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.
