Gloria Crucis Part 3

He is this perfect revelation of the Divine self-sacrifice in His Incarnation, when "He became poor for our sakes," when "He emptied Himself." So the Incarnation is, it may well be, but the climax of the Divine sacrifice involved in creation, when G.o.d limited Himself by His manifestation in "material" things; involved, we may say with greater certainty, in the creation of man, who can, in some real sense, thwart and hinder the Divine Will.

He is the revelation of the Divine in us, in the whole course of His earthly life. "Christ pleased not Himself." "He went about doing good."

And, above all, He is that revelation in the supreme act of love and sacrifice upon the Cross. "In this have we come to know what love is, because He laid down His life for us." We have come to know love, in its supreme manifestation of itself, for ever the test, the standard of all true love; and in coming to know love, we have necessarily come to know G.o.d. The Cross is the perfect self-utterance and disclosure of the Mind of G.o.d, the crowning revelation of His Word. And in coming to know G.o.d, we have come to know ourselves. For the true self of man is the self conformed perfectly to the Divine Life within him.

Thus the Cross of Jesus Christ is the crowning revelation of man, as well as of G.o.d. There, side by side with humanity marred and wrecked and spoilt by sin, which is selfishness, we see man as G.o.d made him, as G.o.d meant him to be, clothed with the Divine beauty and glory of self-sacrifice.

In the Cross we see ourselves, our true selves, not as we have made ourselves, but our real and genuine selves, as we exist in the Mind of G.o.d.

In the light of that wonderful revelation, we can recognise that which is Divine and Christ-like in us, that spirit which bids us seek not the things of self, but the things of others, "even as Christ pleased not Himself."

All this may be summed up in one short phrase, which goes near, I believe, to express the innermost reality of the Christian religion.

Christ, the Son of man, is the true self of every man. To follow Him, to be His disciple, in thought, and word, and deed, is to be oneself, to realise one's own personality. In no other way can I attain to be myself.

Thus the Cross is the supreme revelation of the Divine Life in man. And now we shall go on to see how it brings to us, not merely the knowledge of the Ideal, but also, what is far more, the very means whereby the Ideal may be realised in and by each one of us.

We have dealt with the Cross as illumination; we now approach its consideration as redemptive power.

V THE GREAT RECONCILIATION

"G.o.d was in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself." 2 COR. V. 19.

Such considerations as we have had before us, are of far more than theoretical interest. They are of all questions the most practical. Sin is not a curious object which we examine from an aloof and external standpoint. However we regard it, to whatever view of its nature we are led, it is, alas, a fact within and not merely outside our experience.

And so we are at length brought to this most personal and most urgent inquiry, What has been the result _to me_ of my past acts of sin? I have sinned; what have been, what are, what will be the consequences?

The most hopelessly unintelligent answer is, that there are no results, no consequences. It behoves us to remember that we can never sin with impunity. This is true, even in the apparent absence of all punishment.

Every act of sin is followed by two results, though probably a profounder a.n.a.lysis would show them to be in reality one.

(i) Whenever I sin I inflict a definite injury on myself, varying with the sinfulness of the sin; that is, with its nature and the degree of deliberation it involved. I am become a worse man; I have, in some degree, rejected and done to death the Divine in me, my true self. Every sin, in its own proper measure, is both a rejection of the Christ within, and also an act of spiritual suicide.

Again (ii), each sin, once more according to the degree of its guilt, involves separation from G.o.d. And, as union with G.o.d is life, it follows that sin is, and not merely brings death. That is the death of which the outward, physical death is the mere symbol. It is death of that which makes me man--the weakening of my will, the dulling of my conscience, the loss of spiritual vision. Hereafter, it may be, all this will be recognised by me as being death indeed, when I see how much I have missed, by my own fault, of the life and happiness which might have been mine in virtue of that unbroken communion with G.o.d, for which I was made.

These two results may be regarded as the penalties of sinning; more truly, they are aspects of sin itself. We can hardly be reminded too often that the worst punishment of sin is sin itself. The external results of sin, where such occur, are not evil, but good; for the object for which they are sent is the cure of sin. "To me no harder h.e.l.l was shown than sin." If h.e.l.l is this separation from G.o.d, this veritable and only real death, then h.e.l.l is not an external penalty inflicted upon sin, but is involved in the very nature of sin itself. Or, it would be still more accurate to say, the const.i.tution of the universe (including ourselves) being what it is, and the nature of sin being what it is, these results necessarily follow.

