Grace Is Much More Than Sympathy And Pity

The tendency to dwell upon the passive obedience of Christ is but the theological way of expressing the tendency to dwell on God’s sympathy and to ignore His salvation. There is little doubt that the sympathetic tendency is the more popular to-day, and to press salvation in a real sense is to be accused of a reactionary bias to theology. But a God who is merely or mainly sympathetic is not the Christian God. The Father of an infinite benediction is not the Father of an infinite grace.  
 

We are often warned of the dangers of anthropomorphism, especially by those who are preoccupied with the super-personal element in God. But what we need much more to-day is a caution against anthropopathism, or a conception of God which thinks of Him chiefly as the divine consummation of all our human pity and tenderness to man’s mischance, bewilderment, sorrow and sin. A being of infinite pity would not rise to the height of the Christian God. And a religion of far more sympathy than we have yet felt would not be the Christian religion.
 

It is needless to dwell on the preciousness of sympathy. The man who needs none is something less than human; and the man who receives none remains so. But a sympathy which has no help in it mocks us with an enlargement of our own sensitive impotence, which means so much better than it can. And yet a sympathy which could only help would not secure us against the fear that all its help might be at last in vain. It might not reach me, or not my worst need; or it might be arrested in some future by a power more mighty to foil than to help.
 

We must have a sympathy that can not only help but save, save to the uttermost, save for ever, and not only bless but redeem. Nay, far more, we must have, for the entire confidence of faith, a sympathy that has redeemed, and already triumphs in a conclusive salvation. If God, indeed, could not sympathise, He would be less than God. There would be a region, large or small, into which He could not pass. There would be an insuperable obstacle set to Almighty God by a something which by so far reduced His power and resisted His access. He would be a limited being, tied up, as impersonal things are, by their own nature, and incapable of passing beyond it.
 

But all the same, if God were all sympathy, if His divine power lay chiefly in His ability to infuse Himself with super-human intimacy of feeling into the most unspeakable tangles and crises of human life, then also He would be less than God, and we should have no more than what might be called a monism of heart. Even a loving God is really God not because He loves, but because He has power to subdue all things to the holiness of His love, and even sin itself to His love as redeeming grace. A sympathetic God is really God because He is a holy, saving, redeeming God; because in Him already the great world-transaction is done, and the kingdom of His holy love already set up on His foregone conquest of all evil.
 

The great and crucial thing is done in God and not before Him, in His will and not in His presence, by Him and not/or Him by any servants, not even by a son. It is an act of His own being, a victory in His own immutable and invincible being. And to be saved, in any non- egoistical sense of the word, means that God gains His own victory over again in me, and that I have lost in life’s great issue unless He do. God’s participation in man’s affairs is much more than that of a fellow-sufferer on a divine scale, whose love can rise to a painless sympathy with pain. He not only perfectly understands our case and our problem, but He has morally, actively, finally solved it. The solution is for ever present with Him. Already He sees, and for ever sees, the travail of His soul and is satisfied. All the jars, collisions, contradictions, crises, pities, tragedies and terrors of life are in Him for ever adjusted in a peace which is not resigned and quietist, but triumphant and exultant; and nothing can pluck us from His hands.
 

All history, through His great act at its moral centre, is, in God; resolved into the harmonies of a foregone and final conquest. And our faith is not merely that God is with us, nor that one day He will clear all things up and triumph; but that for Him all things are already triumphant, clear, and sure. All things are working together for good, as good is in the cross of Christ and its saving effect. Our faith is not that one day we shall solve the riddles of providence, and see all things put under us, but that now we see Jesus; and that we commit ourselves to one who has both the solution of every tragic thing and the glory of every dark thing clear and sure in a kingdom that cannot be moved, and, therefore alone, moves for ever on.

From The Cruciality of the Cross, by Peter Taylor Forsyth, pp. 58-62.