1891 272 Dear Sir, — Your paper "Scripture Queries and Answers," in the Bible Treasury for March touches upon a vital question raised and not yet solved. A doctrine has come to light, according to which there was nothing judicial in the death of our blessed Lord. It is asserted that all the judicial part of the work of the cross was previous to the dying and in the sufferings of the abandonment. This notion is founded mainly upon a letter of J. N. D., in which he says, "At the cross I apprehend it was another thing. He was forsaken of God. He had immediately to do with God and just wrath against sin, and He in that place, so that love could have no refuge for His soul. And here, too, He is perfect and having accomplished this ineffable work, His soul having drunk the cup unmixed, atonement having been made, He comes forth from it as heard, and His act of death is merely His own giving up His spirit to His Father; in the time of peace He had said so; but He was to pass through death in His soul, and did as an offering for sin – but then what was death? It was One Who had overcome death, undergone it in its infinite atoning efficacy, and who gives up His soul, more than pure, which had put away sin, into the hands of God." (Letters of J.N.D., i. 208).
Now that our Lord passed through death in His soul during the unfathomable sufferings of the divine forsaking, cannot be doubted. This was moral death, but was "expiation accomplished" through such sufferings, then apart from actual death and blood-shedding? Scripture carefully declares that the blood "maketh atonement". This surely does not exclude the sufferings, but proves that the expiatory work comprises both the sufferings, the actual death, and the blood-shedding. With all deference to the author of the letter above quoted, I am unable to understand expiation without those three things. Again, scripture says, "Christ died for our sins", and, in order to mark that it was actual death, adds immediately, "and He was buried."
Every Christian holds that our blessed Lord had full title to offer Himself to God both as a burnt and as a sin offering, in very virtue of His own spotlessness and intrinsic perfections; also that in that very deed of offering Himself, He the Son of man was glorified and God was glorified in Him: so absolute and infinite was His personal excellency. All this and more was fully brought out in the holocaust, where all went up to God in a smoke of sweet-smelling savour when He was tested by the fire of divine judgment on the brazen altar; and in that character, by very reason of His perfection thus displayed, He could commit His spirit into the hands of His Father and pass away in peace. But there was the sin offering upon the cross as well as the holocaust, although both in one sacrifice, not in two; and in the sin-offering was death "simply the act whereby He commits His own spirit to His Father"? Here one may be allowed to say, with all due respect, that "merely" or "simply" is not simple at all. Where in scripture is the idea that the sin-offering stops short of death, actual death, and therefore confines itself to the sufferings of the abandonment, however needful and profound, yea infinite, these may have been and truly were? In Heb. 2 we read of "the suffering of death", and not apart from death. Hence it is, I humbly submit, that in the two Gospels where our Lord is viewed as the sin-offering on the cross (Matthew and Mark), nothing is said or heard of what is so blessedly in its place in Luke, where we have rather the holocaust and therefore not the forsaking, and in John, where not so much as a shadow is seen to hang over the cross.
It cannot be indeed, as you properly remark, a question of "reconciling" statements of scripture. There are mysteries in the work as in the Person, precisely because both are divine, and to explain them is beyond our competency. Nor need we; for our part is to adore, not to analyse. But where scripture makes such marked distinctions, we should take them into account, and not mix up or supplement.
If wrong in the thoughts expressed, I shall be most thankful for correction. Faith is in God's word, not in erring man's; and if the mind of a greatly honoured servant of the Lord has been misunderstood and his words misapplied, it is important that such misunderstanding and misapplying should also be corrected; for the truth in question is a vital one. C.