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April 1930
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Here was our sin; and there is Christ, who is made sin “over \huper] us” ; and now the judgment for sin that should fall on us fell on Him. Is not that substitution? Is not this one of the greatest religious wonders? " For the good man some one would even dare to die. But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for [huper] us” (Rom. 5 :7> 8). III. A S aved S in n er “That we might become the righteousness of God in him.” In every breast there is the monitor conscience, which urges one on to do the right and to avoid the wrong. Then there are the :defenses which Emerson praises; “example, custom, fear, occasion slow,” which are our “parapet” (his poem entitled “Grace”) ; but neither con science nor social pressure nor any other human device can make us “righteous.” This is due to two things: 1. God’s Attitude Toward Sin. Habakkuk says: “Thou that art of purer eyes than to behold evil, and that const not look on perverseness” (1:13). The Psalmist says: “Jehovah trieth the righteous: but the wicked and him that loveth violence his soul hateth. Upon the wicked he will rain snares; fire and brimstone and burning wind shall be the portion of their cup” (Ps. 11:5, 6). And God Himself says: “The soul that sinneth, it shall die” (Ezek. 18:4, 20). How can such a God save a sinner? How can He, as in the case of Nineveh, threaten with destruction and yet redeem man? Because in both cases He deals in grace on the basis of the atonement made by Christ; in the case of Nineveh He did it in anticipation of the Cross; in our case He does it on the ground of an accomplished redemption. But that makes His action no less a wonder! 2. Man’s Inability to Change God’s Attitude. Isaiah confesses that “ dll our righteousnesses are as a pol luted garment” (64 :6 ); and he adds that God had hid His face from them. Jesus told us that the first and great commandment is this, that we love the Lord our God with all our heart, and with all our soul, and with all our mind (Matt. 22:37). But who is there that would claim that he has always thus loved God? And to admit that we have sometimes failed is to admit that we have sinned. If, then, from this moment on we could thus love God, what would we do about our past remissness? To love God with all our heart, soul, and mind does not give us an opportunity to make up for the failures of the past: we cannot now do any works of supererogation that might be applied on our old account. There is no hope of salvation in this direction. Neither can it be expected that God will ignore or excuse sin. The funda mental attribute in God is His holiness; and this requires Him to deal justly with sin. He can save us only by requiring the full payment of the debt. He was under no obligation to pay it Himself, but the fact that He did pay it is a loud testimony to His grace. He punished sin in a substitute and enabled us to “become the righteous ness of God in him.” For a guilty and helpless sinner to be clothed with the righteousness of God is certainly one of the greatest religious wonders! In conclusion, it should be noted that Christ’s death made such a clothing with the righteousness of God pos sible, but not actual. The provision was made for all men, but not all men have because of it become actually right eous in the sight of God. There is something for us to do if the provided righteousness is to become our actual possession. We must accept the substitutionary work of Christ by faith and reckon His righteousness ours. “ With the heart man believeth unto righteousness; and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation” (Rom. 10:10).
the most obvious and satisfactory interpretation of the words. But they imply, if they do not formally express, the sinlessness of Jesus” (“Amer. Com.,” John, p. 294).. In Heb. 7 :26 He is said to be “holy, guileless [akokos], undefiled, separated from sinners.” And we might revert once more to 1 Pet. 1 :19, where He is spoken of as a “lamb, without blemish [amomos] and without spot [aspilos].” If these words are true, then the view held by some, Irving, for example, that “the flesh of Christ was as rebellious as ours, as fallen as ours” (quoted by Strong, “Theology,” p. 746), is false. Thank God, these words are true, and that here we have the first religious wonder! Among the billions of earth-dwellers there is One, though only One, who is sinless in conduct and in nature ! II. A S ubstitutionary S acrifice “ Him . . . he made, to be sin on our behalf .” Here is the second religious wonder ! “Gregg, in ‘Creed of Christendom,’ 2:222, speaks of ‘the strangely inconsistent doctrine that God is so just that He could not let sin go unpunished, yet so unjust that he could punish it in the person of the innocent. . . . It is for orthodox dialectics to explain how the divine justice can be impugned by pardoning the guilty, and yet vindicated by punishing the innocent’ ” (quoted in Lias, “Atonement,” 16). An exam ination of this statement will help to remove this dif ficulty. 1. The Divine Imputation. We are told that God “made him to be sin.” There is a similar statement in Gal. 3 :13 : “ Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us.” The reference before us seems to look back to the sin-offering and the guilt-offer ing in Lev. 4, and to the scapegoat in Lev. 16 (Plummer, Second Corinthians, p. 187). In some mysterious way, God put “on him the iniquity of us all” (Isa. 53:6), and so Christ “bare our sins in his body upon the tree” (1 Pet. 2:24). By metonymy Christ is here called not only the Sin-Bearer, but Sin itself. God put sin, all human sin, upon Him that He might judge it in Him and so put it out of the way, As for the difficulty about God’s justice in punishing the innocent Jesus, that vanishes when we remember that God Himself, in the Person of Christ, voluntarily took sin upon Himself . Paul had just said in 2 Cor. 5 :19, that “God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself.” Have we any fault to find when the offended himself takes the penalty? Besides, Christ was human as well as divine. By becoming a man He took upon Himself certain obligations of the race. If, therefore, He assumed the full debt owed by man, we cannot accuse God of injustice in ratifying the assumption. 2. The Human Relationship. What is the significance of the preposition here used? The A. S. V. renders it “on our behalf”; and Plummer likewise translates it that way. But though huper most commonly has this notion, the resultant meaning, derived from a consideration of the preposition plus the context in which it occurs, often is “instead of.” Dr. A. T. Robertson says, in his monu mental Grammar of the Greek'Testament, on huper: “It is sometimes said that anti means literally ‘instead’ and huper, ‘in behalf of.’ But Winer sees more clearly when he says:.‘In most cases one who acts in behalf of another takes his place.’ . . . In the papyri and the ostraca huper often bore the sense of ‘instead of.’ . . . There is no inherent objection in huper itself to its conveying the notion of ‘instead’ as a resultant idea. In fact it is per se as natural as with anti” (pp. 630-32). The resultant meaning in our text points to the idea of substitution.
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