ceiving of tory offering for sin; (b) that of the redemption of the. pean life and liberty of a captive by the payment of a ransom ais. in his stead ; and (c) the satisfaction of the law by the sages. vicarious fulfilment of its demands. These different conceptions are designed both to limit and to supplement each other in a manner strictly analogous to the com- bination of the different perceptions of the same object by the different bodily senses. The sense of sight, although when educated in connection with the concur- rent and mutually limiting and supplementing percep- tions of the organs of touch and hearing, it is unmatched as to the extent and accuracy of its information, yet would, if left to itself, never have risen beyond an infant’s vague perception of a surface variously shaded, without any sense of relation in space. All our know- ledge of the material world, considered as an. object of sense, arises from the education of our minds in the use of our bodily senses in combination, and the habits of judgment and inference which are thus produced. Men learn to interpret the impressions made upon them through their eyes by means of other impressions made upon them, in connection with the same objects, through the senses of touch and hearing, and vice versd. In like manner our knowledge of the true nature of the work of Christ and its bearing upon us results from all the various forms in which the Scriptures set it forth in
EFFECTS OF CHRIST'S WORK. 181
combination, each at once limiting, modifying, and sup- cHaprux plementing all the others. It should be noticed, more- over, that the Scriptures do not present these several views as different sides of the same house, to be taken in succession, but habitually present them in combination,
as lights and shades blend together in the same picture
in producing the same intelligible expression. Thus,
in the same sentences, it is said, ‘‘We are redeemed with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot” (1 Pet. i. 18, 19). Christ came “to give his life a ransom for many” (Matt. xx.
28). “Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the
law, being made a curse for us” (Gal. i. 13). ‘He hath made him, who knew no sin, to be a sin-offering
for us, that we might be made the righteousness of God
in him” (2 Cor. v. 21).* That is, he redeems us not
in the sense of making a pecuniary payment in can- cellation of our debts, but by his vicarious suffering,
like the bleeding sacrifices of the Mosaic ritual, of the penalty due our sins.
The fact here noticed, that the same inspired sentences represent Christ at the same instant and in the same relations as a ransom and as a sin-offering, and as made to endure the curse of the law for us, is worthy of careful study. The teaching of Scripture is not that Christ is a sacrifice, and a ransom, and a bearer of the curse of the law; but it is that he is that particular species of sacrifice which is a ransom—that his redemp- tion is of that nature which is effected by his bearing the curse of the law in our stead, and that he redeems us by offering himself a bleeding sacrifice to God. Thus, the teaching of the Holy Ghost is as precise as any ecclesiastical theory of Atonement. Christ saves us by being a sacrifice. But not any one of the many
* Macdonnell’s Donnellan Lecture for 1857, pp. 115-125,
CHAPTER XTI.
182 THE NATURE OF THE ATONEMENT.
kinds embraced in the whole genus sacrifice. He is specifically a sin-offering in the Jewish. sense, because this was declared, while the temple was still standing, by a Jewish apostle to Jewish readers. More specifically yet, the offering of himself as a sin-offering is declared to have been equivalent to his making himself a ransom for us, and to his bearing the curse of the law in our stead; and that the design and effect of this ran- som-paying, curse-bearing sacrifice of his is, that he redeems us from the curse of the law. It is not any kind of a sacrifice, but a ransom-paying, curse-bear- ing sacrifice. It is not any kind of redemption, but a sacrificial redemption. A given line of latitude a thousand miles long may be a very indeterminate definition of the geographical position of a city; but the precise point of intersection of a line of latitude and a determinate line of longitude marks a mathe- matical point with metaphysical precision, The Holy Ghost has ideally represented the work of Christ as marked by the precise point of convergence of the bleeding sacrifice, of redemption by the substitution of a personal ransom, and of the vicarious bearing of the curse of the law by a substitute in the stead of the criminal.*