Redemption

Here's the third and final in a series of posts from J. Gresham Machen's 1929 address The Gospel and the Modern World. It will be helpful to first read part one and part two.

In the third place, in the Christian religion we find redemption. Into this vast universe, into this human world of sin, there came from the outside, in God's good time, a divine Redeemer. No mere teacher is he to us, no mere example, no mere leader into a larger life, no mere symbol or embodiment of an all-pervading divinity. Oh no; we stand to him, if we are really his, in a relationship far dearer, far closer than all that. For us he gave his precious life upon the cross to make all well between us sinners and the righteous God, by whose love he came.

At that point I despair of finding words to tell modern men fully what I mean. Perhaps we may tell them what we think about the cross of Christ, but it is harder to tell them what we feel. They may dismiss it all as a "theory of the atonement" and fall back upon the customary commonplaces about a principle of self-sacrifice, or the culmination of a universal law, or a revelation of the love of God, or the similarity between Christ's death and the death of soldiers who gave themselves for others in the world war. And then, by God's grace, there may come a flash of light into their souls; they may be born again, and all will become as clear as day. Then they will say with Paul, as they contemplate the Savior upon the cross: "He loved me and gave himself for me." Then will the ancient burden fall from their back; then will they be true moderns at last. "Old things are passed away; behold they are become new." Then and then only will they have true freedom. It will be a freedom from mechanism, but the freedom from mechanism will be rooted in a freedom from sin. (J. Gresham Machen, The Gospel and the Modern World)