(Lincoln’s Inn, Sunday after Ascension Day, May 28, 1854.)
‘Therefore by the deeds of the law there shall no flesh be justified in his sight: for by the law is the knowledge of sin. But now the righteousness of God without the law is manifested, being witnessed by the law and the prophets; even the righteousness of God which is by faith of Jesus Christ unto all and upon all them that believe: for there is no difference: for all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God; being justified freely by his grace, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus: whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood, to declare His righteousness for the remission of sins that are past, through the forbearance of God; to declare, I say, at this time his righteousness: that he might be just, and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus.’—Romans iii. 20-27.
My special object in this sermon is to consider the meaning of the word Propitiation, which occupies so prominent a place in the passage I have read to you. But you will observe that the idea of Redemption, which has occupied us for the last two Sundays, is as much dwelt upon here as it was in the Epistle of St. Peter, or in the Epistle to the Galatians. The two words evidently point to different necessities of man, to different aspects of the divine purpose. Yet they are brought together; the apostle treats them as inseparable. It is in Sacrifice they find their meeting point.
I could wish that you would read the letter to the Romans by the light of these sentences; that you would trace the principle which is unfolded in them, as it works itself out through all the reasonings, exhortations, expositions of national and human history, and revelations of personal experience, which are found in that wonderful book. But I shall be content if you will fix your minds on these two or three verses, and will notice a few of their more obvious characteristics.
(1.) The first that would strike you is, that the Righteousness of God is the subject, the groundwork, of the apostle’s discourse. He assumes that it is the purpose of God to make his own righteousness known. He assumes that what man wants is that his righteousness should be made known. Nor does he for an instant distinguish between the revelation of God’s righteousness and the revelation of Himself. He supposes that God is the righteous Being; that He is this, and nothing but this; that to be acquainted with Him is to be acquainted with Right in its very essence and substance, with that Right which is the ground of all we think, and do, and are.
(2.) Next he affirms the Law testifies of this righteousness of God, but that it does not bring any man to the knowledge of righteousness; on the contrary, it brings him to the knowledge of sin. You will remember that this was one great point in the argument which the apostle held with the Galatians, and with the teachers who wished to bring them under the Law. The Law, he showed them, could not make any man right; could not bless any man. Its office was to make him feel that he was wrong; its power lay in its curse.
(3.) Thirdly, he says that the righteousness of God manifests itself in another way than by Law, namely, in the Person of Jesus Christ; and that, so manifested, it is effectual to make men righteous; it is effectual to confer a blessing. And this righteousness, he says, comes through the faith of Jesus Christ. I will not stop to dispute whether he means through the faith which Jesus Christ had in His Father—that is, perhaps, the more obvious and natural construction—or through the faith which a man has in Christ; for I think that one meaning involves the other, and that neither will be complete without the other. At any rate, he affirms that this righteousness came through Jesus Christ upon all who believe, all who confess it, and trust it when it is manifested in Him; upon all, without exception, because all have sinned, all have come short of the glory of God; all are convicted by God’s Law, whether delivered in stones, or only speaking in the conscience, of having that in them which is at war with this righteousness.
(4.) As this righteous Being makes men conscious of their evil by the Law, and manifests His righteousness to them in His Son, so He is declared, in the next verse, freely to justify them by His grace, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus. I must remind you, that the word justified is the cognate verb to the adjective which we translate righteous. I do not say that the translators ought to have kept up the analogy of the words; perhaps they could not; perhaps they attempted it more than we suppose, seeing that the just man and the righteous man were more nearly identical in their days than they are in ours. Still I do not doubt they put a force upon the phrase ‘justified,’ which would not have been expressed by the phrase made righteous. They were afraid to use that form of expression, lest it should seem to intimate that men became righteous in themselves, and are not, as our Article expresses it, ‘accounted righteous only for the sake of Jesus Christ.’ I believe that fear had a most reasonable ground; though there may have been another fear as reasonable, to which they were not equally alive. They dreaded lest men should fancy they had a righteousness of their own; and that dread no one could entertain so strongly as St. Paul. But they did not tremble as much as the Apostle did, lest men should suppose that the judgment of God was not according to truth lest they should ever charge Him with acting upon a legal fiction. St. Paul discovered that frightful mistake in his own countrymen; they thought they were better than the heathen, because God was favouring them, and treating them as righteous, while they were committing the same evils as other men. His whole reasoning, in the second chapter, had been aimed at this delusion; he had been affirming the commonplace, which had become a paradox, that good is good in a heathen, that sin is sin in a Jew. He could not advance one step in making them understand his Gospel, while they held the contrary opinion. When, therefore, he goes on to speak of God justifying the Jew and the heathen equally, he has prepared both to understand that they can have no real righteousness but that which they derive from God; and that they possess it in Him by renouncing it in themselves; that they have it when they trust Him; that they have it not when they distrust Him. And, connecting this with the manifestation of God’s righteousness in his Son, he affirms that God has freely justified them, or made them righteous, in that Son; that in Him He has acquitted them of their transgressions, and owned them as belonging to Him. If they believe that this is the intent of His acts, if they acknowledge this to be the object of His revelation, they rise up right, true, justified men.
