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I. IS GOD A BEING PASSIBLE OR IMPASSIBLE?

1. It would seem to follow from the infinitude of His creatively-efficient power and the immensity of His nature that He must be impassible. Besides, He is spirit only, and what we call force cannot touch Him.

2. But after all there must be some kind of passibleness in God, else there could be no genuine character in Him. A cast-iron Deity could not command our love and reverence. The beauty of God is that He feels appropriately toward everything; that He feels badness as badness, and goodness as goodness — pained by one, pleased by the other. A very large share of all the virtues have, in fact, an element of passibility in them, and without that element they could not exist. Indeed, greatness of character culminates in the right proportion and co-ordination of these passive elements. And God is great as being great in feeling.

3. We raise a distinction between what we call the active and the passive virtues. If I impart a charity, that is my active virtue; if I receive an insult without wishing to revenge it, that is my passive virtue. And without this in its varieties we should be only no-characters, dry logs of wood instead of Christian men. Or, if we kept on acting still, we should only be active machines; for what better is the active giving of a charity if there be no fellow-feeling or pitying passion with it to make it a charity? Now God must have these passive virtues as truly as men. How, then, shall we conceive Him to have them when He is, in fact, impassible? The salvation is here; God, being physically impassible, is yet morally passible, i.e., He is a Being whose very perfection it is that He feels the moral significance of things. Be can feel ingratitude when He cannot feel a blow. He can loathe impurity when He cannot be injured by any assault. He is pleased and gratified by acts of sacrifice when He could not be comforted or enriched by benevolence. A thermometer is not more exactly and delicately passive to heat than He is to the merit and demerit of all actions. This, accordingly, is the representation given of Him in the Scriptures. Thus He is blessed according to the merit and beauty of whatever is done that is right. He smelled a sweet savour in Noah's sacrifice. He has pleasure in them that hope in His mercy. He is tender to the obedient, pitying them that fear Him as a father pitieth his children. On the other hand, by how many pains of feeling does He suffer in His relation to scenes of human wrong. The sighing of the prisoner comes before Him to command His sympathy. In all the afflictions of His people He is afflicted Himself. And, in the same manner, He is said to be exercised by all manner of unpleasant sentiments in relation to all manner of evil doings; sore displeased, wroth, &c.

4. But this painful feeling in regard to evil — what is this but to assume the unhappiness, or, at least, the diminished happiness of God? How, then, shall we save His infinite blessedness? By just dropping out our calculations of arithmetic and looking at facts. It seems to be good arithmetic that, if any subtraction is made from God's infinite happiness, He cannot be infinitely happy. No, on the contrary, He may even be the more blessed because f the subtraction, for to see that He feels rightly towards evil, despite of the pain suffered from it, to know that He is pouring the fulness of His love upon it, to be studying now, in conscious sacrifice, a saving mercy — out of this springs up a joy deeper than the pain, and, by a fixed law of holy compensation, the sea of His blessedness is kept continually full. All moral natures exist under this law of compensation. To receive evil rightly is to master it, to be rightly pained by it is to be kept in sovereign joy.

II. Thus far I have spoken of God's passive virtue, principally as concerned in feeling towards what is moral just according to its quality. But THERE IS A MORAL PASSIVITY VASTLY HIGHER AND REACHING FURTHER, VIZ., A PASSIVITY OF MERCY OR SACRIFICE.

1. In this a good or perfect being not only feels toward good or evil according to what it is, but willingly endures evil, to make it what it is not — to recover and heal it. No extraordinary purity is necessary to make any one sensible of disgust in the contemplation of what is vile, but to submit one's ease to the endurance of wickedness, in order to recover and subdue it, requires what is far more difficult.

2. Just here, then, we begin to open upon the true meaning of "Christ the power of God." There is no so great power even among men as that which conquers evil by enduring evil. Just here evil becomes insupportable to itself. It can argue against everything but suffering patience: this disarms it. All its fire is spent. Christ crucified is the power of God, because He shows God in self-sacrifice, because He brings out and makes historical in the world God's passive virtue. By this it is that He opens our human feeling, bad and blind as it is, pouring Himself into its deepest recesses and bathing it with His cleansing, new-creating influence. There is the highest efficiency in it for it is moral power, not physical force. Hence it is that so much is said of Christ as a new-discovered power — the power of God unto salvation: the Son of God with power; the power of Christ. The power is conceived to be such that Christ is really our new Creator. We are His workmanship created unto good works.

