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Re: Soteriology

Posted: Mon Apr 15, 2019 6:14 pm
by Paidion
Homer, perhaps the following passage is relevant to understanding Paul's position:

He who was delivered over because of our transgressions, and was raised because of our justification. Therefore, having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom also we have obtained our introduction by faith into this grace in which we stand; and we exult in hope of the glory of God. (Romans 4:25, 5:1,2 NAS95)

The word δικαιωσις (dikaiōsis), translated as "justification" by the NAS95 in the above passage is derived from δικαιοω (dikaioō) which means "to make righteous." And δικαιοω is derived from "δικαιος" (dikaios) which means "righteous." I suggest that the above passage should have been translated:

He who was delivered over because of our transgressions, and was raised because of our [need for] righteousifying. Therefore, having been made righteous by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom also we have obtained our introduction by faith into this grace in which we stand; and we exult in hope of the glory of God.

We must trust God to provide enabling grace (Titus 2) which we appropriate by faith, to eschew evil and live righteously:

For the grace of God has appeared for the salvation of all people, training us to renounce impiety and worldly passions, and to live sensible, righteous, and devout lives in the present age, expecting the blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of the great God and of our Savior Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify for himself a people of his own who are zealous for good works. Declare these things; encourage and reprove with all authority. Let no one disregard you. (Titus 2:11-15)

However, someone might say to me, "Why don't you look back 3 verses from your quote! It says that Abraham's faith was counted to him as righteousness!" Does it really? The Greek preposition is the word "εις." The preposition does NOT mean "as"; it means "into." In Greek, for it to be counted to him into righteousness means that righteousness is the goal or result of Abraham's faith. Likewise with us. We appropriate God's enabling grace by faith, and this results in a life-long period of eschewing wrongdoing and working righteousness.

By the way, that Greek word δικαιωσις (that occurs in Romans 4:25 above) is found in only one other verse in the entire New Testament. That verse is Romans 5:18

Therefore, as through one man’s offense judgment came to all men, resulting in condemnation, even so through one Man’s righteous act the free gift came to all men, resulting in righteousifying of life.

Again, "righteousifying" is my translation of the word. It makes sense to me that Jesus' righteous act of dying for us, made available to us that free gift of God's enabling grace, and this results in the "righteousifying" or "sanctifying" of life. But what in the world would be the meaning of the free gift resulting in the "justification of life" as virtually all translations have it?

Re: Soteriology

Posted: Wed Apr 17, 2019 11:06 am
by Homer
Hi Paidion,

I have no quibble with your last post, in fact I agree with it. But I do disagree that you have defined the extent of the benefits of Christ's atonement. I believe Jesus' death and resurrection had far greater effect, namely He suffered and died for the sins of all who ever lived. The scriptures are replete with figures of speech and a prominent one in relation to the atonement is the metonym. The scriptures plainly inform us that Jesus bore or sin on the cross. How does one literally bear the sin of another? But it is easy to see how one might take on the penalty (think debt) of another.

The scriptures are simply overwhelming in this regard:

Isaiah 53 v 6: We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.

1 Peter 2 v 24: He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness; by his wounds you have been healed.

Isaiah 53 v 12: Therefore I will give him a portion among the great, and he will divide the spoils with the strong, because he poured out his life unto death, and was numbered with the transgressors. For he bore the sin of many and made intercession for the transgressors.

Hebrews 9 v 28: So Christ was sacrificed once to take away the sins of many people; and he will appear a second time, not to bear sin, but to bring salvation to those who are waiting for him.

1 John 2 v 2: He is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not only for ours but also for the sins of the whole world.

1 John 4 v 10: This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.

Isaiah 53 v 5: But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed.

Hebrews 2 v 9: But we see Jesus, who was made a little lower than the angels, now crowned with glory and honor because he suffered death, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone.

Ephesians 1 v 7: In Him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, in accordance with the riches of God's grace.

Romans 5 v 6- 11: (6) You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. (7) Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die. (8) But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us. (9) Since we have been justified by his blood, how much more shall we be saved from God's wrath through him! (10) For if, when we were God's enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son, how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through his life! (11) Not only is this so, but we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.

Ephesians 5 v 2: And live a life of love, just as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us and gave himself for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.


I am still hoping to hear how you might rebut, from scripture, that Jesus died for those who lived and died prior to His coming.

