Salvation Traced to God the Father
“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only-hegotten Son, that whosever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”
What verse of Scripture is more deeply engraved on our memory? Where is a passage to be found which has been more frequently uttered in Christian assemblies? Is there one which more ftdly comprises the essence of the Gospel plan? Or could we choose a divine saying of our Lord better suited to guide and elevate our thoughts?
Here is Jesus speaking of himself, and declaring why he came from heaven to earth. Here is the provision of mercy traced up to its eternal fountain, in the
* New York, May 16, 1852.
infinite benevolence of the Most High. Here is the river of compassion widening towards all nations. Here is the door of escape set wide open, from hell to heaven. And here is the direction how any willing soul may gain entrance to that way. My brethren, it is matter which iaterests us all; for we are all unholy and subject to condemnation; we are all in jeopardy; we are all hastening to death, yet naturally desirous of everlasting happiness. And in these words we have a Saviour offered to all. The subject is God’s love, and the method by which this love may become our personal salvation. If God should vouchsafe to carry the truth home to your heart this day, he would thus make it a temple of the Holy Ghost. And I affirm without hesitation, that the words of my text, if received in their spiritual meaniag and with firm persuasion, are able to make you wise unto salvation through faith that is in Christ Jesus.
Does God the Father really love the world of sinners? and what is the character of this love? These are the questions which we have to answer. We may vaguely assent to the existence of such love without deeply entering into its grandeur. Accompany me, while we consider, first, the reaUty of this love, and secondly, its degree. Both are exhibited by meanfe of a great and marvellous gift.
I. The REALITY OF THE FaTHEr’s LOVE TO THE WORLD IS SHOWN BY HIS GIVING HIS SON. The WOrds
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apon which we have come to meditate set forth this great and overwhelming argument for the love of God: He gave his Son. Small words sometimes contain vast meaning. In the solemn act of worship called an oath, and in the form of it so often uttered and heard with lightness and irreverence, So help you God, the immense weight of the imprecation hes in the shortest monosyllable so; that is, may Almighty God so help you, or the reverse, as you now declare the truth. In like manner the text revolves on the same brief adverb, as the principal hinge of its significancy. By what proof or evidence are we convinced that God loved the world? And how great was this love? The answer is, God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son. This is the demonstration of the love in its reality, and the measure of the love in its greatness. And if God so loved the world as to make a sacrifice of infinite value, the love is such that it passeth knowledge.
The heathen had no such being in their crude mythology as a God of pure love. When the philosophers revolted against the incredible and corrupting fables of tradition and poetry, they formed various conceptions of a Supreme Intelligence; but the best of them fell infinitely short of the idea which a young child in Christian households acquires of a Being, infinite, eternal and unchangeable in wisdom, power, justice, truth, and goodness. As soon as we think of One who has all perfections, we think of One who is benevolent.
and if we add the conception of this Supreme Existence as coming forth from the sohtude of his eternal majesty to create intelligent spirits, we immediately, as by a necessity of reason, conclude that he loves the creatures whom he has made. If we could stop here, all would be free from difficulty.
If we could truly regard the Most High as not only benevolent, but nothing besides; as loving every object, whether good or evil; as possessing no moral discrimination, as acting only and forever towards the happiness of all he has made; we should look with confidence toward the awful future of eternity, as assured that, whether pure or sinful, we should be made blessed forever. And some take this view; thus founding on a partial idea of divine excellence the destructive scheme of universal salvation. But on this hypothesis we can never explain the enigma of the universe. If God were all love, and in such a sense as to be nothing but love; if God had no end in creation but to make his creatures happy, there would of course be no unhappiness in the world. The proof that such a view is false, stares us in the face on which side soever we turn our eyes. Tor is the existing earth, to go no farther, full of unmingled bliss? Answer ye, who pass lifetimes of sorrow; ye millions of sufferers by disease, war, and a thousand deaths. The fact, as we see it and feel it, disproves the assumption that God has no other principle of government than that of promoting universal happiness. Unless, indeed, we deny his sovereignty.
