Tj Mercy never bears so grand a look, or moves so majestically, as when she takes counsel of justice. No man is ever so magnifi- cently just as he that can be even tenderly merciful, no man so truly merciful as one that can hold steadily exact the balance of truth and justice. Our highest impressions of God's justice are obtained when we conceive it as the partly discretionary dis- pensation of a mind in the tenderness and loving patience of the cross ; our highest impressions of His mercy when we conceive it as the wonderful sacrifice to which even His justice allows Him to bend. Little honour then does any one pay to God's judicial majesty in a scheme of satisfaction that takes away His right of discretion and requires Him to stand for His exact equivalent of pain, according to the count of arithmetic.2
2. When we come to think of God, what is it we must find at the centre of His nature so far as we can conceive of Him in His greatness? Is it not His goodness — is it not that heart of
1 J. Thain Davidson, The City Youth, 285.
2 H. Bushnell, The Vicarious Sacrifice, 236.
200 GOD AND THE SINNER
benevolent intentions and desires that leads Him as the great centre to spread His mercies over all His works and to make manifest the loving-kindness of His heart whenever His ways are understood ? Beyond all question, good is God, and God is good. God is love, and love properly understood is infinite goodness. In the deep nature where He feels more than all created goodness can feel, and the infinite intensity of that heart of love that constitutes Him God, is there not reason why He should say, and say with emphasis, and confirm it with this oath, as He has written it in the blood of His Son, that He has no pleasure in the death of the wicked? "God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life." Here is the attitude of God's mind towards sinners. Here is His yearning over them. Here is His boundless love. Here is the means devised for their redemption. Not even the devil can face that epitome of the gospel and affirm God's pleasure in the death of the wicked.
Tj Of the three great truths that God is Spirit, is Light, is Love, this last is the chief, for the other two ideas are incomplete without it. If, says Augustine, this one thing only were all we were told by the voice of the Spirit of God, that God is love, nothing more ought we to require. All the Divine attributes are combined in love, as in their centre and vital principle. This unity of the Divine nature is more than a moral union, it is one of essence, it is one of holiness. In the words of Van Oosterzee, God is Holy Love. All His properties must be regarded as the attributes of love. God's power is thus the power of love ; God's knowledge the intelligence of love ; God's righteousness the right- eousness of love.1
Tj The love of God is too great to understand and to grasp, for it is infinite. It would be too great to believe, only He who is the Truth has said it. Let us then wonder and be amazed at it, while we believe in it. This is the feeling God would work in you by it. " Can it be ? " might be the question of wondering love at the infinite and unutterable love of God, or it might be doubt. When the question comes, let us thank God that it is, and then the feeling will be, not doubt but admiring love.2
3. The universality of the gospel invitations, their earnestness,
1 R. F. Weidner, Theologia, or the Doctrine of God, 30.
2 The Story of Dr. Pusey's Life, 361.
EZEKIEL xxxiii. n 201
their broadness, is an evidence of the truth that a sinner's death can never be attributed to God's pleasure. God's pleasure runs in another direction. It is further evidenced by the welcome that is extended to the man who accepts the invitation and who returns to God. Eead the fifteenth chapter of Luke, in that matchless parable of the prodigal son : " But when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck and kissed him, and . . . said to his servants, Bring forth the best robe, and put it on him; and put a ring on his hand, and shoes on his feet : and bring hither the fatted calf, and kill it ; and let us eat, and be merry : for this my son was dead, and is alive again ; he was lost, and is found. ... It was meet that we should make merry, and be glad: for this thy brother was dead, and is alive again ; and was lost, and is found." In this beautiful image is expressed the attitude of God towards any sinner who turns and repents. The naturalness of it is the force of it. Its power is in the adaptation to our conception. We can understand when a wayward son has run away from home and wasted his substance in riotous living, and yet, when in want, seeks by repentance to return to the father's house — we can understand that the old man's heart would go out to his erring and wandering boy, and that he would not spurn him from his door ; that he would keep the light shining in the windows that he might see it and return, and that he would welcome him with more joy than one who had never been astray. Now one cannot look at a scene of that kind and say that that father had pleasure in the want and in the death of his boy. One could not look at that welcome and say that the reason the boy was in such deplorable condition was that his father's mind was hostile to him.