Gospel of Paul, The
The Gospel of Paul Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield A Sermon from The Saviour of the World:
Sermons preached in the Chapel of Princeton Theological Seminary.
New York: Hodder and Stoughton, 1913.
2 Corinthians v. 14-15, 18-19, 21:—For the love of Christ constraineth us; because we thus judge, that one died for all, therefore all died; and He died for all, that they which live should no longer live unto themselves, but unto Him who for their sakes died and rose again. . .
. But all things are of God, who reconciled us to Himself through Christ, and gave unto us the ministry of reconciliation; to wit, that God was in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself, not reckoning unto them their trespasses. . . . Him who knew no sin He made to be sin on our behalf; that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.
I HAVE chosen for my text three sentences which do not form a consecutive passage. They stand, however, in very close contiguity within the limits of a single short paragraph, within the narrow compass, indeed, of eight verses. More than that, they stand out upon the face of this short paragraph as marked features, from which it receives its character and chief significance. Glancing over this paragraph, the eye can no more fail to fix itself upon these three sentences than gazing over a rich plain from some high point of sight it could fail to be attracted by a series of bold promontories throwing themselves athwart it; or glancing on the fretted lid of some highly wrought casket it could fail to be drawn and dazzled by the jewels
which blaze upon it. We cannot say, indeed, that the paragraph exists for these three sentences: they, rather, are here for the purposes of the paragraph and fulfil these purposes with perfection. But in prosecuting the end he has here in view the apostle is led to make his appeal to considerations of so high an order that the sentences in which they are adduced stand out above the general drift of the discussion like mountain-peaks in a plain, glow on its surface like jewels in their setting.
What Paul is engaged upon in this section of his Epistle is the vindication of his integrity as a minister of grace, and of the purity of the Gospel he preached. It is in full view of the judgment-seat of Christ, he asserts, that he prosecutes the mission that has been committed to him; and he has permitted nothing to deflect him by a hair's-breadth from the message which has been placed on his lips.
In giving force to this contention he is led to enunciate the contents of the message of which he has been made the bearer: and it is this enunciation which is thrown up to our view in these sentences I have chosen for my text.
In these sentences is contained therefore the announcement of Paul's Gospel; and it is this fact which gives them their distinction. Search throughout the whole compass of Paul's Epistles and it is doubtful if you will find another such succinct, complete and pungent statement of the Gospel which Paul preached; of what he deemed the very touchstone and heart of the message he brought to men. Certainly you will find none more formally set forth as the apostle's own declaration of the essence of his Gospel. If we wish to know precisely what Paul preached and precisely in what he conceived all that he preached to centre and to be summed up, we cannot do better than attend to these crisp sentences.
I have called them crisp sentences, and I might almost have spoken of them as detached sentences. For part and parcel as they are of Paul's argument, fitting into it and bearing their part in it with the perfection of sentences born of the discussion of the moment, they
yet have an odd air of detachment about them, which seems to assure us they were not struck out in the heat of this debate, but have been brought into it from without. One of them is introduced by what we may almost call a formula of citation: "because we thus judge"—"seeing that our judgment is this,"—viz. what follows. All of them are phrased with that sharply cut frugality of language which belongs to proverbial speech, and is the result, no doubt, of the attrition which sentences suffer from much repetition, by which all the rough edges, like superfluous particles, are worn off. "One died for all: therefore all died: and He died for all that, living, they might no longer live to themselves, but to Him who died and rose for them." "All is of God; who reconciled us with Himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation, since it was God who in Christ was reconciling the world with Himself." "Him that knew no sin He made sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him." There is not a redundant word in any of these sentences; there is even a notable parsimony of words; even what might have been deemed the necessary connecting particles are omitted. I think we may be quite sure that these sentences were not first framed as Paul set them down on the sheets of this letter; that they had often been on his lips before; and that they went down on the sheets he was writing here in the form they had taken on his lips after numerous repetitions. In a word, we have here the phrases in which Paul was accustomed to give expression to the heart of his
Gospel.
It is tempting to turn aside to remark upon the analogy supplied by this discovery to a phenomenon characteristic of the so-called
Pastoral Epistles, in which we repeatedly meet with gnome-like announcements of the great truths of the Gospel, encysted, as it were, in the tissues of the Epistle. It would seem that from the beginning Paul was accustomed to imbed in his Epistles the "faithful sayings" in which he was wont to find adequate expression given to the mighty truths it was his life-work to make effective among men.
