John McLeod Campbell · 20 of 23

CHAPTER XV. · Part 2

Thus are the outward preaching of the kingdom of God, and the revelation of that kingdom within us, known in their unity, in the experience of salvation; and the light shining in the Scriptures and the light shining in man are known as one light,--at once universal and individual, as is the nature of light. When I hear, in the most general reference to men, the words "God has given to us eternal life, and this life is in His Son,"--"This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased: hear ye Him,"--I hear what connects me in my own thoughts, as by a revelation of truth, with the fatherliness that is in God the Father, and the sonship that is in the Son of God; and so, still, as the light of life dawns on me, and brightens, and I become a child of light and of the day, when I know, in my own inner being, the Father drawing me to the Son, and the Son moving and quickening in me the cry, Abba, Father, and have the illustration of a personal experience shed upon the words of Christ--"No man knoweth the Son but the Father; neither knoweth any man the Father save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son will reveal Him;" still the fatherliness that is thus calling me to sonship, the sonship that is enabling to respond to that fatherliness,--I know as one receiving knowledge of the truth of things; my experience is that of conforming to what is a revelation to me at once of God and of man,--that is to say, as I am a man, of myself. In obeying I am obedient to the truth. I do not--I should say, I dare not--doubt the voice of that fatherliness by which I am drawn to the Son, or doubt that the Son is revealed to me by the teaching of the Father for this very end, that I may know the desire and choice of the Father of my spirit for me. I do not--I dare not--doubt the light of that sonship, or that the Son is truly teaching me, as well as lovingly teaching me, how it is right for me to feel towards the Father of my spirit,--the response to His heart which accords with the truth of what that heart is in relation to me. I do not ask, "Have I exercised a faith in Christ which has justified me, and am I certain that that faith is so sound as to warrant me to believe that now I am a child of God, and entitled to call Him Father?" I am exercising a faith to which it is a contradiction to doubt the fatherliness of my Father, or the welcome that awaits me in coming to Him as a child. I am exercising a faith in which it is impossible for me to be disobedient to the Son, quickening the cry, Abba, Father, in my spirit.

I have been at pains, in relation to justification by faith, to shew how faith excludes boasting; not by any artificial arrangement, nor at all by denying to the faith itself the attribute of righteousness, but, on the contrary, because it is itself the true righteousness, and that boasting is impossible in that light of the truth into which faith introduces; for in faith we are beholding the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ, and no flesh shall glory in His sight. I would add here, that the life of sonship, as now represented as quickened in us, excludes boasting.

That faith is trust in God, as He is revealed in Christ, excludes, as we have seen, boasting, and makes the righteousness of faith to be the opposite of self-righteousness;--that this faith apprehends the fatherliness of God, and that its responsive trust is sonship, this yet more and more excludes boasting. The trust of a child in a Father's heart is just the perfect opposite of a self-righteous trust; for it is a going back to the fountain of our being,--a dealing with that interest in us which was before we did good or evil; and, as cherished by us sinners towards God, against whom we have sinned, such trust deals with fatherliness as what has survived our sins; so that our trust, so far from being self-righteous, implies, commences with the confession of sin. Doubtless this trust is in itself holy--the mind of the Son; but it is not on that account less lowly,--less remote from boasting. Are we not, in cherishing it, "learning of Him who is meek and lowly in heart"?

There is, indeed, a further exclusion of boasting, in the consciousness that it is in the Son that we are approaching the Father,--that He, who made atonement for our sins, and brought into humanity the everlasting righteousness of sonship, is not the mere pattern of our life, but is Himself that life in us in which we are able to confess our sins, and to call God Father;--that He is the vine, that we are the branches. But I feel it important that we should realise that in its own nature, and apart from its derived character as existing in us, the confidence of sonship is essentially and necessarily the opposite of self-righteousness.

I the more insist upon this, while also desirous to fix attention on that deepest sense of dependence on Christ, which, in knowing Him as our life, our spirits prove, because I believe, that the whole attraction to conscience which has been found in the conception of an imputation of Christ's merits to us, has been its seeming fitness to secure the result of a peace with God free from self-righteousness, and which shall be really a trust in God and not in ourselves; the doing away with what Luther calls, "The monstrous idea of human merit, which must by all means be beat down;" and in reference to which he values the law as "a hammer with which to break it in pieces." This right result, essential to the glory of God in us, and to our being in harmony with the truth of things in the attitude of our spirits towards God, the truth of the life of sonship in us secures, and alone can secure.

Nay more, the life of sonship is not only the purest and simplest trust in the heart of the Father, but its nature is, because of the experience which it implies, to be a continually growing trust in God. I must see a Father's heart in God towards me before I can call Him Father; but, in calling Him Father, the consciousness which comes with so doing, is itself a fresh proof to me that He is my Father, and that in so believing I am not welcoming a cunningly devised fable; and thus progress in the life of sonship is not the coming to have a new ground of confidence towards God, but an experience which enables us to "hold fast the beginning of our confidence" more and more firmly. Experience, in calling God Father in spirit and in truth, becomes a source of increased freedom in doing so; not because it has created any further or fresh title to do so, for it has not, but because the rightness that is in this mind towards God, its harmony with the truth of our relation to Him, and the glory which it gives to Him, become clearer to us in that increased light as to what it is to follow God as dear children, which is implied in the experience of doing so.

And, as this holds true as to our trust in the Father, so also, as to our trust in Christ as our life, all experience of life in abiding in Him as a branch in the vine, only developes into deeper consciousness the sense of dependence upon Him, shutting us up to so abiding for all expectation of well being; for the more I know what it is to be able to say, ''I live, yet not I, but Christ in me," the more simple, and absolute, and continuous will be my living by Him. The mystery of God, both of the Father and of Christ, being thus experimentally known as our fellowship with the Father and with His Son Jesus Christ, abounds, the fulfilment of God's purpose in us enlightens us more and more in that purpose, and thereby deepens our faith in it as His purpose.

I do not feel that the ground for faith, which is thus found in the experience of faith, has been sufficiently valued, especially when the object has been to save us from looking for a ground of peace in ourselves. We cannot be too jealous of looking to self, if we rightly discriminate. But beyond all question, eternal life experienced must have its own proper consciousness; and the apprehension of it as given in Christ, and the consciousness of receiving it, and being alive in it as a conscious life, must be trusted to to exclude self-righteousness, as light excludes darkness, and not otherwise.

It seems to me that Luther, notwithstanding his high estimate of the righteousness that is in faith, and notwithstanding the power to prevail with God which he recognises as being in the feeblest utterance of the cry "Father," has not given its true place to the subjective experience of the life of sonship. I have felt justified in saying above, that the great Reformer was the preacher of justification by faith, according to a truer and stricter meaning of the expression than it has had, or could have had, in the teaching of those who have not understood as he did, either that condition of things which the gospel reveals to our faith, and which by its very nature excludes boasting, or that excellent glory which God has in the faith which apprehends and trusts God, according to the revelation of Himself which He has granted to us in Christ, and in the exercise of which our souls "make their boast in God." The difference is indeed broad and unmistakeable between the faith that would correspond with the revelation of a work of Christ performed on behalf of an elected number, by which he purchased and secured for them certain benefits to be in due time imparted to them,--according to the teaching of Dr. Owen and President Edwards; or the faith that would correspond with the modified Calvinism, which preaches a work of Christ for all men, by which a foundation has been laid on which God may righteously proceed in dispensing benefits to those who will receive them on that footing; and that faith to which Luther called men, when he proclaimed a work of Christ by which He had redeemed us, even all men, "from the law and death and all evils," and procured for us the adoption of sons, so that we are not under the law, but under grace, and are called to believe, directly and personally, and with appropriation to ourselves, because it is so in truth, that Christ is the Father's gift to us, that He is made of God unto us wisdom, and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption. For, however far Luther is from shedding light on the nature of the atonement, however little of the spiritual light which he had himself, he has imparted to us in an intellectual form which we can understand, and however startling, and incapable of acceptance according to their sound, are the expressions of which he makes choice in speaking of the relation to our sin, into which Christ came in working out our redemption; these things in him are very clear, viz., that he saw the Father in the Son, and therefore had confidence towards God, because of what he thus saw God to be; and that he saw Christ, and in Him all things pertaining to life and to godliness, as the gift of God to men, to all men, to every man:--so that he neither spoke of God as having come under an obligation to do certain things for an unknown some; nor as having put it in His own power righteously to extend mercy to all who would receive it on the ground on which it was offered; but as having already done the greatest thing for all men, and as calling upon all men to believe and enter upon the enjoyment of what He had done.

Yet while Luther's teaching has all the superiority which is implied in a truer conception of what is presented to our faith, as well as the advantage of a juster appreciation of the excellent nature of faith viewed in itself, it seems to me, as compared with the teaching of the Apostles, wanting in its setting forth of that to which the gospel calls man; a defect which, in reference to the twofold revelation in Christ, the revelation of fatherliness, and of sonship, may be expressed by saying, that his preaching is more a setting forth of the fatherliness in which we are to trust, than of the sonship to which we are called. Luther keeps before the mind

God as He is revealed to be trusted in,--trusted in at this moment, by those who have never trusted in Him before; rather than the contemplated life of Christ in us, in the conscious experience of which we are to grow day by day in the assurance of faith and free life of sonship. I do not at all mean that Luther would deny the soundness of all such increase of freedom, assuming it to be indeed that which has now been spoken of, viz., increased trust in God, and in His Christ, through the experience of trusting; but that this he does not set forth or dwell on. Therefore, while the history of his own first peace in God is, most profitably for us, present in all his commending of the gospel and putting away of the law, there is still in his renewed urging of the difficulty of trusting in Christ in seasons of deep realisation of our sins, a contrast, and, to my mind, an instructive contrast, to the calm consciousness of being living the new eternal life which breathes in such words as these, "We know that the Son of God is come, and hath given us an understanding, that we may know Him that is true, and we are in Him that is true, even in His Son Jesus Christ. This is the true God, and eternal life."

There is a state of mind in relation to the view now taken of the sonship quickened in us in faith, which it is right here to notice. The character of salvation as now represented, as what is accomplished in us by our being "brought out of darkness into God's marvellous light,'' it is felt difficult to harmonise with the greatness of the change which has come to pass in those who are saved, both as respects the condition of their own being, and their relation to God. It is asked, "If God is the Father of our spirits antecedent to our faith in Christ, and that the gospel reveals Him as our Father, how does the Apostle say--'In this are the children of God manifest, and the children of the devil'? And how, when the Jews said, 'God is our Father,' did the Lord seem to deny that it was so?--'If God were your Father ye would love me . . . ye are of your father the devil.' " The harmony between the abiding truth of our relation to God as we are all His offspring, and the oppositeness of the conditions of our being, which are by choice of our own will, according as we receive the light of Christ or believe the devil's lie, not being understood, it is felt that the expressions used in relation to those who are alive to God through faith in Christ, cannot have their truth simply in the spiritual conformity of these individual men, with a relation of all men to God, and a constitution of things in Christ which embraces all men; and therefore the gospel is received only as a revelation of a willingness in God to become our Father, and so a manifestation of the highest benevolence, but not the revelation of the interest of the Father of our spirits in us as His offspring.

In consistency with this conception of the gospel, it is held that in such discourses of our Lord as that recorded in the 5th, 6th, and 7th chapters of the Gospel of Matthew, the use of the name "Father," on which I have dwelt above as a part of our Lord's coming to men in His Father's name, is not to be understood as a claim made for God, and the setting forth of the conception of God with which men ought to approach Him, but as assuming faith and justification and adoption; so that to say, "When ye pray, say. Our Father," was not to teach men what they were to believe God already to be, but what He would become if they believed: so also that to say, "If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more will your heavenly Father give the Holy

Spirit to them that ask Him?" was not intended by our Lord to be understood as the proclaiming of a will in God to impart His Spirit to all, because He was the Father of the spirits of all flesh, but only of such a will as to those who had become His children by faith.

If it were only meant that our acting on such teaching implies faith, and that we only truly pray the Lord's prayer in the measure in which we receive the Son to reign in our hearts, there would be in this no more than a most needed warning,--seeing the great self-deception connected with the use of that prayer in a way of mere fleshly repetition of it, void of all life of sonship. But this is not what is meant; and so the parable of the prodigal son, on which so much weight has now been laid, is denied to be a preaching of the gospel, or a revelation of the interest with which God regards men--all men--while yet in their sins; its comfort being reduced to what, in consistency, can only be offered to men on the assumption that they have been adopted through faith, and are such as only need to be encouraged to return to their first love.

But while I notice this state of mind, and do so in much sympathy with the deep sense which it implies of the great issues involved in passing from death to life, I do not do so with the purpose of attempting to offer any help in relation to it, that has not been presented already in these pages. To my mind the expression of which I have made so much use--"My son was dead, and is alive again, both accords with the great change that faith implies, vindicating the strongest language in which its important results are ever expressed, and also fully recognises our original and abiding relation to God as the Father of our spirits.

But while some feel as if it were taking from the sense of salvation with which they themselves call God

Father as believing in Christ, thus to regard Him as the Father of the spirits of all flesh, others can testify, that the perfect freedom of sonship has only been attained by them in seeing the heart of the heavenly Father towards all men, to be revealed in Christ, and the life of sonship manifested in Christ to be the fulfilment of the divine purpose in themselves, because it is the fulfilment of the divine purpose in man.

I have just noticed the increased freedom in living the life of sonship, and increased assurance of being in the light of God, which comes through the actual experience of a true and living Christianity. Now, while this is, in one view, personal, it is in another view only a deeper certainty of knowledge as to the will of God in relation to all men, and the "common salvation." It is the record that God has given to us, that is, to men, eternal life, and that this life is in His Son, which he that believeth hath in himself. Therefore is the Christian a living Epistle of the grace of God.

The progress of mind often experienced in relation to the gospel is very instructive. Some who have at one time contemplated the atonement as having reference to an elected number, and have then felt that their own personal hold of salvation would be weakened if Christ had died for all men, have afterwards come to see, that they could never have felt intelligently certain that Christ had died for them, excepting as that fact was included in the fact that He had died for all men; and the unsatisfactory shifts had recourse to, in the attempt to combine a free preaching of Christ with a limited atonement, have become very palpable to them, and they have wondered how, saying, that, "though Christ had died only for some, He was freely offered to all," could ever have been received by them as an adequate foundation for an appropriating and personal faith. And so, as to the results of the work of redemption,--what we are called to apprehend as true antecedent to our faith,--what the statement "that God has given to us eternal life, and that this life is in His Son" amounts to,--many are for a time satisfied with the apprehension of a mercy in God embracing them, such as Christ's death for their sins implies,--a will in God to bestow benefits on them through Christ, who afterwards come to see, that a relation to them more internal to their own being, is alike implied in the language of Scripture, and required by their need,--if indeed they are to be alive to God through faith in Jesus Christ. They, therefore, welcome that fuller light of truth which at once reveals to them a gulf as left between them and Christ by the simple fact of an atonement external to their own being, and that gulf as done away with in the actual nearness of Christ to their spirits,--His presence in them as their true life. For they now understand the teaching of the Father, and His drawing of us to the Son, as what is in the Spirit, and not in the Scriptures only, and as what directs us to Christ, as He is present in our inner being, there where the sap of the vine passes into the branch--a present life to be welcomed or rejected--the ingrafted, in-breathed word, which is able to save our souls. To this presence of Christ in us is the testimony of God, "that He has given to us eternal life, and that this life is in His Son," now known to refer. And as now the literal spiritual truth of the testimony that God has given this gift, and brought it into the needed nearness--and if He had not, how should we?--is apprehended, so now also the manner of the teaching of the Son, the manner of His shewing us the Father, is understood. For it is found that, according as we receive the testimony of the Father to the Son, and, in obedience of faith, receive the Son as our true life, and in Him call God Father, the divine fatherliness becomes known by us as it can be known to sonship alone. For as, in respect of the natural relation which typifies the spiritual, where a father and his children are present together, with others also not his offspring, the children alone--yea, the children who know that they look upon their father, see--with the eyes of the heart--see a father; so also in the higher region in which we now are, the Son enables us, God's offspring, to see our heavenly Father, when, receiving Christ as our life, we in Him raise to the Father the eyes and the heart of true sonship.

In thus receiving and obeying the testimony of the Father to the Son, and, in consequence, knowing the Father as the Son knows Him, and gives us to know Him, is the deepest manner of experience of that word--"The secret of the Lord is with them that fear Him, and He will shew them His covenant."

But let us be clear as to the elements of our consciousness when this is our conscious history. We have not, by any movement of our own being, caused this drawing of the Father; we have only yielded to it;--neither have we by any movement of our being brought the Son thus near to us. He was thus near to us even when we knew it not. Only under the teaching of God we have Christ revealed in us the hope of glory. The mystery hid from ages and generations is made known to us. Therefore, understanding the nature of the grace of which we find ourselves the objects, we recognise it as that gracious kingdom of God within us which the gospel proclaims. We find our feet in a large place,--we are consciously in circumstances to receive and obey the word of Christ, "Abide in me;" the personality of these circumstances in relation to us, not being less, nor the importance of the issues that depend on the faith of them less either, because the grace in which we stand is the "common salvation." And, like the man, who at one time felt that to believe that Christ had died for all would weaken His own conscious hold of salvation, but who has subsequently understood that unless Christ died for all there was no certainty that He had died for him; so, if we ever felt a distinctive and elective character in the divine drawing which draws to Christ, and a distinctive and elective character in Christ teaching us to call God Father, an element in our religious peace, we now find the stability and depth of that peace to consist in the unindividual, the universal character of that testimony of the Father to the Son, and of that testimony of the Son to the Father, in which we are rejoicing with an individual and personal hearing and obedience of faith. Surely that others refuse God's teaching no more affects my certainty that I am receiving the light of truth in welcoming that teaching, than that others are refusing Christ, for whom He died as truly as for me, affects my peace in trusting in His death for me. Nay, that the voice of the Eternal Wisdom to which I listen, is "unto the sons of men," and to me individually, just as I am one of the sons of men, is one element in my certainty that it is the voice of God.

It is a remarkable and instructive fact, that the experience that the faith of a work of Christ without us, which left us without the knowledge of a presence and power of Christ within us, was inadequate to sustain the intelligent purpose of living the life of sonship,--and that the recognition of a nearer relation to Christ was needed,--has been to some the attraction of the doctrine of baptismal regeneration; the spiritual change in our inner being, so conceived of, seeming to supply that living link with Christ which has been felt to be necessary to our living by Him, and which the fact of the relation of Christ's work to all men did not provide. Yet the difference between a spiritual relation to Christ as our life, revealed in the preached gospel, and made known to us as a spiritual reality in our own inner being by the divine teaching, (the drawing of us to the Son by the Father,) and such a relation as coming into existence in connexion with the ordinance of baptism, and subsequently assumed in a way of faith in that ordinance, is one of the greatest possible amount and greatest possible importance.

Christian baptism is into "the name of God, the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit." It relates to a gospel proclaiming that name. It is administered to those capable of intelligent apprehension of the gospel, as believing in that name as the true name of God, and that in the light of which they see their relations to Him. Its administration to infants is only understandable on the assumption that they are already interested in that name of God, and that parents and ministers of Christ know them to be so, and are justified in bringing them up in the faith of that name as the true name of God. But that we should find in our baptism more than is in the name into which we have been baptised, and that "more," that spiritual relation to Christ in the light of which we can alone hear and respond to the call to follow God as dear children; this is, in effect, to believe about baptism that which would make it a contradiction of that name of God into which we are baptised. For to say that baptism brings us into the needed spiritual relation to Christ as our life, is to say, that we were not in it antecedently to baptism, that the grace which the gospel reveals to our faith has not amounted to this; that is to say, that we might know the name of God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and yet not feel in possession of the light of life.