016. REDEMPTION INFINITE SELF-LIMITATION

REDEMPTION INFINITE SELF-LIMITATION

There is a principle in God which answers to conscience in man,—a principle that demands reparation for sin,—and God can in no wise clear the guilty so long as that principle has not its full rights accorded to it. Moral evil must be either punished or atoned for. God does not desire to punish, hence he provides atonement. Aye, he provides that atonement even when he determines to create. Sin has cost God more than it has cost man; God permitted it only in view of the cross. Christ is *’ the Lamb slain from before the foundation of the world." In the beginning God gave his Son to die; the provision of redemption antedates the historical existence of sin itself; Calvary is only the outward manifestation of a sacrifice which was from eternity. In sacrifice the world was born; in sacrifice it continues to be. Only in Christ does the universe "consist " or hold together. His pierced hand keeps it from disintegration, from chaos, from annihilation. Justice would sweep away a world of sinners if it were not for the self-limitation of love. So we are to look on the laws of nature by which summer and winter, seed-time and harvest, cold and heat, succeed one another in even round as voluntary limitations imposed on himself by God. And supernatural working, as well as natural, miracles, regeneration, resurrection, all God’s plan made known in prophecy and executed in providence, all the promises by which God binds himself and attaches himself to the faith and the prayers of men, are various methods of selflimitation in which love reveals itself, challenges attention, draws us to itself. So God prepares us for the one great act and exhibition of his love which surpasses, and yet in a true sense includes, all the rest. How far, we ask once more, will this self-limitation go? And the answer is the startling words: "He emptied himself." Human love will go far in self-abnegation and selfsurrender. But divine love will make the infinite descent from the very heights of glory to the very depths of shame.

It is not my present purpose fully to treat the great subject of Christ’s humiliation. I wish only to indicate in the briefest way how the principles already suggested may be applied to its defense and elucidation. The humiliation of Christ was two-fold: it pertained on the one hand to his person and on the other hand to his work. In Christ’s person there was a self-limitation that affected God’s natural attributes. In Christ’s work there was a self-limitation that affected God’s moral attributes. When Christ became man he gave up the independent exercise of his divine attributes. During his earthly life the God in him was veiled and subject. He voluntarily put his deity under control. God by himself could never be born or suffer or die— but God united to humanity could do all these. When he was made in the likeness of men he took the form of a servant. In the human nature which he took to himself, he who was Lord of the Spirit, he who gave the Spirit, he who worked through the Spirit, condescended to be the servant of the Holy Spirit, and to know and act, not as God, but as man, and only as the Holy Spirit should permit and the exigencies of his Messianic mission required. The Godhead in Christ commonly manifested itself in proportion to the capacity of Christ’s humanity—only a little when the humanity was infantile and weak, more and more fully as the humanity became older and more developed. Jesus when a babe was not omniscient; indeed, even in his later years there were some things hid from him, for he said: "Of that day"—the day of the end—"knoweth no man, neither the angels of God, neither the Son, but the Father." He learned obedience and suffered being tempted, as he could not have done had all things been open to his gaze. His humanity dropped a curtain before the eyes of the God-man. Just as the reservoir may be full of water, but we get in our houses only a quantity measured by the size of our service pipe, so God was manifest in the flesh only so far as the flesh furnished a channel through which deity could communicate itself. In Robert Browning’s "Ring and the Book," Pompilia says truly: "Now I see how God is likest God, in being born." This self-limitation of deity to the narrow bounds of humanity, that our humanity might be addressed on its own level and in its own language, this is the thing that is "likest God." And yet it is a great mystery—the Scriptures seem to intimate that God manifest in the flesh is the greatest mystery of all. How can there be divine attributes that are not exercised, resources that are not used? Fortunately we are not without analogies which help us to comprehend the possibility of it. There is more of resource in us than we use; we know more than we can tell; there is more in the memory of every man than he can at this moment recall; every one of us has more power than he now knows of—only the exigency calls it forth. The spiritual life of the Christian is a greater and more blessed thing than at present he has any idea of—" It doth not yet appear what we shall be."

