A JUST GOD

C.H. SPURGEON

WHEN I was under conviction of sin I had a deep and sharp sense of the justice of God. Sin, whatever it might be to other people, became to me an intolerable burden. It was not so much that I feared the wrath to come, but that I feared sin. I knew myself to be so horribly guilty that I remember feeling that if God did not punish me for sin, He ought to do so. I felt that the judge of all the earth ought to condemn such sin as mine. I sat on the judgment seat and I condemned myself to perish, for I confessed that, had I been God, I could have done no other than send such a guilty creature as I was down to the lowest hell. All the while, I had upon my mind a deep concern for the honor of God's name and the integrity of His moral government. I felt that it would not satisfy my conscience if it could be forgiven unjustly. The sin that I had committed must be punished. But then there was the question how God could be just and yet justify me who had been so guilty. I asked my heart, “How can He be just and yet the Justifier?” (Rom 3:26). I was worried and wearied with this question; neither could I see any answer to it. Certainly I could never have invented an answer which would have satisfied my conscience.

The doctrine of the atonement is to my mind one of the surest proofs of the divine inspiration of Holy Scripture. Who would or could have thought of the just Ruler dying for the unjust rebel? This is no teaching of human mythology or dream of poetical imagination. This method of expiation is only known among men because it is a fact. Fiction could not have devised it. God Himself ordained it. It is not a matter which could have been imagined.

I had heard the plan of salvation by the sacrifice of Jesus from my youth up, but I did not know any more about it in my innermost soul than if I had been born a Hottentot. It came to me as a new revelation, as fresh as if I had never read the scriptures, that Jesus was declared to be “the propitiation for our sins” (1 John 2:2), that God might be just.

When I was anxious about the possibility of a just God pardoning me, I understood and saw by faith that He who is the Son of God became man and, in His own blessed person, bore my sin in His own body on the tree. I saw the chastisement of my peace was laid upon Him, and with His stripes I was healed (Isa 53:5). Have you ever seen that? Have you ever understood how God can be just to the full, not remitting penalty nor blunting the edge of the sword, and yet can be infinitely merciful and can justify the ungodly who turn to Him? It was because the Son of God, supremely glorious in His matchless person, undertook to vindicate the law, by bearing the sentence due me, that therefore God is able to pass by my sin. The law of God was more vindicated by the death of Christ than it would have been had all transgressions been punished forever. For the Son of God to suffer for sin was a more glorious establishment of the government of God than for the whole race to suffer.

“Jesus has borne the death penalty on our behalf!” Behold the wonder! There He hangs upon the cross! This is the greatest sight you will ever see: Son of God and Son of man! There He hangs, bearing pains unutterable—the Just for the unjust—that He might bring us to God. Oh, the glory of that sight! The Innocent suffering! The Holy One condemned! The Ever-blessed made a curse! The Infinitely Glorious put to a shameful death! The more I look at the sufferings of the Son of God, the more sure I am that they must meet my case. Why did He suffer, if not to turn aside the penalty from us? If, then, He turned it aside by His death, it is turned aside, and those who believe in Him need not fear it. It must be so, that since expiation is made, God is able to forgive without shaking the basis of His throne or in the least degree blotting out the statute book. Conscience gets a full answer to her tremendous question. The wrath of God against iniquity, whatever that may be, must be beyond all conception terrible. Well did Moses say, “Who knoweth the power of thine anger!” (Psalm 90:11). Yet, when we hear the Lord of Glory cry, “Why hast thou forsaken me?” (Psalm 22:1) and see Him yielding up the ghost, we feel that the justice of God has received abundant vindication by obedience so perfect and death so terrible, rendered by so divine a Person. If God Himself bows before His own law, what more can be done? There is more in the atonement by way of merit than there is in all human sin by way of demerit. The great gulf of Jesus' loving self sacrifice can swallow up the mountains of our sin, all of them. For the sake of the infinite good of this one representative Man, the Lord may well look with favor upon other men, however unworthy they may be in and of themselves. It was a miracle of miracles that the Lord Jesus Christ should stand in our stead and “bear, that we might never bear, His Fathers righteous Ire.” But He has done so. “It is finished” (John 19:30). God will save the sinner because He did not spare His Son. God can pass by your transgressions because He laid those transgressions upon His only begotten Son.

