“One day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.”
Things which once existed in their own abstract significations between God and man, and which maintained their distinctiveness, revolving so to speak round their own centers, have been marvelously brought together in Christ, and inseparably connected by His work on the cross, with the counsels of God before the world was, and our blessing. Take as an example the great fact, that “mercy and truth have met together, righteousness and peace have kissed each other.” It is not that truth has ceased to be truth, or merged itself into mercy, so that the native character of each is destroyed, any more than the possibility that righteousness could change itself into peace; but, on the contrary, a new foundation has been formed between God and His creatures in and through the cross by which “grace reigns through righteousness unto eternal life by Jesus Christ our Lord.”
So with the attributes of God, such as His holiness and justice; or rather what He is as light and love. How could they cease to be what they are in themselves? Nor can they admit of any changes in their exercise towards mankind, else they would fail to be perfect as displaying the character of God. Each is in its nature what each was, but each finds in the blood of atonement what each needs for its vindication, in the fullest exercise towards us. Moreover, each is further bound up with the Lord's own perfectness henceforth.
But that new action of God towards Him in raising Him up from out of the dead! All that God is, as well as all that we were in our sins, have not only been concentrated in Him-in His life and death-but by means of death and judgment He has separated the evil from the good forever, by putting away sin through the sacrifice of Himself. Thus He has left nothing but the good and what God is in unspotted holiness, with the blood of His Son our Lord and Savior before Him, and sprinkled upon us as His rule. So as regards life and death, death and redemption, redemption and resurrection between God and ourselves. Not only has each got another and a new meaning in Christ to what they had in themselves, as viewed in the light of promise or by Levitical type, but they are brought together in the person and work of Christ; so that the distance which naturally existed between them is done away.
For example, at the cross and sepulcher, three days serve to measure the distance between death and life, death to the old man and life in the new. And these same three days now close the once vast space of His incarnation, when it stood in promise and type between our redemption and His resurrection. Forty days serve to mark the period of time when the last Adam was born out of death, and the hour when He was carried up into heaven in a cloud as the ascended Lord—the glorified man—head over all things to the church which is His body.
Again, if days and years are brought away from their ordinary computation by time, and put in connection with the Lord and His coming, or with the day of God and the final dissolution of the heavens and the earth, faith's reckonings become like His and we readily believe that “One day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.” It is this new method of calculation which enables us to declare as to this apparently long interval which measures His absence, “the Lord is not slack concerning his promise as men count slackness, but is longsuffering to usward.” The difference between these standards (which are either divine or human) makes the difference which we are contemplating.
Indeed everything between God and ourselves is thus brought into new and close connection through Christ the Second Man, both as to facts and times: and, when learned in their existing order and meaning, by acquaintance with His person and work, gives another character to the ways of God with men, and their thoughts of Him. The cross and the sepulcher here, and the Son of man at the right hand of the throne above, are now become the only established centers of God's everlasting operations in grace towards us, and in righteousness to Christ, and for His glory. These same centers are the resting places of our faith as regards sin put away and righteousness brought in, and sustain the soul in a known peace with God that passeth all understanding, keeping the heart and mind through Christ Jesus. These centers are also the birthplace of our brightest hopes and expectations, for Christ is the alone object between God and ourselves. He will accept no other rule of action toward us, in redemption or resurrection for Himself, and we disown every other as the ground of our confidence and hope before Him. It is by Christ—this Christ—that we believe in God who raised Him up from the dead and gave Him glory, that our faith and hope might be in God. J. E. B.