(Lincoln’s Inn, 2nd Sunday after Trinity, June 25, 1854.)
“Wherefore remember, that ye being in time past Gentiles in the flesh, who are called Uncircumcision by that which is called the Circumcision in the flesh made by hands; that at that time ye were without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope, and without God in the world: but now in Christ Jesus ye who sometimes were far off are made nigh by the blood of Christ. For he is our peace, who hath made both one, and hath broken down the middle wall of partition between us; having abolished in his flesh the enmity, even the law of commandments contained in ordinances; for to make in himself of twain one new man, so making peace; and that he might reconcile both unto God in one body by the cross, having slain the enmity thereby: and came and preached peace to you which were afar off, and to them that were nigh. For through him we both have access by one Spirit unto the Father.’—EPHESIANS ii. 11-18.
The name Atheists—‘without God’—which St. Paul here bestows on the Ephesians, before they became Christians, is the very one by which they and the other heathens described the Jews, and still more the Christians. The absence of all visible images was conclusive evidence to the idolaters of the second century, and probably also of the first, that the disciples of Jesus had renounced all worship and believed in nothing. That the charge should be reversed, that those who acknowledged a multitude of gods should be spoken of as having no God, and this in a letter addressed to the inhabitants of a city with an illustrious temple, and an image that was said to have fallen down from Jupiter, is very startling.
The word is made more pointed and remarkable by that which accompanies it: they were without God ‘in the world.’ The world had seemed to them full of gods. It comprehended, of course, not merely the earth upon which they trod, but the firmament, the sun, and moon, and stars, whatever seemed necessary to complete the order, whatever ministered to the wants of those who dwell on this planet. Each grand object that men beheld denoted a god; was probably the habitation of a god. Every hill had its own ruler; every river and fountain had someone who had caused it to spring forth, and who presided over it. Could men who thought this be without God? Had they not rather an excuse for saying that those who emptied the universe of its celestial character, who denounced the worship under hills and green trees, merited that stigma?
The Apostle, who had declared in the Epistle to the Romans, that through his countrymen the name of God was blasphemed in all lands, knew what pretext there was for this opinion; how much Jews had actually done to shake the faith of other people, giving them nothing in the place of it. He knew, by still more terrible evidence, what a deep-rooted Atheism there was in the hearts of some who were sons of Abraham, and were signed with the sign of his covenant. He knew it, for he had felt it; he had been conscious of Atheism, of something more than mere negative Atheism. There had been in his spirit such a horror of God, such a wish to be rid of Him, as he could never have ascertained, by mere observation or discourse, to exist in any human creature. And what made this discovery more dreadful to him was, that the very aspect of the Divine Being from which he shrunk, was that in which it was the glory of his country to present Him. A mere power he could have faced; it was from the Righteous King and Lawgiver, of whom the commandments spoke, that he could have wished the mountains to hide him, even if they crushed him.
But if it were so, why did he speak of the Gentiles as being without God? Why did he treat it as a great calamity of theirs that they were aliens from the commonwealth of Israel? Because, brethren, it was through this tremendous experience that the Apostle was brought to understand what manner of Being it was who had revealed Himself to his fathers, and why they had testified so continually, He is a God nigh, and not afar off. He found that it was a Father of spirits who had been declared to the chosen race; that He had chosen them as witnesses of His government over their spirits; of His presence there; of His care for them; of His sympathy with them. He found that this was the meaning of the Covenant of Promise which he had given them, the meaning of all their history and discipline. He found that it was the meaning of that Law which had seemed to put him at such a frightful distance from God, to pronounce him an enemy of God. It showed that there was in him and in every man that which God hated, and which hated Him. It showed that this was the very thing from which God had separated them and redeemed them, and which He was teaching them to regard as He regarded it.