Have a wonderful Easter!

Re: Soteriology

Posted: Wed Apr 17, 2019 12:32 pm
by Paidion
Hi Homer, you wrote:I believe Jesus' death and resurrection had far greater effect, namely He suffered and died for the sins of all who ever lived.
If so, how does that benefit the more than 90% of all people who are not Christians?
But it is easy to see how one might take on the penalty (think debt) of another.
Hmmm... "penalty" and "debt" do not seem to be synonyms.

Let's look at "penalty." Does God exact a penalty for sin? Why so? Do penalties of any kind benefit anyone?
Some parents require their children to "pay" a penalty for their misbehavior. "I told you you were not to go out with friends after 10 P.M. But you did so. So I will have to punish you. You will not be allowed go out with friends at all for a week." Penalties do not necessarily change behaviour. The punished person is just more careful the next time so that he won't be caught. The concept is that the offender must "pay" for his offence by receiving a penalty, whether he changes his behavior or not. Maybe this is what you mean by "debt"—the idea that the offender must "pay" by being punished.

One the other hand, loving parents do not think of having their children receive penalties to balance out their wrongdoing. They want their children to change their behavior and they attempt to do this out of loving correction or discipline (teaching or training). There is a great difference between "discipline" and "punishment."

God wants to discipline or correct His children—not punish them. That's why, as expressed in Titus 2, through the sacrifice of Christ, God's grace appeared:
"training us to renounce impiety and worldly passions, and to live sensible, righteous, and devout lives in the present age, expecting the blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of the great God and of our Savior Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify for himself a people of his own who are zealous for good works."

Do you believe that God is obligated to PUNISH all sin, and in order to "satisfy" His need to do so, His beloved Son died in our place, and this fully satisfied Him? Would a human father who believed in punishing or penalizing his misbehaving son for wrongdoing be SATISFIED if his good son (always well-behaved) took that punishment instead?

Re: Soteriology

Posted: Fri May 22, 2020 6:10 pm
by In2joy
Paidion wrote:
Hi Homer, you wrote:I believe Jesus' death and resurrection had far greater effect, namely He suffered and died for the sins of all who ever lived.
If so, how does that benefit the more than 90% of all people who are not Christians?
But it is easy to see how one might take on the penalty (think debt) of another.
Hmmm... "penalty" and "debt" do not seem to be synonyms.

Let's look at "penalty." Does God exact a penalty for sin? Why so? Do penalties of any kind benefit anyone?
Some parents require their children to "pay" a penalty for their misbehavior. "I told you you were not to go out with friends after 10 P.M. But you did so. So I will have to punish you. You will not be allowed go out with friends at all for a week." Penalties do not necessarily change behaviour. The punished person is just more careful the next time so that he won't be caught. The concept is that the offender must "pay" for his offence by receiving a penalty, whether he changes his behavior or not. Maybe this is what you mean by "debt"—the idea that the offender must "pay" by being punished.

One the other hand, loving parents do not think of having their children receive penalties to balance out their wrongdoing. They want their children to change their behavior and they attempt to do this out of loving correction or discipline (teaching or training). There is a great difference between "discipline" and "punishment."

God wants to discipline or correct His children—not punish them. That's why, as expressed in Titus 2, through the sacrifice of Christ, God's grace appeared:
"training us to renounce impiety and worldly passions, and to live sensible, righteous, and devout lives in the present age, expecting the blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of the great God and of our Savior Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify for himself a people of his own who are zealous for good works."

Do you believe that God is obligated to PUNISH all sin, and in order to "satisfy" His need to do so, His beloved Son died in our place, and this fully satisfied Him? Would a human father who believed in punishing or penalizing his misbehaving son for wrongdoing be SATISFIED if his good son (always well-behaved) took that punishment instead?
Those who are not Christians are doomed and will not benefit from the work of salvation.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Re: Soteriology

Posted: Mon May 25, 2020 8:26 pm
by Paidion
So those who die as non-Christians are DOOMED, you say. What do you make of Paul's words to Timothy:

For to this end we toil and strive, because we have our hope set on the living God, who is the Savior of all people, especially of those who believe. (1 Timothy 4:10 ESV)

Does the term "all people" exclude those who are "doomed"?

