GOD'S VAST LOVE

F H Robison

MOST thinking is fathered by a wish and mothered by a fear. It is well, therefore, to look to our ruling desires and dominant fears if we would escape the natural prejudices which warp our thinking. This is true in respect to strictly mundane matters where we, in some measure, know our way around. But it is more notably the case in spiritual things, where we could know nothing at all except by revelation; and if our concepts of revelation be warped by pagan philosophy we shall understand God's purposes but poorly, indeed.

Paul, God's mouthpiece to the gentiles, says on this point: "Now the soulish man is not receiving the things which are of the spirit of God, for they are stupidity to him, and he is not able to know them, seeing that they are spiritually examined" (1 Cor.2:14). A "soulish" man is simply one who relies on his senses to guide him in his conceptions of what God is like and of what He intends to do to and for the human race.

Would we show much love for our human friends if we never read the letters they take the trouble to write us about what they intend to do; or if we read them so superficially or with such cock-sureness of what we think they are going to say that what they do say makes no impression? And yet we do those very things with God's Word.

He says: "In Christ all shall be vivified" (1 Cor.15:22), and we say, "Oh no: that means He is going to make some dead."

He says He is going to "head up all in the Christ--both that in the heavens and that on the earth" (Eph.1:10), and we say, He will certainly scatter part of it.

When God gives us a glimpse into His purpose to "reconcile all to Him" (Col.1:20), we object that He will forever antagonize some. We just know better than God does; that's all.

And when God's Word tells us that "God is to be All in all" (1 Cor.15:28), our prejudices tell us that He means only "All in some" We feel that God is not even God over all, to say nothing of being God in all. The majestic human will must be glorified at any cost.

But let's have done with human feelings as a guide to divine revelation. Our feelings vary greatly, affected, often, by the most trivial circumstances. "That which the eye did not perceive, and the ear did not hear, and to which the heart of man did not ascendÄÄwhatever God makes ready for those who are loving Him" -- that which could not be known by sensuous perception, "to us God reveals them through His spirit" (1 Cor.2:9,10).

There you are: follow your natural judgment and miss the truth; give heed to the Word of God and have a wisdom which comes from no other source. It all depends on what you want, divine truth or self flattery. The two things will not stay in the same heart at the same time.

When we read of the living God being "the Saviour of all mankind" (1 Tim.4:10); when we learn that the Son of Man shall draw all to Himself (John 12:32) as the universal center of gravity; when it is made plain to us that God our Saviour "wills that all mankind be saved and come into a realization of the truth" (1 Tim.2:4), and that Christ Jesus is the One giving Himself "a correspondent Ransom for all" (1 Tim.2:6)--the same all that God wills to be saved (2:4) and for whom believers should pray (2:1); when God's benevolent determination to be "annulling the acts of the Adversary" (1 John 3:8) is revealed to us; when we are informed that death, being the the last enemy, will be abolished (1 Cor.15:26), we, as believers, have no course open to us but to believe.

These are matters concerning which we could know nothing except as God tells us; and this is what God has told us. The slight difficulties which suggest themselves are practically all traceable to the presence of ecclesiastical philosophy in our minds or to faults in our English translations of the Sacred Scriptures.

God's Word, being true, makes every man who does not speak in accord with it a liar (Rom.3:4).

"But men make His love too narrow
By false limits of their own,
And they magnify His justice
With a zeal He will not own.
For the love of God is broader
Than the measure of man's mind;
And the heart of our Creator
Is most wonderfully kind"

One reason, probably the principal reason, why we are so slow to believe in the kindness of God's heart is our innate subconsciousness of sin and its attendant fear of the consequences. And there is no way to escape this fear except by repose in what God in Christ has done to rescue us. And there is no place to hear what God has done except in His Word; for "faith is out of tidings, yet tidings through a declaration of Christ" (Rom.10:17).

