TMSJ 32/1 (Spring 2021) 21–38 IMPUTATION AND ITS IMAGES IN THE PREACHING OF CHARLES HADDON SPURGEON Tom J. Nettles Ph.D., Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary Senior Professor of Historical Theology Southern Baptist Theological Seminary * * * * * The cross was ever at the center of the preaching of Charles Spurgeon. He was fix- ated upon the reality that “as the Lord looked upon Christ as though he had been a sinner, though he was no sinner, and dealt with him as such, so now the Lord looks upon the believing sinner as though he were righteous, though indeed he has no righteousness of his own.” And as a result of that dark day upon the cross, God sees the one in whose place Christ stood and “he loves him, and delights in his perfect comeliness, regarding him as covered with the mantle of his Redeemer’s righteous- ness, and as having neither spot nor wrinkle nor any such thing.” This is the beauty of the doctrine of imputation. And it pervades the thinking and preaching of Charles Spurgeon, as will be demonstrated in this article. * * * * * Spurgeon’s preaching on the cross of Christ never veered from the doctrinal realities involved in imputation. He believed in the reality of the imputation of Adam’s sin and condemnation to the entirety of the human race. As mankind’s federal head, his disobedience was man’s disobedience in the Garden of Eden. The punishment of corruption descends to man from Adam and must be dealt with upon the cross. Spurgeon also affirmed that on the cross, the sins of the elect were imputed to Christ. He placed himself under debt to the justice of God by taking humanity’s cause in the covenant of Redemption and taking their place in the sentence of condemnation unexceptionally placed on lawbreakers. Though not made a sinner, Jesus the Christ was reckoned as one, voluntarily (through His eternal will perfectly expressive of the will of the Father) assuming mankind’s position under merited wrath, and dying in their stead. As a result of His complete obedience, including His death on the cross, Jesus finished the course of obedience which Adam failed. Jesus did this under severely trying circumstances, while Adam failed under the most ingratiating circumstances. Jesus persevered in obedience in a fallen world among 21 22 | Imputation and Its Images hateful, obscene, violent, deceitful, hypocritical people. Adam failed in an unfallen world, in the most pleasant of environments, having to deal only with one fallen creature with a test of positive obedience isolated to one specific, easily discernible command. Jesus had the knowledge of the entire law in its perfection as the content of His obedience with the test of positive obedience being His propitiatory death, dying “the just for the unjust.” His complete righteousness, sealed by His resurrection then, by imputation, becomes the meritorious vestment of the believing sinner. Sinners are justified before God by imputation of righteousness. Spurgeon believed these three categories of imputation. This article, while not omitting the other two, will focus on the imputation of man’s guilt and, thus, punishment to Christ. Spurgeon saw the very purpose of preaching to be the setting forth of the Word of God. He did this by expositing extended passages of Scripture in each worship service, making pertinent comments on selected verses as he read the larger text. He also did this by preaching more concentrated sermons on smaller texts, from which he developed a doctrine which he would explain and apply under two to five points of emphasis. Only with the most extreme rarity would Spurgeon omit some urging of the death of Christ as central to every doctrine of Scripture and aspect of the Christian life. He could refer to his preaching on the cross as “an old truth to which you have listened many and many a time, but it is a truth which should be and will be exceedingly delightful to all those whose consciences are troubled with sin.”1 Among many clear explanations of imputation, Spurgeon’s sermon on “Peace: A Fact and a Feeling,” probes the meaning of imputation as the foundation for the state of peace enjoyed by the believer. Peace is established objectively by “the abounding mercy of God, who in order to our peace, finds a substitute to bear our penalty, and reveals to us this gracious fact.” Sin has been laid on Christ, and He has carried it away. Faith accepts His death as a substitute. He was just, but died; and sinners are unjust, but live, because the One who died under the curse now lives. By imputation of Adam’s sin, fallen man is conceived in condemnation before any voluntary act on their part; so that by the payment of another they can be