Where, Then, Is The Sting?

Oh death! Where is thy sting? 
Dread venom of lowest hell,
Brewed in the bitterness of hatred,
Where is thy sting,
Distilled from violence of rebellion,
Compounded of saddest separation?
This is death’s sting, and yet
Where, oh where, death, is thy sting?
 
Where does the sting incise,
Where pour out its poison,
Ghastly, grisly, doom-dealing, deadly?
In it the shame and pain of
Fruitless remorse, dull anguish,
Dry tongue cleaving, tears destroyed
In lethal cynicism, passion against God,
Rustlings of memories bringing horror,
And the incoming, ravaging darkness—
This is death’s sting.
Yet where, oh death, is thy sting?
 
How then the irrevocable loss
Of the holy, heavenly being—
Man brilliantly lit by God,
Pulsing in glory? How, where, is this loss?
Down in the mocking strata of death,
The leering, gaping grin of the grave,
The stench of corruption, glory-failure
And no-being in God. This is the sting.  
Yet, oh death, where, where is thy sting?
 
The sting is in him. Look up
(All ye that pass by). Look and see.
Do not let the divine drama pass over you,
Be over you, be gone. Look up!
 There, writhing with the sting. Oh yes,
Human enough to suffer and divine
Enough to bear. Look up and see,
All ye who pass by. See where death’s sting 
Was and is no more.
 
If a man stay and look, he will see.
If he pass by, then in a moment
He will pass by love, and will never see.
He will miss the miracle
Hid in the grim gallows. He will bypass
Love reaching out with cool arms
To embrace the sin-fevered.
He will pass by, not knowing
Where the sting has gone.  
  
Where is death’s sting? In him:
Annulled and made void: nothing.
Its poison absorbed, destroyed.
Death tried to conquer. This it could not.
This sting in man is death, fiery,
Anguish and flame of hell,
But in him—after the suffering—
Exploded myth of destruction.
In him the fire of death
Blazed to expending, and expended.
Then death, where is your sting?
 
Ask not, ‘Where is the deathly sting?’
For it is destroyed, absorbed into nothingness
By love’s holy power. Now
It is only life, life flowing,
Life in quality replete, surging up
Out of the empty tomb. Christ’s grave,
Empty through grace, is the wide room
Of man’s new spirit. Man is in life.
Man is enthroned in the heavens,
Having entered into his glory
Through man’s suffering. Man is high.
Gone then is death’s sting. 
Void in the victory—the ancient 
Annulled victory of the grave. 
Oh, death, where is thy sting?

From The Spirit of All Things, by Geoffrey Bingham, pp.90-92

The Message Of The Gospel Measured By What It Effects, Not Simpy How It Affects

  
...Christ had to make the soul which should respond to Him and understand Him. He had to create the very capacity for response. And that is where we are compelled to recognise the doctrine of the Holy Spirit as well as the doctrine of the Saviour. We are always told that faith is the gift of God and the work of the Holy Spirit. The reason why we are told that, and must be told it, lies in the direction I have indicated. The death of Christ had not simply to touch like heroism, but it had to redeem us into power of feeling its own worth. Christ had to save us from what we were too far gone to feel. Just as the man choked with damp in a mine, or a man going to sleep in arctic cold, does not realise his danger, and the sense of danger has to be created within him, so the violent action of the Spirit takes men by force. 

  

The death of Christ must call up more than a responsive feeling. It is not satisfied with affecting our heart. That is mere impressionism. It is very easy to impress an audience. Every preacher knows that there is nothing more simple than to produce tears. You have only to tell a certain number of stories about dying children, lifeboats, fire escapes, and so on, and you can make people thrill. But the thrill is neither here nor there. What is the thrill going to end in? What is the meaning of the thrill for life? If it is not ending as it should, and not ending for life, it is doing harm, not good, because it is sealing the springs of feeling and searing the power of the spiritual life.

 
What the work of Christ requires is the tribute not of our admiration or even gratitude, not of our impressions or our thrills, but of ourselves and our shame. Now we are coming to the crux of the matter—the tribute of our shame. That death had to make new men of us. It had to turn us not from potential friends to actual, but from enemies into friends. It had not merely to touch a spring of slumbering friendship. There was a new creation. The love of God—I quote Paul, who did understand something of these things—the love of God is not merely evoked within us, it is “shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit which is given to us.” That is a very different thing from simply having the reservoir of natural feeling tapped. The death of Christ had to do with our sin and not with our sluggishness. It had to deal with our active hostility, and not simply with the passive dullness of our hearts. 

