“In this was manifested the love of God towards us, because that God sent His only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through Him. Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us, and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins” (1 John 4:9-10).
Here we have presented to us two great blessings, which the death of Christ has brought to the believer, LIFE and PROPITIATION.
LIFE! This is put first in order in these verses, one can understand the reason of this. Man is fallen, has a fallen, sinful nature, incapable of any response to God. Ephesians 2:1 speaks of the believer’s conclusion before conversion as DEAD in trespasses and sins. What can a spiritually dead man do? He may be very active in his sin, as is presented in Romans, but Godward he is DEAD. What he wants is life.
Now the life of the fallen creature is forfeited. Besides which, in its nature it can only sin. If a gardener desires to have good fruit off a crab apple tree, he knows full well that to give the tree stimulating fertilizers, careful pruning, every encouragement that nature can bestow, will never produce good fruit. It will only produce crabs, sour crabs, larger crabs, more crabs. The gardener realises that the only way to get good fruit from that tree is to impart a new life, a life capable of producing good fruit. So he grafts, say, a Ribston pippin, or a Cox’s orange pippin, or some well-known cultivated variety, and the desired result is secured.
So it is with the believer. If it were possible to translate an unbeliever to heaven he would be most unhappy. Just as a hen is unhappy in water, or a fish on dry land, so would the unbeliever find heaven intolerable, his sinful nature is the opposite of what is found there.
This is very definitely emphasized by our Lord, when he said to Nicodemus, the ruler of the synagogue, the expounder of the law, that he must be born again, born from above. It must have been startling to the last degree for that good man, as men speak, to be told that nothing of the old life would do for God, that there must be a new birth, a new spiritual being, if the pleasure of God is to be secured.
But how is that life secured for the believer? This is where the love of God is manifested. He gave His Son, His only begotten Son, gave Him to the death of the cross that righteousness might be satisfied, and the claim of a thrice-holy God met. At Calvary we see the amazing love of God, we see the inexorable claims of divine righteousness, that nothing less than the death of the Son of God as the Sin-bearer at the cross would suffice. So life to which no sin is attached, a life incapable of sinning, is communicated to the believer. True it comes as the sovereign act of God, but the believer comes into the consciousness and intelligent enjoyment of it as he receives the Saviour as His.
PROPITIATION! This is a long word. What does it mean? The same word in other places is translated mercy seat. So we read, “Christ Jesus, whom God has set forth as a propitiation [a mercy Seat] through faith in His blood” (Rom. 3:25). It is set forth typically in the ritual of the tabernacle in the wilderness. There was the ark in the Holiest of All, the ark composed of shittim wood, covered with pure gold. The shittim wood setting forth the humanity of our Lord, the pure gold His deity. God and man, one blessed Person. On the top of the ark lay a slab of pure gold, setting forth divine righteousness. Once a year the High Priest entered the Holiest of All, and sprinkled the blood of the sin-offering on the gold. Typically the gold cried out for its claims to be met. Typically the blood satisfied those claims. Thus it became typically a mercy-seat, a meeting place between God and the sinner, God in all His holiness, the sinner in all his sin and defilement.
The type was worthless save as a type. Here in Romans 3:25, we get the efficacious Antitype, the blessed Son of God, meeting all the claims of God at the cross for His glory and the sinner’s blessing. The love of God was thus expressed.
So through the impartation of life our great need on one line is met; through the propitiation, through the atoning death of Christ on the other line, there is a righteous meeting place between God and the sinner. And when “faith in His blood” is exercised, the value of that propitiation is known by the believer, and he learns that “He [Christ] is the propitiation for OUR sins” (1 John 2:2). Indeed the whole world comes in for the scheme, but it is “faith in His blood” that appropriates it.
May these two blessings commend the love of God to us more and more.