The Two Goats
The Father brings in quite another range of facts, truths, thoughts, and feelings. It is His gracious relation to the Son, and now by grace to the family of faith (for one does not here dwell on His more general Fatherhood as in Eph. 3:15; 4:6). Hence the watchful discipline and holy chastening, as a father towards his children. But, where full judgment of sin is concerned, all consideration of gracious relationship and its fruit is shut out entirely. God is the judge of sin; and there cannot in this be the least mitigation. What sin deserves ought not to be impaired. Mercy is here wholly out of place. Sin must be duly punished. All must be out, and the truth, holiness, and righteousness of God be vindicated at all cost in the execution of His judgment on sin. In the cross of Christ not one kindly ray of light from the Father broke the darkness which surrounded Him Who knew no sin, there made sin for us. Yet never was His perfection so precious in God's eyes as when bearing our sins He cried, “My God, My God, why didst Thou forsake me?”
This shows how complete was the change of our Lord's position on the cross. Was He not the eternal Son? This was unalterable: He could no more cease to be the Son in the Father's bosom, than the Father could cease to be His Father, Had it been possible and fact, His atonement had been vain for God or for man; but it could not be otherwise than it is. Was He not God? He Who is God can never cease to be God; just as a man can never become God. All such notions are the dreams of human vanity, and profane folly. He Who had deigned to become man was now on the cross made sin. And Who made Him to be sin? God alone: man never thought of such a marvel. God, the judge of sin, gave His beloved Son that He might in grace become man, not merely to exhibit perfect dependence and obedience throughout “the days of His flesh” in communion with the Father, but above all suffer to the uttermost all that God could expend in His unsparing judgment of sin on the cross.
Therefore it was that darkness supernatural surrounded our Lord so suffering at that moment. Far from ceasing to be the Son, He said “Father” on the cross, not only before He exclaimed “My God,” &c., but afterward, as if expressly to show that the relationship never ceased for a moment. Yet He said “My God” when actually the victim for sin; and it was no make-believe. If anything could be real since the world began, His sin-bearing was. As all had been genuine in the life of our Lord, all must be and was equally so in His suffering and death for sin. How blessed for us! That the blessing might be as righteous as full, it was Jehovah's lot, not for His people in the first place. Such is the force of the first goat. Its distinctive principle is propitiation.
When we come to the second goat, substitution is no less plain. In these two will be found some help toward a just appreciation of the day of atonement, as the truth stands fully revealed in the New Testament. For some time an active body of men pronounce themselves “thinkers,” and would gladly deny both truths. They wish to fritter all down to the manifestation of gracious feeling in our Lord, to a display of love in martyrdom, or to some kindred departure from God's dealing with sin on the Cross. It is the old error long before Socinus, in a new shape, and on the part of men who shrink from professing to be either Gnostics or Socinians. Such theories are utterly short of, and fatally opposed to, what God wrought in the death of our Lord Jesus. They contradict alike the type and the truth; but the New Testament alone gives the full light of God.
A type is like a parable in this, that it rarely runs on all-fours. What is given in either is but a striking analogy (in the type contrast, no less than resemblance) of some grand principle, but never the complete truth (or image, as it is called in Heb. 10). Evidently, and of course, a type is either human material, or what is lower than human, such as a goat, ox, ram, birds, &c. So a parable speaks of a sower, a marriage feast, a tree, or other suitable comparison. But these figures, being of a creature kind, are necessarily limited; what we have in our Lord Jesus is infinite. Had our Lord Jesus been a hair's-breadth less God than the Father, He could not have been an adequate sacrifice for sins before God the Judge; nor could He have fully declared God to man. Only God could perfectly meet what God requires. That the Son did it, in and as Man, was part of His perfection. Do you ask, “How can God meet God?” If all can understand that a man can meet a man, why should any disbelieve God? That there is unity in the Godhead, no Christian denies; while he fully believes three persons in the Godhead, even the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit (Matt. 28:19).
Nor is the truth to be enfeebled in the least degree. He who allows no more in the Godhead than three aspects of one person is not a Christian, but a deceiver and an antichrist. He does not confess the fully revealed and true God, not the Godhead merely in three characters but in three persons; and so distinct that the Father could send the Son, and the Holy Ghost descend on that Son in the presence of the Father, and in the consciousness of the Son, as it was even outwardly before man also. Such is the early and immense fact recorded in the Gospels, a clear witness to “the Trinity.” What sympathy can one have with those who, overlooking such a fact, stumble over the term? Why be so servile to the letter, and so anxious to get rid. of a word because it is not in the Bible? The thing is distinctly there; the truth, not only open in the N.T., but pervading the Bible (in a more veiled form, like the O.T. in general) from the first chapter to the last. One cannot now read the first chapter of Genesis intelligently without seeing that there are more persons than one in the Godhead. Even the first verse of the first chapter yields a positive though gradual preparation for divulging it, at least after it was revealed.
