To propitiate is to appease, to atone, to turn away the
wrath of an offended person. In the case before us, the wrath turned
away is the wrath of God; the person making the propitiation is Christ;
the propitiating offering or sacrifice is his blood. All this is
expressed in most explicit terms in the following passages: “And he is
the propitiation for our sins,” 1 John ii, 2. “Herein is love, not that
we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the
propitiation for our sins,” 1 John iv, 10. “Whom God hath set forth to
be a propitiation through faith in his blood,” Rom. iii, 25. The word
used in the two former passages is ἱλασμὸς; in the last ἱλαϛήριον. Both
are from the verb ἱλάσκω, so often used by Greek writers to express the
action of a person who, in some appointed way, turned away the wrath of
a deity; and therefore cannot bear the sense which Socinus would put
upon it,--the destruction of sin. This is not supported by a single
example. With all Greek authorities, whether poets, historians, or
others, the word means to _propitiate_, and is, for the most part,
construed with an accusative case, designating the person whose
displeasure is averted. As this could not be denied, Crellius comes to
the aid of Socinus, and contends that the sense of this word was not to
be taken from its common use in the Greek tongue, but from the
Hellenistic use of it in the Greek of the New Testament, the LXX. and
the Apocrypha. But this will not serve him; for both by the LXX. and in
the Apocrypha, it is used in the same sense as in the Greek classic
writers. “He shall offer his ἱλασμὸν, _sin-offering_, saith the Lord
God,” Ezek. xliv, 27. “And the priest shall take the blood of the
ἐξιλασμοῦ, _sin-offering_,” Ezek. xlv, 19. Κριὸς τοῦ ἱλασμοῦ, “The ram
of the atonement,” Num. v, 8. To which may be added, out of the
Apocrypha, “Now as the high priest was making ἱλασμὸν, an _atonement_,”
2 Macc. iii, 33.
The propitiatory sense of the word ἱλασμὸς being thus fixed, the modern
Socinians have conceded, in their note on 1 John ii, 2, in their
Improved Version, that it means the “pacifying of an offended party;”
but they subjoin, that Christ is a propitiation, because by his Gospel
he brings sinners to repentance, and thus averts the divine displeasure.
The concession is important; and the comment cannot weaken it, because
of its absurdity; for, in that interpretation of propitiation, Moses, or
any of the Apostles, or any minister of the Gospel now, who succeeds in
bringing sinners to repentance, is as truly a propitiation for sin as
Christ himself. On Rom. iii, 25, however, the authors of the Improved
Version continue to follow their master Socinus, and translate the
passage, “whom God hath set forth a propitiation, through faith in his
blood,” “whom God hath set forth _as_ a mercy seat in his own blood,”
and lay great stress upon this rendering, as removing that countenance
to the doctrine of atonement by vicarious sufferings which the common
translation affords. The word ἱλαϛὴριον is used in the Septuagint
version, and in the Epistle to the Hebrews, to express the mercy seat or
covering of the ark. But so little is to be gained by taking it in this
sense in this passage, that this rendering is adopted by several
orthodox commentators as expressing, by a figure, or rather by
emphatically supplying a type to the antitype,--the doctrine of our
Lord’s atonement. The mercy seat was so called, because, under the Old
Testament, it was the place where the high priest, on the feast of
expiation, sprinkled the blood of the sin-offerings, in order to make an
atonement for himself and the whole congregation; and, since God
accepted the offering which was then made, it was, for this reason,
accounted the medium through which God showed himself propitious to the
people. With reference to this, Jesus Christ may be called a mercy seat,
as being the person in or through whom God shows himself propitious to
mankind. And as, under the law, God was propitious to those who came to
him by appearing before his mercy seat with the blood of their
sin-offerings; so, under the Gospel dispensation, he is propitious to
those who come unto him by Jesus Christ, through faith in that blood
which is elsewhere called “the blood of sprinkling,” and which he shed
for the remission of sins. Some able critics have, however, argued, from
the force of the context, that the word ought to be taken actively, and
not merely declaratively; not as “a propitiatory,” but as “a
propitiation,” which, says Grotius, is shown by the mention which is
afterward made of blood, to which the power of propitiation is ascribed.
