A HARD TASK FOR THE TRINITY
Harry Foster
"It is hard for the righteous to be saved" 1 Peter 4:18 N.I.V.
MOST versions give a rendering which argues that the righteous is scarcely saved. This is a statement which is not easy to understand. It is apparently a quotation from Proverbs 11:31, but that verse does not give us much assistance in seeking its true meaning. The word "scarcely" cannot indicate an experience of only just scraping in, for that would be unworthy of the gospel. We find it in Romans 5:7, where the stress seems to be on the great difficulties involved: "Scarcely for a righteous man would one die". It is used here to indicate the unlikeliness of the matter, that it is so hard as to be almost impossible. For this reason the N.I.V. translation: "It is hard", is a more helpful one, the stress being on the costliness rather than on the narrowness of the escape.
Young's Concordance renders the word, "with toil and fatigue"; Darby has it: "It is with difficulty"; while the NEB reads: "It is hard enough ...". "Scarcely" does not appear to convey the right idea to us, for it is unlikely that Peter would pass from writing about the believer's portion of fullness of glory to suggest that after all the redeemed sinner has only just scraped into heaven by the skin of his teeth. The apostle preferred to contemplate "an abundant entrance into the everlasting kingdom" (2 Peter 1:11).
Yet the fact remains that here he writes of salvation being "hard". To whom was it hard? Not, surely, to the sinner. Had not Peter spent his life trying to convince men of how easy it is to be saved (Acts 2:39 & 10:43)? No, salvation is not hard for the trusting sinner; for him it is free, as any gospel preacher knows. Then for whom is it hard? Not for the saved, but for the Saviour. Our salvation has been the most difficult and most costly operation ever undertaken by the Triune God. It is free for us but it is not cheap. It is very simple for the repentant sinner but it was indescribably hard for his gracious Saviour.
The rest of the verse asks quite logically what hope there is for the one who does not avail himself of this salvation. If God had so to extend Himself to make it possible, what hope can any man have who does not know His saving grace? Where shall he appear? Where indeed! All of us were "scarcely" saved in the sense that we might so easily have been lost. Only a faithful Creator who made Himself into a sacrificial Redeemer delivered us from our predicament. But at what a cost! The Triune God was extended to the full to get us justified.
It was easy for God to create the world. He just spoke and it was done. It was not difficult for Him to bring the human race into being. He used His hands to form Adam and He breathed His life to animate him, but this entailed no remarkable effort for such a One. But how hard it must have been for Him when man treacherously broke away from His love and entered into league with Satan, His sworn enemy! We feel for the wretched humans, expelled from God's lovely garden, but should we not rather feel for the outraged God of love? There is a sense in which we can describe Genesis 3 as the Father's great sorrow.
And the heartache continued until Jesus was born. At the time of the Flood we are told that God was broken-hearted: "It repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart" (Genesis 6:6). Looking back on those forty wilderness years of His amazing goodness to Israel in the wilderness, God had to confess: "Forty years long was I grieved with that generation" (Psalm 95:10), and later on the prophets bore witness to the continuing tragedy of God's unrequited love: "The more I called them, the more they went from me" (Hosea 11:2). Our right appreciation of the serene majesty of our eternal God must never make us think of Him as unfeeling. In a world like ours supreme holiness must entail deep suffering.
It must have been hard for the Father to keep on loving such an unlovely world as ours. It must have been hard for Him to bear with each of us, as guilty as Adam and as ungrateful as Israel. Think of the strain on His patience! [1/2] Far from being unfeeling, His reaction about Israel was to say to Moses: "Let me alone ... that I may consume them" (Exodus 32:10). Through Isaiah He protested: "I cannot away with iniquity ... your new moons and your appointed feasts my soul hateth ... I am weary to bear them" (Isaiah 1:13-14). It was as though even God Himself could not stand any more. He did, though, but none of us will ever know how sorely His patience must have been tried. His last Old Testament words were a well-justified threat to smite this selfishly ugly world with a curse. But He did not do so. He moved into the New Testament with the gift of His Son. Thousands of years of treacherous ingratitude on man's part had not exhausted His patience. But it must have been very hard -- even for God.
And then the New Testament brings us to the hardest part of all -- the sacrificial sending of His Son to this sinful earth. It is not easy for us to appreciate how much pain the Father bore from the Incarnation to the Cross. Foolish men -- even foolish Christians -- have attributed to Jehovah a cold, judicial or even vindictive attitude which was only pacified by the intervention of the compassionate Jesus. Such ideas are an insult to His name of Father. Let us never forget that it was God who so loved the world that He gave ... May we not reverently suggest that this was the hardest thing that almighty God ever did?
