November 1924
T HE K I N G ’ S B U S I N E S S
688
Mailing It to the Cross The Death of Christ: Example or Expiation? Stenographic report of a sermon preached by Dr. Clarence Edward Macartney, in the Auditorium of the Bible Institute of Los Angeles, Sunday afternoon, July 27, 1024.
his presentation of the subject and his explanation of it more effective than in this passage of the letter to the Colossians, where he says that Christ nailed our sins to the Cross. Paul represents man as under condemnation because he has broken the laws of God. The wages of sin is death. All men have sinned, and are therefore facing the dread penalty upon sin. God would have been •unimpeachably just had He executed upon man the sentence of death. But because God so loved the world He sent His only begotten Son to die for the world. He commended His love towards us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us. Christ, as the representative of both man and God, took man’s place, and on the Cross paid the full penalty of sin, tasting for every man the darkness and death of sin. Because of this death of Christ and its satisfaction to the holy law of God, God can show mercy to the sinner. He can remain just, and yet justify them that believe in Jesus. Paul uses three expressions to show how fully Christ has done this great work of lifting the condemnation for sin from the human race. He says that Christ blotted out the writing against man; that He carried it away, removed it out of sight; and then in this powerful metaphor, that “He nailed it to the Cross.” Utter destruction! Complete for giveness and justification. It is as if he had said that every blow from the Roman soldiers which drove the nails through the hands and feet of our Lord were also blows which nailed our sin and our punishment to ■ the Cross, destroying it forever. When we speak of those great facts of the Atonement, we are dealing with God’s great mystery, and there is no language which is a door into that mystery. But as to the great fact itself, that Christ died for our sins, that He was offered up as an expiation and atonement to make it pos sible for God to forgive sin, as to that there can be no doubt. The first Apostles themselves trusted in this great truth before they preached remission of sins to the world. All of Christianity, its theologies, its liturgies, its art and music and architecture, its past triumphs and its hope of future conquest is centered upon this grand and primary fact that Christ died for our sins on the Cross. n . The New Christianity with the Doctrine of the Cross Left Out Today there is to be seen the emergence of a new kind of Christianity, and the distinguishing thing about it is the absence, not of any particular theory of atonement and expiation, but the absence of the idea itself. This creative idea of Christianity, the satisfaction of Christ for sin, is in some quarters quietly ignored, in other places explained in a way that explains it away, and elsewhere openly and boldly rejected. Let me cite some of the evidences of this great change: A minister of the Congregational Church writes that, “ The Protestant Church with rare and fine exceptions has ceased to preach the absolute necessity of redemption through the Cross of Christ.” A candidate for the ministry in the Presbyterian Church, examined as to the Atonement, says that he believes “ in the principle of vicarious atonement as exemplified in the Cross.” Another tells us that while he believes in vicarious sufferings, he does not believe in the “ governmental theory of substitutionary punishment which (Continued on page 730)
|N THE early spring of this year I received an invi tation to preach and lecture this summer in this auditorium, but I was not able to accept the invi tation. But now, in the Providence of God, I have this opportunity to visit this renowned place. I wish to speak to you this afternoon about the central fact of the Christian religion— the death of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the words about which I shall gather my thoughts are those of the Apostle Paul as recorded in Colossians 2:14: “Nailing it to His cross .’11 Christianity is summed up in the answer we give to three great questions: (1) Who is the Lord Jesus Christ? I ask you to consider with me this afternoon the answer to the second of these great questions,— “What has He done?” “ Blotting out the handwriting of ordinances that was against us, which was contrary to us, and took it out of the way, nailing it to His cross.” (Col. 2:14.) In one of his most eloquent passages, John Chrysostom says that he loves Rome above all cities because there Paul died, there his dust reposes, and there he will he raised up to meet the Lord. He longs to see the “ dust of Paul’s body that sowed the Gospel everywhere; the dust of that mouth which lifted the truth on high, and through which the sacred writings were written; the dust of those feet which ran through the world and were not weary; the dust of those eyes which were blinded gloriously, but which recovered their sight again for the salvation of the world; the dust of that heart which a man would not do wrong to call the heart of the world, so enlarged that it could take in cities and nations and peoples, which burned at each one that was lost, which despised both death and hell, and yet was broken down by a brother’s tears.” ; , The secret of the power of that great life was Christ. But what did Christ mean to Paul? The best answer to that is one word, the Cross. Of the Cross he dreamed, for the. Cross he died, and in the Cross he gloried. What was it in the Cross of Christ that Paul found so constraining, so inspiring, and so suited to the deep needs of humanity? It cannot have been the shame and ignominy which attached to the Cross, nor was it the unmerited pathos and sadness of the death of Jesus on Calvary, for St. Paul never refers to any of those incidents of the trial and agony and crucifix ion of Jesus which so move and touch us in the narratives of the evangelists. The one thing in the death of Christ which thrilled the soul of Paul and engaged all the facul ties of that splendid intellect was the fact of the relation ship of the death of Christ on the Cross to the sin of the world. I. The Cross the Central Fact Other men have died heroic martyr deaths. All who are now in the world must die at their appointed hour. But Jesus Christ was the only one who ever came into this world with the one great purpose of dying. This death of Christ for the sins of the world is the one great theme which is the center of Paul’s thinking and preaching, and writing and dreaming. He approaches the subject by many avenues of argument and illustration. But nowhere is (2) What has He done? (3) What will He yet do?
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