It is important, however, that we should not permit our attention to be distracted from the main point which now claims it. This is that
we have in the sentences now before us not only an announcement of the essence of Paul's Gospel, perhaps the most clear and formal announcement of its essence to be found in his Epistles, but also this announcement in the form which he habitually gave it. It was in these precise words that Paul was accustomed to express himself when he desired to carry the essence of his Gospel home to the minds of men and fix it there with precision and in unmistakable and unalterable distinctness. We may approach the study of these sentences, then, with the utmost confidence that we have in them not some chance, perhaps one-sided, deliverance valid only for the immediate purpose of a particular controversy, but the well-weighed and carefully compacted expression of the very core of his Gospel, that Gospel which had been committed to him by the Lord Himself, by which he won the world, upon which he nourished his own spirit, and which he offers to us as the very word of life.
What, then, is this Gospel of Paul, brought before us here with such directness and energy of expression?
Casting our eye over the sentences in which it is embodied, we are struck at once with the fact that it is a universalistic Gospel. We should have expected this of Paul. The hinge upon which his whole lifework turned was the universalizing of the Gospel of Christ. It was therefore that he was the Apostle of the Gentiles. And it was out of this that all his conflicts, trials, sufferings arose. The bitter strife in which he was engaged in this very Church of Corinth, one campaign of which is fought out in this letter, was itself rooted in the universalism of his Gospel. It could not be that the note of this universalism should be unheard in anything that can put in the slightest claim to be the embodiment of Paul's Gospel.
It is so little unheard here that it would be truer to say that it forms the ground-tone of the whole enunciation. "One died for all: therefore all died"—that is the key-note which is struck at the beginning. "God was in Christ reconciling the world with Himself"— that is the great announcement in which it culminates. We may be
perfectly sure that neither statement was here made by Paul for the first time. Rather, these were the things on which he had fed his courage in those days of afflictions, necessities, distresses, stripes, imprisonments, tumults, labours, watchings, fastings, in which his life had been spent. We may fancy him in the midst of the deaths which he died daily repeating to himself over and over again these great words: "One died for all: therefore all died": "God was in Christ reconciling the world with Himself"—and deriving from them the force by virtue of which, though he died yet behold he lived again, though he was chastened yet he was not destroyed, though he was brought to grief yet he always rejoiced, though he was himself poor he yet enriched many, though he had nothing he yet possessed all things. They constitute indeed the battle-cry of Paul's whole immense conflict and give its character to his entire life-history.
Eliminate this note of universalism from Paul's Gospel and you do away with his significance in history; you cut up the Gospel to which he freely gave his life by the roots.
You cannot exaggerate, therefore, the significance to his Gospel of Paul's universalism. In important respects this universalism was his
Gospel. But unfortunately it is very possible to misconceive and to misrepresent this universalism: and unhappily it is commonly very gravely misconceived and misrepresented.
After all, Paul's universalism was Paul's universalism; and Paul's universalism stood in opposition, not to the particularism of divine grace, but to the exclusiveness of Jewish nationalism. What he gave his life to, what he directed all his teaching toward, was not a passionate assertion of absolute indiscrimination on God's part in His dealings with sinners of the human race, but the vindication to the Gospel of God's grace in Christ Jesus of a world-wide reference. If he argues at one time that "there is no difference" between men, he makes it plain that he means this in point of claim upon God for His mercy; and so soon as he comes to speak of the distribution of the divine gifts, he makes it equally plain that there is a great difference and that this difference depends on the will of the Divine Giver. When Paul therefore nailed to his mast-head the great declaration: "One died for all; therefore all
died," he was as far as possible from intimating that Jesus' death was equally and without distinction in behalf of every individual of the human race, and that therefore every individual of the human race, past, present and to come, died with Christ on the cross. This crass distributive universalism of redemption apparently never once entered his mind. And equally, when he inscribed upon his banner,
"God was in Christ reconciling the world with Himself," he thought of nothing so little as teaching that this reconciliation concerned itself equally with each and every individual who has ever lived in the world, lives in it now, or ever shall live in it. Such a conception is quite alien to his entire thought. What he means is just that God, who is the God not of the Jews only but also of the Gentiles, has given His Son to die not for the Jews only but for the world. His eye has caught this great vision; and, his mouth being open and his heart enlarged, he cries, Not one people only, but the world for Christ! It is the great missionary cry which Paul gives us here. "The world for Christ!" That is the cry that sounds in our ears to-day and fills us with enthusiasm in our service of the cross. It is the cry which Paul heard in his heart two thousand years ago, and under the impulse of which he inaugurated that great mission work which still occupies our hearts and hands. "The world for Christ"—not one nation, not one class, not one race or condition of men, but the world and nothing less than the world for Christ!
