Recalling what I have said as to the precision and carefulness with
which the Apostle varies his expressions in this context; speaking of
Christ's death only by that grim name, and of the death of His servants
as being merely a slumber, we have for the first thought suggested in
reference to Christ's death, that it exhausted all the bitterness of
death. Physically, the sufferings of our Lord were not greater, they
were even less, than that of many a man. His voluntary acceptance of
them was peculiar to Himself. But His death stands alone in this, that
on His head was concentrated the whole awfulness of the thing. So far as
the mere external facts go, there is nothing special about it. But I
know not how the shrinking of Jesus Christ from the Cross can be
explained without impugning His character, unless we see in His death
something far more terrible than is the common lot of men. To me
Gethsemane is altogether mysterious, and that scene beneath the olives
shatters to pieces the perfectness of His character, unless we recognise
that there it was the burden of the world's sin, beneath which, though
His will never faltered, His human power tottered. Except we understand
that, it seems to me that many who derived from Jesus Christ all their
courage, bore their martyrdom better than He did; and that the servant
has many a time been greater than his Lord. But if we take the Scripture
point of view, and say, 'The Lord has made to meet upon Him the iniquity
of us all,' then we can understand the agony beneath the olives, and
the cry from the Cross, 'Why hast Thou forsaken Me?'
Further, I would notice that this death is by the Apostle set forth as
being the main factor in man's redemption. This is the first of Paul's
letters, dating long before the others with which we are familiar.
Whatever may have been the spiritual development of St. Paul in certain
directions after his conversion--and I do not for a moment deny that
there was such--it is very important to notice that the fundamentals of
his Christology and doctrine of salvation were the same from the
beginning to the end, and that in this, his first utterance, he lays
down, as emphatically and clearly as ever afterwards he did, the great
truth that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who died on the Cross, thereby
secured man's redemption. Here he isolates the death from the rest of
the history of Christ, and concentrates the whole light of his thought
upon the Cross, and says, There! that is the power by which men have
been redeemed. I beseech you to ask yourselves whether these
representations of Christian truth adhere to the perspective of
Scripture, which do not in like manner set forth in the foreground of
the whole the atoning death of Jesus Christ our Lord.
Then note, further, that this death, the fountain of life, is a death
for us. Now I know, of course, that the language here does not
necessarily involve the idea of one dying instead of, but only of one
dying on behalf of, another. But then I come to this question, In what
conceivable sense, except the sense of bearing the world's sins, and,
therefore, mine, is the death of Jesus Christ of advantage to me? Take
the Scripture narratives. He died by the condemnation of the Jewish
courts as a blasphemer; by the condemnation of the supercilious Roman
court--cowardly in the midst of its superciliousness--as a possible
rebel, though the sentencer did not believe in the reality of the
charges. I want to know what good that is to me? He died, say some
people, as the victim of a clearer insight and a more loving heart than
the men around Him could understand. What advantage is that to me?
Oh, brethren! there is no meaning in the words 'He died for us' unless
we understand that the benefit of His death lies in the fact that it was
the sacrifice and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world; and
that, therefore, He died for us.
But then remember, too, that in this expression is set forth, not only
the objective fact of Christ's death for us, but much in reference to
the subjective emotions and purposes of Him who died. Paul was writing
to these Thessalonians, of whom none, I suppose, except possibly a few
Jews who might be amongst them, had ever seen Jesus Christ in the flesh,
or known anything about Him. And yet he says to them, 'Away across the
ocean there, Jesus Christ died for you men, not one of whom had ever
appealed to His heart through His eyes.'
The principle involved is capable of the widest possible expansion. When
Christ went to the Cross there was in His heart, in His purposes, in His
desires, a separate place for every soul of man whom He embraced, not
with the dim vision of some philanthropist, who looks upon the masses of
unborn generations as possibly beneficially affected by some of his
far-reaching plans, but with the individualising and separating
knowledge of a divine eye, and the love of a divine heart. Jesus Christ
bore the sins of the world because He bore in His sympathies and His
purposes the sins of each single soul. Yours and mine and all our
fellows' were there. Guilt and fear and loneliness, and all the other
evils that beset men because they have departed from the living God, are
floated away
'By the water and the blood
From Thy wounded side which flowed';
and as the context teaches us, it is because He died for us that He is
our Lord, and because He died for every man that He is every man's
Master and King.
II. Note, secondly, the transformation of our lives and deaths affected
thereby.
