No.9. “Behold . . . the goodness
and the severity of God.”
Let us turn aside for a while, from the direct examination of the terms ‘righteousness’ and ‘justification’ to the consideration of the Lord’s attitude to sin as set forth by the use of one word ‘spare’ Greek pheidomai. ‘Both therefore the goodness and severity of God’ aid the Apostle as he reviewed the repudiation of Israel by the Lord, and the continued expression of goodness to the Gentile (Rom. xi. 22).
A false sentimentalism has obscured some of the characteristics of God, and has magnified His love at the expense of His holiness and holiness can be ‘a consuming fire’. In the course of His dealings with His creatures, God is said to have ‘spared not’ three classes, and the fourth is warned ‘take heed lest He also spares not thee’ (Rom. xi. 21).
(1) He spared not the angels that sinned.
The sum total of what is revealed in the whole of the Scriptures concerning the fall of the angels would probably be less in extent that occupied by the briefest of the minor prophets Obadiah, or the epistle of Jude, and it is to the epistle of Jude and to the parallel passage in II Peter that we instinctively turn to learn something of the nature of their sin and its punishment.
“For if God spared not the angels that sinned, but cast them down to hell, and delivered them into chains of darkness, to be reserved unto judgment” (II Pet. ii. 4).
Peter is evidently in the midst of an argument, and he reverts back to the past to warn the present false prophets and their dupes of ‘damnation that slumbereth not’.
Jude omits the reference to ‘hell’ or, as the reference here is, to “Tartarus”, the place named in Greek mythology for the incarceration of the Titans, the giants who attempted to storm heaven. He repeats however the reference to being “reserved”, to “chains”, to “darkness” and to future judgment.
(2) He spared not the world in the time of Noah.
Again specific knowledge concerning the actual corruption that brought about the deluge is limited to a few difficult passages of Scripture. Gen. vi. speaks of the corruption that followed the union of the ‘sons of God’ and the ‘daughters of men’ with the result that in the pregnant words of II Pet. ii. 5 ‘bringing in the flood upon the world of the ungodly’ He spared not the old world.
(3) He spared not the natural branches of Israel’s olive tree.
Israel however were an elect nation, a covenant people, heirs of the promise made to Abraham, beloved because of the fathers, a people with a peculiar destiny and great glory, yet because of unbelief, which led them to deny the very Messiah sent to them, because of unbelief subsequent to their pardon and the invitation given at Pentecost, Israel, excepting a remnant, were blinded, they were given a spirit of slumber, eyes that they should not see, and ears that they should not hear. Their table was made a snare, a trap, a stumbling block and a recompense, and their back bowed down. They fell, and were castaway, and became as dead (Rom. xi. 8-15). Some of the branches of Israel’s olive tree were broken off, and now comes the warning to the Gentile believer of that dispensation.
“Take heed lest He also spare not thee” (Rom. xi. 21).
Angels, the old world, Sodom and Gomorrah, Israel, and the Gentile believer, all in their turn were compelled to realize ‘the severity of God’. If we stayed here we should have but one side of the picture, rigorous, untempered justice.
There is however another, without which the character of God would be misinterpreted, and His glorious purpose of grace be unknown.
(4) “He spared not His Own Son” (Rom. viii. 32).
How often has the Scriptural insistence on the necessity for a sacrifice as a basis for redeeming, forgiving, justifying grace, been the object of attack, not only from the outside unbeliever, but alas, from those who are untaught and misled.
Have we not heard at some time the public orator working himself up into indignant fury as he denounced the Gospel basis of redeeming blood in some such language as the following?
“My friends, I stand here today, to denounce with every fibre of my outraged being, with all the sense of abhorrence that one feels at the exhibition of tyranny in high places, I stand here to denounce I say, the so called Gospel that outrages every sense of decency left to us, by representing the Father refusing to forgive His erring children, apart from the horrors of a bleeding sacrifice. Which one of you would ever dream of such a brutal and inhuman demand”? etc., etc.
One question and one question only needs to be put to all such misrepresentations, and that question is, “Who supplied, Who gave that bleeding sacrifice?” The answer is “the God Who demanded the sacrifice is the One alone who made it”. He did not demand atonement or offering at the hand of the transgressor, “He spared not His Own Son”. It was the God Who had been offended, the Judge Whose righteousness demanded the sentence of death, the Creator Who had been so outrageously treated by His creatures, it was the Lord God Omnipotent in Whose hand our very breath is, that stooped to be made flesh and to the death of the cross on the behalf of those who had sinned against Him.
A part of the foregoing implies the essential deity of the Lord Jesus Christ, that He was “God manifest in the flesh”, “The Word (Who) became flesh”, the One Whose hands made the heavens and by Whom all things consist, that emptied Himself, taking upon Him the form of a servant, and being made in the likeness of men, Who still further humbled Himself and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross. This we believe to be true, but cannot stay here to attempt to prove this essential doctrine*.
[* - The Deity of Christ or The Form of Sound Words should be
consulted by any reader uncertain of this wondrous subject.]
While God in His essential nature is ‘one’, we creatures whose very constitution limits us to the conditioned and the relative, know Him as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and it was “The Father” Who “sent the Son to be the Saviour of the World”.
John iii. 16 is the direct outcome of the reference made in verse 14 to the lifting up of the brazen serpent. God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son. When God ‘spared not’ His Own Son, but freely gave Him up for us all, He gave Him up to death. He Who spared not sinners, is here represented as “sparing not” the sinners’ substitutes.
One aspect of this great subject is apt to be missed unless the reader is acquainted both with the original of the N.T. and of the language of the Septuagint version.
The words of Gen. xxii. 12 are:
Ouk epeiso tou huiou sou tou agapetou
Not hast thou spared the son of thine the beloved.
The Greek of Rom. viii. 32 reads:
Tou idiou huiou ouk epheisato
Of the own Son not He spared.
Isaac is called ‘the beloved son’. Christ is called “His Own Son”; both indicate exceeding nearness and dearness. The Apostle who knew his Greek O.T. has purposely thrown us back to the story of Abraham and Isaac so that we may see in the torn heart of Abraham as he took the knife, the fire and the beloved on that strange and awful journey, something of what it cost “The Father” not to spare such a “Son”.
Something exists in righteousness, something pertains to God’s administration of the Universe that cannot allow sin to go unpunished. Yet God is love, and love found a way whereby He might be JUST as well as the JUSTIFIER of the ungodly that believe, and that way was in the giving up of His beloved Son.
So we come back to I Cor. i. 30 and learn that He was ‘made’ unto us righteousness. In II Cor. v. 21 we read:
“He hath made Him to be sin for us, Who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him.”
May this excursus, this pause and departure from the straight pursuit of our theme warm our hearts as we realize something of the grace that provided the righteousness wherein we stand.
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(From The Berean Expositor vol. 42, page 116).
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