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the sinfulness of the world, but about the object or aim of the reconciliation in Christ; and if the usage of the word karaλáoow, reconcile, in the New Testament is permitted to have its full weight in deciding the point at issue there ought to be no controversy. In the passage before us the word is employed three times in three successive verses (18-20), and in each case the reconciliation is unto God, not of God unto the world, or unto us. The noun KaTaλλayń, reconciliation, occurring twice in this same passage, in the phrases the ministry of reconciliation and the word of reconciliation, is spoken of as something given and committed unto us, and in the absence of any other reference must be understood as in strict harmony with what the thrice repeated verb affirms—the reconciliation unto God. The use of these same words in Rom. v, 10, 11, is precisely the same: "Being enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son." The reconciliation thus received is affirmed in the most explicit terms to be a reconciliation unto God (T vε). The wrath of God against all unrighteousness of men is everywhere and always to be assumed or understood, but what is made conspicuous in Rom. v, 8-11, is not this wrath, but the adorable love of God which provides for the reconciliation of his enemies unto himself. The peace between God and the sinner effected by this reconciliation is conceived by Paul as a peace of the sinner toward God (πρòs Tòv dɛóv, Rom. v, 1) rather than a peace of God toward the reconciled and justified sinner. The incidental mention of the "reconciliation of the world" in Rom. xi, 15, is in perfect accord with the construction of the word given above, as is also the solemn charge of the apostle, in 1 Cor. vii, 11, that the wife who has improperly departed from her husband ought to be "reconciled to her husband." The wife is the erring party in the case supposed, and, like the sinner, is to be reconciled to the husband. And these are all the instances in the New Testament where the words καταλλάσσω and καταλλαγή occur. The intensified form ἀποκαταλλάσσω, which seems designed to add to the shorter word a suggestion of the completeness or thoroughness of the reconciliation, occurs only in Eph. ii, 16, and Col. i, 20, 21, and is in each of these texts employed to express the complete reconciliation unto God of those who stood in the relation of aliens and enemies to him. There would seem, therefore, to be no ground whatever, in the usage of this term, for the idea that it contemplates a reconciliation of God to man. Even the word diaλλáoow, as employed in Matt. v, 24, shows that the reconciliation enjoined is toward the injured brother. The sinner in this case is the one who is about to offer his gift at the altar; he is to go at once and be reconciled to the brother who has good

reason to complain against him.' The injured brother holds toward this offender a relation similar to that which God is supposed to hold toward the sinner in the texts previously cited, and here as there the reconciliation is explicitly spoken of as a reconciliation of the offender to the offended, not of the injured person to the transgressor. This latter may be understood as something necessarily involved in the transaction and sure to follow, but it is not the particular thing affirmed in any of these scriptures. All these scriptures, however, teach that the reconciliation of the sinner to God is effected through the mediation of Christ, and God and Christ are conceived as one in seeking to bring about this reconciliation. There is nothing in the entire passage of 2 Cor. v, 18-21, which speaks of God as an enemy to be reconciled toward man. There is no allusion to a wrath and hostility toward the sinner on the part of God, but, on the contrary, the whole process of reconciliation originated in him, is mediated through Christ, and proclaimed by the ministers of the word as ambassadors on behalf of Christ. It would seem, therefore, a perversion, not to say a caricature, of this scripture to read into it the idea of God standing afar off, filled with sovereign displeasure and hostility toward the world, and only to be appeased and reconciled to man by receiving some satisfactory compensation for offenses against his majesty. The apostle's representation is the most striking opposite of this. God is set forth as entreating and beseeching those who are estranged from him by their trespasses to become reconciled to himself: "As though God were entreating by us, we beseech you on behalf of Christ, be ye reconciled to God." When now we proceed to inquire into the nature of Christ's mediation in the reconciling of the world to God, we find that he embodies and illustrates by his humiliation and vicarious suffering on account of sin the spirit, the heart, the mind of God. In his saving ministry of reconciliation God is in Christ, not apart from him. Hence the remarkable words that follow in 2 Cor. v, 21: "Him who knew not sin he made sin on our behalf, that we might become the righteousness of God in him." That is, the perfectly sinless Christ, yearning with the emotion of God himself to rescue man from the power of sin, is appointed by God to the task of identifying himself with humanity so closely as to feel the burden and horror of all its sinfulness. The language is bold and striking, but no more so than Isa. liii, 10, where it is said that Jehovah was pleased to

