John McLeod Campbell · 10 of 23

CHAPTER VII. · Part 2

Nor is it by what He presented in Himself as under His Father's guidance alone, that the Son of God reveals to us the Father. He vindicates the name of the Father, and condemns our sin as rebellious children, by all that we see the Father to be to Him through His following God as a dear child walking in love. I have, in this view, noticed above the place which our Lord's "peace'' and "joy," of which He speaks to the disciples as known to them, had in His witnessing for the Father: for, indeed, the Son would have been an imperfect witness for the Father if He was not, by those who saw Him truly, seen to have peace and joy in the Father,--a peace and a joy to which often an unclouded expression would be permitted,--but which would abide in His spirit, however His sorrows from all else might abound; and in respect of which all such sorrows, though they might be what would justify the appeal, "Look, and see if there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow," would be but the trial of faith, and the more abundant manifestation of what the Father was to the Son. Now, as to all by which the Son thus honoured the Father, we are to see that it all entered into His hope for us in His making His soul an offering for sin, because it was in humanity that He was having all this experience.

I have said above that we are to understand that He who is the revealer of God to man is also the revealer of man to Himself. Apart from Christ we know not our God, and apart from Christ we know not ourselves: as, indeed, it is also true, that we are as slow to apprehend and to welcome the one revelation as the other,--as slow to see man in Christ, as to see God in Christ. We have seen how much loss even earnest, and deep thinking, and holy men have suffered through not looking upon the life of love in Christ as the revelation of the Father;--how it has thus come to pass that, looking upon Christ's love to men merely as the fulfilment for man of the law under which man was, they have dwelt on that fulfilment, and enlarged on the circumstances which prove how perfect it was, and yet have not read the heart of God--the love of God to all men, in that record of the life of Christ which they were studying. And so also, these same men, through the assumption that in the life of Christ they were contemplating the working out of a legal righteousness for man, to be his by imputation, as they were turned away from seeing God in Christ, so have also been turned away from seeing man in Christ, seeing themselves in Christ, seeing the capacities of their own being in Christ. Not for His own sake but for our sakes did the Son of God reveal the hidden capacity of good that is in man by putting forth in humanity the power of the law of the Spirit of His own life--the life of sonship. "For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and as a sacrifice for sin, condemned sin in the flesh, that the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us who walk not after the flesh, but after the spirit." We, then, for whose sake this has been, must learn to see in this revelation of what humanity is when pervaded with the life of sonship, that redemption of which we were capable, and which we have in Christ, and set ourselves to the study of the twofold discovery of God and of man in Christ, with the conviction that in it are hid for us all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.

I have said above that the Son alone could reveal the Father--for, indeed, manifested sonship can alone reveal fatherliness, being that in which the desire of that fatherliness is fulfilled,--which therefore reveals that desire by fulfilling it. Thus are we to understand the voice of the Father saying of the Son, "This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased"--which voice, when heard in our hearts, is that drawing of the Father through which we come to the Son. And in this light are we to receive the words, "hear ye Him," which declare the purpose of that drawing. For we are called to hear the Son that we may know the Father through knowing the Son in whom He is well pleased, and so may know what is the Father's desire as to ourselves, and what He has given to us in the Son, that that desire of His heart for us may be fulfilled in us. Let the reader examine his own heart as to the measure in which this is the ground of the interest with which he regards the divine righteousness in humanity, and the Father's testimony to the Son. For, assuredly, it ought to be so; and we ought to be jealous of every thought and view that divides attention with the gift of eternal life--jealous of our going out of the circle of the life that is in Christ in search of the unsearchable riches which we have in Christ; above all, jealous of occupying our imagination with an unknown future blessedness, to be bestowed on us for Christ's sake, instead of keeping to what is included in Christ, in the mind revealed in Christ, and so is addressed to the will in man, as what we are to partake in in yielding our will to be guided by the law of the Spirit of the life that is in Christ--the life of sonship: which is in itself riches, unsearchable infinite riches, because it, and it alone, enjoys the Father as the Father, making us heirs of God,--theirs of God, and joint heirs with Jesus Christ.