It would certainly be exceedingly unfortunate in any event to eviscerate Paul's whole Gospel for the sake of gratuitously imposing on his language an inoperative universalism of redemption which does not actually save. That men could perish for whom Christ died,
Paul never imagined that human minds could conceive. The very nerve of his great declaration that "Christ died for all; therefore all died," is that participation in the death of Christ is salvation.
Therefore he goes on to declare that those who thus die with Christ live, live with the Christ who not only died for them but also rose again for them. So little was it possible for him to admit a distinction between dying with Christ, which is the unconscious lot of all, and living with Christ, which is the conscious attainment of only some,
that he even founds elsewhere an a fortiori argument on participation in Christ's death as removing all doubt of participation in His life. "But God commendeth His own Son towards us," he reasons, "in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us. Much more then, being now justified by His blood, shall we be saved from wrath through Him. For if while we were sinners, we were reconciled with God through the death of His Son, much more, being reconciled, shall we be saved by His life." "But if we died with Christ," he reasons again, "we believe that we shall also live with Him"; and again, "For if we have become united with Him by the likeness of His death, we shall be also by the likeness of His resurrection." Paul therefore will have nothing to do with a distinction between men who have only died with Christ and those who also live with Him. With Paul, to die with Christ means to live together with Him; to be reconciled with God through the death of Christ means to enter into the full inheritance of life. When he passionately declares that when Christ died He died not for Jews only but for all, that in Him God was reconciling nothing less than the world with Himself, he is thinking of no half-measures. He is proclaiming the world-wide reach, the world-wide destiny of God's salvation.
How impossible it is to read Paul as teaching here a purely potential universalism in the death of Christ, to be made effective in each instance by the individual's own act of appropriation, is rendered clear by another prime characteristic of his Gospel as here enunciated. This is what we may perhaps call, for lack of a better phrase, its high supernaturalism. By this we mean to refer to the emphasis and persistence with which he ascribes the whole saving process—in its initiation and outworking alike—to God. This too we should have expected of Paul. There is no more marked feature of his total thought than the vision of God which informs it: and no matter from what point of departure his argument takes its start, it can find its point of rest only when it arrives at "the good pleasure of His will, to the praise of the glory of His grace, which He freely bestowed on us in the Beloved." It can cause us no surprise therefore when we
find him in our present passage insisting, of the new life which he discovers in those—in all those—who have died with Christ, that it is all of God; and representing the whole tremendous transaction by which we sinners are transformed into the likeness of Christ as inaugurated and carried through by God alone. All those for whom
Christ died He tells us died with Him and rose again with Him, and are consequently a new creation, the old things having passed away and become new. And then he adds with what might almost seem superfluous emphasis—for how could these things be, except by the power of God?—"But all these things are of God, who it is that has reconciled us with Himself through Christ and has given to us the ministry of reconciliation, seeing that it was God (observe the emphasis again) "who in Christ was reconciling the world with Himself." Accordingly, when a few verses later he alludes to the redemptive process again, he tells us quite naturally, not that "He who knew no sin was made sin for us," but that "Him who knew no sin God made sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him." So eager is the apostle that his readers shall take off from his page at least this assurance, that what they are in Christ
Jesus and all that they shall become they owe to God and to God alone. It was He, he tells us, who made Christ, the sinless one, to be sin for us; it was He who reconciled us with Himself through Christ; it is of Him that we are new creatures in Christ. In the whole saving process we supply nothing but the sinners to be saved, and the consequent activities induced in us by the saving process, as, in accordance with our nature, we move as we are moved upon.