Now God loves a cheerful giver, for that is what He is like. It follows, therefore, that He accompanied His most sacrificial giving with a song. The angel sang at Bethlehem, though for a time heaven had been emptied of the glorious presence of the well-beloved Son. And even when that Son made His final choice to go to the cruel cross, the Father did not complain but spoke from heaven about glory coming to His name (John 12:28). But, if God rejoiced, He also suffered. We would be foolish to a degree and unappreciative, too, if we did not pause to ask ourselves how hard it must have been for the Father to share in this sacrifice at Calvary.
There is not much in Scripture to explain this costliness to the Father of our salvation. Perhaps the story of Abraham's sacrifice is the best Old Testament illustration of it, for we read how he and Isaac "went both of them together" to Mount Moriah (Genesis 22:6, 8), and we tend to sympathise especially with the father as we consider that sombre journey. It is not difficult to realise something of the cost to that father of the proposed sacrifice of his only and much loved son, and this may give to us some small indication of how hard to the heart of the Father must have been the sacrifice of His Son on the Cross.
There is a further hint of this in the New Testament phrase: "He that spared not his own Son" (Romans 8:32) with the implication that He would rather have done anything else, had it been possible. If we were to be saved it was not possible. God so loved, which means that God had so to suffer.
May we suggest that the darkest moment even in divine history was when the Son cried out: "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" Quite rightly we judge this to have been the hardest blow of all for the Son, but perhaps we have been slower to imagine the infinite distress that must have come to the Father as He heard that anguished cry and forced Himself to remain silent. It is true that the righteous is "scarcely" saved in the sense that only a God whose name is Love could have carried through the work of redemption.
We do not need to enlarge upon the cost to the Son of our salvation, for every justified sinner is constantly reminded at the Lord's Table of how hard it must have been for Christ to die for our sins. In this connection we may be glad to use the word "scarcely", for it hardly seems possible that He would do all that just for us.
But before we consider His death we must ponder the totality of His life as our Saviour. It was not the sensational element in His life but the inner and unseen selflessness which must have been so hard. When He made the paralytic man to walk, He described it as easy (Mark 2:9). When He stilled the fearsome tempest, He did so without hesitation, and only expressed surprise that His disciples had been so worried about it all (Mark 4:40). When He went to Bethany to raise up from the grave a man who had been dead for four days, He gave no impression of effort, but simply thanked the Father for a straightforward answer to a simple prayer. For Him nothing of this was hard. Men marvelled, but to Him it was not difficult. For this reason we are apt to take His holy life for granted, as though everything were easy for Him. How wrong we are! [2/3]
He took up His cross daily, as He told us to do, and that must have meant that He never had an easy day. Was it not hard for Him to choose to be born in a stable and to spend all those years in the carpenter's shop? Was it not hard for Him to endure such opposition from sinful men (Hebrews 12:3)? Was it easy for Him never to please Himself (Romans 15:3), never to do His own will (John 6:38)? Was it not hard for Him to come down from the Mount of Transfiguration instead of stepping straight into the glory of heaven, as presumably He might well have done? As the time of His passion drew near, He was overwhelmed with an agony of inner conflict. "What shall I say?" He cried (John 12:27). "If it be possible, let this cup pass from me", He prayed in a blood-like sweat of agony (Luke 22:44).
In the Gospels we also see clearly how subtle were the Satanic attempts which made life hard for the Son of God. From the first fierce temptations in the wilderness, through the years of ministry when the Tempter even duped the beloved Peter into being his spokesman, and right to the very end when he used the thoughtless crowds to urge Christ to come down from the cross, the Devil stopped at nothing in his efforts to hinder Christ's redemptive work. Mercifully for us, the great enemy of our souls was defeated, but it was a hard, hard fight, right up to its bitter end.
Salvation is the work of the Spirit as well as of the Father and the Son. This is the most difficult part of our consideration, for the Holy Spirit has neither visible shape nor personal name. We are so used to thinking of the Spirit in terms of empowered service or enthusiastic rejoicing, that we tend to think of Him as an influence or an energy, overlooking that He is a real person and subject to real emotion.
His personality is proved by the fact that He loves, He speaks, He guides and He forbids. More than this, though, His capacity for suffering is proved by the fact that both the Old Testament and the New speak of His being grieved. We are told that the people "grieved his holy Spirit" (Isaiah 63:10) and this is made all the more poignant in that His love had been so great that "in all their affliction he was afflicted" (v.9). To the Ephesians Paul wrote: "And grieve not the Holy Spirit of God ..." (4:30). This shows that things may be made hard for the Spirit to bear. Let us never be carried away by the use of the pronoun "it" in the A. V. The Spirit is not an impersonal atmosphere or energy by which God imparts power or joy to us. He is God. He loves; and because He loves He suffers.