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diminish his perfection, ascribe the present state to some rival divinity, and thus upturn the very basis of all religion, natural and revealed. If God’s sole object in creation had been to secure the absence of all unhappiness, no sound mind will deny that he had power to effect it. If, as the fact shows, the case is tremendously the reverse, we have no escape from the conclusion, that along with the disposition to make his creatures happy, there were other divine attributes which allowed the possibihty of pain. We must afiirm this, or else refuse God’s permission to the present state, or deny the perfections or very being of a God. As we shrink from these dreadful tenets of chance and atheism, we are forced to bow down and acknowledge that our plummet cannot sound the depths of the divine immensity. We must own, with adoring fear, that the Infinite One has reasons of awful state why even misery should be allowed to enter his dominions. And we justly look for these reasons in those other attributes of Jehovah, which are revealed no less clearly than his goodness.
God is infinitely holy. He is so by the eternal necessity of his nature. He cannot deny himself. He is and must be forever opposed to all sin. It is his very nature, it is of the essence of his Godhead, to stand in eternal opposition to moral evil. All moral good is such simply because it conforms, we need not say to a divine command, but to the divine nature, as its standard. AU moral evil is such, because it deviates from this eternal standard. But the two are necessarily and everlastingly opposed to one another. The will of God, which is our Law, is only the effluence of this eternal nature; and hence, creatures remaining the same, we cannot conceive of the law as otherwise than it is, or of a law demanding the opposite of what it now demands, or as demanding less than it now demands; in other words, less than perfection. This tendency of God’s nature to demand conformity in moral creatures, belongs to his essential glory, and we call it his Justice. It is not for us to ask why He created man; or why he created him a free agent, or what is the same thing, capable of sinning. He has done so; and shall not the Judge of all the earth do right? We might deem it wiser and holier to make a world in which no sin and no pain could ever exist; but that such a purpose was not necessarily demanded by God’s holiness, we learn assuredly from the fact that God actually designed the world which we see. There may be reasons, nay there must be reasons, all unknown to us, why the greatest glory of God is, after all, most promoted by the very irregularities which we deplore.
Still it abides true, that our Lord is a God of love. No one attribute conflicts with any other. When free creatures, and creatures are not moral beings unless free, in the exercise of their freedom sin and fall, the consequence is misery. Let us not quarrel with this arrangement. The connexion of sin and misery may, for all we know, be as necessary as the connexion between the absence of light and the presence of dark-SALTATION TRACED TO GOD THE FATHER. ^75
ness. Many things in our own experience, lead us to believe this to be so. We are never happy when we sin. Suppose a law given, the misery consequent on violating this law fixed as a penalty; the Word of God uttered to declare this connexion; and we at once behold God’s Justice and his Truth committed on the side of Hohness, and against the sinner. Thus far we gain no rehef by clinging to the assertion that God is good. It is true, eternally true. But how do we know that even Benevolence, on a large scale, may not be glorified by the punishment of obstinate offenders, when, even in civil society, cases occur in which the destruction of one life promotes the salvation of many? But these are mysteries which we are not called upon to resolve. Secret things belong unto God. The Justice and Truth of God are as clearly revealed as his goodness and mercy. They must not be thrown into opposition, but must forever co-exist. And the great all-important deduction which we should make, for the guidance of our thoughts, is, that if Mercy be ever displayed, it will be in such a way as shall hold up Justice and Holiness with undiminished and equal splendour. This is, indeed, the key to the whole Gospel, which is none other than a device of Infinite Wisdom to repair the evils of the fall, and thus show forth all the commingling perfections of God in magnificent and adorable harmony. AH hues blend with consummate beauty in the rainbow around the throne. To effect this harmony was the intention of the most extraordinary transaction in the earth’s history, namely, that He who made it died upon it. The difficulty must have been great which made so extreme a method necessary. No physical difficulty can be imagined in regard to God, for he is Omnipotent. By an act of sovereign will he could translate all souls from heaven to hell, or from hell to heaven. The obstacle to such a transaction can be none but a moral one. There is a sort of impropriety in asserting any such thing as difficulty, where God is concerned; but human language can do no better. It is only a way of saying, that to do this or that would be for God to deny himself.
