Liberating judgement

We must ask, have we in the church not often been responsible for obscuring this liberating meaning of the message about God's final judgement, because we have preached the word of judgement loudly and urgently to the weak and defenseless, while frequently our preaching has been too soft and half-hearted when directed to the powerful of this earth.

Erich Zenger, in A God of Vengeance? understanding the Psalms of Divine wrath, page 65 (quoted in The Psalter Reclaimed, by Gordon Wenham, page 138)

Love, meaningless without judgement

The holiness of God is a deeper revelation in the cross than His love; for it is what gives His love divine value. And it is meaningless without judgement. The one thing He could not do was simply to wipe the slate and write off the loss. He must either inflict punishment or assume it. And He chose the latter course, as honouring the law while saving the guilty. He took His own judgement. It was a course that produced more than all the effect of punishment, and in a better, holier way. It was vindicative and not vindictive. It re-established the holiness; it did not just confound the sinner. Expiation, therefore, is the very opposite of exacting punishment; it is assuming it. Nor is it exacting the last farthing in any quantitative sense. That is not required in a full, true, and sufficient satisfaction. The holy law is satisfied by an adequacy short of equivalency, by due confession of it and not by exaction; by due confession which fully gauges the whole moral situation, as neither sin nor love alone could do; by practical confession in an experience as holy to God as it was sympathetic to man; and by practical confession of God's holiness far more than man's guilt. What a holy God requires is the due confession of His holiness before even the confession of sin.

 

P T Forsyth, in The Cruciality of the Cross, pages 205-6

The Starting-point

In approaching this subject let us be clear about our starting-point. It is the Church and its moral faith. The truth of Christianity cannot be proved to the man in the street till he come off the street by owning its power. In our modern psychology we start from the primacy of the will, and we bring everything to the test of man’s practical and ethical life. And so, here also we start ethically from the holiness of God as the supreme interest in the Christian revelation. The standpoint taken by the Church is that which I believe to be the position of the New Testament. That book represents a grand holiness movement; but it is one which is more concerned with God’s holiness than ours, and lets ours grow of itself by dwelling on His. Christianity is concerned with God’s holiness before all else; which issues to man as love, acts upon sin as grace, and exercises grace through judgment. The idea of God’s holiness is inseparable from the idea of judgement as the mode by which grace goes into action.  And by judgement is meant not merely the self-judgment which holy grace and love stir in man, but the acceptance by Christ of God’s judgment on man’s behalf and its conversion in him to our blessing by faith.

 

By the atonement, therefore, is meant that action of Christ’s death which has a prime regard to God’s holiness, has it for its first charge, and finds man’s reconciliation impossible except as that holiness is divinely satisfied once for all on the cross. Such an atonement is the key to the incarnation. We must take that view of Christ which does most justice to the holiness of God. this starting-point of the supreme holiness of God’s love, rather than its pity, sympathy, or affection, is the watershed between the Gospel and the theological liberalism which makes religion no more than the crown of humanity and the metropolitan province of the world. My point of departure is that Christ’s first concern and revelation was not simply the forgiving love of God, but the holiness of such love.

 

P T Forsyth, in the Introduction to The Cruciality of the Cross, pages 4-6

Just deserts

The fourth of six summings-up that P T Forsyth gives in the sixth chapter of his book, The Work of Christ (page 150)

In this relation to God's holiness and its satisfaction, nobody now thinks of the transfer of our punishment to Christ in its entirety - including the worst pains of hell in a sense of guilt. Christ experienced the world's hate, and the curse of the law in the sense of the suffering entailed on man by sin; but a direct infliction of men's total deserts upon him by God is unthinkable. His penalty was not punishment, because it was dissociated from the sense of desert.  Whatever we mean by atonement must be interpreted in that sense. And judgement is a much better word than either penalty or punishment.