Re: Soteriology

Posted: Tue May 26, 2020 11:35 pm
by In2joy
Paidion wrote:So those who die as non-Christians are DOOMED, you say. What do you make of Paul's words to Timothy:

For to this end we toil and strive, because we have our hope set on the living God, who is the Savior of all people, especially of those who believe. (1 Timothy 4:10 ESV)

Does the term "all people" exclude those who are "doomed"?
Paul does not teach universalism. It’s only when one takes scriptures out of context that they can make the Bible day anything.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Re: Soteriology

Posted: Wed May 27, 2020 8:59 am
by darinhouston
In2joy wrote:
Tue May 26, 2020 11:35 pm
Paidion wrote:So those who die as non-Christians are DOOMED, you say. What do you make of Paul's words to Timothy:

For to this end we toil and strive, because we have our hope set on the living God, who is the Savior of all people, especially of those who believe. (1 Timothy 4:10 ESV)

Does the term "all people" exclude those who are "doomed"?
Paul does not teach universalism. It’s only when one takes scriptures out of context that they can make the Bible day anything.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
So, can you put that in context and explain what Paul means from your perspective? I'm not a universalist, but I have some affinity to their position.

Re: Soteriology

Posted: Thu May 28, 2020 11:50 am
by Seeker
Paidion wrote:
Wed Apr 17, 2019 12:32 pm
Hi Homer, you wrote:I believe Jesus' death and resurrection had far greater effect, namely He suffered and died for the sins of all who ever lived.
If so, how does that benefit the more than 90% of all people who are not Christians?
But it is easy to see how one might take on the penalty (think debt) of another.
Hmmm... "penalty" and "debt" do not seem to be synonyms.

Let's look at "penalty." Does God exact a penalty for sin? Why so? Do penalties of any kind benefit anyone?
Some parents require their children to "pay" a penalty for their misbehavior. "I told you you were not to go out with friends after 10 P.M. But you did so. So I will have to punish you. You will not be allowed go out with friends at all for a week." Penalties do not necessarily change behaviour. The punished person is just more careful the next time so that he won't be caught. The concept is that the offender must "pay" for his offence by receiving a penalty, whether he changes his behavior or not. Maybe this is what you mean by "debt"—the idea that the offender must "pay" by being punished.

One the other hand, loving parents do not think of having their children receive penalties to balance out their wrongdoing. They want their children to change their behavior and they attempt to do this out of loving correction or discipline (teaching or training). There is a great difference between "discipline" and "punishment."

God wants to discipline or correct His children—not punish them. That's why, as expressed in Titus 2, through the sacrifice of Christ, God's grace appeared:
"training us to renounce impiety and worldly passions, and to live sensible, righteous, and devout lives in the present age, expecting the blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of the great God and of our Savior Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify for himself a people of his own who are zealous for good works."

Do you believe that God is obligated to PUNISH all sin, and in order to "satisfy" His need to do so, His beloved Son died in our place, and this fully satisfied Him? Would a human father who believed in punishing or penalizing his misbehaving son for wrongdoing be SATISFIED if his good son (always well-behaved) took that punishment instead?
Just wanted to refresh the thread for this wonderful post. In particular the last paragraph. The idea of substitutionary atonement is probably well past due for a revisiting.

Re: Soteriology

Posted: Fri Jun 05, 2020 5:19 pm
by Paidion
Did Jesus "take our place" and endure the punishment punishment from God that we deserved?.
George MacDonald wrote:They say first, God must punish the sinner, for justice requires it; then they say he does not punish the sinner, but punishes a perfectly righteous man instead, attributes his righteousness to the sinner, and so continues just. Was there ever such a confusion, such an inversion of right and wrong! Justice could not treat a righteous man as an unrighteous; neither, if justice required the punishment of sin, could justice let the sinner go unpunished. To lay the pain upon the righteous in the name of justice is simply monstrous. No wonder unbelief is rampant. Believe in Moloch if you will, but call him Moloch, not Justice. Be sure that the thing that God gives, the righteousness that is of God, is a real thing, and not a contemptible legalism. Pray God I have no righteousness imputed to me. Let me be regarded as the sinner I am; for nothing will serve my need but to be made a righteous man, one that will no more sin. (Unspoken Sermons III, Righteousness)
So the question for me is, "Was it necessary for Jesus, the Son of God, to die?" Yes. Certainly it was necessary, or He would not have undergone death. He prayed to his Father, "O my Father, if possible, let this cup [of suffering and death] pass from me!" (Matt 26:39). And the Father didn't release His Son from suffering and death. So it seems it was not only necessary for Jesus to suffer and die, but impossible for it to be otherwise—that is, if the purpose of God were to be realized.

