1. The word " throne " commonly suggests power, majesty, sovereignty, wealth; but God's throne is here described as one of grace. His generosity is as boundless as His wealth. He
* W. Robertson Nicoll, Sunday Evening, 339. * Bunyan.
340 THE THRONE OF GRACE
bestows blessing not upon the ground of desert or according to any measure of merit, but according to " the exceeding riches of his grace in kindness towards us in Christ Jesus." Having, in the fulness of His benevolence, not " spared his own Son, but delivered him up for us all," He stands ready with Him and through Him, " freely to give us all things." He is the God of love, the Father of mercies, the God of all comfort and consolation, who daily loadeth us with benefits, who preventeth us with the blessings of His goodness, and who in the riches of His grace hath abounded towards us in all wisdom and prudence. It is to give prominence to this aspect of the character of God that the writer represents Him here as seated on a throne of grace. Mercy no less belongs to Him than majesty. If He is the God of glory, He is also the God of all grace. The throne, therefore, on which He sits is represented as a throne of grace — a throne which rests on grace, which is upholden by mercy, and from which blessing flows forth in a free and plenteous stream to the unworthy, the wretched and the lost. The glory that surrounds God's throne, as He manifests Himself to His creatures, is a glory before which the highest of them veil their faces ; they are unable to gaze on its exceeding lustre ; but the form in which it arranges itself is that of a rainbow, the token of mercy and the pledge of blessing, sa that even the guilty and the fallen can approach with confidence to ask of Him who sits on that throne mercy and favour.
^ Mercy is that eternal principle of God's nature which leads Him, even at the cost of infinite self-sacrifice, to seek the temporal good and eternal salvation of those who have opposed themselves to His will. In the words of Martensen : " Viewed in relation to sin, eternal love is compassionate grace." God's con- tinued impartation of natural life is a foreshadowing, in a lower sphere, of what He desires to do for His creatures in the higher sphere — the communication of spiritual and eternal life through Jesus Christ. When He bids us love our enemies, He only bids us follow His own example.^
2. And what is grace ? Grace, of course, is the New Testament
word for the undeserved favour and loving regard of God to man
considered as weak, sinful, and unworthy ; it is love which has its
own motive, apart from any regard to worthiness in the object
^ A. H. Strong, Systematic Theology, i. 289.
HEBREWS IV. i6 341
upon which it falls. Grace is its own real impulse and motive, and grace is set in Scripture as the opposite of desert ; it is of grace, not of works, and so forth. It is set as the antagonist of sin and unrighteousness and all evil, and so runs up to the idea that it expresses the unmerited, self-originated, loving regard of God to us poor miserable creatures, who, if dealt with on the ground of right and retribution, would receive something very difterent indeed. But this text says that the throne of grace is the throne of God. The throne is based and established, as it were, in grace, out of which this undeserved love flows in broad, full streams. Whatever else there may be in the Divine nature, the ruling sovereign element in Deity is unmerited love and mercy and kindly regard to us poor, ignorant, sinful creatures, which keeps pouring itself out over all the world. God is King, and the kingly thing in God is infinite grace. Then we can scarcely but bring into connexion with this grand idea the other phases which the Old Testament gives to the same thought. Eead such words as these : " Justice and judgment are the habitation of his throne " — " God sitteth on the throne of his holiness " — " The throne of thy glory." Yes, the throne of justice and of judgment. White and sparkling — cold and repellent. The throne of glory — flashing and dazzling, coruscating and blinding, glittering and shimmering, ready to smite the diseased eye. " The throne of his holiness." Yes, lofty, far up there, towering above us in its pure completeness, and we poor creatures, being our- selves blinded and dazed, and far away from Him, down amidst the lowlands and materialities, and all that majesty in the heavens — the justice and judgment, the holiness and glory — all that is only the envelope and wrappage; the living centre and heart of it is a pure, lambent glow of tenderness, and the throne is truly the throne of grace. The " throne " gives us all ideas of majesty, sovereignty, dominion, inflnitude, greatness. The thought that it is " the throne of grace " sheathes all these in the softest, tenderest, most blessed folds of love — unmerited, free, spontaneous — simply because He is God, and not on account of any goodness in us.