e perfect
fulfilment of the mission received from the Father. "He became obedient
unto death." He died, rather than, by the slightest concession to that
which was opposed to the Divine Will, be unfaithful or disobedient to
that mission. "He died to sin once for all." His Death was His final,
complete repudiation of sin. And thus it was the absolutely perfect
revelation of the Divine Mind in regard to sin.

This is the truth which underlies all the utterly misleading language
about Christ's Death as a penalty, or about Christ Himself as the Ideal
Penitent. Both penalty and penitence imply personal guilt and the
personal consciousness of guilt. Both conceptions destroy the
significance of the Cross. Only the Sinless One could die to sin, could
perfectly repudiate sin, could perfectly disclose the Mind of God in
relation to sin.

The Death of Christ was indeed, as we have seen, the result of His
perfect obedience in a world of sin, of disobedience. The historical
conditions under which He fulfilled His Mission, necessitated that His
repudiation of sin should take the form which it did actually take. We
may be sure, too, that He felt, as only the Sinless Son of God could
feel, the injury, the affront, the malignity, the degradation of sin. It
is the sense of this which has given rise to the modern idea of Christ as
the Penitent for the world's sin. But if we are to understand the word
in this sense, then we are entirely changing its meaning and connotation.
And we cannot do this, in regard to words like penitent and penitence,
without producing confusion of thought. It is time, surely, that this
misleading and mischievous fallacy of the penitence of Christ should be
finally abandoned by writers on the Atonement.

But, so far, we have only seen that the Death of Christ to sin, His
repudiation of sin to the point of death, is the complete revelation of
the Divine Wrath, the Divine Mind in regard to sin. If we could only
make all this our own, then we should have actually attained to the
changed mind, the [Greek text], which is reconciliation with God.

Now, it is a most significant fact that, in the New Testament, repentance
is ever closely coupled with faith. Faith, in its highest, its most
Christian application, is not faith _in_ Christ, in the sense of
believing that the revelation made by Christ is true, but in the strange
and pregnant phrase of St. Paul and St. John, faith _into_ Christ. And
by this i