So clearly it was necessary for the Son of God to die. But is that the end of the story? Does that satisfy us that the answer to Jesus' prayer showed that it was necessary? But the question is, "WHY was it necessary for the Son of God to die?" Peter, Paul, and the writer to the Hebrews answer that question plainly:

Peter 2:24 He himself endured our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed.

II Corinthians 5:15 And he died for all, that those who live might live no longer for themselves but for him who for their sake died and was raised.

Romans 14:9 For to this end Christ died and lived again, that he might be Lord both of the dead and of the living.

Titus 2:14 who gave himself for us to redeem us from all iniquity and to purify for himself a people of his own who are zealous for good deeds.

Heb 9:26 ...he has appeared once for all at the end of the age for the abolition of sin by the sacrifice of himself.


Many cannot accept these reasons for the death of the Messiah. They make statements such as, "No one can be sinless! So this must mean that God IMPUTES righteousness to me because of Christ's death."
No. It doesn't mean that at all. It doesn't mean that through his death Messiah imparted to us "imputed" righteousness but rather that through his death, He made possible ACTUAL righteousness. We must coöperate with his enabling grace in order to appropriate this REAL righteousness. Further more, the attainment of this righteousness is a process. This process is known as "salvation from sin," and continues throughout our lives. The process begins when we entrust our entire being to Messiah Jesus. And Paul wrote:

I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ. (Philippians 1:6)

So in the day of Jesus Christ, the process will be complete for all those in whom the process has begun. This is all made possible by the enabling grace which God made available through his Son's death:

For the grace of God has appeared for the salvation of all people, training us to renounce impiety and worldly passions, and to live sensible, righteous, and devout lives in the present age, expecting the blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of the great God and of our Savior Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify for himself a people of his own who are zealous for good works. Declare these things; encourage and reprove with all authority. Let no one disregard you. (Titus 2:11-15)

Re: Soteriology

Posted: Mon Oct 18, 2021 5:24 pm
by Paidion
SALVATION FROM SIN. By George MacDonald

—and thou shalt call his name Jesus; for he shall save his people from their sins.—Matthew i. 21.

I would help some to understand what Jesus came from the home of our Father to be to us and do for us. Everything in the world is more or less misunderstood at first: we have to learn what it is, and come at length to see that it must be so, that it could not be otherwise. Then we know it; and we never know a thing really until we know it thus.

I presume there is scarce a human being who, resolved to speak openly, would not confess to having something that plagued him, something from which he would gladly be free, something rendering it impossible for him, at the moment, to regard life as an altogether good thing. Most men, I presume, imagine that, free of such and such things antagonistic, life would be an unmingled satisfaction, worthy of being prolonged indefinitely. The causes of their discomfort are of all kinds, and the degrees of it reach from simple uneasiness to a misery such as makes annihilation the highest hope of the sufferer who can persuade himself of its possibility. Perhaps the greater part of the energy of this world's life goes forth in the endeavour to rid itself of discomfort. Some, to escape it, leave their natural surroundings behind them, and with strong and continuous effort keep rising in the social scale, to discover at every new ascent fresh trouble, as they think, awaiting them, whereas in truth they have brought the trouble with them. Others, making haste to be rich, are slow to find out that the poverty of their souls, none the less that their purses are filling, will yet keep them unhappy. Some court endless change, nor know that on themselves the change must pass that will set them free. Others expand their souls with knowledge, only to find that content will not dwell in the great house they have built. To number the varieties of human endeavour to escape discomfort would be to enumerate all the modes of such life as does not know how to live. All seek the thing whose defect appears the cause of their misery, and is but the variable occasion of it, the cause of the shape it takes, not of the misery itself; for, when one apparent cause is removed, another at once succeeds. The real cause of his trouble is a something the man has not perhaps recognized as even existent; in any case he is not yet acquainted with its true nature.