Do you ask, how can this be? “In the beginning God created.” Perhaps all may not have heard, but it is nevertheless true, that in the original Hebrew “God” is in the plural, naturally pointing to more than one person; yet “created” is in the singular, a form not used where it speaks of heathen gods, but of the living God. With the gods of the nations the verb is plural. With the true God, although the subject be in the plural, the verb is often in the singular. Cases like Gen. 20:13, where the verb also is plural, prove that God (Elohim) was known to be a true plural. Could anything prepare better for revealing unity of the nature and plurality of the persons? Granted that none in the O. T. could certainly see the three persons as revealed later; even the believer had to wait for the N. T. for full light and truth. But when it came in Christ and by the Spirit, the peculiar concord where God's name occurs of old could not but strike those who heed every word of holy writ. Men who hold lax views of inspiration may no doubt dispute the force of any word, because their views are unbelieving and pernicious; for these necessarily enfeeble and undermine inspiration as God has revealed it, and as His Spirit reasons on it. No error has consequences more widely spread than limiting inspiration to God's thoughts in general, and denying it to His written words.
Under the law God was not yet manifested; on the contrary He was hidden behind a veil and a curtain. God was dwelling, as He says there, in thick darkness. Is this the case now? When God sent His own Son, it was no longer so, as John bears witness. Far from dwelling in the thick darkness, the true light came in Christ's person. Then the darkness apprehended it not; but there it shone when Christ was here, as it shone out yet more through the rent veil when He died and rose. All that lay concealed behind—incense, priests, shadows, offerings, sacrifices as well as the tabernacle itself, with its different measures of access to God—all was closed as to letter in the death of Christ. The Levitical system is clean gone that the spirit, the truth couched under it all, and more as yet hid in God, might be known clearly. In the incarnate Son God had come to man; but now, by His death, the way lay open for man in faith to come to God; and this the believer sees and knows to be the essence and distinctive privilege of the gospel. For it is the unmistakable truth of Christ that God did come to man in the person of His Son (Emmanuel); but the revealed effect of the atoning work of Christ is that the way is now made manifest into the holies. The veil of the temple was then rent from the top to the bottom.
If the striking type of the Day of Atonement fall short, assuredly it gives no small witness to the truth. Even the blood of the first goat was carried into the holiest of all. It was no emblem of carrying in blood after Christ died on the cross, as the letter would say. Carrying in Christ's blood! The literal idea must be in the type. There was no way possible but to carry in the blood shed of old; and none but the high priest could carry it in. But to imagine Jesus should have to do some subsequent act, in order to make His blood available before the throne in the heavens, is strange doctrine. The truth is, that the moment the blood was shed, the effect of His atonement was infinitely felt above, before He entered there as the great High Priest in person. The veil of the temple was rent, not from the bottom to the top, as if by any influence from below, but from the top to the bottom. God was glorified in Christ's work of propitiation. It was God, Who signified the consequence of that expiation in His own eyes even then, as He after wards caused the grand results to be proclaimed in the gospel of His grace.
Suppose a Jew to have looked in through the rent veil, what was there to see? The blood upon the mercy-seat, and the blood before the mercy-seat. The blood once sprinkled “upon” the mercy-seat was enough for God. But man requires the utmost means to assure him, and God graciously vouchsafes it: seven times was the blood sprinkled “before” the mercy-seat, giving complete evidence for man that he may safely and surely draw near to God. For God it was simply put on it once. It represented the atoning blood of His Son, Who had so truly taken the place of the victim for sin, that He cried out from the cross, “My God, My God, why didst Thou forsake Me?” Alas! for those who misuse those wondrous words of the Atoning Victim, as an excuse for their own unbelief, and dare to compare their darkness with His. It is false that God ever forsook His saints. Is such unbelief excusable? Assuredly it supposes the densest ignorance of the gospel. But it is also deplorable irreverence to compare your “hours of darkness “ with that which shrouded the Sin-bearer then, and then only. Search the New Testament through, and the Old too, and you will never find an excuse for the darkness of doubting. He who torments his soul with doubts may be a believer; but he is a believer who dishonors his faith by his unfaithfulness inwardly if not outwardly. Can you conceive God giving His word for one to hesitate about? Is not the doubt of a child of God worse and more shameful than that of an unbeliever?
