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Of Romans 8 By John Murray

 Romans 8.32 He that spared not his own son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall he not with him also freely give us all things?
The death of Christ upon the accursed tree is the supreme exhibition of the love of Christ.
Christ loved the church and gave himself for it. Christ laid down his life for the sheep because he loved them with such intensity that no obstacle could quench his love.
But as we are thinking of the death of Christ upon the accursed tree, we must not so focus attention upon the love of Christ that we overlook the action of God the fallen.
It is not as if the Son of God gave himself to this undertaking and the Father turned away his face until the ordeal was ended and then received him into the bosom of his love again.
No, the events of Gethsemane, the events of the arraignment before the high priest and before Pilate, the events of Golgotha were events in which God the Father was intensely involved.
Calvary is also the supreme exhibition of the Father's love and it is upon the love of God the Father that the emphasis falls in this particular text.
Only of the Father is the Lord Jesus Christ the Son and thus only of the Father can the apostle be speaking when he says he that spared not his old son.
Now there are four features of the text upon which we may dwell. First of all the uniqueness of the passion, second the extremity of the sacrifice, third the particularity of the provision and fourthly and finally the guarantee of grace.
So first of all we have the uniqueness of the passion. Jesus called God his own Father and that means that no other but the Father stood in this relation to Jesus the Son.
And then Paul in the text says his own Son and that means that no other stands in this relation to the Father.
God the Father of course has many sons by adoption but the revelation God has given us does not permit any confusion to exist between the sonship of the only begotten and the sonship of the adopted.
The highest privilege bestowed upon men is that they are adopted into the family of God. They are heirs of God and joint heirs with Jesus Christ.
God will bring to glory all the sons whom he has appointed to that destiny. They will be conformed to the image of God's own Son that he might be the firstborn among many brethren.
But however high is the privilege bestowed in adoption there is no confusion in the scripture between the uniqueness of the sonship that belongs to the only begotten and the sonship that belongs to the adopted.
No other but the eternal Son is the Father's old Son. And here there is an ineffable and incomparable sonship as we discovered in our studies of the last two days.
When the Son of God came into the world there was no suspension of this unique sonship, of this eternal sonship.
The glory of the Word made flesh which the disciples beheld was the glory of the only begotten from the Father and the revelation of the Father dispensed by him.
Was revelation dispensed by the only begotten? How eloquently John 1 verses 14 and 18 certify to these facts.
Since there was no suspension of this ineffable fatherhood or sonship, there was no suspension of the love which the Father bore to the Son and the Son bore to the Father.
Jesus said in the days of his flesh, the Father loveth the Son. And he also said, I love the Father.
These very simple statements point to an infinitude of reciprocal love.
Love not constrained by ignorance and love not quenched by knowledge, but love that is drawn out by the exclusive and exhaustive knowledge which the persons have of each other.
Now it was to do the Father's will that the Son came. He came because he loved the Father and the Father sent him because there was no other who could fulfill such a mission.
And throughout all the stages of Jesus' messianic curse, until his work reached its climax in the death upon the cross, the love of God the Father flowed out to him with increasing complacency and delight.
That is Jesus' own witness. Therefore does my Father love me because I lay down my life that I might take it again.
There is of course the necessary distinction between that infinitude of love that flows out from the Father to the Son because of the intrinsic relationships that they sustain to one another.
But there is also the love of complacency that flowed out with increasing intensity to the Son because of his fulfillment of the Father's commission.
And so in the agony of the garden and in the abandonment of Calvary's tree, our Lord was the unique object of the Father's love because he was the Father's own Son, fulfilling the Father's unexampled commission.
Now second we have the extremity of the sacrifice. He spared not, but delivered him out.
Now I'm not suggesting that God the Father sacrificed the Son, Christ sacrificed himself in the certain sense of that word.
Our attention of course is in this case drawn to a negative and a positive, to what the Father did not and to what he did.