  

Our hostility—that is what the easy-going people cannot be brought to recognise. That is what the shallow optimists, who think we can now dispense with emphasis on the death of Christ, feel themselves able to do—to ignore the fact; that the human heart is enmity against God, against a God who makes demands upon it; who goes so far as to make demands for the whole, the absolute obedience of self. Human nature puts its back up against that. That is what Paul means when he speaks about human nature, the natural man—the carnal man is a bad translation—being enmity against God. Man will cling to the last rag of his self-respect. He does not part with that when he thrills, admires, sympathises; but he does when he has to give up his whole self in the obedience of faith. How much self-respect do you think Paul had left in him when he went into Damascus? Christ, with the demand for saving obedience, arouses antagonism in the human heart. And so will the Church that is faithful to Him. 

  

You hear people of the type I have been speaking about saying, If only the Church had been true to Christ’s message it would have done wonders for the world. If only Christ were preached and practised in all His simplicity to the world, how fast Christianity would spread. Would it? Do you really find that the deeper you get into Christ and the meaning of His demands Christianity spreads faster in your heart? Is it not very much the other way? When it comes to close quarters you have actually to be got down and broken, that the old man may be pulverised and the new man created from the dust. Therefore when we hear people abusing the Church and its history the first thing we have to say is, Yes, there is a great deal too much truth in what you say, but there is also a greater truth which you are not allowing for, and it is this. One reason why the Church has been so slow in its progress in mankind and its effect on human history is because it has been so faithful to Christ, so faithful to His Cross. You have to subdue the most intractable, difficult, and slow thing in the world—man’s self-will. You cannot expect rapid successes if you truly preach the Cross whereon Christ died, and which He surmounted not simply by leaving it behind but by rising again, and converting the very Cross into a power and glory.

From The Work of Christ, by P. T. Forsyth, pp. 18-21

Propitiation

Who knows how deep the Cross
Save he who hung and died?
Who knows how deep the deep
Save he who into deep’s great depths
Descended?
Who knows how deep the Cross
Save he who let his life-blood flow,
Save he whose mystery is veiled?

Deep, deep; deep in the depths
The darkest wrath of God; its tide
Flowed on, flowed under, through,
Flowed over him, the deepest depth
That none can depth, save Christ,
Who went the deepest depth full down
To reach the other side
Of depthless holiness.
 
So deep the wrath: so deep, so deep,
Full down as God’s deep holiness.

Tide after tide; tide over tide;
Tide upon tide flowed over him;
The burning of the holiness, the wrath
That grips the sin upon him laid,
And holds and shears a burning swathe
Across the alien lonely waste
Of dark pollution;
Bears on it from the endless holy love,
Giving no breath for foulness dark to live
But bears it down to death,
To changeless death, the endless death,
The full annihilation.

Deep down to deep, to depths of death,
And reconciliation.

From The Spirit of All Things, by Geoffrey Bingham, pp. 64-65

Identification

In the dark reaches of Golgotha’s anguish,
His cold and nerveless hands—
Heavy with the pain of entire human sin,
And all cosmic evil (embracing all time)—
Reached out in a purposeful groping,
An attempted desire to reach,
Reach me, the lonesome, loathsome object
Of his insistent love.

In that moment I knew—in the moment of pain
And the high, wild cry—
I knew he had embraced me,
Become me wholly as I was in my dream,
In my ineluctable anger and hate,
With all the dark deceits of my heart.
 
Me he became, and he anguished
As the intolerable pollution spread
Across the pure reaches of his holy self,
Drawing there out of me
The evil that was mine alone.

In the soft silence of his tomb I lay,
One with him in the unconquerable peace,
And with him I rose
When the world dawned new,
And I was the new man.

From All Things of the Spirit, by Geoffrey C. Bingham, p. 1

Laurel

You are my only love. 

You are closer than all others— 

All others whom I love, 

And those who love me. 

Whence came this love? 

It was born of you 

In your love for me. 

Yet beyond even you 

It came from Him 

Who is love Himself.

He, too, has a Bride. 

I meant to say 

I, too, have a Bride. 

For He has always had His Bride 

Before even the world began. 

Time was not with Him.
In His heart 

She was born to Him 

Who for her sake 

Became Man, and lived, 

And living, died. 

His full love for her 

Won her wondering heart 

On Calvary’s hill.

I am in Him 

And He in me. 

I, with all others, 

Am also His Bride, 

But this He did for me, 

He gave me His Bridegroom’s love 

To love you for ever. 

To love you where my mind, 

Lost in its loveless ego, 

Loved me more than others.

I, too, have been to Calvary,
First to curse and then to kiss. 

His love destroyed the ego, 

Bringing it to life again
As the new self, lost in Him. 

Else I had never loved you 

With ought but ego love, 

Seeking you for myself
And not for you.

Each day His Calvary love kills 

Old ego that would rise. 

Each day His pristine love 

Repristinates my own
Until I love afresh 

With Calvary love— 

God’s agape that grows 

Beyond romantic love
Which hides Man’s ego love: 

So does His love 

Love you, through me.

