The general correctness of the foregoing statement is impaired by the vagueness of its conception of holiness. The Scriptures do not regard holiness as including love, or make all the acts of holiness to be acts of love. Self-affirmation does not include self-impartation, [pg 296]and sin necessitates an exercise of holiness which is not also an exercise of love. But for the Cross, and God's suffering for sin of which the Cross is the expression, there would be conflict between holiness and love. The wisdom of God is most shown, not in reconciling man and God, but in reconciling the holy God with the loving God.
1. Holiness the fundamental attribute in God.
That holiness is the fundamental attribute in God, is evident:
(a) From Scripture,—in which God's holiness is not only most constantly and powerfully impressed upon the attention of man, but is declared to be the chief subject of rejoicing and adoration in heaven.
It is God's attribute of holiness that first and most prominently presents itself to the mind of the sinner, and conscience only follows the method of Scripture: 1 Pet. 1:16—“Ye shall be holy; for I am holy”; Heb. 12:14—“the sanctification without which no man shall see the lord”; cf. Luke 5:8—“Depart from me; for I am a sinful man, O Lord.” Yet this constant insistence upon holiness cannot be due simply to man's present state of sin, for in heaven, where there is no sin, there is the same reiteration: Is. 6:3—“Holy, holy, holy, is Jehovah of hosts”; Rev. 4:8—“Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God, the Almighty.” Of no other attribute is it said that God's throne rests upon it: Ps. 97:2—“Righteousness and justice are the foundation of his throne”; 99:4, 5, 9—“The king's strength also loveth justice.... Exalt ye Jehovah our God.... holy is he.” We would substitute the word holiness for the word love in the statement of Newman Smyth, Christian Ethics, 45—“We assume that love is lord in the divine will, not that the will of God is sovereign over his love. God's omnipotence, as Dorner would say, exists for his love.”
(b) From our own moral constitution,—in which conscience asserts its supremacy over every other impulse and affection of our nature. As we may be kind, but must be righteous, so God, in whose image we are made, may be merciful, but must be holy.
See Bishop Butler's Sermons upon Human Nature, Bohn's ed., 385-414, showing “the supremacy of conscience in the moral constitution of man.” We must be just, before we are generous. So with God, justice must be done always; mercy is optional with him. He was not under obligation to provide a redemption for sinners: 2 Pet. 2:4—“God spared not angels when they sinned, but cast them down to hell.” Salvation is a matter of grace, not of debt. Shedd, Discourses and Essays, 277-298—“The quality of justice is necessary exaction; but ‘the quality of mercy is not (con)strained’ ” [cf. Denham: “His mirth is forced and strained”]. God can apply the salvation, after he has wrought it out, to whomsoever he will: Rom. 9:18—“he hath mercy on whom he will.” Young, Night-Thoughts, 4:233—“A God all mercy is a God unjust.” Emerson: “Your goodness must have some edge to it; else it is none.” Martineau, Study, 2:100—“No one can be just without subordinating Pity to the sense of Right.”
We may learn of God's holiness a priori. Even the heathen could say “Fiat justitia, ruat cœlum,” or “pereat mundus.” But, for our knowledge of God's mercy, we are dependent upon special revelation. Mercy, like omnipotence, may exist in God without being exercised. Mercy is not grace but debt, if God owes the exercise of it either to the sinner or to himself; versus G. B. Stevens, in New Eng., 1888:421-443. “But justice is an attribute which not only exists of necessity, but must be exercised of necessity; because not to exercise it would be injustice”; see Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:218, 219, 389, 390; 2:402, and Sermons to Nat. Man, 366. If it be said that, by parity of reasoning, for God not to exercise mercy is to show himself unmerciful,—we reply that this is not true so long as higher interests require that exercise to be withheld. I am not unmerciful when I refuse to give the poor the money needed to pay an honest debt; nor is the Governor unmerciful when he refuses to pardon the condemned and unrepentant criminal. Mercy has its conditions, as we proceed to show, and it does not cease to bewhen these conditions do not permit it to be exercised. Not so with justice: justice must always be exercised; when it ceases to be exercised, it also ceases to be.
The story of the prodigal shows a love that ever reaches out after the son in the far country, but which is ever conditioned by the father's holiness and restrained from acting until the son has voluntarily forsaken his riotous living. A just father may banish a corrupt son from the household, yet may love him so tenderly that his banishment [pg 297]causes exquisite pain. E. G. Robinson: “God, Christ and the Holy Spirit have a conscience, that is, they distinguish between right and wrong.” E. H. Johnson, Syst. Theology, 85, 86—“Holiness is primary as respects benevolence; for (a) Holiness is itself moral excellence, while the moral excellence of benevolence can be explained. (b) Holiness is an attribute of being, while benevolence is an attribute of action; but action presupposes and is controlled by being. (c) Benevolence must take counsel of holiness, since for a being to desire aught contrary to holiness would be to wish him harm, while that which holiness leads God to seek, benevolence finds best for the creature. (d) The Mosaic dispensation elaborately symbolized, and the Christian dispensation makes provision to meet, the requirements of holiness as supreme; James 3:17—‘First pure, then [by consequence] peaceable.’ ”