As to the question you put: governmental wrath [on Christ] is all totally wrong. When I speak of governmental wrath, it is just in contrast with expiation; and any governmental wrath on the cross was on Israel, not on Christ at all, only He entered into it I believe. That is what they made so much fuss about. His sympathy will be with them at the end, but He suffered in going through it all in heart and spirit, that He might sympathize with them, as He suffered being tried to be able to sympathize with us. This is what H. denied expressly—the actual suffering—or I should have withdrawn the tract for his sake and D.'s, if no more.
But no governmental wrath was on Him; whereas when He was made sin it was on Him though for us—then the cup He had to drink that we might never drink it—He, and He alone (as to us), drank the cup. In the other, He felt the sorrow for His people of their losing all according to the flesh, suffered from Gentiles, suffered from apostate Jews, as they will, and was cut off as Messiah, taking nothing. But the governmental wrath was on them, not on Him, though He entered into it, and had the sorrow and suffering of it on His heart and in His circumstances. But the cross is another thing as expiation. There it was Himself drank the cup instead of others. It was the hatred of God's nature to sin, and His judicial action as to it on Him, to save us; though the scripture, I suppose to avoid the idea of personal displeasure, does not use the word "wrath" as to it. Yet it was the cup of God's wrath against sin. But the absence of the word would suffice to set aside the idea of governmental wrath, which I judge all wrong. I have no difficulty as to it myself. I do not believe one drop of consolation was in Christ's heart when He made propitiation for sin, or it would have rendered the suffering and sacrifice for sin imperfect: He drank the cup—solemn thought—of bitterness without alloy, or any relief, because He was made sin, and had to be that before God as God in holiness for us, and it was just the perfectness of this in obedience and love to His Father, its absoluteness for God's glory, that made God and the Father find perfect complacency in it and in Him. If there had been some relief, some assuagement of the suffering, it would not have been sin before God; but because there was none, and He perfect in glorifying God in it, therefore God's complacency was perfect in it, and the Father's in Him as doing it. Hence, too, He says, "My Father," but on the cross, "My God, my God," when accomplishing the work (still "my" because He was perfect), and "my Father" and "my God" after (and ours then) and that for us too, entering into the full effect in righteousness and love, ever personally His—but now through redemption for us too. The divinity did not screen the manhood from the taste of the terrible cup, but enabled Him to drink it He offered Himself through the eternal Spirit to God, as He cast out devils by the Spirit of God. And though God of course could not die—no more even could a human soul—yet there was no separation of the natures. Let nothing weaken our sense of the full propitiation for sin.
Of course, if I think of the Son as a divine Person, He could not die—no more, I repeat, could a human soul in fact. But if a man not having a soul was there, what is his death? Nonentity. If Christ was only as a man there, it was no more than another man there, only sinless—that is, it was nothing. The Son as a divine Person of course could not die, looked at apart; but He who was Son died and gave Himself, not as apart, but in all the infinite value of His Person and in His divine love to us. I do not say Mary was the mother of God, if I may compare them, but she was the mother of Him personally who was God, and if He was not, His birth was nothing. A person may object to saying the Son died, because he is looking at Him apart as a divine Person; but if it be denied that He being Son died, I have lost the value of His death, which is infinite, both in love and value.
Governmental wrath is all wrong. I admit perfect complacency, but complacency in His perfectly drinking the cup (forsaken of God as to the feeling of His soul) and in Him that did it; but solace by it, there is not a trace of in scripture; it would destroy its perfectness.
1872.