Others supply θῦμα or ἱερεῖον, and render it _expiatory sacrifice_. But,
whichever of these renderings be adopted, the same doctrine is held
forth to us. The covering of the ark was rendered a propitiatory only by
the blood of the victims sprinkled before and upon it; and when the
Apostle says, that God hath set forth Jesus Christ to be a propitiatory,
he immediately adds, having the ceremonies of the temple in his view,
“through faith in his blood.” The text, therefore, contains no
exhibition of any means of obtaining mercy but through the blood of
sacrifice, according to the rule laid down in the Epistle to the
Hebrews, “Without shedding of blood there is no remission;” and is in
strict accordance with Ephesians i, 7, “We have redemption through his
blood, the remission of sins.” It is only by his blood that Christ
reconciles us to God.
Unable as they who deny the vicarious nature of the sufferings of Christ
are to evade the testimony of the above passages which speak of our Lord
as “a propitiation,” their next resource often is to deny the existence
of wrath in God, in the hope of proving that propitiation, in a proper
sense, cannot be the doctrine of Scripture, whatever may be the force of
the mere terms which the sacred writers employ. In order to give
plausibility to their statement, they pervert the opinion of the
orthodox, and argue as though it formed a part of the doctrine of
Christ’s propitiation and oblation for sin, to represent God as
naturally an implacable and vengeful being, and only made placable and
disposed to show mercy by satisfaction being made to his displeasure
through our Lord’s sufferings and death. This is as contrary to
Scripture as it is to the opinions of all sober persons who hold the
doctrine of Christ’s atonement. God is love; but it is not necessary, in
order to support this truth, to assume that he is nothing else. He has
other attributes, which harmonize with this and with each other; though,
assuredly, that harmony cannot be established by any who deny the
propitiation for sin made by the death of Christ. It sufficiently proves
that there is not only no implacability in God, but a most tender and
placable affection toward the sinning human race itself, and that the
Son of God, by whom the propitiation was made, was the free gift of the
Father to us. This is the most eminent proof of his love, that, for our
sakes, and that mercy might be extended to us, “He spared not his own
Son; but delivered him up freely for us all.” Thus he is the fountain
and first moving cause of that scheme of recovery and salvation which
the incarnation and death of our Lord brought into full and efficient
operation. The true questions are, indeed, not whether God is love, or
whether he is of a placable nature; but whether God is holy and just;
whether we, his creatures, are under law or not; whether this law has
any penalty, and whether God, in his rectoral character, is bound to
execute and uphold that law. As the justice of God is punitive, (and if
it is not punitive, his laws are a dead letter,) then is there wrath in
God; then is God angry with the wicked; then is man, as a sinner,
obnoxious to this anger; and so a propitiation becomes necessary to turn
it away from him. Nor are these terms unscriptural; they are used in the
New Testament as emphatically as in the Old; though, the former is, in a
special sense, a revelation of the mercy of God to man. John declares
that, if any man believeth not on the Son of God, “the wrath of God
abideth upon him;” and St. Paul affirms, that “the wrath of God is
revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of
men.” The day of judgment is, with reference to the ungodly, said to be
“the day of wrath;” God is called “a consuming fire;” and, as such, is
the object of “reverence and godly fear.” Nor is this his displeasure
light, and the consequences of it a trifling and temporary
inconvenience. When we only regard the consequences which have followed
sin in society, from the earliest ages, and in every part of the world,
and add to these the many direct and fearful inflictions of punishment
which have proceeded from the “Judge of the whole earth,” then, to use
the language of Scripture, “our flesh may well tremble because of his
judgments.” But when we look at the future state of the wicked as
represented in Scripture, though it is expressed generally, and
surrounded with the mystery of a place, and a condition of being,
unknown to us in the present state, all evils which history has crowded
into the lot of man appear insignificant in comparison of banishment
from God, separation from good men, public condemnation, torment of
spirit, “weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth,” “everlasting
destruction,” “everlasting fire.” Let men talk ever so much or
eloquently of the pure benevolence of God, they cannot abolish the facts
recorded in the history of human suffering in this world as the effects
of transgression; nor can they discharge these fearful comminations from
the pages of the book of God. These cannot be criticised away; and if it
is “Jesus who saves us from this wrath to come,” that is, from those
effects of the wrath of God which are to come, then, but for him, we
should have been liable to them. That principle in God, from which such
effects follow, the Scriptures call wrath; and they who deny the
existence of wrath in God, deny, therefore, the Scriptures.
