I have been crucified with Christ ; yet I live ; and yet no longer I, but Christ liveth in me : and that life which I now live in the flesh I live in faith, the faith which is in the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself up for me. — Gal. ii. 20.
Martin Luther, commenting on the paragraph from which this text is taken, writes thus: — "It seemeth a very strange and monstrous manner of speaking to say — ' I live, I live not : I am dead, I am not dead : I am a sinner, I am not a sinner : I have the law, I have not the law.' But," the Eeformer goes on, " these phrases (seemingly strange and monstrous) are sweet and com- fortable to all those that believe in Christ." The form of state- ment employed does not involve a real, but only an apparent, contradiction. No law of logic is broken by the Apostle when he first affirms, and then proceeds to deny. It is his striking and characteristic method of expressing deep facts of experience — as any one may perceive who has patience to consider what he means.
Three great ideas are suggested to us by this text — I. The Historical Fact of Christ's Death. II. The Reproduction of Christ's Death in the Christian.
III. The New Life in Faith.
L
The Historical Fact of Christ's Death.
1. We have first the great central fact, named last, but round which all the Christian life is gathered. "The Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself up for me." To none of the Apostles did the appeal of the cross come with greater force than to St. Paul. He not only made Jesus Christ the centre of all his preaching, but he placed the cross at the very heart of the gospel. The burden of his message was Christ crucified, as he knew well that
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350 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE
the world's hope centred in Him. The necessary preliminary to the spiritual life is to grasp in some measure the great facts of the Incarnation and the Atonement, which form the foundation of our salvation and sonship. We must see God in Christ recon- ciling the world unto Himself. " He gave himself up for me " ! He endued Himself with the robe of flesh, He entered the house of bondage, He took upon Him the form of a bondslave that He might set the bondslave free. He walked the pilgrim path of limitation, the path of sorrow and temptation ; face to face He met the devil, face to face He met " the terror feared of man," becoming "obedient unto death, even the death of the cross." " He gave himself up for me " ! And in that holy sacrifice of love, the holy law of God received perfect obedience, the violated law of God received a holy satisfaction, the sovereignty of the devil was smitten and overthrown, boastful death lost its sting, and the omnivorous grave its victory !
^ No doctrine, no conception of the Atonement can explain to us the cross of Christ. We stand before that cross that we may gather its meaning for ourselves, that we may feel its import, that we may see its entire and absolute unlikeness to anything else, and so feel that its significance could be explained only by some conception of what we call the Atonement. This cannot exist to us as a logical statement. It exists as a vital truth. As we gaze upon the cross of Christ, and see the sacrifice that He there made, we see and feel that the perfectness of His suffering, the entire self-control that He possessed, and all the great drama of the Crucifixion, showed a beauty, a completeness of His man- hood, which indeed bore our sins. Great was the power of sin, terrible was the exhibition of its power at the foot of the cross ; but above all human vileness and corruption, above all human selfishness and self-seeking, above all , temporary scheming and plotting there rose the perfect form of Him who was the Eternal Truth ; who by His death and suffering testified against all the false seeming of the world and its power, who by His perfect patience and love overcame the pangs of death, who showed that there was something which was above and beyond the world, something which raises our hearts to Him, something which lifts us above those powers and forces under the influence of which our ordinary life is lived something which gives us a sense of redemp- tion.*
* Mandell Creighton, Gounsels/ar Churehpeople, 119.
GAL. II. 20 351
0 Life divine —
Poured out instead of mine —
O Sacrifice —
Who by Thy death hast paid my ransom price —
In whom I see
The righteousness which God accepts for me —
Pour out Thyself within me now:
Life of my life be Thou:
As deeper in Thy death I die,
Rise Thou within, and sanctify
Thy temple — working in me, to fulfil,
0 living Christ, Thy Father's will.i
2. It is absolutely necessary for us to bring out afresh this aspect of the Christian religion by emphasizing the solitary prerogatives of the Christ as He stands in His exaltation and glorification far removed from all others who have claimed to found and explain their religions. Christianity is the religion of the cross and the throne — the vacant cross, the empty tomb, the occupied throne. It is the only religion that has its Founder living and working continuously for its triumph. Men have constructed theories of atonement and reconciliation, some of them repellent enough to the modern mind, yet the age-long effort to understand the wonder and mystery is only a witness to the fact that there are spiritual qualities in this death which lift it into a category by itself. The love that filled the Sufferer's soul, His loyalty to His calling and His God, His voluntary surrender of His life in defence of the Kingdom — because of these Divine achievements, His death becomes a redeeming and uplifting force.