All mankind have fallen in Adam. We are all sinners. By nature, we are all rebels against God and His law – and therefore under condemnation, under a sentence of eternal punishment. We need to be saved, both from the punishment that is due to us because of our sin and from the power and the pollution of sin. But there is no way through which we can deliver ourselves from that terrible predicament.
Yet there is a way through which we may be saved. If we really understood the seriousness of our predicament as condemned sinners, we would stand in utter amazement at the thought that a way of deliverance really exists. But God has indeed revealed a way of deliverance in Scripture, a way which is totally reliable. In fact, it is He who has provided the salvation that we need. He says to us all: “Look unto Me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth: for I am God, and there is none else” (Is 45:22).
We should not fear that He lacks the power to save; He speaks the words just quoted as “the Lord that created the heavens”, and He goes on to say that He is “God Himself that formed the earth and made it; He hath established it, He created it not in vain, He formed it to be inhabited: I am the Lord; and there is none else” (Is 45:18). He is the Creator, the only Creator; there has never been any other being who was able to create the heavens and the earth, an expression which is intended to describe the whole universe. In our time it is important to emphasise that a blind force like evolution could not possibly have brought any part of the universe into existence; in particular, it could not have brought about life, and especially human life. Evolution does not have any power, and certainly does not have the power to bring into existence something as complex as a human being, or even a single cell in a human being – and a single cell is itself amazingly complex.
Great power was needed to create the universe – very great power. But greater power – indeed infinite power – is required to bring about the salvation of sinners from both the power and the consequences of sin. It is not only that Satan must be conquered, who was able to exercise his evil power over our first parents, bringing them under his authority in his kingdom –
though that is a usurped authority. Yet it is an authority from which they were never able to escape by their own power. Nor can any of their descendants. Creation required enormous power, but not infinite power. But even if one sinner was to be saved, it required that God’s justice – God’s infinite justice – be satisfied, and no finite power can satisfy the stringent requirements of divine justice.
The Lord describes Himself as “a just God and a Saviour”; when He saves sinners, He is altogether righteous. And He emphasises, “There is no God else beside Me; there is none beside Me” (Is 45:21); no other being can be put beside Him; nothing that human beings imagine to be a god can be compared to Jehovah, who is the one living and true God. If sinners are to be saved – in particular, if we as individuals are to be saved – it must be the work of the one living and true God.
Many another way of salvation has been tried. People love to look to themselves and what they hope to do by way of making themselves better, turning away from this sin and that sin. But it has always been totally unsuccessful; even if they succeed in giving up particular outward sins, they are still sinners. The root of sin remains in the sinner’s heart, with all the capacity of a sinful heart to produce fresh sins and to continue existing sins, both inward and outward. In spite of all his self-righteousness, Saul of Tarsus discovered that it was imperfect. He came to realise that he was covetous (see Rom 7:7); he began to find himself guilty of heart sin. He had wrongly imagined that he could cleanse himself outwardly, but he was wrong, and God also taught him that he must be cleansed inwardly; he needed a new heart; he required a radical inward transformation, which he could not bring about himself. And we need the same transformation as Saul.
We may return to the words already quoted: “Look unto Me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth: for I am God”, and we may think of Christ, the Son of God, in particular, as the speaker. He is the One who came into this world to work out salvation. He is telling us that, if we look to Him, we will be saved, for He is God. As God the Son, He is all-powerful; so He was able to carry the burden of sin and to bear it away. “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life” (Jn 3:16).
George Smeaton stresses that the words, “He gave His only begotten Son”, have “the sacrificial sense of being delivered or given up to death. . . It is properly the giving up in sacrifice, because the presentation of the victim formed part of the act of sacrifice. . . Wherever [the expression] occurs, whether as denoting the Father’s act in giving the Son (Rom 8:32), or the act of the Son in giving Himself (Mt 20:28, Gal 1:4), it is always descriptive of
the sacrifice which He offered to God the Father.”1 This act of offering up Himself was an act of power, of divine power; it was the perfect act of a divine Person, who can say, “I am God”.
Further, God the Father is perfectly satisfied with the work of His Son as Redeemer. The prophecy was fulfilled: “The Lord is well pleased for His righteousness’ sake; He will magnify the law, and make it honourable” (Is 42:21). God is well pleased with His Son, who made the law of God great and honourable in two ways when He was acting as the substitute for those whom the Father gave to Him, from all eternity, as His people. First, Christ kept the whole law perfectly, in all its precepts, during His time in the world; second, He suffered the entire penalty due to Him as One who undertook to suffer the punishment that was due to His people. The consequence is that, when a sinner obeys the call to “look” to Christ by faith, the sinner is “saved”, saved from all the consequences of a broken law, and it is certain too that the sinner will experience eternal life.
Sinners in “all the ends of the earth” are called. One might think of those who are spiritually far away from Christ, because of the special seriousness of the sins they have committed. They are all called to come to Him by faith, and He assures them all: “Him that cometh to Me I will in no wise cast out” (Jn 6:37). But everyone’s sin is serious, because it is committed against the infinitely holy God. Matthew Henry comments on Isaiah 45:22: “The God of Israel says it to all the ends of the earth, to His people [the Jews], though they are scattered into the utmost corners of the world and seem to be lost and forgotten in their dispersion. [He says,] Let them but look to Me by faith and prayer, look off from all instruments and second causes, look off from all pretenders, but look up to Me, and they shall be saved”.
He continues, “It seems to refer further to the conversion of the Gentiles that lived in the ends of the earth, the most distant nations, when the standard of the gospel is set up. ‘To it shall the Gentiles seek.’ When Christ is lifted up from the earth, as the brazen serpent upon the pole, He shall draw the eyes of all men to Him. They shall all be invited to look unto Him, as the stung Israelites did to the brazen serpent; and so strong is the eye of faith that by divine grace it will reach the Saviour and fetch in salvation by Him even from the ends of the earth; for He is God, and there is none else.”
The salvation that Christ has procured is suited to sinners of every kind. To all who hear the gospel, that call comes with full divine authority. Yes, God is speaking to each one of us when He says, “Look unto Me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth: for I am God, and there is none else”.
1Smeaton, The Doctrine of the Atonement as Taught by Christ Himself, Alpha Publications reprint, 1979, pp 44, 45.