S. Christ the Power and Wisdom of God

CHRIST THE POWER AND WISDOM OF GOD

“But unto them which are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God.” - 1 Corinthians 1:24

“But of him are ye in Christ Jesus, who of God is made unto us wisdom, and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption.” - 1 Corinthians 1:30 THE two leading thoughts in this passage are, what Christ crucified is, as of God; and what Christ crucified is, as of God, to us who are of God in him. As of God, Christ crucified is power and wisdom; the power of God and the wisdom of God. As of God to us, Christ crucified is made wisdom, and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption; or, briefly, wisdom and power. For these three particulars, righteousness, sanctification, and redemption, may be brought under the one general head of power. These then are the two topics of our discourse. But first, and as preliminary to our discussion of them, I must ask you to consider the states of mind to which Christ crucified is neither the power of God nor the wisdom of God; but only a stumblingblock and foolishness: “For the Jews require a sign, and the Greeks seek after wisdom: But we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumblingblock, and unto the Greeks foolishness” (1 Corinthians 1:22-23).

Two ideas of Deity are natural to the natural mind; the one more rude, coarse, and material; the other more refined and spiritual. The one is the idea of vast physical force; the other is the idea of consummate intelligence and skill. Hence result two distinct schools or forms of what maybe called natural religion; the religion congenial to fallen man.

Viewed in that aspect of grandeur in which it first strikes the eye, all nature suggests the vivid notion of power; of giant strength and resistless might. The abrupt forms and immense proportions of earth’s broken surface, as it shows everywhere the tokens and remains of terrible convulsions and wondrous reconstructions; the agencies still always and everywhere at work; the rolling clouds, the thunder’s voice, the lightning flash; stormy winds, tempests, hurricanes, desolating the plain, and lashing ocean into fury; earthquakes, volcanoes, eclipses; portents and signs in the sunlit or in the starry heavens; these all, not to speak of the living monsters and wild beasts of prey, swarming in the woods and waves, might well, in the primeval world, foster the idea of a Being having a mighty arm, and a voice on the waters full of majesty. Wonder, terror, awe, are the instinctive emotions of the new-born, and, alas! newly fallen, race of man. Apart from the revealed word of grace, which comparatively few accept, the earliest type of religion that suggests itself to the human heart is a vague sense of superior or supernatural power.

But, as wonder wears away, nature begins to be questioned as well as gazed at. Its stupendous processes are investigated, and more or less clearly understood. Its march and movements are more or less satisfactorily accounted for. The very lightning of heaven is imitated or reproduced by human art on earth. Fire, vapour, electric sparks, galvanic shocks, - the forces which cause creation’s death-struggles and birththroes, become the servants and ministers of human science, to be wielded by the feeblest arm and applied to the commonest purposes and uses. Nothing continues to surprise. Men cease to be merely amazed, and alarmed, and stupefied. Knowledge now alone is power. Intelligence is the only God!

Such, I think, is the natural history or genesis of all uninspired religion, whether in its polytheistic or in its pantheistic tendency. It is either the worship of mere force or forces, above nature, or else the worship of nature itself, as the impersonation, or embodiment, or expression, of intelligence and mind. The former belongs chiefly to the fresh infancy of human thought, when the faculty of wonder is all entire, and the facility of objective faith. The latter springs from the less picturesque, but more subtle habit which maturer reflection is apt to form. Real personal gods, endowed with resistless physical power, peopled the busy heaven of primeval heathenism. An impersonal and ideal spirit of design, as the all-pervading and all-embracing essence of the universe, is the cold abstraction that seeks to satisfy the refined wisdom of a riper age.