It by no means follows, however, that this wrath is a passion in God; or
that, though we contend that the awful attribute of his justice requires
satisfaction, in order to the forgiveness of the guilty, we afford
reason to any to charge us with attributing vengeful affections to the
divine Being. “Our adversaries,” says Bishop Stillingfleet, “first make
opinions for us, and then show that they are unreasonable. They first
suppose that anger in God is to be considered as a passion, and that
passion a desire of revenge; and then tell us, that if we do not prove
that this desire of revenge can be satisfied by the sufferings of
Christ, then we can never prove the doctrine of satisfaction to be true;
whereas, we do not mean by God’s anger, any such passion, but the just
declaration of God’s will to punish, upon our provocation of him by our
sins; we do not make the design of the satisfaction to be that God may
please himself in revenging the sins of the guilty upon the most
innocent person, because we make the design of punishment not to be the
satisfaction of anger as a desire of revenge, but to be the vindication
of the honour and rights of the offended person by such a way as he
himself shall judge satisfactory to the ends of his government.” See
ATONEMENT and EXPIATION.
wrath of an offended person. In the case before us, the wrath turned
away is the wrath of God; the person making the propitiation is Christ;
the propitiating offering or sacrifice is his blood. All this is
expressed in most explicit terms in the following passages: “And he is
the propitiation for our sins,” 1 John ii, 2. “Herein is love, not that
we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the
propitiation for our sins,” 1 John iv, 10. “Whom God hath set forth to
be a propitiation through faith in his blood,” Rom. iii, 25. The word
used in the two former passages is ἱλασμὸς; in the last ἱλαϛήριον. Both
are from the verb ἱλάσκω, so often used by Greek writers to express the
action of a person who, in some appointed way, turned away the wrath of
a deity; and therefore cannot bear the sense which Socinus would put
upon it,--the destruction of sin. This is not supported by a single
example. With all Greek authorities, whether poets, historians, or
others, the word means to _propitiate_, and is, for the most part,
construed with an accusative case, designating the person whose
displeasure is averted. As this could not be denied, Crellius comes to
the aid of Socinus, and contends that the sense of this word was not to
be taken from its common use in the Greek tongue, but from the
Hellenistic use of it in the Greek of the New Testament, the LXX. and
the Apocrypha. But this will not serve him; for both by the LXX. and in
the Apocrypha, it is used in the same sense as in the Greek classic
writers. “He shall offer his ἱλασμὸν, _sin-offering_, saith the Lord
God,” Ezek. xliv, 27. “And the priest shall take the blood of the
ἐξιλασμοῦ, _sin-offering_,” Ezek. xlv, 19. Κριὸς τοῦ ἱλασμοῦ, “The ram
of the atonement,” Num. v, 8. To which may be added, out of the
Apocrypha, “Now as the high priest was making ἱλασμὸν, an _atonement_,”
2 Macc. iii, 33.
The propitiatory sense of the word ἱλασμὸς being thus fixed, the modern
Socinians have conceded, in their note on 1 John ii, 2, in their
Improved Version, that it means the “pacifying of an offended party;”
but they subjoin, that Christ is a propitiation, because by his Gospel
he brings sinners to repentance, and thus averts the divine displeasure.
