'Died _for_ us.' Now that expression plainly implies two things:
first, that Christ died of His own accord, and being impelled by a
great motive, beneficence; and, second, that that voluntary death,
somehow or other, is for our behoof and advantage. The word in the
original, 'for,' does not define in what way that death ministers to
our advantage, but it does assert that for those Roman Christians who
had never seen Jesus Christ, and by consequence for you and me
nineteen centuries off the Cross, there is benefit in the fact of
that death. Now, suppose we quote an incident in the story of
missionary martyrdom. There was a young lady, whom some of us knew
and loved, in a Chinese mission station, who, with the rest of the
missionary band, was flying. Her life was safe. She looked back, and
saw a Chinese boy that her heart twined round, in danger. She
returned to save him; they laid hold of her and flung her into the
burning house, and her charred remains have never been found. That
was a death for another, but 'Jesus died for us' in a deeper sense
than that. Take another case. A man sets himself to some great cause,
not his own, and he sees that in order to bless humanity, either by
the proclamation of some truth, or by the origination of some great
movement, or in some other way, if he is to carry out his purpose,
he must give his life. He does so, and dies a martyr. What he aimed
at could only be done by the sacrifice of his life. The death was a
means to his end, and he died for his fellows. That is not the depth
of the sense in which Paul meant that Jesus Christ died for us. It
was not that He was true to His message, and, like many another
martyr, died. There is only one way, as it seems to me, in which any
beneficial relation can be established between the Death of Christ
and us, and it is that when He died He died for us, because 'He bare
our sins in His own body on the tree.'
Dear brethren, I dare say some of you do not take that view, but I
know not how justice can be done to the plain words of Scripture
unless this is the point of view from which we look at the Cross of
Calvary--that there the Lamb of Sacrifice was bearing, and bearing
away, the sins of the whole world. I know that Christian men who
unite in the belief that Christ's death was a sacrifice and an
atonement diverge from one another in their interpretations of the
way in which that came to be a fact, and I believe, for my part, that
the divergent interpretations are like the divergent beams of light
that fall upon men who stand round the same great luminary, and that
all of them take their origin in, and are part of the manifestation
of, the one transcendent fact, which passes all understanding, and
gathers into itself all the diverse conceptions of it which are
formed by limited minds. He died for us because, in His death, our
sins are taken away and we are restored to the divine favour.
I know that Jesus Christ is said to have made far less of that aspect
of His work in the Gospels than His disciples have done in the
Epistles, and that we are told that, if we go back to Jesus, we shall
not find the doctrine which for some of us is the first form in which
the Gospel finds its way into the hearts of men. I admit that the
fully-developed teaching followed the fact, as was necessarily the
case. I do not admit that Jesus Christ 'spake nothing concerning
Himself' as the sacrifice for the world's sins. For I hear from His
lips--not to dwell upon other sayings which I could quote--I hear
from His lips, 'The Son of Man came not to be ministered unto, but to
minister'--that is only half His purpose--'and to give His life a
ransom instead of the many.' You cannot strike the atoning aspect of
His death out of that expression by any fair handling of the words.
And what does the Lord's Supper mean? Why did Jesus Christ select
that one point of His life as the point to be remembered? Why did He
institute the double memorial, the body parted from the blood being a
sign of a violent death? I know of no explanation that makes that
Lord's Supper an intelligible rite except the explanation which says
that He came, to live indeed, and in that life to be a sacrifice, but
to make the sacrifice complete by Himself bearing the consequences of
transgression, and making atonement for the sins of the world.
Brethren, that is the only aspect of Christ's death which makes it of
any consequence to us. Strip it of that, and what does it matter to
me that He died, any more than it matters to me that any
philanthropist, any great teacher, any hero or martyr or saint,
should have died? As it seems to me, nothing. Christ's death is
surrounded by tenderly pathetic and beautiful accompaniments. As a
story it moves the hearts of men, and 'purges them, by pity and by
terror.' But the death of many a hero of tragedy does all that.
And if you want to have the Cross of Christ held upright in its place
as the Throne of Christ and the attractive power for the whole world,
you must not tamper with that great truth, but say, 'He died for our
sins, according to the Scriptures.'