(5.) Next, then, St. Paul says, that this righteousness and justification comes upon them through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus. The word, you will perceive, carries precisely the signification which it bore in all the cases we have examined hitherto. They who were enslaved by the vain conversation handed down from their fathers, who had thought of God as like themselves, who had regarded Him as an enemy, were ransomed by the precious blood of the Lamb from that intolerable bondage; those who were chained by their own iniquity were enabled to lay hold on a righteousness that was not their own, and yet which they could claim as their own; those who felt that the Law was cursing them, and cutting them off from God, were brought nigh to God, were able to call Him Father. This, which we found St. Peter and St. Paul asserting so emphatically in the other passages, comes out, if that is possible, more clearly, more fully, here. God is Himself the Redeemer, the Deliverer, of a spirit out of the fetters which it has forged for itself. He delivers it in the way which it feels and confesses to be the only possible way. It could not know God, it could not be released from the self-will which is contrary to God, if He did not meet it in sacrifice, if He did not Himself make the sacrifice which it can accept as the fullest revelation both of His righteousness and of His forgiveness.
(6.) We are thus brought to the words, ‘Whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in His blood, to declare His righteousness for the remission of sins that are past, through the forbearance of God.’
You are aware, probably, that many have objected to our version of the word ἱλαστήριον, and have contended that ‘mercy-seat’ should be substituted for it. You may think perhaps, since I have dwelt so much upon the desire to make the powers above or beneath propitiable, as the characteristic of Heathen sacrifices, that I shall eagerly join in this complaint, and urge this alteration. But I do not feel the least tempted to take this course. It seems to me that our rendering is, on the whole, a good and satisfactory one; and that we should lose, not gain, if we forgot that the word had presented, and still present, to the minds of those whom St. Paul was addressing, whether they were his own countrymen or Gentiles, all the associations which had belonged to the most degrading devil-worship. I do not conceive that it was the function of an apostle to cast aside old forms of expression, and to strike out new in a mint of his own. I imagine that he was to take those which he found, just as they were, defaced by the wear and tear of centuries, debased by the adulterations of the weak and of the wicked, of the dupe and the impostor, and to bring out, by severe tests, the pure metal, as well as the image and superscription with which it had been originally stamped. He did recollect, doubtless, thankfully and wonderingly recollect, the mercy-seat in the tabernacle and the temple, as expressing the true idea of propitiation. But he did not look upon that mercy-seat as enshrining a peculiar, esoteric doctrine, with which the world at large had nothing to do. He who had established the mercy-seat was the Lord God of that earth from which the foulest steam of human sacrifices was ascending to the Baals and the Molochs. He was testifying, there, that from Him came freely down the blessings which they were hoping to buy of these gods; that He blotted out the transgressions of which the worshippers were seeking, by the cruellest oblations, to escape the penalty. And now the God of Israel, and the gods of the nations, were no longer standing aloof in distant defiance; they were in closer conflict than when Dagon fell prostrate before the ark. Christ had come to fulfil the promises made to the fathers. Christ had come a Light to lighten the Gentiles. Hebrew was no longer the tongue in which the mystery of a living and righteous God was to enshrine itself. In the language of Heathen civilisation, in the beautiful forms which generations of polytheists had consecrated to the service of demigods, of beings like themselves, was the Eternal Son, the brightness of the Father’s glory, to utter His voice, and claim the homage of those whom He had not been ashamed to call His brethren. What business had those to whom this new and mighty instrument had been intrusted, to cast away any one of the modes of thought and speech that had received an idolatrous taint and impregnation? Why was the Spirit given them but that men might hear, in their own tongue, purged and regenerated, as the lips that spoke it were, by His living presence and power, the wonderful works of God?
Far then from wishing that the words]and ’Hacrjpiov had not the sense which we should gather from all the history of the Heathen world that they must have had, or that this sense was not one which would naturally suggest itself to the readers of the Epistle, baptized men though they were, I would earnestly press the reflection on you, that any other view of the case is incredible; and then I would ask you to observe with what a divine art and wisdom the apostle vindicates the word to a Christian use, showing that for that use its Heathen signification must be not modified—but inverted.