3. But how does it appear that so great efficacy is added to the known character of God by the life and death of Christ? Was not everything shown to us in His death explicitly revealed in the Old Testament? God was represented there as being duly affected by all evil according to its true nature; displeased, abhorrent, &c. But to have these things ascribed formally to God is one thing, and a very different to have them lived and acted historically in the world. Perfections that are set before us in mere epithets have little significance; but perfections lived and acted before the senses, under social conditions, have quite another grade of meaning. And if this be true respecting God's mere passivities of sensibility to right and wrong, how much truer is it when we speak of Him in sacrifice. No such impression or conception of God was ever drawn out, as a truth positive, from any of the epithets we have cited. And nature gives it no complexion of evidence. We could almost as soon look for sacrifice in a steam-engine as in nature. How necessary, original, powerful, then, is the God of sacrifice — He that endures evil and takes it as a burden to bear — when we see Him struggling under the load. Somewhere there is a wondrous power hid in the Cross! And the suffering is physical — a suffering under force.

III. IF, THEN, GOD IS PHYSICALLY IMPASSIBLE, HOW DOES IT APPEAR THAT HE IS ANY WAY EXPRESSED IN THE PASSION OF CHRIST? how does the passion present Him as in sacrifice?

1. By the physical impassibility of God is not meant that He cannot suffer by consent or self-subjection, but only that He cannot be subjected involuntarily. To deny His liberty to exist under assumed conditions whenever there are any sufficient reasons for so doing might even be a greater infringement of His power than to maintain His natural passibility.

2. We can clearly enough see that there is no difficulty in the Passion of Christ which does not also exist in the Incarnation itself. How can the Infinite Being God exist under finite conditions? How (for that is only another form of the same question) can the Impassible suffer? And yet it would be a most severe assumption to say that God cannot, to express Himself and forward His negotiation with sin, subject Himself, in some way mysteriously qualified, to just these impossible conditions.

3. Be this all as it may, there are ways of knowing that are shorter and wiser than the processes of the head. In this Passion of Jesus it must be enough that I look on the travail of a Divine feeling, and behold the spectacle of God in sacrifice. This I see and nothing less. He is visibly not a man. I feel a divinity in Him. He floods me with a sense of God, such as I receive not from all God's works and worlds beside. And when I stand by His Cross I want no logical endorsement; enough that I can see the heart of God, and in all this wondrous Passion know Him as enduring the contradiction of sinners. Why should I debate the matter in my heart when I have the God of sacrifice in my heart? He that endures me so, subdues me, and I yield.O Thou Lamb of God, that takest away the sin of the world! what Thou didst bear in Thy blessed hands and feet I cannot bear. Take it all away. Hide me in the depths of Thy suffering love. Conclusion:

1. Here let us learn to conceive more fitly the greatness of God. His greatness culminates in sacrifice. If He were only wise, omnipotent, eternal, just; even that would present Him as an object worthy of profoundest reverence, but in the Passion of Jesus He is more. There His power is force; here it is sacrifice. There He astonishes the eye; here He touches and transforms the heart. The God of mere amplitude will do to amuse the fancy of the ingenious — the God of sacrifice only can approve Himself to a sinner.

2. And here it is that our gospel comes to be so great a power. It is not, on one hand, the power of omnipotence falling in secretly regenerative blows. Neither is it, on the other, any mere appeal of gratitude drawing the soul to God by the consideration of what He has done. No; this wonderful power is God in sacrifice. This is the power that has new-created and sent home, as trophies, in all the past ages, its uncounted myriads of believing, new-created, glorified souls.

3. And you that have known this dawning of the Lord, what a certification have you in this sacrifice of God's sympathy! How intensely personal He is to you! Go to Him in your every trouble. When the loads of conscious sin are heaviest on yon, and you seem even to be sinking in its mires, address Him as the God of sacrifice. Have it also as your lesson, that you yourself will be most in power when readiest in the enduring of evil; that you will bear fruit and be strong, not by your force, not by your address, not by your words, but only when you are with Christ in sacrifice.

(H. Bushnell, D. D.)

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KJV: But unto them which are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God.

WEB: but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God.