'Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners.' Now, every word
there is weighty, and might be, not beaten out, but opened out into
volumes. Mark who it is that comes--the solemn double name of that great
Lord, 'Christ Jesus.' The former tells of His divine appointment and
preparation, inasmuch as the Spirit of the Lord God is upon Him,
anointing Him to proclaim good tidings to the poor, and to open the
prison doors to all the captives, and asserts that it is He to whom
prophets and ritual witnessed, and for whose coming prophets and kings
looked wearily through the ages, and died rejoicing even to see afar off
the glimmer of His day. The name of Jesus tells of the child born in
Bethlehem, who knows the experience of our lives by His own, and not
only bends over our griefs with the pity and omniscience of a God, but
with the experience and sympathy of a man.
'Christ Jesus came.' Then He _was_ before He came. His own will impelled
His feet, and brought Him to earth.
'Christ Jesus came to save.' Then there is disease, for saving is
healing; and there is danger, for saving is making secure.
'Christ Jesus came to save sinners'--the universal condition,
co-extensive with the 'world' into which, and for which, He came. And so
the essence of the Gospel, as it lay in Paul's mind, and had been
verified in his experience, was this--that a divine person had left a
life of glory, and in wonderful fashion had taken upon Himself manhood
in order to deliver men from the universal danger and disease. That is
the Gospel which Paul believed, and which he commends to us as 'a
faithful saying.'
Well, then, if that be so, there are two or three things very important
for us to lay to heart. The first is the universality of sin. That is
the thing in which we are all alike, dear friends. That is the one thing
about which any man is safe in his estimate of another. We differ
profoundly. The members of this congregation, gathered accidentally
together, and perhaps never to be all together again, may be at the
antipodes of culture, of condition, of circumstances, of modes of life;
but, just as really below all the diversities there lies the common
possession of the one human heart, so really and universally below all
diversities there lies the black drop in the heart, and 'we all have
sinned and come short of the glory of God.' It is that truth which I
want to lay on your hearts as the first condition to understanding
anything about the power, the meaning, the blessedness of the Gospel
which we say we believe.
And what does Paul mean by this universal indictment? If you take the
vivid autobiographical sketch in the midst of which it is embedded, you
will understand. He goes on to say, 'of whom I am chief.' It was the
same man that said, without supposing that he was contradicting this
utterance at all, 'touching the righteousness which is in the law' I was
'blameless.' And yet, 'I am chief.' So all true men who have ever shown
us their heart, in telling their Christian faith, have repeated Paul's
statement; from Augustine in his wonderful _Confessions_, to John Bunyan
in his _Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners_. And then prosaic men
have said, 'What profligates they must have been, or what exaggerators
they are now!' No. Sewer gas of the worst sort has no smell; and the
most poisonous exhalations are only perceptible by their effects. What
made Paul think himself the chief of sinners was not that he had broken
the commandments, for he might have said, and in effect did say, 'All
these have I kept from my youth up,' but that, through all the
respectability and morality of his early life there ran this streak--an
alienation of heart, in the pride of self-confidence, from God, and an
ignorance of his own wretchedness and need. Ah! brethren, I do not need
to exaggerate, nor to talk about 'splendid vices,' in the untrue
language of one of the old saints, but this I seek to press on you: that
the deep, universal sin does not lie in the indulgence of passions, or
the breach of moralities, but it lies here--'thou hast left Me, the
fountain of living water.' That is what I charge on myself, and on every
one of you, and I beseech you to recognise the existence of this
sinfulness beneath all the surface of reputable and pure lives.
Beautiful they may be; God forbid that I should deny it: beautiful with
many a strenuous effort after goodness, and charming in many respects,
but yet vitiated by this, 'The God in whose hand thy breath is, and
whose are all thy ways, thou hast not glorified.' That is enough to make
a man brush away all the respectabilities and proprieties and graces,
and look at the black reality beneath, and wail out 'of whom I am
chief.'
