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1. THIS MAKES GOD INFERIOR TO MAN. Man can and often does freely forgive those who
wrong him, but, according to the view under consideration, God cannot forgive until He has
received satisfaction. This means that He is less good and less charitable than sinful men. But
they who raise this objection fail to observe that God cannot simply be compared to a private
individual, who can without injustice forget about his personal grievances. He is the Judge of all
the earth, and in that capacity must maintain the law and exercise strict justice. A judge may be
very kind-hearted, generous, and forgiving as a private individual, but in his official capacity he
must see to it that the law takes its course. Moreover, this objection utterly ignores the fact
that God was not under obligation to open up a way of redemption for disobedient and fallen
man, but could with perfect justice have left man to his self-chosen doom. The ground of His
determination to redeem a goodly number of the human race, and in them the race itself, can
only be found in His good pleasure. The love to sinners revealed in it was not awakened by any
consideration of satisfaction, but was entirely sovereign and free. The Mediator Himself was a
gift of the Father’s love, which naturally could not be contingent on the atonement. And, finally,
it should not be forgotten that God Himself wrought the atonement. He had to make a
tremendous sacrifice, the sacrifice of His only begotten and beloved Son, in order to save His
enemies.
2. The objection just considered often goes hand in hand with another, namely, that this view
of the absolute necessity of the atonement assumes a schism in the trinitarian life of God, and
this is a rather monstrous idea. Says David Smith, the author of In the Days of His Flesh: “It (the
penal theory of satisfaction) places a gulf between God and Christ, representing God as the
stern Judge who insisted on the execution of justice, and Christ as the pitiful Saviour who
interposed and satisfied His legal demand and appeased His righteous wrath. They are not one
either in their attitudes toward sinners or in the parts which they play. God is propitiated; Christ
propitiates; God inflicts the punishment, Christ suffers it; God exacts the debt, Christ pays
it.”[The Atonement in the Light of History and the Modern Spirit, p. 106.] This objection is also
based on a misunderstanding, a misunderstanding for which those Christians are, at least in
part, to blame who speak and sing as if Christ, rather than the triune God, were exclusively the
author of their salvation. The Bible teaches us that the triune God provided freely for the
salvation of sinners. There was nothing to constrain Him. The Father made the sacrifice of His
Son, and the Son willingly offered Himself. There was no schism but the most beautiful
harmony between the Father and the Son. Cf. Ps. 40:6-8; Luke 1:47-50,78; Eph. 1:3-14; 2:4-10; I
Pet. 1:2.