The last judgement

The holiness of God becomes our salvation not by slackness of demand but by completeness of judgement; not because he relaxes his demand, not because he spends less condemnation on sin, lets us off or lets sin off, or lets Christ off ('spared not'); but because in Christ judgement becomes finished and final, because none but a holy Christ could spread sin out in all its sinfulness for thorough judgement.
I have a way of putting it which startles some of my friends.  The last judgement is past. It took place on Christ's cross. What we talk about as the last judgement is simply the working out of Christ's cross in detail. The final judgement, the absolute judgement, the crucial judgement for the race took place in principle on the Cross of Christ. Sin had been judged finally there. All judgement is given to the Son in virtue of his Cross. All other debts are bought up there.

From The Work of Christ, by P T Forsyth, page 137

Holy love or nothing

Get rid of the idea that judgement is chiefly retribution, and directly infliction. Realise that it is, positively, the establishing and the securing of eternal righteousness and holiness. View punishment as an indirect and collateral necessity, like the surgical pains that make room for nature's curing power. You will then find nothing morally repulsive in the idea of judgment effected in and on Christ, any more than in the thought that the kingdom was set up for him.

God could only justify man before him by justifying himself and his holy law before men. If he had not vindicated his holiness to the uttermost in that way of judgment, it would not be a kind of holiness that men could trust. Thus a faith which could justify man, which could make a foundation for a new humanity, could not exist. We can only be eternally justified by faith in a God who justifies himself as so holy that he must set up his holiness in human history at any price, even at the price of his own beloved and eternal Son.

I close, then, upon that unchangeable word of God's self-justifying holiness. Even the sinner could not trust a love that could not justify itself as holy. It is the holiness of God's love, I urge, that alone enables us to trust him. Without that we should only love him, and the love would fluctuate. For we could not be perfectly sure that his would not. It is the holiness in God's love that is the eternal, stable, unchangeable element in it - the holiness secured for history and its destiny in the Cross. It is only the unchangeable that we could trust; and there alone we find it. If we only loved the love of God, we should have no staple, eternal, universal religion. But we love the holy love he established in Christ, and therefore we are safe with an everlasting salvation.

From P T Forsyth's The Work of Christ, pages 122-3

Reconciliation

The following is a very long extract from pages 89-93 of P T Forsyth's The Work of Christ. Because it's all of a piece, it's difficult to extract anything shorter. I've re-paragraphed it (not necessarily in places Forsyth would have chosen) otherwise it appear even longer in a blog post. 

Reconciliation, then, has no meaning apart from a sense of guilt, that guilt which is involved in our justification....I want to note here that it means not so much that God is reconciled, but that God is the reconciler.  It is the neglect of that truth which has produced so much scepticism in the matter of the atonement. So much of our orthodox religion has come to talk as though God were reconciled by a third part. We lose sight of this great central verse, ‘God was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself.’  As we are both living persons, that means that there was reconciliation on God’s side as well as ours; but wherever it was, it was effected by God himself in himself. 

In what sense was God reconciled within himself?  We come to that surely as we see that the first charge upon reconciling grace is to put away guilt, reconciling by not imputing trespasses. Return to our cardinal verse, II Corinthians 5 v 19, [God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them]. In reconciliation the ground for God’s wrath or God’s judgement was put away. Guilt rest on God’s charging up sin; reconciliation rests upon God’s non-imputation of sin; God’s non-imputation of sin rests upon Christ being made sin for us. 

You have thus three stages in this magnificent verse. God’s reconciliation rests upon this, that on his eternal son, who knew no sin in his ex  Christ was made sin for us, as he could never have been if he had been made a sinner. It was sin that had to be judged, more even than the sinner, in a world-salvation; and God made Christ sin in this sense, that God as it were took him in the place of sin, rather than of the sinner, and judged the sin upon him; and in putting him there he really put himself there in our place (Christ being what he was); so that the divine judgement of sin was real and effectual.  That is, it fell where it was perfectly understood, owned, and praised , and had the sanctifying effect of judgement, the effect of giving holiness at last its own.

perience (although he knew more about sin that any man who has ever lived), sin’s judgement fell. Him who knew no sin by experience, God made sin. That is to say, God by Christ’s own consent identified him with sin in treatment though not in feeling. God did not judge him, but judged sin upon his head. He never once counted him sinful; he was always well please with him; it was part, indeed, of his own holy self-complacency.

