02 The Sin-Bearing Lamb

Chapter 2 THE SIN-BEARING LAMB. Not all the blood of beasts, On Jewish altars slain, Could give the guilty conscience peace, Or wash away the stain. But Christ, the Heavenly Lamb, Takes all our sins away ; A sacrifice of nobler name. And richer blood than they. My faith would lay her hand. On that dear head of thine ;

While like a penitent I stand. And there confess my sin. My soul looks back to see. The burden thou didst bear, When hanging on the cursed tree, And knows her guilt was there. The great difference between Christianity and other religions is that in Christianity the work of salvation is accomplished by God. In other religions and systems of moral reformation the work of emancipation is one that man himself must accomplish. They begin by telling him what he has to do to avert the wrath and to win the favour of Deity. They differ, indeed, in their requirements, but this fundamental idea is common to every one of them, which shows that it is a natural and congenial thought of the human mind. The true religion, on the other hand, commences by contradicting and overturning this thought. It tells us that salvation, so far from being a work of man, is the result of a long and arduous work of sacrifice accomplished by God Himself. It tells us not what man has to do to win God, but what God has done to win man. It comes to him not as an elaborate code of rules which he must obey, but as a free gift which he is to receive ; and the reason why so many fail to gain salvation is because they make the fatal mistake of supposing that it is something that they must work out, instead of something that they must receive from the God who Himself has wrought it out. When John says, " Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world," he is manifestly pointing back to the sacrificial system which pervades the Bible from the beginning to the end. He is thinking of the great process which led up to Christ. He remembers how from the beginning lambs were slain continually — how they were offered up by Abel, Noah, and Abraham — how the altar of God was ever red with blood ; and he sees Jesus Christ as coming to complete these sacrifices and terminate them by the offering of Himself. So to understand the force of the passage we must look to these sacrifices, and no sufficient explanation of them can be given which does not admit that they implied the substitution of the victim in place of the offerer, and the acceptance of a satisfaction for the offense; in other words, that they were both vicarious and expiatory. And so Jesus Christ, as a sacrifice, is to be viewed as satisfying Divine justice, and reconciling men to God. We must indeed exclude the idea that He produced a new disposition in God toward us. But what He did was to reconcile the Godhead within itself, and so to alter the judicial relations of God toward us as that He can deal with us upon a new footing. So much as this may be defined as the teaching of Scripture, from which we learn all that we know on the subject, in contradistinction to what we may guess or suppose. But this explanation leaves great mysteries, which we could explain only if it were possible for us to climb the heights and fathom the depths of the Divine nature. A consideration of Jesus Christ as the sacrificial Lamb may show us both what we can understand, and why it is impossible for us to understand more.

I

1. Jesus Christ died, but, as we have seen, not for His own sins. He was the Lamb of God. He passed pure as a sunbeam through all the defilement of the world. His life was like a spring of water in the salt sea, throwing its sweetness over the surrounding bitterness. He appeared, indeed, in the likeness of sinful flesh, even as the brazen serpent was made in the likeness of the serpents that slew the Israelites. "Man," says Gregory, "is freed from sin by Him who assumed the form of sin, and was made after our fashion, who were changed into the form of the serpent." But, as there was no venom in the life-giving image to which the people looked, so Jesus Christ had in Himself no taint of sin. He was holy, harmless, and undefiled ; and His death cannot be understood except as a death for the sin of others. Had He not been sinless His life would have been forfeited, and it would not have been in His power to offer it up in atonement.

2. Jesus Christ died according to the appointment of His Father, They do fatally misconceive the whole evangelical system who represent the heart of the Father toward man as different from the heart of Christ. "God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten son." It pleased the Father that in Him should all fulness dwell, and that that fulness should be opened up in His death. It pleased the Lord to bruise Him. Christ is the Lamb which God Himself furnishes for sacrifice. The idea that God needed to be mollified or appeased by the sacrifice of His Son is a heathenish misconception. Whatever love dwelt in the heart of Christ was the love of the Father. Whatever fulness dwells in Him to forgive and to save is the fulness of the Father. He appeared to do the will of God when He came into the world to die.

3. Not only was He the Lamb appointed by God — He was also God Himself. He took upon Him our humanity, but He took it into union with His divine nature. It was through His eternal divine nature that He offered Himself to be a sacrifice to God, and because it was so the sacrifice was efficacious. He took human nature at His incarnation into eternal union with the Divine. The blood which He shed on the tree was the blood not merely of the Son of Mary, but of the Infinite Being thus united to a created form. Hence came its efficacy. The blood of bulls and goats secured the outward religious position of the offerer, but could not put away sin, could not operate in the sphere of the spiritual. The blood of the eternal Christ must have a transcendent power. How great we cannot tell. The thought distances and rebukes reason. But it has power to put away sin. And this helps us to see why the doctrine of the atonement must be in a measure mysterious.