It surely belongs to the most astonishing curiosities of exposition, then, that in the face of this abounding emphasis upon the sole efficiency of God in salvation, there should be found those who insist that, according to Paul's teaching, the decisive act in salvation is supplied by an action of the human will. See, we are told, the apostle in this very context beseeches his readers not to permit the grace of God to come to them in vain, but to be reconciled with God. Does not this imply that all that God has done lies without us, and it belongs to us, in our sovereign freedom, to give it validity each for his own
person? We need not pause to point out that the inference thus so confidently drawn is explicitly contradicted a score of times elsewhere by the apostle, who consistently represents it as "of God" that men differ in their spiritual endowments; and declares that no one has the least advantage over another which he has not received from above, and therefore cannot glory in it as if it were of his own production,—that, in a word, in the matter of spiritual standing, it is not of him that willeth nor of him that runneth but of God that showeth mercy. Nor need we pause to point out that there is a great difference, which we dare not neglect in a matter like the present, between an exhortation to action in accordance with the really moving force, and exhortation to action designed to set this force in motion. When this same apostle exhorts us to work out our own salvation with fear and trembling, "for it is God who is working in you both the willing and the doing for His good pleasure," we certainly cannot infer that our salvation so hangs upon our own will that God's energizing waits upon our act: the contrary is openly asserted—that our act rests rather on His energizing; it is He that works our very willing as well as our doing. Similarly it can scarcely be inferred from Paul's exhortation to us "to be reconciled with God," that reconciliation with God so depends on the unmoved action of our own free-will that all of God's action looking to our salvation must wait upon it. Apart from all this, it would seem to be enough to observe that no inference of this kind can set aside Paul's explicit and emphatic ascription here of this very reconciliation to God. For it is precisely our reconciliation which Paul ascribes to God with what seems almost an excessive energy of emphasis: "All these things are of God, who it was that reconciled us with Himself through Jesus
Christ": "It was God who, in Christ, was reconciling the world with Himself." When, immediately after this strong assertion of the divine production of reconciliation, he entreats his readers to be reconciled with God, the one most certain thing of all is that he does not mean to imply that their reconciliation is so in their own hands that the act of God waits upon their act. And this becomes the more evident when we observe that even in this exhortation itself the verb is thrown into the passive voice, and points therefore not to something
which we are to do, but to something which we are to suffer. The exhortation, in other words, is not that we should "reconcile ourselves" to God, but that we should assume an attitude consonant with the reconciliation which God has wrought with respect to us.
That is to say, we have a conception here which ranges perfectly with that other exhortation which we have already illustratively adduced: that we should work out our own salvation, knowing it is God who is working in us both the willing and the doing. It is an exhortation to consonant, not to determining activity.
We are led thus, however, to advert to a further prime characteristic of the Gospel of Paul, as set forth in our passage. That is that it finds its key-note in a doctrine of reconciliation. The core of Paul's Gospel is indeed expressed in this one word, Reconciliation; and it behoves us to consider carefully what he means by it. There are several things that are told us about it in our present passage. In the first place we are very emphatically told, as we have just seen, that the author of it is God: it is God Himself, not man, who works this reconciliation.
"All these things," says the apostle, "are of God, who it is that has reconciled us with Himself through Christ." "For it was God who in Christ was reconciling the world with Himself." Next we are told that the effects by which this reconciliation manifests itself among men are relief from the burden of their sin, and the proclamation of free pardon. "It was surely God who in Christ was reconciling the world with Himself, since He does not impute to them their trespasses and has placed in us the word of reconciliation." Then we are told that it finds its ground in the sin-bearing of Christ. " We beseech you in the behalf of Christ, Be ye reconciled with God: Him who knew no sin He made sin for us, that we may be the righteousness of God in Him."
From such suggestions as these it is perfectly easy to see what Paul means by this reconciliation, the ministry of which he declares to be his only function, the proclamation of which his one duty—or rather privilege—in the world. It is, shortly, not the reconciliation of man to God, as the shortcomings of our English version might mislead us into supposing: but the reconciliation of God to man—a reconciliation which God has Himself undertaken and which He has
accomplished at the tremendous cost of the death of His Son, on the ground of which He is able to release men from their trespasses. Of course men are at enmity with God: they do not like even to retain
God in their knowledge, and they turn against Him with unconcealed dread and hatred. But this is not the thing which most disturbs Paul.