God made him to be sin in treatment though not in feeling, so that holiness might be perfected in judgement, and we might become the righteousness of God in him; so that we might have in God’s sight righteousness by our living union with Christ, righteousness which did not belong to us actually, naturally, and finally.  Our righteousness is as little ours individually as the sin of Christ was his. The thief on the cross, for instance – I do not suppose he would have turned what we call a saint if he had survived; though saved, he would not have become sinless all at once. And the great saint, Paul, had sin working in him long after his conversion. Yet by union with Christ they were made God’s righteousness, they were integrated into the new goodness; God made them partakers of his eternal love to the ever-holy Christ.  That is a most wonderful thing. Men like Paul, and far worse men than Paul, by the grace of God, and by a living faith, became partakers of that same eternal love which God from everlasting and to everlasting bestowed upon his only-begotten Son.  It is beyond words.

It was not a case of wiping a slate. Sin is graven in. You cannot wipe off sin. It goes into the tissue of the spiritual being. And it alters things for both parties. Guilt affected both God and man. It was not a case of destroying an unfortunate prejudice we had against God. it was not a case of putting right a misunderstanding we had of God. ‘You are afraid of God,’ you hear easy people say; ‘it is a great mistake to be afraid of God. there is nothing to be afraid of. God is love.’ But there is everything in the love of God to be afraid of.  Love is not holy without judgement. It is the love of holy God that is consuming fire. It was not simply a case of changing our method, or thought, our prejudices, or moral direction of our soul. It was not a case of giving us courage when we were cast down, showing us how groundless our depression was. It was not that. If that were all it would be a comparatively light matter.

If that were all, Paul could only have spoke about the reconciliation of single souls, not about reconciliation of the whole world as a unity. He could not have spoken about a finished reconciliation to which every age of the future was to look back as its glorious and fontal [pertaining to the source] past. In the words of that verse which I am constantly pressing, ‘God was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself.’

Observe first, ‘the world’ is the unity which corresponds to the reconciled unity of ‘himself’; and second, that he was not trying, not taking steps to provide means of reconciliation, not opening doors of reconciliation if we would only walk in at them, not labouring toward reconciliation, not (according to the unhappy phrase) waiting to be gracious, but ‘God was in Christ reconciling’ actually reconciling, finishing the work. It was not a tentative, preliminary affair (Romans xi 15 [for if the casting away of them be the reconciling of the world, what shall the receiving of them be, but life from the dead?]). Reconciliation was finished in Christ’s death. Paul did not preach a gradual reconciliation. He preached what the old divines used to call the finished work. He did not preach a gradual reconciliation which was to become the reconciliation of the world only piecemeal, as men were induced to accept it, or were affected by the gospel. He preached something done once for all – a reconciliation which is the base of every soul’s reconciliation, not an invitation only. What the church has to do is to appropriate the thing that has been finally and universally done.

We have to enter upon the reconciled position, on the new creation. Individual men have to enter upon that reconciled position, that new covenant, that new relation, which already, in virtue of Christ’s Cross, belonged to the race as a whole. I will even use for convenience’ sake the word totality. (People turn up their noses at a word like that, and they say it smells of philosophy. Well, philosophy has not a bad smell! You cannot have a proper theology unless you have a philosophy. You cannot accurately express the things that theology handles most deeply. The misfortune of our ministry is that it comes to theology without the proper preliminary culture – with a pious or literary culture only. ) I am going to use this word totality, and say that the first bearing of Christ’s work was upon the race as a totality. The first thing reconciliation does is to change man’s corporate relation to God. Then when it is taken home individually it changes our present attitude. Christ, as it were, put us into the eternal Church; the Holy Spirit teaches us how to behave properly in the Church.

Wisdom and folly

Thou through thy commandments hast made me wiser than mine enemies.

