Secondly, it must be borne in mind that our forgiveness through the sacrifice is only the first step towards fellowship with God. It is only the removal of the preliminary obstacle which guilt had raised against actual admittance into the life of God. The language of the New Testament refuses to allow us to separate the forgiveness of our sins from our admission into the 'body of Christ' by baptism[[13]], or, in other words, our incorporation into the life of the redeemed people, the new Israel. For the faith which accepts forgiveness is the same identical quality which corresponds with all the later movement of the new life. God's free gift of grace is not forgiveness only, but forgiveness and new life; it is 'forgiveness of sins and an inheritance among them that are sanctified by faith that is in Christ[[14]].' St. Paul does not contemplate, or contemplates only to repudiate, a faith which accepts forgiveness and stops there—indifferent to actual holiness or baptismal incorporation. For it would be no real faith at all. The preliminary justification or acquittal is simply and solely to serve as a basis for the life of consecration and glory. The stages of justification and sanctification are separable in idea but not in fact. The refusal to proceed from the threshold of the acquittal into the palace of the new life would expel even from the threshold; even as the failure of the unthankful servant to behave as one should behave who has been excused the debt he could not pay, cancelled all his acquittal and left him with the weight of the old debt rolled back upon him to his destruction.
Lastly, and in one word, it must never be left out of sight that even the initial movement of faith, the taking Christ at His word and believing His promises, involves the element of moral allegiance. His gracious person and character attract even while the boon is being accepted, and a new motive enters into life. Justifying faith at its very root is a faith which yields allegiance to its object.
ii.
To a Jew, and to almost all races when St. Paul wrote, the idea of an expiatory sacrifice for sin seemed natural and obvious. But for the special Christian doctrine of expiation the basis is to be found in the memorable chapter liii of the 'later Isaiah.' That great prophet of the captivity is assuring Israel of their restoration to their own land. This restoration is to follow on the due punishment of her sins—'She hath received of the Lord's hands double for all her sins.' And the restored people is to be, before all else, a righteous people—'all righteous'—a people of God's favour, because they are living according to God. But there is so much sin still remaining in them as to make it necessary that the new life of the recovered people should be based on a great act of propitiation. The Righteous Servant of Jehovah, who is, at starting, the idealized people itself, but who comes to be represented as an individual acting for the people while repudiated by them, offers his life a willing sacrifice for their sins. The chastisement of their iniquities falls on him, and he accepts the burden, and is obedient unto death. Dying he makes his soul a guilt offering: and, living through death exalted and powerful, he becomes an intercessor accepted with God, the head of a new seed whom he 'justifies' before God by the intimate knowledge of God's mind and character which in his voluntary humiliation he has won. This wonderful prophetic picture represents a vast advance in moral teaching on what had gone before. It is not only that the self-sacrifice of a perfect human will is substituted for the animal victims to which the enlightened conscience of God's people already refused to allow any real efficacy; but also that the idea of propitiation is put in a context where it is made plain that it can only be the prelude to a state of actual righteousness in those who are to be justified by it. It occurs as part of the answer to the question, not—How is Israel to escape punishment? but, How is Israel to become the really righteous nation, living in the likeness of God?
In the later books of the Maccabees we have this idea of the expiatory sacrifice and intercession of the ideal Israelite still retained, but degraded, probably under Greek influences. 'And I, as my brethren,' says the Maccabean martyr, 'give up both body and soul for the laws of our fathers, calling upon God that he may speedily become gracious to the nation ... and that in me and my brethren may be stayed the wrath of the Almighty, which hath been justly brought upon our whole race[[15]].' 'Be propitious to my race,' prays Eleazar, in another Alexandrian version of the story, 'being satisfied with our punishment on their behalf. Make my blood a propitiation for them, and receive my life as a substitute for theirs[[16]].' These passages are on a lower moral level than Isaiah's, because in them the prominent idea of propitiation is that it is a means of procuring from God exemption from further punishment, not a step to the restoration to holiness. The idea both of what God desires and of what man desires is lower. And indeed all conceptions of propitiation may be distinguished into true or false, according as righteousness or exemption from punishment is the end which is specially in view.
