THE ATONEMENT
By
REV. JOHN MORGAN,
D.D. Object of Judgments and
Mercies When sin is perpetrated, it
seems due to God's moral creatures that he should make
manifest his views on the subject, demonstrate his
abhorrence of the sinner, and counteract as far as possible
his evil influence. Words are not enough for this end.
Punishment seems the natural and necessary resort of him who
is the moral Guardian of the universe. It plainly must be
pushed to such an extent as to be an emphatic expression of
the mind of God, to show that to him sin is an evil and
bitter thing indeed. Hence the awful severity of God's
punishments, often fitted to make the ears of all that heard
of them tingle, and their hearts fail them for
fear. Prophetic records, whether in form
denunciatory or historical, are adapted to produce that
quailing of the soul that the prophets themselves mention as
the natural effect of the judgments of God on evil-doers.
And yet we are not to think of them as a full execution of
retributive justice. They might have been, with no exceeding
of the ill-desert of the sinner, pushed much farther. But
they were pushed as far as infinite wisdom saw good for the
best effect. What is the full ill-desert of sin is known
only to God; and we know not that sin is ever punished in
any world as much as it deserves to be. Objective penal
justice is not an end; and God will urge its infliction no
farther than benevolence requires. If towards sinners. God had appeared
in no other light than that of a punisher, though not in any
instance putting forth all his wrath, there might have been
a sadly false impression made respecting his character; it
might have seemed unamiably stern. It was wise, then, for
God to manifest himself as a God of mercy--as forgiving
iniquity, transgression, and sin. That grand revelation of
his mercy to Moses appears in all his ways in the history of
the world. Towards Israel and towards the
Gentiles there was mercy, all along down the ages, ready for
the penitent, sometimes unmingled with severities, at other
times accompanied by such severities as served to keep alive
a sense of God's hatred of sin, of his remembering wrath in
mercy as truly as mercy in wrath. How wonderful the discipline and
training through which mankind were carried by the various
dispensations, the antediluvian, the patriarchal, the
legal,--all tending to show how weak man is, and how much in
need of the mightiest divine working in wisdom and love to
rescue him from sin, to reconcile him to God, and to fit him
to stand in the filial relation to his. Heavenly Father.
There doubtless was, as has been said, a moral necessity,
that God should give an emphatic expression, in act as well
as word, to his sense of the evil of sin. Many hold that the
law, both of nature and of revelation, contains a
commination that must be executed, either on the sinner or a
substitute. But no law ever did or could contemplate
substitution in such a way that vicarious obedience and
punishment should be regarded as a proper fulfillment of the
precept and penalty of law. Substitution is said to be resorted
to sometimes in China; but this cannot be according to the
provision of any law, but must be a contrivance of corrupt
officials, substituting defenseless plebeians for rich
criminals of rank. This view is supported by the fact that a
son, recently substituted for a father at his own request,
had to persuade the magistrates that he was the real
criminal. The precept of law is laid on every
individual, and it is absurd to imagine that one can obey
for another. The obligation of obedience extends to every,
moral being in the universe. Nor is it possible that one
moral being should be punished for another, and that thus
the sinner himself should be legally exempted from just
liability. No legislative authority ever could have enacted
such a law. Each subject, on the other hand, is held to his
personal, untransferable responsibility. But does not such an interpretation
of law as this preclude pardon? No: it never was the case
except in the instance of the laws of the Medes and
Persians, that pardon was made impossible by the published
penalty of any law, unless it was expressly said that there
would be no pardon. The promise of a law must be fulfilled,
because the promises has an indefeasible interest in its
fulfillment; but in every case when pardon may be exercised
without detriment to the public good, pardon may be
legitimately granted, and sometimes it may be in the power
of the government to remove obstacles standing in the way of
pardon. On these principles governments have almost
universally acted; and the scripture history shows that God
has acted on the same principles, pardoning when he could
wisely and benevolently do so. The same principles sometimes
authorize a commutation of punishment, or punishments of
less severity than the laws seem to prescribe. Indeed, every
exercise of mercy rests on the same fundamental reason,
including the forbearance or long-suffering so often spoken
of in the Bible. But obviously the public good must in every
case be paramount to private interest, and be guarded with
the most scrupulous care. The idea that penal justice must,
always be done, in the sense that the penalty of the law
must always be inflicted, would exclude the possibility of
pardon and of atonement. For the infliction of the penalty
on a substitute would not be justice, but, if the substitute
were innocent, manifest injustice, and his consent would not
materially alter the case. If by justice be meant justice to
the public good, this indeed must he always done, and no
pardon or mercy inconsistent with this can be legitimate. I
shall by-and-by speak of the governmental expedient for the
legitimation of pardon, called atonement. Not all who suffer when punishment is
inflicted are punished. Near friends are smitten when a
criminal is struck down, as when a criminal father or son or
brother is executed. Infant children perished in the flood,
and with the Sodomites. These were slain in mercy, not in
wrath, as was also the case when the doomed Canaanites were
destroyed. it may be difficult to explain all the cues; but
we have no reason to doubt that the Abrahamic doctrine, that
the Judge of all the earth must do right, is true. At
present, when possible, the tares, for the sake of saving
the wheat, are spared till the harvest; but the pious Elijah
suffers with the people whom his own prayer has smitten with
famine. But there is often real
responsibility when a superficial view does not recognize
it. Had Israel been as zealous for the honor of God as was
incumbent, Achan might not have committed his sin, and it is
therefore charged on all Israel, and chastisement
accordingly inflicted. But when the chief criminal was
discovered, the weight of punishment fell on him. If Israel
bad been entirely innocent the anger of the Lord could not
have been kindled against them. In some degree the crime was
practically laid to the charge of the whole. In case murder is committed it is
said to defile the land. Somehow it is an evidence that a
brother's life is not so precious there that a murderer is
wholly an unnatural product of the land. Till his crime has
brought the community to such a hatred of the atrocity as is
expressed in the solemn shedding of his blood, the land is
unclean. His execution makes atonement, not for him, but for
the land, and is an expression of the repentance of the
people. Or if the previous guilt is not considered so great,
the land is plainly held in duress, and, as it were,
suspected, till they have shown by punishing the murderer
that they have no voluntary part in his crime. So when any
crime had been committed and the perpetrator was unknown, or
when any one had ignorantly done anything forbidden by the
law, there was supposed to be some possible lack of
vigilance and care, and a solemn atonement was made on the
part of those who might be suspected of this deficiency,
though conceived to be guilty of no wilful violation of the
divine law. God walked among the people as a holy, jealous
God, not allowing his creatures to stand in any doubtful
relation to his law and its violation. Another instance of awful but most
wise severity, is found in the visitation of the sins of the
fathers on the children, recognized by our Lord in his
declaration that all the righteous blood shed from the
foundation of the world would be visited on that
generation. These passages, and others like them,
have often been sadly misinterpreted. Onkelos long ago in
his Targum gave the key to their meaning in the few words:
"When the children imitate the iniquity of their fathers."
