p. 105We discussed the question of Divine anger last time. I think your next difficulty was the appointment of sacrifice?—Yes. I have been accustomed to regard it as anomalous that sacrifice should be required as an element of religious service; especially the sacrifice of Christ. I must acknowedge my inability to understand why the good and the pure and the holy should be crucified, as Jesus Christ was, before God could allow man to approach Him or hope for salvation.
If you admit that God requires sacrifice in the approaches of man, you ought to have no difficulty in receiving the fact.—I cannot receive anything that appears to stultify truth.
I am afraid if you had been Abraham when he received command to offer up his only son, Isaac, in whom posterity had been promised, you would not have been so prompt to obey.—I don’t know how it might have been had I received so direct a p. 106 command as he did. I grant it might have seemed a difficulty how God required me to shed man’s blood, after having forbidden it, and how He could ask me to destroy a son in whom issue promised had not yet taken place. But, perhaps, in the presence of His actual requirement, I would not have felt these scruples. I hope I am not a rebel.
The sentiment of insubordination is at the root of many of the religious difficulties of men.
You are rather hard.—I do not mean the remark in any offensive sense. I intend it in the scientific sense—that is, in the sense of fact coolly noted.
That makes the matter worse.—I hope not. I am looking away from persons and dealing neutrally with truth. Jesus utters the sentiment in another way, when he says “If any man will do His will, he shall know of the doctrine.” As much as to say, if there be not first a docile and willing mind, there can be no perception of the truth. Indeed, He plainly says this in another case: “Except a man humble himself as a little child, he cannot see the Kingdom of God.” To the opposite state of mind he refers thus: “How can ye believe that receive honour one of another and seek not the honour that cometh from God only.”
We are straying from the point, are we not?—Just a little, perhaps. I was meaning to suggest that your discernment of the fact that God requires sacrifice ought to relieve you of all difficulty as to His reason.
I suppose it ought, but we naturally desire to understand, and especially to get rid of, anything that appears to violate our understanding.—It is possible to understand this question of sacrifice if you admit the elementary principles out of which it arises.
p. 107 What are they?—First of all, take the fact which God declared to Moses: “I will be sanctified in them that approach unto me.” Look this well in the face and realize to yourself whether you admit it or no; that, as God said to Malachi, “I am a great King,” and that “His name must be magnified and had in reverence of all those who come near to Him” (Mal. i. 14; ii. 2; Psa. lxxxix. 7; Lev. i. 3).
I could not, of course, demur to such a sentiment.—You may not demur; but do you really feel the sentiment? I fix your attention here, because it is the root of the matter in question. No man can enter into the meaning of sacrifice who fails in the discernment of God’s greatness, and in the feeling of reverence and awe towards Him which that discernment will inspire when allowed to have its full effect. The great failing of our age, as Carlyle used to say, is “the want of reverence.”
I must admit the truth of the impeachment. I desire to be innocent in the matter. I hope I am sufficiently under the power of reason (to put it on no higher ground) to recognize the majesty and sacredness of the Divine Being.—It is astonishing how easily people feel the dignity of human greatness. The greatness of God does not touch them in the least, when the presence of royalty, or even of a judge on the bench, will fill them with a sense of awe and deference.
We must make some allowance for the difference between faith and sight.—That is, doubtless part of the explanation. In the present case, there is no need for the allowance. You recognize the greatness and majesty of God. Is it not, therefore, reasonable that in permitting approach to Him, He should appoint acts of extreme reverence on the part of the worshippers?
p. 108 That, of course, I cannot deny, and I would have no difficulty in understanding bowing or kneeling, or entire prostration as the expression of reverence; but sacrifice——?—Here you require another of the elementary principles to which I referred. Surrender to it as frankly, and your difficulty will be gone.
What is it?—That the disobedience of any commandment of God (otherwise expressed by the term “sin”) is a heinous crime on the part of a created being; and that God’s intolerance towards it is so extreme that He will not hold communion with a sinner or suffer him to live. Can you object?
