Page:Groves - Darbyism - Its Rise and Development and a Review of the Bethesda Question.djvu/78

 of God need not to enter into the sinner’s place to enable Him to sympathize; a remark which is often repeated by advocates of this heresy, as it was by E. Irving. He, the maker of man, knows of what he is made, and sympathizes with man in His Godhead, because He knows what is in him. In the second place, the position taken by the blessed Lord was a real one, and never a fictitious one. He stands really as the Holy One, ever doing the will of the Father, ever rejoicing in Him, and ever rejoiced in by Him; and He stood the sin-offering unto God when the judgment of sin came down upon Him, and the penalties of a broken law rested on Him as consuming fire, and this He endured God-wards. But in Mr. Darby’s views of the sufferings, we have wrath coming down on Him personally, not as the sin-offering, on Him the holy obedient child not in atonement unto God, but in regard to certain circumstances in which God had placed Him, or to certain future circumstances, which are, we are told, to arise in the history of Israel hereafter. This at once demoralizes all right apprehension of the justice of God, as if, except in atonement and vicariously, He could ever treat the righteous as the wicked. This Abraham knew was far from God, and so will it ever be. When contending against Mr. Newton, Mr. Darby was keen enough to discern the danger of connecting the judgment of God’s wrath with the Lord, in any other way than in atonement, and observes, “It is the pure unmingled heresy of wrath on Christ which was not vicarious;” and yet it is this very unmingled heresy which Mr. Darby has been introducing in a form so very similar to that formerly held by Mr. Newton, that no one unacquainted with the controversy could discern the difference that may lie between them.

All saints adoringly acknowledge with more or less distinctness the blessed sympathy of Jesus with His mystic body, for wherein one member suffers all suffer, and in that sense the sufferings of a Father’s chastening and of a Father’s smiting, that come down on any of His children with no atoning reference, can be borne in sympathy by Jesus. In this sense of mystic oneness, we often hear the Lord Jesus, the Head of the body, making allusion to the hand of God as being stretched out. This principle is illustrated in 2 Sam. vii, where, after God says of Solomon and his Antitype, “I will be his Father, and he shall be My son.” He continues, If he forsake My law and walk not in My covenant, I will chasten him with the rod of men; but My mercy will I not take from him.” The former part of this verse is in Heb. i, 5 quoted of our Lord in resurrection, and the latter can only have an application to Him, when