Mind: our worst fears about sin and its deserts are well founded; and all that pagan religions (in whatever land) have done is to chafe the sore that is already there; all that human ethics and philosophies have done is to try to get people to forget without any authoritative ground for forgetting. All that pleasure seekers and jazz makers can do is to occupy the attention, to keep it away from the thought of sin.

But the honest truth is, we are in a bad way unless God has done something about it. And the pertinent question is, Did Christ appear in order to put away sin once for all by the sacrifice of Himself? (Heb.9:26). If He did, the penalty not only was paid but is paid; and no one can be asked to suffer pain of any pitch, intensity, or duration as a penalty or be called upon to "satisfy" a justice which Christ Himself has already fully vindicated. Is the grace, the undeserved kindness, of God to be thus frustrated by human additions? "Not by me," says Paul (Gal. 2:21).

Furthermore, is Christ Jesus, having begun the good work, unable to bring it to completion; is He unable to cope with sin so that it will never cease to be? Is the law and its death penalty to exist when death is abolished? Are there to be tortured or even dead enemies when all things in heaven and earth are reconciled to God--brought into grateful, friendly appreciation of His loving kindness? Is God, with all power and wisdom concentrated in His risen Son, unable to bring to bear influences which will affect the motives, the inmost preferences of every individual, as He did with Abel, with Saul of Tarsus, and with everyone of us who believe? Is not Christ the "power of God" as well as the "wisdom of God" (1 Cor.1:24)?

What say the Scriptures?

1 Jn. 3: 4 Sin is lawlessness.
Rom. 3:20 Through law is the recognition of sin.
7: 8 Apart from law sin is dead.

Sin, as a judicial technicality, is thus identified with laws. But what has been actually done about it?

Gal. 3:13 Christ reclaims us from the curse of the law, becoming a curse for our sakes.
John 1:29 Lo! the Lamb of God Which is taking away the sin of the world!
Heb. 9:26 Since then, He must often be suffering from the disruption of the world, yet now, once, at the conclusion of the eons, for the repudiation of sin through His sacrifice, is He manifest.
2Cor 5:19 Not reckoning their [the unbelieving world's] offenses to them.
1 Pet.2:24 Who Himself carries up our sins in His body on to the pole.

'Tis done; the great transaction's done!
"Well might the sun in darkness hide,
And shut His glories in,
When Christ, the mighty Maker, died
For man, the creature's sin"

And is Christ, this mighty Maker, so poor a workman that He will have to discard the most of His work? Or will He gather up the fragments that nothing be lost? What humanly conducted factory could rate for efficiency if it had to dump most, or even much, of its product into some hellhole or offal place of perdition?

Of course there are parables and other statements, most of them applying to Christ's thousand-year reign as the Son of Man or to the immediate preparation for that reign, which speak in a different tone. And right here it is well to note that the greatest single cause of confusion in Scripture study consists in failure to discern correctly the times, seasons, dispensations, classes, etc., which are in God's plan. The thousand-year reign of Christ, often called the millennium, is something of a reversion, in that it goes back to law. It gives men the flawless rule, the righteous government which they think they need to have a fair "chance" It is given to them to prove that they need something more. The present dispensation, however, is one in which grace reigns and not law (Rom.5:21). The same will be true in the eon to follow the millennium. But even the judgments of Christ's reign are disciplinary rather than penal; for when the Lamb of God bore away the sin of the world He bore it all away, not our sins up to date with a running account thereafter--which would benefit us none, seeing we were born after His sacrifice was made.

No act of sin is now or will ever be the cause of condemnatory sentence or of penal suffering on the part of anybody. Thank God for that. There is discipline, however. But what a difference to the heart of faith!