It was hard for the Holy Spirit to bring salvation to the sinner. Is this sound doctrine? I suggest that it is not difficult to prove that it is. Was it hard for Jesus to be tempted in the wilderness? Of course it was -- much harder than we can realise. But who was responsible for that bitter conflict? It was the Holy Spirit who had no sooner descended as a dove upon the Lord than He led Him into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil (Matthew 4:1). If the tender, gracious Spirit of God delights to comfort, how costly must it have been to precipitate such bitter suffering! He did not enjoy leading Jesus into the wilderness. For Him it would surely have been so much more pleasant to have begun straight away by anointing the lips of Jesus in the Nazareth synagogue. But for our sakes and our redemption, it was somehow necessary for the Lord first to be tempted and tried, hard as it might be for Him personally to go, and hard also as it must have been for the Spirit so to direct His steps. And in fact when Jesus did go to Nazareth and the anointing Spirit empowered Him to speak wonderful words of life, the outcome was complete rejection by the people there. Can we doubt that such hostile response was hard for the Spirit to bear? How grieved He must have been?
Much harder, though, when He led the Lord to the cross. This He certainly did. The whole life of Jesus was ruled and directed by the Holy Spirit, so it must have been the Spirit who led the Saviour to Jerusalem, to the Garden of Gethsemane and to the cruel cross. We know that it was so, for we are told that "through the eternal Spirit" Christ offered Himself to God (Hebrews 9:14). Who, then, can deny that however easy it may be for the Spirit to perform miracles, it was bitterly hard for Him to accomplish our redemption? The Father, the Son and the Spirit worked harmoniously and sacrificially that even one sinner might be saved. In our text the word "righteous" is singular. All this was necessary for the salvation of one sinner. It was the hardest of all tasks for the whole Trinity to provide salvation just for Peter, or for you, or for me. Surely we can say, with Jeremiah: "There [3/4] is nothing too hard for the Lord", but we do so in no glib or superficial manner but with a deep sense of the miracle of divine love and power provided by the cross. In a sense, it is all a part of God's creator activities that the work of redemption should safeguard His purpose in creation, and perhaps it is for this reason that Peter makes use of the striking phrase: "their faithful Creator". Faithfulness is a costly virtue, and God had to pay a fearful price to redeem His fallen creatures. Was it worth it? This is not an unreasonable question, and in fact any sensitive believer may well feel a doubt as to whether his personal salvation warranted the enormous cost which God paid for it. Does the Triune God consider the pains of the cross to be worthwhile? We turn again to the Scriptures for the answer to such a question.
For this purpose we begin with the Son, for of Him it is clearly stated that: "He shall see of the travail of his soul, and shall be satisfied" (Isaiah 53:11). This makes it plain that, far from regretting the pains which He endured, our Saviour is well content with the fruits of His redeeming work. It was hard, very hard, to make it possible for a lost sinner to become a justified son of God, but the Lord Jesus finds deep pleasure in His saved people. One can only begin to imagine what deep gratification must have flooded the risen Saviour's heart as He listened to Mary Magdalene's delighted exclamation; "Rabboni", and as He wiped away the tears of His dear Peter. And so with each one of us. "He shall see his seed", the prophet foretold, and He does see us. "He will be satisfied" Isaiah prophesied, and we may be sure that He is.
What about the Father? Well, His supreme satisfaction is always in His Son, as He Himself repeatedly declared, but so far as we are concerned there is an illuminating phrase in Paul's writings in which he speaks of "the glorious gospel of the happy God" (1 Timothy 1:11). The association of God's blessedness with His gospel at least hints at the pleasure which has come to Him in our salvation. Earlier in his ministry Paul had reminded the Corinthians that "it was God's good pleasure, through the foolishness of the preaching (of the word of the cross), to save them that believe" (1 Corinthians 1:21). Clearly, then, the Father is delighted with redemption's results and feels well recompensed for the great price which He had to pay to achieve it for us.
It is neither easy nor profitable to make discriminations within the Godhead, but surely we are justified in asserting that the Holy Spirit shares in this satisfaction. See how He came in such fullness to the Church at Pentecost, notice how He was poured out in jubilant praise at Caesarea (Acts 10:45), and note that when the Thessalonians received the gospel message, they found that it was accompanied by "joy of the Holy Spirit" (1 Thessalonians 1:6). Paul assures us that the kingdom of God is composed of "joy in the Holy Spirit" (Romans 14:17).
This is probably enough to prove our point. There is one verse which helps to stress both the combined work of the Trinity and the satisfaction enjoyed in salvation; it is Galatians 1:15, where Paul speaks of his experience "When it was the good pleasure of God ... to reveal his Son in me ...". The Father separated Paul; the Son called him; and the Spirit indwelt him. And the whole operation was marked by God's good pleasure. In this, Paul is a pattern for each justified sinner. For our compassion and prayers this is also a reminder of the dire peril of those for whom the cross is still foolishness. "Where shall the non-believer and the unbeliever appear?" Where indeed?
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