God's Plan with Men

by T. T. Martin

"There is no such thing as partly saved and partly lost; partly justified and partly guilty; partly alive and partly dead; partly born of God and partly not. There are but two states, and we must be in either the one or the other."—Wm. Reid, in "The Blood of Jesus."

To many earnest men it seems dangerous to teach men that when they are redeemed from the curse of the law (Gal. 3:13), and adopted as God's children (Gal. 4:3-7), they then really have as an actual possession eternal life, and that they shall never perish, "hath everlasting life, and shall not come unto condemnation,"—John 5:24; "I give unto them eternal life, and they shall never perish,"—John 10:28; they think that such a belief will be a temptation to sin; that it is liable to lead to presumptuous, wilful sinning. They think it much safer for men to believe that they have not really the eternal life itself as an actual present possession, but only the promise of it; and that by their sinning hereafter they may forfeit that promise and be lost. They think that this fear of being lost will act as a check, a safeguard, a restraining power. To the extent that it does, it produces service from the motive of fear of Hell, fear of losing Heaven, and not from the motive of love to Christ for having redeemed them from all iniquity (Titus 2:14). But God's word on this point is clear: "The love of Christ [not the fear of Hell, nor the fear of losing Heaven] constraineth us; because we thus judge, that if one died for all, then all died; and he died for all that they who live should not henceforth live unto themselves, but unto him who died for them, and rose again."—2 Cor. 5:14, 15.

The teaching that the redeemed, saved man has now eternal life and shall never perish, will lead to wilful, presumptuous sinning on the part of hypocrites, and may lead to indifference and sin on the part of those who honestly think they are redeemed, saved, but who really are not; for such are not born again (1 Peter 1:23), and have not the motive power of love, because really redeemed, prompting their action.

Those who think it is dangerous to teach a redeemed (1 Peter 1:18, 19), saved (Eph. 2:8, R. V.) man, a child of God (Gal. 4:4-7), that he has here and now, as an actual possession, eternal life, and shall never perish (John 10:28), shall not come into condemnation (John 5:24), lose sight of five facts in God's plan with men:—

First, the redeemed man is born again, born of God, "Whosoever believeth that Jesus is the Christ is born of God."—1 John 5:1. "Therefore if any one is in Christ he is a new creature."—2 Cor. 5:17. This is not a mere theory. All down the centuries since the Saviour came, there have been multitudes of notable cases where hardened men and women, deep down in sin, have actually become new creatures by being redeemed and being born again. Many are now living, whose names could be given, who are widely known, who were once notorious in sin, and they are now willingly and gladly wearing out their lives in God's service, and are living godly lives: and this change came in their lives, not by a gradual process, but in a moment. God's word says it is a new birth. There is no other explanation. But every one who is redeemed is thus born of God (1 John 5:1), and this new nature will lead one to hate sin, and prompt to a godly life.

Second, the redeemed man is under the new motive of love to Christ ("if ye love me, keep my commandments,"—John 14:15) to prompt him to a faithful Christian life. On this point James Denny in "The Death of Christ" says, "The love which is the motive of it acts immediately upon the sinful; gratitude exerts an irresistible constraint; His responsibility means our emancipation; His death, our life; His bleeding wound, our healing. Whoever says, 'He bore our sins,' says substitution; and to say substitution is to say something which involves an immeasurable obligation to Christ, and has therefore in it an incalculable motive power." Let the reader note well, that the purpose of God in saving men through Christ dying of their sins (1 Cor. 15:3) is to purify the motive power and make it effective. "He died for all, that they who live should not henceforth live unto themselves, but unto him."—2 Cor. 5:15.

When men live in order that they may retain the promise of eternal life, that they may attain eternal life hereafter, from fear lest they should forfeit the promise and not attain eternal life hereafter, they "live unto themselves." When men live because they already have as an actual possession, eternal life, and realize that it is eternal, they live from love, and not unto themselves but "unto Him."

