The Orthodox Doctrine of the Atonement Proved by the Character of the Effects Which Are Attributed to It in Scripture
As our seventh argument, we cite those numerous passages of Scripture which describe in various relations and lights the effects of the redemption work of our Lord. These are set forth in three capital relations: (a) as these effects concern God, they are termed propitiation, and hence reconciliation; (6) as they respect sin, expiation; and (c) as they respect the sinner himself, redemption.
I. The effect of Christ’s death, as it regards God, is revealed to be propitiation, and consequently reconciliation. The principal words which have been used by the Holy Ghost to express the effect of the atoning work of Christ as it regards God, are the Greek words Getv, iXdaxeadaij and !Aaff-, and the Hebrew word 1. The classical usage of the word xa.Ta)JAffcrecv is (a) to change, to exchange; and (6) to change a person from enmity to friendship, to reconcile. And the usage with regard to the derivative noun is precisely similar. When God is said to reconcile us to himself by Jesus Christ, the expression doubtless comprehends the whole result effected, and that evidently includes a mutual reconciliation of God to us and of us to God. Young and Bushnell, and the advocates of the Moral Influence hypothesis generally, insist thai, the word is used only in the sense of the persuasion of the sinner by God, through the cross of Christ, to lay aside his wicked alienation. But that the other sense of the propitiation, or rendering placable the divine nature in respect to sinners, is also included, and in some passages is the main sense intended, is plain from the following considerations: (1.) In Rom. v. 10, 11, the phrase, “We were reconciled to God by the death of his Son,” is explained by the parallel phrase, “being justified by his blood,” so as to be “saved from wrath through him.” (2.) In 2 Cor. v. 18-20, the phrase that “God was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself,” is explained by saying in the same sentence, “not i mputing their trespasses unto them.” Not to impute sin is to forgive it. Rom. iv. 5; 2 Tim. iv. 16. (3.) The command addressed by Paul to gospel-hearers, “Be ye reconciled to God,” is precisely parallel to that other command given by Christ in Matt. v. 24: “Therefore, if thou bring thy gift to the altar, and there rememberest that thy brother hath aught agaimt ihee, go thy way; first be reconciled to thy brother, and then come and offer thy gift.” This must mean, Go, cause thy brother to be reconciled to thee by removing the cause for his anger. So, “Be ye reconciled to God,” must mean that they should accept Christ as their propitiation, as that whereby they might be reconciled to their God. (4.) The meaning of this word is rendered plain, and the doctrine I am insisting on is conclusively established, by the usage of the second Greek verb noted above, H6.axs.cfd at, and its association with the Hebrew word *13D.
2. In its classical sense the word IXdaxscrOac means to propitiate an offended deity by means of expiatory sacrifices or penances. This was the universally received sense of the word and its uniform usage among all persons who used the Greek language ages before the translators of the Septuagint used it as the proper Greek equivalent of the Hebrew ^23; and it continued to be its sense without shadow of change down to the time when the inspired apostles used it to express the precise effect of Christ’s work as it respects God. This fact is acknowledged by Young, although it is radically subversive alike of the Governmental Atonement Theory and of his own. Thus Christ is made a faithful high priest, in things pertaining to God, to make reconciliation for (l)Aaxs.(j6ai) the sins of his people. Heb. ii. 17. In 1 John ii. 2, and iv. 10, the Lord Jesus is said to be the IhaafJLCx; for our sins — a word used by the Seventy to translate DnDD, expiation. And in Rom. iii. 25, he is declared to be an llaaiyptov through faith in his blood — that is, a propitiation by means of an expiatory sacrifice covering the sins of his people with his blood.
