Our Master: Thoughts for Salvationists about Their Lord

by Bramwell Booth

IV.

"It is finished."

There is a repose, a kind of majesty about this declaration which marks it out from all other human words. There is, perhaps, nothing about the death of Jesus which is in more striking contrast with death as men generally know it than is revealed in this one saying. We are so accustomed to regrets, to confessions that this and that are, alas! unfinished; to those sad recitals which so often conclude with the dirge-like refrain, "it might have been," that death stands forth in a new light when it is viewed as the end of a completed journey, and the conclusion of a finished task. This is exactly the aspect of it to which our Lord refers. His work was done.

The suffering, also, was ended. Darkness had had its night of sore trial, and now the day was at hand. Trial and suffering do end. It is sometimes hard to believe it, but the end is already appointed from the beginning. It was so with the Saviour of the world; and at length the hour is come, and He raises His bruised and bleeding head for the last time, and cries in token of His triumph, "It is finished!"

But is there not also here a suggestion of something more? Up to that concluding hour it was always possible for Him to draw back. "I lay down My life for the sheep," He had said; "no man taketh it from Me, but I lay it down of Myself." His was, in the very highest and widest sense of the word, a voluntary offering, a voluntary humiliation, a voluntary death. Up to the very last, therefore, He could have stepped down from the cross, going no further toward the dark abyss. But the moment came when this would be no longer possible; when, even for Him, the sacrifice would be irrevocable--when the possibility "to save Himself" was ended, and when He became for ever "the Lamb that was slain," bearing the marks of His wounds in His eternal body. When that moment passed, He might well say, "It is finished."

Is there not something that should answer to this in the lives of many of His disciples? Is there not a point for us, also, at which we may pass over the line of uncertainty or reserve in our offering, saying for ever--it is finished? Is there not an appointed Calvary somewhere, at which we can settle the questions that have been so long unsettled, and, in the strength of God, at last declare that, as for controversy of any kind with Him, "it is finished"? Is there not at this very same cross of our dying Saviour a place where doubt and shame may perish together--crucified with Him, and finished for ever?

This would be, indeed, a blessed conformity to His death.

V.

"I thirst."

This is the first of the three words of Christ which relate specially to His own inner experiences, and which I have placed together for the purpose of this paper.

"I thirst." They gave Him vinegar to drink--or, probably, in a moment of pity the soldiers brought Him the sour wine which they had provided for themselves. He seems to have partaken of it, although He had refused the mixture that had been before offered Him merely to deaden His pain. To bear that pain was the lofty duty set before Him, and so He would not turn aside from it one hair's breadth.

But He humbled Himself to receive what was necessary from the very hands that had been crucifying Him. He, who could have so easily commanded a whole multitude of the heavenly host to appear for His succour, and to whose precious lips, parched in death, the princes of the eternal Kingdom would have so gladly hastened with a draught from celestial springs, condescended to ask the help of those who mocked Him, and to take the support He so sadly needed from His triumphant persecutors.

Oh, you who are proud by nature, who are reserved by nature, who are sensitive in spirit, who feel every wrong done to you like a knife entering your breast, and who, when you forgive an injury, find it difficult to forget, and harder still to humble yourselves in any way to those who, you feel, have wronged you--here for you is a lesson, here for you is an example, a precious example, of the condescension of Love. Yes. to love those who seem to be against you, to love those in whom there always appears to you to be some difference of spirit or incompatibility of temperament, will mean, if you are made conformable unto your Master's death, that you will be able to receive at their hands services, kindnesses, pity, advice, which your own poor, fallen nature would, without divine grace, have scorned and spurned.

VI.

"My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?"

Here is a great mystery. No doubt, to the human nature of our Lord, it did appear as though the Father had forsaken Him, and that was the last bitter drop in the cup of His humiliation and anguish. If men only knew it, the realisation that God has left them will be the greatest agony of the sinner's doom. And here upon the cross, our Lord, undergoing the penalty of sins not His own has yet to experience fully the severance which sin makes between God and the human soul.

But, even to many of those who love and serve God fully, there does come at times something which is very similar to this strange and dark experience of our Lord's. Before the final struggle in many great conflicts, those inward consolations on which so much seems to depend are often mysteriously withdrawn. Why it should be so we do not know; it is a mystery. Some loyal spirits have thought that God withdraws His consolations and His peace, that the soul may be more truly filled with His presence, thus substituting for divine consolation the "God of consolation," and for divine peace the "God of peace." In any case we have this comfort: it was so with our Master. Do not let the servant expect to be above his Lord.

This terrible moment of seeming separation from the Father, and the dark cry which was wrung from our Saviour's broken heart, did not, however, make the final victory any the less. And, if you are one with Him, and have really set your heart on glorifying Him, and if you can only endure, such moments will not take from your victory one shred of its joy. Oh, then, hold on to your cross! hold on to your cross! even if it seems, as it sometimes may, that God Himself has forsaken you, and that you are left to suffer alone, without either the sympathy of those around you, or the conscious support of the indwelling God. Hold on to your cross. This is the way of Calvary--this is becoming conformable to the death of the Lord Jesus.