What is it to believe in Him? It is not merely to say, “He is God and the Saviour,” but to trust Him wholly and entirely, and take Him for all your salvation from this time forth and forever—your Lord, your Master, your All. If you will have the Lord Jesus, He has you already. If you believe on Him, I tell you, you cannot go to hell, for that were to make the perfect sacrifice of Christ to none effect. If the Lord Jesus Christ died in my stead, why should I die also? Every believer by faith has laid his hands on the Sacrifice, and made it his own, and therefore may rest assured that he can never perish. The Lord would not receive this offering on our behalf and then condemn us to die. The Lord cannot read our pardon written in the blood of His own Son and then smite us. That were impossible. Oh, that you may have grace given you at once to look away to Jesus, Who is the fountainhead of mercy to guilty man! Will you come into this lifeboat just as you are? Here is safety from the wreck. Accept the sure deliverance. Leap for it just as you are, and leap now!

I will tell you this thing about myself to encourage you. My sole hope for heaven lies in the full atonement made upon Calvary's cross for the ungodly. On that I firmly rely. I have not a shadow of hope anywhere else. You are in the same condition as I am, for we, neither of us, have anything of our own worth thinking of as a ground of trust. Let us join hands and stand together at the foot of the cross and trust our souls once for all to Him who shed His blood for the guilty. We will be saved by the one and the same Saviour. If you perish trusting Him, I must perish too. What can I do more to prove my own confidence in the Gospel which is set before you?
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The Holy Spirit’s Testimony to the Blood of Jesus

By William Reid

The question is not, whether do we think it scriptural for an awakened sinner to desire the secret and power-giving presence of the Holy Spirit to open the eyes of his understanding, and shew him the all sufficiency of Christ. That is what neither we nor any other true Christian would for a moment think of forbidding. Nor is it the question, whether the work of the Holy Spirit be necessary in order to salvation. The very fact of writing as we have done on regeneration, as well as writing1 to encourage our brethren to meet together, and also meeting ourselves, to pray for the Holy Spirit to put forth His reviving, sanctifying, convincing, and converting power, will satisfy all ingenuous minds that we hold the absolute necessity of the work of the Holy Spirit in order to the regeneration and conversion of perishing souls.

The only question, then, which falls to be considered is, What am I to say to an awakened and anxious sinner? Am I to say simply “Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved” (Acts 16:31), as said the apostle of the Gentiles to the trembling jailor of Philippi? or am I, as the first thing I do, to exhort him to pray for the Holy Spirit to convince him more deeply of his sin, enlighten his darkened understanding, renew his perverse will, and enable him to believe on the Lord Jesus Christ to the saving of his soul? Am I to direct him, as the grand thing he has to do, to believe in Jesus, and accept His blood-shedding as the only foundation of his peace with God; or to seek the work of the Spirit as an addition to Christ's work, in order that he may be justified? The former leads to justification by faith alone, the true Apostolic doctrine of the churches of the first age; the latter leads to justification by sanctification , the pernicious doctrine of a later era, by embracing which a man can never reach any satisfactory assurance that his sins are pardoned, even after a lifetime's religious experience and devout and sincere performance of religious duties;2 whereas, by teaching salvation by the blood of Christ alone, a man may, like the Philippian jailor, “rejoice, believing in God with all his house,” (Acts 16:34), “in the same hour” in which Christ is presented as the alone object of personal faith and consequent reconciliation.

There is, we regret to think, a large class of professing Christians who seem to have the unfounded notion engrained in their minds, that Christ came as a Saviour in the fulness of time, and on being rejected and received up into glory, the Holy Spirit came down to be the Saviour of sinners in His stead, and that whether men are now to be saved or lost depends entirely on the work of the Holy Spirit in them, and not on the work of Christ done for them; whereas the Holy Spirit was given as the crowning evidence that JESUS IS STILL THE SAVIOUR, even now that He is in heaven; and the great work of the Spirit is not to assume the place of Jesus as our Saviour, but to bear witness to Christ Jesus as the only Saviour, and by His quickening grace bring lost sinners to Him, that they may become “the children of God by faith in Christ Jesus” (Gal 3:26). This He did on the blessed day of Pentecost, when thousands of divinely quickened souls received His testimony, believed “in the name of Jesus,” and obtained “remission of sins” (Acts 2:38).

