pre-eminently righteous; he had
always been a man who did much for religion. But he had known, in a
form in which it is known to very few of us, what it was to be
conscious of being under God's condemnation. God had been to him as a
taskmaster over against him, breaking in upon his life with continual
and searching warnings as to the divine requirements, with continual
threatenings and continual terrors; and he had been as one standing
over against God with the consciousness that, do as he might, he could
never satisfy, or climb up to the level of, the requirements of the
righteous God. There was always the haunting sense that he fell
short--always the haunting sense that he was on his trial, and on that
trial was condemned. But now all had been changed; and that by a
process which in a certain sense was as simple as possible, but than
which nothing could be more fundamental and deep. All was changed
because the relation had begun at the other end. No longer was there a
climbing up of man to God, no longer the effort of a Saul to commend
himself to God. The relationship had begun at the other end, at God's
end. Or rather, what had begun was the realization on the man's {273}
part of the true order. For God had been beforehand with Saul all
along. All the time that he was striving, working, slaving to commend
himself to a God whose righteousness he could never attain to, God was
waiting there for him to find out his mistake--waiting to reveal
Himself as no hard taskmaster, but as the Creator, the Father of his
spirit. The process had now begun anew from the other side. God had
simply of His own pure initiative manifested His love. He had sent His
Son out of His own essential being into this world as it was, not
asking whether it was a fit world for the Son to enter into; but taking
it simply as it was, because it appealed to the divine compassion by
the very multitude of its sins and the very vastness of its need, God
had sent forth His only begotten Son out of the bosom of His love and
of His pure initiative; had sent Him to take this nature of ours upon
Him, in it to make atonement for us with God, and in it, raised from
death and glorified, to be the source of a new and spiritual life, such
as should triumph over sin in all who will believe in Him. That is the
great point. It was all purely God's doing: a pure disclosure and act
of God, who showed Himself ready to take {274} men as they were, to
forgive