Much of the misconception which has attended the orthodox theory of the atonement has arisen from the fact that it has been unconsciously discussed on a Unitarian theory of the person Christ. The transcendent mystery which we cannot remove lies in the fact that we have in the atonement the love of the Three-one God working for man ; or, as it has been expressed, the self-reconciling of the Godhead with itself, or an action of the Godhead within, and at unity with itself for our salvation.

4. The Lamb of God was also true man. He became man and entered into true sympathy with all our sufferings. He was bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh, and He enters into vital union with those whom He came to save. And here we have another fruitful source of error arising from the question of the atonement being disposed of as if Christ and man were entirely distinct, whereas there is between the Redeemer and the redeemed an essential and vital unity. The Christ on the cross is not some miserable man suffering for his own sins, but a representative of mankind. He is the Flower and Head of the race, the Representative of humanity, the second Adam. He becomes one with those who have seen Him as identified with them in a manner which finds its parallel only in the unity of the Triune God. Those who believe in Him live and move and have their spiritual being in Him.

5. He died of his own free will. From the very beginning His obedience was voluntary. His incarnation loses its whole meaning and value, unless we understand it as the willing entrance into our condition for our sakes of the Son of God. For our sakes He deigned and consented to be born, even as for our sakes He deigned and consented to die. He had before Him all the way what He was to pass through. In the very beginning of His ministry, the same thought came over His spirit that crossed it at the end ; and He said that He had to be lifted up even as the serpent was lifted up in the wilderness. This gives their whole meaning to His sufferings. The very essence of sacrifice lies in the spirit, and if the spirit of Jesus Christ had rebelled, or if He had been but the feeble victim of an enormous wrong, His sacrifice would have been of no value. So if the shocks and storms of life had taken Him unawares, as they take us, the meaning of that life would not have been what it is. But we know that He counted the cost — that every step of his restless wandering life brought him nearer Jerusalem, where the prophets were slain, and that He freely willed to die for us. " If I had known," we often say, "what I had to pass through, I never could have lived." He knew it all, and loaded with the weight of this foreknowledge. He went through it for our sakes.

6. His sufferings were in a peculiar sense the bearing of our sins. Looked at externally, we could not assign to the life of Jesus Christ the pre-eminence in suffering. Life has been less sweet and death more bitter from that point of view to others than to Him. Others have endured greater privations, greater physical tortures, and have had far less to up-bear and console them than He had; but, when we look at the matter more closely, we perceive that His sufferings were in a mysterious sense the endurance of sin. Especially we see this in connection with His death. The shuddering with which He looked forward to it is not explained by the natural shrinking and reluctance of the physical frame. " We know," it has been said, "with what a piercing strength the first glimpses of a coming sorrow shoot in upon us — how they checker our whole life and overshadow all things, how sad thoughts glance off from all we say and do and listen to, how the mind converts everything into its own feeling and master thought. It is not only on the greater and sad occasions that our afflictions overwhelm us; perhaps our keenest sufferings are in sudden recollections, remote associations, words, tones, little acts of unconscious friends. And so it was with Jesus. The very spikenard had in it the savour of death." " She hath done it against my burial." " I have a baptism to be baptized with, and how am I straitened till it be accomplished." The shrinking is most manifest at Gethsemane. There, we are told, He began to be appalled, stunned, smitten out of Himself. His soul was sorrowful all round. His straining eyes stretched the whole horizon, and found it one unbroken pall. He was sorrowful even unto death, as if one more weight laid upon the quivering breast would have been too much. Great drops of blood fell from Him in His agony. How shall we explain that thundercloud of darkness, and storm, and passion, with its flashing lightnings, in which His soul was wrapped? Is there any torch which throws a ray into deep gloom save that which was put in our hands by the prophet when he says, " He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities . " The heroic calmness and courage which marks the life of Christ makes it impossible for us to explain His fear of death in any other way. He if any had lived -- A life which dares send A challenge to its end, And when it comes say, " Welcome, friend."

He who the noble army of martyrs praise is not less brave than the bravest of that company ; and yet he shrank and shuddered as none of them ever did, because in His sufferings He was to enter a deeper depth than any of them could ever know.

II. The result of all this is, that the suffering is efficacious — " He taketh away the sin of the world." The blood of bulls and of goats could never take away sin, but this man has offered up one sacrifice for sins for ever, " He taketh away ; " it is not merely " He bears the sin of the world."