Now, vulgar traditionary Judaism, in the apostle’s day, might well represent the first of the two tendencies I have been noticing. The religious speculations of Greek philosophy might stand for the type of the other: “For the Jews require a sign, and the Greeks seek after wisdom” (1 Corinthians 1:22). The Jews require a sign. They were a wonder-loving people from the beginning; accustomed, through all their history, to prodigies. It might almost seem as if God was to them little more than a giver of signs. Nor was it any sign that would content them. They had become greedy in their demand for marvels. They must have the terrors of Egypt and the Red Sea, the sublimities of Sinai, the judgments and deliverances of the wilderness, with its angels’ food, its water from the flinty rock, its fiery serpents, its yawning gulph to swallow up apostates, its glowing cloudy pillar marching over the Arabian sands; these, and such signs as these; not to speak of other and later instances of Jehovah’s arm visibly made bare; they must have matched or surpassed in the proofs of any new era or dispensation to be introduced among them. Hence the Lord’s simple and significant deeds of mercy failed to convince them. Their cry was still for a sign; a sign of his commission, his authority, to do these very miracles. And the sign must be on a scale and after a style corresponding to the wonders of old. Show us a sign from heaven. Our fathers did eat manna in the wilderness. Let the like credentials attest and illustrate thy Messiahship. This morbid rage for the supernatural on the part of the Jewish, or any other, vulgar; this gaping after wonders in air, earth, sea, and sky; - see how it calls up a smile of calm contempt in that academic sage or sophist, with scarcely curled lip and slightly supercilious brow, who has allegorised, or spiritualised, in his wisdom, the whole gross mythology of Greece! Yes! he can afford to smile at the popular belief, while he himself sees in it, with all its intricacies and abominations, its vile plots of gods and heroes, only a recondite system of universal nature; a veiled portraiture of the various processes of birth, decay, and reproduction, that are ever going on among its tribes. This is the god of his idolatry. He first dissects, and then deifies, nature. He masters all her functions and operations in his keen search after influences and causes. And having got, as he imagines, behind the scenes, and reached the very springs of motion and life, he admires, in the whole scheme which he thinks he has thus grasped, little else than the image of his own sagacity in grasping it. Then he carries the same spirit into the domain of mind and morals, and the higher speculations which touch the destiny of the soul. There too he would refine away all the real substantial doctrines of individual immortality and judicial reckoning, and eternal retribution; an actual heaven and an actual hell. Nothing remains at last but mere abstract infinite thought, without character, without history, without law: “The world by wisdom knew not God.”

Thus the extremes of all-knowing science, ashamed to wonder at anything, and stupid star-gazing bewilderment, looking out for wonders everywhere, meet in a denial of the one only all-wise and almighty God. The Jew, vaguely clamouring for a sign that may appeal to his mere sense of the marvellous, and the Greek, politely smiling at all marvels, and affecting to embrace all things in heaven and earth in his philosophy; both alike miss what is lying at their door; what alone has in it anything, - what alone has in it everything, - of the Godhead that is attainable here below; the Christ whom we preach; Christ crucified; Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.

I. Consider now this Christ as the power of God and the wisdom of God. He is so essentially, being true and very God, the Eternal Son of the Father, the “Word which in the beginning was with God, and was God. And as the Word made flesh, Immanuel, God manifest in the flesh, he is still, in his person, character, and work, the power of God and the wisdom of God. But now, to conceive of him aright in this view, it is necessary to inquire what sort of power, what sort of wisdom he is; or, in other words, to distinguish carefully power, as the power of God; wisdom, as the wisdom of God, from the broken images of these elements of majesty which pass for power and wisdom among men. With us, power is commonly violent, and wisdom artful, ingenious, inventive. We measure power by the din, and noise, and tumult it creates; we measure wisdom by its shrewd guesses and apt contrivances and plans. But nothing of all this is to be found about the holy Jesus! He makes no mighty stir when he exerts his power. He surprises by no mere exercise of ingenuity when he manifests his wisdom. Calmness, simplicity, repose, and what might almost be called unconsciousness, are the features that most distinguish his manner. There is nothing fitful or capricious in Christ as the power of God; nothing like the putting forth of a giant’s or a tyrant’s might. There is nothing strained, and refined, or artful, in Christ as the wisdom of God. His wisdom is not mere knowing or cunning. Power with him is serene and unimpassioned. Wisdom with him is always self-possessed; calm and clear in the unruffled fulness of its infinite forethought, and foresight, and insight. And hence the grandeur of his character. Excitement may be great, but repose is greater. Samson, among his enemies, is terrible for the blows he wildly deals. Hushai, David’s friend at the court of Absalom, is admirable for the tact with which he turns the counsel of Ahithophel to foolishness. But more sublime by far is the eye that smote Peter’s heart, and the voice that knew so well to speak a word in season to the weary! The power of Jesus in working miracles is a quiet look or word. He speaks and it is done. The wisdom of Jesus in all his teaching is the pure transparency of truth. He speaks as one having authority, and not as the scribes. The testimony is true: “Never man spake like this man!”