3. The Hebrew word *)3D is the principal one used by the Holy Spirit to express the precise effect designed and accomplished by the sacrifices, (a) in respect to sin as a covering, and hence (6) in respect to God as a means of reconciliation. The root-meaning of the word is to cover, overlay, and this sense is carried with it through its entire usage. The Holy of Holies, in the temple, was God’s immediate presence-chamber, and the mercy-seat, covering the Ark of the Covenant, was God’s throne, In this ark, as the foundation on which his throne rests, were placed the two stone tables of the law, on which were engraven those commandments summarily embody ing the principles of perfect righteousness, constituting in this position God’s terrible testimony against all sin and all sinners. The ark was covered with a slab of pure gold, called the m«D or covering, rendered in the Greek, IXaaTyptov; in the Latin, propitiatorium; and in the English, mercy-seat. Immediately over this mercy-seat, and between the cherubim, habitually dwelt the Schekinah, or visible manifestation of Jehovah’s presence. On the great day of atonement, the high priest entered within the veil, first with the blood of the bullock slain, as an atonement for the sin of his house; and again with the blood of the goat slain, as a sin-offering for the sin of the people; and he sprinkled them both in turn over the mercy-seat, and seven times before it. Lev. xvi. 14, 15. Hence, when God looked down toward his law, on which rests his throne, and which called for the execution of the penalty upon every transgression, his eye rested first on the m23, or covering bearing the sacrificial blood; the sins were therefore covered, and God was reconciled. Hence this small slab of gold became the most important part of the tabernacle — the Holy of Holies being at times designated as “the house of the m33, or the house of the blood-bearing covering.” 1 Chron. xxviii. 11.* Hence the word *123, originally signifying to cover, came to be used by the Holy Ghost to express the effect
*See Hengstenberg, Gen. of the Pent., vol. ii., pp. 524-526. See Fairbairn’s Typology, vol. ii., chap. v.
of a sacrifice in expiating the guilt of sin, arid hence in propitiating the infinitely holy God. Hence it is properly translated in our version, in different constructions, by the words to make atonement, to appease, to pacify, to reconcile, to purge, to purge away. Ezek. xvi. 63; Gen. xxxii. 20, 21; Ps. lxv. 3, 4; lxxviii. 38; 1 Sam. iii. 14; Numb. xxxv. 33. And hence also the cog nate word, ons:) is translated atonement, and 133 is translated sometimes ransom; Ps. xlix. 7. “If there shall be laid upon him a sum of money (an atonement, something to cover his offence), then he shall give for the ransom of his soul whatsoever is laid upon him.’7 Ex. xxi. 30. “I am the Lord thy God, the Holy One of Israel; I gave Egypt for thy ransom, Ethiopia and Seba for thee.” Isa. xliii. 3; and sometimes satisfaction. Numb. xxxv. 31, 32. Thus under the Old Testament, as well as under the New, sacrificial expiation is declared to be of the nature of a ransom; that is, of some person or thing given for another as the condition of deliverance. But the fixed idea of the basis of the whole usage of the word and its derivatives is, that (a) God is reconciled to the sinner only by covering his sin, and (6) that sin is covered only by sacrificial blood. Thus, in Lev. x. 17, it is said that the “sin-offering is given to make atonement (that is, covering of sin by blood) for them before the Lord.” Paul declares, as the sum of the Old Testament ritual, that “without shedding of blood is no remission,” and “where remission of these is, there is no more offering for sin.” Hob. ix. 22 and x. 18. The Seventy habitually translate this word -133 (to cover sin by blood) by the Greek word VAaxeadat, the fixed meaning of which was to propitiate by expiation. And the apostles, following the Seventy, apply the same word ,o Christ and his work. His “blood is shed for the remission of sins.” Matt. xxvi. 28. He is the IXaa/jLOi; (1 John ii. 2) and the ttaffTijptov, or mercy-seat, covering our sins with sacrificial blood.
II. The effect of Christ’s sufferings, as it respects the sins of his people, was expiation of guilt. Propitiation has reference to the bearing or effect of satisfaction upon God. Expiation has reference to the bearing of the same satisfaction upon the guilt of sin. It does not, in the least degree, remove the pollution or moral turpitude of sin. It removes only its guilt or moral obligation, and hence its legal exposure to punishment. The same words, alike in classical Latin and Greek, and in the originals of both the Old and the New Testaments, are used in different constructions to express this double bearing of a bloody sacrifice, now upon God and now upon sin. (a.) The words ttdffxo/jiat and IXafffjLOS, translated in the English New Testament by the word propitiate, were habitually used by the Seventy to translate 193, which can only, as a general thing, signify expiation by covering with blood. (6.) The word DAaxouat, when construed with God, evidently and confessedly is used by both classical writers and the Seventy in the sense of propitiation; but when it is construed with sin, it can only be used in the sense of expiation. Heb. ii. 17. Christ was made a faithful High Priest in things pertaining to God (jMaxsadat r«c <fy/«/?r/«c roy haou), to expiate the sins of the people. In 1 John ii. 2 and iv. 10, Christ is twice declared to be the expiation for our sim. (c.) The Hebrew word i£D is sometimes con-EFFECTS OF CHRIST WOEK. 185