Now, then, it could not but appear to him Atheism—living without God—for men to have ten thousand gods in the world, on the outside of them, while the God of their spirits, in whom they were living and moving and having their being, this Lord and Ruler of themselves, was not known. St. Paul did not slight, as his speech in Lycaonia so clearly shows, any of the tokens which God was bearing by rains and fruitful seasons, of His presence with men in one country or another. But these tokens, as he said, were so many calls and messages to the spirit of man, to turn from dumb idols to Him who was feeding the body with bread and the heart with gladness. He did not slight, as his speech at Athens shows still more evidently, the testimonies of poets, or philosophers, or mythologers, to the truth that men were God’s offspring, or that there was an unknown God, and that He was not far from any of them. But all these testimonies were so many proofs that to make God in the likeness of art and man’s device, was to project Him to a distance, that they might flee from Him and not be haunted by His presence. It was the impulse of an atheistical spirit; the more that impulse was obeyed, the more atheistical, the more alienated from the righteous God, the God of the hearts and reins, they must become. And while this godlessness continued, they were also hopeless. They were seeking to escape from themselves, as well as their Maker; to avoid looking at the realities of their own condition. They had an inward certainty that they could not do so always; that some day the truth would meet them, and force them to confront it. The future, therefore, was drearier and darker than the present. So, he said, it had been with the Ephesians; they knew that it had. What had caused any difference in their state of mind? The same revelation which had brought Saul the Hebrew from a state of inward war to peace; from an unutterable dread of God, to trust in Him as a Father. ‘Now in Christ Jesus, ye who were sometimes far off are made nigh by the blood of Christ.’ He, from whom they were turning away, to shun whose presence they would have taken the wings of the morning, or have made their bed in hell, presented Himself to them as one who was seeking after them, claiming them as His children, sending His own Son to earth, to death, to the grave, to hell, that He might fetch them home. The blood, the actual human blood which had been poured out, testified of a human life in Christ—of an union with them. But the love which came out in His death, signified a deeper life, the life of God. It was the love of a Father, exhibited as Love only can be exhibited, in sacrifice; it was the love of a Brother, reflecting that love, consummating the sacrifice in death. It spake not to the eye that gazed on idols of wood and stone, nor to the slavish fear that crouched before powers in earth and sea and air. It spoke to the man himself; to the being who used these eyes; who was beset with these fears. It roused him to the recollection of the Being about the bed and about the board, who could not be beheld in the likeness of anything above or beneath, whom the heart trembled to hear of, and yet in whom it was created to trust and to live. It assured him that there was One in whom that Being could be well pleased; One in whom He could meet His creatures; One who had poured out His life-blood, in obedience to His will, for their sakes. The Cross, the blood, said all this, and infinitely more than this, to the spirit that had been losing itself amidst world gods, and was just beginning to dream of its Father’s house. St. Paul knew how poor words were as a translation of all the secret love-messages and pledges which the blood of Christ carried to the wanderer. He resorted to explanations when they were necessary; he always joyfully returned to the language which implied an act, sufferings, a person. The Spirit who governed him would not suffer his explanations to put themselves in place of that which they were to explain, or to hinder the direct communion which the living symbols expressed and kept up.
St. Paul’s own education as a Jew, enabled him to see a further truth which the Gentile, however simple and serious his faith might be, was only beginning to apprehend. The Covenant of Promise—the Commonwealth of Israel—witnessed that God had adopted and still cared for Israelites, stiff-necked as they were. That had been a source of comfort and pride to him till he had perceived that the law demanded actual righteousness; and certainly not less from the Jew than the Gentile. Then the thought of a formal covenant could no longer sustain him, or in the least diminish his terrors. Now when he had seen in the cross of Christ the full revelation of the God of Abraham, he perceived also the deep and true foundation of that divine election, which he had taken to be artificial and arbitrary. The Cross told him in whom it was that God had elected them, in whom He had blessed them with all spiritual blessings. It showed him the Eternal Mediator, the Living Word, in whom God had created the worlds, in whom He had held converse with the sons of men. It unfolded the mystery of the past; the Law, the Prophets, the Priesthood, the Sacrifices. But it took away the exclusiveness, the merely Jewish character, of them all. They were witnesses of the Man, in whom God looked not upon the sons of Abraham, but on the sons of men, in whom He would at last gather together all things, both which are in heaven and which are in earth.
This revelation or manifestation of Him in whom God had chosen the Apostle of the Gentiles, in whom He had chosen Hebrews and Gentiles equally to be holy and without blame before Him in love, is the peculiar subject of the Epistle to the Ephesians. That being the case, if the dry and artificial rules and arrangements of divines had governed the mind of the Apostle, we might expect to find less in this book concerning the Atonement, or reconciliation by the Cross of Christ. That doctrine, one might suppose, would be treated of somewhere else; it would not intrude itself while a different portion of the system was receiving exposition. But the method of St. Paul, as anyone who reads any of his Epistles with seriousness will soon convince himself, utterly repudiates those trammels. He is teaching of God, and Man; what the relations between them are; how it has pleased God to establish them, restore them, make them known; He is not announcing certain conceptions which we may reduce under classes or formulas that we find convenient. I am far from wishing you to forget the names and titles by which, both in popular and learned treatises, what we call the doctrines of the Gospel are denoted. They may be of great value to us, if instead of translating the New Testament phrases into them, we ask the New Testament to tell us what they signify, to show us the bonds of living connexion between them, to remove the confusions which torment us when we think of them. For this purpose I have considered those different aspects of Sacrifice, which associate themselves with Redemption; with the deliverance from the curse of the Law; with propitiation; with remission of sins; with Christ as the Lamb known before the foundation of the world; with Christ as made Sin for us, though He knew no sin. It has been impossible, in reflecting on any one of these thoughts, not to speak of Reconciliation. The idea of it is involved in each one of them. But, as I observed before, though the Peaceoffering under the Law implied the existence of sin, and a desire to be delivered from it,—though the Sin-offering implied a want of peace, and a search for it,—still they were kept distinct in the Mosaic economy, and their separation served a wonderful purpose in the education of men—leading them to perceive the different needs of their spirits, and how He who had awakened them, was supplying them. For the same reason, we are underrating the power and results of the all-perfect Sacrifice, if we assume that, because there can be no Redemption or Propitiation without Reconciliation and Atonement, we have, therefore, no need to give the last a separate and solemn consideration.