One has spoken of difficulty in joining, in anticipation, "himself and glory in one thought." The greater difficulty is to join ourselves and eternal life in one thought now,--although God has already in Christ so connected us in the very truth of things. But, as I have said, we are alike slow of heart to receive Christ's revelation of ourselves, and to receive His revelation of God,--to believe that God has given to us eternal life in His Son, and to believe that God is love.

I know, indeed, that the difficulty felt in believing that our humanity and its capacity of good in respect of the eternal life which we have in Christ, is what the life of Christ reveals it to be,--is what we are tempted to excuse on the ground of the felt sinfulness of our own nature. Yet, is not the deepest knowledge of that sinfulness expressed in the verses just before those in which the Apostle recognises the power of the law of the Spirit of the life that is in Christ to make us free from the law of sin and death? Has, in this matter, experimental knowledge ever gone further than what the words express,--"I find a law in my members warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin that is in my members. O wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this death?" This was the question, and this the state of mind in relation to which the knowledge of the power of the life of sonship in humanity moved the Apostle to thank God through Jesus Christ. We know not the truth of humanity,--we know only its perversion while we are living the life of self and enmity, and are as gods to ourselves. What it is to be a man, what we possess in humanity, we never know until we see humanity in Him who through the eternal Spirit offered Himself without spot to God.

Let us understand it. The difficulty of believing the revelation of man that is in Christ, and the difficulty of believing the revelation of God that is in Christ, is one difficulty. To believe that God is love, as this is revealed by His manifestation of love to us, is to believe that love, as ascribed to God in relation to man, means, that desire for man which is fulfilled in the humanity of Christ, and can in that alone be satisfied. Therefore, those general conceptions of the divine mercy and benevolence which are formed when God is contemplated only as so feeling for our misery and desiring our happiness as that He gave Christ to die for us that we might be saved from misery and partake in everlasting bliss, however they are true conceptions so far as they go, come altogether short of the love of God to us in Christ Jesus. For the element of fatherliness is wanting--what it craves for--what alone can satisfy it. But on fatherliness, as ascribed to God, is the attention kept continually fixed in the gospel. That God has a Father's heart, may not, indeed, be admitted as a proof that the capacity of sonship has remained to us. But, at least, the manifestation of that fatherliness by the Son as the light of life to us does prove it.

Let us not think of Christ, therefore, simply as revealing how kind and compassionate God is, and how forgiving to our sins, as those who have broken His righteous law. Let us think of Christ as the Son who reveals the Father, that we may know the Father's heart against which we have sinned, that we may see how sin, in making us godless, has made us as orphans, and understand that the grace of God, which is at once the remission of past sin, and the gift of eternal life, restores to our orphan spirits their Father, and to the Father of spirits His lost children.

I have dwelt above on the difference between a filial standing and a legal standing. I have spoken also of what Christ's being our example in the life of faith implies as to the footing on which we are to draw near to God, and the nature of the confidence which Christ desires to quicken in us. Yet I feel it necessary thus to insist upon the faith of the sonship in humanity, which is revealed in Christ, as the necessary supplement and complement of the faith of the fatherliness, revealed to be in God: and I must often recur to this because, in truth, my hope of helping any out of the perplexities and confusions which I feel to prevail on the subjects of justification and sanctification, is simply the hope of helping them to see the contradiction between coming to God in the spirit of sonship, with the confidence which the faith of the Father's heart sustains, and coming to God with a legal confidence as righteous in His sight, because clothed with a legal righteousness, or at least accepted on the ground of such a righteousness.

In speaking of that which he had come to experience through knowledge of the eternal life which was with the Father and was manifested in the Son--that experience into the fellowship of which he desired to bring others, the Apostle says, ''And truly our fellowship is with the Father and with His Son Jesus Christ." "Father" and "Son" here do more than indicate persons: they indicate that in these persons with which the fellowship is experienced. Eternal life is to the Apostle a light in which the mind of fatherliness in the Father, and the mind of sonship in the Son, are apprehended and rejoiced in. This teaching as to the nature of salvation is the same which we receive from the Lord Himself when He says, "This is eternal life, to know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent;" as also when He says, "If a man love me, he will keep my words: and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him."