Now it is as being thus in himself, personally, the power of God and the wisdom of God, that Christ is constituted and appointed, officially, to be the head of all principality and power. The government is upon his shoulders. As being the power of God and the wisdom of God, he is the representative to you of him with whom you have to do; either now, for peace, or at the last, for judgment. His being the power of God and the wisdom of God brings out the principle and manner of all the Lord’s dealings with you. Into his hands, and to his disposal, you are, one and all of you, whether willingly or against your will, given over. And it is as bearing upon that view of your position, that you are most deeply concerned to know how, in what sense, and to what effect, Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God.

Take, for instance, first, his government of the world now, his providence alike over the godly and over the unjust. How few consider this rightly! What really is my position here, as consciously a criminal, having broken the law of God, and incurred its righteous and inevitable doom? I am in the grasp of one who, as to power, can crush my utmost strength; and who, as to wisdom, can baffle my shrewdest scheme. Yes! But my strength is not thus crushed, my scheme is not thus baffled, however they may both be against God. Hence I dream of escaping his arm, and eluding his eye! Were he, as my adversary, meeting me at every turn; matching his force, at every effort I make, with mine; and counterworking every plot of mine, as it is hatched, by a deeper and more dexterous policy of his own; - were he thus, ever in detail, and step by step, measuring his strength directly with my strength, and closely tracking every turn and winding of the subtle spirit of evil within me; then, by actual contact and resistance, I might feel the reality of that power which I so madly brave, and that omniscient wisdom which I so vainly seek to outmanoeuvre or to outwit. But he lets me alone. There is no palpable pressure of his hand against my hand; no trace of his keen eye detecting and defeating each several device of my wily course of sin. He smites not. He speaks not. It might almost seem that he cares not, that he sees not. Hence guilt in my conscience waxes bold and defiant; and guile in my spirit, the guile of self-excuse and self-justification, becomes more and more seductive, satisfying, and soothing. Alas! I forget that he in whose hands I am is not one to bandy stroke for stroke, or stratagem for stratagem, with me. His is a far more formidable power. His is a far more awful wisdom. Silent he sits on high, while I, a worm of the dust, am exhausting the resources of my impotent force and fraud in desperate struggles to get the better of him, or to get away from him; rejecting his blessed gospel; resisting his gracious Spirit; and all the while trying to persuade myself that his power, after all, may not actually be put forth so as to reach to my utter destruction; and that his wise and holy searching may stop short of inexorable detection and discovery, and arrest, and judgment.

Oh! to be awakened in time from this delusion, and made to know, by the Spirit’s living and experimental teaching, that it is not power and wisdom expended beforehand, in petty skirmishing, as it were, that is most to be dreaded by the children of guilt and guile; but power and wisdom held in reserve for one final and irrevocable reckoning. It is hard to kick against the pricks, or evade the eye of him before whom hell is open. It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. Who may stand before the wrath of the Lamb, when the great day of his wrath is come, and, in the character of Judge, he appears, the power of God and the wisdom of God, to render to every one according to his works? The power of the Judge then, who may defy? His wisdom, who may question?

