duties taught in the two texts.
1. Confession. Expect not that God will forgive you until you confess. You are not to confess to a man, unless you have offended against him. If you have, leave thy gift upon the altar, and go and make peace with him, and then come and make peace with God. You are to make confession of your sin to God. You cannot mention every offence, but do not hide one.
2. Faith. (C. H. Spurgeon.)
Justice and redemption
What was the main purpose of Christ’s sufferings?
I. The question is answered in very various ways.
1. There are those who say that they had no purpose, but were brought about by the operation of blind forces, which act sometimes through the working of inanimate nature, sometimes through the malignity of human wills. We need not look beyond them to account for the spectacle of the best of human lives ending as though it had been the worst; for that anomaly, that while Tiberius was enthroned in Rome, Jesus should have been crucified in Jerusalem. To discuss this would be to open the question whether there is any Divine government at all. Suffice it to say, that if there is a Being who is almighty, and has a moral character, then the world is governed by Him. If a great deal is permitted to go on in it which is a contradiction to the moral nature of such a ruler, this only shows that, from certain reasons, He has allowed sin to enter into and to mar His work, and in its train, pain, and death. The sufferings of Christ are thus only an extreme illustration of what we see everywhere around us on a smaller scale, but they afford no ground for the opinion that human lives drift helplessly before forces which are as entirely without moral purpose as the wave or the hurricane is void of intelligence or of sympathy.
2. A more satisfactory account of the sufferings of our Lord is that they were the crowning feature of the testimony He bore to the sacredness of truth. This, it may be truly urged, is His own account of the matter. “To this end was I born … that I might bear witness unto the truth.” But the question is whether this was the only or the most important object. If it was, then He does not differ from sages, prophets, and martyrs, who have all done this service to truth. There is a more important purpose in the death of our Lord which distinguishes it from every other.
II. The true answer is that Christ’s death was intended to set forth in action an Attribute of God.
1. This attribute is not, as we might expect, God’s love or mercy, although we know that if God gave His only begotten Son to die, it was because “He so loved the world”; but the attribute of which St. Paul is thinking is God’s righteousness or justice.
2. When we speak of righteousness we presuppose the existence of a law of right, a law which justice upholds. This law has its witness partly in the structure of society, partly in the conscience of man. If human society is largely unfaithful to this law, it cannot altogether neglect it without going to pieces, sooner or later. And the conscience of every man attests the existence of right, as opposed to wrong. Without doing violence to the mind which God has given us, we cannot conceive of a time when right was not right, and when justice was not a virtue; and if so then right and justice are eternal; and since nothing distinct from God can be conceived of as eternal--for in that case there would be two eternals--it follows that right and justice belong to God’s essential nature. To think of God as unrighteous is only a mode of thinking of Him as not existing at all.
3. This great truth it was a main purpose of the Jewish revelation to teach. From generation to generation its voice is, “Righteous art Thou, O Lord, and true is Thy judgment.” Its law was a proclamation of righteousness applied to human life; its prophets were preachers of righteousness; its penalties were the sanctions of righteousness; its sacrifices were a perpetual reminder of the Divine righteousness; its promises pointed to One who would make clearer than ever to man the beauty and the power of Divine righteousness. And so when He came He was named the “Just One” and “Jesus Christ the Righteous,” and it was but in accordance with these titles that both in His life and in His death He revealed to man the righteousness of God as it had never been revealed before.
III. But how was the death of Christ a declaration of God’s righteousness?
1. Here we must consider that righteousness is an active attribute. There is no such thing as a working distinction between a theoretical and a practical justice. And if this is true in man, much more true is it in God. To conceive of God as just in Himself, but as indifferent to the strict requirements of justice, would, one might think, be impossible for any clear and reverent mind. And yet many a man has said, “If I were God, I would forgive the sinner, just as a good-natured man forgives a personal offence, without expecting an equivalent.” Here is a confusion between an offence against man and one against God. An offence against us does not necessarily involve an infraction of the eternal law of right. But with the Master of the moral universe it is otherwise. That violations of right must be followed by punishment is as much part of the absolute law of right as is the existence of right itself. If the maxim holds in human law, that the acquittal of the guilty is the condemnation of the judge, it holds true in a higher sense of Him whose passionless rectitude is as incapable of being distorted by a false benevolence as by a prejudiced animosity.
2. The death of our Lord was a proclamation of God’s righteousness in exacting the penalty which is due to sin. If we would take the measure of moral evil, let us not merely track it to the workhouse, the prison, the gallows, not even to the eternal condition of the lost; let us stand in spirit on Mount Calvary, and there look how Christ is “made to be sin for us, who knew no sin, that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him.”
