THE ATONEMENT
By
REV. JOHN MORGAN,
D.D. Mercy But it is plain that man was
not doomed for his first sin, or for manifold sins, to
eternal woe. In that case there would be no room for any
gracious interposition. Of course, if the sin continued the
curse remained, yet so that God, to gain if possible the
sinner, made his sun to shine on him and his rain to descend
for his benefit. A merciful promise was given to our first
parents; Cain was spared; the long-suffering of God waited
in the days of Noah; God bore long with the Amorites; he
showed Pharaoh great mercy, and was not ready to destroy him
or his people till the last effort of graciousness was
tried: the Canaanites would all have been spared if they had
humbled themselves as the Gibeonites did, who need no
deceptive trick to secure grace from the God that made
them. All through the history of Israel and
of the Gentiles, as they appear in the Bible, we find mercy
alternating with judgment or intermingled with it. The
threatenings of God, even when expressed without
qualification, were found to mean that they would be
executed unless there was repentance, as in the case of
Nineveh. Jonah was right in his interpretation of the nature
of God's comminations; and he was afraid he would lose his
character as a prophet, because in case the Ninevites
repented his denunciation would come to nought. God said to
Jeremiah: "In what instant I shall speak concerning a nation
and concerning a kingdom, to pluck up, to pull down, and to
destroy it, if that nation against whom I have pronounced
turn from their evil, I will repent of the evil that I
thought to do unto them." In Ezekiel the principle is
extended to the individual: "When I say unto a wicked man,
Thou shalt surely die, if he turn from his sin . . . none of
his sins which he hath committed shall be mentioned unto
him." Everything shows that man was not
brought by the representative sin of Adam into a hopeless
condition. But there were some forms of evil to which, in
general, the race was to be subjected, as disease, decay,
and animal death, and the train of bereavement and sorrow
connected with these evils such that, on account of the fear
of them, men, till the hope of the gospel delivers them, are
all their lifetime in bondage. Prophecy, especially in the
Apocalypse, speaks of the visible judgments on the nations
under the reign of Christ, to whom his Father has committed
all judgment, as quite as terrible as those inflicted on the
old world. The imagery of the prophet of Patmos is fully as
awful and impressive as that of the more ancient seers. The
same may be said of the language of our Lord himself. The
judgments on the old world are represented in the Now
Testament as the punishment of the time of God's forbearance
of the time when God relatively overlooked, winked at, the
ill-desert of men. In a large degree the punishments of
Old Testament times are the visible judgments exhibited on
the theatre of history for it was God's design to prepare
thus a historical, matter-of-fact proof of his moral reign
over the nations of the earth. This would prepare mankind to
appreciate the revelations respecting the retributions of
the unseen world. These were not brought into the bold
relief they present in the New Testament revelation, though
they were by no means unknown to ancient Israel, and are
spoken of in the Book of Daniel as plainly as in the
apostolic writings.