UNQUESTIONING AUTHORITY OF GOD

UNQUESTIONING AUTHORITY OF GOD

There is, however, another side to the Cross, and to it we turn with great gladness of heart, for therein is revealed the grace of God answering and triumphing over everything that sin is. Grace in the Cross is THE ASSERTION OF THE UNQUESTIONING AUTHORITY OF GOD. It is THE REVELATION AND WORKING OF HIS UNQUENCHABLE LOVE. It is THE OUTSHINING OF HIS UNCLOUDED WISDOM.

First, grace asserted itself in UNQUESTIONING AUTHORITY. It asked no permission. It took no counsel with man. It moved along the line of a great right and authority, in spite of man's willful rebellion against the throne. Man had not dethroned God when he erected the Cross; neither did man destroy God's King therein. God is love, and He did not abandon man, even when man abandoned Him. That is the great lesson of the. Cross. Men said we will not be governed by God, and yet there in the Cross ex­pressing that attitude, love is seen still retaining the throne, still holding the reins of government, still declaring to men that without Him they can do nothing. Apart from His authority, they are hopelessly and forever ruined. Even in the blood-baptism of that awful passion, in which man's sin has declared its refusal of God, GOD ENTHRONES HIM­SELF, and asserts the will of essential love as superior to the will of rebellion. Never for one moment did He vacate the throne. Men cast His appointed King out into dark­ness, but in the darkness He was still the King, and prose­cuted His reign in love. It was not merely the enforce­ment of authority. It was not merely an insistence upon government. It was not merely the defense of a right, for it seems as though if these had been all, God might have established all these things by ridding Himself of man. These are not the principles vindicated and revealed in the Cross. The Cross is the insistence of love. It is the persistence of love. It is love that holds the throne in the darkness. But for love there would have been no Cross. Every violated fact within the Divine purpose might have been re-established by the destruction of that which had so signally and awfully failed. Love by determinate counsel and foreknowledge permits man to express his sin in the Cross; and in that very act of full and final expression, grace occupies the throne, sways the scepter, and reveals, as in no other way, the authority of God, and its reason of love.