Repeatedly urged to say more on the recent heterodoxy as to propitiation, I had declined on various grounds. Enough as it seemed to me was published to warn souls; and those who did not heed it were disposed to think what had been written too strong, bitter, personal, and I know not what. One could not convince those whose will was adverse.
But now attention is drawn to a development, new to most, in “Help and Instruction,” compiled by Walter Scott, and published some two years ago by E. P. Nicholls, 19, Church Street, Kensington, which contains the following statements— “Now we are not to understand by this that God needed to be propitiated by the sacrifice of the Lord Jesus Christ, in order to reconcile Him to us. We, not God, needed the reconciliation,” &e. (p. 38); “To speak then of propitiating God by sacrifice would be to belie the teaching of revelation, and to deny what He is Whom we know as our God. Such a thought would do for a heathen, but not for Christians;” &c. (p. 39); “But if He needs not to be propitiated,” &c. (Ib.); “To be propitiated on their behalf He never needed” (Ib.); “Propitiation, therefore, had to be made, though God needed not to be propitiated” (Ib. and 40).
These words have alarmed souls who did not see the doctrine of propitiation in “Recent Utterances” to be fundamentally unsound. No wonder it is seen now. They deny what is universally among Christians felt to be the essence of propitiation in the O.T. as well as the New. The sentiment is really skeptical. Not that propitiation is denied in terms; it is asserted in the same pages and elsewhere. But the necessary appeasing of divine wrath is here categorically excluded from propitiation, as by all misbelievers or rationalists, who also confound it with reconciliation. There might be a loophole of escape in the first of these extracts, “in order to reconcile Him to us;” for this no intelligent believer accepts for a moment. Reconciliation according to scripture is, in God's love, of us only. But the author goes farther, and lays it down thrice in the page that follows in the most unreserved and absolute way.
John 3:16 is cited, without a word about ver. 14, 15. Yet the cross is the turning-point of propitiation, whatever the love of God that gave the Son. On such a question think of leaving out here “even so must the Son of man be lifted up”! The presence of the Lord on earth was indeed a blessed witness of His errand of reconciliation; but how does, how could, it refute the faith of God's elect, that God needed to be, and in fact was, propitiated in His vast abhorrence of our sins by Christ's death? Was there not the deepest displeasure on God's part borne by the Sin-bearer? This is now plainly, deliberately, repeatedly denied to be a vital part of propitiation, in a pamphlet of selections made by another, revised throughout by the author, and sent forth for the direct edification and blessing of all who love our Lord Jesus Christ! The editor is “satisfied that the truths therein unfolded will commend themselves as of God to Bible readers.” May all concerned be forgiven so wanton a wrong!
It is not insinuated for a moment that there are not true things in the pamphlet, and some of them (as in pp. 63, 64) quite inconsistent with the new doctrine on propitiation. But I affirm that the author has abandoned the truth of God on propitiation in a way which the simplest believer in the most unenlightened sect, if orthodox, would denounce as false and evil. Other truths cannot lighten the guilt of setting aside the truth, the foundation truth, of the propitiation. God made Christ sin for us, and forsook Him on the cross, where He became a curse for others, and suffered for sins, Just for unjust. This indeed was needed in propitiation, to meet the righteous but offended majesty of God, a God that had indignation every day. But this, to which the simplest saint clings in his soul and for which the most instructed only deepens in his thankful and adoring value, is just what is now excluded. “To speak then of propitiating God by sacrifice would be to belie the teaching of revelation and to deny what He is Whom we know as our God.”
Are we to sink below what Israel will soon confess, when Isa. 53. is no longer explained away but believed. “He was wounded for our transgressions; He was bruised for our iniquities; the chastisement of our peace was upon Him; and with His stripes we are healed.” Does anyone doubt that it was God Who so dealt with Him and that He so suffered in propitiation? The next verse is conclusive: “Jehovah made to light on Him the iniquity of us all,” and farther on, “Yet it pleased Jehovah to bruise Him; He hath put Him to grief: when Thou shalt make His soul an offering for sin,” &c. So will the converted Jew own the infinite sufferings of his Messiah in propitiation. The heterodoxy before us jumbles it with reconciliation, and so shuts out God in this, the pivot (I do not say the source) of all blessing to saint or sinner. Man is the object of reconciliation, God of propitiation. It is a shutting out of God's wrath revealed from heaven, which the gospel enables us to behold in all its holy nature and solemn issues, because we have submitted ourselves to His righteousness. But it is no true testimony to love in God if one denies that He needed to be propitiated by sacrifice: thereby we lose His love incalculably.
So far is the author blinded by his error that he does not scruple to say that the thought of that need “would do for a heathen.” The fact is that not only did God in the law keep the need of appeasing Him ever before His ancient people by the sacrificial system, but that Gentiles, besotted though they were, could rarely rid themselves of some imperfect and corrupted notions of its necessity. To have no such conscience, no such faith, is so far to be lower even than a heathen. That God provided Himself the Lamb is undoubtedly of faith, and the revelation of His grace and truth in Christ; but it is the enemy's work to leave out and deny that anger of God against sin, even when only imputed to our blessed Lord, which befell Him as propitiation for us. And the astounding fact lies before us, that, as far as is known of the author's associates, there has not been a cry or a groan, not one public protest or private secession of a faithful soul, because of an error which every single-eyed Christian ought to reject, and clear himself from for Christ's sake. It is not merely (as in 1886) a fable supplanting the truth; it is since then an open contradiction of a most essential element of propitiation as revealed in all the scriptures of God, though presumably the last error flowed from the first. For if propitiation be only in heaven after death, there can be in it no abandonment of God, no suffering of Christ. Both errors make shipwreck of the faith; but the former is the parent of the latter, and necessarily involves it.