What most disturbs him is that God is at enmity with man: that His wrath is revealed from heaven against their abounding unrighteousness. And what fills his heart with joy—the joy that made him the zealous missionary he was,—is the assurance that this enmity has been removed, that this wrath has been appeased and that by God Himself, who has reconciled us with Himself through Christ, by making Him who knew no sin to be sin for us,—and so enabling Himself not to impute our trespasses to us. The proclamation of this great transaction seemed to Paul so glorious that he joyfully made the ministry of reconciliation his life-work; the word of reconciliation his Gospel. In it lies, in a word, the very heart of Paul's Gospel.
Now the presupposition of this Gospel, you will perceive, is a deep and keen sense of human sin and that in the aspect of guilt. The reason why Paul's heart was filled with such joy at the thought of a reconciled God was that his heart was oppressed with a sense of guilt in the presence of a just God. A holy and righteous God, he knew, could not possibly look upon him, or his partners in guilt, without abhorrence and indignation. In his conscience the wrath of God was revealed against the abounding iniquity of men. O wretched men that we are, his soul of souls cried out, who shall deliver us from this mass of sin? It was because he felt so deeply and keenly the guilt of sin, and knew so clearly the depth and heinousness of his own and of the world's guilt, that he broke out with such rejoicing at the sight of a reconciled God, and made the proclamation of His reconciliation his
Gospel—the substance of the glad tidings which he bore to a sinstricken and hopeless race. The underlying conception of sin,—of sin oppressing, of sin removed—thus dominates the passages which are now engaging our attention. Why should Christ,—the "One"—need to die for men: and why is it glad tidings that all for whom He died,
died with Him? Why should the Gospel of reconciliation be announced as manifesting itself precisely in the non-imputation of men's trespasses to them? Why above all should the exhortation to be reconciled with God be supported by the great declaration that He who knew no sin has been made sin for us? Is it not clear that underneath all Paul's Gospel lies the most profound and poignant sense of sin, and that his Gospel consists precisely in a proclamation of relief from the intolerable burden of guilt? This then was the word of reconciliation, the ministry of which was committed to him: that the righteous wrath of God against sin has been appeased and the face of God has been turned to us again clothed in a smile of favour.
It has seemed worth while to dwell upon this, partly because of the apparent dying out of a deep sense of sin in wide circles of presentday life, but more because this sense of sin though it may be temporarily obscured cannot really die out, but will sooner or later assert itself in every human breast and bring despair when it does not find its antidote in a sense of a reconciled God. No doubt our age is marked by a "vanishing sense of sin," and there are multitudes about us who seem never to have awakened to any adequate realization of their moral condition, or of the significance of their moral condition with respect to their relations to God and to that future over which the righteous award of God rules. It would not be strange if there were some sitting here to-day to whom Paul's strong agony under the consciousness of sin seems wholly alien to normal human experience, something at any rate into which they find it impossible sympathetically to enter. I do not say that this condition of apathy in face of the most tremendous fact of human life is scarcely creditable to you: I do not even say that it ought to be viewed by you as a signal of extreme danger, because it is the index of an indurated heart, a heart callous to its own wickedness, and therefore should cause you the deepest concern and call out your best endeavours to see things more truly even if less comfortably. What I wish to say now to you is, that it is a condition that cannot last. We are all sinners: and, being sinners, we are under the condemnation of the just God, who does righteousness in heaven and on earth. We
cannot always conceal from ourselves this state of things. Sooner or later our troubled eyes will open with fright upon it: and all our smug contentment with ourselves will be gone. Now, life may run on upon oiled axles. Then, Time will seem to us "a maniac scattering dust, and Life a Fury slinging flame." And then, having discovered what sin is and what we are as sinners, we shall discover also the joy which Paul felt at the vision of a reconciled God. It will no longer seem strange to us that our Lord declared that there is joy in heaven over one sinner that repents, more than over ninety and nine just persons who need no repentance. It will no longer be difficult for us to understand that the gladdest of all glad tidings which the apostle knew to bring to the world, was the glad tidings of reconciliation in the blood of Jesus
Christ.