Dare I venture next, secondly, to raise the curtain that hides the abode of misery beyond all time? The lost! They who have fallen into the hands of the living God! What a wall of brass is all around; what a keen, searching, blasting, withering light is all above the dark pit and prison of their doom! And how is the horror enhanced by the fixedness and passionless repose of the power and wisdom that together hold them fast in the vengeance of eternal fire! Were it power with which they could grapple in the impetuous strife of a hand-to-hand engagement; were it wisdom with which they coukl keep up a game of ever new craftiness and subtle shifts, they might, though defeated, have a sort of desperate solace in the excitement of such personal battle and the angry feelings of defiance they might thus vent against their tormentor.

Some such idea the grand tragic poet of ancient Greece has embodied in his sublime and awful picture of a human spirit, brave and shrewd, plunged into hot debate with the omnipotence and omniscience of Jove. Chained to his immovable rock, with the deathless vulture preying on his vitals, the criminal, - his strength and sagacity unimpaired by all his sufferings, - rises to a hero in his keen encounter of personal antagonism with the god of whose mere brute force and cunning craft he is the unsubdued and indignant victim. Even Christian poets have given colour to the delusion of a sort of active strife with the Almighty and All-wise, on the part of fallen angels and lost men. But Scripture affords no warrant for the thought. Look at the evil spirits meeting Christ when he was on earth! See how vainly and impotently they chafe and fret in the presence of their appointed Judge. Terribly do they vent their rage, whether in one final convulsive onset on the poor sufferers whom they are ordered to let go, or in such frenzy as that of seizing the herd of swine. But the calm majesty of Jesus himself they could not face. With him, the power of God and the wisdom of God, there is no contending; no room for effort or device of any kind. Ah! that cry of theirs, “I know thee who thou art, the Holy One of God.” Is it not the cry of utter helpless, prostrate, passive wretchedness; of dreary imbecile submission; the presage of a dark and hopeless unrelieved eternity of woe. And it is this same Jesus, the Holy One of God, that you, impenitent sinner, must have to do with in the day of judgment, and throughout the endless ages! Most appalling is he in the heat of his fierce anger, when he rides forth red with the blood of enemies, taking swift and summary vengeance on nations of the ungodly, and treading the winepress of the fury of the Most High! I explain away none of these tremendous images; earth seems about to know their meaning and reality too well! But more appalling, if possible, is Christ the Judge, in the aspect he wears when such scenes of carnage are over; when, seated on the great white throne and holding in his hand the eternal awards, he appears in the serene, unruffled majesty of the power of God and the wisdom of God! What shall the sinner do within the arm, beneath the eye, of such power and such wisdom? Is it a power put forth in impulses? Is it a wisdom open to failure of plan or change of purpose? If that were the case, there might be times of relaxed effort, of which advantage might be taken; there might be room somehow, and some day in the long lapse of everlasting years, for some shifts or suggestions, or expedients of relief. But, alas! alas! for those whose doom is pronounced by him who is no fitful or capricious adversary, but himself the very power, the very wisdom of God. It cannot but be a doom, resistless, changeless; with neither ray of hope, nor even any lightning flash of some last effort of despair, to break the monotonous gloom of its endless, restless night. Ah! be thankful that he comes to you now, once more at least, ere he comes for such judgment as this. Still more be thankful that he comes not to you, as the devils complained that he came to them, to torment you before the time.

