BIBLE CHRISTIAN MAGAZINE,

APRIL, 1870.

THE LAMB OF GOD.

Ar this season of the year, the minds of all Christians are turned to Jesus, the world's Saviour, and the world's Saviour because He made a full atonement for the world's sin. All that Christ is, and ever did or said, is worthy of our profound attention and admiring study; but his Person, Character, and Work are the chief points of attraction and interest.

1. Christ's Person is Wonderful. It is His glory, His distinction, which He shares with no other, that He is both one with God, and one with men. That he is one with God none can seriously doubt who have properly considered His own words, "I and my Father are one." "He that hath seen me hath seen the Father." The beloved disciple declares that "whosoever abideth in the doctrine of Christ, he hath both the Father and the Son." The meaning of these sentences can be scarcely mistaken. The great God is our Saviour.

But Christ is also one with men. He is one with men at the same time that He is one with God. He not only bears some resemblance to us, but He is actually one of us-"bone of our bone, and flesh of our flesh." He throbs all over with the joys and griefs of humanity. He has a real human body, and a real human soul. His own personal experience of sorrow and difficulty is His grand qualification to be our sympathizing High Priest. He felt the pangs of hunger and thirst as keenly as any of us feel them. Sleep was as refreshing and welcome to His wearied frame as to ours. His hands tired with labour just as our own do. He shrank from pain and suffering and death just as we shrink from the same things. He had to resist temptation just as we have to resist it. "In all points he was made like unto His brethren, yet without sin." The Saviour was like, and yet unlike all others, for He was without sin. It is His glory, His distinction therefore, that—

2. His character is perfect. This perfection of character was secured by His miraculous conception and birth. Infidels in all ages have ridiculed the plain and decisive teaching of Scripture on this point; but there are facts in Christ's history, which all persons admit who acknowledge that he was an historical person, which His miraculous conception and birth only can explain. The holy thing that was born of Mary was to be called the Son of God. The uniform testimony concerning Christ is, that "He was holy, harmless, undefiled, separate from sinners." Brought into actual contact with sin and sinners, He himself remained as pure as when He dwelt in the bosom of His Father. His unanswered and unanswerable challenge to all men demonstrates the infinite superiority of APRIL, 1870. L

His character.

"Which of you convinceth me of sin?" No selfish motive ever stained the purity of His conduct. No revengeful thought or feeling ever took possession of His heart. No unholy passion ever ruffled the calmness of His soul. No angry word ever passed His lips. No ray of malice ever darted from His eye. "He was full of grace and truth." Love without weakness, and truth without severity, were perfectly united in Him. He was full of grace, so full indeed as if in His heart there dwelt not aught besides; and yet He was so full of truth, that He may fitly be denominated the truth. The evidence as to the perfection of Christ's character is indisputable. Judas after he had betrayed his Lord would have been glad of any excuse to justify his conduct. If there had been any secret faults which his close intimacy with his Master had discovered, Judas doubtless would have gratefully remembered them, and used them as his apology, in his utter misery and despair. But Christ's innocence constituted the very sting of his remorse. "I have sinned in that I have betrayed the innocent blood." Pilate was a heathen judge, most anxious to please the people, and not over-scrupulous in such matters; but he was obliged to acknowledge, "I find no fault in Him." The consciences of Christ's bitterest enemies were on His side. He was a perfect example of obedience to God, and love to men. His meekness, His gentleness, His purity are all indicated by this most glorious and expressive of His titles, The Lamb of God. But this name is chiefly appropriate because of,

3. Christ's sacrificial work. The Jewish economy, as is so forcibly taught in the epistle to the Hebrews, had its deepest and ultimate fulfilment in the Person and Work of Christ. The most wonderful part of that most wonderful system of prefiguration was the Paschal Lamb. And it is most remarkable that the time-the very month and day and hour-* the manner, and the circumstances of Christ's death, literally corresponded with the most suggestive and significant of all the types. We cannot err in declaring with the apostle that "Christ, our Passover, was sacrificed for us.' To use language, which we should shrink from using, if it were not inspired, we may boldly assert, that " He was made sin for us," i.e., either treated as a sinner, or made a sin-offering for us; but "He was made sin for us"—and without becoming, as Luther says, "the greatest sinner in the universe -"that we might be made," or rather that we might become, for so it is in the original, "the righteousness of God in him." The Lord laid on him the iniquities of us all. He was stricken that He might be omnipotent to save. "He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities." He bore our sins in His own body on the tree. Man's Saviour, because man's surety. Man's hope, because man's substitute.

Christ is the Lamb of God. He was divinely appointed to make an atonement for sin. That atoning work has all the value of his own infinite nature. It eternally secures for Him the Father's brightest smile. It makes Christ the centre of heavenly attraction and joy.