absolved of the punishment of guilt through no voluntary righteousness of their own. When God devised the “plan of substitution the full penalty demanded of the guiltless surety” brought exemption from punishment for the guilty. “That Jesus should suffer vicariously and yet those for whom he paid the quittance in drops of blood should obtain no acquittal could not be.” He has both obeyed the law and suffered the penalty of the law in humanity’s stead, so they must be declared perfectly righteous and free from any susceptibility of punishment. “According to the infinite purpose and will of God the righteousness of Christ is imputed to the believer.” The sinner now is “covered with the mantle of his Redeemer’s righteousness.” Peace may now come to the heart, and those who trust in Christ may say with perfect verity in light of an objective, historical reality, “Soul, thou art free from sin, for Christ has borne thy sin in his own body on the tree. Soul, thou art righteous before God, for the righteousness of Christ is thine by imputation.” The payment of “quittance in drops of blood” meant 1 “The Putting Away of Sin,” in Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, 63 vols. (repr. Logos Research Edition, 2012), 16:37. Hereafter referred to as MTP, the Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit consists of 63 volumes, begun a the new Park Street Pulpit and changed to MTP at volume 7, 1861. The titles of sermons will be given at the first reference. The Master’s Seminary Journal | 23 that the sinner “has borne the utmost penalty of the law by his Substitute, which penalty God himself has accepted.” How was such justice served through a substitute? “He took our sin, but he has our sin no longer, for on the cross he discharged and annihilated it all so that it ceased to be, and he has gone into the glory as the representative and the substitute of his people, cleared from their imputed liabilities—clean delivered from anything that could be brought against him on their account.” Christ is the manifestation of the Father’s eternal love and is thus, the “object of divine complacency.” Also, He is loved for He has fully accomplished the Father’s will. United with Him by faith, therefore, believers receive that love with which Christ was loved before the foundation of the world, and, because also embraced in the love of a fully accomplished righteousness, “Sin is forgiven. What is more, righteousness is imputed.”2 In describing Paul’s meaning in the phrase: “There is no difference,” Spurgeon summarized, “All have forfeited every claim to personal righteousness, all must be made righteous by the imputation of the righteousness of Christ to them.”3 Expanding on this idea, he defined the entire “plan of salvation” in terms of the transfer, the imputation, of man’s sin to Christ and His righteousness to man. The plan of salvation is this,—that we do confess and acknowledge that our own righteousness is but filthy rags, that there is nothing in us that can merit anything of God; and, next, that we apprehend that the Lord has put his dear Son into our place, has laid on him our sin, and smitten him with the strokes that ought to have fallen upon us; he, on his part willingly becoming our Surety and Substitute. We must believe this if we would be saved. That being done, we must accept what Christ has endured as being borne for us, and trust in it with our whole hearts. We must, in fact, change places with Christ;—let him stand, as he did stand, and be reckoned as the sinner, that we might stand here, and be looked upon by God as if we had been like his Son, perfectly righteous and without sin. He clothes himself in our rags, and he puts on us his royal robes. Faith appropriates to itself the righteousness of the Lord Jesus Christ, and so is clothed with what is called in our text “the righteousness of God.”4 In “The Putting Away of Sin,” Spurgeon surrounded the idea of imputation with several defining concepts. When Christ came into the world, the sins of all His people were “made to meet in one tremendous mass.” Since for this very purpose He came, “Jesus Christ suffered all this to be imputed to him,” for according to the terms of the covenant, the Lord—that is His Father—“laid on him the iniquity of us all.” In this transaction “he was accounted as if he had committed it all.” His sufferings, therefore, were endured as “the penalty due for all the sins of his people, or rather the death which God had stipulated should stand as an equivalent for the sufferings of all the guilty ones for whom he stood.” This mountainous mass of sin was completely and 2 “Peace: A Fact and a Feeling,” in Spurgeon’s Expository Encyclopedia, 15 vols.