However absurd the statement may appear to one who has not yet discovered the fact for himself, the cause of every man's discomfort is evil, moral evil—first of all, evil in himself, his own sin, his own wrongness, his own unrightness; and then, evil in those he loves: with this latter I have not now to deal; the only way to get rid of it, is for the man to get rid of his own sin. No special sin may be recognizable as having caused this or that special physical discomfort—which may indeed have originated with some ancestor; but evil in ourselves is the cause of its continuance, the source of its necessity, and the preventive of that patience which would soon take from it, or at least blunt its sting. The evil is essentially unnecessary, and passes with the attainment of the object for which it is permitted—namely, the development of pure will in man; the suffering also is essentially unnecessary, but while the evil lasts, the suffering, whether consequent or merely concomitant, is absolutely necessary. Foolish is the man, and there are many such men, who would rid himself or his fellows of discomfort by setting the world right, by waging war on the evils around him, while he neglects that integral part of the world where lies his business, his first business—namely, his own character and conduct. Were it possible—an absurd supposition—that the world should thus be righted from the outside, it would yet be impossible for the man who had contributed to the work, remaining what he was, ever to enjoy the perfection of the result; himself not in tune with the organ he had tuned, he must imagine it still a distracted, jarring instrument. The philanthropist who regards the wrong as in the race, forgetting that the race is made up of conscious and wrong individuals, forgets also that wrong is always generated in and done by an individual; that the wrongness exists in the individual, and by him is passed over, as tendency, to the race; and that no evil can be cured in the race, except by its being cured in its individuals: tendency is not absolute evil; it is there that it may be resisted, not yielded to. There is no way of making three men right but by making right each one of the three; but a cure in one man who repents and turns, is a beginning of the cure of the whole human race.

Even if a man's suffering be a far inheritance, for the curing of which by faith and obedience this life would not be sufficiently long, faith and obedience will yet render it endurable to the man, and overflow in help to his fellow-sufferers. The groaning body, wrapt in the garment of hope, will, with outstretched neck, look for its redemption, and endure.

The one cure for any organism, is to be set right—to have all its parts brought into harmony with each other; the one comfort is to know this cure in process. Rightness alone is cure. The return of the organism to its true self, is its only possible ease. To free a man from suffering, he must be set right, put in health; and the health at the root of man's being, his rightness, is to be free from wrongness, that is, from sin. A man is right when there is no wrong in him. The wrong, the evil is in him; he must be set free from it. I do not mean set free from the sins he has done: that will follow; I mean the sins he is doing, or is capable of doing; the sins in his being which spoil his nature—the wrongness in him—the evil he consents to; the sin he is, which makes him do the sin he does.

To save a man from his sins, is to say to him, in sense perfect and eternal, 'Rise up and walk. Be at liberty in thy essential being. Be free as the son of God is free.' To do this for us, Jesus was born, and remains born to all the ages. When misery drives a man to call out to the source of his life,—and I take the increasing outcry against existence as a sign of the growth of the race toward a sense of the need of regeneration—the answer, I think, will come in a quickening of his conscience. This earnest of the promised deliverance may not, in all probability will not be what the man desires; he will want only to be rid of his suffering; but that he cannot have, save in being delivered from its essential root, a thing infinitely worse than any suffering it can produce. If he will not have that deliverance, he must keep his suffering. Through chastisement he will take at last the only way that leads into the liberty of that which is and must be. There can be no deliverance but to come out of his evil dream into the glory of God.