But how can this be, seeing that our Saviour saith that the men of this world are wiser in their own generation than the children of God? The answer is, our Saviour doth not call worldlings wise men simply; but wiser in their own generation; that is, wise in things pertaining to this life. Or as Jeremiah calls them, "wise to do evil"; and when they have so done, wise to conceal and cloak it. All which in very deed is but folly; and therefore David, who by the light of God's word saw that it was so, could not be moved to follow their course. Well; there is a great controversy between the godly and the wicked: either of them in their judgment accounts the other to be fools; but it is the light of God's word which must decide it.

William Cowper, quoted in Charles Spurgeon's The Treasury of David, on Psalm 119, verse 98

Believing in the commandments

From the additional notes to Charles Spurgon's The Treasury of David, Psalm 119.

Verse 66. — For I have believed thy commandments. These words deserve a little consideration, because believing is here joined to an unusual object. Had it been, "for I have believed thy promises," or, "obeyed thy commandments," the sense of the clause had been more obvious to every vulgar apprehension. To believe commandments, sounds as harsh to a common ear, as to see with the ear, and hear with the eye; but, for all this, the commandments are the object; and of them he saith, not, "I have obeyed"; but, "I have believed."

To take off the seeming asperity of the phrase, some interpreters conceive that "commandments" is put for the word in general; and so promises are included, yea, they think, principally intended, especially those promises which encouraged him to look to God for necessary things, such as good judgment and knowledge are. But this interpretation would divert us from the weight and force of these significant words. Therefore let us note, —

1. Certainly there is a faith in the commandments, as well as in the promises. We must believe that God is their author, and that they are the expressions of his commanding and legislative will, which we are bound to obey. Faith must discern the sovereignty and goodness of the law maker and believe that his commands are holy, just, and good; it must also teach us that God loves those who keep his law and is angry with those who transgress, and that he will see to it that His law is vindicated at the last great day.

2. Faith in the commandments is as necessary as faith in the promises; for, as the promises are not esteemed, embraced, and improved, unless they are believed to be of God, so neither are the precepts: they do not sway the conscience, nor incline the affections, except as they are believed to be divine.

3. Faith in the commands must be as lively as faith in the promises. As the promises are not believed with a lively faith, unless they draw off the heart from carnal vanities to seek that happiness which they offer to us; so the precepts are not believed rightly, unless we be fully resolved to acquiesce in them as the only rule to guide us in obtaining that happiness, and unless we are determined to adhere to them, and obey them. As the king's laws are not kept as soon as they are believed to be the king's laws, unless also, upon the consideration of his authority and power, we subject ourselves to them; so this believing notes a ready alacrity to hear God's voice and obey it, and to govern our hearts and actions according to his counsel and direction in the word. — Thomas Manton.

Being offended

We probably ought to be careful about deciding we're feeling offended; it can get old after a while. We become offended in all the ways God isn't. The seat of offendedness (like the seat of judgment) can be a real tricky spot to occupy. Before we know it, it can become a twenty-four-hour-a-day job. It becomes all we're known for, and when we're all caught up in all the things we're against, we forget the beauty of the things we're supposed to be for. We forget what the kingdom of God looks like and all the wonderfully odd characters taking up residence there. We forget to revel in dappled things. We forget we're dappled.

David Dark

Everyday Apocalypse

Gracious, righteous, merciful

From the additional notes to Charles Spurgeon's The Treasury of David, Psalm 116, verse 5. 

Gracious is the Lord, and righteous; yea, our God is merciful. 

He is gracious in hearing, he is "righteous" in judging, he is "merciful" in pardoning, and how, then, can I doubt of his will to help me? He is righteous to reward according to deserts; he is gracious to reward above deserts; yea, he is merciful to reward without deserts; and how, then, can I doubt of his will to help me? He is gracious, and this shows his bounty; he is righteous, and this shows his justice; yea, he is merciful, and this shows his love; and how, then, can I doubt of his will to help me? If he were not gracious I could not hope he would hear me; if he were not righteous, I could not depend upon his promise; if he were not merciful, I could not expect his pardon; but now that he is gracious and righteous and merciful too, how can I doubt of his will to help me? 