This love’s a mystery. 

Daily the Marriage Feast 

Draws nearer in our time, 

But in our time delights to be 

As it one day will be 

In time’s full time. 

Now in our love the Feast is here 

And you love me 

As I love you 

With Calvary Bridal love. 

And ever will.

From All Things of the Spirit, by Geoffrey C. Bingham, pp. 152-4

The Cross of Christ Has Moral Reality Not Simply Impressive Effect

It is sometimes said, “There are several theories of the Atonement, but we have to do with the fact, and not with our understanding of it.” This frame of mind is the root of all that is most feeble and ominous in our Churches today. The one thing we need is to understand the Atonement, with a life’s understanding, with a vital conscience. There it is that Christ comes to Himself for good. There, as it were, He finally finds His tongue, and takes command of the deep eloquence of moral things. Christ, I repeat, is to us just what His cross is. You do not understand Christ till you understand His cross. Nor have you measured the moral world. Such a fact as Christ or His Atonement only exists as it is intelligible, as it comes home to us with a moral meaning and a moral nature. It is only by understanding it that it becomes anything else than a martyrdom, that it becomes the saving act of God. It is only by understanding it that we escape from religion with no mind, and from religion which is all mind, from pietism with its lack of critical judgment, and from rationalism with its lack of everything else.... 

...The feeble gospel preaches “God is ready to forgive”; the mighty gospel preaches “God has redeemed.” It works not with forgiveness alone, which would be mere futile amnesty, but with forgiveness in a moral way, with holy forgiveness, a forgiveness which not only restores the soul, but restores it in the only final and eternal way, by restoring in the same act the infinite moral order, and reconstructing mankind from the foundation of a moral revolution. God reconciles by making Christ to be sin, and not imputing it (2 Cor. 5:21). The Christian act of forgiveness at once regards the whole wide moral order of things, and goes deep to the springs of the human will for entire repentance and a new order of obedience. This it does by the consummation of God’s judgment in the central act of mercy. 

Do not think of God’s judgment as an arbitrary infliction, but as the necessary reaction to sin in a holy God. There alone do you have the divine necessity of the cross in a sinful world—the moral necessity of judgment. A judgment upon man alone would have destroyed him. And a judgment borne by God alone would be manqué, it would be wide of the mark, as being irrelevant to man’s experience and regeneration. But borne by God in man, in such a racial, nay cosmic, experience as the cross of Christ, it is the creation of a new conscience, and of the new ethic of the race. When Christ died, all died. Dying with Christ is not a mere ethical idea, complete only as we succeed in doing it. It is a religious or mystic idea, which is ethical as taking effect in a holy act, where, however, it is already complete in principle. It is not applying the principle of salvation to life; the foregone salvation becomes our life; and practical Christianity is freely living it out, and not merely squaring life to it laboriously. The judgment involved is one that fell on Christ once for all. It is not a judgment in individual men, but in man in Christ. It is not the sum total of our self-judgments under Christ’s light; rather say, all our self-judgment is but inspired by the complete judgment on Christ once for all. It is on us according as we are in Him, yet not as a judgment, but as a grace; not as a punishment, but as salvation; not as a scourge, but as a cross.

From The Cruciality of the Cross, by Peter Taylor Forsyth, pp. 45-46; 52-54.

The Cross and Reconciliation

Our chief natural legacy from the past is distance and alienation from God. The chief problem of the present (and of every present) is to reduce and destroy that. It is reconciliation.

But reconciliation is no aesthetic, or educational, or impressionist affair. It is not a revival. It is not a question of touching a certain number of individuals, and gathering them for salvation out of a lost mankind. It cannot be done by a magnetic temperament, a noble character, or a lofty sage. It means changing a whole race’s relation to God. For good and all that could only be done from God’s side; and it was done in the cross.

We have to be redeemed into that reconciliation, and redeemed as a race. It was a work that had to be done, and not merely a personal influence that was to be conveyed. Christ did not die simply to affect men but to effect salvation, not simply to move man’s heart but to accomplish God’s will. All we may do to reconcile men to God is but the following up of a great and final deed of God— the cross.

It is the cross, then, that is the key to Christ. None but a Christ essentially divine could do what the Church beyond all other knowledge knows the cross to have done for its soul. The divinity of Christ is what the Church was driven upon to explain the effect on it of the cross. Nothing less could explain the new creation, which is so much deeper than any impression on us, and calls for an author so much more than prophetic, hortatory, or impressionist in soul.

The atonement of the cross is the key that opens the door, but the house we enter is not made with hands. It is the very heart of God we have in Christ. We are not landed in a vestibule but straight in the sanctuary of the place. This Son of God is God the Son.


From The Cruciality of the Cross, by Peter Taylor Forsyth, p.29-30.