It is true that Jesus came, in delivering us from our sins, to deliver us also from the painful consequences of our sins. But these consequences exist by the one law of the universe, the true will of the Perfect. That broken, that disobeyed by the creature, disorganization renders suffering inevitable; it is the natural consequence of the unnatural—and, in the perfection of God's creation, the result is curative of the cause; the pain at least tends to the healing of the breach. The Lord never came to deliver men from the consequences of their sins while yet those sins remained: that would be to cast out of window the medicine of cure while yet the man lay sick; to go dead against the very laws of being. Yet men, loving their sins, and feeling nothing of their dread hatefulness, have, consistently with their low condition, constantly taken this word concerning the Lord to mean that he came to save them from the punishment of their sins. The idea—the miserable fancy rather—has terribly corrupted the preaching of the gospel. The message of the good news has not been truly delivered. Unable to believe in the forgiveness of their Father in heaven, imagining him not at liberty to forgive, or incapable of forgiving forthright; not really believing him God our Saviour, but a God bound, either in his own nature or by a law above him and compulsory upon him, to exact some recompense or satisfaction for sin, a multitude of teaching men have taught their fellows that Jesus came to bear our punishment and save us from hell. They have represented a result as the object of his mission—the said result nowise to be desired by true man save as consequent on the gain of his object. The mission of Jesus was from the same source and with the same object as the punishment of our sins. He came to work along with our punishment. He came to side with it, and set us free from our sins. No man is safe from hell until he is free from his sins; but a man to whom his sins, that is the evil things in him, are a burden, while he may indeed sometimes feel as if he were in hell, will soon have forgotten that ever he had any other hell to think of than that of his sinful condition. For to him his sins are hell; he would go to the other hell to be free of them; free of them, hell itself would be endurable to him. For hell is God's and not the devil's. Hell is on the side of God and man, to free the child of God from the corruption of death. Not one soul will ever be redeemed from hell but by being saved from his sins, from the evil in him. If hell be needful to save him, hell will blaze, and the worm will writhe and bite, until he takes refuge in the will of the Father. 'Salvation from hell, is salvation as conceived by such to whom hell and not evil is the terror.' But if even for dread of hell a poor soul seek the Father, he will be heard of him in his terror, and, taught of him to seek the immeasurably greater gift, will in the greater receive the less.

There is another important misapprehension of the words of the messengers of the good tidings—that they threaten us with punishment because of the sins we have committed, whereas their message is of forgiveness, not of vengeance; of deliverance, not of evil to come. Not for anything he has committed do they threaten a man with the outer darkness. Not for any or all of his sins that are past shall a man be condemned; not for the worst of them needs he dread remaining unforgiven. The sin he dwells in, the sin he will not come out of, is the sole ruin of a man. His present, his live sins—those pervading his thoughts and ruling his conduct; the sins he keeps doing, and will not give up; the sins he is called to abandon, and clings to; the same sins which are the cause of his misery, though he may not know it—these are they for which he is even now condemned. It is true the memory of the wrongs we have done is, or will become very bitter; but not for those is condemnation; and if that in our character which made them possible were abolished, remorse would lose its worst bitterness in the hope of future amends. 'This is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil.'

It is the indwelling badness, ready to produce bad actions, that we need to be delivered from. Against this badness if a man will not strive, he is left to commit evil and reap the consequences. To be saved from these consequences, would be no deliverance; it would be an immediate, ever deepening damnation. It is the evil in our being—no essential part of it, thank God!—the miserable fact that the very child of God does not care for his father and will not obey him, causing us to desire wrongly, act wrongly, or, where we try not to act wrongly, yet making it impossible for us not to feel wrongly—this is what he came to deliver us from;—not the things we have done, but the possibility of doing such things any more. With the departure of this possibility, and with the hope of confession hereafter to those we have wronged, will depart also the power over us of the evil things we have done, and so we shall be saved from them also. The bad that lives in us, our evil judgments, our unjust desires, our hate and pride and envy and greed and self-satisfaction—these are the souls of our sins, our live sins, more terrible than the bodies of our sins, namely the deeds we do, inasmuch as they not only produce these loathsome things, but make us loathsome as they. Our wrong deeds are our dead works; our evil thoughts are our live sins. These, the essential opposites of faith and love, the sins that dwell and work in us, are the sins from which Jesus came to deliver us. When we turn against them and refuse to obey them, they rise in fierce insistence, but the same moment begin to die. We are then on the Lord's side, as he has always been on ours, and he begins to deliver us from them.