For, thirdly, it is chiefly in his cross that Jesus is to be considered as the power of God and the wisdom of God. In every view of it, the work of redemption is pre-eminently a work of power and wisdom; and he who would undertake it must be possessed of these perfections in all their fulness. But a redeemer or mediator might be imagined, having power and wisdom, not properly of God, but distinct from God’s; power, for instance, to prevail by mere vehement importunity of intercession; wisdom to discern and seize relenting moments for overcoming the resentment of an offended Deity and procuring for the offender a measure of indulgence. Such in fact, is the vulgar notion of mediation, in all heathenism, whether pagan or popish, in all fond superstition and every religion of mere terror and alarm. And such, it is to be feared, is the notion, at least in part, which some who should know better, still have of the mediation of Christ. But such notion, by whomsoever entertained, we condemn as unscriptural, and indeed blasphemous. The imputation of it to evangelical theology generally we repudiate with just indignation. Christ indeed, as Mediator, has all power, - power over his own life to lay it down and to take it again, power, as the true Israel, the prince, to prevail with God; and in him are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. But the power he has is identified with that of the Father, and his wisdom with the Father’s wisdom. It is, and must be so. For the possible availableness, if I may so speak, of his power and his wisdom for your redemption, depends on his intimate personal oneness with the Father, and the thorough counsel of peace that is between them both. “I and my Father are one.” And then consider how this power and this wisdom, being thus of God, became actually available for your redemption. By what sort of power, by what sort of wisdom, can guilty sinners be redeemed? The redemption of the soul - how precious is it! To create a world is, with the Almighty, but the utterance of a word. He spake and it was done; he said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. To fill the world he creates with all various instances and illustrations of adaptation and design, in its material elements and structures, in its animal tribes, in man, the head and crown of all, is with the All-wise but the unfolding of himself in his manifold works. But no mere word of power, no mere fiat of the Almighty, not his simply saying. Let it be, can undo the fact of sin, or alter its nature; make it either, as it were, no longer a real existence, or no longer exceeding sinful. Guilt cannot thus be cancelled or purged. And even infinite intelligence, considered simply as such, could but foresee the inevitable and inexorable necessity of the sentence of retribution, and find no expedient for modifying or evading it. Is there then, even with the Highest, no eye effectually to pity, no arm strong to save? Behold the Lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world! See that willing servant, that divine sufferer, made under the law, bearing the weight of all your obligations and all your liabilities under the law. See him on the cross, meeting as the substitute of the guilty, the doom of guilt, its very real and actual doom, the sting of sin, the curse, the wrath of God! Has divine power, has divine wisdom, no means of escape or exemption for him, for him the holy one, for him the beloved of the father, from such a fate as that? Is there no relief for him, through any exertion of power or any exercise of wisdom, from the dire necessity of paying the uttermost farthing, enduring the extremest penalty, draining the cup of imputed guiltiness and inflicted judgment to the very dregs? None, absolutely none, if he is to be the surety and Saviour of sinners. Power says, I have no arm to break the bonds of law. Wisdom says, I have no device for evading the claims of law. Power may be great, and wisdom greater; but the holy supremacy of law is above all. It is not possible for the cup to pass! Himself he cannot save! Yes! In the case of this divine victim, thus laid on the bloody altar of atonement, even divine power must fail, and divine wisdom, as it may seem, be helpless, No voice from heaven can arrest the sacrifice; no ram caught in a thicket can release that only begotten Son of the Father! He is crucified through weakness. He died, one might almost say, as was said of Abner, he died as a fool dieth. As a man falleth before wicked men, so fell he.

“But the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.” He, on whose own behalf personally and for whose own deliverance, in that dark and dread crisis, divine power was as weakness, and divine wisdom was as foolishness, becomes through that very weakness and that very foolishness, effectually and savingly the power of God, and the wisdom of God, powerful now to save the lost, wise to win souls. He saveth others; sinners, me the chief of sinners, he saves. And he saves not by an act of power doing rude violence to the holy sanction of law; not by such wisdom as might seek, like our worldly and carnal wisdom, to compromise them; but powerfully and wisely in accordance with strictest law, most strictly applied, on the very footing of the authority of the law and the lawgiver being anew ratified, confirmed, and sealed.

Thus is Jesus able to save his people to the uttermost. With a strong arm now he breaks all their bonds, and leads them forth by the right way, that they may go to a city of habitation. For now, on their behalf, and for the weakness and foolishness of the cross he bore for them, he is at fullest liberty, he has the most unquestionable right to expend all the resources of the power and wisdom that are his. In him now no accuser can ever challenge their standing as accepted in the Father’s sight; for he answers every charge. It is God that justifieth. Who is he that condemneth? It is Christ that died, yea rather, that is risen again, and ever liveth at the right hand of God, to make intercession for us. Having power now through his great sacrifice, to purge away all your guilt and pardon all your sins, - power to give the Holy Ghost for the perpetual washing of your souls in that pure fountain of blood and water, will he not, by the same power, keep you through faith unto salvation? Having wisdom, even the knowledge and revelation of God, wisdom to open to you his own heart and the heart of his Father, and by the Spirit of wisdom to draw your hearts to himself and to his Father, will he not wisely guide your feet in the way of peace? will he not give you the wisdom that is profitable to direct; making you wise unto that which is good, wise even unto salvation? Thus Christ crucified is to be seen and owned as the power of God and the wisdom of God.

