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.