The Holy Ghost is not the Saviour, and He never professed to be so, but His great work, in so far as the unconverted are concerned, is to direct sinners to the Saviour, and to get them persuaded to embrace Him and rely upon Him. When speaking of the Holy Spirit, Jesus said distinctly to His disciples, “He shall not speak of Himself...HE SHALL GLORIFY ME“ (John 16:13,14). If to glorify Christ be the grand aim and peculiar work of the Holy Spirit, should it not also be the grand aim and constant work of those who believe in Him, and more especially of the ministers of His gospel?

The whole drift of the Holy Spirit's inspired oracles, as we have them in the Bible, is to glorify Christ; and the gospel ministry has been granted by Him (Eph 4:11,12), to keep the purport of those Scriptures incessantly before the minds of men, and in so doing to beseech sinners to be reconciled to God. Now, Holy Scripture throughout clearly teaches that, simply on account of the one finished, all-sufficient and eternally efficacious work of Christ, sinners who believe in Him are “justified from all things” ; that we are “justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus: whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in His blood” (Rom 3:24,25); and we are justified as “sinners,” as “ungodly,” (Rom 5:6,8) and not as having an incipient personal righteousness wrought in us by the Holy Ghost. Few men, with the Word of God in their hands, would subscribe to such a doctrine; and yet it is the latent creed of the great majority of professing Christians. It is, in fact, the universal creed of the natural heart. Fallen human nature, when under terror, says, Get into a better state by all means; feel better, pray better, do better; become holier, and reform your life and conduct, and God will have mercy upon you! But grace says, “Behold, God is my salvation!” (Isa 12:2). To give God some equivalent for His mercy, either in the shape of an inward work of sanctification, or of an outward work of reformation, the natural man can comprehend and approve of; but to be justified by faith alone, on the ground of the finished work of Christ, irrespective of both, is quite beyond his comprehension. But “the foolishness of God is wiser than men” (1 Cor 1:25); for, instead of preaching holiness as a ground of peace with God, “we preach Christ crucified” (1 Cor 1:23), “for other foundation can no man lay” —either for justification or sanctification— “than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ” (1 Cor 3:11); and, whatever others may do, I am “determined not to know anything among you, save Jesus Christ and him crucified” (1 Cor 2:2).

“O my Redeemer, who for me wast slain, Who bringest me forgiveness and release, Whose death has ransom'd me to God again, And now my heart can rest in perfect peace!

Still more and more do Thou my soul redeem, From every bondage set me wholly free; Though evil oft the mightiest power may seem, Still make me more than conqueror, Lord, in Thee!”

FOOTNOTES:

1. The author refers to his book, “The Spirit Of Jesus, “ which is entirely devoted to the elucidation of the work of the Holy Ghost in the conversion of souls.

2. This is referred to in a forcible and memorable manner by Thomas Adams, one of the old Puritans, when he is discoursing on “the first-born which are written in heaven:”— “Woe” says he, “to that religion which teacheth even the best saint to doubt of his salvation while he liveth! Hath Christ said, Believe , and shall man say, Doubt? This is a rack and strappado to the conscience; for he that doubteth of his salvation doubteth of God's love, and he that doubteth God's love cannot heartily love Him again. If this love be wanting, it is not possible to have true peace. Oh the terrors of this troubled conscience! It is like an ague; it may have intermission, but the fit will return and shake him. An untoward beast is a trouble to a man; an untoward wife is a greater trouble; but the greatest trouble of all is an untoward conscience. Blessed is the man whose sins are forgiven; where there is no remission of sins, there is no blessedness. Now, there is no true blessedness but that which is enjoyed; and none is enjoyed unless it be felt; and it cannot be felt unless it be possessed; and it is not possessed unless a man know it; and how does he know it that doubts whether he hath it or not?”

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