4 The suffering of Christ reconciles men to God. — As a rivulet, after its toilsome, lonely progress past moor and forest, falls into the larger current of the river, as the river, after many windings and doublings, pours itself into the sea, so the soul, after the vain struggles of self-will, is reconciled to the river of God's will, which is the river of life eternal. Eeconciliation is harmony, agreement, atonement, and nothing else satisfies God or man. Punishment can never satisfy either the holiness of God or the conscience of man. The Divine holiness can be satisfied only
^ J. Thomas, The Mysteries of Grace, 54.
2 J. Morgan Gibbon, Evangelical Heterodoxy, 88.
122 DEPTHS OF MERCY
with holiness, and " I shall be satisfied, when I awake, with thy likeness." The homecoming of the prodigal quits all scores. Father and son are satisfied, and God is, in Christ, reconciling the world to Himself without reckoning their trespasses.
^ He suffered, " that he might bring us to God," All that need be said about that gracious " bringing " is just this, that in Jesus, answering the call of His redeeming grace, men and women in countless numbers have turned their faces home, and are making their way out of the deadening bondage of sin into the " glorious liberty of the children of God."
Far, far away, like bells at evening pealing, The voice of Jesus sounds o'er land and sea,
And laden souls, by thousands meekly stealing, Kind Shepherd, turn their weary steps to Thee.^
5. Christ identifies Himself with us in suffering. — In our increasing grasp of the solidarity of the human race we have learned to look upon the human family as being one thing ; and we know that the human family thrills throughout its wide extent under the power of this suffering of One for the many. All that you need is identification existing between the sufferers and those through whom they suffer. Well it is here. Our Lord, the Son of God, has become the Son of humanity ; He has entered into that relation with the race, and with each member of the race, which a perfect community of nature involves. He is linked to all and each with the link of perfect love ; and what exquisite capacities of suffering love always carries with it ! He is the Head of the race, its Eepresentative, the Second Adam. The whole race is re-gathered up in Him ; and there is no possibility of identification between men like the identification that exists between the man Christ Jesus and us His brethren. It is because of the relation in which He stands to the race, that He died for us upon the Cross ; and His death has all the wonderful effects which are assigned to it in Christian teaching, because it is a sorrow which is more fruitful than any other sorrow could be. I go to the Cross then, and I look to the Christ hanging there as my representative and dying that redeeming death.
•[I They preach of a great Vicarious Anguish suffered for the world. Do they not know, rather, that it was suffered in and
^ J. H, Jowett, The Ejjistles of Peter, 142,
I PETER III. 18-22 123
with it? that it was instead an Infinite Participance and Sympathy ? that the anguish was in the world, and the Love came down, and tasted, and identified itself with it, making of the ultimate of pain a sublime, mysterious Eapture ? That it is far more to feel the upholding touch of One who goes down into the deep waters before us, and to receive, so, some little drops that we can bear of the great Chrism, than to stand apart, safe on the sunny bank, while He passeth the flood for us, bringing it safely for our uncleansed feet for ever. That — not this — was the Pity and the Sacrifice ; that is the Help and the Salvation ; the Love and the Pain enfold us together ; that is what the jasper and the crimson mean ; the first refraction where the Divine Light falls into our denser medium of being ; the foundation stone of the heavenly building. The beginning of the At-one-ment ; till, through . . . the tenderer, peacefuller tints, our life passes the whole prism of its mysterious experience, and beyond the far-off violet, at last, it rarifies to receive and to transmit the full white Light of God.i
IL
Ministry in Hades. " He went and preached unto the spirits in prison."
1. This declaration is like a little window through which we look into a world unknown and almost unsuspected ; and what is suggested by the glimpse through the window is so strange, it involves so many extraordinary possibilities, that one can hardly wonder that many extravagant theories have been raised upon it. It was the extravagance of these theories that led St. Augustine in the beginning of the fifth century to seek for some other explana- tion of the text altogether ; and he maintained that there is no reference in this text to what is called the descensus ad inferos — a >, descent to the shades — but that it refers simply to the historical episode of Noah preaching to those who subsequently perished by the flood. And Lutlier, no doubt seeing what a tremendous pile of mediicval superstition had been reared on the strength of the text, admitted St. Augustine's view ; and Protestants have largely followed Luther, and have declared that the passage simply means that during the time of the flood, or just before, Jesus Christ » A. D. T. Whituey.