I say, reconciliation in the blood of Jesus Christ. For we do not get to the heart of Paul's doctrine of reconciliation, until we bring clearly before us what he teaches us of the way in which it has been accomplished. That way is, briefly, by a great act of substitution: of the substitution of Jesus Christ for us before the judgment-seat of God and the expiating of our guilt by Him on the tree. If Paul's doctrine of reconciliation is the heart of his Gospel, his doctrine of substitution is the heart of the heart of his Gospel. In it all the glad tidings he had to proclaim to man culminate and find their true significance. What does Paul mean by that great declaration which stands in the forefront of our present passage: "One died for all: therefore all died"? And what does he mean by that even greater declaration with which the passage closes: "Him who knew no sin
God made sin for us "? Obviously what he means is just substitution.
We must not lose ourselves here in possibly learned but certainly meaningless discussions of the precise fundamental significance of the preposition "for." Of course its fundamental meaning is "for the sake of," "for the benefit of." It was for the sake of the all that Christ died; and it was precisely because He died for their sakes that they share in that death of His which was for their benefit and not for His.
It was for our sakes that God made Him who knew no sin to be sin; and it is precisely because this great transaction was done for our
benefit that it avails for us. And what else could Paul have meant when he cries out in the joy of his salvation, "Christ died for me,"
"God made Him sin for me," than just that Christ had died for his sake and it inured to his benefit that He had been made sin? Would you expect a beneficiary of this tremendous transaction, suffused with a sense of the immense benefit received, to employ in describing it language which was wholly denuded of all emotional recognition that it was all for him, for his sake? And this is the real account to give of the prevalence in the allusions of the Biblical writers to the death of Christ of the broad preposition "for," with the primary implication of "for the sake of," rather than of the more precise "for" with the primary implication of "instead of," in relating that death to themselves. They were not putting together a systematic statement of the exact relation of Christ's death to human salvation: they were giving expression to their deepest religious convictions, and they could not but choose language charged with their profound emotions. When they employ the particular preposition they do employ, they derogate nothing from the substitutive nature of the death they are describing, but they couch their description of it in language freighted with their answering gratitude and love. When
Paul declares that when Christ died in behalf of all, then all died with Him—that God made Him sin in our behalf though He Himself knew no sin—he asserts substitution just as clearly as if he had said that He died in our stead and had been made sin in our place; and at the same time he uncovers to us his own heart, throbbing with grateful response to such an unheard-of benefit.
The glad tidings which Paul's Gospel brings to men, then, is just, to put it briefly and in familiar language, salvation from sin in the blood of Jesus Christ. What it means is, in the crispest form of statement, just that Jesus has done it all. He has taken our place and borne in His own body on the tree all our iniquities: He has died our death: and He grants us His righteousness that hereafter we may live and live to Him. This, according to Paul, is the very heart of the heart of the Gospel.
And now let us observe finally what according to Paul is the issue of all this for life. Here we have brought before us yet another primary characteristic of his Gospel. Shall we say. Because Jesus has done it all, there remains nothing for us to do? So says not Paul. We could not save ourselves, or do the least thing towards, or contributing to, our salvation. Until Jesus had died for us there was nothing for us to do but to die. We were dead in sin, and held under death for sin. But now since He has died for us, we can work our salvation out into life.
And that is what Paul teaches us. We cannot save ourselves: but having been saved, we can illustrate our salvation in newness of life.
"One died for all," he says, "therefore all died: and He died for all, that, living, they might no longer live for themselves, but to Him who for them died and rose again." "He that knew no sin was made sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him." "So then, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature: the old things have passed away, behold, they have become new." There is, it will be observed, a declaration here and an exhortation. The declaration is that this newness of life is the result of salvation in Christ. The exhortation is that we shall walk in accordance with this newness of life. The apostle does not leave it an open question whether those for whom Christ has died (and who, therefore,—so he says—have died with Him) shall possess this new life. He says they are "a new creation"; and a new creation is not a self-made thing, which waits upon our own choice whether it is made or not; but a product of the almighty power of God. And therefore the apostle at once adds that it has God for its author: "And all these things are of God." If Christ died for us, He died for us only for this end—that we may live and, living, may live not for ourselves, but to Him. If He was made sin for us, He was made sin for us only for this end—that we may be the righteousness of God in Him. The end can no more fail than the means. He who is in Christ Jesus is a "new creation." To him the old things have passed away; all has become wholly new. Paul had found it so: and he makes his finding it so the substance of his defence to the Corinthians. He could not but be true to his mission and office as an apostle of Christ: for it was the love of Christ—not his love to Christ, but Christ's love to him—which constrained him—held him in
—that he should not give himself to aught but that to which he was sent. Being in Christ, he was a new creation, and everything that was of the flesh had fallen away from him.