stri ed with God when it must be rendered propitiation, as, for instance, Ezek. xvi. 63: “When I am pacified toward thee for all that thou hast done, saith the Lord.” See Gen. xxxii. 20. Whereas the same word is generally and more immediately, in accordance with its radical meaning, construed with sin, or with the person or thing in which the sin inheres. Isa. vi. 7; Dan. ix. 24; and Lev. iv. 20; v. 6, 10; xvi. 6, 12: “And Aaron shall bring the bullock of the sin-offering, which is for him self, and shall make an atonement for himself and for his house;... and he shall take a censer full of burning coals of fire from off the altar before the LORD, and his hands full of sweet incense beaten small, and bring it within the veil: and he shall put the incense upon the fire before the LORD, that the cloud of the incense may cover the mercy-seat (mSD or covering) that is upon the testimony, that he die not. And he shall take of the blood of the bullock, and sprinkle it with his finger upon the mercy-seat eastward: and before the mercy-seat shall he sprinkle of the blood with his finger seven times. Then shall he kill the yoat of the sin-offering that is for the people, and bring his blood within the veil, and do with that blood as he did with the blood of the bullock, and sprinkle it upon the mercy-seat, and before the mercy-seat: and he shall make an atonement (covering by sacrificial blood) for the holy place, because of the uncleanness of the children of Israel, and because of their transgressions in all their sins.” Although a different word is used, this is evidently the idea of David when, in Ps. xxxii. 1, he sars, “Blessed is the man whose sin is covered;” which he explains by the parallel phrases, “whose sin is forgiven, “and “to whom the Lord
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1 86 THE NATURE OF THE ATC^ CMENT.
imputeth not iniquity.” And Paul, in Rom. iv. 5, declares that this is the principle on which, in the gospel, God justifies the ungodly without works, and reckons faith for righteousness.
Young supposes that he overthrows this entire body of proof by noticing the fact (a) that the Seventy sometimes translate the word “iSD by the Greek terms bcftazw, to consecrate, and by xa.6af)ietv, to purify, although he admits that their characteristic rendering is ttdaxeadat. (b.) That in those cases in which the word -12D is used to set forth the ceremonial atonement for the sacred instruments of religion, as the altar (Ex. xxix. 36, 37), and for the plague of leprosy in the walls of a house (Lev. xiv. 48-53), it cannot possibly be used in the strict sense of making expiation for sin.* We answer to the first point, that the very thing expressed by the habitual and always consistent usage of this word is, that a sinner can be reconciled, and his sin cleansed, and soul made holy, and his life consecrated to God’s service, only as his sin is covered and so atoned by sacrificial blood. Remission of sins, the immediate effect of an acceptable offering, is in order to sanctifi cation — ,’sanctification is not in order to remission. But since sacrificial blood, by making expiation, and so securing remission, always effects purification, it is eminently proper that the instrumentality should be differently designated, as one or other effect might be in the special case most prominently thought of. To the second point, the answer is obvious, that the sin of man really brings, in a true sense, under condemnation with himself, his bfdy, his world, and the very instruments of his daily * Young’s “Life and Light of Men,” pp. 2S7-239.
life, and religious service. The disease of leprosy was chosen as a type or image of sin. Leprosy in the walls of a house was treated as an image of that in man. The priest was directed to slay a bird, to sprinkle the house seven times to make an atonement for the house. This is of course a figure from beginning to end; but a figure of what? The leprosy is a figure of human sinfulness, involving guilt and pollution. The atonement is a figure of human redemption from sin. In both cases the cleansing comes through the atonement or covering, and the covering is effected through sacrificial blood.
When it is said that the Atonement had a bearing upon the divine nature, and in some real sense propitiated God’s justice and so reconciled him to the sinner, it is by no means forgotten (a) that God is absolutely unchangeable in his states and moods, as well as in his essence, or (6) that instead of the Atonement being the cause of God’s love for his people, it is itself the effect of that love pre-existing from eternity. For “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son.” John iii. 16.
The scriptural doctrine of propitiation is no more inconsistent with the divine unchangeableness than the Scripture doctrine with respect to the real efficacy of prayer. We may not be able to define the method of that consistency, yet it is not difficult to believe that the atoning work of Christ was present, like every act of prayer, in the divine mind from eternity. It by no means follows that because there are no chronological successions in God, there are therefore to be traced no relations of cause and effect through his thoughts, purposes or actions.