* See Dr. Cooke's Sermon in our January number.

It is our duty to behold Him. "Look unto him, ye nations." The blood of the Paschal Lamb had not only to be shed, but to be sprinkled on the lintels and on the posts of the door, and Christ's blood must be sprinkled on our hearts and consciences.

But while Christ must be believed in to be our Saviour, we have only to believe in Him in order to be saved. The sacrifice of the mass has no place in the Christian system. If it be, as the Council of Trent asserts, "a proper and propitiatory sacrifice for the sins of the living and the dead," then Christ must often have suffered since he entered into his glory; but "once in the end of the world he put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself." It is only necessary therefore for the sinner to believe in Him to be saved; to say from the heart,

THE STRAIT GATE AND THE NARROW WAY.

"Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it."-MATT. VII. 14.

WHY is the gate "strait," and why is the way "narrow?" Why? emphatically, as the result is that few find the way of life. Is not this strange, mysterious, inexplicable? So strange, mysterious, and inexplicable is it, that we are led to ask, Are the words of the text the words of Jesus, man's merciful and compassionate Saviour? Has He imposed such hard conditions as these? Has He made the way of salvation thus difficult? These questions suggest the thought, whether our usual conceptions of Christ's character and the teachings of the New Testament be correct. Shall we have to modify, or reject as false, however painful that may be, the views that we have hitherto held on these points? Is it our duty to re-examine, with greater care and minuteness, the foundations of our faith? If God requires all men to enter by one gate, and to walk in one way, why has He made the gate "strait," and the way "narrow?"

If we can answer these questions satisfactorily, we may be rendering some perplexed and anxious soul valuable and necessary service.

It is plain that Christ cannot have intended, in the words of our text, to exclude multitudes of our fellow-men from every chance of salvation. The love of God for the whole world, the nature of the atonement offered by Jesus for the sins of men, the universality of the Spirit's operations, and of the Gospel's adaptation, promises, and obligations, and even the arrangements and events of Providence, and a thousand things besides, forbid us to entertain such a supposition as that for one moment. It may be hard for men who have not mastered some of the most difficult problems of God's moral government to believe that a God of Infinite Wisdom, Holiness, and Power, loves every sinner with Infinite Love and wills his salvation: but if we believe the Bible we must believe it, for it is

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revealed there with startling distinctness and force. "As I live, saith the Lord GOD, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked; but that the wicked turn from his way and live: turn ye, turn ye, from your evil ways; for why will ye die, O house of Israel ?" "The Lord .... is longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance." That the men of Jerusalem did not know the time of their visitation filled the eyes of the Divine Man with bitterest tears, and His heart with deepest sorrow. Such passages as those to which we have referred are only specimens of a large class, and which are so important that if they were eliminated from the Bible it would not be the same Bible, but another.

Nor can Christ have meant to teach that only a few persons would be saved. The text is rather to be regarded as the statement of a fact concerning the men of his generation (alas! unhappily, too true concerning the men of every succeeding age) than a prediction of what must necessarily happen. If all men are alike in ruin and redemption, and Experience proves the one and Revelation the other, then the salvation of one man is a pledge that all men may be saved. The following illustration is not perfect, but it is sufficiently accurate for our purpose. If one vessel has passed through the famous Suez canal, all vessels of the same size and kind can do so also. If one army has threaded its way through narrow defiles and over precipitous cliffs from one country to another, it is easier for other armies, with commanders equally skilful and troops equally courageous, to follow in its track. It is a simple historical fact that great multitudes have been saved, and therefore the text cannot mean that only a few will be saved. Perhaps in the end it may be found that more will have entered by the "strait gate than the "wide" one, and have come by the " narrow way to heaven than gone by the "broad" way to hell. Christ never intended to be the Saviour of a "chosen " few, or of one favoured nation exclusively. Very early in his public ministry Jesus declared, and the announcement must have been a terrible shock to the pride and prejudices of many of his hearers, "that many shall come from the east and the west, and shall sit down with Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, in the kingdom of heaven." There have been grand and beautiful illustrations of this divine announcement, but none perhaps more grand and beautiful than the events that are now transpiring in Madagascar. The people there, with one consent, are yielding to the influence of the Gospel, and proffering their allegiance to King Jesus. The idols are being utterly abolished. The inhabitants are flying as a cloud, and as the doves to their windows, almost darkening the sun at noonday. What has occurred in many nations, and is now occurring in Madagascar, shall yet occur, if the Bible be true, in every nation under heaven. We must not therefore fix upon any narrow interpretation of this text, and hastily conclude it is the right or only one.

Once more, Christ cannot have intended to teach that his salvation is not a "common as well as a 66 great" salvation, or that its benefits are not to be enjoyed upon the easiest conditions. In a perfectly plain and intelligible sense, it is easier for a man to be lost than to