Anything in you, which, in your own child, would make you feel him not so pleasant as you would have him, is something wrong. This may mean much to one, little or nothing to another. Things in a child which to one parent would not seem worth minding, would fill another with horror. After his moral development, where the one parent would smile, the other would look aghast, perceiving both the present evil, and the serpent-brood to follow. But as the love of him who is love, transcends ours as the heavens are higher than the earth, so must he desire in his child infinitely more than the most jealous love of the best mother can desire in hers. He would have him rid of all discontent, all fear, all grudging, all bitterness in word or thought, all gauging and measuring of his own with a different rod from that he would apply to another's. He will have no curling of the lip; no indifference in him to the man whose service in any form he uses; no desire to excel another, no contentment at gaining by his loss. He will not have him receive the smallest service without gratitude; would not hear from him a tone to jar the heart of another, a word to make it ache, be the ache ever so transient. From such, as from all other sins, Jesus was born to deliver us; not, primarily, or by itself, from the punishment of any of them. When all are gone, the holy punishment will have departed also. He came to make us good, and therein blessed children.
One master-sin is at the root of all the rest. It is no individual action, or anything that comes of mood, or passion; it is the non-recognition by the man, and consequent inactivity in him, of the highest of all relations, that relation which is the root and first essential condition of every other true relation of or in the human soul. It is the absence in the man of harmony with the being whose thought is the man's existence, whose word is the man's power of thought. It is true that, being thus his offspring, God, as St Paul affirms, cannot be far from any one of us: were we not in closest contact of creating and created, we could not exist; as we have in us no power to be, so have we none to continue being; but there is a closer contact still, as absolutely necessary to our well-being and highest existence, as the other to our being at all, to the mere capacity of faring well or ill. For the highest creation of God in man is his will, and until the highest in man meets the highest in God, their true relation is not yet a spiritual fact. The flower lies in the root, but the root is not the flower. The relation exists, but while one of the parties neither knows, loves, nor acts upon it, the relation is, as it were, yet unborn. The highest in man is neither his intellect nor his imagination nor his reason; all are inferior to his will, and indeed, in a grand way, dependent upon it: his will must meet God's—a will distinct from God's, else were no harmony possible between them. Not the less, therefore, but the more, is all God's. For God creates in the man the power to will His will. It may cost God a suffering man can never know, to bring the man to the point at which he will will His will; but when he is brought to that point, and declares for the truth, that is, for the will of God, he becomes one with God, and the end of God in the man's creation, the end for which Jesus was born and died, is gained. The man is saved from his sins, and the universe flowers yet again in his redemption. But I would not be supposed, from what I have said, to imagine the Lord without sympathy for the sorrows and pains which reveal what sin is, and by means of which he would make men sick of sin. With everything human he sympathizes. Evil is not human; it is the defect and opposite of the human; but the suffering that follows it is human, belonging of necessity to the human that has sinned: while it is by cause of sin, suffering is for the sinner, that he may be delivered from his sin. Jesus is in himself aware of every human pain. He feels it also. In him too it is pain. With the energy of tenderest love he wills his brothers and sisters free, that he may fill them to overflowing with that essential thing, joy. For that they were indeed created. But the moment they exist, truth becomes the first thing, not happiness; and he must make them true. Were it possible, however, for pain to continue after evil was gone, he would never rest while one ache was yet in the world. Perfect in sympathy, he feels in himself, I say, the tortured presence of every nerve that lacks its repose. The man may recognize the evil in him only as pain; he may know little and care nothing about his sins; yet is the Lord sorry for his pain. He cries aloud, 'Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.' He does not say, 'Come unto me, all ye that feel the burden of your sins;' he opens his arms to all weary enough to come to him in the poorest hope of rest. Right gladly would he free them from their misery—but he knows only one way: he will teach them to be like himself, meek and lowly, bearing with gladness the yoke of his father's will. This is the one, the only right, the only possible way of freeing them from their sins, the cause of their unrest. With them the weariness comes first; with him the sins: there is but one cure for both—the will of the Father. That which is his joy will be their deliverance! He might indeed, it may be, take from them the human, send them down to some lower stage of being, and so free them from suffering—but that must be either a descent toward annihilation, or a fresh beginning to grow up again toward the region of suffering they have left; for that which is not growing must at length die out of creation. The disobedient and selfish would fain in the hell of their hearts possess the liberty and gladness that belong to purity and love, but they cannot have them; they are weary and heavy-laden, both with what they are, and because of what they were made for but are not. The Lord knows what they need; they know only what they want. They want ease; he knows they need purity. Their very existence is an evil, of which, but for his resolve to purify them, their maker must rid his universe. How can he keep in his sight a foul presence? Must the creator send forth his virtue to hold alive a thing that will be evil—a thing that ought not to be, that has no claim but to cease? The Lord himself would not live save with an existence absolutely good.