3. But here it will be asked whether God’s justice is not compromised in the very act of its assertion, whether the penalty paid by the sinless Sufferer is not inconsistent with the rule of justice that the real sinner should be punished for his sins. But consider--
(1) That a vicarious penalty is not unjust, e.g., when the person who pays it has a natural title to represent the criminal. Natural and civil law are agreed in making a father responsible for the son’s misconduct, and in exacting from him the payment which the boy himself cannot produce. On the other hand, a parent’s conduct, good or bad, affects profoundly the destiny of his descendants. Their temperate habits or their loose way of living have a present effect on our lives; and the good or bad name which a parent leaves to his children colours and shapes their lives in a thousand ways. To be the son of David procured for Solomon the delay of the penalty which his own misdeeds had deserved. To be descended from Jeroboam was to ascend a throne which was already forfeited. The Romans welcomed with enthusiasm the worthless son of Marcus Aurelius, though they already knew something of his character. The death of Louis XVI was not wholly due to Jacobin ferocity, nor to his own misconduct, but to the policy of ancestors who had bequeathed the fatal legacy of the disaffection and discontent of a great people. Certainly the application of this principle is modified partly by the gospel doctrine of individual responsibility: but it is not abrogated or forgotten. St. Paul applies this consideration to the relation of our first parent to the whole human family. “By one man’s disobedience many were made sinners.” Adam’s representative relation made his acts representative, and every child of Adam must consequently say, “Behold, I was shapen in wickedness, and in sin hath my mother conceived me.” This representative character belonged to our Lord not less truly than to our natural parent Adam. This is the deepest meaning of His name--the Son of Man--and this is why St. Paul calls Him the second Adam. There are, of course, important differences. Adam represents all the descendants who derive their physical life from him; Christ represents all who derive their spiritual life from Him. But the representation is as real in the one case as in the other, and it relieves our Lord’s vicarious sufferings of the imputation of capricious injustice. He is “the Everlasting Father,” or the parent of the coming age, who pays the penalty for the misdeeds of His children; and in claiming by faith our share in His work we are falling back on a law of representation which is common to nature and to grace, and which can only be charged with injustice if God is to be debarred on some arbitrary ground from treating His creatures as members of a common body, as well as in their individual capacity. It was Christ’s good pleasure to take our place upon the Cross. Surely there is no injustice in accepting a satisfaction which is freely offered. When a savage tribe would expiate its offences by the sacrifice of a victim against his will, this destruction of a life against the will of its owner would alone involve the forfeiture of any moral value attaching to the proceedings. If we could conceive any compulsion in our Lord’s case, it would be impossible to make good a moral basis for the atoning virtue of His death; but “No man,” He said, “taketh My life from Me, but I lay it down of Myself.” “Christ through the eternal Spirit offered Himself without spot to God”; and, therefore, because our Lord took a nature which represented the race, and freely willed the act, and suffered in that nature as its representative, His death has without any slur on the law of justice a propitiatory virtue.
4. But how could the penalty paid by one man be accepted as a penalty sufficient to atone for the sins of millions, the sins of the centuries that may be to come as well as of the ages that are past? Had the life which was offered been only a human life, it could not have made any such atonement. He who died on Calvary was more than man, and it is His higher and Divine nature which imparts to all that Christ did and suffered an infinite value. If we contemplate the infinitude of God, our wonder will be not that the death of Christ should have effected so much, but rather so far as we know it should have effected so little. I say so far as we know, for it may have had relations to other worlds of which we know nothing, although it may have had no effect beyond the redemption won for and offered to man. To achieve that redemption it was plainly more than equal. How large a number of blossoms drop off without bearing fruit; how few seeds fall where they can germinate, and of those which do take root how small a proportion do anything more; how out of all proportion to the lives which actually survive, are the preparations for life in the animal world! These things have led people to ask whether it would not have been better to create only so much life as was wanted. This is the reasoning of a finite creature surveying from his petty point of view the boundless resources and the magnificent profusion of the great Creator. And if, as we may think, He does more than He need do in order to save us without tampering with His own eternal law of right, it is because His resources, and His ungrudging generosity, are alike without limit. At any rate, if the death of our Lord offered more than a satisfaction, there can be no question that the satisfaction which it offered was fully adequate, that the blood of Him, the Son of God, cleanses from all sin. (Canon Liddon.)
