Atonement

“ But thus would no atonement be wrought—nothing be done to make up for the wrong God has allowed to come into being by creating man. There must be an atonement, a making-up, a bringing together—an atonement which, I say, cannot be made except by the man who has sinned.
Punishment, I repeat, is not the thing required of God, but the absolute destruction of sin. What better is the world, what better is the sinner, what better is God, what better is the truth, that the sinner should suffer—continue suffering to all eternity? Would there be less sin in the universe? ”

“ The root principle of Atonement is not that of escaping punishment for transgression, but the assertion of the fundamental oneness of God and man. This may or may not be accompanied by feelings of guilt and contrition, but it is the very marrow of religion. Atonement implies the acting-together of God and man, the subordination of the individual will to the universal will, the fulfilment of the unit in the whole. ”

“ An Atonement which offers suffering as a propitiation can have nothing in common with God's will for man, and must be utterly beside the mark, perfectly inadequate. If we must have Atonement, let it at least consist of something which will suit the Righteousness and Love of God, and be in keeping with his perfection; let it not borrow the language of ancient savagery, and breathe of blood and dying victims, and tortured human frames, racked with pain. ”

“ How hard it is to make amends to the majesty of God, dishonored by man's individual transgression of divine law—let the severity of the Christ's Atonement for man's sin bear witness; for it required all that the Christ gave in suffering and agony of spirit and body, to lay the grounds for man's forgiveness and reconciliation with God.
The severity of the Atonement should impress men with the fact that we live in a world of stern realities; that human actions draw with them tremendous consequences that may not be easily set aside if the actions in which they have their origin are wrong. ”

“ Taking the term Atonement in its technical signification to denote the satisfaction of divine justice for the sin of man, by the substituted penal sufferings of the son of God, we shall find a slower scientific unfolding of this great cardinal doctrine than of any other of the principal truths of Christianity. ”

“ Sins like mine, which I am not trying to justify by hereditary defects or by the pernicious effects of an education so contrary to my nature, call for terrible atonement, and the atonement which I have chosen is a public confession of my life.
I say to myself that merciful and noble hearts will think kindly of my self-imposed humiliation and I also say to myself that my example will perhaps serve as a lesson to others. ”

“ Remember that you always choose between truth and illusion; between the real Atonement that would heal and the ego's "atonement" that would destroy. The power of God and all His Love, without limit, will support you as you seek only your place in the plan of Atonement arising from His Love. Be an ally of God and not the ego in seeking how Atonement can come to you. ”

“ Fully in every wrong lived the conscious I, confessing, abjuring, lamenting the dead, making atonement with each person I had injured, hurt, or offended. Every human soul to which I had caused a troubled thought, was now grown unspeakably dear to me, and I humbled myself before it, agonising to cast from between us the clinging offence. ”

“ In his statement of the doctrine of the atonement,—a simple digest of the Scriptural statement,—all is made to hinge on the important fact, that God having once willed the salvation of men, an atonement became as essentially necessary to Him, in order that the moral nature which He did not give himself might not be violated, as to the lapsed race, who might recognize in it their sole hope of restoration and recovery. ”

“ To drop the mask, to tear asunder the robe of pretense, to cry the truth from the housetops, and, like some Scriptural woman taken in adultery, lie down, groaning and stunned, under the pelting of the stones of those who had not sinned, became to her, as the hours dragged on, an atonement more and more imperative. ”

“ The penalty is paid in bitter shame and tears, in the consciousness of degradation and of eternal loss, in the deep humiliation of a spirit that has quenched within it the divine flame, and treated with no respect the image of God in which it was made. Can such a being sin and escape without atonement—can a spiritual creature darken the angel and cherish the animal, and yet pay no penalty, start at last with no horror, and throb with no remorseful agony? ”

“ Our atonement shall be a sweet offering, the performance of our duties. Let us bear all that may be put upon us like men bound to the sacrifice, without one thought of the results. Each day has its weight of troubles. ”

“ As to original sin and an atonement to satisfy a broken law, these to me are mythological stories begotten from men’s fertile imagination. The best atonement is a repentant 236heart, a contrite spirit and a pure life. ‘As a father pitieth his children so does the Lord love them that fear Him. Who shall ascend unto the hill of the Lord? or who shall stand in His holy place? He that hath clean hands and a pure heart. For thy name’s sake, O Lord, pardon my iniquity for it is great. What man is he that feareth the Lord? ”

“ Thou knowest the mysteries of the Universe and the hidden secrets of all living. Thou searchest all the inner most recesses and triest the reins and the heart. Naught is hidden from thee, neither is anything concealed from thine eyes.
May it therefore be thy will, O Lord our God and God of our fathers, to forgive us all our sins, to pardon us all our iniquities, and to grant us atonement for all our trans gressions.
For the sin wherein we have sinned before thee under compulsion or of freewill,
And for the sin wherein we have sinned before thee by hardening of the heart ”

“ The atonement was made for man, it is true; but, in a still higher sense, man was made for the atonement. All things were made for Christ. God, whose prerogative it is to bring good out of evil, will turn the short-lived triumph of the powers of darkness into a glorious victory, and cause it to be a universal song of rejoicing to his great name throughout the endless ages of eternity. ”

“ He cannot thrive Unless her prayers, whom heaven delights to hear And loves to grant, reprieve him from the wrath Of greatest justice.” See a good statement of the Ethical theory of the Atonement in its relation to God's holiness, in Denney, Studies in Theology, 100-124. ”

