Him (when He endured the wrath of God’s judgment against sin), He only, of the three that were crucified together, could or did bear that wrath; and the agony of that wrath, if His alone of the three then and there crucified, was distinct from, though present to Him at the same time as the agonies (infinitely lesser) of the cross of wood.”[1]
There is in this quotation that which is so profane, that we scarce like to comment on it—a linking together of the Spotless One and the malefactors crucified with him, that the heart shudders in reading it, and cannot but feel that such teaching will fast turn those who sit under it to infidelity “The Cross to Christ,” we are told, “must have been far more sorrowful than to the two thieves,” for his bodily sensibilities were keener!! There is in remarks of this nature an unholy familiarity in treating those holy and awful sufferings of the Son of God, which robs the cross of its unutterable glory, and the person of the Sufferer of that reverential adoration which is his due at the hands of those who are healed by his stripes. What was this “legal curse” which “was not the same thing as the wrath, when He cried out ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me’”? What is this curse which we are told “the thieves bore as He did”? According to this, the curse he bore had nothing to do with those of whom we are told that he died to bear their sins in his own body on the tree—it was not the sinner’s curse, but a legal curse appended by God governmentally to the death of the Cross, and the Cross becomes no emblem of atoning grace and love, but the emblem of something that thieves endured as well as He!!
This same way of treating of the sufferings of the Holy One of God we find in the September number of the Bible Treasury for the current year, which is alike revolting to all spiritual apprehension of the awful mysteries of the Cross of which we know so little, and to all scriptural revelation concerning Christ and his atoning death. The writer there says:—
“Now that which was properly expiation or atonement was not the pure, however precious act of Christ’s death. Of course death was necessary for this and for other objects in the counsels of God; but it is what Jesus went through from and with God, when made sin, it is what He suffered for our sins not only in body, but in soul under divine wrath, that the atonement depends on. Many besides Jesus have been crucified; but atonement was in no way wrought then. Many have suffered horrors of torment for the truth’s sake in life and up to death; but they would have been the first to abhor the falsehood that their sufferings atoned for themselves any more than for others.”
- ↑ See The Present Testimony, p. 167, published by G. Morrish, Warwick Lane, Paternoster Row.