And first of all then you have the negative. He spared not. Well, sparing applies to suffering that may be inflicted.
Parents spare their children when they do not inflict the full measure of the chastisement due.
Judges spare criminals when they do not pronounce a sentence commensurate with the crime committed.
Well, this is the opposite of what God the Father did. The opposite. He did not spare his own Son.
Suffering was inflicted by God the Father upon his own Son and the Father did not spare. He did not alleviate the stroke.
He did not withhold one quest of the full toll of judgment due to the sins of those of whose behalf the Son suffered.
Do we hesitate with such a thought? Let us remember the words of the Prophet.
The Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all. If please, the Lord proves you. He has put into grace and sake friends of the incomparable conjunction.
There is nothing like it elsewhere. There is no such conjunction elsewhere even in God's counsel.
The Father loved the Son with infinite and immutable love because he did not cease to be the only begotten Son.
And the infinite love necessarily flowed out from the very relationship that he essentially and imputably sustained to God the Father.
And furthermore, every detail of the suffering endured by the Son constrained the love and delight of God the Father.
It was all endured by the Son in obedience to the Father's will. Therefore it constrained that love of complacency.
Because in the performance of the Father's will he committed no sin. He was holy, harmless, undefiled.
And in his own witness it was his mate and friend to do the will of the Father who was in heaven.
But the Father did not lighten the stroke that fell upon his own well-beloved Son.
And so you have this incomparable conjunction of the full tone of judgement executed upon the person who was the object of infinite and immutable love.
And who in the very performance of his undertaking was growing out necessarily because of the perfection of his obedience and performance, the complacency of the light of God the Father.
The stroke fell upon him with unrelieved intensity, with all the weight due to the sins that he owed.
Now what does this mean? Well it is the barber of the Father's love to the people whom he had chosen.
It was the person uniquely related to the Father as the well-beloved Son, uniquely loved by the Father with infinite and immutable love, whom the Father did not spare.
And the reason is that if he had stirred him, if any of the judgement had been left for the people of God to bear, that remnant would have served this Father in the form of sin of substance and to force their condemnation upon his own sons.
And that is the Father's love. Do you stagger with amazement? Does your mind wheel with amazement?
Oh, let it not be the amazement of bewilderment, but may it be the amazement of believing and adoring wonder.
But then there is the positive. He delivered him out. The Father delivered him over to nothing less than the curse and dessert of sin.
Jesus was made a curse and he was made sin. He was brought into the closest relation that was possible for him to come, to sin, without becoming himself sinful.
And it is that that the Apostle Paul in a unique expression brings to our attention. He was made sin. Not simply the sin-bearer, he was made sin.
And you are pointed to the intimacy of the relationship that he sustained to the sin-knight, justified with it as closely as it could, without becoming himself implicated in the defilement.
Now the condemnation of sin is preeminently God's wrath. It is the wrath of God that will burn in the place of low, and it is the wrath of God that will constitute hell essentially.
It is not for us to, to, er, to, er, to governmentize with respect to certain other circumstances. This week we must know that it is the wrath of God that will constitute the burning of the place of woe, the breath of the Lord like a stream of brimstone doth candle it.
And here, my friends, again we have unheard of conjunction the sun for the stock of the father's cloth and the most normal erosion.
Don't be deceived by the widespread current of thought that denies the real doctrine of propitiation. The essence of sin's curse, the essence of sin's judgment is the wrath of God.
And if Jesus bore sin, and if he bore our curse, if he was made sin, the vicarious bearing of the wrath of God belongs to the very essence of his atoning accomplishment.
And how craft the understanding, and how now this unique love that it could at the same time be the subject of the wrath of God.
The opposite of love is not wrath, it is hate. And there is no inconsistency between the infilitude of love that flowed forth to him and the execution upon him of the full toll of divine condemnation for sin.
And therefore the full toll of divine wrath, divine infilitude, no other would be equal to it.
