God Himself is the ultimate and absolute standard of righteousness. Man is commanded to recognize a standard of righteousness outside of and above himself, and his will and conduct must conform thereto. That standard of righteousness is the revealed will of God. But shall we reason from this that God also recognizes a standard of righteousness to which His will must be conformed, a standard which makes right being made right, and right being made right, He wills it because it is right? No, indeed. The truth is, that we best discover what the nature of God requires Him to do, by noting what He, by His will, actually does. When God says, “I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy” (Rom. 9:15), He assuredly sets before us His will, in its utmost freedom and sovereignty. But this supreme act of sovereign grace is the act of God Himself, an act into which the whole nature of God (His will being included in that nature) moved Him. We fail to trace anything to its original source unless we track it right back to the sovereign will of God. This is true alike of creation, of providence, and of redemption. God was not obliged to have created this world; He did so simply because it so pleased Him (Rev. 4:10). Having created it, when Adam fell, He could have well left the whole race to perish in its sins, and would have done so, unless His sovereign will had, previously, determined otherwise. Justice did not require Him to intervene in mercy, for as the righteous Governor of the world, He might have proceeded to uphold the authority of His law by exacting its penalty upon all the disobedient, and thus have given to the unfallen angels a further example of His awful vengeance. Nor did His goodness require that He should rescue any of His rebellious subjects from the misery, which they had brought upon themselves, for He had already given a complete display of that in creation. Nor did His love, abstractly considered, demand that a Savior should be provided; had that been the case one must also have been given to the angels which fell. It needs to be pointed out that the manifestative glory of God does not depend upon the display of any particular attribute, but rather upon the exhibition of them all, in full harmony, and on proper occasions. He is glorified when He bestows blessings upon the righteous, and is equally glorified when He inflicts Punishment on the wicked. God’s manifestative glory consists in the revelation of His character to His creatures; yet this is purely optional on His part: it is quite voluntary, and contributes nothing to His happiness, and might have been withheld had He so pleased. Yet, as God always acts consistently with Himself, if He shows Himself at all to His creatures, the discovery will ever correspond to the greatness and excellency of His nature. That the atoning death of Christ had its source in the will of God, is plainly declared in Acts 2:23, “Him being delivered by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God.” Though accomplished in the fullness of time, it was resolved upon before time, decreed and enacted in heaven by the Eternal Three. Therefore do we read in Revelation 13:8 of “The Lamb slain from the foundation [or “founding”] of the earth.” Christ was “the Lamb slain” determinately, in the counsel and decree of God (Acts 2:23); promissorily, in the word of God passed to Adam after the fall (Gen. 3:15); typically, in the sacrifices appointed immediately after the promise of redemption (Gen. 3:21; 4:4); efficaciously, in regard of the merit of it, applied by God to believers before the actual sufferings of Christ (Rom. 3:25; Heb. 9:15). He [God] made him [Christ, the Mediator] to be sin for us (2 Cor. 5:21): “made” or “constituted” by a Divine statute (i.e., He was ordained to enter the place of the penal condition of sinners). Had not God appointed it, the death of Christ had no meritorious value. Once more in Hebrews 10 the efficacy of Christ’s sacrifice unto the elect is traced back and directly ascribed to the eternal and sovereign will of God. In verse 7, we find Christ Himself saying, as He was about to become incarnate and enter this world, “Lo, I come to do thy will, O God;” while in verse 10 we are told, “by the which will we are sanctified [consecrated to God] through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.” That which saves, or sanctifies, us is not simply the offering of Christ—for that had availed us nought if it had not been Divinely appointed—but the “will” and decree of the Eternal Three concerning that offering. Pink, A. W. (2005). The satisfaction of Christ. Bellingham, WA: Logos Bible Software.
Posted on: Thu, 20 Nov 2014 22:37:51 +0000
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