The bondage of circumstances, of the world, but chiefly of self, has at times seemed to me quite intolerable; the more because it takes away all one's energy to throw it oft and then the difficulty of escaping to God ! of asking to have the weight taken away ! Oh there is infinite comfort in the thought that
* The Life of Henry Drummond, 478.
REVELATION i. 5, 6 11
He hears all our cries for rescue, and is Himself the Author and Finisher of it.^
3. "He loosed us from our sins by his blood." Christ is the Emancipator, and the instrument by which He makes us free is His blood. The teaching of Scripture is that the death of Christ was necessary for the remission of man's sin. The ex- planation of that necessity may be beyond us ; a full explanation is certainly beyond our powers at present. But not only is the fact made clear in Scripture, the reasons are not obscurely shadowed forth. And we are taught that without such death God could not Himself righteously forgive sin, and that its bands could not be loosed, because the chief bondage which holds an unforgiven sinner under the wrath of a holy God cannot be relaxed by mere fiat, by the single word. Go free ! It is not that the Father is angry and the Son steps in to save us from His wrath, as if there could be schism in the Godhead. It is, God so loved the world that He gave His Son to save it, and Christ so loved the world that He loosed the bands of its sins by His blood. As without shedding of blood there was no remission under the Jewish law, so without the death of the cross there is no redemp- tion for a sinful world. A Saviour who stopped short of death would have lacked the power to loose man from sin, in relation either to God or to the powers of evil or to his own moral and spiritual constitution.
If Any simple statement of the Gospel had a great attraction for him, and the simpler it was he enjoyed it the more, if it was not controversial but the genuine utterance of the heart. The account of redemption from the lips of an African woman, a slave, impressed him deeply ; he liked to repeat it in conversation, and on one occasion at a meeting for prayer, he stood up and said without further remark of his own: "I have never heard the gospel better stated than it was put by a poor negress : * Me die, or He die ; He die, me no die.' " 2
If Some of the great artists of the Crucifixion have painted the cross as reaching into the skies, exercising a cosmic influence for the world upon which its foot rests, whilst its top touches and moves the very heavens. There is such a painting by Luino at Lugano, and another by Guido Eeni at Rome. The head of the
^ Life of Frederick Denison Maurice, i. 620.
* A. Moody Stuart, Eeeollecliojis of the late John Duncan, 193.
12 REDEEMING LOVE
suffering Christ in tlie latter is often reproduced, but the whole of the picture should be seen to understand the artist's thought. And so the power of the Cross touches the burden of sin which we sinners carry on our shoulders at a thousand points, loosening it at every one and so causing it to fall away from our shoulders in the way Bunyan describes. Freed from condemnation in the sight of God, we are freed altogether : it is God that justifieth, who is he that condemneth ? We are freed from the bondage of law, from the thraldom of the devil, from the power of evil habit, from the fear of death and that which follows after death.
Neither passion nor pride Thy cross can abide. But melt in the fountain that streams from Thy side.^
III.
The Love that has Given Us Citizenship.
**And he made us to be a kingdom, to be priests unto his God and
Father."
1. Here the Kevisers adopted, not the reading that would give the smoothest and simplest English, but the reading that had the highest support in the Greek text. And so they sub- stituted " a kingdom " for " kings." This substitution places the promises of the new dispensation in direct connexion with the facts of the old. The language of St. Peter and St. John was no novel coinage. It was merely an adaptation to the Israel after the spirit of the titles and distinctions accorded of old to the " Israel after the flesh." There was a holy nation, a peculiar people, a regal priesthood, before Christianity. It was only en- larged, developed, spiritualized, under the gospel. The foundation passage in the Old Testament on which the language of both Christian Apostles alike was moulded is the promise made to the Israelites through Moses on Sinai, "If ye will obey my voice indeed, and keep my covenant, then ye shall be a peculiar treasure unto me above all people ... ye shall be unto me a kingdom of priests, and an holy nation." Thus the mention of the kingdom links Sinai with Zion — the old with the new.