This is the key to Paul’s great message which won the Roman Empire. It was not a new philosophy. It was the irresistible appeal to love, exhibited in Christ crucified. “He loved me and gave Himself for me;” “We are more than conquerors through Him that loved us.” “I am persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Sacrificing love, the Divine Heart suffering over sin, God Himself taking up the infinite burden and cost of raising men like us into sons of God like Himself; this is the revelation in the face of Jesus Christ. The heart that can stand that untouched can stand anything.
The power unto salvation, the dynamic of the Gospel is in the cross, which exhibits in temporal setting the eternal fact, that God suffers over sin, that He takes upon Himself the cost of winning sons to glory and that His love reaches out to the most sin-scarred wanderer, who clutches the swine husks in his lean hands.
But the appeal of love and sacrifice is not the whole of the truth which this word atonement covers. We have been seeing, in some feeble way, how God in Christ enters into human life, identifies Himself with us, and reveals the energy of Grace. But we cannot stop with “what has been done for us without us.” Sin, as has been already said, is an affair of personal choice—it is a condition of inward life. It is not an abstract entity, in a metaphysical realm. It is the attitude of heart and will in a living, throbbing person who cannot get free from the lower nature in himself. So too with Salvation. It cannot be a transaction in some realm foreign to the individual himself. It is not a plan, or scheme. It is an actual deliverance, a new creation. It is nothing short of a redeemed inward nature. Such a change cannot be wrought without the man himself. It cannot come by a tergo compulsion. It must be by a positive winning of the will. A dynamic faith in the man must cooperate with that energy from God. Something comes down from above, but something must also go up from below. Paul, who has given the most vital interpretation of both sides of the truth of redemption—the objective and the subjective—that has ever been expressed, uses the word “faith” to name the human part of the process.
Faith, in Paul’s sense of it, means an identification of ourselves with Christ, by which we re-live His life. As He identified Himself with sinning humanity, so, by the attraction of his love, we identify ourselves with His victorious Life. We go down into death with Him—a death to sin and the old self—and we rise with Him into newness of life, to live henceforth unto Him who loved us.
There is no easy road out of a nature of sin into a holy nature. It is vain to try and patch up a scheme which will relieve us of our share of the tragedy of sin—or to put it another way, the travail for the birth of the sons of God. The Redeemer suffers, but He does not suffer in our stead—He suffers in our behalf, [[ὑπέρ] not [άντι]]. He makes His appeal of love to us to share His life as He shares ours. It is Paul’s goal—a flying goal, surely—“to know Him and the power of His resurrection, and the fellowship of His sufferings, being made conformable unto His death.” The boldest word which comes from his pen was: “I rejoice in my sufferings on your behalf; and fill up that which is lacking of the afflictions of Christ in my flesh, for His body’s sake, which is the Church.” (Col. 1, 24.) It is not repeating His words that saves us, it is reliving His life, co-dying, and co-rising with Him, and entering with a radiant joy, caught from His face, into the common task of redeeming a world of sin to a kingdom of love and holiness.
In that great book of spiritual symbolism—the Book of Revelation—those who overcome are builded, as pillars, into the Temple of God, and He writes His new name upon them. The new name is Redeemer. Those who have come up through great tribulation and have washed their robes in the blood of the Lamb are builded in as a permanent part of the Temple, where God reveals Himself, and they share with Him in the great redeeming work of the ages.
Whatever it has meant in the past, in the ages when the races were sloughing off their paganism, in the future the atonement must be vital and dynamic. It must be put in language which grips the heart, convinces the mind, and carries the will. It will name for us the Divine-human travail for a redeemed humanity. It will cease to signify a way by which God was appeased and it will come to express, as it did in the apostolic days, the identification of God with us in the person of Christ, and the identification, by the power of His love, of ourselves with Him. We shall pass from the terms which were inherited from magic and ancient sacerdotal rites and we shall use instead the language of our riper experience. We shall abandon illustrations drawn from law courts and judicial decisions and we shall rise to conceptions which fit the actual facts of inward, personal experience where higher and lower natures contend for the mastery. The drama will not be in some foreign realm, apart from human consciousness, it will rise in our thought into the supreme drama of history—the tragedy of the spiritual universe—the battle of holiness with sin—the blood and tears which tell the cost of sin and create in response a passion for the Divine Lover who is our Father. It will stop at no fictitious righteousness which is counted unto us, as though it were ours. We shall demand an actual redemption of the entire self which has become righteous, because it lives, in Christ’s power, the life which He lived.
We shall learn to tell the story in such a way that the cross will not seem to be brought in, as an afterthought, to repair the damage wrought by an unforeseen catastrophe. It will stand as the consummation of an elemental spiritual movement and it will be organic with the entire process of the making of men. With charm and power, Ruskin has told how the black dirt that soils the city pavement is composed of four elements which make, when they follow the law of their nature, the sapphire, the opal, the diamond and the dew drop. The glory and splendor do not appear in the black dirt, but the possibilities are there. When the law of the nature of these elements has full sweep the glory comes out. Man was not meant for a sinner, and to live a dark, chaotic life. There are far other possibilities in him. He is a potential child of God. The full nature has broken forth in one life and men beheld its glory. “To as many as receive Him, to them gives He power to become the sons of God.”