argue this question; I merely indicate that scripture
one can measure or tell. When men speak of it they do so as painters speak of shade in a scene or picture; as rather a needful thing, nay, a thing of beauty in its own way. They have no due sense or estimate of it at all. It is not to them what it is to God. It is not by any means in their books what it is in the book of God.
Yet, right views of sin are the key to the Bible, the key to the history of the world, and the key to God's purposes concerning it. He who does not know what sin is cannot understand the Bible. It must be a dark and strange book to him. He cannot solve the difficulties of the world's history. All is perplexed and contradictory. He cannot enter into God's purposes respecting it either in curse or in blessing, either in condemnation or redemption. Sin is not misfortune, but guilt; not disease, but crime; not an evil, but the evil, the evil of evils, the root of all evils; terrible in itself as fraught with all that we call "moral evil," and terrible in its judicial effects as necessarily and inexorably bound up with irresistible and irreversible condemnation.
In spite of all the divine teaching, both in God's book and in the world's history, man refuses to believe that sin is what God has proclaimed it, and what its own development, in the annals of the ages, has shown that it really is.
The first and fundamental lesson of the Levitical service is the infinite evil of sin. Sacrifice is God's declaration of His estimate of SIN. Strike this thought out of it, and sacrifice is simple barbarism,--a coarse emblem of the vengeance of a Jupiter, or a Moloch, or a Baal upon helpless creaturehood.
2. Substitution is righteousness.--I do not argue this question; I merely indicate that scripture assumes this.
Often has the doctrine of substitution been evil spoken of as a slander against God's free love. It has been called a commercial transaction, a bargain inconsistent with true generosity, a money-payment of so much love for so much suffering. Philosophy,
falsely so called, has frequently, by such representations, striven to write down a truth for which it could not find a niche in its speculations, and of which the philosopher himself had never felt His need. With any book less buoyant than the Bible to float it up, this doctrine must long before this have been submerged under the weight of ridicule, which the wisdom of this world has brought to bear upon it.
But it has been seen that the Bible and the truth of substitution cannot be sundered. They must sink or float together. The great philosophic puzzle with many, who were not prepared to cast off the Scriptures, was how to disentangle the two, so as to strike out the doctrine and yet preserve the old Book.
This difficulty has been felt all the more, because in the Bible itself there are no indications of any misgivings as to the doctrine, no explanations meant to smooth angularities and make the doctrine less philosophically objectionable. As if unconscious of the force of any such objection, it makes use of figures, once and again, which are directly taken from the commercial transactions of life. Even if what is branded as the mercantile theology could be proved untrue, it is certainly very like what we find in the Bible; nor can one help feeling that if the above theology be untrue, it is rather strange that the Bible should lay itself so open to the suspicion of favouring it. For, after all, the strongest statements and most obnoxious figures are those of that Book itself. Eliminate these and we are ready to hear how philosophy can argue. We do not say "explain them," we say "eliminate them"; for our difficulty lies in the simple existence of such passages. Why are they there, if substitution and transference be not true? They are stumbling-blocks and snares. Let these passages themselves bear the blame, if blame there is. It is idle to revile a doctrine, yet leave the figures, from which it is drawn, untouched and uncondemned.
Substitution may be philosophical or unphilosophical, defensible or indefensible; still it is imbedded in the Bible; specially in the sacrificial books and sacerdotal ordinances. Its writers may be credited or discredited; but no one can deny that
substitution was an article of their creed, and that they meant to teach this doctrine if they meant anything at all. We might as well affirm that Moses did not mean to teach creation in Genesis, or Israel's deliverance in Exodus, as that he did not profess to promulgate Substitution in Leviticus. Substitution is in that book beyond all question; along with that book let it stand or fall.
There is then substitution revealed to us beyond mistake in Scripture; revealed in connection with Israel's worship, Israel's tabernacle, and Israel's Messiah. The special thing in that service, in that sanctuary, and in that Deliverer, with which substitution is connected, is THE BLOOD. Hence it is with blood that we find atonement, expiation, and propitiation connected. For the blood is the life; and it is the substitution of one life for another that accomplishes these results, and brings with it these blessings to the guilty.
Let me take two passages, one from the Old Testament, the other from the New, in illustration of what the blood is affirmed to be and to do. I give but a brief sketch of what I suppose they include; but it will suffice to show what Scripture teaches on the subject.
The first is Zechariah 9:11, "As for thee also, BY THE BLOOD OF THY COVENANT I have sent forth thy prisoners out of the pit wherein is no water." Blood here is declared to be the cause of deliverance,--the blood of the covenant; as if without this covenanted blood-shedding there could be no setting free of the prisoner. The blood goes in, the prisoner comes out. The blood touches his chain, and it falls off. The blood drops on the prison-bar, and the gate flies open. It is blood that does it all; blood whose virtue is recognised by God; blood whose effects and results are embraced in the everlasting covenant; the covenant of peace, the covenant of deliverance, the covenant of liberty, the covenant of life. But let us look more closely at the language of the prophet.
The words "as for thee also," or "thou also," are the very words of our Lord, when weeping over Jerusalem; "Even thou," thou, the guiltiest of the