II. Is he really so to you? That now is the question, to which the answer is found in 1 Corinthians 1:30 : “Of him are ye in Christ Jesus, who of God is made unto us wisdom, and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption.” There is here a double work of God; making you Christ’s, and making Christ yours; causing you to be in Christ Jesus, as he is, the power of God and the wisdom of God, and causing him to be to you that very wisdom and that very power which he is himself. The work is a divine work, in which the Holy Ghost is the agent; the Holy Ghost shutting you up into Christ, and taking of what is Christ’s and showing it to you. Blessed indeed is the correspondence of these two divine operations to one another. To be by a divine work, yourselves in Christ Jesus; and by a divine work also, to have Christ Jesus made all things to you! Yes, I say all things! For what is there that is not embraced in this complete and comprehensive enumeration? Let us briefly note the particulars of this experimental Christianity; Christ made of God unto us wisdom, and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption.

1. He is made of God unto you wisdom. He is made of God to you in your experience, that very wisdom of God which he himself is. For all your wisdom is still only Christ. Christ known; Christ believed; Christ applied to you by the Holy Spirit, and appropriated on the warrant of the free call and command of the gospel; Christ, in short, grasped as yours, nay rather, grasping you as his. Thus you become wise, wiser than the ancients, wiser than your teachers, when Christ alone is all your wisdom. Ah! what wisdom, holy, heavenly, divine, does a simple acquaintance with Christ and him crucified impart to very babes! What intelligence and what clear insight on things hidden from the wise and prudent! What an understanding of God has such a one, of his character, his ways, his truth and love; and what an understanding of all things as seen in the light of God, his law, his will, his promises. “No man knoweth the Father but the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son shall reveal him.” What manner of knowledge is this? How does the Son himself know the Father? For he to whom the Son reveals the Father must know the Father even as the Son knows him.

Therefore you to whom Christ is made wisdom, even the wisdom of God, are near to God as Christ is near. You see God even as Christ sees him. You have an insight into his very heart, and into all its yearnings of compassion, pity, tenderness, and love. And your knowledge of him is, like Christ’s, a knowledge of holy sympathy, of blessed complacency, of willing submission even to what in his dealings generally may seem most mysterious, and what in his dealings with you particularly may seem sorest, and hardest, and darkest. You know him so as to say, “Though he slay me, I will trust in him.” You know him so as to say, “The cup which my Father giveth me, shall I not drink it?” You know him so as to justify his utmost severity in visiting sin, and to magnify the riches of his forbearance and lovingkindness in receiving sinners such as you are so graciously, loving them so freely, blessing them so abundantly.

2. Not is this wisdom barren and theoretical merely, abstract speculation, and nothing more: it is intensely practical. For it is allied to power. He who is of God made to you wisdom, is also made of God to you power; power effectual (1) for your justification through his righteousness; (2) for your sanctification by his indwelling Spirit; and (3) for your redemption, under his government, from all the effects of sin, the ills of life, the power of Satan, the sting of death, the victory of the grave. Consider these three particulars in respect of which Christ is made of God to you power as well as wisdom.

