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What happens if the human race considers the death of Jesus on the cross - and shrugs? Whatever..... P. T. Forsythe suggests the ramifications, and it sounds a lot like what we are facing today.
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Propitiation is the work of the Lord Jesus Christ by which He appeases the wrath of God and conciliates Him who would otherwise be offended by our sin and would demand that we pay the penalty for it.
Sadly, our age has ceased affirming that truth. P. T. Forsythe did his best to keep the propitiatory element from extinction. Like a skilled diagnostician, he articulates the symptions of a race having lost its way, oblivious to the ways of a holy God.
Forsythe champions "a true grasp of the atonement.....which meets the age in its need and impotence, its need of a center, of an authority, of a creative source, a guiding line, and a final goal.
It (a substitutinary atonement)....meets our....lack of a fixed point. All around us in a growing flux; change is everywhere; and it may or may not be development according as our fixed standard and goal may be.
With no center. either for its own action or for our estimate, it means disintegration. And especially does our religion need a moral center. It grows on the one hand evolutionary and therefore inevitably unearnest; and on the other hand sentimental.
Fraternity grows at the cost of fidelity, the democratic sympathies and pities monopolize the moral world, the moral type changes and another scale of virtues fills the ideal.
Forsythe then quotes a nurse from the working class who observes: "generosity ranks before justice, sympathy before truth, love before chastity, a pliant and obliging disposition before a rigidly honest one, and the less admixture of intellect required for the practice of any virtue the higher it stands in the popular estimation."
C. H. Spurgeon spelled out the take away from the cross this way....
You were in debt, but a friend paid your debt; no writ can be served on you. It matters nothing that you did not pay it, it is paid, you have the receipt. That is sufficient in any court of equity. So with all the penalty that was due to us Christ had bourne it.
It is true I have not bourne it; I have not been to hell and suffered the full wrath of God, but Christ has suffered that wrath for me, and I am as clear as if I had myself paid the debt to God and had myself suffered His wrath.
Sadly, our age has ceased affirming that truth. P. T. Forsythe did his best to keep the propitiatory element from extinction. Like a skilled diagnostician, he articulates the symptions of a race having lost its way, oblivious to the ways of a holy God.
Forsythe champions "a true grasp of the atonement.....which meets the age in its need and impotence, its need of a center, of an authority, of a creative source, a guiding line, and a final goal.
It (a substitutinary atonement)....meets our....lack of a fixed point. All around us in a growing flux; change is everywhere; and it may or may not be development according as our fixed standard and goal may be.
With no center. either for its own action or for our estimate, it means disintegration. And especially does our religion need a moral center. It grows on the one hand evolutionary and therefore inevitably unearnest; and on the other hand sentimental.
Fraternity grows at the cost of fidelity, the democratic sympathies and pities monopolize the moral world, the moral type changes and another scale of virtues fills the ideal.
Forsythe then quotes a nurse from the working class who observes: "generosity ranks before justice, sympathy before truth, love before chastity, a pliant and obliging disposition before a rigidly honest one, and the less admixture of intellect required for the practice of any virtue the higher it stands in the popular estimation."
C. H. Spurgeon spelled out the take away from the cross this way....
You were in debt, but a friend paid your debt; no writ can be served on you. It matters nothing that you did not pay it, it is paid, you have the receipt. That is sufficient in any court of equity. So with all the penalty that was due to us Christ had bourne it.
It is true I have not bourne it; I have not been to hell and suffered the full wrath of God, but Christ has suffered that wrath for me, and I am as clear as if I had myself paid the debt to God and had myself suffered His wrath.
