Testament, I hold it to be impossible that any one who honestly makes the Scriptures the rule of his faith can thoughtfully maintain, in any strict sense, that the death of Christ made God merciful. Yet some have imagined this; and language is still often employed, in Christian congregations, which in proportion as it operates, must divert the current of supreme love and gratitude from Him whom our Saviour has taught us to love with all our heart, to him who was the effect, and not the cause of Divine grace and mercy. That I may not be supposed to calumniate the orthodox world, I will read to you a few passages from writers who are still in great request among some classes. Flavel uses such expressions as the following: 'To wrath, to the wrath of an infinite God, without mixture, to the very torments of Hell, was Christ delivered, and that by the hand of his own Father.' God stood 'God stood upon full satisfaction, and would not remit one sin without it."The design and end of this oblation was to atone, pacify, and reconcile God, by giving him a full and adequate compensation or satisfaction for the sins of his elect.'3 • His soul felt the wrath of an angry God, which was terribly impressed upon it. As the wrath, the pure unmixed wrath of God, lay 1 his soul, so all the wrath of God was poured out upon him even to the last drop.' Calvin says, that the burden of damnation from which we were delivered, was laid upon Christ ;'5 that Fountain of Life opened, p. 119. * p. 417. 2 *p. 129. 3 p. 134. 5 Institutions, ii. 16. § 4. 2 there is no other satisfaction by which God, being displeased, may be made favourable and appeased ;' that in his soul, he (Christ) suffered the torments of a damned and forsaken man; and that he bore the character of a priest to make the Father favourable and merciful to us.' 3 Is not this proof enough? If you do not feel it so, I refer you to Wright's Free Grace of God, where, from various sources, the author gives expressions which make the Unitarian shudder.4 They speak of the blood of Christ appeasing the Divine wrath, making God propitious, procuring mercy for the sinner, making satisfaction to the indignation of God. And Bishop Beveridge says, Unless Christ Institutions. iii. 4. § 26. 2 ii. 16 § 10. 3 ii. 15. § 6. Bishop Taylor in prayer to Christ says, 'The storms of death, and thy Father's anger, broke thee all in pieces.' Bishop Hall declares, 'Never was man so afraid of the torments of hell, as Christ (standing in our room) of his Father's wrath.' And similar ideas may be found in the works of modern orthodoxy. The Rev. H. J. Prince, in the tract already quoted, thus writes, p. 5:-'Christ has already appeased or pacified God's anger towards you on account of your sins, so that though you richly deserve God's severest anger on account of your sins, yet He is not, and never will be, angry with you for them, because he has already completely exhausted His anger on the person of His Son, Jesus Christ.' The Author of a 'Narrative of a mission of inquiry to the Jews from the Church of Scotland,' 1843, when speaking of the desert through which our Lord is supposed to have been carried into Egypt, says, p. 84:- Perhaps these scorching beams beat upon his infant brow, and this sand-laded breeze dried up his infant lips, while the heat of the curse of God began to melt his heart within. Even in the desert we see the surety-ship of Jesus.'-Ed. mediate or intercede for us, we may pray our hearts out, all will signify nothing; God will neither grant what we desire, nor accept of anything we do.'1 There is too much reason to believe that such expressions are not unfrequently employed, even in these days, in the pulpits of those who adopt and lay stress upon the Satisfaction Scheme. In their zeal to exalt the honour and glory of the Saviour, they seem to forget Him whose glory was the grand object of our Saviour's life: unintentionally, I doubt not, but effectually, they rob that gracious Being who is kind even to the unthankful and the evil, of his darling attribute; and make him the first cause of salvation, whose mission, and death, and offered blessings, all proceed from the free grace of God. And these ideas are still more fixed in the minds of the unthinking, by the hymns which are even yet employed in the worship of these classes of our fellow Christians. What is in the hymn-book is read and sung till it is fixed in the memory, and on the heart its impression is aided by the pleasure of poetic harmony, and still more by the influence of devotional music, and of the glowing sympathy with which numbers unite in singing parts peculiarly interesting to their feelings.From different hymn-books in prevalent use, I might select several passages almost equal to those from Flavel: but I shall content myself with reading you parts of one hymn among the early 1Sermons, vol. x. 202. Ꭰ effusions of the excellent Watts, the 108th of his Second Book. 1. Come let us lift our joyful eyes And smile to see our Father there 2. Once 'twas a seat of dreadful wrath, 2. Rich were the drops of Jesus' blood 6. To thee ten thousand thanks we bring And glory to the eternal King Such language, I repeat it, can have no other tendency than to give the Mediator the chief place in the heart as the first cause of salvation; and to debase and pervert the affections due to Him of whom and by whom and unto whom are all things."1 1 As a refreshing contrast to the above, I may quote the following observations from Irving, in his Tract entitled 'The Orthodox and Catholic Doctrine of our Lord's human nature, set forth in four parts,' 1830, p. 100, 101. 'There is a third objection which is generally put in this form-And wherein then lay the great meritoriousness of Christ's sufferings? To which question, the answer generally given is, that they procured God's favour, pacified him, and made him placable. This goes exactly upon the notion of the heathen, that God wanteth and will have suffering, The same objections cannot be urged in their full force against the IInd view of the Satisfaction Scheme, which represents the death of Christ as necessary to enable God to extend His mercy to the repentant sinner; which maintains that the justice of God would not allow Him to forgive, unless the debt of punishment were paid; and that, without the death of Christ, God could not have been merciful without violating His justice. And as wanteth and will have compensation, standeth to his point and will not abate one iota of suffering to any one. he had a mind to save so many, Christ came and bore the suffering which they ought to have borne; every jot of it, but not one jot more; for if he had borne one jot more, the Father would have been unjust, and if he had borne one jot less, the Father would have abated of his sternest rectitude. And therefore it is that they have such an abhorrence of the idea that Christ died for all, that he was a propitiation for all, and bore the sin of the world. Such is the system of theology, or rather the one false view of a great truth, which hath swallowed up all theology, and upon which are constructed the greater part of the sermons with which the evangelical part of the Church are nourished, or rather poisoned. Of all errors, an error concerning the nature of God is the most fatal, and such an error is involved in those representations which set forth only one attribute of his being, viz. his holy severity against and hatred of sin, and wholly obscureth another, which is his love to his creatures, and his mercy towards his sinful creatures. Moreover it representeth God as changeable, and being changed; as having a different disposition towards me after the incarnation than before it, in prospect of the incarnation than not in prospect of it. And then the question is, what moved him to the incarnation? It must have been to change himself, to bring himself into another state than he was in before, which are horrid blasphemies.' |