(1) He is made of God to you righteousness. He who knew no sin is made sin for you, that you may be made the righteousness of God in him. You are in yourselves sin, altogether sin, and sin only. Sin is, as it were, your very being; your essential nature, as fallen and corrupt. Guiltiness, helpless, hell-deserving guiltiness, is the sum and substance of your spiritual state, of your life, which is simply death. But in Christ you are made - he is made of God to you - righteousness, the righteousness of God. What an instance of power, of omnipotence! One moment you are a criminal, a guilt-laden, hell-doomed criminal. The next you are an acquitted, justified, righteous, and loyal subject of heaven’s kingdom! Surely there is power in this marvellous transformation! not the power of mere might or magic, but power allied to wisdom; power working in the line of a wise harmonising of the holy claims of the righteous God and the helpless need of sinful man. Still there is divine power here, even the working of the mighty power which God wrought in Christ when he raised him from the dead. He quickens you together with Christ when he justifies you. He raises you from death to newness of life.

(2) To you who are of God in Christ Jesus he is made of God sanctification. Personal holiness of character, as well as righteousness for your right judicial standing before God, you find in Christ, in Christ himself, in Christ himself alone, not merely in his doctrines and the influence they are fitted to exert; not in his pure precepts and the sanctions by which they are enforced; not in his example and the sweet constraint by which it should draw you to follow his steps; not in any or in all of these together, though all are instrumental, helpful, indispensable; yet not in them have you this holiness, but in him, in himself, his living self, himself alone. He is made of God unto you sanctification.

Oh! what power, what virtue is there in that Holy One to turn the foulest thing he touches into purity and pure peace! Be sure, be very sure, thou whom indwelling sin is vexing; thou for whom inveterate, inborn corruption is too strong; thou who hast got some sense of the beauty of holiness, some taste and relish for the blessedness of holy love; thou who wouldst fain be rid of those carnal, worldly thoughts and lusts that trouble thee; thou who longest in real and right earnest to have the very same affections in thy bosom towards all things that are in the bosom of thy God; be sure that it is Christ himself who is thy holiness as well as thy peace; for he is made of God unto thee, not righteousness only, but sanctification also. Deal with him, directly and personally with himself, for the one grace as well as for the other. Abide in him, and let him and his word abide in you. Take his death as your own; his life also, his risen life, as your own. Die daily in and with him. Be daily renewed after the image of his life. For you are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God. Mortify therefore your members which are on the earth. You are dead. Let them be dead too. And let Christ, living in you, and shedding abroad in your hearts a sweet sense of the love of God, through the Holy Ghost being given to you; let Christ - made over to you as yours in the gospel; appropriated as yours by faith; lived upon, fed upon, tasted and enjoyed, in a growing experience of living fellowship and living trust - be more and more apprehended as being himself, in his death and in his life, the principle, the spring, the motive, the end and aim, of all your thoughts and all your activities. Thus he will be made of God to you, more and more powerfully, sanctification as well as righteousness, as you grow in his grace and in his knowledge.

(3) Christ, as the power of God, is made to you redemption. Whatever of divine power is not included in your justification through his righteousness, and your sanctification by his Spirit is fully covered by this most comprehensive word, as it is here used, redemption. If the first two exhaust the whole of his justifying work for you and his sanctifying work in you, this last takes in all his work of rule and government over you; his entire administration of all things on your behalf and for your sake. As he is made unto you righteousness, jow. are just before God. As he is made unto you sanctification, you become holy, as God is holy. And now, as he is made unto you redemption, you, thus justified and sanctified, have all saving benefits secured to you. For what does not redemption, in its widest sense, embrace? Is it not a purchased deliverance from all the evils of sin, and a purchased title to all the glory of the heavenly inheritance? From the wrath to come, from death and him that hath the power of death, redemption fully saves you. It ensures your victory over all your enemies, even the last enemy, which is death. It takes the sting from death, and from all the grief which death occasions; for that sting is sin, and sin has no more power to bring you, or any loved brother in the Lord, under condemnation again. It makes you more than conquerors through him who loved you and gave himself for you.