A very different course is prescribed in Matt. xviii, 15, for one who thinks that his brother has sinned against him. In such a situation he is to go after his faulty brother, show him his sin, and seek like God himself to gain him over to the Church.

bruise his servant and to make his soul a trespass offering (DUN; Septuagint, Teρì áμapтías). It is not improbable that the apostle had this very passage of Isaiah in his thought. The statement cannot mean that God in any literal or real sense made the sinless One an actual sinner. Many of the older interpreters maintain that the word sin is here to be understood in the sense of sin offering, and not a little may be said in favor of this explanation. It is much to be preferred over that interpretation which holds that Christ was made to suffer the punishment of sin; for the conception of punishing the sinless for the sinful, and of imputing guilt to Christ and his personal righteousness to the credit of the guilty transgressor, is a scholastic fiction and abhorrent to the moral sense. But we may understand the apostle here as using the word sin in a bold, pregnant sense for a personal contact with sin, a subjection to suffering and death on account of sin, so real as to be mystically conceived as a terrible identification with the sins of the world. The divine purpose of his thus becoming sin for our sake was "that we might become the righteousness of God in him." Here too the word dikaιoovn, righteousness, is employed in the same bold way as the word sin in the previous sentence. The abstract is used for the concrete, and the strange brevity of each expression involves an obscurity in the thought which no exegesis has been able to clear away.

4. Epistle to the Galatians. We find a somewhat similar declaration in the epistle to the Galatians (iii, 13): "Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become in our behalf a curse: for it is written, Cursed is every one that hangeth on a tree: that upon the Gentiles the blessing of Abraham might come in Jesus Christ; that we might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith." In this passage the word curse, kaтápa, is emphatic and bears a boldness of expression much like that of sin in 2 Cor. v, 21, and it is to be noticed that in both cases the words are used without the article, thus indicating some general character or quality of Christ's redeeming work, and the abstract is used for the concrete to intensify the rhetorical force of the statement. According to Deut. xxi, 22, 23, "a sin worthy of death" was to be punished by putting the criminal to death and hanging his dead body on a

The fact that it is used in the Septuagint of Isa. liii, 10, for D, trespass offering, and regularly in the Priest Code for л, sin offering (for example, Exod. xxix, 14, 36; Lev. iv, 3, 8, 20, 32, etc.; Num. vi, 11, 16; vii, 16, 22, etc.), furnishes a strong support for this view. In Ezek. xliii, 25; xlv, 17, 22, and other places it is used in the same sense and construed with row. The objection that the Septuagint usually has the phrase repi dμaprías is not insuperable. Codexes A and B have eis dμapríav in Lev. iv, 32. Moreover, the explanation of sin in 2 Cor. v, 21, in the sense of sin-bearer, is virtually equivalent to what is represented by the sin offering.

tree; the body was not to be left all night upon the tree, but buried the same day; for, says the Hebrew text, "accursed of God is one that is hanged." Our apostle does not quote accurately either the Hebrew text or the Septuagint, but expresses the main thought in both. The publicly executed criminal was looked upon as an object of God's curse. In a similar manner in verse 10 he quotes another passage from Deut. xxvii, 26, to prove that "as many as are of the works of the law are under curse." That is, all who are conditioned in life by a law of works are under strictest obligation to observe perfectly all that the law prescribes and to continue in such perfect obedience. Otherwise they fall at once under the curse which the law of Deut. xxvii, 26, pronounces. But the apostle insists that as matter of fact no man is justified before God by way of such perfect continuance in keeping the whole law, and he cites in proof the words of Hab. ii, 4: "The one who is righteous shall live by faith." Here then is a way of salvation by faith, opened by the mediation of Christ, and availing to redeem the Jewish people from the curse which their law imposed on everyone who failed to perform all its requirements. The divine purpose of Christ's mediation, however, was not merely the redemption of the Jews from the curse of the law, but also that upon the Gentiles the gospel preached beforehand unto Abraham (ver. 8) might come with its fullness of blessing. Thus it is that both Jews and Gentiles "receive the promise of the Spirit through faith."