Look at things according to God; consider what doubting Him means, what an insult to His truth and love in Christ Say not what the child pleads, after doing some bad or foolish thing, “Mother, I never meant it.” Nobody charges the child with wicked intent. But why meddle with what ought not to have been touched? So it is with those who are but babes in faith and spiritual understanding, sadly ignorant of God and of themselves. It is for want of simple rest in His Son and His word. Has not God given us the most ample grounds on which we should confide in Him? What could match the truth now before us—the Son of God taking on Himself the full consequences of sin at the hand of God? What! Was it not that God might be glorified in the Son of man made sin? This may be its most abstract and absolute form; but what is the blessed result for the soul that bows to God in faith? Not only that the believer is saved by grace, but that the gospel can go out to every creature under heaven. What does the gospel declare as its ground and vindication? That He is the propitiation for our sins; and not for ours only, but also for the whole world (1 John 2:2).
Do you observe that certain words, printed in the italics of the Authorized Version, are here left out? The reason is, because they ought never to have been in. It is no pleasure to make such a remark on the common English Version. They are the words of one who values as a whole the plain English Bible beyond any other version in general use. But let God be true Who did not write those words. There is a marked difference in the two clauses. “He was the propitiation for our sins.” Who are the “our?” The family of God, you will answer: as this is the ordinary “we” of scripture: not, as is known, the only “we” there, but beyond just doubt the prevailing usage. For “we,” as a general rule, unless there be modifying circumstances clearly marked, regularly means the family of faith, as “we know,” “we believe, &c.” Does everybody know or believe? Certainly not; but the faithful, or Christians. So in this case Christ is “the propitiation for our sins.”
But is this all? Thank God, He is “also for the whole world,” not “for the [sins of the] whole world.” Had Christ been the propitiation for the sins of the whole world, as He is for the sins of believers, the whole world must be saved. If they were borne away, what remains for judgment? It is not so. There is a marked difference. What then is the preacher of the gospel entitled to proclaim? Life eternal in Christ, and everlasting redemption through His blood. Life eternal He gives; His work is no less valid before God. But for whom is either? For all that repent and believe the gospel. Not a hair's-breadth more does God allow. It is the revealed reply in its simplicity, its distinction, and its fullness. Man is not entitled to tell an unbeliever, “Christ bore your sins in His own body on the tree;” when one believes, God's word assures him of it.
Scripture is most precise as to the difference between propitiation and substitution. Another opportunity of going into substitution with more detail comes in a subsequent lecture; but the present suffices to indicate, in passing, the distinctive truth of each. Propitiation, as being Godwardly Christ's work, takes in not merely what God is toward His people, but what He is toward sinners, wherever and whatever they may be. Would you limit God, as the Jews did? He will not sanction it. The work of Christ's propitiation, being infinite before God, opens the door consequently to God's love in beseeching every creature on earth. Doubtless the type here or anywhere fails to set forth such love as this. No Jew could possibly understand it, nor did God reveal it before. The reason for the reserve was because the law stood in the way. Yet we now see a dim confirmation in the fact that nothing said or done limits the efficacy of Jehovah's lot, as we find in the people's lot. A not insignificant difference lay in the absence at first of express confession of Israel's sins, and of Aaron's laying on of hands. The people might see a shower of blessing for them only; but in God's mind was much more. His nature, word, majesty, and character, were met in the slain offering for sin. The effect of the antitype is that now God delights in sending His glad tidings to every creature. Still the fact remains that some who hear the gospel are, and some are not, saved. Sinners who hear it are the more guilty if they believe not, and must perish everlastingly.
Is it then that the saved are better than the unsaved? Do you presume that your superiority is the ground why you stand in the favor of God? Suffer me to have doubts of you, if such is your plea. You will not find scripture to support but condemn you. Not that one forgets for a moment that there arises the most decided difference in every soul born of God from every other that is not; but does your superior goodness earn the life of Christ, or enter into the remission of your sins? It flatly contradicts His word and nullifies Christ's work. Look only at the effect of such a thought. If true, God's favor must be turned away from every believer the moment he did not fully answer to the character of Christ, Whose advocacy too would be at an end. Is either true? Is justification of works? or is the access into God's presence and grace a fluctuating condition? Does salvation change like the cloudy face of the sky? Is not the believer's nearness stable and constant? According to the Epistle to the Hebrews, approach to God for the believer is as unbroken as the efficacy of the work of Christ for his sins. But, you say, God chastises. Certainly. So you chastise your child when it is needed; but do you love it the less, or is it less your child? On the contrary it is because you are its father, and love it dearly, that you have the rod, and are called to use it. (continued)