70. Grace and Obligation Exclude Each Other

Grace and Obligation Exclude Each Other

Grace can never enter where obligation to show favor is present. God was under obligation to banish man forever from His presence, after he became a spiritual corpse. But He found a way to postpone that obligation, voluntarily assuming the obligation instead, all in pure grace, to bring man back out of sin into His love. So He starts after man as soon as sin enters, calling after him in love: “Where art thou?” (Genesis 3:9). And finding and confronting the sinning pair with their sin, He first, in grace, announces the way of salvation from their sin, and then in justice, He pronounces the penalty from which He has already promised the salvation.

Then continuing still in grace as the ultimate motive, He nevertheless assumes obligations as He puts Himself under oaths, and covenants, and promises, all across the 4,000 years of Old Testament history. But how did men receive it? They outraged conscience, quenched the light of nature, despised God’s covenants, contemned His oaths, forfeited His promises, trampled His Law under foot, cast out and killed the messengers He sent them, until at last it had been shown that man’s defiant rebellion against God was the supreme fact of all human history. And yet God did not cut the race off. Men were still on terms with Him. His obligation to banish them was still held in abeyance, for there was one more thing He would do. So He gathers all His oaths, covenants and promises together and personifies them in His Son. Then He sends Him to man, thus so completely fulfilling His assumed obligations that there was nothing left that He could do. But man’s answer was to turn the Son into a “Man of sorrows” by such outrageous treatment and contemptuous rejection as could never again be equaled through all eternity. Every step He took was on an errand of mercy, yet He had murderers constantly hounding His footsteps. Every word He spoke told of measureless love, yet they were received with utmost contempt. Every deed He wrought was one of infinite tenderness, yet all was received with hellish cruelty. For pity He received scorn; for blessing, curses; for love, hatred; until at last they rose up and forfeited every claim they could ever, have on God through covenants, oaths and promises, by hangings His Gift for their fulfillment on a tree!

God had now completely fulfilled all His covenants and oaths to the race, and this was what it had come to! He had offered His infinite love to men in His incarnate Son, and they had cried: “Away with him! Crucify him!” He had exhausted all to get men to return to Him, and they had taken sides with the devil against Him! And now, when He had so completely fulfilled all His obligations assumed in grace that there was nothing left to fulfil and it had all been outrageously despised and He Himself insulted to the last possible degree, what more claim could man have on Him? When men scorn and reject all He offers them, what more can He do? He certainly can do nothing more when He has done all, and men have refused and rejected it in an act that can never be undone!

Yet if there is nothing more He can do, His obligation to banish the race from Him forever must come into action, and He has failed in His purpose to bring men back to His love. For if man refuses God’s offered Way to heaven, there is nothing left open to him but the way to hell. And how can there still be any hope for moral beings who, by the answer of murder to the offer of God, must have forever closed the door of hope?