Now, the universe is not something which G.o.d has created and then, as it were, flung off from Himself, standing for ever outside it, as it is for ever outside Him. The universe, at each moment of its existence, is the expression, in time and s.p.a.ce, of the Divine Mind. What we call its "laws," whether in the physical or the spiritual sphere, are the thoughts of the Mind of G.o.d: its "forces" are the operations of the Will of G.o.d, acting in accordance with His thoughts: material "things" are His thoughts embodied, that is, Divine thoughts rendered, by an act of the Divine Will, accessible to our senses.

Now we are in a position to understand both what is meant by the Wrath of G.o.d, and the manner in which it acts.

By the expression, "the Wrath of G.o.d," we are to understand the hostility of the Divine Mind to moral evil: the eternal antagonism of the Divine righteousness to its opposite. We are not now dealing with the question of the real or substantive existence of evil. But revelation amply confirms and enforces the conviction of our moral consciousness that, with a hatred beyond all human measures of hatred, G.o.d hates sin. It is hardly necessary to add, that that eternal and immeasurable hatred and hostility of the Divine Mind towards sin is compatible with infinite love towards His children, in whose minds and lives sin is elaborated and manifested. In fact, all attempts to reconcile the Wrath of G.o.d with His love seem to be utterly beside the mark. They only serve to obscure the truth that the Divine Wrath is itself a manifestation of the Divine Love.

For if sin is, as we have already seen, in its very essence, selfishness, and if Love is the very Being of G.o.d--if He is not merely loving, but Love itself--then the Wrath of G.o.d, His hostility to sin, is His Love viewed in one particular aspect, in its outlook on moral evil, in its relation to that which is its very opposite and ant.i.thesis. h.e.l.l and Heaven, separation from G.o.d and union with Him, are alike expressions of the Eternal Love, which, because it is love, burns with unquenchable fire against all forms of selfishness and lovelessness.

This is the true, the ultimate reason why, in a universe which is the expression of the Mind of G.o.d, we cannot sin, and never have sinned, with impunity.

From these two fundamental truths--

(_a_) The universe is the expression of the Mind of G.o.d;

(_b_) G.o.d is love,

There follow, by a natural and inevitable law, the two results which accompany every act of sin.

(_a_) The destruction of the true self, the Christ, the Divine Life within man.

(_b_) Separation from G.o.d, which is death. We separate these results in thought; but it will now be sufficiently obvious that they are, in fact, one.

Is this taking too serious a view of sin? I do not think that this can be maintained in view of our whole preceding argument.

But are we taking too serious a view of little sins, of sins which spring from ignorance, of the sins of children?

We have already seen that knowledge and freedom are both necessary to const.i.tute an act of sin. If ignorance is complete, then complete also is the absence of sin. For sin lies not in any material act, but in consciousness and will. The will alone can be sinful, as the will alone can be good. And it is entirely consistent with our standpoint, to admit the existence of an almost infinite number of degrees of sinfulness.

Now we reach this immensely important result. We having sinned, our supreme need is forgiveness. The Gospel of Jesus Christ is a Gospel for this precise reason, that it meets, as it claimed from the beginning to meet, this uttermost need of men. Its offer is, always and everywhere, the forgiveness, the remission of sins.

But what are we to understand by forgiveness? The forgiveness which is offered to us in the name of Jesus Christ is not, and our own moral sense ought to a.s.sure us that it could not be, the being let off punishment.

"Thou shalt call His name Jesus, for He shall save His people from their sins," not from any external pains or penalties of their sins. To be saved from sin, is to have sin brought to an end, abolished within us. It is the recovery of the true self, the restoration of that union with G.o.d which is, here and now, eternal life. In other words, understanding the Divine Wrath as we have seen reason to understand it, forgiveness must mean to cease to be, or to cease to identify ourselves with, that in us which is the object of the Divine Wrath. In short, forgiveness is, in the great phrase of St. Paul, reconciliation with G.o.d.

How, then, is forgiveness or reconciliation to be obtained? The answer which the apostle gives is this: "G.o.d was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself." Let us try to see what this means.

There can only be one way of ceasing to be the object of the Divine Wrath, and that is by identifying oneself with it; if we may use the catch-phrase, by becoming its subject instead of its object. This means that, so far as is in our power, we must enter into the Divine Mind in regard to sin, and our own sins in particular. Up to the limit of our power, we must make that Mind our own mind, we must hate sin, and our sins, as G.o.d hates them.