5. Becoming a Curse for Us. In order to accomplish this redemption from the curse of the law Christ "has become a curse for us" (vπèo huwv, on our behalf; for our sake). The reference to the curse of being hanged on a tree associates most naturally with the thought of Christ nailed upon the cross (comp. 1 Pet. ii, 24; Col. ii, 14). So in Gal. iii, 1, Christ is said to have been "openly set forth crucified." This public and shameful suffering of death had all the outer semblance of the curse of the law, and this open exhibition of Jesus as if he were an accursed criminal was a conspicuous part of his humiliation. It is, perhaps, a little less startling to say he "became a curse on our behalf" than to say that God "made him sin on our behalf." But both statements are of the nature of metonymy, and cannot be literally underderstood. Both express the voluntary self-humiliation of Christ and his vicarious identification with man under the curse of sin. He entered into the depths of human suffering and felt most keenly the bitter exposure of sinful man to the curse of violated law, and being himself personally without sin and without any condemnation from law he was the more capable of becoming "greatly amazed and sore troubled" (Mark xiv, 33) over the desperate situation of

sin-cursed humanity under the curse of holy law. In all this portraiture of the vicarious suffering of the Redeemer we should. look, therefore, to see, not a victim of some extraneous demand of law, but rather a voluntary sympathetic friend of the sinner, the purest embodiment of love as well as of fidelity to truth and righteousness, in whom God's Spirit rules, and whose every action reveals the mind and feeling of God himself. Hence the peculiar force of the language employed further on in the epistle (iv, 4, 5): "God sent forth his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, that he might redeem them that were under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons." This redemption from the curse of the law delivers one also from its dominion as a rule of life leading to salvation, so that the newly adopted sons of God are no longer in the position of bondservants, but of sons and heirs, in whose hearts the Spirit cries Abba, Father (vers. 6 and 7). Hence, too, the exultant confession of the apostle in vi, 14: "Far be it from me to glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom the world hath been crucified unto me, and I unto the world." Being crucified with Christ he lives in Christ, as we have already heard him say in 2 Cor. v, 14, 15; and in this new and heavenly relationship there is no more curse of legal condemnation, but marvelous salvation from sin. Hence the mystical but characteristic Pauline confession of faith (Gal. ii, 19, 20): "Through law I died to law, that I might live to God. With Christ have I been crucified; and it is no longer I that live, but Christ liveth in me; and that which I now live in the flesh I live in faith, namely, that of the Son of God who loved me and gave himself up on my behalf." These words suggest how God is truly in Christ reconciling the world unto himself. The Lord Jesus Christ "gave himself for our sins, that he might deliver us out of this present evil world according to the will of our God and Father" (i, 4). Thus this epistle furnishes a most valuable contribution to the doctrine of the mediation of Christ.

6. Epistle to the Romans. Paul's epistle to the Romans is usually regarded as his masterpiece for the exposition of Christ's mediatorial work in the salvation of men. His great theme is the gospel considered as the "power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth" (i, 16). After a very full showing that all the world of mankind is under condemnation before God on account of a universal sinfulness he makes in iii, 21-26, one of the most formal and comprehensive statements in the New Testament touching the redemption from sin which is effected by the grace of God in Jesus Christ. The passage may be quite literally translated as follows: "But now apart from law a righteousness of God has

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