HERALDS OF GOD
the faith of the New Testament. No Pentecost will ever attend a ministry which boggles at the implications of Christ's cry upon the Cross, "It is finished!" For something happened then which settled the issue for ever. "Once and for all"—that is the authentic trumpet-note of apostolic religion. "I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven." That is decisive, After Calvary, it can never be midnight again. Long and hard may be the campaign: for "we wrestle against principalities and powers." But we know now that we are fighting a defeated enemy. "Christ died for our sins," says Peter in his epistle, "the just for the unjust, once for all." "In that He died," writes Paul to the Romans, "He died for sin, once for all." "He has appeared," declares the epistle to the Hebrews, "once for all to abolish sin by the sacrifice of Himself." By all means, drop the word "transaction" if you please: no doubt the term has been abused. But do not mutilate the Gospel of the Cross by reducing it to a doctrine of subjective influence. Preach the Cross as victory. Here where the very greatness of the apparent triumph of iniquity was its own irrevocable defeat; here where evil once for all has shot its bolt, and its deadly weapon is turned against itself; here where eternal love is seen asserting its sovereignty, not just in spite of the tragic mystery of sin, but—as by a master-stroke of divine strategy—precisely through that mystery—here is the ground of all our hope. Here the human prospect has been transfigured radically and for ever.
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