Thus when we pass on into the New Testament we find in Caiaphas' saying, 'It is expedient for you that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation perish not[[17]],' the typical expression of the quite immoral notion[[18]] of the forcible sacrifice of an innocent person in order to exempt a guilty race from punishment. In our Lord's teaching, on the other hand, we find the doctrine of atonement raised to its highest moral power. As the Forerunner had revived the teaching of the later Isaiah by pointing to Him as 'the Lamb of God who taketh away (i.e. taketh up and expiateth) the sin of the world[[19]],' so Christ Himself spoke unmistakeably of the new covenant which He came to inaugurate, as to be based upon the sacrificial offering of His body and the outpouring of His blood[[20]]: spoke also of 'the remission of sins' as the benefit to be expected from His expiation. But no teacher in the world ever made it so plain that God can be satisfied with nothing that any other can do for us—with nothing but actual likeness to Him in ourselves. No teacher ever made it so plain that what we are to desire is not to be let off punishment, but to be actually freed from sin. He left no room for doubt that only by following His steps, even to the cross and surrender of our lives, can we share His fellowship. The very life which is offered in sacrifice to lay the foundation of the new covenant is a life or spirit which we are to share. We are to eat and drink His sacrificed flesh and blood—the blood which is the life—and so to be one with Him and He with us. He sacrificed Himself, in other words, in order to make possible, through His life and Spirit, a new covenanted society, in which men should have perfect fellowship with God and with one another. He did not reject the idea of a propitiation won for man by His vicarious sacrifice—the truth is far from that—but He keeps it in inseparable connexion with the life which is to be based upon it; and in the eucharist He brought back the idea of sacrifice to what had been its starting-point in all primitive usages. 'The one point,' says Professor Robertson-Smith, 'that comes out clear and strong (from the examination of ancient sacrificial customs), is that the fundamental idea of ancient sacrifice is sacramental communion, and that all atoning rites are ultimately to be regarded as owing their efficacy to a communication of divine life to the worshipper, and to the establishment or confirmation of a living bond between them and their God[[21]].'
Still Christ's sacrifice of propitiation, to which we contribute nothing, in which we do not share, remains a necessary prelude to the establishment of the new life. It is in virtue of this that we are justified and accepted and allowed to start afresh. This fact the New Testament in general takes for granted, and offers no explanation of it; as indeed the human heart has in general accepted the benefit in all thankfulness and asked no questions. But the speculative modern intellect has found a difficulty in the matter—in the matter at least as commonly represented—and we have noticed that a suggestion of explanation is made by St. Paul in this passage. God had long gone on 'passing over' sin all over the world in loving forbearance, bearing with all men's sinfulness, till they had thoroughly learnt the lesson of their own need of God and inability to save themselves. But this very forbearance rendered God's character liable to complete misunderstanding. He might have been supposed to be kind indeed, but indifferent to sin. 'These things hast thou done and I kept silence: thou thoughtest that I was altogether such an one as thyself[[22]].' Thus the severity manifested in the claim of the 'righteous Father' upon the Son of Man, His claim of an obedience unto the shedding of His blood, and the ready response to His claim on the part of the Son of Man gladly rendering up His life in homage to the Father—these taken together, the claim of the Father and the sacrifice of the Son, vindicated within the area of the Christian faith the true character of God, and forced the believer in Jesus to hold the severity and the love in their inseparable unity as making up the divine righteousness.
Does not this thought open at least an intelligible vista into the mystery of the Atonement? Christ is the Son of Man. He is to inaugurate the true manhood. But first He must deal with the manhood that has gone astray, and make an act of reparation to the Father for all the outrage that our sins have done Him. Thus in contrast to all our self-pleasing, self-indulgence, self-excusing, in contrast to all our clamorous insolence towards God and indifference to His laws, we behold the Son of Man recognizing the Father's strict requirements, and lifting before His eyes, in the name of the manhood which He represents, the great reparation of an unshrinking obedience and loyalty unto death. The Father spared not His only Son the natural consequences of obedience in a world of sin. The Son spared not Himself, but shed His blood—the 'blood which is the life'—at the Father's will. This is the one full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world. It is the sacrifice offered in the power of nothing less than 'eternal spirit.' Henceforth, then, no man can come to God in faith in Jesus, in the faith which even at its root is moral allegiance, and think lightly either of God's holiness or of his own or others' sin. God forgives him his sin, but it cost Him much to forgive it. The Cross is the measure of the antipathy between God and sin.
And it is well to notice how the great thought of this passage is made intelligible to the ordinary English reader again, only by the Revised Version. In the old Bible the word signifying 'passing over' of sins is translated 'remission'—the very thing with which it is in fact contrasted. It is not an exaggeration to say that, in this and very many places of the epistles, the Revised Version for the first time renders the thought of the apostles again intelligible to the English reader. And if the Revised Version is not popular, as the booksellers tell us it is not, this is, I fear, only a sign that the majority of English Christians do not really care to understand the meaning of the message with which, as a matter of words, they are so familiar.