The concession is important; and the comment cannot weaken it, because
of its absurdity; for, in that interpretation of propitiation, Moses, or
any of the Apostles, or any minister of the Gospel now, who succeeds in
bringing sinners to repentance, is as truly a propitiation for sin as
Christ himself. On Rom. iii, 25, however, the authors of the Improved
Version continue to follow their master Socinus, and translate the
passage, “whom God hath set forth a propitiation, through faith in his
blood,” “whom God hath set forth _as_ a mercy seat in his own blood,”
and lay great stress upon this rendering, as removing that countenance
to the doctrine of atonement by vicarious sufferings which the common
translation affords. The word ἱλαϛὴριον is used in the Septuagint
version, and in the Epistle to the Hebrews, to express the mercy seat or
covering of the ark. But so little is to be gained by taking it in this
sense in this passage, that this rendering is adopted by several
orthodox commentators as expressing, by a figure, or rather by
emphatically supplying a type to the antitype,--the doctrine of our
Lord’s atonement. The mercy seat was so called, because, under the Old
Testament, it was the place where the high priest, on the feast of
expiation, sprinkled the blood of the sin-offerings, in order to make an
atonement for himself and the whole congregation; and, since God
accepted the offering which was then made, it was, for this reason,
accounted the medium through which God showed himself propitious to the
people. With reference to this, Jesus Christ may be called a mercy seat,
as being the person in or through whom God shows himself propitious to
mankind. And as, under the law, God was propitious to those who came to
him by appearing before his mercy seat with the blood of their
sin-offerings; so, under the Gospel dispensation, he is propitious to
those who come unto him by Jesus Christ, through faith in that blood
which is elsewhere called “the blood of sprinkling,” and which he shed
for the remission of sins. Some able critics have, however, argued, from
the force of the context, that the word ought to be taken actively, and
not merely declaratively; not as “a propitiatory,” but as “a
propitiation,” which, says Grotius, is shown by the mention which is
afterward made of blood, to which the power of propitiation is ascribed.
Others supply θῦμα or ἱερεῖον, and render it _expiatory sacrifice_. But,
whichever of these renderings be adopted, the same doctrine is held
forth to us. The covering of the ark was rendered a propitiatory only by
the blood of the victims sprinkled before and upon it; and when the
Apostle says, that God hath set forth Jesus Christ to be a propitiatory,
he immediately adds, having the ceremonies of the temple in his view,
“through faith in his blood.” The text, therefore, contains no
exhibition of any means of obtaining mercy but through the blood of
sacrifice, according to the rule laid down in the Epistle to the
Hebrews, “Without shedding of blood there is no remission;” and is in
strict accordance with Ephesians i, 7, “We have redemption through his
blood, the remission of sins.” It is only by his blood that Christ
reconciles us to God.
