Sayfadaki görseller
PDF
ePub

consent. As in those two-faced pictures, look upon the crucifying of Christ one way, as complotted by a treacherous disciple and malicious priests and rulers, and nothing more deformed and hateful than the authors of it; but view it again, as determined in God's counsel, for the restoring of lost mankind, and it is full of unspeakable beauty and sweetness,-infinite wisdom and love in every trait of it.

Thus also, as to the persons for whom Christ engaged to suffer, their coming unto Him looks back to that first donation of the Father, as flowing from that: All that the Father giveth me shall come unto me. (John vi. 37.)

Now this being God's great design, it is that which He would have men eye and consider more than all the rest of His works; and yet it is least of all considered by the most! The other Covenant, made with the first Adam, was but to make way, and, if we may so speak, to make work for this. For He knew that it would not hold; therefore, as this New Covenant became needful by the breach of the other, so the failing of that other sets off and commends the firmness of this. The former was made with a man in his best condition, and yet he kept it not: even then, he proved vanity, as it is, Psal. xxxix. 5, Verily, every man, in his best estate, is altogether vanity. So that the second, that it might be stronger, is made with A Man indeed, to supply the place of the former, but he is GodMan, to be surer than the former, and therefore it holds. And this is the difference, as the Apostle expresses it, that the first Adam, in that Covenant, was laid as a foundation, and, though we say not that the Church, in its true notion, was built on him, yet the estate of the whole race of mankind, the materials which the Church is built of, lay on him for that time; and it failed. But upon this rock, the second Adam, is the Church so firmly built, that the gates of hell cannot prevail against her. The first man, Adam, was made a living soul; the last Adam was made a quickening (or life-giving) spirit. (1 Cor. xv. 45.) The First had life, but he transferred it not, yea, he kept it not for himself, but drew in and transferred death; but

the Second, by death, conveys life to all that are reckoned his seed: He bare their sins.

2. As to the work itself. He bare them on the tree. In that outside of His suffering, the visible kind of death inflicted on Him, in that it was hanging on the tree of the cross, there was an analogy with the end and main work; and it was ordered by the Lord with regard unto that end, being a death declared accursed by the Law, as the Apostle St. Paul observes, (Gal. iii. 13,) and so declaring Him who was God blessed for ever, to have been made a curse (that is, accounted as accursed) for us, that we might be blessed in Him, in whom, according to the promise, all the nations of the earth are blessed.

But that wherein lay the strength and main stress of His sufferings, was this invisible weight, which none could see who gazed on Him, but which He felt more than all the rest; He bare our sins. In this there are three things. 1. The weight of sin. 2. The transferring of it upon Christ. 3. His bearing of it.

1. He bare sin as a heavy burden; so the word bearing imports in general, (vývɛyxɛv,) and those two words particularly used by the prophet, Isa. liii. 4, to which these allude, (b) imply the bearing of some great mass or load. And such sin is; for it hath the wrath of an offended God hanging at it, indissolubly tied to it, of which, who can bear the least? And therefore the least sin, being the procuring cause of it, will press a man down for ever, that he shall not be able to rise. Who can stand before Thee when once Thou art angry? says the Psalmist, Psal. lxxvi. 7. And the Prophet, Jer. iii. 12, Return, backsliding Israel, and I will not cause my wrath to fall upon thee-to fall as a great weight: or as a millstone, and crush the soul.

But senseless we go light under the burden of sin, and feel it not, we complain not of it, and are therefore truly said to be dead in it; otherwise it could not but press us, and press out complaints. O wretched man that I am! who

shall deliver me? A profane, secure sinner thinks it nothing to break the holy Law of God, to please his flesh, or the world; he counts sin a light matter, makes a mock of it, as Solomon says, Prov. xiv. 9. But a stirring conscience is of another mind: Mine iniquities are gone over my head; as a heavy burden, they are too heavy for me. (Psal. xxxviii. 4.)

Sin is such a burden as makes the very frame of heaven and earth, which is not guilty of it, yea the whole creation, to crack and groan, (it is the Apostle's doctrine, Rom. viii. 22,) and yet the impenitent heart, whose guiltiness it is, continues unmoved, groaneth not; for your accustomed groaning is no such matter.