And God's plan is effective. "The love of Christ constraineth us" (2 Cor. 5:14), it does constrain. Hence, Jesus says, "if a man love me, he will keep my words."—John 14:23. Again, "If God were your Father ye would love me."—John 8:42. So important is this fact of the new motive power and its effectiveness, that the reader's attention will now be directed to the words of James Denny in "The Death of Christ" on this subject. That the reader may the better appreciate these words, his attention is first called to the estimates of Denny's great work by two of the leading religious editors of the world. The Pittsburg Christian Advocate: "To thoughtful students 'The Death of Christ' came as one of the most stirring books of the decade if not of the generation." The New York Examiner: "The most important contribution to the all-important doctrine of the atonement since the appearance of Dr. Dale's epoch-making book.... Exegetically considered, it is the most important book published within the memory of the younger generation of preachers." On the death of Christ for our sins (1 Cor. 15:3) being the motive power in the Christian life, and its being effective, Denny says: "The problem before us is to discover what it is in the death of Christ which gives it its power to generate such experience, to exercise on human hearts the constraining influence of which the apostle speaks; and this is precisely what we discover, in the inferential clause; 'so then all died.' This clause puts as plainly as it can be put the idea that His death was equivalent to the death of all; in other words, it was the death of all men which was died by Him."... "Their relation to God is not determined now in the very least by sin or law: it is determined by Christ, the propitiation, and by faith. The position of the believer is not that of one trembling at the judgment seat, or of one for whom everything remains somehow in a condition of suspense; it is that of one who has the assurance of a Divine love which has gone deeper than all his sins, and has taken on itself the responsibility of them, and the responsibility of delivering him from them."... "Take away the certainty of it and the New Testament temper expires. Joy in this certainty is not presumption; on the contrary, it is joy in the Lord, and such joy is the Christian's strength. It is the impulse and the hope of sanctification; and to deprecate it, and the assurance from which it springs, is no true evangelical humility, but a failure to believe in the infinite goodness of God who in Christ removes our sins from us as far as the east is from the west, and plants our life in His eternal reconciling love."... "An absolute justification is needed to give the sinner a start. He must have the certainty of 'no condemnation' of being, without reserve or drawback, right with God through God's gracious act in Christ, before he can begin to live the new life."... "It is not by denying the gospel outright, from the very beginning, that we are to guard against the possible abuse of it."... "To try to take some preliminary security from the sinner's future morality before you make the gospel available for him, is not only to strike at the root of assurance, it is to pay a very poor tribute to the power of the gospel. The truth is, morality is best guaranteed by Christ, and not by any precautions we can take before Christ gets a chance, or by any virtue that is in faith except as it unites the soul to Him."... "If it is our death that Christ died on the cross, there is in the cross the constraint of an infinite love; but if it is not our death at all—if it is not our burden and doom that He has taken on Himself there, then what is it to us?"... "He who has done so tremendous a thing as to take our death to Himself has established a claim upon our life. We are not in the sphere of mystical union, of dying with Christ and living with Him; but in that of love transcendently shown, and of gratitude profoundly felt."... "But this can only come on the foundation of the other; it is the discharge from the responsibilities of sin involved in Christ's death and appropriated in faith, which is the motive power in the daily ethical dying to sin."... "The new life springs out of the sense of debt to Christ."... "It is the knowledge that we have been bought with a price which makes us cease to be our own, and live for Him who so dearly bought us."... "But when its certainty, completeness, and freeness are so qualified or disguised that assurance becomes suspect and joy is quenched, the Christian religion has ceased to be."... "This is why St. Paul is not afraid to trust the new life to its own resources, and why he objects equally to supplanting it by legal regulations afterwards, or by what are supposed to be ethical securities beforehand. It does not need them, and is bound to repel them as dishonoring to Christ. To demand moral guarantees from a sinner before you give him the benefit of the atonement, or to impose legal restrictions on him after he has yielded to its appeal, and received it through faith, is to make the atonement itself of no effect."... "In any case, I do not hesitate to say that the sense of debt to Christ is the most profound and pervasive of all emotions in the New Testament, and that only a gospel which evokes this, as the gospel of atonement does, is true to primitive and normal Christianity."

Let the reader consider two statements just here from another great work, concerning the effectiveness of love as the motive power in the redeemed man's life (in the writer's judgment no greater work, excepting the gospel of John [John 20:30, 31], has ever been written for honest sceptics, than Walker's "Philosophy of the Plan of Salvation"). "Just in proportion as the soul feels its lost, guilty and dangerous condition, in the same proportion will it exercise love to the being who grants spiritual favor and salvation."... "It may be affirmed, without hesitancy, that it would be impossible for the human soul to exercise full faith in the testimony that it was a guilty and needy creature, condemned by the holy law of a holy God, and that from this condition of spiritual guilt and danger Jesus Christ suffered and died to accomplish its ransom,—we say, a human being could not exercise full faith in these truths and not love the Saviour."

Third, those who fear that if redeemed men, God's children, are taught that they have, here and now, eternal life as an actual present possession, and that it is eternal, it will be liable to lead them into presumptuous, wilful sin, lose sight of a third fact. The redeemed man, the real child of God, can be tempted, can be led into sin, and some of them do become backsliders, but God's word teaches that they will be chastised in this life. Let the reader turn back and read Chapter V. Two Scriptures there quoted make plain the chastening of God's disobedient children: "Also I will make him my firstborn, higher than the kings of the earth. My mercy will I keep for him forevermore, and my covenant shall stand fast with him. His seed also will I make to endure forever, and his throne as the days of heaven. If his children forsake my law, and walk not in my judgments, if they break my statutes and keep not my commandments, then will I visit their transgression with the rod and their iniquity with stripes. Nevertheless, my loving-kindness will I not utterly take from him, nor suffer my faithfulness to fail. My covenant will I not break, nor alter the thing that is gone out of my lips."—Ps. 89:27-34. Equally explicit is the New Testament: "Ye have forgotten the exhortation which speaketh unto you as unto sons. My son, despise not thou the chastening of the Lord, nor faint when thou art rebuked of him; for whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom he receiveth. If ye endure chastening, God dealeth with you as with sons; for what son is he whom the father chasteneth not? But if ye be without chastening, whereof all are partakers, then are ye bastards and not sons. Furthermore, we have had fathers of our flesh, who corrected us, and we gave them reverence; shall we not much rather be in subjection to the Father of spirits and live? For they verily for a few days chastened us as seemed right to them; but he for our profit, that we might be partakers of his holiness. Now no chastening for the present seemeth to be joyous, but grievous; nevertheless afterwards it yieldeth the peaceable fruit of righteousness unto them that are exercised thereby."—Heb. 12:5-11. So that, the disobedient child of God will suffer for his sins, not in Hell, but in this life; and not as a just penalty for violated law, for he is not under the law ("Ye are not under the law,"—Rom. 6:14), but as chastening, for correction. It is not a theory merely, for God's word declares that God's plan works—"It yieldeth the peaceable fruit of righteousness."