Now the lost in perdition will be abandoned eternally, but not one of the lost in perdition will be able or ever have occasion to say,
My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? The abandonment of Christ on Calvary's tree was abandonment in pursuance of the commission given him by the Father.
And it was a balance for money, not pilot, for health, for fear, not the juice for envy, but the Father for love.
The determinate purpose of the Father's love is the explanation of the spectacle that has no parallel.
And the love the Father bore to the Son did not diminish the severity of the ordeal which creates this spectacle.
The ordeal of wrath and the value it could do against him. Did not Jesus say to his adversaries, This is your hour and the power of darkness?
And did he not speak in prophecy, Many bulls have compassed me, strong bulls of Asian have beset me round.
They gaped upon me with their mouths as a waddening and a roaring lion, for dogs have compassed me.
The assembly of the wicked have enclosed me, they pierced my hands and my feet.
Now if there had been restraint placed upon the power of the enemy, is further proof of the Father's love that he gave over his own son.
To the malignity and hate, the power and ingenuity of the Prince of darkness.
Therefore gave him over to the contradiction of what he, the Son of God, was in his own spotless purity and love.
Now we need the money for the man who owes again, but we cannot afford him to stop the shot of the Holy of Holies of the Father's love.
The love which has the emphasis in this text. It is then that we shall get to the fountains of the old plan of salvation and it is then that we shall have a deeper appreciation of Christ's old love.
God is not merely inexhaustible. Oh, how necessary it is to appreciate what lies back to the old spectacle of the past.
God the Father's love and God the Father's action in pursuance of the determining purpose of his love.
Now third we have the particularity of the provision in this text for us all. Who are they?
Well, they are the all defined by the context. It is an elementary principle of hermeneutics that we have always to observe the universe of discourse.
And of course when Paul says for us all, he has in mind those of whom he is speaking in the context.
Paul has been speaking of the called according to purpose. In verse 28, that purpose is defined in terms of foreknowledge and predestination.
In verse 29, he is addressing those of whom he can challenge or for whom he can challenge if God be for us who can be against us when he proceeds to the protestation.
Who shall lay anything to the charge of God's elect? It is simply exegetically monstrous to try to extend the denotation of the all in our text.
Beyond the denotation provided by the universe of discourse in the context.
But the point of importance here, I say the point of importance, the point of emphasis is that within the subtle of those concerned there is no restriction or exclusion.
That's the emphasis. He respect not his own son but delivered him up for us all.
Jesus was delivered up for us all. If we are within the circle those defined in this particular context, now each person has his or her own individuality.
No two persons are identically the same, not even identical twins. They have their own distinguishing marks and the parents soon discover that.
And this particularity is true also in sin, misery and liability. All we like sheep have gone astray. We have turned everyone to his own way.
And we cannot place this manifold of guilt in any one category. There are as many categories as there are individuals.
Oh, there is state of one characterization that all have sinned and come short of the glory of God. But within that characterization there are as many categories as there are individuals.
And when God saves, he does not save in the math. He deals with each individual in his or her own particularity.
And it is best that the apostle is emphasizing in our text in reference to the giving up of God's forms.
The Father contemplated them, that is those who are embraced in this vicarious undertaking. He contemplated them in the displacement of their sin, of their misery and their liability.
If we are sensitive to the enormity of our own sin, if we are sensitive to the individuality and the particularity of our own sin, of our own gift, then it may be difficult for us to entertain this thought.
I say it may be difficult. It might be easier for us to think of the Father's love and provision if we were as it were submerged in the mass and not contemplated in our own individuality and in the particular aggravations of our own sin.
But we dare not think of the Father's provision in that session.
For if we were submerged in the mass and as it were forgotten in the mass, there would be no salvation at all.
A salvation that is a mass salvation will not do me.
And the wretched particularity of my own sin.
