2. The death of Christ, " the Eternal Son of God," teaches us, as nothing else can, what sin is, and how awful is the purity and holiness of God. We begin to see why "remission of sins" belongs so especially to the death of Christ rather than to His Incarnation. We begin to see why the cross is so dear to the pardoned sinner. In the cross of Calvary we see that finished work whereby the sins of the past are done away, the wound of nature is healed, freedom from bondage is won, since man is once more reconciled, made just in the sight of God, " accepted in the beloved." By the sacrifice of the cross is revealed the infinite love of God, in vindicating the eternal law, and yet saving man from death. No legal fiction, no mere vicarious sacrifice, can
EZEKIEL xviii. 4, 27 193
satisfy our conscience, and make us just before God. It was man that sinned ; it is man that must suffer.
0 generous love ! that He who smote
In Man for man the foe, The double agony in Man
For man should undergo.
It is a beautiful suggestion of the greatest of the Schoolmen, that the perfect love and obedience of the perfect manhood, taken into God, was to the Father something He loved more than He hated sin. But, in our day, we love rather to think of the summing up of humanity in Christ, the offering up of all the members in Him who is the Head. So viewed, Christ's death becomes what it has been finely called, " the Amen of humanity " to the righteous law which sin transgressed. " The soul that sinneth, it shall die " ; and Christ, the perfect Man, and man in Him, admits the justice of that law. So is the eternal law vindicated ; so is the Father once more well pleased as He looks on man in His well-beloved Son; so to men and angels God shows Himself "just, and the justifier of him that hath faith in Jesus."
3. In Christ there dwells the eternal life of God, and the eternal life of God through Him is made the inheritance of those who gratefully receive His pardon for sin and the gift of the power that renders righteousness possible. And therefore when we read the story of His uprightness, of His patience, of His goodness, of His gentleness, of His self-sacrifice, we have courage to attempt to imitate Him, or we can live the life that He lived in the power of the life that dwells in Him. He is not remote from us, commanding the reverence of succeeding centuries but altogether beyond our reach. We have discovered that the roots of our life are in Him ; and all Christian men know that when- ever they attempt the higher forms of goodness, in the strength that comes to them from Christ, those forms become possible to them because they are natural to Him. " The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge " — that is the imperfect order. " The soul that sinneth, it shall die " — that, too, is not the final order. In the power of another life than ours we, too, live a life transcending our own strength, as through the
JER.-MAL. — 13
i94 THE DEATH OF THE SOUL
death of the Son we receive the forgiveness of all our sin. The solidarity of the race, imperfectly revealed in the transient order, has its final interpretation in God's ultimate conception — the race was created in Christ, and in Christ it is to achieve its eternal perfection.
1[ There is a season in the lifetime of each of us when all that the word " life " expresses has a greater charm for us than any other good thing, though it is then that all good things are poured out before us in the richest abundance. Life seems to flow bounteously within us and around us, and we are slow to tolerate any restraints upon its exuberance. Many things which are then good in our eyes are permitted to draw us away from Him whom the Gospel calls our Life ; and at best we find the stream of our inner self divided into many a mazy current. Yet if this inward distraction continues, the life which we prize is condemned to be fleeting in duration and fruitless in result. Now more than ever have we need of the one Master Life to take possession of us and of all His gifts to us. Now more than ever must we hold fast the faith, which experience will ratify in due time, that our own desires are less the ministers than the destroyers of life until they are subdued into glad obedience to His holy and hallowing Will, the Will of the Life that was crucified and rose again from the dead.1
1 F. J. A. Hort, The Way, the Truth, the Life, 147.
God and the Sinner.
19s
Literature.
Bonar (H.), Family Sermons, 311, 319.
Campbell (J. M.), Bible Questions, 155.
Carroll (B. H.), Sermons and Life Sketch, 149.
Cooper (E.), Fifty-Two Family Sermons, 204.
Farindon (A.), Sermons, i. 497 ; ii. 1.
Finney (C. G.), The Way of Salvation, 254.
Gibbon (J. M.), Evangelical Heterodoxy, 61.