the choicest weapons of Satan for corrupting and spoiling professors of religion* Gehazi, Ananias and Sapphira are names which naturally occur to our minds. But of all proofs, there is none so melancholy as the one before us. For money a chosen apostle sold the best and most loving of Masters ! For money Judas Iscariot betrayed Christ ! Let us watch and pray against the love of money. It is a subtle disease, and often far nearer to us than we suppose. A poor man is just as liable to it as a rich man. It is possible to love money without having it, and it is possible to have it without loving it. Let us be " content with such things as we have." (Heb. xiii. 6.) We never know what we might do if we became suddenly rich. It is a striking fact, that there is only one prayer in all the Book of Proverbs, and that one of the three petitions in that prayer, is the wise request, — " Give me neither poverty nor riches." (Prov. xxx. 8.)
We see, lastly, in these verses, the close connection between our Lord Jesus Christ's death and the Feast of the Passover. Four times we are reminded here that the evening before His crucifixion was the time of the great Jewish feast. It was " the day when the Passover must be killed."
We cannot doubt that the time of our Lord's cruci- fixion was overruled by God. His perfect wisdom and controlling power arranged that the Lamb of God should die, at the very time when the passover-lamb was being slain. The death of Christ was the fulfilment of the passover. He was the true sacrifice to which every pass- over-lamb had been pointing for 1500 years. What the death of the lamb had been to Israel in Egypt, His
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death was to be to sinnero all over the world. The flafety which the blood of the passover-lamb had provided for Israel^ His blood was to provide far more abuadantly for all that believed in Him.
Let us never forget the sacrificial character of Christ's death. Let us reject with abhorrence the modem notion that it was nothing more than a mighty instance of self- sacrifice and self-denial. It was this no donbt ; — ^but it was something far higher, deeper, and moi^ important than this. It was a propitiation for the sins of the wodd. It was an atonement for man's tran^ession. It was the killing of the true passover, through whose death destruction is warded off from sinners believing on Him. "Christ our passover," says St Paul, "is sacrificed for us." (I Cor. V. 7.) Let us grasp that truth firmly, and never let it go.
Notes. Luke XXTT. 1 — 13.
1. — ( Which U called the passover.] Let it be noted that this expres- sion shows that St. Luke wrote his Gospel specially for the bene- fit of the Gentiles. Such an explanatory phrase as this would not have been used, if it had been written for the Jews.
2. — [Chief Priests and Scribes sought how, del Burkitt remarks on this verse, "As general councils have erred, and may err fundamentally, both in matter of doctrine and practice, so did this general council at Jerusalem, consisting of Chief Priests, Doctors and Eiders, with the High Priest for their president."
\_Feared the people.'] The dread of public opinion is curiously shown here, as well as in the famous case of Herod desiring to kill John the Baptist, and yet a&aid. Well-directed public opinion is one of God's most poweiful instruments for controlling tyrants and oppressors, and keeping the world in ord^.
3. — [Then entered Satan into Judas.] Calvin remarks on this ex- expression, " Though Satan drives us every day to crime, and feigns in us, when he hurries us into a course of extraordinary wickedness ; yet he is said to enter into the reprobate when he tiikes possession of all their senses, overthrowB the fear of God,