Page:What Is The True Christian Religion?.pdf/33

 There was no other Deity, for God is one and indivisible,-no other Deity demanding thee death of the innocent for the guilty. "For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.—" became the "mercy-seat". God projected Himself into the world by the assumption of a human nature to face and ﬁght against the enemies of the human race,—became the "mercy-seat" to make God's mercy ever present—but God was not divided into two equal Deities, for God is One being, and indivisible, One God did not accept the death of another God, for God is ONE. His own Arm brought the eternal rescue of mankind and made possible man's salvation. Jesus said plainly, "I lay down my life for the sheep . . . I lay down my life, that I might take it again. No man taketh it from me, but I lay it down of myself." He did not lay down His life—His human life—because of God's demand to have a bloody sacrifice to satisfy His wrath or His sense of justice, to pay the penalty of man's sins, but to save mankind personally from man's enemies of the underworld by fighting against them in His assumed human and delivering mankind from hopeless subjection to the hells. "In all their affliction he was afflicted—. . . in his love and in his pity he redeemed them."

And yet we heat over the radio daily, and from a thousand pulpits, that people are saved only by "the shed blood of Christ," and that men cannot possibly do anything that is good which contributes to salvation. But still people are urged to repent and be baptized and to surrender their lives to God as ?indispensable to salvation, as if everything depended upon turning away from evil and living as a Christian. It would seem as if there were complete contradiction in these statements.

Let us examine what is meant that we are saved only "by the blood."