^ Christ often explained the purpose of His coming in other words. He had come, He said, to show the Father and to do the Father's will. He had come to be the Light of the world and to give men life more abundantly. He had come to be the servant of all, and to set men an example that they should follow His steps. He had come to give deliverance to the captives, and to heal the bruised and broken heart. He had fifty gracious, merci- ful, saving ends in view, but they were all included in the one supreme purpose to save sinners from their sins, to scatter the darkness and heal the blindness which sin had made, to remove the alienation from God which sin had produced, to heal the hatreds, enmities, and moral diseases which were the offspring of sin, to redeem men from the sorrows, heart-burnings, and fears which sin brought, and to shed abroad in all hearts the love which sin kills. Man has only one enemy in Christ's thought, though
90 A FAITHFUL SAYING
he often thinks he has a legion. Sin is the enemy, and Christ's long warfare in living and dying was against that. " He came into the world to save sinners." ^
*[[ It is only by saving us from sin that Christ saves us from ignorance and from misery. There is a high and true sense, valid here too, in the saying that faith precedes reason : that it is only he that is in Christ Jesus who can know God and acquire any effective insight into spiritual truth. And equally in that other maxim that the regeneration of the individual is the condition of the regeneration of society : that it is only he that is in Christ Jesus who can have added to him even these lesser benefits. Apart from the central salvation from sin, knowledge can but puff up, and society at best is a whited sepulchre, full of dead men's bones. And it is only by His prime work of saving from sin — that sin which is the root of all ignorance and of all our bitterness alike — that He makes the tree good that its fruits may be good also.2
From the palace of His glory,
From the radiance and the rest, Came the Son of God to seek me,
Bear me home upon His breast.
There from that eternal brightness Did His thouglits flow forth to me —
He in His great love would have me Ever there with Him to be.
Far away, undone, forsaken,
Not for Him my heart was sore; But for need and bitter hunger —
Christ desired I nevermore.
Could it be that in the glory,
Ere of Him I had a thought, He was yearning o'er the lost one.
Whom His precious Blood had bought?
That it was His need that brought Him
Down to the accursed tree. Deeper than His deep compassion.
Wondrous thought ! His need of me.
1 J. G. Greenliough, The Mvnd of Christ m St. Paul, 30.
2 B. B. Warfiold, The Tower of Qod wtUe Salvation, 46.
I TIMOTHY I. 15 91
Trembling, I had hoped for mercy, Some low place within His door —
But the crown, the throne, the mansion, He made ready long before.
And in dim and distant ages,
In those courts so bright and fair,
Ere I was, was He rejoicing, All He won with me to share.^
(2) Jesus came to save sinners ! But from what ? Was it from the consequences of our sins ? Or was it from sin itself ? Here we encounter one of the most prevalent misconceptions of the atonement. The doctrine is sometimes presented as if our Lord was punished in order that we might be let off, and as if the Bufferings of the Just for the unjust were undergone so that the guilty might escape the reward of their misdeeds. According to this theory, salvation is regarded as an escape from penalty, a deliverance from the result of wrong-doing, a rescue from loss and ruin. No wonder that men have revolted from such a doctrine, stated, as it often has been, in a form that contradicts the moral instincts of our nature. "We must pay our debts," says Mr. Bernard Shaw ; and the conscience of the modern world approves his dictum, and cannot tolerate the notion of a decree which, pro- fessing to be Divine, cancels moral obligations, and sets the wrong- doer free from the outcome of his sin. Moreover, while the nobler souls are in protest against such a representation, the meaner souls have at times been ready to take shelter under it, and to say to themselves that, since through the gospel they can escape the consequences of their sins, they need not be specially careful to avoid transgression. "Let us continue to sin, that grace may abound ! " So spake the deceitful heart of men in the age of the Apostles, and the evil whisper is re-echoed to-day by the Enemy of our souls.
The protest of the world's conscience is entirely justifiable. Yet it is just at this point that we must be particularly careful, and try to disentangle the truth from the falsehood in the popular misinterpretation. The truth is this : Sin, in one of its aspects, is its own punishment. It separates us from God, producing a sense