In like manner, our doctrine is not in the least inconsistent with the glorious truth that the love of God for his own people is eternal and self-originated — the cause and not the effect of the Atonement. The fact is, that his love for their persons, and his holy displeasure for their sins, were co-existent states of mind from eternity. And yet the apostle takes upon himself to say that the very elect themselves, so beloved, were, because of God’s righteousness, “by nature the children of wrath, even as others.” Eph. ii. 3. The wrath of God is a verity, being revealed from heaven, and coming even now upon the children of disobedience, and in many cases fearfully treasured up against the day of wrath to come. Rom. i. 18; ii. 5. But it is asserted over and over again that “we shall be saved from wrath through Christ”- (Rom. v. 9), and that “Christ delivered us from the wrath to come.” 1 Thess. i. 10. Absolutely considered, God is unchangeable. But such a change in our relations to God was wrought by the work of Christ, that his infinite righteousness coincides with his infinite love in all their blessed manifestations and operations towards his own people for ever.
Young complains that our doctrine of Satisfaction leads inevitably to the conception of two different Gods.* “The one God is angry with the other God; and the incarnate God is represented as bearing the wrath of the first.” He admits, that” When we bow in adoring reverence before the eternal essential Unity, it is not hard to think of distinct aspects blending mysteri- *Life and Light of Men, pp. 284, 285.
ously and harmoniously in one being, or of distinct agencies and influences springing out of one source/7 Although we have not time to dwell upon the point, it is impossible not to notice the very significant fact that, although he professes to be, and doubtless is in his heart, a devout believer in the real divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ, yet having adopted the Unitarian theory as to the nature of Christ’s work, he necessarily gravi tates towards the Unitarian theory as to the constitution of his person. In the above extract, which harmonizes with the tone of his whole book, he distinctly excludes the scriptural doctrine of the three-fold distinction of persons in the unity of essence. If the first clause, in which he speaks of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost as “distinct aspects” stood alone, we would credit him with being a Sabellian, holding that God is one single person as well as one single essence, and admitting a modal three-foldness in respect to manifestation and operation. But in the second clause, which doubtless he intends to be exegetical of the first, he represents the divine in Christ and the Holy Ghost to be “agencies or influences” springing out of a divine source. Neither Strauss nor Renan would object to such a statement of the Trinity as involved in a rational conception of the person of Christ. Let the reader, for the purpose of tracing the connection, compare Bushnell’s book on the “Vicarious Sacrifice,” in which he gives the Unitarian view as to the work of Christ, with the radically defective view of the person of our Lord given in his “God in Christ.”
To the charge that our view of Satisfaction necessarily involves Tritheism, we answer -(1.) That the eternal subsistence of three distinct persons, capable of mutual personal interaction in the unity of one indivisible essence, is a truth clearly revealed in Scripture, yet one which no man can distinctly construe in his own mind. As it is presented in different relations in Scripture, every person who, with competent clearness of thought, observes his own mental states, knows that his mind oscillates between the extreme of too widely separating the persons (Tritheism), and the opposite extreme of too closely pressing the unity toward the extinction of the personal distinction (Sabellianism). Nevertheless, there are no truths more clearly taught in Scripture than these: (a.) That the true God is one God. (6.) That Christ, in the highest sense the word bears, is the great God in person, (c.) That, at the same time, he is a distinct person from the Father. (2.) We answer, that our doctrine of the execution, by the Father, of the penalty of the law upon the person of the God-man as the Substitute of his people does not bear a tritheistic appearance any more than the undeniable representations given in Scripture of the relations sustained by the Son to the Father. They mutually love and are beloved by each other. The Son is commanded, is sent by the Father; prays to him; addresses t/j him the pronoun thou; uses, with reference to him, the pronoun he. When the Son came in the place of men, and suffered in their stead (avTt), then the Scriptures declare that the Father laid upon him the iniquities of us all, and made him to be sin and a curse. On the cross the Son cried in agony, the whole world darkening in sympathy, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me f
III. The Scriptures set forth the effect of the atoning work of Christ, as it bears upon the sinner himsdf, as a redemption; as a deliverance from the curse of the law by the payment of an equivalent as a ransom-price. The words which express this effect are of frequent recurrence, and are such as dj-opdew, to buy. “Ye are bought with a price,” 1 Cor. vii. 23; “Redeemed us to God by thy blood,” Rev. v. 9; ‘E^ayopd’scv, to redeem, to buy out of the hands of; “Hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us.” Gal. iii. 13. Also Xurpow, mid., to ransom, to redeem by payment of a ransom; “For ye were not redeemed with corruptible things, such as silver and gold, but with the precious blood of Christ.” 1 Pet. i. 18. Christ is called our kuTpov, ransom (Matt. xx. 28), and our dvr/^yrov, substituted ransom (1 Tim. ii. 6) Aorpbco is very frequently used by the Seventy to translate the Hebrew ^K; and ma, words of very frequent occurrence, and translated in our version by redeem and ransom. The Jehovah of the Old Testament habitually is described as the Redeemer of his people of Israel. Isa. xli. 14; xliv. 24, &c. And the people of the Lord are constantly set forth as those who have been bought with a price — ransomed. Isa. xxxv. 10; li. 11; lxii. 12, &c.
