THE ATONEMENT

It is impossible to peruse the Scriptures attentively and not perceive that a special importance attaches to the sufferings of Christ’s soul, and of the concluding period of His life. We are not to confine the matter of the atonement to any one kind or degree of suffering; but as little are we at liberty to overlook the speciality that attaches to those sufferings to which we now refer. His bodily pains were of consequence, but the agonies of His holy-soul were of more consequence. The suffering of infancy and childhood and youth are not to be lost sight of, but those of the final conflict call for particular notice.

The soul is often spoken of with particular emphasis. “Thou shalt make his soul an offering for sin — The waters are come in unto my soul — My soul is full of troubles and my life draweth nigh to the grave — My soul is exceeding sorrowful even unto death — Now is my soul troubled, and what shall I say?” What our divine surety suffered in His soul must ever surpass all our powers of description or conception. The language used by the inspired writers denotes the highest pitch of intensity, while we have the best reason to suppose that every variety of inward agony which a sinless spirit can possibly feel was experienced by Him. His soul was exceeding sorrowful; the most pungent sorrow filled His bosom; His heart was pierced through with many sorrows; He was a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. He began to be very heavy; an unutterable load of dejection, an overpowering weight of consternation pressed down His spirits to the lowest depths of depression. He was sore amazed — filled with inexpressible wonder and horrific terror at the evil of sin, and the magnitude of the curse to be endured for its expiation. His soul was troubled — agitated with alarm, filled with apprehension, overwhelmed with anguish, at thought of that awful wrath which He had to endure; at sight of that thick darkness, that midnight gloom of hell which He had to approach and to dissipate; at the experience of that condemnation which now weighted Him down under its mountain load; at the taste of that cup of gall which had to be drunk with all its wornwood bitterness. Well might He take up the complaint, “My soul is full of troubles; the waters are come in unto my soul.” And this was it that “He made His soul an offering for sin.”

Nor can it be doubted that the sufferings of the latter period of His life possess a speciality of interest. The period of His mysterious agony, His awful desertion, and His actual death calls for particular notice. This is what is emphatically called “his hour — the hour and the power of darkness — the hour that He should depart out of this world.” It was now that He was subjected to that inexplicable agony which, in the absence of every adequate external cause, covered Him over with a copious sweat of blood. It was now that He was cruelly deserted by all His former friends, there being among the whole multitude of those whom He had cured of their sicknesses, to whom He had preached the gospel of salvation, and whom He had chosen as His disciples, one to abide with Him in His dire extremity, but being left to utter the heavy complaint, “I looked for some to take pity, but there was none; and for comforters, but I found none.” It was now that He suffered the withdrawal of all sensible tokens of His Father’s love; the suspension of every kind of sensible support, of every display of divine complacency; the felt manifestation of God’s righteous displeasure at sin; the total eclipse of the hallowed light which had formerly cheered Him amid the deepest gloom; the paternal desertion which drew from Him the deep groan of bereavement, “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken Me.” It was now that He suffered the pains of actual dissolution; He died the death of the cross; He bowed the head and gave up the ghost. It was no faint, no swoon, no temporary suspension of the vital functions. It was death — a complete separation of the soul and body; the heart having been pierced by the soldier’s spear, and His enemies themselves bearing witness to the reality of His departure. “Then came the soldiers and brake the legs of the first, and of the other which was crucified with him: but when they came to Jesus and saw that He was dead already, they brake not His legs: but one of the soldiers with a spear pierced His side, and forthwith came there out blood and water.” This was the period when emphatically the Son of God made atonement for sin; when the tide of suffering rose to its height; when the dregs of the bitter cup of anguish were wrung out; when the sentence of woe reached its climax. A period, into which whatever is painful in torture, ignominious in shame, distressing in privation, terrific in satanic assault, and overwhelming in experienced wrath, was, as it were, compressed! — a period, whether to the Sufferer Himself or to the guilty world whose cause He undertook, the most awfully momentous that had ever occurred since the commencement of time.

Such, then, is what constitutes the substance of Christ’s atonement — His sufferings, all his sufferings, and the sufferings of His soul and of the concluding period of His life in particular. It is not necessary to suppose that the sufferings which Christ endured on our behalf were precisely the same in kind and degree which are experienced by the wicked in the place of final woe. There are, on the one hand, ingredients in their misery which He could not feel, as remorse, despair, and the fury of evil passions. Eemorse He could not feel, for His soul was a stranger to personal guilt. Despair He could not feel, for He had full assurance of deliver? ance from the bondage of death and the prison of the grave. And as for sinful passions, they had at no time a seat in His breast. On the other hand, there were ingredients in the sufferings of Christ, arising from the repugnance of His pure soul at moral defilement, which those who go down to the pit are incapable of feeling.

“It is, I humbly conceive,” says Dr. Pye Smith, “worse than improper to represent the sufferings of Jesus Christ, in their last and most terrible extremity, as the same with those of condemned sinners in the state of punishment. In the case of such incorrigible and wretched criminals, there is a leading circumstance which could not, by any possibility, exist in the suffering Saviour. They eat of the fruit of their own way, and are filled with their own devices. A most material part of their misery consists in the unrestrained power of sinful passions, forever raging but for ever ungratified;. Their minds are constantly torn with the racking consciousness of personal guilt; with mutual aggravations and insults; with the remorse of despair; with malice, fury, and blasphemy against the Holy and Blessed God Himself; and with an indubitable sense of Jehovah’s righteous abhorrence and rejection of them. No such passions as these, not the slightest tincture of them, could have place in the breast of the holy Jesus. That meek and purest Lamb offered Himself without spot. His heart, though broken and bleeding with agonies to us unknown, ever felt a perfect resignation to the hand that smote Him, and a full acquiescence in all the bitterness of the cup which was appointed Him to drink: the resignation and acquiescence of love and conviction. He suffered in such a manner as a being perfectly holy could suffer. Though animated by the joy that was set before Him, He endured the cross and despised the shame; yet there appear to have been seasons in the hour of His deepest extremity, in which He underwent the entire absence of divine joy and every kind of comfort or sensible support. What but the total eclipse of the sun of consolation could have wrung.from Him that exceedingly bitter and piercing cry, My God! My God! why hast Thou forsaken Me? The fire of Heaven consumed the sacrifice. The tremendous manifestations of God’s displeasure against sin He endured, though in Him was no sin: and He endured them in a manner of which even those unhappy spirits who shall drink the fierceness of the wrath of Almighty God, will never be able to form an adequate idea! They know not the HOLY and EXQUISITE SENSIBILITY which belong to this immaculate sacrifice. That clear sight of the transgressions of His people in all their heinousness and atrocity, and that acute sense of the infinite vileness of sin, its baseness, ingratitude, and evil in every respect which He possed, must have produced, in Him, a feeling of extreme distress, of a kind and to a degree which no creature, whose moral sense is impaired by personal sin, can justly conceive. As such a feeling would accrue from the purity and ardour of His love to God and holiness, acting in His perfectly peculiar circumstances; so it would be increased by the pity and tenderness which He ever felt towards the objects of His redeeming love. A wise and good father is more deeply distressed by a crime which his beloved child has perpetrated than by the same offence if committed by an indifferent person.”

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