The two fundamental aspects of sin, then, are (1) its inward moral effect upon the soul, its enslaving power over the sinner, and (2) its tendency to open a chasm between God and man, to make God appear full of wrath. How does Christ meet this human situation? What is the heart of the Gospel? First of all, Christ reverses the entire pagan attitude. He reveals God as a Father whose very inherent nature is love and tenderness and forgiveness. In place of a sovereign demanding justice, He shows an infinite Lover. We must either give up the parable of the Prodigal Son, or accept this view of God. But this parable fits the entire Gospel. John was only uttering what Jesus Christ taught by every act of His life and what He exhibited supremely on His cross, when He said “God is Love.” To surrender this truth, and to start with the assumption of a God who must be appeased, or reconciled or changed in attitude is to surrender the heart of the Gospel, and to weave the shining threads of our message of salvation in with the black threads of a pagan warp. He who came to show us the Father, has unmistakably showed Him full of love, not only for the saint, for the actual son; but also for the sinner, the potential son. Either God is Love, or we must conclude that Christ has not revealed Him as He is.
But the great difficulty is that so many fail to see what Divine Love and human sin involve when they come together. It has superficially been assumed that if God is a loving Father He will lightly overlook sin and cannot be hard upon the sinner. They catch at a soft view of sin and patch up a rose water theory of its cure. This soft view has appealed to those who like an easy religion, and it has often driven the evangelical Christian to an opposite extreme, which finds no support in the Gospel. To arrive at a deeper view we must go back to Christ and go down into the deeps of love as we know it in actual human life.
True love is never weak and thin, and unconcerned about the character of the beloved. The father does not “lay aside” his love when he punishes his erring boy, and keeps him impressed with the reality of moral distinctions. It is the father’s intense love which wields the rod. All true corrections and chastisements flow out of love. Even Dante knew this, when he wrote on the door of Hell, “Love was my maker.” It is an ignorant and mushy love that cannot rise above kisses and sugar plums, and it is extremely superficial to set up a schism between love and justice.
But that is not all. Love always involves vicarious suffering. Love is an organic principle. It carries with it the necessity of sharing life with other persons, and in a world of imperfect persons, it means not only sharing gains and triumphs, it means, too, sharing losses and defeats. No man can sin in a sin-tight compartment. Suffer for his own sin the sinner assuredly will. But he does not stop there. Many innocent persons will suffer for it, too. This is one of the tragic aspects of life which has baffled many a lone sufferer like Job. Those who are nearest and closest to the sufferer will suffer most, but his sin has endless possibilities of causing suffering upon persons far remote in time and space. That ancient figure of the ripples from the little pebble, which sends rings to the farthest shores of the sea, is not overdrawn. Not one of us can estimate the havoc of his sin, or forecast the trail of suffering which it will leave behind it. So long as life remains organic there will be vicarious suffering.
But that is only one side of life. Holiness also involves a like suffering. There are no holiness-tight compartments. No man can be holy unto himself. Just as far as he has any rag of holiness he must share it—he must feel himself a debtor to others who lack—he must take up the task of making others holy. That costs something.
You cannot command or compel people into holiness, you cannot increase their spiritual stature one cubit by any kind of force or compulsion. You can do it only by sharing your life with them, by making them feel your goodness, by your love and sacrifice for them. When a martyr dies for some truth, men suddenly discover for the first time how much it is worth and they eagerly pursue it over all obstacles. In spiritual things we always make our appeal to the cost of the truth or the principle. Think of the blood which has been shed for freedom of conscience! Remember what a price has been paid in blood for the principle of democracy! Thus we speak of all the privileges of life. They are ours because somebody has felt that they were worth the cost, because somebody has died that we might freely have them. It is the tragedy of human life that we must suffer through the sin of others, and we must suffer also if we would carry goodness or holiness into other lives. Every bit of goodness which ever prevails anywhere in this world has cost somebody something.
This principle of vicarious suffering is no late arrival; it appears at every scale of life, heightening as we go up—becoming less blind and more voluntary. It was a central truth of Christ’s revelation that this principle does not stop with man; it goes on up to the top of the spiritual scale. It finds its complete and final expression in God Himself. God’s life and our lives are bound together, as a vine with branches, as a body with members. So corporate are we that no one can give a cup of cold water to the least person in the world without giving it to Him! But He is perfect and we are imperfect, He is holy and we sin. If the wayward boy, who wastes his life, pains the heart of his mother whose life is wrapped up in him, can we fling our lives away and not make our Heavenly Father suffer? The cross is the answer. He has undertaken to make Sons of God out of such creatures as we are, to take us out of the pit and the miry clay, to put spiritual songs in our mouths and write His own name on our foreheads, will that cost Him nothing? Again, the cross is the answer.
Here we discover—it is the main miracle of the Gospel—that the original movement to bridge the chasm comes from the Divine side. What man hoped to do, but could not, with his bleating lamb and timid dove, God Himself has done. He has reached across the chasm, taking on Himself the sacrifice and cost, to show the sinner that the only obstruction to peace and reconciliation is in the sinner himself. “This is love, not that we loved Him, but that He loved us,” and this is sacrifice, not that we give our bulls and goats to please Him, but that He gives Himself to draw us.
Browning puts it all in a line:
“Thou needs must love me who have died for thee.”