Though I took an unusually long passage for my text, it might be better for the sense of it if I had gone further back still, and led you to reflect on the connexion in which it stands with the fourth verse. ‘God, who is rich in mercy, for His great love wherewith He loved us, even when we were dead in sins, hath quickened us together with Christ (by grace ye are saved).’ That verse removes all doubts about the question, whether the Apostle is here, as in the Second Epistle to the Corinthians, representing God as reconciling the world to Himself, or whether he has departed from all his usual habits of thinking and speaking, and is, for once, supposing the first movement to be from the side of man. There is nothing in the verses I have read which could in the slightest degree warrant the supposition. But when it is said, in the fifteenth verse, that Christ has abolished the enmity, even the law of commandments contained in ordinances, that He might make in Himself of twain one new man, so making peace, and that He might reconcile both under God in one body by the Cross, there is an opening for a theory drawn from the heathen notions of sacrifice; we can make the Apostle’s words, by a few outrages upon their letter, and by destroying their spirit, echo and confirm it. Taking them with those that precede them,—recollecting that the aim of St. Paul, in all his letters, has been to trace the whole economy of the universe, and of the redemption of men from their wicked works and the enmity which they had caused, to God’s original purpose, to His creation of man in the eternal Son we gain a glimpse of the nature of Christ’s peaceoffering, and of its effects on mankind, which illuminates all the past history of the world, as well as all the saddest experiences of individuals.
The Gentile was seeking God where He was not to be found, invoking Him when He was not near. Conscience made a coward of him; he was afraid of the Lord of his spirit, whose rebukes sounded so alarming; he made himself other lords out of the things which he looked upon, and asked them to save him from himself. The Jew, unable to find a refuge in the forms of the world, forced to think of God as speaking to him and commanding him, would fain have destroyed the Being who, he thought, was ready at any moment to destroy him. God presents His only-begotten Son to both, as the true image of Himself, as the perfect Righteousness which the Law enjoins; He gives Him up for all, as the assurance that there is a bond between Him and His creatures, which no rebellion of theirs, which no law of ’His, could set aside. By this mighty offering, He breaks down the middle wall of partition between those whom He seemed to favour and those whom He seemed to curse. The blessing of the one is found to be a curse, unless it has led him to the living trust in God, not in his own privileges. The curse of the other is found to be a blessing, if it has led him, in weariness and sorrow, to cry for a Teacher and Deliverer of his spirit. One Man is proclaimed as the King and Saviour of both. The signs of His royalty, the marks of the Victor, are the prints of the nails. By these he establishes His right to the trust and the obedience of His creatures; by these He justifies His eternal relation to God. These are the sure testimonies that God has atoned Man to Himself; that there is no distinction of favoured or neglected race. He is our Peace; the centre of union and fellowship between the tribes of the earth; the Destroyer of whatever there was in themselves, of whatever there seemed to be in the divine ordinances for the teaching and correction of men, which set them at war. Humanity, which had heretofore stood in these apparently hopeless divisions of Jew and Gentile,—while yet it was evincing itself, by the most undoubted proofs, to be essentially the same in both—the same in its conscious evil, the same in its certainty that this evil was the strife against a good, for which it was created humanity henceforth stands united in Him. He has made in Himself of twain one new man, so making peace. Henceforth, to treat any man as an alien from God, as cut off by any legal sentence from Him, was to deny Christ’s death; to say that God had not made the great Peace-offering; that the Cross had not removed all which gave one advantage over another.
‘For,’ he goes on, ’ through Him we both have access by one Spirit unto the Father. This is the climax of the doctrine, and yet also the foundation of it. The access to God is the highest conceivable blessing which any creature could obtain. To have the right of approaching Him without dread, to be warranted in calling Him, Father,—to be sure that that which binds us to Him is mightier than all that is making us feel at a distance from Him,—this is that fruit of the Atonement which, if we really knew our own wants, we should perceive must be greater than all others. And yet it is beneath all the rest; no other has any reality apart from it; the peace with our fellow-men, the freedom from terror of the future, the hope of good things to come, all lie in that. It is not possible to conceive of an atonement with man, which has not its basis in an atonement with God. It is possible for it has been done—to conceive of an atonement, which means the removal of the punishment or consequences of the war into which man’s distrust of his Creator has brought him, without the ceasing of the war itself. But such a conception sets at nought the meaning of words; the teaching of Apostles; the needs of man; the Gospel of God. It is a dead formula of the schools, which, because it is of itself soulless and skinless, the hearts of men fill out with their own great cravings and hopes, with their terrible sorrows and fears; and so turn it sometimes into a living faith; as often into a dark superstition; a scheme for persuading God to be at peace with that evil against which He has declared eternal war; a scheme for proving that He is still at enmity with a great majority of that race with which He has made peace in the blood of His Son.
