Kindle Notes & Highlights
Those who say justice means the punishing of sin, and mercy the not punishing of sin, and attribute both to God, would make a schism in the very idea of God.
God is no magistrate; but, if he were, it would be a position to which his fatherhood alone gave him the right; his rights as a father cover every other right he can be analytically supposed to possess.
But where an evil thing is invented to explain and account for a good thing, and a lover of God is called upon to believe the invention or be cast out, he needs not mind being cast out, for it is into the company of Jesus.
God does punish sin, but there is no opposition between punishment and forgiveness. The one may be essential to the possibility of the other.
what atonement is there in the suffering? The notion is a false one altogether.
God is not bound to punish sin; he is bound to destroy sin.
vengeance on the sinner, the law of a tooth for a tooth, is not in the heart of God, neither in his hand.
What better is the world, what better is the sinner, what better is God, what better is the truth, that the sinner should suffer—continue suffering to all eternity?
To suffer to all eternity could not make up for one unjust word.
Sorrow and confession and self-abasing love will make up for the evil word; suffering will not .
The only vengeance worth having on sin is to make the sinner himself its executioner.
Sin and suffering are not natural opposites; the opposite of evil is good, not suffering; the opposite of sin is not suffering, but righteousness.
Repentance, restitution, confession, prayer for forgiveness, righteous dealing thereafter, is the sole possible, the only true makeup for sin.
Paul glories in the cross of Christ, but he does not trust in the cross: he trusts in the living Christ and his living father.
It is no pleasure to God, as it so often is to us, to see the wicked suffer. To regard any suffering with satisfaction, save it be sympathetically with its curative quality, comes of evil, is inhuman because it is undivine, is a thing God is incapable of.
The notion that the salvation of Jesus is a salvation from the consequences of our sins, is a false, mean, low notion. The salvation of Christ is salvation from the smallest tendency or leaning to sin. It is a deliverance into the pure air of God’s ways of thinking and feeling. It is a salvation that makes the heart pure, with the will and choice of the heart to be pure.
Jesus did not die to save us from punishment; he was called Jesus because he should save his people from their sins.
One chief cause of the amount of unbelief in the world is, that those who have seen something of the glory of Christ, set themselves to theorize concerning him rather than to obey him. In teaching men, they have not taught them Christ, but taught them about Christ.
If it be asked how, if it be false, the doctrine of substitution can have been permitted to remain so long an article of faith to so many, I answer, On the same principle on which God took up and made use of the sacrifices men had, in their lack of faith, invented as a way of pleasing him . . . God accepted men’s sacrifices until he could get them to see—and with how many has he yet not succeeded, in the church and out of it!—that he does not care for such things.
Truth is indeed too good for men to believe; they must dilute it before they can take it; they must dilute it before they dare give it. They must make it less true before they can believe it enough to get any good of it.
While they are capable of being satisfied with them, there would be no advantage in their becoming intellectually convinced that such thoughts were wrong.
Better the reformers had kept their belief in a purgatory, and parted with what is called vicarious sacrifice!
A man must say, “I have sinned, and deserve to be tortured to all eternity. But Christ has paid my debts, by being punished instead of me. Therefore he is my Saviour. I am now bound by gratitude to him to turn away from evil.”
will not have the God of the scribes and the pharisees whether Jewish or Christian, protestant, Roman, or Greek, but thy father, O Christ! He is my God
Adams was brought before his denomination on charges of heresy. He was expelled and his ordination revoked.
age and world.
The ages are limited by periods of time.
“ages to come”
In other words it appears that God’s grace broadens and His plan develops as the ages roll, mysteries that have been hid in past ages are made known, and the future ages are to witness the “riches of His grace” to an extent “exceeding” that of any previous age. This word aeon occurs in the New Testament in so many peculiar and varying forms as to make it certain that it expresses some deep and important meaning well worth searching out.
