H. Nunnerley
Paper No. 2
We have already considered:
(1) Full atonement effected, and God glorified in His holiness, at Calvary.
(2) Christ’s nature and perfections there manifested.
We will now briefly look at the death of Christ as the revelation of God’s love in its fullness, and as meeting man in regard to his sins.
So loved! He “so loved” His creature, His fallen, ruined, sinful creature, that He gave the very best gift of heaven. “Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us, and sent His Son the propitiation for our sins” (1 John 4:1010Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. (1 John 4:10)). In this was manifested the love of God toward us. The love was always in God’s heart, Christ’s death did not put it there, nor did His sufferings alter God’s feelings toward this world, but they were the expression of that love in all its fullness. God spared not His Son, because He would spare us. God gave His Son to suffer for sins, because He wanted us near to Himself. He died to bring us to God — to God’s heart of love now, hereafter to God’s home of peace and love forever.
This love of God is holy, compassionate, forgiving and spontaneous. Its holy character is seen in Christ’s suffering for sin; its compassion, in giving Him for helpless, undone sinners; its forgiving nature, in its being shown toward His enemies; and its spontaneity, in that it was the outcome of His essential nature and being — unsought, unasked, by those who are its objects. God is love. The cross, the death of Christ, declares this as nothing else: there God is made known.
The Father sent the Son.
The whole Trinity was deeply, intensely concerned, and each Person therein had a part in this great work. God was never really known in love or holiness until the cross. Now, His intrinsic being has been revealed; Christ’s death has brought to light His love — boundless, causeless, matchless, eternal.
“Love that no tongue can teach,
Love that no thought can reach,
No love like His.”
This love of God is a holy love: God is “light” as well as “love”. The cross shows how mercy and truth have met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other. That which light demanded, love provided; the righteous claims of light were met by the gracious provision of love.
Love was fully expressed when God gave His well-beloved; holiness fully manifested, when He hid His face from Him, whom He “made sin” for us.
These heavenly wonders, these divine mysteries, these apparent contradictions, these stumbling-blocks to the subtle reasoner, are the joy and delight of the believer. In them he discovers God revealed as He truly is, and in that revelation he learns how God can be just and the Justifier, and that not only is the love of God fully declared, but that God, thus revealed in love, maintains His holy, righteous character.
But, further, the death of Christ is also God’s perfect provision for sinful man. In part we have already considered this wondrous death on the side of atonement, but let us examine a little more closely the two-fold aspect of the sacrifice of Christ as it is presented in Leviticus. 16. In verse 15 of the chapter we read how the blood of the bullock and the goat were carried into the holy of holies by the high priest, veiled in a cloud of incense, thus offering typically a propitiatory sacrifice to the outraged majesty of Jehovah. So Christ in His death removed the dishonor brought upon God by His sinful creature, man, and glorified God as God, in all that pertained to His rights as Creator, and His claims as the Governor of the universe, as well as in the essential attributes of His being.
This aspect of the work of Christ is Godward (though man be in view, see verse 16); it is therefore of supreme importance. The throne must be propitiated ere the sinner can be pardoned; nor does it follow, of necessity, that pardon is involved in propitiation. Thousands refuse to bow to Christ, and ignore God’s commands to repent and believe the gospel, but this in no way alters the value of Christ’s death God-ward. At the cross, God was fully glorified in His nature and in all His attributes by One able to take account of all that sin was as affecting the throne of God and to meet the utmost requirements of that throne in respect of sin. This He has done God has been glorified as to the whole question of sin, and His throne propitiated, and He who did it is now seated at the right hand of the Majesty on high.
Founded on this, flowing out from it, and connected with it, though distinct in aspect, is another side of the death of Christ, which is typified in the second goat of Leviticus 16:1010But the goat, on which the lot fell to be the scapegoat, shall be presented alive before the Lord, to make an atonement with him, and to let him go for a scapegoat into the wilderness. (Leviticus 16:10). Here we learn that the same work which has glorified God inside the Holiest, also atones for man’s guilt, and is a righteous basis on which God can justify the ungodly sinner outside.
Picture that second goat standing with’ the hands of the high priest on its head: listen! he is confessing Israel’s sins — all the iniquities of the children of Israel, and all their transgressions in all their sins — and thus transfers their guilt to the goat: the goat becomes their substitute. Then, burdened with their transferred load, it is conducted by the hand of a “fit man” (margin “a man of opportunity”) into a land of separation, uninhabited, outside the camp, to perish (vss. 21-22).
God was thus teaching Israel that their guilt had been removed, their sins banished into a land of forgetfulness, on the head of the goat; and teaching us that Christ is the Substitute and Sin-bearer, as well as a Propitiatory, or Mercy-seat.
Rest then the eye of faith upon the holy Victim on the central cross of Calvary, and listen to the testimony of the Holy Spirit that Christ’s work on the cross is vicarious and substitutionary: “His own self bare our sins, in His own body on the tree” (1 Pet. 2:2424Who his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree, that we, being dead to sins, should live unto righteousness: by whose stripes ye were healed. (1 Peter 2:24)).
“In my place condemned He stood
Sealed my pardon with His blood.”
Yes, every believer is entitled to say, “it was for me He suffered, for — or instead of — me He bore the judgment, drank the bitter cup, endured the hiding of God’s face. It was for me all the accumulated punishment due to my sins was concentrated upon Him on Calvary, it was for me He descended to the lower parts of the earth, went into the dark domain of death, bowed His head, gave up the ghost, and thus finished the work of substitution, propitiation and atonement.”
The just One died for the unjust ones, the chastisement of our peace was upon Him, it is in virtue of His stripes that healing is ours. Those opposites, sin and Jesus, were brought together on the cross; the sinless One was made sin.
There Jesus took our sins upon Himself, answered for them, bore them, exhausted the judgment they deserved, and took them away from before God.
The sting of death is sin, the wages of sin is death: never was death’s sting so intensely known, never was death so solemnly tasted as sin’s awful wage as in the death of Jesus. Banishment from God’s presence was God’s sentence on Adam; into the deepest meaning of that banishment Christ entered, and thus made a way by which His “banished” can be brought back again, for through His work on Calvary death is now abolished and distance removed.
Nay more: of such surpassing excellence is that atoning work, so complete and perfect the removal of “sins, iniquities and transgressions,” that God can declare of every believer “their sins and iniquities will I remember no more” (Heb. 8:1212For I will be merciful to their unrighteousness, and their sins and their iniquities will I remember no more. (Hebrews 8:12)), — no more forever — they are removed as “far as the east is from the west,” and shall never again be “imputed,” or laid to their charge.
Calvary witnessed the true Day of Atonement; Jesus is the “man of opportunity,” God’s “fit man” for our extremity, our Substitute, our Sin-bearer. He glorified God as to sin, and also carried away our sins, burying them forever out of God’s sight; for when He rose, He rose absolutely free of both the sins and the judgment due to them. In contrast to all the types, He consumed the “fire” which fell upon Him, exhausted the judgment, and is today in heaven in all the favor of God, without one of the sins He bore on the cross, and each believer is as free of them as He is.