But, further, Paul's condensed summary of the Gospel implies the fatal
character of this universal sin. 'He comes to save,' says he. Now what
answers to 'save' is either disease or danger. The word is employed in
the original in antithesis to both conditions. To save is to heal and to
make safe. And I need not remind you, I suppose, of how truly the
alienation from God, and the substitution for Him of self or of
creature, is the sickness of the whole man. But the end of sickness
uncured is death. We 'have no healing medicine,' and the 'wound is
incurable' by the skill of any earthly chirurgeon. The notion of
sickness passes, therefore, at once into that of danger: for unhealed
sickness can only end in death. Oh! that my words could have the waking
power that would startle some of my complacent hearers into the
recognition of the bare facts of their lives and character, and of the
position in which they stand on a slippery inclined plane that goes
straight down into darkness!
You do not hear much about the danger of sin from some modern pulpits.
God forbid that it should be the staple of any; but God forbid that it
should be excluded from any! Whilst fear is a low motive,
self-preservation is not a low one; and it is to that that I now appeal.
Brethren, the danger of every sin is, first, its rapid growth; second,
its power of separating from God; third, the certainty of a future--ay!
and _present_--retribution.
To me, the proof of the fatal effect of sin is what God had to do in
order to stop it. Do you think that it would be a small, superficial cut
which could be stanched by nothing else but the pierced hand of Jesus
Christ? Measure the intensity of danger by the cost of deliverance, and
judge how grave are the wounds for the healing of which stripes had to
be laid on Him. Ah! if you and I had not been in danger of death, Jesus
Christ would not have died. And if it be true that the Son of God laid
aside His glory, and came into the world and died on the Cross for men,
out of the very greatness of the gift, and the marvellousness of the
mercy, there comes solemn teaching as to the intensity of the misery and
the reality and awfulness of the retribution from which we were
delivered by such a death. Sin, the universal condition, brings with it
no slight disease and no small danger.
Further, we may gather from this condensed summary where the true heart
and essence of the Christian revelation is. You will never understand it
until you are contented to take the point of view which the New
Testament takes, and give all weight and gravity to the fact of man's
transgression and the consequences thereof. We shall never know what the
power and the glory of the revelation of God in Jesus Christ is until we
recognise that, first and foremost, it is the mighty means by which
man's ruin is repaired, man's downrush is stopped, sin is forgiven and
capable of being cleansed. Only when we think of the Gospel of Jesus
Christ as being, first and foremost, the redemption of the world by the
great act of incarnation and sacrifice, do we come to be in a position
in any measure to estimate its superlative worth.
And, for my part, I believe that almost all the mistakes and errors and
evaporations of Christianity into a mere dead nothing which have
characterised the various ages of the Church come mainly from this, that
men fail to see how deep and how fatal are the wounds of sin, and so
fail to apprehend the Gospel as being mainly and primarily a system of
redemption. There are many other most beautiful aspects about it, much
else in it, that is lovely and of good report, and fitted to draw men's
hearts and admiration; but all is rooted in this, the life and death of
Jesus Christ, the sacrifice by whom we are forgiven, and in whom we are
healed. And if you strike that out, you have a dead nothing left--an
eviscerated Gospel.
I believe that we all need to be reminded of that to-day, as we always
do, but mainly to-day, when we hear from so many lips estimates,
favourable or unfavourable to Christianity and its mission in the world,
which leave out of sight, or minimise into undue insignificance, or
shove into a backward place, its essential characteristic, that it is
the power of God through Christ, His Son Incarnate, dying and rising
again for the salvation of individual souls from the penalty, the guilt,
the habit, and the love of their sins, and only secondarily is it a
morality, a philosophy, a social lever. I take for mine the quaint
saying of one of the old Puritans, 'When so many brethren are preaching
to the times, it may be allowed one poor brother to preach for
eternity.'
'This is a faithful saying, that Christ Jesus came into the world to
save sinners.'