"PEACE WITH GOD"
“PEACE WITH GOD”
Believers on the Lord Jesus Christ may be divided into three classes. An old lady in Yorkshire told me she had had doubts and fears ever since her conversion, which had taken place sixty years before. She was truly converted, and looking only to Jesus and His blood for salvation, but she had no assurance. She represents one class. If some of the plain and blessed statements of Holy Scripture had been brought before her at the time of her conversion, she might have escaped much of the trying experience of those sixty years. Instead of being directed to the Word of God for the ground of assurance, she had been told to examine herself for evidences of grace, and to measure her acceptance with God by her experience and the state of her feelings. This kept her in a sad perplexity of unrest and self-occupation through all those long years.
Then there are thousands who have listened to a clearer gospel than the old lady had been privileged to hear, and they have had many precious and assuring texts of Scripture brought before them, upon which their faith has laid hold. John 3: 16; John 5: 24; Romans 10: 9; 1 Timothy 1: 15, and many other texts, have been used thus to give assurance to souls. Nor will the Word of God fail those who thus rest upon it and make it the stay of their souls. But assurance is not quite the same thing as peace. To be safe in the life-boat and to know it is one thing, to be landed on the shore is another. Peace is known when one is beyond the reach of the storm. Many have assurance of eternal security who do not know what it is to have “peace with God”. These are in class number two.
[p. 25] The third class is the one to which I trust every reader of this book may belong. It is composed of those who, being justified by faith, have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ: by whom also they have access by faith into the favour of God wherein they stand. Romans 5: 1,2.
There are four things which hinder souls from having Peace:
- Sins
- The judgment of God
- Their own weakness and inconsistency
- The fear of death
I will use four Old Testament pictures to show how every question in connection with these four things has been met and settled for the believer.
1. SINS
“And when he hath made an end of reconciling the holy place, and the tabernacle of the congregation, and the altar, he shall bring the live goat: and Aaron shall lay both his hands upon the head of the live goat, and confess over him all the iniquities of the children of Israel, and all their transgressions in all their sins, putting them upon the head of the goat, and shall send him away by the hand of a fit man into the wilderness: and the goat shall bear upon him all their iniquities unto a land not inhabited [margin, ‘a land of separation’]: and he shall let go the goat in the wilderness”. Leviticus 16: 20 - 22. Many believers in Jesus do not know that their sins are put away. I had trusted the Saviour some little time before I knew that my sins were put away. I believed that God had forgiven them, and that He would not charge me with them, and that it was for Christ’s sake He had done it. But it was a great joy to me when I saw that they were gone — actually carried out of God’s sight, and removed from before Him by being borne by Jesus The scapegoat carried the iniquities, transgressions, and sins of the children of Israel into “a land of separation”. Christ once in the end of the world hath appeared “to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself. And as it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment: so Christ was once offered to bear the sins of many”. Hebrews 9: 26 - 28. We can never know what it cost that blessed Saviour to “bear our sins in his own body on the tree”. No one could explain the meaning of those simple words “the sacrifice of himself”. If we think of His Godhead glory and of all His perfection in manhood, we may learn something of the greatness of redemption when we see that it could only be accomplished by “the sacrifice of himself” — by the absolute surrender of His holy and blessed Person to bear all that was due to us on account of our sins.
“Our sins, our guilt, in love divine,
Confessed and borne by Thee:
The gall, the curse, the wrath were Thine,
To set Thy ransomed free”.
In that dark hour of untold sorrow in which He had to cry, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”
He removed our sins into a “land of separation”, from which they can never return. Blessed be His name for this stupendous work of divine love.