Even in our own circle of experience, different principles within us may thus come into seeming conflict. The Judge may have to pass sentence on one whom he pities; here justice has to settle it with compassion. The parent is often called to punish the child whom he loves. It is easy for us to say that God might freely pardon any sinner, or all sinners, without any intervention or propitiation. I prefer at this time to rest on the reply — and it admits of no contradiction — that God has done otherwise, and has so proved that there was no other way. One thing, indeed, the Supreme Lawgiver and Judge might have done. He might have suffered the sentence to become absolute; have shut the door of pardon; and have turned away from the world of sinners, and left them to whirl away into the infinite spaces of increasing sin and misery. No man can say this would have been unjust, unless he is pre-SALVATION TRACED TO GOD THE FATHER. ^-jry
pared to say that the law was unjust; for this was the demand of law. Especially might the offended Sovereign have so done, when the mode of doing otherwise involved the most stupendous sacrifice. And why not? Why did Divine Wisdom and Holiness pause, and suspend the lifted sword of vengeance? Why did heavenly condescension look upon ruined men? Oh, my brethren, it was because Love, boundless Love, stayed the hand of Justice, held the bolt of fiery retribution, and interposed itself between the descending edge and our condemned souls. If God were all Justice, and he is as truly just as loving, no redemption had been possible. If God had been all Love, and he is as truly loving as he is just, no redemption had been necessary. But because He is both Justice and Mercy, and because Justice demanded satisfaction, and Mercy pleaded for remission, “Righteousness and Peace kissed each other;” and Love hung on the arm of paternal severity, while Wisdom pointed out a method to reconcile both.
To our poor limited faculties, this has to be represented under figure of a conflict of attributes; but, in reality, there is no conflict in God. To our apprehension, there seems a series of counsels and a change of plan; but there is neither succession nor mutation in God. Still the highest philosophy commands us to abide by the childlike expressions of the Bible. We shall never comprehend this mystery better than when, as in our early days, we regard God as angry against sin, yet desiring not the death of the sinner. This love for sinners must have been unutterably great, or there had been no such event as the Crucifixion.
And let me with more than ordinary earnestness implore you not to misapprehend this love, by an error which is common among shallow theologians. I intend those, who think of God the Father as less loving than the Son; as more rigorously just than the Son; as in some sort a relentless and implacable sovereign; as originating no tender mercies, and thirsting for the blood of vengeance, till appeased by the Son. Into such extremes some may be led by the inadequacy of all earthly words and figures to represent heavenly realities. No, beloved brethren, the God of our text, who gives his Son, is God the Father. He is as clearly the God of Love. There is no conflict between the Father and the Son; and there is a divine harmony in their acts; for whatsoever things the Father doth, those doth the Son likewise. The adorable Son of God is co-equal in infinite justice and hatred of sin. The adorable Father is boundless in love and compassion. From him came the whole scheme of salvation. “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only-begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” Thus far have we dwelt mainly on the reaUty of this love. True, this it was impossible to do, without frequent glimpses of its degree; but now more particularly let us bring this into review, by meditating with you on the extent of this divine love, as manifested in its grand testimonial.
