Now we have a solution of the difficulty which has puzzled theologians, which has created the rival sects of Arminian and Calvinists, and which men in all ages have sought to solve. How can the question of human responsibility be reconciled with a standing in life and righteousness before God? If the history of the first man demonstrates the fact that he is so thoroughly under the power of evil, that the very presence of God in love on earth was unbearable, and He must be got rid of at all costs, how self-evident is the utter impossibility of obtaining life on that ground! Two certain results must follow if God be God. Judgment thorough and unsparing must make good the righteousness of God's claims upon the sinner, and love sovereignly bestow life.
Now the cross is man's answer to God's love, but it is also the answer of God to the ruined responsibility of man. There the storm of divine wrath swept on and over the spotless and undefiled one, there was perfected the sin of man, and there rose to its height divine goodness; there every moral question was divinely settled. There Satan was vanquished, sin judged, and God glorified. Ah I amongst the counsels of God and the facts of time, the cross is beyond all in moral grandeur. But why does Peter say, "who His own self bare our sins in His own body on the tree:" why say the "tree" and not the cross? “The responsibility of man had run its course for 4000 years. Now at the end of the world—morally so—Christ appeared to deal with the responsibility-tree, not to get from it, but to condemn it utterly, root, fruit, and branches. He identified Himself with it, took up the fruit of 40 centuries' growth, and presented all before God. The tree was ripe fox judgment. The Lord charged Himself with the responsibilities of all His own, suffered in their stead, and went down under the weight of God's wrath upon sin, crying out when the work was done, "It is finished." What a solemn sanction is given to the law, to its claims, to its curse, to its authority in the death of Christ; there too the Jewish law-breaker and the equally responsible Gentile have been morally judged! Man is not recoverable; the cross demonstrates that.
Christ then, has taken the whole consequences of our responsibility upon Himself, and put all away, glorifying God in the work. Now He is raised from the dead, and in His work and person we are set down in the glory of God, in divine righteousness and in the enjoyment of eternal life. Thus in Christ and in Him only can you conciliate the two principles of responsibility and life. Until the cross they were always apart and treated of separately; thus in the law we have the one, and in Abram—430 years before—the other. But in Christ they unite: on the cross He meets the responsibility, and as risen He bestows life.
“Now in the place where He was crucified there was a garden; and in the garden a new sepulcher, wherein was never man yet laid" (John 1941). Here we have the cross, garden, and sepulcher—all telling of the work and triumph of the Second Man. It was in a garden where the two trees stood (Gen. 2.) where Satan too overcame the first man (Gen. 3.) 4000 years roll on, and once again we have a garden containing a cross and a sepulcher—on the one He terminated the history of the first and responsible man, out of the other He rose—the head of a new and eternally living race before God. He came into the world a man for men; He went out of it a man for God. "The tree of the knowledge of good and evil" has its answer in the cross. "The tree of life" is answered in the resurrection. Defeat in the first garden; victory in the second; there Satan the conqueror, here Christ the victor; there death came in, here life comes out; there Adamic responsibility before God began, here we see its termination for the believer; there sin came in, here it is put away for faith.
So here the past ways of God are taken up in the cross and resurrection of Christ, and the result is infinite gain to us. We will arrange the results in loss and gain so that the reader may judge:—