If we could imagine the soul of a Humboldt coming back to this world and being joined again to an infant’s body, we should not expect that soul with all its knowledge perfectly to reveal itself at the first; only as the infant’s body developed and matured could the genius of Humboldt be made manifest. So, although there was an ocean-like fullness of resource in Christ, upon which he was permitted at times to draw, yet those vast resources were commonly hidden, even from himself. The independent exercise of his divine attributes he surrendered when he gave up the form of God to take the form of a servant and to be made in the likeness of men.

Christ’s humiliation then was a self-limitation as respects his person. God gave up the independent exercise of his natural attributes in becoming man. But there was a greater humiliation than this involved in the work which he did and came to do, a humiliation that pertained to God’s moral attributes. Christ joined himself not merely to humanity, but to guilty humanity. When he became one of the race he took by inheritance all the burden of ill-desert which rested upon the race. ’All our exposures and liabilities became his so soon as he became organically connected with us. He put himself under law and under penalty when he took our nature. Father Damien when stricken with leprosy wrote: "Now I must stay with my own people." So, when Christ joined himself to us, he put himself under bonds to suffer and to die. His circumcision and his baptism indicated this. All through his life on earth there hung over him the shadow of approaching death. Human nature was under condemnation and he had human nature. In this moral self-limitation was the greatest sacrifice of all. Gethsemane was the clear realization of what was due to sin; Calvary was the actual paying of the debt which not he personally, but the human nature of which he had become a part, owed to the law and the holiness of God. Hastening forward to the cross with the majestic self-abandonment of love, yet shrinking from the cross as only infinite purity could shrink from the doom of sin, we have in the passion and atonement of the Son of God the most marvelous illustration of God’s self-limitation. For Jesus endured the whole penalty of human sin, both physical and spiritual death. Physical death is the separation of the soul from the body, and Jesus died for our sins in this sense. Spiritual death is the separation of the soul from God, and Jesus suffered the agonies of spiritual death also when he cried, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" Here was the last conceivable or possible sacrifice, the endurance of that frown and desertion of God, which the unpardoned sinner must endure forever, simply because a finite being can never exhaust an infinite penalty, but which Christ in a few brief hours could exhaust and did exhaust, because in his divine nature he was himself infinite. So near to absolute extinction did Jesus go in order that he might redeem us. His holiness came into closest contact with unholiness; yes, took upon itself all the consequences of man’s unholiness—did everything but become actually unholy—that we might be saved. Here is the climax of God’s self-limitation. Love makes every sacrifice but the sacrifice of holiness; God gives up everything but his essential Godhood. The form of God, that he resigns. Our nature, our guilt, our penalty, our death, these he takes. And so "he emptied himself." The heart of God reveals itself in sacrifice. Would God be more perfect without this self-limitation of love? No, this is his very perfection, that he can stoop so low to save us. In Christ’s sympathy and sorrow God stands manifested, for "God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself." This is Christianity—the coming down of God to man—in distinction from heathenism, which is man’s vain effort to lift himself to God. So the gospel rectifies our perverted ideals of character and of conduct. We can win no true success in life except by following Christ’s example of self-limitation. The last and greatest wonder of that gospel is that the great Model does not leave us to copy him at a distance, but actually enters our souls and remodels us. And faith is only the closing of the soul with Christ, by which this living Redeemer, with his self-sacrificing and yet his victorious Spirit, becomes ours. So the God who nineteen hundred years ago subjected himself to the limitations and liabilities of our human nature still continues his work of self-limitation by re-incarnating himself in every believer and by enabling him to sacrifice himself for others as his Lord sacrificed himself for him. I have been trying to render Christ’s person and work acceptable to an enlightened reason. But of all that I have said this is the sum: Christ’s humiliation is possible, simply because infinite love is capable of infinite self-limitation and because the immeasurable depths and everlasting reaches of man’s misery and condemnation constitute an infinite need of such love. "God commendeth his love toward us in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us." "This is the true God and eternal life."