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II. The GREATNESS OF THE PaTHEr’s LOVE TO THE WORLD IS SHOWN BY HIS GIVING THE SoN. Not that
you or I, or angels above us, can take the gauge and dimensions of this divinity of goodness. With us they look into the chasm, with folded wings, and murmur. Oh, the depth, the depth! Yet, again, they learn enough to burst forth into chorus, while the shining retinue, reaching from earth to heaven, breaks forth in the doxology, “Glory to God in the highest, and peace on earth, good- will to men!” Love is measured by its gifts and sacrifices. Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friend. God’s love is measured by the gift and sacrifice of his Son. But while we repeat and adopt the words, who will assume to comprehend them! God gave his Son, but who can take the measurement of the gift? for who cai ascend to the height of his glory, or descend to the depth of his humiliation? Who hath entered into the dread chamber and pavilion of that eternity before all worlds, in which the Only-Begotten, who is in the bosom of the Pather, dwelt in the plenitude of the triune bliss, the Word, which was with God, which was God? Lose yourself as you may in the delightful contemplation of this wonderful glory, you are still baffled in every essay to gaze more nearly into the empyrean majesty, or seize the dazzling lines of that transaction, when it was decreed in council that God should become man. Yet mth reverent intentness of adoring thought, we may, through a veihng cloud, discern so much as the Spirit has seen fit to intimate. No man knoweth the Son but the Father, and he to whom the Father shall reveal him. From the recesses of that unapproachable glory, “dark with excessive light,” proceeds a voice which syllables the sentence dear to every penitent and thankful soul, “God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son.” Here are tones which cause the inmost chords of humanity to vibrate.
The word Son carries its peculiar touching charm to any parental heart. An “only Son,” is of all phrases that which wakes affectionate yearning here about our sinful hearths. Faint shadows are these of the things in heaven. He who has chosen to be knovm as Father, has chosen to reveal the eternal Word as Son, and as “the Only-Begotten of the Father.” Divine paternity is inscrutable. Divine love is as far above human love, as God is above the creature. Yet we were made in his image, in order to know a little of his heart; and the sentiment, though vastly unequal, is the same in the points intended to be believed.
God gave his Son. In intention and decree he gave him. In covenant he gave him. Looking on man as helplessly fallen, he gave him, as purposing him to be man’s Saviour. In the garden of Eden, now stained with deadly sin, he gave him, and anticipated the words of curse by words of blessing. Throughout the tedious tracts of the long Judaic night, when clouds and transient rays struggled together, in a coloured haze of types and vision, he gave him, the Messiah yet to come.
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But fully and actually and with transcendent love he gave him, when the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth. And then, consummating the boon of eternal destination, he gave hun, when, amidst a quaking earth and a shrouded heaven, it pleased the Lord to bruise him, when his sword awoke against the Man that was his fellow; and when Justice, as a weapon of death, steeped itself in the heart of humanity embraced by Godhead, and the Holy One, at the acme of his dying pangs, cried. It is finished.
The thoughts need repose after such a contemplation. Sit down, oh believer; sit down with the beloved John, and with the Marys, amidst the effusion of the water and the blood, and tell, if you can, the magnitude of this affection. It is divine.” Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that God loved us and gave his
Would you feel it more? Look in that other direction, to the damned world. Measure the sin and sorrow of a state which but for this sacrifice had been yours and mine. That we should not perish but have eternal life, was the motive of this gift. Raise your eyes to that “eternal life,” and meditate the glory and the bliss, till you somewhat forget the seductive pleasures of time. All this is signified by the gift of God’s only-begotten Son. Once more turn inward and attempt an estimate of your own demerit.” God commendeth his love to us, iQ that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for
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US! “What! still unrelenting! Are no gentle affections stirred within you, this day, by God’s chief argument? With what can we hope to move you? Behold here the hell you have deserved and sought; the heaven surpassing your most adventurous imagining; the Cross of Jesus, where the just God becomes the Saviour. This is the great sight which has melted the hearts of all generations of those who have been saved. And I have yet to add, if I would not withhold the principal theme of my commission, that God the Father gives the Only-’Begotten Son this day in the offer of the Gospel. To you is the word of this salvation sent. The great atoning action was not to be concealed, but to be published to all nations for the obedience of faith. There is no restriction. To whom do I hear you ask, is this offer tendered? To the world, I answer; to all who hear the “word of the truth of the Gospel.” To you who have come hither this morning; to every one of you; from the hoary despiser to the babe who only begins to comprehend the words. By whom may it be accepted? By sinners. “This is a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners.” If the greatest offender of all the sons of men were to rise revealed as such in this assembly, I am authorised to address him as included in this invitation of abounding grace. This Gospel was preached first at Jerusalem, and made known to those who crucified the Lord of glory. “Therefore,” cried Peter to the Pentecostal multitude, “let all the house of Israel (the very nation which had committed this sin of sins) know assuredly, that God hath made this same* Jesus, whom ye have crucified, both Lord and Christ.” The apostle’s declaration, and all subsequent preaching, have held forth the same Gospel, or good news of God’s love in giving his Only-Begotten Son, By this alone have perishing souls, in all ages of the dispensation of grace, obtained eternal life; and the profier is now to you. To you, my hearer, however hardened in your sins and however destitute of all right feelings, this way of immediate escape is held out. The fountain which burst forth from the rock smitten at Golgotha continues to follow the march of our desert pilgrimage; and the terms are, as of old, “Whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely.”
