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Himself says: “No man taketh my life from me, I lay it down of myself,” John 10:18. On the
other hand it was also part of Christ’s passive obedience, that He lived in subjection to the law.
His moving about in the form of a servant constituted an important element of His sufferings.
Christ’s active and passive obedience should be regarded as complementary parts of an organic
whole. In discussing it, account should be taken of a threefold relation in which Christ stood to
the law, namely, the natural, the federal, and the penal relation. Man proved a failure in each
one of these. He did not keep the law in its natural and federal aspects, and is not now in a
position to pay the penalty, in order to be restored in the favor of God. While Christ naturally
entered the first relation by His incarnation, He vicariously entered only the second and third
relations. And it is with these that we are particularly concerned in this connection.
a. The active obedience of Christ.
Christ as Mediator entered the federal relation in which
Adam stood in the state of integrity, in order to merit eternal life for the sinner. This constitutes
the active obedience of Christ, consisting in all that Christ did to observe the law in its federal
aspect, as the condition for obtaining eternal life. The active obedience of Christ was necessary
to make His passive obedience acceptable with God, that is, to make it an object of God’s good
pleasure. It is only on account of it that God’s estimate of the sufferings of Christ differs from
His estimate of the sufferings of the lost. Moreover, if Christ had not rendered active
obedience, the human nature of Christ itself would have fallen short of the just demands of
God, and He would not have been able to atone for others. And, finally, if Christ had suffered
only the penalty imposed on man, those who shared in the fruits of His work would have been
left exactly where Adam was before he fell. Christ merits more for sinners than the forgiveness
of sins. According to Gal. 4:4,5 they are through Christ set free from the law as the condition of
life, are adopted to be sons of God, and as sons are also heirs of eternal life, Gal. 4:7. All this is
conditioned primarily on the active obedience of Christ. Through Christ the righteousness of
faith is substituted for the righteousness of the law, Rom. 10:3,4. Paul tells us that by the work
of Christ “the righteousness of the law is fulfilled in us,” Rom. 8:3,4; and that we are made “the
righteousness of God in Him,” II Cor. 5:21.
According to Anselm Christ’s life of obedience had no redemptive significance, since He owed
this to God for Himself. Only the sufferings of the Saviour constituted a claim on God and were
basic to the sinner’s redemption. Thinking along somewhat similar lines Piscator, the
seventeenth century Arminians, Richard Watson, R. N. Davies, and other Arminian scholars
deny that the active obedience of Christ has the redemptive significance which we ascribe to it.
Their denial rests especially on two considerations: (1) Christ needed His active obedience for
Himself as man. Being under the law, He was in duty bound to keep it for Himself. In answer to
this it may be said that Christ, though possessing a human nature, was yet a divine person, and
as such was not subject to the law in its federal aspect, the law as the condition of life in the