Sir Richard Baker.

In 1639 [Baker] began a series of pious meditations on the Psalms. The first book of the series bore the title of 'Meditations and Disquisitions upon the Seven Psalmes of David, commonly called the Penitentiall Psalmes, 1639.' It was dedicated to Mary, countess of Dorset, and to it were appended meditations 'upon the three last psalmes of David,' with a separate dedication to the Earl of Manchester. In 1640 there appeared a similar treatise 'upon seven consolatorie psalmes of David, namely, the 23, the 27, the 30, the 34, the 84, the 103, the 116,' with a dedication to Lord Craven, who is there thanked by the author for 'the remission of a great debt.' The last work in the series, 'Upon the First Psalme of David,' was also issued in 1640, with a dedication to Lord Coventry. (These meditations on the Psalms were collected and edited with an introduction by Dr. A. B. Grosart in 1882.)

Putting His enemies under His footstool

From the additional notes to Charles Spurgeon's The Treasury of David, Psalm 110:

Verse 1. Make thine enemies thy footstool! This expression, that the conquest of Christ's enemies shall be but as the removing of a stool into its place, notes unto us two things: first, the easiness of God's victory over the enemies of Christ. They are before him as nothing, less than nothing, the drop of a bucket, the dust of the balance, a very little thing...Secondly, as this putting of Christ's enemies like a stool under the feet notes easiness, so also it notes order or beauty too. When Christ's enemies shall be under his foot, then there shall be a right order in things; then it shall indeed appear that God is a God of order, and therefore the day wherein that shall be done, is called "the times of the restitution of all things, "Ac 3:21. 

The putting of Christ's enemies under his feet is an act of justice; and of all others, justice is the most orderly virtue, that which keepeth beauty upon the face of a people, as consisting itself in symmetry and proportion. This putting of Christ's enemies as a stool under his feet, also denotes unto us two things in reference to Christ: first, his rest, and secondly, his triumph. To stand, in the Scripture phrase, denotes ministry, and to sit, rest; and there is no posture so easy as to sit with a stool under one's feet. Till Christ's enemies then be all under his feet, he is not fully in his rest. 

Furthermore, this "footstool" under Christ's feet, in reference to his enemies, denotes unto us four things. First, the extreme shame and confusion which they shall everlastingly suffer, the utter abasing and bringing down of all that exalteth itself against Christ. Secondly, hereby is noted the burden which wicked men must bear: the footstool beareth the weight of the body, so must the enemies of Christ bear the weight of his heavy and everlasting wrath upon their souls. Thirdly, herein is noted the relation which the just recompense of God bears unto the sins of ungodly men. Thus will Christ deal with his enemies at the last day. Here they trample upon Christ in his word, in his ways, in his members; they make the saints bow down for them to go over, and make them as the pavements on the ground; they tread under foot the blood of the covenant, and the sanctuary of the Lord, and put Christ to shame; but there their own measure shall be returned into their bosoms, they shall be constrained to confess as Adonibezek, "As I have done, so God hath requited me." 

Lastly, herein we may note the great power and wisdom of Christ in turning the malice and mischief of his enemies unto his own use and advantage; and so ordering wicked men that though they intend nothing but extirpation and ruin to his kingdom, yet they shall be useful unto him, and, against their own wills, serviceable to those glorious ends, in the accomplishing whereof he shall be admired by all those that believe. As in a great house there is necessary use of vessels of dishonour, destined unto sordid and mean, but yet daily, services: so in the great house of God, wicked men are his utensils and household instruments, as footstools and staves, and vessels wherein there is no pleasure, though of them there may be good use. 

Condensed from Edward Reynolds.

Meting out judgement

Many that live deserve death. And some die that deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then be not too eager to deal out death in the name of justice, fearing for your own safety. Even the wise cannot see all ends.

Gandalf in The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien