Some preachers speak not of the death of Christ, but His life, because it is more pleasing to the natural ear; but the life of Christ may be preached for ever and it will not save any man, if His death is left out. A live lamb could not have kept death out of the houses of Goshen. God did not say that He wanted a live lamb at every door, but to have the lintels and door-posts sprinkled with the blood of the lamb. People sometimes say, “If I was as good as that minister, that preached the gospel for fifty years”; or, “If I was as good as that mother, who did so and so for her children”; but if we are behind the blood of God’s Son, we are just as safe as any Christian that has ever walked the face of the earth.
It is not a long life of usefulness that makes men and women acceptable to God. We must work for Christ; but we get salvation as a gift, and then begin to work because we cannot help it. All the work a person does before he becomes converted goes for nothing.
The little child down in Goshen behind the blood of the lamb was just as safe as Joshua, or any man in the whole town. The angel of death passed by when he saw the blood. The little tiny fly was as safe in the ark with Noah as the elephant. It was equally the ark that saved the fly and the elephant, and it is
THE BLOOD THAT SAVES
the weakest and the strongest. When death came that night with his sword, he entered the palace of the prince, and went into the houses of the great and mighty, and they all had to pay tribute to death; for the first-born in Egypt was smitten down that night. The only thing that kept death out was death itself. The only way that death can be met is by death. I have sinned, and must die; or get some one to die for me. The great question is—Have you got the token? If death should come after any one of us to-night, are we sheltered behind the blood? that is the point. It is the blood that atones. Not my good resolutions, or prayers, or position in society, or what I have done, but what has been done by another. God looks for the token.
Take another illustration. Suppose a man wanted to go from London to Liverpool, and he got into a railway carriage, he would soon hear the guard running along the platform crying out for tickets. A man might be rich or he might be poor, black or white, he might be learned or unlearned, that was not what the guard wanted to know—he wanted to see the tickets; for the ticket was the token, and if you have got a ticket you pass.
NO DEATH WHERE THE BLOOD WAS.
The Egyptians looked at the Israelites killing a lamb and sprinkling the blood on the door-posts no doubt as a very foolish proceeding, but not one house in the city, upon the doorposts and lintels of which the blood was not sprinkled, escaped; no matter who were the inhabitants, rich or poor, that night there was no difference. There was a wail heard in every habitation, from the palace to the meanest hovel where the blood had not been sprinkled, but where it had been sprinkled death was kept out. That showed clearly the truth, that without the shedding of blood there is no remission. Let no man or woman be guilty of laughing at this doctrine, that “the blood of Jesus Christ, His Son, cleanseth us from all sin.”
In the eleventh verse of the same chapter we read, “And thus shall ye eat it; with your loins girded, your shoes on your feet, and your staff in your hand; and ye shall eat it in haste: it is the Lord’s passover.” Why you have not got more power is because you don’t feed on the Lamb; and this is why there are so many weak Christians. The Lamb not only atones for our sins, but we are to feed upon the Lamb. We have got a wilderness journey before us, as the children of Israel had. After we are saved we are to feed upon Christ; He is the true bread from heaven. If I don’t feed my soul with the true bread from heaven I am sickly, and have not power to go and work for Christ; and that is the reason, I believe, why so few in the Church have power. Some people think if they get one glimpse of Christ that is enough.
Some think much of their dinner; why should not God’s children think a good deal of