Let the reader think of this, and take his own experience to this light. To me it appears, that the temptation to stop short of the light that shines to us in the communion of the Son with the Father in humanity is strong, and greatly prevails. But this light is the very light of life to us; for this communion is the gift of the Father to us in the Son. In the experience of this communion in our nature and as our brother, did our Lord look forward to our partaking in it as what would be our salvation. The seventeenth chapter of the Gospel of John most fully declares this. Indeed the evidence abounds that it was this which was ever in the contemplation of Christ in glorifying the Father on the earth; while of anything like the consciousness of being working out a righteousness to be imputed to men to give them a legal ground of confidence towards God there is no trace.

I have already referred to President Edwards' legal representation of the righteousness of Christ, assumed to be imputed in faith, as perfected in His obedience unto death, and that of which God manifested His acceptance when He raised Christ from the dead. But the testimony to the Saviour was deeper and higher. Christ was declared to be the Son of God by the resurrection from the dead. The righteousness then acknowledged was none other than what the Father had previously borne testimony to when He said, "This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased;"--on the sonship, the life of sonship that was in Christ, was attention thus fixed, and not on the legal perfection of the righteousness which it fulfilled. How then can we think of the Father's testimony to the Son as other than a commending of sonship to us, or think of the Father's delight in the Son otherwise than as what justifies His imparting the life of sonship to us?

Let us in this light regard Christ's being delivered for our offences, and raised again for our justification. The offences for which He made expiation were ours,--that expiation being the due atonement for the sin of man--accepted on behalf of all men. His righteousness, declared in His resurrection from the dead, is ours--the proper righteousness for man, and in Him given to all men: and that righteousness is NOT the past fact

of legal obligation discharged, but the mind of sonship towards the Father; for in the beloved Son is the Father seen to be well pleased, and in our being through Him to the Father dear children will it come to pass that the Father will be well pleased in us.

II. All that we thus learn as to the prospective reference of the atonement in considering Christ's own manifested life in humanity as His witnessing for the Father to men, is confirmed, and further light shed upon it, when we consider with the same prospective reference the atonement as the Son's dealing with the Father on our behalf.

We cannot conceive of our Lord's dealing with the Father on our behalf without passing on to its prospective reference. We could not formerly speak freely of that intercession for sinners which the Prophet has conjoined with His bearing of their sins, because that intercession could not be conceived of as stopping short of the prayer for our participation in eternal life, to which the expiatory confession of our sins, and prayer for the pardon of our sins necessarily led forward, and in connexion with which alone they could have existed. We now approach the subject of this dealing of Christ with the Father in the light of Christ's own perfection in humanity, and connect His laying hold of the hope for man which was in God with the Father's testimony that He was well pleased in the Son. What we have thought of Christ as necessarily desiring for us, was the fellowship of what He Himself was in humanity. This, therefore, was that which He would ask for us; and we can now understand that He would do so with a confidence connected with His own consciousness that in humanity He abode in His Father's love and in the light of His countenance. Thus would His own righteousness be presented along with the confession of our sins when He asked for us remission of sins and eternal life.

And this is the right conception of Christ pleading His own merits on our behalf. Our capacity of that which He asked for us was so implied in these merits, and the Father's delight in these merits so implied His delight in their reproduction in us, that the prayer which proceeds on these grounds is manifestly according to the will of the Father--to offer it is a part of the doing of the Father's will--to offer it in the faith and hope of an answer is a part of the trust in the Father by which He declared the Father's name, and is to be contemplated as completing that response to the mind of the Father towards us in our sin and misery, which was present but in part in the retrospective confession of our sin.

And these--the confession and the intercession--so harmonise, are so truly each the complement of the other, that we feel in passing from the one to the other our faith in the Father's acceptance of each confirmed by seeing it in connexion with the other; that is to say, we more easily believe in the Father's acceptance of Christ's expiatory confession of our sins when we see that confession as contemplating our yet living to God--our partaking in eternal life; and we more easily believe in the gift of eternal life to those who have sinned, when we see it in connexion with that due and perfect expiation for their past sin.