Unable as they who deny the vicarious nature of the sufferings of Christ
are to evade the testimony of the above passages which speak of our Lord
as “a propitiation,” their next resource often is to deny the existence
of wrath in God, in the hope of proving that propitiation, in a proper
sense, cannot be the doctrine of Scripture, whatever may be the force of
the mere terms which the sacred writers employ. In order to give
plausibility to their statement, they pervert the opinion of the
orthodox, and argue as though it formed a part of the doctrine of
Christ’s propitiation and oblation for sin, to represent God as
naturally an implacable and vengeful being, and only made placable and
disposed to show mercy by satisfaction being made to his displeasure
through our Lord’s sufferings and death. This is as contrary to
Scripture as it is to the opinions of all sober persons who hold the
doctrine of Christ’s atonement. God is love; but it is not necessary, in
order to support this truth, to assume that he is nothing else. He has
other attributes, which harmonize with this and with each other; though,
assuredly, that harmony cannot be established by any who deny the
propitiation for sin made by the death of Christ. It sufficiently proves
that there is not only no implacability in God, but a most tender and
placable affection toward the sinning human race itself, and that the
Son of God, by whom the propitiation was made, was the free gift of the
Father to us. This is the most eminent proof of his love, that, for our
sakes, and that mercy might be extended to us, “He spared not his own
Son; but delivered him up freely for us all.” Thus he is the fountain
and first moving cause of that scheme of recovery and salvation which
the incarnation and death of our Lord brought into full and efficient
operation. The true questions are, indeed, not whether God is love, or
whether he is of a placable nature; but whether God is holy and just;
whether we, his creatures, are under law or not; whether this law has
any penalty, and whether God, in his rectoral character, is bound to
execute and uphold that law. As the justice of God is punitive, (and if
it is not punitive, his laws are a dead letter,) then is there wrath in
God; then is God angry with the wicked; then is man, as a sinner,
obnoxious to this anger; and so a propitiation becomes necessary to turn
it away from him. Nor are these terms unscriptural; they are used in the
New Testament as emphatically as in the Old; though, the former is, in a
special sense, a revelation of the mercy of God to man. John declares
that, if any man believeth not on the Son of God, “the wrath of God
abideth upon him;” and St. Paul affirms, that “the wrath of God is
revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of
men.” The day of judgment is, with reference to the ungodly, said to be
“the day of wrath;” God is called “a consuming fire;” and, as such, is
the object of “reverence and godly fear.” Nor is this his displeasure
light, and the consequences of it a trifling and temporary
inconvenience. When we only regard the consequences which have followed
sin in society, from the earliest ages, and in every part of the world,
and add to these the many direct and fearful inflictions of punishment
which have proceeded from the “Judge of the whole earth,” then, to use
the language of Scripture, “our flesh may well tremble because of his
judgments.” But when we look at the future state of the wicked as
represented in Scripture, though it is expressed generally, and
surrounded with the mystery of a place, and a condition of being,
unknown to us in the present state, all evils which history has crowded
into the lot of man appear insignificant in comparison of banishment
from God, separation from good men, public condemnation, torment of
spirit, “weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth,” “everlasting
destruction,” “everlasting fire.” Let men talk ever so much or
eloquently of the pure benevolence of God, they cannot abolish the facts
recorded in the history of human suffering in this world as the effects
of transgression; nor can they discharge these fearful comminations from
the pages of the book of God. These cannot be criticised away; and if it
is “Jesus who saves us from this wrath to come,” that is, from those
effects of the wrath of God which are to come, then, but for him, we
should have been liable to them. That principle in God, from which such
effects follow, the Scriptures call wrath; and they who deny the
existence of wrath in God, deny, therefore, the Scriptures.
It by no means follows, however, that this wrath is a passion in God; or
that, though we contend that the awful attribute of his justice requires
satisfaction, in order to the forgiveness of the guilty, we afford
reason to any to charge us with attributing vengeful affections to the
divine Being. “Our adversaries,” says Bishop Stillingfleet, “first make
opinions for us, and then show that they are unreasonable. They first
suppose that anger in God is to be considered as a passion, and that
passion a desire of revenge; and then tell us, that if we do not prove
that this desire of revenge can be satisfied by the sufferings of
Christ, then we can never prove the doctrine of satisfaction to be true;
whereas, we do not mean by God’s anger, any such passion, but the just
declaration of God’s will to punish, upon our provocation of him by our
sins; we do not make the design of the satisfaction to be that God may
please himself in revenging the sins of the guilty upon the most
innocent person, because we make the design of punishment not to be the
satisfaction of anger as a desire of revenge, but to be the vindication
of the honour and rights of the offended person by such a way as he
himself shall judge satisfactory to the ends of his government.” See
ATONEMENT and EXPIATION.