2 Cor. 4:3-4.
1905 362 How solemn, yet how blessed, the truth which the gospel reveals to faith, that both God and man are thoroughly manifested! All is out on both sides: God in all His grace and truth; man in all his hatred and guilt. The cross of Christ makes the good and the evil perfectly plain to the uttermost. It is not merely that man, the chosen people, failed in every respect under the law of God (that is, in the duty to God and man which was justly required); but that when God in the person of Christ came in love and active unmerited goodness to ruined man, He was cast out with nothing but ignominy and scorn. Man would not have the true God of grace at any price, but crucified Him who is His image.
This necessarily and in principle closed all question of relationship with God for the people who had His law and boasted in that which could only condemn them. But the same death of the Cross, which proved the Jew's irretrievable ruin on the ground of law, opened the door of indiscriminate grace to all mankind as manifestly lost sinners, Jew and Gentile alike. It is in vain for the Jew to talk of the law, vainer still for the Gentile still more openly God's lawless enemy. The gospel goes out since Christ's death, resurrection and ascension, expressly on the ground that all sinned, and that none is righteous, no not one.
When man had thus manifestly, and after all patience and long-suffering, done his worst against God, no less is it manifest that God in the face of all did His best in giving His Son to be a sin-offering for such a wicked and rebellious world, that whosoever calls on His name should be saved. There is no ground of salvation in man. All turns on the Second man. Not only is He alone worthy, but He suffered for sins, Just for unjust, that the vilest who believes in his heart and confesses with his mouth might be saved. It is God's salvation complete, perfect, and everlasting, in contrast with Israel's temporal favours; and they too as a nation, when their heart turns to Him whom they despised and refused, shall enter into His mercy for ever.
Why then parley with the enemy, or listen to the evil heart of unbelief, when God sends you the word of reconciliation? He assures you that the atoning work is done by His Son, the only work which could glorify Him as to sin, the only work which could cleanse you from your sins. Yea the Son of Man so glorified Him, not only as Father but as God, that He is now glorified as man in God Himself, before the kingdom comes in displayed power and glory. And thus the gospel is not only of God's grace, but of Christ's glory as now on the Father's throne, whence He is coming, we know not how soon, to take us there where He is now. This is incomparably more than to reign with Him over the earth, though we shall share in it also.
So complete thus is the manifestation of God in grace and truth, yea and in heavenly glory, to bless the lost sinner who casts himself as he is on Christ. And so completely does He prove that there is no good in us but evil beyond our fathoming, that there is no excuse for the least delay. All of badness on my part is out; all is out of sovereign grace on His part. Both of these are the strongest motives to come and find life eternal and everlasting redemption in Christ Jesus the Lord. "But if also our gospel is veiled, it is veiled in those that are perishing, in whom the god of this age blinded the thoughts of the unbelieving, so that the radiancy of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is God's image, should not shine forth." What madness to hesitate or question! Who but God could so bless a lost sinner? and He only through Christ's cross, which makes it to be God's righteousness; and thus by faith we too become His righteousness in Christ.
What a joy it is, that when man was proved irretrievably lost, God in the gospel reveals His righteousness justifying the believer in the most glorious way! For it is not only in what the blood of Christ effects that his sins should be cleansed away atoningly, but that the believer himself should enter the new and heavenly place, yea in Christ as He is in glory before God. Thus if no one saw the heavenly vision as the apostle did, every Christian is entitled to say that he has the substance of the blessing which was made known to Saul and through him to all who believe His word. The grace of God gratuitously met him in his sins when he bowed to Christ; it has also made him to become God's righteousness in Him, not as He was but as He is in heavenly glory.
No wonder then that the apostle could speak of the gospel of God's glory. For if love brought down the Son to us as the only but perfectly efficacious propitiation for our sins, He so glorified God about sin that God has glorified Him in Himself, and gives us to become His righteousness in that glory, whence the light of Christ in glory reached our dark hearts, and we are henceforth identified with Him there. The light of the knowledge of God's glory in the face of Jesus Christ was not for Saul of Tarsus only, but through his inspired testimony that the Corinthian saints of old and that we now who believe might know ourselves blessed after the same rich pattern. What wondrous grace to be a Christian in the simple, unadulterated, and full faith of Christ according to the gospel of His glory! How unutterably wretched to be anything less! Between the two there is no middle ground of standing sanctioned by God. Christendom is utterly short of the truth, and hastening full sail into the abyss of the apostasy.