He takes it away by taking it upon Him. Many an unconscious victim had shed its blood for the sin of the world, and yet the sin remained. Many a great heart had borne the sin of the World, and had broken under the weight, and still the sin remained. There had been many that palliated the sin of the world, and yet it remained.

It is possible to disguise the sin of the world, to drive it under the surface, to cover it with a fair exterior, to make excuse for it, but that is not to take it away. It is possible to fight with separate sins of the world, and in some measure to master them, but as long as any sin remains the sin of the world has not been taken away. But Jesus came not to deal with the sins of the world but with the sin of the world. In human nature strictness in one direction often compensates itself by laxity in another, and men dream that they have overcome sin when they have gained a victory in some isolated fragment of the world of moral duty. But to exchange one sin for another, as Samson the Nazarite did, is not redemption. Nor is the mere escaping from the penalty of sin redemption. Redemption means the removal of sin, not merely of the punishment of sin ; and He who dealt with sin effectually by taking it away was Jesus Christ, and Jesus Christ alone. The sin of the world, not the sins. The victory of Christ was over sin as a unity, the whole corruption of human nature which finds expression in separate sins. The sin of the world is regarded as heaped up in one tremendous pile, and that pile laid upon the head of Christ. That was the load which He staggered under. Think of the sin of one life, the sin with which it is born, the sins of childhood, youth, manhood, age ; the sins of broken vows, broken oaths, unfulfilled duties ; and then multiply that one life by the numbers of all the world, and consider what a foe it was Christ came to reckon with, what a foe it was that He overcame in the body of His flesh through death. The sin of the world. When John spoke of the world he manifestly did not think of the extent of redemption. He did not mean to say that the work of Christ was effectual for all humanity, and that all sinners, no matter how they regarded Christ and His atonement, had their sins removed. He was thinking of the world, not in its extent but in its nature. He thought of the world as it is apart from and hostile to God, and the sin which belongs to the world as such. The world has ceased to be the expression of God’s mind and has become his rival. On the one side He sees the world with its sin, on the other side he sees God with His Lamb, and God with His Lamb is able to meet the world with its sin. The remedy is sufficient ; the obstacle henceforth lies on the side of man and not upon the side of God. We believe that our Jesus is the Saviour of the whole world. Although only one-third of the human race is Christian even in name, we know that He is the new head of humanity, not of England or of present Christendom only, but of the whole world — that all the aimless self-denial of the Buddhist, all the Pantheistic yearnings of the Brahmin, all the loveless theism of the Mohammedan, all the blind gropings of the rude and unlettered savage will find their real rest and satisfaction in Him.

III. The condition of salvation is to behold ; and if we consider the nature of salvation we see that the condition is not arbitrary but lies in the very nature of the case. If the Gospel had been an elaborate code of laws it would not have required trust. If it had been possible through rites and ceremonies to save the soul, then the performance of these, apart from the feeling of the worshiper, would have been sufficient. But since salvation is vitally and essentially a gift that God is willing to give to man, it is clear that if man be free everything must depend upon man’s willingness to receive the gift—that is, upon his faith ; and so the connection between faith and salvation is simply inevitable. The look is the look of longing, of desire, of trust ; such a look as the dying Israelite in the desert, where the very sand round him seemed to be hatching serpents, gave to the brazen serpent lifted on high. Then new life stole into the languid frame. It is the look that takes hold of Christ. Appropriation, said Isaac Taylor, is the secret of dying. And it is the secret of living too. We take hold of Him, He takes hold of us, and the great old word is fulfilled—He sent down from above ; He drew me; He took me out of many waters.

Round this doctrine of the Atonement man’s trust and hope have ever gathered. It is the resting-place of the soul. Denounced as immoral by those who do not understand it, not thoroughly apprehended, and often much misapprehended, even by those who love it, it has vindicated itself triumphantly in its influence on faith and life through all the ages. It will increasingly vindicate itself in the experience of those who lovingly embrace it. ’’While there is life in thee," says a great teacher of the Church, "in this death alone place thy trust, confide in nothing else besides to this death commit thyself altogether ; with this shelter thy whole self ; with this death array thyself from head to foot. And if the Lord thy God will judge thee, say, Lord, between Thy judgment and me I cast the death of our Lord Jesus Christ ; no otherwise can I contend with Thee. And if He say to thee, Thou art a sinner, say, Lord, I stretch forth the death of our Lord Jesus Christ between my sins and Thee. If he say, Thou art worthy of condemnation, say, Lord, I set the death of our Lord Jesus Christ between my evil deserts and Thee, and His merits I offer for those merits which I ought to have, but have not of my own. If He say that He is wroth with thee, say. Lord, I lift up the death of our Lord Jesus Christ between Thy wrath and me."