But even pathos like that will bo lost on us, unless we further see what the Fatherhood of God involves, namely, that His nature and ours are essentially akin, so that, allowance being made for our moral imiierfection, from our own experience wc m:iy
206
KECONCILIATION
RECOXCILIATION
safely infer His. If man was marie in the image of God, a <'ood man must be a good guide to right thoughts about God. If a good man may be angry, so may God. A good man's anger wiil never be mere blind rage, nor mere personal resentment, but as moral indignation it may rise to any heiglit ; and the better he is, the higher it will ri.se, in the presence of deliberate wrong-doing. And that being so, it were surely strange to conclude that if he were altogether perfect, his anger would entirelj' disapi)ear. There would disappear from it only what deliled it before — the smolce, but not the flame ; as we see in the one perfect Man of the whole race — the Man, Christ Jesus. Was He never angry? Did not He look round on His enemies ' with anger, being grieved for the hard- ness of their hearts'? (Mk 3''). And can we con- ceive Him denouncing the hypocrites of His day in cold, nnirapassioned language ? Is not His indict- ment against them instinct Avith moral indignation, the fire of which we feel as we read it still ? We cannot doubt the reality of His anger. Why, then, should we doubt the reality of God's ? Was not God in Christ denouncing the Pharisees, as well as reconciling the world to Himself? And does not the one fact go far to determine how the other should be understood ?
2. The Possibility of Reconciliation on the part of God. — But many demur to a mutual recon- ciliation, not only because they doubt the reality of God's anger, and see no need of reconciliation on the part of God, but also because they doubt its possibility, for reconciliation implies a change of feeling, and there can be no change in God. This, however, is confusion of thought. It is to misunderstand the nature of God's unchangeable- ness. God is not a mere mechanical force, but a living, moral mind. It is His character that is unchangeable, not His feelings, nor His actions. These must change with the changing character and conduct of His creatures, just because He changeth not. In any relevant sense of the word, it is not He that changes, but we. If we obey not. He abideth faithful. He cannot deny Him- self, and therefore He must deny us, when we defy Him. In fact this apparent change in God proves His real unchangeableness, just as an apparent unchangeableness would prove a real change. (See Domer on ' the Divine Immutability ' in System of Chnstian Doctrine, i. 244 fi'., iv. 80).
1. But both the need and the possibility of recon- ciliation on the Divine side seem to many forbidden from another point of view. There seems no room for it in the Christian conception of God. God is Lo\ e, and love is incapable of anger or hostility. But if God is love, love must be more than a mere emotion. It is a character, and a character is made up of likes and dislikes, attractions and re- pulsions, according to its affinity for, or aversion to, the character and conduct of those with whom it comes in contact. In other words, God is a person, not a force. He can, and does, discrimin- ate between the righteous and the -(vicked. ' The eyes of the Lord are upon the righteous . . . the face of the Lord is against them that do evil ' (Ps 34""). That does not mean that He does not love even them that do evil, but it does mean that His love is capable of hostility. How, indeed, can God love us for our good without showing His hostility to what would do us harm ? When a river is dammed back by some obstruction thrown in its way, it chafes against it, and poetically we say it is angry. But it is not mere poetry to say that when the Divine love is held Dack by our Bin, so that it can no longer flow forth to bless ns as it would, it chafes against the obstacle, and cannot bear to be balked of its benign purpose concerning us. Love is goodness in earnest to
make others good, and when it cannot have its way it is grieveil, when it is deliberately thwarted it is angry, and, as Coleridge says —
' To be wroth with one you love Doth work Ukc niadntsji in the brain.*
It ia here that Simon (Redemption of Man, p. 216 ff,), who has done so much to define and defend the reality of God'a anger, has lost his wa.v. According to him, ' love and wrath are mutually exclusive ' ; that is, thry cannot both be felt for one and the same person at one and the same time, though the.v may both be felt by one and the same person towards different persons. * A father may become angry with one of his children, and, to that extent, cease loving him, without therefore ceasing to love the rest. At the moment of intensest indignation with the one he may turn with tenderness to the rest. Not other- wise with God.* It is true, he adds that a man who is angry because his love has been repelled, * will also, even whilst angry, carefully search for means of vanquishing the indiffer- ence, and converting the contemptuous aversion into loving regard. This is what a lovin(/ being, a loving God, can do, hut it is misleading to ascribe it to love*(iA. p. 201). But surely, as Scott Lidgett has pointed out (The Spiritual Principle oj the Atonement, p. 25U f.), it is contrary to the most familiar exTserience of life to say that love must either be requited or withdrawn. Life is full of unrequited and even outraged love that has never been withdrawn. Witness the way in which a mother will cling to a reprobate son, and for all the wrong he has done her never give him up while she Uves. Nor is the love that will not let him go love in general, but distinctively her love for him. How could her love for her other children supply the energy required to seek reconciliation with him from whom, by the supposition, it has been withdrawn? It is a moral impossibility. Simon's mistake is due to his making too much of love as a mere emotion, forgetting that in its deepest and divinest sense it is a character, a moral determination of the whole being towards another. As a character, love may survive the mere enjojiuent of \Vb own satisfaction. Satis- faction may give place to dissatisfaction and the severest dis- pleasure. These may be the only emotions proper to it for the time being, but it cannot enjoy these, cannot even endure them, and, in its own interest as well as that of its object, it will seek their removal, and, if possible, out of its own resources provide a propitiation. That is precisely what God has done for ua. * Herein is love, not that we love God, but that God loved ua, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins ' (1 Jn 4^0).