Romans 3:26 To declare, I say, at this time his righteousness: that he might be just, and the justifier of him which believes in Jesus. 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.) Parallel Verses KJV: To declare, I say, at this time his righteousness: that he might be just, and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus. |
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