“But God commended his love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” Rom 5:8

That “God is love” and unchangeable we believe to be prime facts of the gospel; and that man alone is alienated and needs reconciliation. The death of Christ was not for the purpose of purchasing God’s love: it is above price; nor for the purpose of appeasing – quieting, pacifying, or cooling down – God’s wrath, as though he were excited and hated man, but by meeting a necessity of man, in his relation to a broken law, to express God’s love for man.

It is a great mistake to think that God ever did, or ever will hate man. God devised the plan, provided the Ransom, and sent his Son to die for us, because he loved us. [John 3:16] This is one great fact the world needs to know.

Love appreciated will produce love in return. “We love him because he first loved us.”

Then God loved us when we knew him not and even though we hated him, (feared what we had been erroneously taught about him by the world and the professing church). Parents and teachers, beware! If you tell those under your care, that God will love them if they are good, you make the impression on their minds that he will hate them if they are bad, which is false. By such means you make the wall higher, or the gulf deeper between them and the Lord, and though, you may, through fear, succeed in driving them to outward obedience, or gather them into the nominal church, by a “profession of religion,” they may be as far from God as before, for only the goodness of God leadeth to repentance. Had we the power of ten thousand voices, we would proclaim, that God loved us while we were yet sinners, and Christ died to commend that love.

“But,” it is sometimes said, “you must believe it, Christ died for you, if you will believe.” Indeed! Believe what?

Believe that Christ died for you, of course. But if it is not true, I have no right to believe it, and my believing would not make it true. On the other hand, its being a fact that Christ died for me, is the best possible reason for believing it, and all the unbelief possible could not make it untrue. Truth is entirely independent of man’s faith or unbelief, Faith in or knowledge of, a fact cannot make, or change, the fact, but it changes the man.

God loves us whether we believe it or not, and Christ died for us whether we believe it or not, but the knowledge of these truths must exist, before gratitude and love can spring up in our hearts, and loving obedience result. Whatever facts or changes were produced by the death of Christ, are real, and not dependent on our believing, any more than is the fact that Christ died. If it be true, [as some teach, but which we do not believe] that the death of Christ secures spiritual life for some (for the few only), we think it would follow of necessity that it would secure it for all, because Christ died FOR ALL as the Scriptures so attest. See 2 Cor 5:14,15. Heb 2:9 and 1 Tim 2:6.

What Christ’s death does not secure for everyone; it secures for none.

While the death of Christ does not secure spiritual life for any, it makes it possible for all, and on account of man’s relation to the law, as dead, without Christ’s death spiritual life would not be attainable.

Repentance is a necessity in order to gain spiritual life, and without the motive of love, as presented to us in the death of Christ, repentance toward God would be impossible. But neither God’s love, nor Christ’s death, produce repentance in man, until man believes in the love and death (the love and the sacrifice of Christ). Hence God’s love would be fruitless, were men allowed to remain in ignorance of the truth. God’s love does not exhaust itself in the death of Christ, though that death commends it, for God has constituted Christ not only the Redeemer but the Light of the world. He engaged not only to save man from death by a Ransom, but to bring man to the knowledge of that truth. 1 Tim 2:4.

Hence Christ is the “True light that lights every man that cometh into the world.” John1 :9. Not all at once nor in one age, but “to be testified (to all) in due time.” 1 Tim 2:6.

Now it is evident, that man cannot repent, because of a truth, until he knows that truth, and yet when known, the truth is the “Foundation of repentance from dead works.” The greatest possible sin is to “sin willfully, after we have received the knowledge of the truth;” and for this “there remains no more sacrifice.” Heb 10:26, and it is impossible “to renew them again unto repentance; seeing, they crucify to themselves the Son of God afresh, and put him to an open shame.” Heb 6:4,6.

We believe, then, that the death of Christ is an expression of God’s love, and that in order to win man from sin to holiness one of the first things a man needs to learn, is that Christ died for him.

But how does the death of Christ show, or commend, God’s love?

We will consider this in our next post.