NO man could possibly dwell in heavenly glory unless God Himself had opened the way. There were three insuperable barriers from the moment when man became a sinner, which none but God Himself could remove. But blessed be His name, in love He has done it. Hence the way is thrown open wide to all. Let us see what these barriers were, and how He has removed them.
The first was His own essential character.
The second was the great power of Satan.
The third was the momentous question of sin.
God is a Spirit, love, light, holy, omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent, Man, fallen and under sin, is totally (and as far as his own efforts are concerned, irretrievably) unfit for His presence. If he were suddenly translated to the heavenly glory of God, he would he utterly miserable. All that he is, all that he thinks, all that he says, all that he does, being mixed with sin, he is utterly disqualified. God, who is of purer eyes than to behold iniquity, and who has said that the very heavens are not clean in His sight, could not suffer a sinner in His presence for a moment. His very heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked. His sin would be an insuperable barrier to God’s lavishing His love upon him. His light would completely expose him in all the dense darkness of his heart and mind; His holiness, for He is a consuming fire, would wither him to the very roots of his being; His majesty would overwhelm him; His knowledge of him would utterly confound him; His glory and power would consign him to everlasting misery. If God and a fallen sinner meet, apart from Christ, woe be to the sinner! The lake of fire would be his irrevocable portion. The essential character of God is an insuperable barrier to any sinner entering heavenly glory. He alone can open the way.
Satan is also a spirit, great, powerful, but fallen, and essentially wicked. He hates God, and he hates man, into whose nostrils the Lord God breathed the breath of life. He holds the power of darkness and of death; he is a liar, a deceiver, a murderer; he beguiles and deceives the whole world; he works in the children of disobedience; he goes about to devour; he sets innumerable wiles, and lays innumerable snares; he transforms himself into an angel of light; his depths are beyond the sinner’s ken. The whole world lieth in him. His knowledge is wondrous, his power enormous. The sinner with his puny forces resists him in vain. His natural though unenlightened conscience may refuse a measure of evil, and he may struggle to release himself from Satan’s power, but he stands as an impassable barrier between him and the heavenly glory of God. God alone can enable him to pass.
Sin, which keeps man at a distance from God so long as he is under it, dominates all, without exception (Rom. 3:9,9What then? are we better than they? No, in no wise: for we have before proved both Jews and Gentiles, that they are all under sin; (Romans 3:9) vs. 19). It is another insuperable barrier between the sinner and God. However a man may struggle against it, he cannot possibly free himself from it; it has taken possession of his heart and mind; both are under its sway. He can neither eradicate it from his own moral being, nor escape from its powerful influence all around him. The world is full of it. It is a huge moral blot in the sight of God, and man, so to speak, is in the blot. Its workings in him are most terrible in their effects. He devises many plans to escape it, or to ameliorate his own or his fellows’ condition under it, but he still remains more or less enslaved. It haunts him all his life; it mars both his circumstances and his pleasures; it affects his health. From his birth to the end of his days, though he live an hundred years, it threatens continually to pay him its wage, death, and eventually does so. It is the only wage man’s heart would not like to be increased. And yet how often men, by what we call war, pay it to one another wholesale and relentlessly! Sin is a high and wide impassable barrier. None can surmount it by any effort of his own, and yet none, without surmounting it, can ever reach the heavenly glory of God. God alone can enable him, and that in His way, not ours.
The sinner’s position, then, is this, and not one is exempt. God’s holiness, Satan’s power, sin’s mastery, are three insuperable barriers to his reaching the glory; and yet, if he thinks seriously about the matter, that is the goal of his desire. How, then, can he reach it? What is impossible to man is possible to God, for with Him all things are possible. All his own plans are worse than folly. But God Himself, in love, has devised a plan whereby, as Scripture puts it, His banished be not expelled from Him (2 Sam. 14:1414For we must needs die, and are as water spilt on the ground, which cannot be gathered up again; neither doth God respect any person: yet doth he devise means, that his banished be not expelled from him. (2 Samuel 14:14)). And He does it for His own glory and heart’s joy, in a manner worthy of and consistent with Himself. What is it?
BY THE GIFT AND DEATH OF HIS SON.
When the fullness of time had come, God sent forth His Son. The Son came into Manhood, sin apart, the holy One and the Just. Ever dwelling in the bosom of the Father, He walked in bondsman form on earth. He was the Lamb of God’s providing, sent in infinite love to man to remove every barrier. He was without blemish and without spot. The strictest priestly scrutiny could find no speck of evil in Him in any form whatever. His delight was the will of God, and He went in perfect obedience to the cross. There He endured the holy judgment of God and died. And He rose again from the dead. All the claims of the holy nature and character of God were maintained and fully met. All the power of Satan was faced, overcome, and annulled. All the dominion of sin was broken. He glorified God in death infinitely more than if sin had never entered the world. He completely annulled the whole power of Satan, triumphing in resurrection over his power of death. And being made sin, He put it away from beneath the eye of God so completely that grace has flowed through righteousness from His heart of love towards man ever since; and sin with all its terrible consequences will at the end of time be finally removed altogether.
The love of God has broken every barrier down through Christ’s finished work. On the ground of accomplished redemption, the price, His precious life’s blood, God welcomes and receives any and every sinner who returns to Him. The glory of the Father claimed and raised Christ on the other side of death, where Satan has never trodden and sin has never come. God, in absolute righteousness, and for His own glory, forgives, justifies, reconciles, saves, and brings into blest relationship with Himself every one that believeth. He casts all his sins behind His back; He justifies him from all things; He reconciles him to Himself; He delivers him from the world; and He folds him in His fond embrace of love as one of His own sons.
Every barrier is completely and eternally removed on God’s side, and His heart of love invites all alike everywhere to come home to Him. His everlasting arms are outstretched to receive them. Christ, and Christ alone, is the way. So complete is God’s great and wondrous salvation that His holiness invites instead of repels, and the one who believes on Christ, His Son, is cleansed from all sin by His precious blood, and is perfectly fitted for the light of His holy presence in the risen Christ Himself, even the beloved (1 John 1:77But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin. (1 John 1:7); Eph. 1:66To the praise of the glory of his grace, wherein he hath made us accepted in the beloved. (Ephesians 1:6)). The once far-off sinner, with insuperable barriers between him and God, is brought right home and made at home in the holy presence of Him who is love, where Satan never has obtruded and never can, and where sin never has been and never can be. God does His work perfectly, and hence all the barriers are as though they had never been—to the one who in child-like simplicity of faith wholly submits to Him. Believing Him, we find ourselves in His presence without a spot. And He gives us His Holy Spirit, whereby, being exercised, we keep ourselves in His love, and without spot in our walk and ways, until we shall be in the full enjoyment, without hindrance, where Christ has already gone, of the salvation which is in Him with eternal glory.
All have sinned and come short of the glory of God, but One, Jesus, the Son of God, came up to that glory. Such an One died for God’s glory and for us. Through Him our sin is gone from before God, and in Him we become God’s righteousness, rejoice in hope of His glory, and wait with patience till He claims us for it forever. This may be realized at any moment by Christ’s return, for every one that believeth. Dear reader, are you one?
E. H. C.
Oh, to think of the Lord Himself, whom none of the princes of this world knew, but who was the Lord of glory, sitting weary on the well, thirsty, and dependent upon this world for a drink of water—the world that was made by Him, and knew Him not.
J. N. D.