The necessity of the atonement
I.The atonement was necessary entirely on God’s account. It is easy to see that it could not be necessary on the account of sinners. When Adam sinned, God might have destroyed him and the race, or He might have saved them in a sovereign manner, without doing injustice to them or any other created beings. But the apostle assures us that an atonement was necessary on God’s account, that He might be just, and the justifier.
II. Why the atonement was necessary on God’s account.
1. If we can only discover why Adam, after he had sinned and incurred the penalty, despaired of pardon, we shall see this. Adam knew that God was good, but he knew, too, that God was just; that it was morally impossible that He should exercise His goodness inconsistently with His justice; and that His perfect justice implied an inflexible disposition to punish the guilty. It is not probable that Adam thought of an atonement; and if he did, he could not see how an atonement could be made. Now as God could not have been just to Himself in forgiving Adam, so He cannot be in forgiving any of His guilty posterity without an atonement. And as God did determine to show mercy to sinners, so it was absolutely necessary that Christ should make an atonement for their sins, and its necessity originated entirely in His immutable justice. There was nothing in men that required an atonement, and there was nothing in God that required an atonement, but His justice.
2. Now there never was any difficulty in God’s doing good to the innocent, nor in His punishing the guilty; but there was a difficulty in forgiving the wicked.
(1) God’s goodness is a disposition to do good to the innocent; His justice a disposition to punish the guilty; and His mercy a disposition to pardon and save the guilty. The great difficulty, therefore, was to reconcile God’s disposition to punish with His disposition to forgive.
(2) This was a difficulty in the Divine character, and a still greater difficulty in the Divine government. For God had revealed His justice in His moral government, There was a clear exhibition of retributive justice in the first law given to man. “In the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.” This law, clothed with all the authority of God, man violated, and involved all his posterity. What now could be done? The fallen angels had been doomed for their first offence. But how could pardoning grace be displayed? This none of the intelligent creation could tell. The angels of light could not tell; for they had seen those who kept not their first estate, excluded from heaven. Man could not tell. This question God alone was able to solve. He know that He could be just to Himself, if His justice were displayed by the sufferings of a proper substitute in the room of sinners. Christ was the only substitute to be found who was competent to the great work. Him, therefore, the Father set forth to be a propitiation, to declare His righteousness for the remission of sins.
III. What follows? If the atonement of Christ was necessary entirely on God’s account, that He might be just in exercising pardoning mercy, then--
1. It was universal, and sufficient for the pardon of all. What can be more unjust than to punish sinners for not accepting a salvation which was never provided for them? And it never was provided for them, if Christ did not, by His sufferings and death, make atonement for them.
2. It did not satisfy justice towards sinners themselves. Nothing which Christ did or suffered altered their characters, obligations, or deserts. His obedience did not free them from their obligation to obey the Divine law, nor did His sufferings free them from their desert of suffering the penalty.
3. Christ did not merit anything at the hand of God for Himself, or for mankind. There is no phrase more misunderstood than “the merits of Christ.” Though Christ suffered the just for the unjust, yet He did not lay God under the least obligation, in point of justice, to pardon. God is above being bound by any; and He cannot bind Himself otherwise than by a free, gratuitous promise. God’s promise to pardon is an act of grace, and not an act of justice. Accordingly, the apostle says that believers are “justified freely by His grace, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.” And as Christ did not merit pardon for believers by His sufferings, so He did not merit a reward for them by His obedience. It is true, God has promised to reward Him for His obedience unto death, but His promise is a promise of grace, and not of justice. So He has promised to reward every man for the least good he does, even for giving a cup of cold water in sincerity. But His promise is a promise of grace, not of justice, and without the least regard to Christ’s obedience as the ground of it. By obeying and suffering in the room of sinners, He only rendered it consistent for God to pardon or to reward.
4. God exercises the same free grace in pardoning sinners through the atonement, as if no atonement had been made.
5. It is absurd to suppose that the atonement was merely expedient. There was no other possible way of saving sinners. There is no reason to think that God would have subjected the Son of His love to the Cross if He could have forgiven it without such an infinitely costly atonement.
6. We may safely conclude that the atonement consisted in Christ’s sufferings, and not in His obedience. His obedience was necessary on His account, to qualify Him for making atonement for the disobedient; but His sufferings were necessary on God’s account, to display His justice.
7. God can consistently pardon any penitent, believing sinners on account of Christ’s atonement. He can now be just, and be the justifier of everyone that believeth. (N. Emmons, D. D.)