The grand truth is that Christ was the head of the old creation, consisting of heavens and earth and all that in them is (Gen.1:1). In this matter of creation He was not an outsider who finished something and stepped aside. He continued to uphold it (Heb.1:3); it all cohered in Him (Col.1:17); and when He died the whole creation went into death with Him because it was made in Him (Col.1:16, RV) and not merely by Him (same verse, last part). And when He rose, all, when He arose, it was as head of a new creation, which may be entered into and enjoyed by faith now (2 Cor.5:17) until He makes all things new (Rev.21:5), "a new heaven and a new earth" (Rev.21:1; Isa.65:17; 66:22). "I am the resurrection and the life" (John 11:25), the Master said.

"For the love of Christ is constraining us, judging this, that, if one died for the sake of all, consequently all died. And He died for the sake of all that those who are living should by no means still be living to themselves, but to the One dying and being roused for their sakes."

The dying is finished. Sin is dealt with in its judicial aspects, though we still experience it for discipline of faith until our change comes (Phil.3:20,21). The almighty Head of the New Creation is dealing now principally with ignorance and unbelief. These obscure the light of the glory of God as it shines in the face of Jesus Christ no less than sin.

Only a sense of one's own insufficiency-without-God-and-His-Christ can bring one to trust in that God and Christ. The churches are full of indoctrinated unbelievers. And as long as they think they are self-sufficient, in unit or in group, they are going to stay unbelievers, no matter what they know; because faith is trust in a Person. Until they can sing with sincerity, as well as with truth, "nothing in my hand I bring," there will be no reconciliation, no lively appreciation of the fact that His will is sweeter than our wish.

Saul of Tarsus was certainly no small sinner, foremost representative he calls himself (1 Tim.1:15); he was ignorant and unbelieving (1 Tim.1:13); yet we see how the grace of God was shown to him. He was a calumniator, a persecutor, and an outrager or brutal person in his persecutions. It would be difficult to find a harder case. Poor, drunken bums along the Bowery are nothing compared to him. But one glimpse of his glorified Lord and that stony heart was melted down like butter. One word from that gracious voice, which spake as never man spake, and his ignorance of God as He is began to be dispelled. A few words from a heaven-sent and heaven-instructed brother, and unbelief dissolved like discontent on the bosom of a great calm.

"Who art Thou?" was his cry. "I am justice, whom thou disregardest" Did the glorious One say that? Not being taught by the Pharisees, He did not. "I am Jesus"ÄÄSaviour! How different. Not a condemner but a rescuer. The wrong-doer was arrested by love, and there broken, contrite he lay at the feet of his risen Lord.

And all this, Paul tells us, was in the nature of a pattern of what God intended to do to and for other unbelievers who were to come to believe. "Therefore was I shown mercy, that in me, the foremost [sinner], Jesus Christ should be displaying all His patience, for a pattern of those who are about to be believing on Him for life eonian" (1 Tim.1:16).

Saul was not punished for his iniquity. The One Whom he persecuted had already paid the penalty for the sin of persecution in Saul. There was no penalty, but much discipline. There is not only no future punishment for sin but no punishment now. "Sin reigns in death" only (Rom.5:21). Sin has no resurrection. In the death of Christ sin came to an end and in the resurrection power of Christ "grace reigns through righteousness," superabundant above sin and its consequences by virtue of the headship of Jesus Christ our Lord.

Man's dread of a hell of torment is taught by the precepts of men, and not by the Word of God. Read Romans 6:1-14 and see how simply the apostle presents the facts. Our horizon has been entirely filled by sin and sinners. It is like moaning over a debt that's paid. Christ, not sin, should have the preeminence in all things.

And know this: No sin however heinous, and no aggregation of sinners, however numerous or ignorant or willful, can bankrupt the riches of God's grace or undo what was done on Calvary's brow. If peace is not made by the blood of His cross then it will not be made by any effort or righteousness of our own. "Now thanks be to God, Who always gives us a triumph in Christ!"

"Since mine eyes were fixed on Jesus
I've lost sight of all beside
So enchained my spirit's vision
Looking at the Crucified"

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