And we dare not think of salvation even once for all accomplished in that way. Salvation can be only, can be for us if it is salvation in all the particularity of our need, in all the enormity of my particular guilt,
in all the rosomeness of my particular corruption.
It is this of course that Paul expresses in reference to the love of Christ. He loved me and he gave himself up for me.
And he did not tell them. He expresses it in terms of the Father's love.
And when you think it over my friend, when you think with a little more maturity, that great truth becomes supremely precious.
But this truth alone inspires the confidence needed in the gravity of our own individual sin and in the enormity of our own individual gift.
That God the Father gave up his own son to the loss and curse and condemnation that your sins deserved, that my sins deserved.
That is what constrains again the marvel of believing a prevention.
There is no case therefore that falls outside the scope of the Father's provision.
Let us all bear in mind that the Father knew each in all the loathomeness of his retirement,
in the enormity of his guilt, in the wretchedness of his misery, in the particularity of his perversity,
and in all the intensity of his need. And he loved the everlasting love of never the less.
Loved with such intensity that he gave no other than his own well-beloved and only begotten Son that he might bear that sin.
Bear that sin of full judgment that belongs to it by reason of the holiness and justice of God.
He loved with a love so great, so invincible, so purposeful, that he gave over his own son to his death.
For every one of the sons to be brought the glory, and they will never taste one drop of this damnation.
Oh, they will taste much of the bitterness and with their increasing sanctification they will more and more taste.
The bitterness of their sin, and they will taste of it something of the desperation of which Mr. Martin spoke the other night.
But oh, they will never taste one drop of the damnation of that sin.
There is therefore now no condemnation to them who are in Christ Jesus.
And all will exclaim in the language of condiment the marvel of the Father's love.
Eternity will not scale its heights. It will not have him at step. It is like the love of Christ himself. It passes knowledge.
And as the greatness of God is incomprehensible, so is the greatness of his love.
It will fill us with amazement. It will fill us increasingly with amazement.
Let it not be the amazement of bewilderment, but let it be the amazement of believing and adoring and loving content.
Now finally we have the guarantee of grace. How shall he not with him also freely give us all things?
Now if you read this text it is necessary to notice that all that proceeds in the text leads up to this rhetorical question.
He that spared not his own son but delivered him up for us all, how shall he not with him also freely give us all things?
The interrogatory form of this question, of this statement, confronts us with the unthinkable death of the opposite.
The purpose is to enforce the assurance that all things necessary to, yea all things securing and furthering the glorification of the people of God, will be freely and undoubtedly bestowed.
It is the argument of course from the greater to the less, if the Father did not spare his own son, delivered him up, how shall he fail to bring to fruition?
And final realization, the end contemplated in such giving up, it is well to take account of this very brief expression, with him also.
How shall he not with him also? Now that attaches itself very closely to the for us all of the preceding class.
Delivered him up for us all, how shall he not with him also freely give us all things?
The Father gave the Son to undergo for our benefit all that had been stated in both negative and positive implications, shall he not with him give us all things?
Do you see something of the contrast between the Son and things? How shall he not with him give us all things?
What was the Father's greatest gift? What was the most precious donation for us? It was nothing.
However precious is calling, when God the Father calls into the fellowship with his Son. However precious is justification, when God the Father freely justifies life.
However precious is adoption, when he brings into his own family the Son to be brought to glory. However precious is sanctification, however precious ultimate glorification.
These are not the greatest gifts of God. It is not even the security with which the apostle closes the concluding peroration of this particular chapter.
You see all of these are favors bestowed and graces dispensed in the design of God the Father's counsel, but the incomparable gift is the giving up of his own Son.
And not only was he given for us, but he is also given to us in all the plenitude of his grace and power and truth and love.
But there does not miss that, the richness of the preposition. You care him all for us, soon now told with heaven.
Let us not miss these, the significance in the thought is that so great is the gift, so marvelous are its implications, so far reaching its consequences.
