VII.
THE ULTIMATE PURPOSE OF RECONCILIATION AND ITS HUMAN CONDITIONS.
“To present you holy and without blemish and unreproveable before Him: if so be that ye continue in the faith, grounded and stedfast, and not moved away from the hope of the gospel which ye heard, which was preached in all creation under heaven; whereof I Paul was made a minister.”—Col. i. 22, 23 (Rev. Ver.).
The Apostle has been sketching in magnificent outline a vast system, which we may almost call the scheme of the universe. He has set forth Christ as its Lord and centre, through Whom all things at first came into being, and still continue to be. In parallel manner he has presented Christ as Lord and Centre of the Church, its lifegiving Head. And finally he has set forth Christ as the Reconciler of all discords in heaven and earth, and especially of that which parts sinful men from God.
And now he shows us here, in the first words of our text, the purpose of this whole manifestation of God in Christ to be the presenting of men perfect in purity, before the perfect judgment of God. He then appends the condition on which the accomplishment of this ultimate purpose in each man depends—namely, the man’s continuance in the faith and hope of the Gospel. That leads him to gather up, in a series of clauses characterizing the Gospel, certain aspects of it which constitute subordinate motives and encouragements to such stedfastness. That is, I think, the outline connection of the words before us, which at first sight seem somewhat tangled and difficult to unravel.
I. We have then, first, to consider the ultimate purpose of God in the work of Christ.
“To present you holy and without blemish and unreproveable before Him.” It may be a question whether these words should be connected with “now hath He reconciled,” or whether we are to go farther back in the long paragraph, and make them dependent on “it was the good pleasure of the Father.” The former seems the more natural—namely, to see here a statement of the great end contemplated in our reconciliation to God; which, indeed, whatever may be the grammatical construction preferred here, is also, of course, the ultimate object of the Father’s good pleasure. In the word “present” there is possibly a sacrificial allusion, as there is unquestionably in its use in Rom. xii., “Present your bodies a living sacrifice”; or there may be another and even more eloquent metaphor implied, that of the bringing of the bride to the husband by the friend of the bridegroom. That lovely figure is found in two instances of the use of the word in Paul’s epistle (2 Cor. ii. 2, “to present you as a chaste virgin to Christ,” and Eph. v. 27, “that He might present it to Himself a glorious Church”), and possibly in others. It certainly gives an appropriate and beautiful emblem here if we think of the presentation of the bride in virginal beauty and purity to her Lord at that last great day which is the bridal day of the perfected Church.
There is, however, no need to suppose any metaphor at all, nor any allusion beyond the general meaning of the word—to set in the presence of. The sacrificial reference is incongruous here, and the bridal one not indicated by anything in the context, as it is in the instances just quoted. One thing is clear, that the reference is to a future presentation in the day of judgment, as in another place, where Paul says, “He ... shall raise up us also ... and shall present us” (2 Cor. iv. 14). In the light of that revealing day, His purpose is that we shall stand “holy,” that is, devoted to God and therefore pure—“without blemish,” as the offerings had to be, and “unreproveable,” against whom no charge can be brought. These three express a regular sequence; first, the inward principle of consecration and devotion to God, then its visible issue in stainless conduct and character, and then its last consequence, that in the judgment of God and of men we shall stand acquitted of blame, and every accusation drop away from our dazzling purity, like muddy water from the white wing of the sea-bird as it soars. And all this moral perfectness and unblameableness is to be not merely in the judgment of men, but “before Him,” the light of whose “pure eyes and perfect judgment” discovers all stains and evils. They must be spotless indeed who are “without fault before the throne of God.”
Such, then, is the grand conception of the ultimate purpose and issue of Christ’s reconciling work. All the lines of thought in the preceding section lead up to and converge in this peak. The meaning of God in creation and redemption cannot be fully fathomed without taking into view the future perfecting of men. This Christian ideal of the possibilities for men is the noblest vision that can animate our hopes. Absolute moral purity which shall be recognised as perfect by the perfect Judge, and a close approach to God, so as that we shall be “before Him” in a manner unknown here—are hopes as much brighter than those which any other systems of belief print on the dim canvass curtain of the future, as the Christian estimate of man’s condition apart from Christ is sadder and darker than theirs. Christianity has a much more extended scale of colours than they have. It goes further down into blackness for the tints with which it paints man as he is, and further up into flashing glories of splendour for the gleaming hues with which it paints him as he may become. They move within narrow limits of neutral tints. The Gospel alone does not try to minimise man’s evil, because it is triumphantly confident of its power to turn all that evil into good.
Nothing short of this complete purity and blamelessness satisfies God’s heart. We may travel back to the beginning of this section, and connect its first words with these, “It pleased the Father, to present us holy and spotless and blameless.” It delights Him thus to effect the purifying of sinful souls, and He is glad when He sees Himself surrounded by spirits thus echoing His will and reflecting His light. This is what he longs for. This is what He aims at in all His working—to make good and pure men. The moral interest is uppermost in His heart and in His doings. The physical universe is but the scaffolding by which the true house of God may be built. The work of Christ is the means to that end, and when God has got us, by such lavish expenditure, to be white like Himself, and can find nothing in us to condemn, then, and not till then, does He brood over us satisfied and glad at heart, resting in His love, and rejoicing over us with singing.
Nor will anything short of this complete purity exhaust the power of the Reconciling Christ. His work is like an unfinished column, or Giotto’s Campanile, all shining with marbles and alabasters and set about with fair figures, but waiting for centuries for the glittering apex to gather its glories into a heaven-piercing point. His cross and passion reach no adequate result, short of the perfecting of saints, nor was it worth Christ’s while to die for any less end. His cross and passion have evidently power to effect this perfect purity, and cannot be supposed to have done all that is in them to do, until they have done that with every Christian.