010. HOW CAN INNOCENT SUFFER FOR GUILTY?

HOW CAN INNOCENT SUFFER FOR GUILTY?

How can the innocent justly suffer the penalty for the guilty? How can the justification of Christ become my justification? Because "in him all things consist." There is nothing arbitrary in the process; it is simply natural law and actual fact. It is impossible that he who is the natural life of humanity should not be responsible for the sin committed by his own members. It is impossible that he should not suffer, that he should not make reparation, that he should not atone. The incarnation and death of Christ are only the outward and temporal exhibition of an eternal fact in the being of God, and of a suffering for sin endured by the pre-incarnate Son of God ever since the fall. The wrath of God against sin began to be endured by Christ just so soon as sin began. The patriarchs and prophets were saved, not so much by the retroactive effect of a future atonement, as by the present effect of an atonement which was even then in progress. The sacrifices of the Mosaic system had something behind them even then. Gethsemane and Calvary were concrete presentations of agelong facts: the fact, on the one hand, that holiness must punish sin; and the fact, on the other hand, that he who gave his life to man at the beginning must share man’s guilt and penalty. But the satisfaction of justice culminates in redemption—that is, in the conquest of sin and death. The eternal atonement is not such a conquest. The historical atonement is such a conquest. It is not merely a manifestation, it is the objectivication, of the eternal suffering love of God, and at the same time the actual deliverance of our nature from sin and death by Jesus Christ. The union of Christ with the race by the fact of creation explains not only the necessity of the atonement and its foundation in justice, but it also shows how the work of the great Sin-bearer inures to the benefit of the race. It is easy to see how justification comes to all who are united to Christ by faith, for those who are made spiritually one with him become partakers of his justification. But how shall we make comprehensible the salvation of infants and of those who, like imbeciles and idiots, never in this life come to moral consciousness? Their natures are perverted, the germs of evil are in them, we believe them to be saved, but how? I venture to say that Christ’s natural union with the race furnishes an explanation here. Man’s natural and unconscious union with Christ gives him the benefit of Christ’s work for corporate humanity and justifies him from hereditary and unconscious sin, just as man’s spiritual and conscious union with Christ gives him the benefit of Christ’s work for the individual and justifies him from conscious and personal sin. Every other doctrine of infant salvation fails to meet the objection that guilt is taken away from none but those who are in union with Christ. The natural union of all men with Christ, "in whom all things consist," provides for man’s unconscious and hereditary sin an unconscious and hereditary justification in the case of all who do not, like Esau, reject their birthright.