Pre-Sinaitic Sacrifices (Part 2)

If the patriarchal sacrifices were instituted by the Creator, it is reasonable to suppose that they were not positive and arbitrary requirements, with no hint of the reasons on which they were grounded — man’s dependence on omnipotent power and his exposure to offended justice. This revealed reason would involve the element of propitiation. But if sacrifices were the natural outgrowth of man’s religious nature — the expression of his deepest spiritual necessities — they must have had some reference to sin, the saddest fact in his consciousness. In either case, whether they were ordained of God or were spontaneous with man, the notion of expiation would not have been entirely absent.

At the same time it is reasonable to suppose that this idea was not distinct and prominent in the minds of the patriarchs, because the holiness of God had not yet been emphatically disclosed — that bright background on which the grim deformities of sin are portrayed. To the patriarchs God always turned the benignant and merciful side of his nature. He talks with Abraham as a friend, putting him quite at ease in his presence, and his wife laughs with incredulity while hearing the words of promise from the Lord’s lips. There is no inspiration of painful awe, no putting off the sandals to stand upon ground sanctified by the tread of the most holy Jehovah. From Adam to Moses there is no specific revelation of the holiness of the Supreme One. We look in vain in the book of Genesis, the record of patriarchal life, for the words holy and holiness as descriptive of the Divine character.

The hour for the revelation of this attribute did not arrive till the exiled Moses, at Horeb, turned aside from his flock to “see this great sight,” the bush burning yet not consumed. Exodus 3:3. The footsteps of the inquisitive Hebrew shepherd are suddenly arrested by the awful words, “Draw not nigh hither!” A new aspect of Jehovah’s nature is from this hour to be unfolded with ever-increasing splendour: “I am holy.” Sin having now, for the first time since the fall, its proper measure, becomes, by contrast, “exceeding sinful,” and needs to be purged from the conscience by blood distinctly expiatory.

We arrive at the same conclusion when we trace the history of man through the period in which he had only that internal sense of right and wrong called the unwritten law; which, indeed, constitutes him a subject of God’s moral government, and renders him amenable to the penalties of violated law, but is without that vivid apprehension of guilt which overwhelms his soul when that law, still legible within, takes on the form of an objective code written in stone by the finger of God amid the quakings of burning Horeb. Now, as never before, he regards himself as a sinner. “The law entered, that the offence might abound.” Romans 5:20. Now he needs relief from conscious guilt by a method of expiation bearing the unmistakable signature of his offended God. His forgiveness must be as authentically announced as his guilt has been glaringly demonstrated. Hence the provision for the typical purgation of the conscience is the logical sequence of the decalogue. Sinai has rendered the institution of the sin offering a necessity for the peace and salvation of the penitent sinner. 

— Commentary on Leviticus.

Salvation Conundrums

QUESTION: If God takes away from the dying infant the bent to sinning, why does he not take it away from the babe destined to become adult?

ANSWER: This conundrum resolves itself into another, "Why does not God save irresponsibles and responsibles in the same way, on just the same terms?" A still harder question which this Arminian Question Box cannot answer is this: "Why does an impartial God elect to eternal life unconditionally a part of the human race, by death in infancy, and subject the other part to the hazards of probation in which they are to be saved conditionally?" Why does the Creator send into probation one through the gateway of a heathen birth and another through that of a Christian birth? All these questions I bind up in the bundle of mysteries which a righteous God may explain to me in the ceaseless ages of eternity. He has not revealed anything respecting the future of infants specifically except, "Of such is the kingdom of heaven"; and even this ray of light some would cruelly take away when they say it doesn't mean babes, but adults who have child-like qualities, such as trust, teachableness, and a sense of dependence.

— Steele's Answers p. 267.

Could God Have Prevented Sin?

QUESTION: Could not God have refused to create the tree bearing forbidden fruit, and in this way have prevented the sin of Adam and Eve?

ANSWER: He could have refrained from such a creation, but in that case there would have been some other way of testing their obedience to their Creator. A test must consist in something which appeals to desire. The good-looking fruit appealed to appetite. It would have been too severe if there had not been a great variety of permitted fruit for their health and pleasure. Every free agent, without intelligence and experience, in attempting to find the line between right and wrong, will probably sooner or later find out by stepping over this fiery boundary and getting well scorched for his daring act. The liability of free agents to sin can be prevented only by suppressing their freedom and converting them into machines, i. e., by uncreating them. It is reasonable to suppose that out of all possible plans of a moral universe God selected that one which he foresaw would involve the least suffering. Therefore we should praise God for creating us with all our moral risks instead of censuring Him for the self-induced failure and suffering of as few perhaps relatively as the prisoners in our State prisons are to the entire population outside.

— Steele's Answers p. 258.

Does the Carnal Nature Return?

QUESTION: Does the carnal nature, destroyed by entire sanctification, return and become the impulse to the sinful act when a person entirely sanctified commits sin?

ANSWER: No. The sinful act defiles the nature. This raises the question how a perfectly holy being can sin. How did sin get into a holy universe. This is an unanswerable question which has vexed all the philosophy of all generations. There are no causes of sin, and no good reason, only conditions privative, such as defect of knowledge in Adam and in all children; want of acquaintance with law and its penalty, with the added fact that no free agent is ever created or born fully equipped for liberty by experience and good habits. And lastly, the holiest person on the earth is exposed to the irruption of evil spirits. These considerations do not necessitate sin, but they render it highly probable. Father E. T. Taylor, "the old man eloquent" in the Boston Seaman's Bethel, used to speak of Adam as a "big baby toddling forth amid the pitfalls of Satan." This is only a concrete way of saying with Bishop Butler's Analogy, that the Creator could not make a moral agent with good moral habits. The puzzle of the sin of an entirely sanctified person, though of the same kind as that of the sin of the holy angels, may be somewhat greater because of his former experience of the sorrow of sinning.

— Steele's Answers pp. 212, 213.

Irresistible Conversions?

QUESTION: Does God irresistibly convert men temporarily, suspending the free will for that purpose?

ANSWER: Never either in this world nor in that to come will he turn a free agent into a machine in order to save him. This doctrine leads to universalism, for if God, who is no respecter of persons, saves one sinner in that way, justice requires that he should save all in the same way, whether men or devils. Moreover, it implies the crude notion that the moral realm is the appropriate sphere of physical omnipotence. It also involves the marring of God's image in man by God himself, for moral freedom is the very center of man's likeness to his Creator. Man creates his own character, which in God's estimate is worth more than the whole material universe. He has the assistance of Divine grace, as a moral suasive, but not as a determining force. Saving faith is a graciously aided human act, not an irresistible grace — one of the five points of Calvinism. "Salvation through faith is not of yourselves; it is the gift of God," is the meaning of Eph. 2:8, as every Greek scholar will say. See the exegetes.

— Steele's Answers p. 170, 171.