of the final — and who ^vill not .sometimes say the speedy? — triumph of His cause. We may mis- conceive the mode of it, even when we Uy to guide ourselves by His words ; but the important thing is not the mode but the fact, and of that we iire as sure as we are sure of Him.
(c) Besides the authority which He exerci-sed in establishing His ascendency over men, and that which we recognize in Him as the Truth, we may distinguish (though it is but part of His revelation of the Father) the gracious authority exercised by Christ in forgiving sins. That He did forrive sins is not to be doubted. The narrative in Mk 2'-'^ makes this clear. Jesus no more declared that the paralytic's sins were forgiven than He declared that he was not lame : the meaning of the whole incident is that His word conferred with eqiial power the gift of pardon and the gift of bodily strength. The one miracle of redemption — 'who forgiveth all thine iniquities, who healeth all thy diseases' — reaches through the whole of human nature, and Jesus has authority to perform it all. It is in this sense that we mu.st interpret passages like Lk 7''™- 23« as well as Mk 2", Lk 15, and ultimately Mt IS's and Jn 20=3. There is not any- thing to be said of this authority but that it must vindicate itself. No one can believe that Jesus has authority to forgive sins except the man who through Jesus has had the experience of forgive- ness. The Divine love that dwelt in Jesus, tliat received sinners and ate with them, that spent itself to seek and save the lost, that saw what was of God in men and touched it : that Divine love made forgiveness not only credible to sinners, but real. It entered into their hearts with God's own authority, and in penitent faith and love the burden passed from tlieir consciences and they were born again. When He was challenged by the scribes, Jesus appealed to the physical miracle, which was indisputable, in support of the spiritual one, which lay beyond the reach of sense ; but it was only the scribes, not the forgiven man, who needed this seal of His authority to pardon. Those whom He forgave had tlie witness in them- selves, and ultimately there can be no other. The authority which Jesus exercised in this gracious sense He extended to His disciples alike during their brief mission while He was on earth (Mk 'A^ 6'"'^), and in view of their wider calling when He was exalted (Mt IS'^, Jn 20=').
Some light is thrown upon the authority of Jesus if we consider the occasions on which it was challenged, and the way in which Jesus met them.
(a) It was tacitly challenged wherever men were ' ott'ended ' in Him. To be offended (aKavSaKlitaBai) is to stumble at His claims, to find something in Him which one cannot get over and which is in- compatible with absolute surrender to Him ; it is to deny His right to impose upon men the conse- quences (persecution, poverty, even death) which may be involved in accepting His authority (see Mt lloiS'i-^f- 15'=24">26": the other Gospels here add nothing to Mt.). Sometimes Jesus met tliis tacit challenge by pointing to the general charac- ter of His work as vindicating His claims. This is what He does in the case of John the Baptist (Mt 1 !=■*}. Wliether we read this passage — 'the blind receive their sight, the lame walk,' etc. — in the physical or the spiritual sense, the works in question are the signs that God's Anointed has tome, and it can only mean loss and ruin to men if they fail to see and to acknowledge Him as ^^ hat He is. Sometimes, again, Jesus encountered those who were ' oflended ' in Him with a sever- ity amounting to scorn. When the Pharisees ' stumbled ' because His word about things that do and do not defile cut straight across tlieir tra- ditional prejudices, He did nothing to conciliate
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them. ' Every plant that my heavenly Father hath not planted shall be rooted up. Let them alone. They are blind guides of Ijlind men. And if the blind man leads the blind, both shall fall into the ditch ' (Mt 15'^'-)- I'> reality the ' oti'ence ' in this case meant that sham holiness would not acknowledge true ; and in tliis situation it can only be war A Voutrancc. As a rule, however, Jesus only speaks of men being offended, or offended in Hira, by way of warning ; and He assumes that to the solemn tones of His warning conscience will respond. His authority is inherent in Himself and His actions, and cannot with a good conscience be repudiated by any one who sees what He is. This is the tone of Mt 13=' 241" 26^1.
(j3) It is a more explicit challenge of His authority when Jesus is asked to show a sign, or a sign from heaven (Mt 12^'- 16"-, Lk 238, jn gs"). This was the recurrence of the temptation of the pinnacle, and Jesus consistently rejected it. He never consented (not even in the case of the paralytic of Mk 2'-', see above) to present the physical as evidence for the spiritual. The proof of the authority with which He spoke did not lie outside of His word, in something which could be attached to it, but in the word itself ; if it was not self -attesting, nothing else could attest it. This is put with peculiar force in the Fourth Gospel. It is true that an evidential