50. A Problem only God Can Solve
A Problem only God Can Solve This is a problem fit for a God of infinite wisdom! Is it possible that any solution can be found? Certainly not by the wisdom either of man or of angel. No creature can ever cope with the situation that sin thrust into the moral universe, nor find any way out of these inescapable necessities.
We have thus arrived at the place where man’s wisdom ends, and his philosophy stands dumb and helpless. Our lesser minds cannot answer the question that baffled Socrates and all the rest among the greatest minds this world ever saw. This is the problem, therefore, on which we must have a direct and supernatural revelation from God, if He has any to give. Is there such a revelation? If not, then all our reasoned conclusions are vain, and we are overwhelmed with black despair. For though we see with Socrates the inescapable necessity for sin to be forgiven, we also with him cry out that we cannot see how it can be made possible. But if there is such a revelation, then we are eager to know if our philosophy is seen in its light to be worthless or even error, or whether it is found so to fit into the principles given by the revelation, that we can come to rest in the knowledge that reason and revelation form a harmony that can never be overthrown.
It was anticipated early in the first chapter (page 17) that God might be expected to give us a revelation at just this point. And it is the good news of the Gospel that He has given us just such a direct revelation as our helplessness before this problem calls for. And when we begin to grasp its principles, we find it to be the one great centralizing and unifying truth in which all that relates to salvation finds its perfect setting, and all reasonable moral philosophy its meaning. The just forgiveness of sin was the problem God faced when He cried out for some one who could so interpose, so go between Him and the sinning race, that His mercy would have full freedom to set the penalty aside and forgive. And it was also a cry for some one through whom His love for the sinless might be forever established before them, by full freedom to execute the penalty on sin. So when there seemed to be none to respond to the call of His love, His own arm brought salvation unto him (Isaiah 59:16)—the salvation of His love from the defeat that otherwise either justice or mercy must have suffered. For He Himself, when no one else in all the universe could be found, took the place that no other being could possibly have taken, and wrought out a salvation that is so running over with divine wisdom and power, holiness and love, that we shall never exhaust its meaning through the ages of the ages. But what is the nature of this salvation He wrought out both for Himself and for sinning man? On what principle was this problem which no man could solve worked out? On the simple and easily understood principle of substitution.
Unphilosophic rationalism calls the doctrine of substitution a theory. The Bible everywhere sets it forth as a fact. If it is a fact, it has gone beyond the realm of theory. Let the sheer logic of the principle itself speak its word of wisdom to your mind.
It was on the principle of substitution that the penalty on sin was both executed and set aside at the same time, and in the same act. No other way is conceivable. In the nature of things, no other solution of the problem of salvation is possible. By this method alone can justice, through a substitute, execute the penalty on sin with unhindered freedom, while mercy not only consents but gladly co-operates. And only by this same method can mercy, through the same substitute, avert the penalty with unhindered freedom from the sinner, while justice gladly consents and co-operates. Justice and mercy, through a substitute, are thus united in eternal fellowship in solving the problem of sin. “Mercy and truth are met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other” (Psalms 85:10). The method of substitution thus becomes the perfect solution of the entire problem of salvation. There is no phase of the problem that it does not completely and eternally meet. By it God is able, first of all, to continue to be reconciled within Himself, because the threatened antagonism between His justice and His mercy is thus forever rendered impossible; while at the same time the demands of His love for both the sinless and the sinful are fully and eternally satisfied.
He is thereby able to save His government from threatened rupture and destruction, for His absolute sovereignty throughout the moral universe is thus so completely established that He can forever maintain both the honor and the glory of His sovereignty by executing the full penalty on law-breaking, and yet be righteous in forgiving fully and forever the penitent law-breaker.
Salvation is also brought by this method to the whole moral creation, except those who have gone, or will yet go, forever beyond it by refusing it. For He is able not only to put the sinless eternally beyond the reach of sin’s destructive power, but also to separate the sinner from his sin—not as a poetic fancy, but as a living and eternal fact so real, that He can and does utterly cancel and nullify the effects of sin in the sinner’s deepest being.
It is no wonder, therefore, that from the slain animals of Genesis with whose skins God clothed Adam and Eve (Genesis 3:21) to the song of Moses and the slain Lamb of God, which is sung in heaven, the Bible is one continuous unfolding of the principle of substitution.
Reason can find no other way of salvation, and the Bible proclaims no other way. And for any man to refuse to admit the principle of substitution into the solution of the problem of salvation, is to confess that he is either an inexcusably careless or shallow thinker, or else that he is so saturated with the lying philosophy of Satan that he is incapable of taking in the divine philosophy, which we have found forever rests on axiomatic, self-evident, eternal truth, which grows out of the very nature of Him who is truth.