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.