Before closing the service, I must lay before you, in few words, one provision of my text. It concerns the mode of becoming interested in this gracious gift of God. The mode is by believing; “that whosoever believeth in him should not perish,” etc. Gospel faith is the cordial behoving of this message. Some of you, let me joyfidly think, have already believed, do now believe. Your language is,” This is my beloved, and this is my friend. He found me fainting in the wilderness. He lifted my head. He spake words of comfort to me. He strengthened me with strength in my soul. And all this he did by pouring a flood of light on his own person and work, by making this great ob-Ig4 SALVATION TRACED TO GOD THE FATHER.
ject stand forth prominent and luminous, that is, by working in me faith.”
But there are others whose language is, “Nothing is more mysterious to me than the saving character of faith. I believe these truths; and yet I find no rehef for my burden.” To such a one I must, in all respect and love, speak a word of contradiction. No, my anxious hearer, you do not believe the Gospel. Or, at at any rate, since there are degrees in faith, you believe but faintly. You have been looking too long and too much at self, and too little at the Saviour. If you believed that God so loved the world, you would see and know that even for you there is room in the bosom of infinite Compassion. If you believed that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, and by specification, the chief of sinners, you would see salvation brought home to your own heart. If you believed that Grace is abounding, free, present, made over by gift to just such as you, in all your hardness and all your guilt, and that the very first saving act is that of acquiescence in this gratuity, you would gaze with wonder and gratitude on the pierced hands and feet and the opened side, and would exclaim with Thomas, My Lord and My God! If you believed, you would turn away from the study of your wi-etched self, and being all absorbed in another object, resplendent, soul-entrancing and divine, would joyfully cry, “God forbid that I should glory, save in this.” And it is just because you still refuse to let go your hold of something within you; because you doubt the capacity of Christ’s love to embrace you as you are; in a word, because you do not believe, that you persist in perishing with a condemned world. The difficulty does not He in any want of atoning love or gracious provision. The sacrifice has been made; it is infinitely pleasing to God; it is accepted; it can never be repeated; it can never be added to; it stands before the universe in immutable, consummate glory. Nor does the difficulty he in the nature of faith, as though it were comphcated, mysterious, or unintelligible; it is one of the very simplest actings of the human soul. But it hes in this, that you do not apprehend in a spiritual manner the precious, the ever-blessed truth to be believed. You see God under a false aspect, as a hard, exacting Lawgiver and a relentless Judge. You look on Christ as coming to you with some legal conditions to be fulfilled in you, before He can be yours. And justly conscious that such conditions are wanting in you, you stay away from the fountain of life, and will forever stay away, tOl the light of God dawns on your erring mind. Now, my sorrowing friend and hearer, now you have arrived at what is perhaps a critical point in your history. Will you flee to Jesus Christ to-day? Will you perish, or will you believe? Whatever is your determination, note it when you go home; “This day I have chosen Christ,” or “This day I have rejected him.” Eor it is noted in heaven.