That all gifts of lesser magnitude are entirely certain of free bestowment. That is the apostle's argument.
The argument from the greater to the less. And if he did the greater, if he did that which is incomparable, shall he not really give us all things?
Well, are we thinking of the enormity of our sins and the question of the pardon?
Are we simply appalled by the offense that is offered to the majesty of God by our sins so that we are overwhelmed with the enormity of their guilt?
Well, the Father will blot them out as a big cloud because these very sins in all the enormity of their being and liability he laid upon his own Son.
Let us always get back to the assurance of that fact that it is God the Father who forgives, that he forgives because of that which he did.
Not sparing his own Son, but delivering his love not for us all. Are we thinking of the temptations, so subtle and overpowering that we dread the fall before the tempter's devices?
For the tempter's stratagems, to use the word that was used last night. Are we?
Do we tremble before the iniquity that is perpetrated by the great Dutch enemy who is human in the slanders that will be circulated because people hate the people of God?
Oh, remember my friends, remember that God gave up his own Son to bring to naught the Prince of darkness.
He cast him out. He is no longer the victor.
Now is the judgment of this world said Jesus. Now shall the Prince of this world be cast out.
And it is just because God the Father gave him up to the full power of the arch enemy that he executed upon him this fatal wound.
Are we thinking of the last enemy, death of the grim struggle that may be harsh when death assails us?
It is natural to dread death because death is unnatural.
I say it again, it is natural to dread death because death is unnatural.
Do we dread what we may have to face? Well, remember the Father gave his Son to die in order that he might take the sting out of death.
Death is the consummation of the people of God as they contemplate confrontation with the last enemy.
It is not without significance that the wider of the epistles of the Hebrews reminded his readers that it was the Lord Jesus Christ who delivered them from the fear of death.
Because he brought not him that had the power of death, that is the devil.
Oh, there is reality in this and perhaps that reality is being accented in our day and generation but whatever our situation may be as we are thinking of death, let us remember.
Christ, because he was delivered up by God the Father to the full power of the great arch enemy, he was the power of death.
We said, oh death, where is thy sting? Oh death, where is thy victory?
The sting of death is sin and the strength of sin is the law but I speak to God.
Give us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. Are you thinking of the spotless perfection that must be ours if we are to enter the portals of glory?
Are you thinking of the awful discrepancy that there is between your present condition and that which is entailed in your hope?
Well, remember this beloved, that it is no meaner destiny that the Father inscribed on the Son's commission.
And this is the Father's will which has sent me that of all which he has given me I should lose nothing but should raise it up again the last day.
In this conference surely I will speak the feelings of everyone. Have we not been laid prostrate?
Have we not felt our utter desperation before the reproof of God's Word?
Have we not felt the awful discrepancy that there is between our attainment and our obligation?
Have we not been prostrate in the dust? Well, I want to bring to you the encouragement. Here it is.
He that spared not his old son, but delivered him mud for us all, how shall he not with him also freely give us all things?
And the determining purpose of his love will not rest.
Everyone whom Christ is precious will be presented thoughtless before the pretzels of his glory with exceeding joy and attained to the highest conceivable destiny.
The highest destiny that God himself could devise for sinners, that they will be conformed to the image of his Son.
That he may be the firstborn among many brethren, and in the pilgrimage to that glorious consummation,
let us find how so constantly in this assurance, the assurance of God of all his love,
He that spared not his own son, but delivered him mud for us all, how shall he not with him also freely give us all things?
Let us pray.
O, eternal and devil blessed God, do thou be merciful to us.
Meet our insufficiency with the abundance of thy provision.
Meet our unbelief with the power of thy grace.
And grant that we may be able more and more to abound in faith, in love and in hope,
that we may put on the Lord Jesus Christ, make no provision for the flesh,
but lay hold upon all the promises that are gay, and our men in Christ, and out of his wholeness may we all be seen.
Grace, all grace, in his name, amen.