It may be my reader will desire me to say how the Lord will deliver him from his sins. That is like the lawyer's 'Who is my neighbour?' The spirit of such a mode of receiving the offer of the Lord's deliverance, is the root of all the horrors of a corrupt theology, so acceptable to those who love weak and beggarly hornbooks of religion. Such questions spring from the passion for the fruit of the tree of knowledge, not the fruit of the tree of life. Men would understand: they do not care to obey,—understand where it is impossible they should understand save by obeying. They would search into the work of the Lord instead of doing their part in it—thus making it impossible both for the Lord to go on with his work, and for themselves to become capable of seeing and understanding what he does. Instead of immediately obeying the Lord of life, the one condition upon which he can help them, and in itself the beginning of their deliverance, they set themselves to question their unenlightened intellects as to his plans for their deliverance—and not merely how he means to effect it, but how he can be able to effect it. They would bind their Samson until they have scanned his limbs and thews. Incapable of understanding the first motions of freedom in themselves, they proceed to interpret the riches of his divine soul in terms of their own beggarly notions, to paraphrase his glorious verse into their own paltry commercial prose; and then, in the growing presumption of imagined success, to insist upon their neighbours' acceptance of their distorted shadows of 'the plan of salvation' as the truth of him in whom is no darkness, and the one condition of their acceptance with him. They delay setting their foot on the stair which alone can lead them to the house of wisdom, until they shall have determined the material and mode of its construction. For the sake of knowing, they postpone that which alone can enable them to know, and substitute for the true understanding which lies beyond, a false persuasion that they already understand. They will not accept, that is, act upon, their highest privilege, that of obeying the Son of God. It is on them that do his will, that the day dawns; to them the day-star arises in their hearts. Obedience is the soul of knowledge.

By obedience, I intend no kind of obedience to man, or submission to authority claimed by man or community of men. I mean obedience to the will of the Father, however revealed in our conscience.
God forbid I should seem to despise understanding. The New Testament is full of urgings to understand. Our whole life, to be life at all, must be a growth in understanding. What I cry out upon is the misunderstanding that comes of man's endeavour to understand while not obeying. Upon obedience our energy must be spent; understanding will follow. Not anxious to know our duty, or knowing it and not doing it, how shall we understand that which only a true heart and a clean soul can ever understand? The power in us that would understand were it free, lies in the bonds of imperfection and impurity, and is therefore incapable of judging the divine. It cannot see the truth. If it could see it, it would not know it, and would not have it. Until a man begins to obey, the light that is in him is darkness.
Any honest soul may understand this much, however—for it is a thing we may of ourselves judge to be right—that the Lord cannot save a man from his sins while he holds to his sins. An omnipotence that could do and not do the same thing at the same moment, were an idea too absurd for mockery; an omnipotence that could at once make a man a free man, and leave him a self-degraded slave—make him the very likeness of God, and good only because he could not help being good, would be an idea of the same character—equally absurd, equally self-contradictory.

But the Lord is not unreasonable; he requires no high motives where such could not yet exist. He does not say, 'You must be sorry for your sins, or you need not come to me:' to be sorry for his sins a man must love God and man, and love is the very thing that has to be developed in him. It is but common sense that a man, longing to be freed from suffering, or made able to bear it, should betake himself to the Power by whom he is. Equally is it common sense that, if a man would be delivered from the evil in him, he must himself begin to cast it out, himself begin to disobey it, and work righteousness. As much as either is it common sense that a man should look for and expect the help of his Father in the endeavour. Alone, he might labour to all eternity and not succeed. He who has not made himself, cannot set himself right without him who made him. But his maker is in him, and is his strength. The man, however, who, instead of doing what he is told, broods speculating on the metaphysics of him who calls him to his work, stands leaning his back against the door by which the Lord would enter to help him. The moment he sets about putting straight the thing that is crooked—I mean doing right where he has been doing wrong, he withdraws from the entrance, gives way for the Master to come in. He cannot make himself pure, but he can leave that which is impure; he can spread out the 'defiled, discoloured web' of his life before the bleaching sun of righteousness; he cannot save himself, but he can let the Lord save him. The struggle of his weakness is as essential to the coming victory as the strength of Him who resisted unto death, striving against sin.

The sum of the whole matter is this:—The Son has come from the Father to set the children free from their sins; the children must hear and obey him, that he may send forth judgment unto victory.

Son of our Father, help us to do what thou sayest, and so with thee die unto sin, that we may rise to the sonship for which we were created. Help us to repent even to the sending away of our sins.