It is in the dealing of the Son with the Father on our behalf, thus in all its aspects before us, that the full light of the atonement shines to us. In the life of Christ, as the revelation of the Father by the Son, we see the love of God to man--the will of God for man--the eternal life which the Father has given to us in the Son--that salvation which the gospel reveals as the

Apostle knew it when he invited men to the fellowship of it as fellowship with the Father and with His Son Jesus Christ. Proceeding from this contemplation of the light of eternal life as shining in Christ's own life on earth, to consider the Son in His dealing with the Father on our behalf, and contemplating Him now as bearing us and our sins and miseries on His heart before the Father, and uttering all that in love to the Father and to us He feels regarding us--all His divine sorrow--all His desire--all His hope--all that He admits and confesses as against us--all that, notwithstanding. He asks for us, with that in His own human consciousness, in His following the Father as a dear child walking in love, which justifies His hope in making intercession--enabling Him to intercede in conscious righteousness as well as conscious compassion and love,--we have the elements of the atonement before us as presented by the Son and accepted by the Father, and see the grounds of the divine procedure in granting to us remission of our sins and the gift of eternal life. We are contemplating what the Son, who dwells in the bosom of the Father, and whom the Father heareth always, offers to the Father as what He knows to be according to the Father's will, which, receiving the Father's acknowledgment as accepted by Him, is sealed to us as the true and perfect response of the Son to the Father's heart and mind in relation to man, the perfect doing of His will--the perfect declaring of His name.

In the light of what God thus accepted when Christ through the eternal Spirit offered Himself without spot to God, we see the ultimate ground--the ultimate foundation in God--for that peace with God which we have in Christ. I say the ultimate ground in God for that peace with God which we have in our Lord Jesus

Christ; for, while the immediate ground is the atonement thus present to our faith, that is to say, the purpose as fulfilled which our Lord expressed, when coming to put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself, He said, "Lo, I come to do thy will, O God;" yet clearly it is that eternal will itself which He thus came to do, and which by doing it the Son has revealed, even that name of God which the Son has declared, which is itself the ultimate peace and rest of our spirits.

In this full light of the atonement our first conviction is, that in this divine transaction in humanity, through which we have the remission of our sins and the gift of eternal life, there has been nothing arbitrary. We see a righteous and necessary relation between the remission of our sins and Christ's expiatory confession as the due and adequate confession of them--a perfect expiation in that it was divine,--perfect in relation to us in that it was human. We see a righteous and necessary relation between the gift of eternal life and Christ's righteousness; God's delight in that righteousness in humanity justifying to us the Son's offering it, and the Father's accepting it on behalf of man to be the righteousness of man.

We see further that what is thus offered on our behalf is so offered by the Son and so accepted by the Father, entirely with the prospective purpose that it is to be reproduced in us. The expiatory confession of our sins which we have been contemplating is to be shared in by ourselves: to accept it on our behalf was to accept it as that mind in relation to sin in the fellowship of which we are to come to God. The righteous trust in the Father, that following Him as a dear child walking in love, which we have been contemplating as Christ's righteousness, is to be shared in by us: to accept it on our behalf as the righteousness of man, was to accept it as what pleases God in man,--what alone can please God in man,--therefore as that in the fellowship of which we are to draw near and live that life which is in God's favour.

In the light of the atonement this is seen clearly; and the light, as our eyes become able to bear it, reconciles us to itself. We soon are thankful that what God has accepted for us in Christ, is also what God has given to us in Christ. As to our past sins, we not only see that the atonement presented to our faith is far more honouring to the righteous law of God against which we had sinned, than any penal infliction for our sins, whether endured by another for us, or endured by ourselves in abiding misery, could have been; but are further able to accept, as a most welcome part of the gift of God in Christ, the power to confess our sins with an Amen to Christ's confession of them, true and deep in the measure in which we partake in His Spirit. We are contented and thankful to begin our new life with partaking in the mind of Christ concerning our old life, and feel the confession of our sins to be the side on which the life of holiness is nearest to us, the form in which it naturally becomes ours, and in which it must first be tasted by us: for holiness, truth, righteousness, love, must first dawn in us as confessions of sin. So we welcome the fellowship of the mind in which Christ, by the grace of God, tasted death for every man, as the first breathing of that life which comes to us through His death. As to our interest in the righteousness of Christ, we not only soon see that the acceptance of that righteousness on behalf of man, with the purpose of imparting it to man, is more glorifying to the divine delight in righteousness than any other conception that has been entertained, but also feel the confidence toward the Father which we cherish in receiving Christ as our life, what, by our own experience in cherishing it, we know to be the only confidence towards God which can meet alike the desires of His heart for us, and the need of our own spirits as God's offspring.

