Is the Lord Jehovah of the Old Testament the Lord Jesus of the New?
They are the same, my friends. He who laid waste the land of Egypt is he who came to seek and to save that which was lost.
He who slew the children in Egypt is he who took little children up in his arms and blessed them.
He who spoke the awful words of the text is he who was brought as a lamb to the slaughter; and as a sheep before the shearers is dumb, so he opened not his mouth.
This is very wonderful. But why should it not be wonderful? What can God be but wonderful? His character, just because it is perfect, must contain in itself all other characters, all forms of spiritual life which are without sin. And yet again it is not so very wonderful. Have we not seen—I have often—in the same mortal man these two different characters at once? Have we not seen soldiers and sailors, brave men, stern men, men who have fought in many a bloody battle, to whom it is a light thing to kill their fellow-men, or to be killed themselves in the cause of duty; and yet most full of tenderness, as gentle as lambs to little children and to weak women; nursing the sick lovingly and carefully with the same hand which would not shrink from firing the fatal cannon to blast a whole company into eternity, or sink a ship with all its crew? I have seen such men, brave as the lion and gentle as the lamb, and I saw in them the likeness of Christ—the Lion of Judah; and yet the Lamb of God.
Christ is the Lamb of God; and in him there are the innocence of the lamb, the gentleness of the lamb, the patience of the lamb: but there is more. What words are these which St. John speaks in the spirit?—
‘And the heaven departed as a scroll when it is rolled together, and every mountain and island were moved out of their places; and the kings of the earth, and the great, and the rich, and the chief captains, and the mighty men, and every bondman and every freeman hid themselves in the dens and in the rocks of the mountains; and said to the mountains and to the rocks, Fall on us, and hide us from the face of him that sitteth on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb; for the great day of his wrath is come; and who shall be able to stand?’
Yes, look at that awful book of Revelation with which the Bible ends, and see if the Bible does not end as it began, by revealing a God who, however loving and merciful, long-suffering, and of great goodness, still wages war eternally against all sin and unrighteousness of man, and who will by no means clear the guilty; a God of whom the apostle St. Paul, who knew most of his mercy and forgiveness to sinners, could nevertheless say, just as Moses had said ages before him, ‘Our God is a consuming fire.’
Now I think it most necessary to recollect this in Passion Week; ay, and to do more—to remember it all our lives long.
For it is too much the fashion now, and has often been so before, to think only of one side of our Lord’s character, of the side which seems more pleasant and less awful. People please themselves in hymns which talk of the meek and lowly Jesus, and in pictures which represent him with a sad, weary, delicate, almost feminine face. Now I do not say that this is wrong. He is the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever; as tender, as compassionate now as when he was on earth; and it is good that little children and innocent young people should think of him as an altogether gentle, gracious, loveable being; for with the meek he will be meek; but again, with the froward, the violent, and self-willed, he will be froward. He will show the violent that he is the stronger of the two, and the self-willed that he will have his will and not theirs done.