It has often been charged against the supporters of the orthodox doctrine of the Atonement that, by unduly pressing the literal sense of a few passages like those just cited, we have been led to represent the work of our Lord as purely a mercantile transaction. This objection is utterly unfounded. The orthodox have from the first carefully distinguished in statement, and in argument triumphantly vindicated their doctrine, in view of the distinction between a pecuniary satisfaction on the one hand and a penal satisfaction on the other.* In a matter of pecuniary indebtedness, the claim respects exclusively the thing due, and not at all the person of the debtor. A pecuniary satisfaction, therefore, being the payment of the money due, which was all the claim required, ipso facto, liberates, no matter whether the debtor pays or another pays for him. The receipt in full of the creditor is purely a business acknowledgment that his claim is satisfied, and therefore extinguished by the simple force of the payment, and without any room for the exercise of grace on his part. In a case of debt, moreover, the demand is for the precise amount due. Nothing satisfies but the payment of the very thing nominated in the bond. Now the orthodox doctrine is, that the sufferings of Christ are a penal satisfaction to the demands of the law. In this case the claim of the law essentially respects the person of the criminal as well as the penal debt incurred. The claims of law, preceptive and penal, are all personal, and can be transferred from person to person only by the prerogative of the sovereign as a matter of gracious will. As a matter of mere law, no satisfaction can find acceptance other than the literal suffering of the penalty by the criminal in person. If the sovereign admits a substitute in the place of the criminal, it is a matter of pure grace. Even if the sovereign does admit a substitute, the solution of the penal debt by that substitute does not give any claim to the criminal represented, nor, ipso facto, liberate him from the legal bonds in which he is held. The only rights to which the vicarious solution of a penal debt can give rise accrue to the substitute, not the criminal, * Turretin, Locus 14, Qusestio 10.
and the criminal receives the benefits thereof purely as a matter of grace, and at such times and under such conditions as may be settled between the sovereign j udge and the substitute. In the case of a penal infliction, the demand respects not any constant and definite kind and degree of suffering. The demand is for whatever kind and degree of suffering the infinitely righteous intelligence of God sees in each given case to be morally right; the crime to be expiated and the person to suffer being both taken into consideration.
The commercial language, above quoted, is not the invention of orthodox theologians. It is the spontaneous and very frequent language of the Holy Ghost, deliberately chosen to set before our minds the true nature and method of Christian salvation. It is moreover plain that this language, taken in its obvious sense, is most appropriate to the subject, if our view of the nature of the Atonement be true, while it is certainly unnatural and misleading if either of the alternative views should be true.
On the Moral Influence Theory the language must be emptied of all sense, and the ideas it suggests must not only be modified, but totally ignored. As a moral impression, the work of Christ terminates upon the heart of the sinner. But as a ransom, as an act of redemption out of the hands of justice for a price paid, it must respect the deliverance of the sinner from the claim and power of some person exterior to himself.
The Governmental Atonement Theory sets forth the sufferings of Christ as having only a general and impersonal relation to the mass of sinners, and a very indefinite relation to thr law and its penalty. The sufferings of Christ, iii this view, secured no claim upon God on Christ’s part any more than on ours. It simply makes it consistent with governmental expediency to offer salvation on easier terms, and it puts the sinner in a salvable, not a saved condition. But this characteristic scriptural language of ransom, buying with a price, redeemed out of the hands of, &c., necessarily carries with it the ideas (a) of a personal reference to the individuals redeemed, that is, paid for; (6) of these persons being really saved by redemption, not simply put in a salvable condition; and (c) of Christ having acquired a right to that for which he had paid the price. There is an exact correspondence between the representation that Christ assumed our law-place, and as our Substitute suffered, in our stead and behalf, the penalty of the law, and this scriptural language above quoted, that Christ is the ransom of our souls, the price paid for our redemption; that is, by which we were bought off from the claims of that law by which we were held.
