1885 Watch Tower - A2Z.org

How clearly the Scriptures guard us against the two extremetheories of man. They assure us that God is love; that the Lord isvery pitiful and of tender compassion; that he has no pleasure in thedeath of the wicked, but would that all would turn unto him andlive; that he authorized Christ and all his followers to be hisambassadors and ministers, to make known the good tidings ofreconciliation accomplished "by the death ofR788 : page 4his Son, whom he set forth to be a propitiation for our sins, and notfor ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world." (Rom. 3:25,and 1 John 2:2.) They assure us also that Jehovah's love andwisdom planned the redemption, and that, in raising Christ from thedead, he gave proof of the acceptableness of the sacrifice, and ofthe certainty of the resultant blessing. It is not only true that in duetime God sent his only begotten Son for our redemption (Rom. 5:6),and that God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while wewere yet sinners, Christ died for us (Rom. 5:8), but it is true alsothat this was Jehovah's original plan, and that before sin entered,even before the foundation of the world (1 Pet. 1:18-20; Rev. 13:8),his wisdom and love provided, and beheld in the distance, "theLamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world."So far as God is concerned, the mediation of Christ Jesus is all inthe past. As the Apostle expresses it in the text under consideration,the Mediator who stood BETWEEN the just Creator and hiscondemned and guilty creatures, was "the man Christ Jesus," andnot the exalted Jesus. He mediated by giving himself a ransom [acorresponding price] for all. It is not the glorified Jesus thatintercedes as mediator and prays pardon for sinners. If such werethe case, the Son of God need not have come into the world to diefor the sinners, but might from the first have prayed for them. Butif prayers only were needed, no mediator would have beennecessary, for God himself "SO LOVED the world" --"while wewere yet sinners." It was because no mediation, in the sense ofentreaty, was necessary, and because no such action could mediatebetween God's violated law and the sinner, that the mediation wasaccomplished in a totally different manner. The Mediator was theman Christ Jesus. He became a man that he might be the Mediator.The act of mediation consisted in the man Jesus giving himself aransom [corresponding price] for all men, to meet the penalty of thelaw of God against all men, that henceforth the condemnation of sinand its penalty death being removed, there might be no obstaclehindering men from the enjoyment of God's blessing and favor. Ina word, the sacrifice for sins is the mediation, and the Sacrificer atthe time of the sacrifice is the Mediator.That this is the correct idea, is not only borne out by reason, and theabove statement of Scripture, but by every text in which the wordMediator, as applied to Jesus, occurs. The same word occurs asfollows: Gal. 3:19,20; 1 Tim. 2:5; Heb. 8:6; 9:15 and 12:24. Theserefer to Jesus and Moses, both as mediators. They show that Moses,