In that great book of spiritual symbolism--the Book of Revelation--those who overcome are builded, as pillars, into the Temple of God, and He writes His new name upon them. The new name is Redeemer. Those who have come up through great tribulation and have washed their robes in the blood of the Lamb are builded in as a permanent part of the Temple, where God reveals Himself, and they share with Him in the great redeeming work of the ages.
Whatever it has meant in the past, in the ages when the races were sloughing off their paganism, in the future the atonement must be vital and dynamic. It must be put in language which grips the heart, convinces the mind, and carries the will. It will name for us the Divine-human travail for a redeemed humanity. It will cease to signify a way by which God was appeased and it will come to express, as it did in the apostolic days, the identification of God with us in the person of Christ, and the identification, by the power of His love, of ourselves with Him. We shall pass from the terms which were inherited from magic and ancient sacerdotal rites and we shall use instead the language of our riper experience. We shall abandon illustrations drawn from law courts and judicial decisions and we shall rise to conceptions which fit the actual facts of inward, personal experience where higher and lower natures contend for the mastery. The drama will not be in some foreign realm, apart from human consciousness, it will rise in our thought into the supreme drama of history--the tragedy of the spiritual universe--the battle of holiness with sin--the blood and tears which tell the cost of sin and create in response a passion for the Divine Lover who is our Father. It will stop at no fictitious righteousness which is counted unto us, as though it were ours. We shall demand an actual redemption of the entire self which has become righteous, because it lives, in Christ’s power, the life which He lived.
We shall learn to tell the story in such a way that the cross will not seem to be brought in, as an afterthought, to repair the damage wrought by an unforeseen catastrophe. It will stand as the consummation of an elemental spiritual movement and it will be organic with the entire process of the making of men. With charm and power, Ruskin has told how the black dirt that soils the city pavement is composed of four elements which make, when they follow the law of their nature, the sapphire, the opal, the diamond and the dew drop. The glory and splendor do not appear in the black dirt, but the possibilities are there. When the law of the nature of these elements has full sweep the glory comes out. Man was not meant for a sinner, and to live a dark, chaotic life. There are far other possibilities in him. He is a potential child of God. The full nature has broken forth in one life and men beheld its glory. “To as many as receive Him, to them gives He power to become the sons of God.”