And every one who, like Paul, has been made the object of Christ's love, for whom Christ has died, and who has been made partaker of Christ's death, will like Paul find the love of Christ constraining him, will find the life of Christ flowing into his veins, will discover himself a new creation, looking out as such on a new world, filled with new enthusiasms, directing himself to new ends. You cannot die with Christ and not rise again with Him: it cannot be that He who knew no sin shall have been made sin for you, and you who have known no righteousness shall not be made the righteousness of God in Him.
This is Paul's declaration to you: and there could be no declaration of greater joy. Being in Christ Jesus, you have within you the powers of a new life, and they will grow, and grow, and grow. Sinner that you are, Christ who knew no sin has been made sin for you, and you shall become the righteousness of God in Him. Could there be a greater inducement to effort brought to bear upon us than this great declaration? It is God that is working in us: shall we not then work out our own salvation with fear and trembling? This is Paul's exhortation to you. In effect he says: Seeing that you are a new creation, live as becomes those who are a new creation. Desert the old plane of your living; it is not worthy of new creatures. Having died with Christ, live with and for Him. He has been made sin for you. See that you become the righteousness of God in Him. You are released from the bondage of sin and freed for a new life of holiness.
Live it. Adorn the Gospel you profess: for God has called you not to sin but to holiness, and if you walk not in this holiness,—are you in Him? have you died with Him? He who dies with Him lives also in and with Him, and living in and with Him lives to Him.
So the apostle mingles declaration and exhortation, warning and encouragement; and the upshot of it all is, as we cannot have failed long ere this to have told ourselves, that the Gospel he preaches is an eminently ethical Gospel. Righteousness in Christ, righteousness
through Christ,—justification, sanctification —these things do not stand with the apostle as separable entities over against one another, one of which can be had without the other. They are distinctly correlatives, implying and implicating one the other. It would be inconceivable to him that there could be sanctification which did not rest on justification, or that there could be justification which did not issue in sanctification. To die with Christ is to live with Him; to live with Him means to live to Him. To be reconciled with God by Christ's death means a new creation through His Spirit. Analysis of parts and stages there may be; distinguishings of inceptions from continuations and continuations from consummations: but to the apostle there is but one salvation, and that salvation is an indivisible whole. The holy life ripening into that perfection without which no man shall see the Lord, is not with Him an arbitrary addition to acceptance by God in Christ Jesus, but its natural and necessary outgrowth: and therefore, with all his proclamation of life in Christ, the life of faith, and of an objective salvation in the blood of Jesus, he never looses sight of the essence of salvation in holiness of life. So, in our present passage, the whole movement of which turns as on its hinge upon the substitution of Christ for sinners and His death in their behalf and their consequent righteousness in Him, the issue of all is found nevertheless in holiness of life. Those for whom Christ has died are, in their new creaturehood, to live no longer for themselves but for Him who died and rose again for them. The revolution in standing is marked by a revolution in living. If their trespasses are no longer imputed to them, they are also no longer to have trespasses to be imputed to them. In a word, their salvation is not merely from the penalty but from the power of sin: and the mark of it is the life that is free not only from the condemnation but from the commission of sin. We are saved while yet sinners, but not that we may remain sinners, but that we may glorify God and His saving power by becoming under His guidance saints.
This is what, according to Paul, we are saved to: this is what, in his conception of it, salvation is. It is the promise to us of a perfected life.
And surely there is no promise which could come to us with a more
penetrating appeal. There is no one of us so degraded that he would not fain be good: the desire that stirs within us may be so faded and so weak that we can scarcely call it a desire, but we secretly admire the good even when we pursue the bad. Paul points the way not to an inoperative admiration, but to an effective accomplishment. He says to us in effect that all which the best of men have longed for and vainly striven after and the worst have dully admired while impatiently spuming is placed within our reach in Christ Jesus. He says that in Him there is the potency of a new life and that this potency shall surely pass into actualization for all those that are in Him. Or if we choose, we can give form to his message to us to-day rather in the words of his Master and our Master. For what does he say in effect but this: Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled? For they shall be filled! Let these words be our encouragement to-day. Let them become from today the strength of our life. "They shall be filled!"