“ If I am worthy of my vocation, my first desire toward this man who has attempted to take my life should be, not to know that human justice has overtaken him, but to know that he has truly and religiously repented and made atonement for his guilt. To such repentance and atonement let it be my duty to call him ”

“ The Atonement opens wide the door of pardon, of uttermost Salvation, and of bliss eternal to every penitent sinner who will believe on Christ and follow Him, while it sweeps away every excuse from the impenitent sinner who will not trust and obey Him. ”

“ Do you rejoice when the atonement made by the priest has removed the civil stain from your name, restored you to your privileges as a son of Abraham, and replaced you in the respect of your brethren?—Here is an atonement which takes away a deeper and worse stain, an eating canker-spot in the very heart of your personal being. This, to as many as receive it, gives the privilege to become sons of God (John i. 12) ; this will admit you to the society of angels, and insure to you the rights of brotherhood with spirits made perfect.— (Heb. xii. 22.) ”

“ To preach the Atonement means not only to preach One who bore our sins in death, but One who by rising again from the dead demonstrated the final defeat of sin, and One who comes in the power of His risen life—which means, in the power of the Atonement accepted by God—to make all who commit themselves to Him in faith partakers in His victory. ”

“ The way to this end is opened by the Atonement, that is the Redemption from this world and its ways. And in the moral system, instead of the law of vengeance, there is the command to love your enemy; instead of the promise of innumerable posterity, the assurance of eternal life; instead of visiting the sins of the fathers upon the children to the third and fourth generations, the Holy Spirit governs and overshadows all. ”

“ Then had half an hour's studying of the lesson, which was upon the Atonement. Some of the thoughts drawn out were: Mediation,—arbitration,—the God-man,—dead goat and the goat sent away,—the passover,—the victim,—a substitute,—altar, victim, shed blood; vivid picture of offering the lamb;—atonement looks both ways;—blood cleanseth. How do you get the atonement? Have you got it? How do you prove gratitude to God for it? Exalting the great truth, "Christ died for me." He is the only barrier against eternal death. The lesson was shown in three phases: 1. The Redeemer buys us from sin—is our ransom ”

“ It begets in us, or develops and deepens, the sense of sin, and so may be said to point to what it does not teach, the atonement by which our Lord has expiated the sins of the world, and brought us back to reconciliation with our Father which is in heaven. But again an atonement which merely secured our forgiveness for past sins would be no real remedy. It would leave us weak as we were before. Nothing can satisfy us but actual and permanent redemption from the power and the taint of sin. ”

“ Facts like these suggest the naturalness, the humanness, as well as the God-likeness of the work of atonement that is going on all over the world, as it climbs and swings slowly up out of the darkness and into the light of life. Jesus the great atoning sacrifice? Yes, but thousands on thousands of others atoning in just the same divine way, just the same human way, just as naturally, just as necessarily. ”

“ Go into any home where the spirit of self-sacrificing love is trying to do anything to supply a need or save a transgressor, and you see the Atonement. Follow that Salvation lassie to the slums, and listen to her as she tries to persuade a drunken husband and father to give up the soul-destroying habit which is such a curse to wife and child, and you see the Atonement. ”

“ Your hands are full of blood. Wash you; make you clean put away the evil of your doings from before mine eyes; cease to do evil; learn to do well." And He tells them that if they will put away the evil of their doings from before the Lord, "though their sins be as scarlet they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool." This result comes, not from expiation, or an atonement, but by at-one-ment arrived at by a changed life where evil is forever put away. To use the word " atonement" is to pervert the meaning of Scripture. ”

“ It is equally irrelevant to argue that the atonement may be said to be universal, because it contains enough to save the whole world, if they would or could embrace it, and it is only their excessive depravity which renders it impossible for them to receive the atonement. ”

“ There is in the moral world, as in the physical, the absolute and perfect relation of cause and effect. For this reason, the atonement becomes an impossibility. Others may suffer by your crime, but their suffering cannot discharge you; it simply increases your guilt and adds to your burden. ”

“ Agreeably to this conclusion we find it expressly declared, in the several cases of piacular oblations for transgression of the divine commands, that the sin for which atonement was made by those oblations should be forgiven.
7. As the notion that the sacrifices of the law were not vicarious, but mere mulcts and fines, is overturned by the general appointment of the blood to be an atonement for the souls, the forfeited lives, of men, so also is it contradicted by particular instances. ”

“ Few left to the light of nature seem to have conceived the necessity of repentance, in order to obtain the divine favor. For their sins, they must somehow, make atonement, and they would then be forgiven, though they continued to commit them! Mankind have entertained different ideas of what was necessary to make atonement. ”

“ The consequences of my sin, moreover, are rendered less terrible by virtues not my own. I am literally saved from penalties because another pays the penalty for me. The atonement, and what it accomplished for man, were therefore a sublime summing up as it were of what sublime men have to do for their race; an exemplification, rather than a contradiction, of Nature herself, as we know her in our own experience.
Now, all this was really intended as a defence of the atonement; but the President heard me that Sunday, and on the Monday he called me into his room. ”

“ The one great propitiation was enough, and we want no more. We know that there is deep corruption eating into the very heart’s core; we know that we cannot stand a moment before God without atonement, but we know also—and we hope to spend eternity in praising God for that blessed knowledge, that the atonement then made was perfect ”

“ Then it is also a gift of God unto man. And thus we may go through all the ordinances, that God ordained from before the foundation of the world unto the present time, and all of them can be called the gifts of God unto man on conditions, and some of them without conditions. The atonement came without any condition on the part of man. It was without repentance, without faith on the part of man. The atonement was something given through the pure love of God to fallen man, without any acts of good works on the part of man. ”