The opening of the twenty-fifth verse at once explains the method of the apostle’s teaching: ‘Whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation.’ Try, if you can, to translate that language into the Heathen notion of a propitiatory sacrifice. You want something to make God propitious, or favourable, to you. You wish you could find something mighty enough, transcendent enough, which you might be sure would have that effect. Does St. Paul follow out this line of thought? Does he say, ‘The mighty transcendent means of bringing God to be at peace with you is here’? No! but he introduces Him as setting forth to us the One all-sufficient, all-satisfactory evidence that He has made peace with us. Placing himself on the old Jewish ground, affirming that all good must come down from the Lord of all, that He must be the standard of righteousness, and the author of righteousness, to man, the standard and the author of forgiveness to man, he raises that principle to its highest power; he affirms that the barrier between God and His creatures is removed by Himself, is removed freely without money and without price, and that the act of His Son in shedding His blood is the authentic declaration of that removal. He does not stop here; as a Jew he could not, still more as a believer in Jesus Christ he could not. The mercy-seat in the tabernacle was not merely a sign that the Jews were adopted and acknowledged as a righteous nation by God, and that He was willing to restore those who had forgotten their high calling; it was the witness of a fellowship and intercourse between Him and His people. ‘There will I meet with thee,’ was the form which denoted its perpetual purpose. Christ’s death could not, according to St. Paul, be a propitiation, if it did not prove and declare Him to be the Mercy-seat, the living Mediator, in whom God meets with His creatures, and in whom His creatures meet Him.
(7.) I reserve this great subject of Intercession for another and fuller consideration. But I could not pass it over, lest the words, faith in His blood, which are such prominent words here, should be emptied of one most practical and blessed part of their significance. If we do not receive that blood as the sure witness that we are admitted into God’s holy and blessed presence, that we have the awful privilege of drawing nigh to Him always, we cannot be said to believe in it; it does not give us that trust in God of which sin has robbed us. I am quite willing, however, to dwell chiefly, though I dare not dwell exclusively, on the remission of sins that are past, as the effect of this declaration of God’s righteousness. Never, for a single instant, ought we to make light of that craving for pardon, that sense of an infinite burden of evil already committed, which has given rise to every confessional and penance that has existed, or does exist, in the world. There are some who would persuade us, that to dwell on that which has been, is a mere device of priestcraft; that, provided we can do the right thing now, we may be well content, whatever we may have to reproach ourselves with, in the years that are gone by. To them the prayer of the Psalmist, ‘Remember not the sins of my youth,’ seems to be the utterance of a vain and self-tormenting superstition. Dear brethren! do not let us delude ourselves with these half-truths, which sound so exceedingly plausible, which prove, in experience, so utterly worthless. We do feel the sins of our youth, we are assaulted every day and hour by thoughts, words, acts, which we have left years behind us. Do we think we get rid of these facts, by adopting a theory that they mean nothing? But what a melancholy thing it would be for us, if they did mean nothing! What a proof it would be that man is a being who does not look before and after; that he has not the conditions of a rational, voluntary, spiritual creature! Ascribe to him these conditions, and of necessity he becomes incapable of forgetting that which has been once a part of himself, that which has belonged to his own substance; it cleaves to him; centuries and millenniums cannot divorce it from him. And, oh! are we not deeply and awfully aware that recollections which we would give worlds to preserve, recollections of forms and faces, and loving words spoken, and loving acts done, may pass away from us, almost, it would seem, into utter darkness; while words and acts that we should like to bury thousands of fathoms deep, survive, and reappear, like the ghost of Banquo, at men’s feasts—at God’s feast—to make the present and the future dark alike?
What avails it to talk against priestcraft when these things are so? I admit that priestcraft makes enormous, frightful, use of these states of mind; but if they were nothing, if they could be cast off by an easy effort, or charmed away by a little metaphysical talk, all its devices might be treated with very great indifference. How do they come into operation? how is it, that, in its very worst form the trade of the Priest, as distinguished from his glorious and divine vocation, may be as mischievous and as gainful a one now as it was in any past generation; that it may be most successful with the most refined classes of society?