You may remember that, in my introductory remarks, I pointed out the
double application of that antithesis of waking or sleeping in the
context as referring in one case to the fact of physical life or death,
and in the other to the fact of moral engrossment with the slumbering
influences of the present, or of Christian vigilance. I carry some
allusion to both of these ideas in the remarks that I have to make.
Through Jesus Christ life may be quickened into watchfulness. It is not
enough to take waking as meaning living, for you may turn the metaphor
round and say about a great many men that living means dreamy sleeping.
Paul speaks in the preceding verses of 'others' than Christians as being
asleep, and their lives as one long debauch and slumber in the night.
Whilst, in contrast with physical death, physical life may be called
'waking'; the condition of thousands of men, in regard to all the higher
faculties, activities, and realities of being, is that of
somnambulists--they are walking indeed, but they are walking in their
sleep. Just as a man fast asleep knows nothing of the realities round
him; just as he is swallowed up in his own dreams, so many walk in a
vain show. Their highest faculties are dormant; the only real things do
not touch them, and their eyes are closed to these. They live in a
region of illusions which will pass away at cock-crowing, and leave them
desolate. For some of us here living is only a distempered sleep,
troubled by dreams which, whether they be pleasant or bitter, equally
lack roots in the permanent realities to which we shall wake some day.
But if we hold by Jesus Christ, who died for us, and let His love
constrain us, His Cross quicken us, and the might of His great sacrifice
touch us, and the blood of sprinkling be applied to our eyeballs as an
eye-salve, that we may see, we shall wake from our opiate sleep--though
it may be as deep as if the sky rained soporifics upon us--and be
conscious of the things that are, and have our dormant faculties roused,
and be quickened into intense vigilance against our enemies, and brace
ourselves for our tasks, and be ever looking forward to that joyful
hope, to that coming which shall bring the fulness of waking and of
life. So, you professing Christians, do you take the lessons of this
text? A sleeping Christian is on the high road to cease to be a
Christian at all. If there be one thing more comprehensively imperative
upon us than another, it is this, that, belonging, as we do by our very
profession, to the day, and being the children of the light, we shall
neither sleep nor be drunken, but be sober, watching as they who expect
their Lord. You walk amidst realities that will hide themselves unless
you gaze for them; therefore, watch. You walk amidst enemies that will
steal subtly upon you, like some gliding serpent through the grass, or
some painted savage in the forest; therefore, watch. You expect a Lord
to come from heaven with a relieving army that is to raise the siege
and free the hard-beset garrison from its fears and its toilsome work;
therefore, watch. 'They that sleep, sleep in the night.' They who are
Christ's should be like the living creatures in the Revelation, all eyes
round about, and every eye gazing on things unseen and looking for the
Master when He comes.
On the other hand, the death of Christ will soften our deaths into
slumber. The Apostle will not call what the senses call death, by that
dread name, which was warranted when applied to the facts of Christ's
death. The physical fact remaining the same, all that is included under
the complex whole called death which makes its terrors, goes, for a man
who keeps fast hold of Christ who died and lives. For what makes the
sting of death? Two or three things. It is like some poisonous insect's
sting, it is a complex weapon. One side of it is the fear of
retribution. Another side of it is the shrinking from loneliness.
Another side of it is the dread of the dim darkness of an unknown
future. And all these are taken clean away. Is it guilt, dread of
retribution? 'Thou shalt answer, Lord, for me.' Is it loneliness? In the
valley of darkness 'I will be with thee. My rod and My staff will
comfort thee.' Is it a shrinking from the dim unknown and all the
familiar habitudes and occupations of the warm corner where we have
lived? 'Jesus Christ has brought immortality to light by the Gospel.' We
do _not_, according to the sad words of one of the victims of modern
advanced thought, pass by the common road into the great darkness, but
by the Christ-made living Way into the everlasting light. And so it is a
misnomer to apply the same term to the physical fact plus the
accompaniment of dread and shrinking and fear of retribution and
solitude and darkness, and to the physical fact invested with the direct
and bright opposites of all these.
Sleep is rest; sleep is consciousness; sleep is the prophecy of waking.
We know not what the condition of those who sleep in Jesus may be, but
we know that the child on its mother's breast, and conscious somehow, in
its slumber, of the warm place where its head rests, is full of repose.
And they that sleep in Jesus will be _so_. Then, whether we wake or
sleep does not seem to matter so very much.