There is one word in the New Testament which expresses all this, and that is the word only partially and inadequately translated "repentance." The word thus represented is [Greek text], and [Greek text] is exactly "a change of mind." It really means the coming over to G.o.d's side, the entire revolution of our mental att.i.tude and outlook with regard to sin.

The word stands for self-identification with the Wrath of G.o.d, with the Divine Mind in its outlook upon sin. That change of mind is itself reconciliation, forgiveness, remission of sins. And that which alone makes [Greek text] and, therefore, forgiveness, possible, is the Death of Jesus Christ upon the Cross.

For that Death is the perfect revelation, in the only way in which it could be interpreted to us, that is, in terms of our common human life, of the Wrath of G.o.d, the Divine hostility to, and repudiation of sin. For the Death of Christ was the complete repudiation of sin, by G.o.d Himself, in our manhood. The Incarnate Son laid down His life in the perfect fulfilment of the mission received from the Father. "He became obedient unto death." He died, rather than, by the slightest concession to that which was opposed to the Divine Will, be unfaithful or disobedient to that mission. "He died to sin once for all." His Death was His final, complete repudiation of sin. And thus it was the absolutely perfect revelation of the Divine Mind in regard to sin.

This is the truth which underlies all the utterly misleading language about Christ's Death as a penalty, or about Christ Himself as the Ideal Penitent. Both penalty and penitence imply personal guilt and the personal consciousness of guilt. Both conceptions destroy the significance of the Cross. Only the Sinless One could die to sin, could perfectly repudiate sin, could perfectly disclose the Mind of G.o.d in relation to sin.

The Death of Christ was indeed, as we have seen, the result of His perfect obedience in a world of sin, of disobedience. The historical conditions under which He fulfilled His Mission, necessitated that His repudiation of sin should take the form which it did actually take. We may be sure, too, that He felt, as only the Sinless Son of G.o.d could feel, the injury, the affront, the malignity, the degradation of sin. It is the sense of this which has given rise to the modern idea of Christ as the Penitent for the world's sin. But if we are to understand the word in this sense, then we are entirely changing its meaning and connotation.

And we cannot do this, in regard to words like penitent and penitence, without producing confusion of thought. It is time, surely, that this misleading and mischievous fallacy of the penitence of Christ should be finally abandoned by writers on the Atonement.

But, so far, we have only seen that the Death of Christ to sin, His repudiation of sin to the point of death, is the complete revelation of the Divine Wrath, the Divine Mind in regard to sin. If we could only make all this our own, then we should have actually attained to the changed mind, the [Greek text], which is reconciliation with G.o.d.

Now, it is a most significant fact that, in the New Testament, repentance is ever closely coupled with faith. Faith, in its highest, its most Christian application, is not faith _in_ Christ, in the sense of believing that the revelation made by Christ is true, but in the strange and pregnant phrase of St. Paul and St. John, faith _into_ Christ. And by this is meant entire self-abandonment, the utter giving up of ourselves to Christ. To have faith into Christ is the perfect expression of discipleship. It is the supreme act of self-surrender by which a man takes Christ henceforth to be the Lord and Master of his life. It implies, no doubt, the existence of certain intellectual convictions; but the faith which rests there is, as St. James tells us, the faith of the demons "who also tremble." In the full sense, faith is an act of the whole personal being. And as the will is our personality in action, we may say that faith into Christ is, above all, an affair of the will.

But thus to surrender oneself to Christ, to make Him, and not self, the centre and governing principle of our life is, in other words, to make His Will our will, His Mind our mind. St. Paul is exactly describing the full fruition and final issue of faith when he says of himself, "I live, yet no longer I, but Christ liveth in me."

Faith _is_ self-identification with the Mind of Christ. And that Mind is the Mind of Him Who died to sin, Who by dying repudiated sin, and revealed His implacable hatred of and hostility to it, which is the hatred and hostility of G.o.d, in our manhood, to the moral evil which destroys it.

Thus the man, who, by the supreme act of faith into Christ, has made Christ's Mind his own mind, has thereby gained the changed mind, the [Greek text], in regard to sin, which is the ceasing to be the object of G.o.d's wrath, because it is the being identified with it. He is, henceforth, reconciled to G.o.d. The state of alienation and death is over. In Christ he, too, has died to sin. The false self, in him, has been put to death. With Christ he has been crucified. With Christ he lives henceforth to G.o.d, in that union and fellowship with Him, which is the life eternal, the life which is life indeed. His true self, the Christ in him, is alive for evermore in the power of the Resurrection.