They thus indorse it, and really make it their own, instead
of considering, and refusing to do such like. Men are thus
held responsible to profit morally by the history of the
past, not to follow recklessly in the way of ancestors. The
great French poet Racine, in his Athalie, has put into the
mouth of Joad [Jehoiada] an indignant denial of the
doctrine maintained by some. Il ne reeherche point, aveugle en sa
colére, Sur ce fils qui le craint
l'impidété du père. "God does not visit, in his anger
wild, The father's sin upon the pious
child." There are cases, not to be confounded
with this, in which children are placed in less desirable
circumstances, and even subjected to painful diseases in
consequence of the sin of parents; as when leprosy was
inflicted on Gehazi and descended to his children, or the
priesthood was taken from the family of Eli. These evils
were not punishments to the innocent children, but to the
parents, yet disadvantages assigned by the All-wise
Sovereign to the children as motives to parents for parental
fidelity. The law of the descent both of advantages and
disadvantages is one of great influence to the human soul,
and is therefore maintained by God with great constancy. But
punishment can descend only when the immoral character
descends also. Punishment must, in the nature of things, be
a purely personal matter, that cannot come, like leprosy or
scrofula, by mere natural causation. Extensive infliction of punishment is
often avoided by human authorities by the punishment of the
ringleaders in the case of an outbreak of
iniquity--multitudes being spared the roughest brunt of
suffering, though bearing the shame of crime. A course
similar to this was pursued in the case of those who
perished in the flood. They were the indorsers of the
wickedness of all past generations of sinners, and were most
justly made examples, after God's long-suffering gave them
ample opportunity for repentance and mercy. The Sodomites were the vilest sinners
of the period and the region. They had long been the
recipients of kindness, till the ill-fame of their vileness
went up to heaven; and when God sent down to them an angel
committee of inquiry they gave the angels abundant proof
that the report did not exceed their enormous guilt; and the
rain of fire and brimstone came down. Had ten righteous men
been found there the city would have been spared. The
solitary one was rescued. There were guilty cities that
deserved to perish with Sodom and the other four; but they
were spared. We find mercy mingled with the
chastisement of the guilty sons of Jacob. Though their sin
found them out, and they suffered severely for it, they were
not destroyed, but even blessed, while most of them deserved
to die as murderers. When Israel sinned in the
wilderness--almost all guilty--God did not destroy the whole
of the guilty ones, but smote down the ringleaders, and made
their doom a warning to the rest. When sentenced to die in
the wilderness they had a space for repentance and for the
admonition of the children. The same course of merciful
limitation of punishment characterized the way of God in the
whole recorded history of Israel, and characterizes it
still; so that we can easily accept Paul's declaration that
"they, are beloved for the fathers' sakes." Nor are these
co-minglings of mercies with judgments confined to Israel,
or to sinners of the antediluvian period. They appear in the
whole history of the world. It is remarkable that when Daniel is
telling us of the destruction of the great empires of
antiquity he tells us that there was mercy for all but the
last and most tyrannous. The wild beast representing this
was slain, and his body destroyed and given to the burning
flame. "As concerning the rest of the beasts, they had their
dominion taken away, yet their lives were prolonged for a
season and time. But God, while he thus revealed his
mercy, and showed that he forgives transgression and sin,
was careful to provide that he should not be trifled with.
So when Moses sinned he sentenced his beloved servant never
to tread the land of promise, and would not bear his
supplications for full forgiveness. He might behold the
land, but might not enter it. How affecting the rebuke to
Moses, and how solemn the lesson to Israel and to all the
nations and all their generations! And when David sinned,
though God did not reject him as he did Saul, how awful was
the punishment inflicted--not in secret, but in the light of
the sun. And the instrument of his punishment was his
beautiful and beloved son Absalom, over whose deserved ruin
and slaughter he wailed out that most pathetic outcry of a
stricken father's heart, probably pierced through with the
thought that his own sin had contributed to make Absalom the
contemptible fool that he was.