XIV

JESUS AND THE SENSE OF SIN

The eye of the priest is forever on each sinful past as it matures. It is on this account that he can never close his confessional, or leave his penances behind him, or consider his sacrificial rites at an end. He fancies he can make each wrong past right, or cover it up from the eyes of God, by means of the substitutionary "sacrifice oblation and satisfaction" which he offers. He may even fancy that divine forgiveness means the complete removal of sin's penalty. But deliverance from a life of conscious sinning he regards as a practical impossibility. He must always have a bad past to deal with.

The prophet knows better. Proceeding scientifically, that is to say, dismissing all arbitrary theorizing and all crooked textual interpretations, he notes the facts of life as they appear upon its very surface even, and knows that no divine forgiveness ever breaks the indissoluble bond with which God himself has joined sin and suffering for the present life at least, and therefore that the afflicting and disabling effects of each man's sins can be traced in his body, his intellect and his painfully accusing conscience,

after his forgiveness as well as before it. The prophet can also warn the forgiven sinner that some of the consequences of his sins may curse his offspring, and even some of his acquaintances and their descendants, for generations; and that his own deliverance in the same directions, so far as it is possible at all, can be reached only through the steady observance by himself of God's various laws for the health of the body, the mind and the conscience. But he knows, too, that our salvation from lives of conscious sinning is a most prominent and essential part of the redeeming work of Jesus.

The divine forgiveness of sins is first of all a deliverance from sinning. It leaves no drunkard still a slave to his cups, no debauchee in thraldom to his vices, and no sinner whatever the bondman it found him. God accomplishes this deliverance by addressing himself through the morally awakened intellect to the affections and the will. Through causing the sinner to perceive the utter badness of sin in the light of his own holy love, he changes his enjoyment of it into discomfort, and his dislike of goodness in its chief demands into such a longing for it as cannot be satisfied short of complete obedience to God. Along with this revelation of sin and holiness God shows himself in Jesus as everywhere present to "set free from the control of Sin" the sinner in whom he is at work, and cause him to "become a servant to Righteousness." (Rom. 6:18.) Thus encour

aged by the divine inworking the sinner delivers himself over to God's will as far as he knows it through Jesus, and "recognizes the truth that his old self is crucified with Christ, in order that the body, the stronghold of Sin, may be rendered powerless, so that he may no longer be a slave to Sin." (Rom. 6:6.) (Rom. 6:6.) Then the testimony he

and his fellow believers adopt is this

"Thank God, there is deliverance through Jesus Christ, Our Lord. What the law could not do, in so far as our earthly nature weakened its action, God did, by sending his Son, with а nature resembling our sinful na

ture.

He condemned sin in that earthly nature, so that the requirements of the Law might be satisfied in us who live now in obedience, not to our earthly natures, but to the Spirit. There is, therefore, now no condemnation for those who are in union with Christ Jesus; for through our union with Christ Jesus the Law of the life-giving Spirit has set us free from the Law of Sin and Death." (Rom. 7:25; 8:1-4.)

I have placed the first verse of the eighth chapter last here to show as clearly as possible the precise nature and force of Paul's reasoning. His teaching at this point is the same as that of the tenth chapter of the letter to the Hebrews. He could not write of saving faith without serious obscurity, but he could read its holy fruits out of his own lofty experience. By its means he had been brought into "union with Christ

Jesus." By God's lovingkindness he had been saved through it. (Eph. 2:8.) "By God's lovingkindness," that is to say, he had through it been introduced to the place where he found himself constantly united with Jesus in the declaration to God himself—

"See, I have come to do thy will." (Heb. 10:9.) He had passed out of both God's condemnation and his own, because he had through Jesus passed out of his life of sinning. God's frown and his own rested upon the evil past which he had forsaken. That could never, of course, be otherwise, while he and God remained holy. Neither, while he and God remained holy, could it ever be otherwise than that they should both smile upon his present. He had ceased to belong to his past through quitting it for an ever-living present of devotion to the holy will of God. Through yielding himself up to all the requirements of this will that were known to him, he had been taken up into it, and by it had been purified, sanctified, or set apart for a life of obedient doing and suffering, like that of Jesus himself. (Heb. 10:10.) And how could God deny his approval to the character, which, as the God of salvation, it was his special work to impart? And did not God demand of him that he also should give it his approval?

I have taken pains to elaborate this point because the self-approval of Christ-like men is still viewed with grave suspicion by influential lead

ers of Christian thought. And I cannot pass away from it without a further word. Where is there one syllable of apostolic warrant for the cultivation of a guilty self-accusing spirit? The man who answers that the seventh chapter of Romans certainly furnishes it, is a man who can believe it possible for a Christian to live in that experience and the experience of the eighth chapter at one and the same time; and not only possible but necessary. To him holiness of character may strike desire through and through, but never the dispositions or the will. He thinks that the joy of salvation arises from the conviction that some one else was holy in our place, with a holiness which on the one condition of humble trust avails for us all, because it is imputed to each believer in all its fullness. We are holy for the most part by proxy. It is ours "to exult in God, through Jesus Christ, our Lord," not because through his obedience unto death we have, by the divine spirit, been brought into the completest conscious reconciliation or harmony with God, but because he died in our place! and was raised again for our justification. God pronounces us righteous while he knows we are no such thing, but still the bond-slaves of sin and crying out in anguish, "Who shall deliver me?" So long as we are here in the flesh we can do no better than mingle our bitter cry of actual daily defeat with our pean of triumph over a victory achieved in our human nature by one, whom it