Yea, to consider it in connexion with the present subject, where we may best read what it is, Sin was a heavy load to Jesus Christ. In Psal. xl. 12, the Psalmist, speaking in the person of Christ, complains heavily, Innumerable evils have compassed me about: Mine iniquities (not His, as done by Him, but yet His, by His undertaking to pay for them) have taken hold of me, so that I am not able to look up; they are more than the hairs of my head, therefore my heart faileth me. And surely, that which pressed Him so sore who upholds Heaven and earth, no other in Heaven or on earth could have sustained and surmounted, but would have sunk and perished under it. Was it, think you, the pain of that common outside of his death, though very painful, that drew such a word from him, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? Or was it the fear of that beforehand, that pressed a sweat of blood from him? No, it was this burden of sin, the first of which was committed in the garden of Eden, that then began to be laid upon Him and fastened upon his shoulders in the garden of Gethsemane, ten thousand times heavier than the cross which he was caused to bear. That might be for a while turned over to another, but this could not. This was the cup he trembled at more than at that gall and vinegar to be afterwards offered to him by his crucifiers, or any part of his external sufferings: it was the bitter cup of wrath due to sin,

which his Father put into his hand, and caused him to drink, the very same thing that is here called the bearing our sins in his body.

And consider, that the very smallest sins contributed to make up this load, and made it so much the heavier; and therefore, though sins be comparatively smaller and greater, yet learn thence to account no sin in itself small, which offends the great God, and which lay heavy upon your great Redeemer, in the day of His sufferings.

At His apprehension, besides the soldiers, that invisible crowd of the sins he was to suffer for came about him, for it was these that laid strongest hold on him; he could easily have shaken off all the rest, as appears Matt. xxvi. 33, but our sins laid the arrest on him, being accounted His, as it is in that forecited place, Psal. xl. 12, Mine iniquities. Now, amongst these were even those sins we call small; they were of the number that took him, and they were amongst those instruments of his bloodshed. If the greater were as the spear that pierced his side, the less were as the nails that pierced his hands and his feet, and the very least as the thorns that were set on his precious head. And the multitude of them made up what was wanting in their magnitude; though they were small, they were many.

2. They were transferred upon Him by virtue of that covenant we spoke of. They became His debt, and He responsible for all they came to. Seeing you have accepted of this business according to My will, (may we conceive the Father saying to his Son,) you must go through with it; you are engaged in it, but it is no other than what you understood perfectly before; you knew what it would cost you, and yet, out of joint love with Me to those I named to be saved by you, you were as willing as I to the whole undertaking. Now therefore the time is come, that I must lay upon you the sins of all those persons, and you must bear them; the sins of all those believers who lived before, and all who are to come after, to the end of the world. The Lord laid on Him the iniquity

of us all, says the Prophet, Isa. liii. 6, took it off from us and charged it on him, made it to meet on Him, or to fall in together, as the word in the original imports. The sins of all, in all ages, before and after, who were to be saved, all their guiltiness met together on His back upon the Cross. Whosoever of all that number had least sin, yet had no small burden to cast on Him: and to give accession to the whole weight, every man hath had his own way of wandering, as the Prophet there expresseth it, and He paid for all; all fell on Him. And as in testimony of his meekness and patience, so in this respect likewise was He so silent in His sufferings, that though His enemies dealt most unjustly with Him, yet He stood as convicted before the justice-seat of His Father, under the imputed guilt of all our sins, and so eyeing Him, and accounting His business to be chiefly with Him, he did patiently bear the due punishment of all our sins at His Father's hand, according to that of the Psalmist, I was dumb, I opened not my mouth because Thou didst it. (Psal. xxxix. 9.) Therefore the Prophet immediately subjoins the description of his silent carriage, to that which he had spoken of, the confluence of our iniquities upon Him: As a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so He openeth not His mouth. (Isa. liii. 7.)

And if our sins were thus accounted His, then, in the same way, and for that very reason, His sufferings and satisfaction. must of necessity be accounted ours. As He said for his disciples to the men who came to take him, If it be me ye seek, then let these go free; so He said for all believers, to his Father, His wrath then seizing on him, If on me Thou wilt lay hold, then let these go free. And thus the agreement was: He was made sin for us who knew no sin, that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him. (2 Cor. v. ult.)

So then, there is a union betwixt believers and Jesus Christ, by which this interchange is made; He being charged with their sins, and they clothed with his satisfaction and righteousness. This union is founded, 1st, in God's decree of Election, running to this effect, that they should live in Christ, and so,

« ÖncekiDevam »