I know too well what temptation there is in all our hearts, to think that such words as the Apostle uses are not altogether safe words; that we must contract his amazing declaration, that all barriers have been taken away, that men are reconciled and atoned to God in Christ; that this Atonement is the fulfilment and manifestation of His original purpose, when He created all things in Christ; that He is Himself the Peace-maker—the Author and Finisher of the sacrifice. Every harsh and selfish word we speak, and act we do, our indifference, coldness, hardness of heart, makes the feeling stronger that there must be some exaggeration in these phrases, or that we have misunderstood them, or that they do not apply to us, or that we ought not to hold them forth as true to other men. But if a thousand internal demonstrations have convinced any of us that the hardness, coldness, cruelty of heart grows stronger and nearly invincible, as we forget or disbelieve the fact of this Peace-offering, and the truth of the eternal union between God and His creatures in Christ, which it implies,—and that the only cure for them lies in casting aside all notions that we can make that peace for ourselves which God has made, and all dream that it has been made for us more than for any outcast in the world,—we may well be afraid of yielding to a conviction which is most natural, just as every sin is natural, but which, no one who has traced its workings in himself can believe to be salutary and divinely imparted.
If we set before ourselves some higher result of our religion than this, ‘I will arise, and go to my Father;’
if we suppose that there is some better morality than that which comes from the Spirit of Righteousness and Truth; some more exalted divinity than that which brings us to renounce ourselves and put our trust in God; we shall be continually thinking that a message, which only tells us that God has made peace with us in His Son, which only speaks of a divine “Sacrifice offered once for all,” which only declares that ‘through Him who has offered it we have all access in Spirit to the Father,’ is not enough for us: that we must find out some mode of applying that Atonement otherwise than by presenting ourselves and the universe in the strength of it before God, some other way of cleansing our consciences from dead works than by receiving this assurance that He would have us serve the living God. But, if we are in the world to live, and act, and suffer, this, I think, will do for us; and nothing less than this will. We shall not want to find out from some subtle divine why the righteous Law of God made a sacrifice necessary. The Law of God will tell our hearts better than we can, that there is something wrong in them. It will tell them, that that wrong comes through separation from a living God; from our selfishness and unlovingness. And, therefore, we cannot, if we let our consciences and reasons speak, be slow to confess that it is He who must make peace with us; and that there can be no sign of peace so fully expressing His nature, so exactly meeting our evil—so mysteriously extracting it—as this of sacrifice. If we want more, God will teach us more as we pray to Him, as we present to Him the Sacrifice which taketh away the sins of the world, as we offer up our own bodies in sacrifice. If we want more, God will teach us more when we do not shrink from carrying the words of reconciliation to them that are afar off, and them that are near; when we show by tokens which men can understand, that we do believe that Christ is their peace, and that the peace which is in Him passes their understanding and ours; but that it can keep them and us in the knowledge and love of God, and of His Son. The text I have been speaking from this afternoon declares to us the true foundation of the modern world. The old world existed to testify of the distinction between God and His creatures; of the separation which sin and death had made between them. Its lessons can never be obsolete; every day should make us understand better their deep and eternal import. The new world exists to testify of the atonement of God and His creatures, of their union and fellowship with each other, on the ground of the Sacrifice that He has made. When we enter into the greatness and glory of our own position, as a Church bearing witness of the Atonement to mankind, we shall have such a sense of the awfulness of God’s Nature and Being as we never had before; we shall have such a sense of the evil which sets men at strife with the goodness and blessedness, which is embracing and seeking to subdue them, as we never had before.
We shall not strive to build up the wall of partition between men which He has broken down, but we shall feel and confess, each in himself, as we never did, the opposition between the spirit and the flesh. We shall not put Adam in the place of Christ, or build our morality and divinity on the fall which proclaimed men sinners, when Christ’s obedience has proclaimed them righteous; but we shall feel more than ever what that sin is, which leads men to distrust Him who has taken it away. We shall not doubt that Christ is, and ever has been, the perfect Mediator between God and man, and that in Him all have access by one Spirit to the Father; but we shall ask ourselves with tenfold earnestness, how it comes to pass that we live so atheistically, so hopelessly, in the world,—how it comes to pass that we can bear to act as aliens and outcasts, when we have been made fellow-citizens with the Saints, and of the Household of God.