If those old recollections, which come back with such appalling force, belonged altogether to ourselves, if they pointed to no One against whom we have sinned, I suppose that suicide would be the continual refuge from them. And yet what a refuge! How completely the prince of Denmark expressed the madness of that experiment, when he said that there might be dreams, and more frightful dreams, in the sleep after death than in any before it. But the supposition is an impossible one. Everyone does connect the images of the past distinctly or indistinctly with God; his theory may be an atheistical one, but the fact of conscience, the sense of evil, brings back the phantom which he thought he had banished for ever. It comes back as a phantom. As such, the false priest speaks to it. He devises means for making the man less afraid of the dark image which he has cast from himself. He tells him that there is a chance of the past being overlooked, that this act and that act increases the chance. And in the meantime, the man actually feels a relief from having told his wrong. The clearing of the breast has helped him, he is sure of that. And the punishment that has been imposed upon him is not without its own comfort. It is a witness to him of moral discipline. It suggests thoughts of a process by which not merely the past evil may be cured, but by which he may be cured. What a dawn of light is this! How it might brighten into perfect day, if there was only a voice to say to him, God hath set forth His Son as a propitiation, and a mercy-seat, to declare His righteousness for the remission of the sins that are past. If God could be declared to the man as the Propitiator—as the Being who puts away sins because He is righteous, because He would not have the man tied and yoked to evil, because He would make him his free and true servant; if instead of this declaration being merely made in words, the fact of Christ’s death could be proclaimed as the sure declaration of God’s righteousness in the forgiveness of sins; how would the man feel that neither suicide nor atheism was the refuge from the past, but faith in Him who knows it all, who is, and was, and is to come; faith in Him, as manifested in the sacrifice of His Son; faith in Him, as desiring to make us partakers of His own righteous mind! How naturally would this faith find its full expression in confession to Him who so thoroughly understands the length and breadth of the evil, who sees it not, as man sees it, through the blundering, stammering phrases of the penitent, and who so much more desires the deliverance and reformation of the offender than he has even yet learned to desire it! How cheerfully should we, holding fast this faith in such a Being, accept His punishments—of whatever kind they be,—as the tokens that he is educating, disciplining, purifying the child whom He has adopted!
But the theory of a propitiation, not set forth by God, but devised to influence His mind,—of a propitiation that does not declare God’s righteousness in the forgiveness of sins, but which makes it possible for Him to forgive sins, though He is righteous,—this scheme changes all the relations of the Creator and creature; this scheme does build up a priestcraft which subverts utterly the morality of the Bible, because it first subverts its theology.
I know, brethren, that it would be easy to obtain a favourable hearing from a Protestant people, if I were to denounce this priestcraft as it presents itself in Romish countries, or among those who imitate Romish practices. I do not think I underrate that danger, or regard it as a distant one. On the contrary, I feel sure that the confessional and the whole scheme which is connected with it, must prove stronger than that which we oppose to it—and that atheism may prove stronger than either—if we do not earnestly consider with ourselves whether we are not sanctioning the principle which supports all the practices we condemn; whether we are not practically renouncing the faith of our forefathers, while we are ready to denounce our brethren for forsaking it in name. Those mighty words, ‘That he might be just, and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus,’ are entirely stripped of their meaning by the strange interpolation of the word yet. They are supposed to say that God is just, and yet that, in consequence of Christ’s offering, He can justify those who believe in Him. Thus the whole argument of St. Paul, the whole Gospel of St. Paul concerning God, is deliberately effaced and contradicted. God does not manifest His righteous will and purpose, His righteous character, in the death of His Son; but, through the agency of that death, a certain notion of justice, quite distinct from the righteousness with which St. Paul uniformly identifies it, is satisfied; and so a certain portion of mankind may be excused the penalty of their past ill-doings. It is only the accidental blending of this opinion with a higher faith, which is utterly at variance with it, that has ever served to make it effectual for any moral purposes. It will be found more utterly powerless for such purposes, more perilous to morality, more perilous to all reverence for God, to all belief in Christ’s sacrifice and satisfaction, every day and hour. It must bring forth its proper and legitimate fruits in the most degraded, most heathenish kind of Romanism—such a form of it as has not existed in any previous century—or else it will drive men into the most defying reckless infidelity.
But there is hope, not only for ourselves, but for all. If we will go to the law and testimony, instead of merely boasting of them, and declaiming against others for not going to them,—if we will let the Bible speak to us in its own clear, broad, intelligible language, and will let it hew in pieces all the notions and traditions by which we have been corrupting and disguising the truths that would have made us free, we shall again have a Gospel, not for Protestants, but for Romanists, Jews, Turks, Infidels, for all who have been setting up a righteousness of their own, and yet prove in a thousand ways that they can never be satisfied till they submit to the righteousness of God.
And then the words of the beloved disciple will be found to be in perfect harmony with those of the Apostle of the Gentiles. I shall have to speak hereafter, for another purpose, of those words in which he declares, that we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous, who is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only, but for the sins of the whole world. But I cannot pass them over here; because, if you will read them in connection with the first chapter of the Epistle, you will see how marvellously they sustain that doctrine of propitiation which St. Paul preached to the Romans. The object of St. John is expressly to bring a message concerning Him who was from the beginning; to proclaim Him as the Light, in whom is no darkness at all. And Jesus Christ is set forth as the Propitiation by the Great Father of all, that He might be declared in this character, that the sins of them and of the world might be taken away. It may be that this Gospel sounds even broader, freer, than St. Paul’s. But it is not really so. In the fifth chapter of the Epistle to the Romans he declares, that “as by the offence of one, judgment came upon all men to condemnation; even so by the righteousness of one, the free gift came upon all men unto justification of life.’ We cannot enlarge the force or application of such a Gospel. God will confound us, if we dare, by any arrangements of ours, to narrow it.