I don’t know that I can object if I am to receive what the Bible teaches.
You admit that the Bible teaches this, and you have admitted that the evidence of the Bible’s truth cannot be rejected. Where are we?—I suppose I am bound to assent to what you say.
Do you not think it reasonable that the insubordination of the creature should be a crime against the Creator?—I cannot say it is unreasonable.
Do you not think it reasonable that such a crime should put an end to friendly relations between them?—Suppose I must admit it, what then?
It would mean eternal breach.—I do not see where sacrifice comes in.
This is just where it does come in. God is kind as well as great. And He is willing for a healing of the breach, provided there be a recognition of His supremacy and submission on the part of the offender.
How does sacrifice ensure this?—It is the enactment of confession. The wages of sin is death; and when a sinner comes with sacrifice in his hand, laying his hand on its head, he identifies himself with it, and acknowledges, in its death, that he is p. 109 deserving of death. Thus both sin and the claims of God are confessed.
You are speaking of the sacrifice of animals.—Yes, they were first in the order of appointment.
It is the sacrifice of Christ that my mind is on, more particularly, as a difficulty. I could understand that the offering of an animal might be a suitable ceremony of contrition: but here is a righteous man put to death: I cannot so well understand that.—I grant there is more in that case than in the typical foreshadowings of the Mosaic law; still, the one was a prefigurement of the other.
How am I to understand you?—In the animal, sin was only typically condemned. In Christ, it was really so.
I do not understand that. How could sin be condemned in Christ who was no sinner?—By reason of the nature he obtained by derivation from his mother Mary. This was the nature common to all the sons of Adam, which inherits death from the condemnation passed upon the transgressor in Eden (Rom. v. 12, 18). When, therefore, his flesh was impaled on Calvary, sin was “condemned in the flesh” (Rom. viii. 3), and the basis of propitiation laid in the pouring out of his blood (Rom. iii. 25, 26). He was thus “made sin for us who knew no sin” (2 Cor. v. 21). If he had not been of our identical nature in the first place, I grant I could not answer your question.
But granting he was in our identical nature, I do not see what was accomplished?—Paul’s definition is an inspired one, and may be taken to cover the whole ground. He not only says, “Sin was condemned in the flesh,” but that the object was “to declare the righteousness of God” as a basis “for the p. 110 the remission of sins that are past through the forbearance of God, that He might be just and the justifier of him that believeth in Jesus” (see Rom. iii. 25, 28). We therefore get the idea that in the death of Christ, human nature was federally crucified, and the righteousness of God in His dealings with the Adamic race, publicly asserted and vindicated, with this result, that the way was opened for God to shew His forbearance in our forgiveness, provided we humble ourselves by associating ourselves with this public declaration of His righteousness and vindication of His supremacy.
How can you do that?—Paul supplies the answer in saying that when believers are baptized into Christ, they are baptized into his death, in undergoing a burial in water which he styles “the likeness of his death” (see Rom. vi. 2, 6). By this submission to a death-resembling rite, they are said to be “crucified with Christ” which identifies them with the process to which Christ is his love submitted, and therefore stand humbly before God as confessors of their sin, that they may receive a free forgiveness through him who not only “died that we might live” but who, being raised from the dead, ever lives that he may act as intercessor between God and “all who come unto God by him.”
I must say it is a different idea of the atonement from what I have always been accustomed to hear.—The clerical idea of the atonement creates difficulties that do not belong to the Bible exhibition of the subject.
The view you have presented removes some difficulty. Still, I should have thought the kindness of God would have have been equal to the forgiveness of sinners, without sacrifice of any kind. p. 111 —I must remind you that it is not what we think that settles the question of truth. If you will but realize that God is great and holy, as well as kind, the subject of sacrifice will present no difficulty. God is to be feared and venerated by the angels who please Him: how much more by man who is not only an impure creature of the earth, but a sinner deserving of death. It is nothing but fitting and beautiful in the highest degree that his permitted approaches should be in a form that keeps his own worthlessness, and God’s great kindness and justice, always before his eyes.