Archive for May 24th, 2011
EXTENT OF THE ATONEMENT.
“And he is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world.”–First Epistle of St. John. ii. 2.
THE amplitude and all-sufficiency of God’s provision for the lost, is a no less important article of the Christian faith, than the fact itself, that such a provision has “been made. Everyone must feel, the moment the subject is laid before him clearly, that the value of the atonement, to anyone, is inseparable from its sufficiency for all. To tell me in my sorrows, under a sin-oppressed conscience, that provision is made for forgiveness, and yet to east suspicion upon its fullness, is but to awaken a hope, the warrant of which is uncertain, because it leaves me entirely in the dark upon the question, whether that provision is within my reach. There is nothing here to relieve my straitened spirit, nothing to authorize my confidence; so far as all practical effects are concerned, I am in very much the same condition as before the announcement of pardon, through the atonement, was made. Better not say anything of forgiveness of sin, if in the same breath you must suggest a doubt as to the possibility of my forgiveness. You do but make my case the more wretched, as you awaken a hope only for the purpose of destroying it.
The great question which throws its overwhelming burden upon the mind, in view of its spiritual relations, is, after all, a personal question–it relates to my own individual circumstances and hopes. The value of the gospel, therefore, to me as a sinner, grows out of the answer which it furnishes to this question. The mere fact that God can forgive sin, is nothing, except as it is brought home to my own personal interests. The pages upon which that fact is announced, may beam with the bright and the beautiful, but if they do not bring home to me, as an individual, this truth as a certainty, that God can be just and forgive my sin, they have no brightness and beauty for me; they do but put me in the condition of the famishing wretch, who is told of abundance, but not that he may touch it, or the victim of some dreadful disease, who is told of a certain remedy, but not how he may reach it.
The question, then, as to the extent of the atonement, is not a question, as some men would have us believe, of mere speculative theology, but one of vast practical interest. Every man can understand its importance, if he will but observe how the whole aspect of the gospel will vary; how its power over his own spirit will be increased or diminished, according to the views which he may take of this single question; and I cannot, therefore, think that I am giving myself up to a useless task, or one without its interest to all my hearers, when I undertake to agitate, for the purpose of reaching a satisfactory conclusion, the inquiry as to the extent of the atonement of Jesus Christ.