There are three several generic forms of conception under which the work wrought by Christ for the salvation of men is set forth. These are (a) that of an expiatory offering for sin; (b) that of the redemption of the life and liberty of a captive by the payment of a ransom in his stead; and (c) the satisfaction of the law by the vicarious fulfilment of its demands. These different conceptions are designed both to limit and to supplement each other in a manner strictly analogous to the combination of the different perceptions of the same object by the different bodily senses. The sense of sight, although when educated in connection with the concurrent and mutually limiting and supplementing perceptions of the organs of touch and hearing, it is unmatched as to the extent and accuracy of its information, yet would, if left to itself, never have risen beyond an infant’s vague perception of a surface variously shaded, without any sense of relation in space. All our knowledge of the material world, considered as an object of sense, arises from the education of our minds in the use of our bodily senses in combination, and the habits of judgment and inference which are thus produced. Men learn to interpret the impressions made upon them through their eyes by means of other impressions made upon them, in connection with the same objects, through the senses of touch and hearing, and vice versa. In like manner our knowledge of the true nature of the work of Christ and its bearing upon us results from all the various forms in which the Scriptures set it forth in combination, each at once limiting, modifying and supplementing all the others. It should be noticed, moreover, that the Scriptures do not present these several views as different sides of the same house to be taken in succession, but habitually present them in combination, as lights and shades blend together in the same picture in producing the same intelligible expression. Thus, in the same sentences, it is said, “We are redeemed with the precious blood of Christ as of a lamb without blemish and without spot” 1 Pet. i. 18, 19. Christ came “to give his life SL ransom for many.” Matt. xx. 28. “Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us.” Gal. iii. 13. “He hath made him, who kne’V no sin, to be a sin-offering for us, that we might be made the righteousness of God, in him.” 2 Cor. v. 21.* That * Macdonnell’s Donnellan Lecture for 1857, pp. 115-125.
is, he redeems us not in the sense of making a pecuniary payment in cancellation of our debts, but by his vicarious suffering, like the bleeding sacrifices of the Mosaic ritual, of the penalty due our sins.
The fact here noticed, that the same inspired sentences represent Christ at the same instant and in the same relations as a ransom and as a sin-offering, and as made to endure the curse of the law for us, is worthy of careful study. The teaching of Scripture is not that Christ is a sacrifice, and a ransom, and a bearer of the curse of the law, but it is that he is that particular species of sacrifice which is a ransom; that his redemption is of that nature which is effected by his bearing the curse of the law in our stead, and that he redeems us by offering himself a bleeding sacrifice to God. Thus, the teaching of the Holy Ghost is as precise as any ecclesiastical theory of Atonement. Christ saves us by being a sacrifice. But not any one of the many kinds embraced in the whole genus sacrifice. He is specifically a sin-offering in the Jewish sense, because this was declared, while the temple was still standing, by a Jewish apostle to Jewish readers. More specifically yet, the offering of himself as a sin-offering is declared to have been equivalent to his making himself a ransom for us, and to his bearing the curse of the law in our stead, and that the design and effect of this ransom-paying, curse-bearing sacrifice of his is, that he redeems us from the curse of the law. It is not any kind of a sacrifice, but a ransom-paying, curse-bearing sacrifice. It is not any kind of redemption, but a sacrificial redemption. A given line of latitude a thousand miles long may be a very indeterminate definition of the geographical position of a city; but the precise point of intersection of a line of latitude and a determinate line of longitude marks a mathematical point with meta physical precision. The Holy Ghost has ideally represented the work of Christ as marked by the precise point of convergence of the bleeding sacrifice, of redemption by the substitution of a personal ransom, and of the vicarious bearing of the curse of the law by a substitute in the stead of the criminal.*
Besides this, these different expressions are sometimes applied to different subjects. When it is said that Christ “has redeemed us by his blood” (Rev. v. 9), the term redemption of course is used to designate the nature and designed effect of his sacrifice, which he finished on the cross. But when it is said that Christ “obtained eternal redemption for us” (Heb. ix. 12), and that we are “sealed by the Holy Spirit unto the day of redemption,” the word is of course used to include, in addition to the means whereby Christ obtained our salvation, also its application and complete realization by us — when not only the remission of sin and the complete sanctification of our souls will have been attained, but upon the consummated adoption, to wit, the redemption of our bodies, “the creature itself also shall bt, delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God.” Rom. viii. 21-23.
* See Chapter iii., Definition 7.