IV Newness of Life What forgiveness would have been without What Christ (if it were possible), no man knows. What forgiveness is in Christ, what it means to "have redemption through his blood, even the forgiveness of sins," this the gospel that rings like music through the whole New Testament. It is inward peace, and secret joy, and newness of life. An experience like this cannot possibly be expressed in any language which is fixed and formal. It must utter itself in vital speech because it is a vital experience. The attempt to transform any of the glowing words which the Apostles use to describe it into a cool, abstract, scientific definition inevitably results in a misrepresentation. The attempt to interpret any of the terms which are associated with the experience of atonement as if they described legal transactions or artificial adjustments destroys their real significance as utterances of conscious life. forgiveness brings. Take, for example, Paul's famous phrase, Justifica"justified by faith." Suppose we attempt to tion by define that by making it mean that the guilt faith. No fiction in Christ's mission. of the sinner has been legally transferred to Christ, and the merits of Christ have been legally transferred to the sinner; so that Christ on the cross is declared guilty and is punished for sin, while the sinner, believing, is pronounced righteous and escapes from punishment. What effect would such an idea of the atonement have upon the inner life? Apart from the frightful confusion which it must introduce into the moral sense to think of God as the author of such an arrangement, what conceivable influence of a real and permanent nature could such a thought have upon the soul? Does it bring inward happiness to a man's heart to be pronounced righteous when he knows that he is still unrighteous? Does it give a man inward peace to be set free from punishment when he is conscious that the evils which deserved it are still within him? Does it reconcile a man's inner life with God to have the righteousness of another person attributed to him by a legal fiction, while his own soul is still out of harmony with God? Merely to put these questions is to see the answer to them. No; if Christ's mission is to the inner life, then His work in the inner life must be real and vital. In this region there is no room for anything that is merely formal and artificial. There is no room for what Phillips Brooks calls "the fantastic conception of the imputation to Christ of a sinfulness which was not His, of God's counting Him guilty of wickedness which He had never done." There is no legal fiction in the real atonement. God is not a maker of fiction, nor can the inner life of man be satisfied with formalities. The human heart revolts at the idea of the punishment of the innocent in the place of the guilty. Those instincts which lie deeper than all reasoning, are insulted and wounded by the thought of the arbitrary transfer of the merits of one person to the credit of another person. The moral sense could never find peace in the contemplation of such a purely forensic transaction. parted. But the testimony of the Apostles is that Righteoustheir moral sense, their conscience, actually ness imdid find peace through the atonement as they believed in it. "Justification by faith," as they use the words, must therefore mean something very different from the definition which has sometimes been given to it. It must mean that righteousness is not merely imputed, but actually imparted through faith. It must mean A new obedience. Faith counted unto right eousness. that sinners are not merely declared just, but actually made just, by Christ's work as the Saviour. It is not justification of law, it is “justification of life.”1 There is not a single passage in the New Testament where the merits of one person are transferred, or reckoned, or counted to another. But there are a hundred passages where the righteousness and obedience of Christ are spoken of as the source of a new righteousness, a new obedience in us. "How much more shall the blood of Christ purge your conscience from dead works to serve the living God." 2 "Elect according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, through sanctification of the Spirit, unto obedience and sprinkling of the blood of Christ."3 "Our Saviour Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us that he might redeem us from all iniquity and purify unto himself a peculiar people, zealous of good works."4 "If we walk in the light as he is in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin.” 5 What, then, does Paul mean when he says that "faith is counted for righteousness"? 6 1 Rom. v. 18. 2 Heb. ix. 14. 8 1 Pet. i. 2. 4 Titus ii. 14. 5 1 John i. 7. 6 Rom. iv. 5. He means not that faith is taken in the place of righteousness, as if it were enough for a man to believe that Christ was holy without making any effort to attain to holiness himself. He means that faith is regarded as an actual beginning of righteousness, a seed of divine promise and power in the soul of man, to be unfolded, by the grace of God, into a holy life.1 He means that there is infinitely more hope and potency of goodness in the man who trusts in God's mercy to save him, and in God's holiness to purify him, and in God's grace to make him righteous, than there is in the man who tries to work out salvation in his own strength according to the law. This is Paul's personal consciousness of the atonement. It is not the peace of death: it is the peace of new life joined to God. It involves a spiritual crucifixion with Christ unto sin. It involves also a real resurrection with Christ unto righteousness. "Therefore we are buried with him by baptism into death, that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we should walk in newness of life." 2 1 Marvin R. Vincent, Word-Studies in the New Testament, Vol. III., p. 52. 2 Rom. vi. 4. |