Then, positively as well as negatively, what does redemption contain? Father, what does it not? With a purchased deliverance from all the sad fruits of the fall, is there not joined a purchased right to more than all the blessedness and joy of paradise? All things are yours when you are of God in Christ Jesus, and he is made of God to you redemption. Peace with God is yours; assurance of God’s love is yours; the earnest of the Spirit is yours; adoption into the family of heaven is yours; brotherhood with the first-begotten is yours; to cry Abba Father as he did is yours; the chastenings of God are yours; the fulness of earth is yours; the march of providence is yours. And yours, in fine, is the crown, yours the palm, yours the triumph in that day when to him that overcometh he gives to sit with him in his throne, even as he also overcame, and is set down with the Father in his throne.

Observe, in conclusion, the connection of the two topics.

What Christ is of God, that he is to you who are of God in him. He is of God power and wisdom; he is to you wisdom and power. In Christ these divine attributes become yours; yours to be available on your behalf; yours to be appropriated and used as yours for all saving purposes. Does this seem too high for you? Nay, consider how Christ himself, is the power of God and the wisdom of God. Is it not in the humiliation of his cross? Be you one with him in that, crucified with him, accepting in his death your own death. Then are you one with him in all the power and prestige of his risen life. The connecting link between what Christ is of God, or as God’s, and what he is to you, or as yours, is his being wisdom. Observe, in this view, the alternation or change of order. On the part of God there is power put forth in Christ for your salvation; not power operating violently and lawlessly, but power seeking its end wisely, in the way of a wise adaptation to the essential perfections of the divine nature and the unchangeable principles of the divine government. On your part there is a wise spiritual discernment of this wise procedure of God, an intelligent sympathy with it, a cordial acquiescence in it, a willing consent to it. And thus there is found in it all power to save your souls; power to justify, and sanctify, and redeem. In the highest sense, therefore, knowledge to you is power. The wisdom of God, which Christ is, working in you wisdom toward God, becomes in you and to you saving strength.

How complete is Christ for you, and how complete are you in him! The sovereign prerogatives of God are power and wisdom. And these now, in their very highest exercise, are identified with Christ, and with Christ crucified. The weakness of his cross is the power of God. The foolishness of the cross is the wisdom of God. This all holy beings confess. And in this you who are of God in Christ rejoice. For all is for your sakes, that in a way of consummate wisdom, and by a work of power beyond all measurement, you may be righteously and lawfully, and therefore thoroughly, saved.

How glorifying to God is all this arrangement! It is of God that Christ Jesus, as mediator and redeemer, is constituted and recognised by the Father as the power of God and the wisdom of God. It is of God that you are, by the effectual working of the Spirit, in Christ. It is of God that Christ is made to you wisdom, and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption. All is of God. Let no flesh glory in his presence. “He that glorieth, let him glory in the Lord.” “For thus saith the Lord, Let not the wise man glory in his wisdom, neither let the mighty man glory in his might, let not the rich man glory in his riches: But let him that glorieth glory in this, that he understandeth and knoweth me, that I am the Lord which exercise lovingkindness, judgment, and righteousness, in the earth: for in these things I delight, saith the Lord.”

How vain is the notion of any other mediation than that of him who is at once the power and the wisdom of God, or any other salvation than what these sovereign prerogatives of the Godhead combine to secure. If there were any power in the universe that could overmaster the wisdom of God, any wisdom that could evade or elude the power of God, sinners out of Christ might have hope. If there were an arm of might that could defy the All-wise, or if there were a cunning craft that might undermine the resources of the Almighty, then, by power violently overmastering wisdom, or by wisdom evading power, you might think that somehow you had a chance of safety at the last. But, sinners in the hands of an angry God, and that God resistless in power and unerring in wisdom, how can you escape if you neglect the great salvation? Escape now by consenting to be of God in him who is made of God unto you wisdom, and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption; who is to you all in all; who is all your salvation and all your desire. “Now to him that is of power to stablish you according to my gospel, and the preaching of Jesus Christ: to God only wise, be glory through Jesus Christ for ever.” “Unto him that is able to keep you from falling, and to present you faultless before the presence of his glory with exceeding joy, to the only wise God our Saviour, be glory and majesty, dominion and power, both now and ever. Amen.”