And thus we are in a light in which all drawing of us by the Father to the Son,--that is to say, all testifying to our spirits by the Father of our spirits that He has given to us eternal life in His Son,--comes to us as the personal application to ourselves of that eternal will of God which we have seen revealed in Christ's dealing with the Father on our behalf. This drawing is felt to accord with, and to be interpreted by, the offering of the Son, and the acceptance of that offering by the Father; and as our faith realises the work of atonement,--Christ's confession of our sins, Christ's presentation of His own righteousness in humanity in relation to us, and the Father's acceptance of both on our behalf,--we are more and more able to understand and to believe the testimony of God in the Spirit, that God has given to us eternal life, and that this life is in His Son.

In proportion as the light of the divine counsel thus strengthens to us, and in proportion to the growing awakenedness of our spirits to the proper consciousness of God's offspring and realisation of what the divine fatherliness must be,--what it must desire,--what alone can be satisfying to it,--we come to see the work of redemption in the light of our ultimate and root relation to God as the Father of spirits, with whom abides the fountain of life. We see that, however we had departed from God, our true well-being continued to be, and must ever continue to be, so bound up in what God is to us in Himself, and what the aspect of our mind is towards Him, as that nothing external to this,--nothing in God's outward dealing with us,--nothing that He can give or we can receive,--nothing that is not included in the state of our own spirits towards God, and the response in our own hearts to that which is in His heart towards us,--can be our salvation.

I have noticed above how much we may deceive ourselves if we expect that light from the typical sacrifices under the law which can only be shed upon us by the antitype itself. But there is an error from which these services might have saved men, which yet has been fallen into. What these services present to us as the picture of God's spiritual kingdom, is, a temple and a worship, --the participation in that worship being the good set forth,--disqualification for that worship the evil,--and sacrifices, and participation in these sacrifices, the means of deliverance from that evil and participation in that good. Not to deliver from punishment, but to cleanse and purify for worship, was the blood of the victim shed. Not the receiving of any manner of reward for righteousness, but the being holy and accepted worshippers, was the benefit received through being sprinkled with the victim's blood. In the light of this centre idea of worship, therefore, are we to see the sprinkling of all things with blood, and the remission of sins to which this related.

Accordingly, when we pass from the type to the antitype, we find worship the great good set forth to us--that worship in spirit and in truth which the heart of the Father craves for,--that worship which is sonship,--the response of the heart of the Son to the heart of the Father. We find the disqualification for worship to be not a mere fact of guilt, but the carnal mind which is enmity against God,--the law in man's members warring against the law of his mind, and bringing him into captivity to the law of sin that is in his members. We find that when the Son of God came to be the needed victim, and to put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself, He indicated the nature and virtue of His contemplated sacrifice by the words, "Lo, I come to do thy will, O God;" so that by this will it is that we are sanctified through the offering of the body of Christ,--the blood shed for the remission of sins being the blood of Christ, who, through the eternal Spirit, offered himself without spot to God, which purges the conscience from dead works to serve the living God.

Thus we are taught the strictly moral and spiritual relation of the sacrifice to the worship,--we see the fitness of the blood shed to fit the spirits which shall be washed in it to partake in that worship,--we see the mind of Christ, which is in that blood, to be that mind in the light of which and in the fellowship of which the worshipper will cry, Abba, Father. Finally, we see why the High Priest and head of this worship is the Son of God; and why His relation to the worshippers is not "the law of a carnal commandment,"--not a mere institution or arrangement, but a spiritual relation, viz., "the power of an endless life,"--so that He is their High Priest in that He is their life.