In the course of Christ’s prophetic teaching upon earth, we find evident proofs, that he had appeared not only for that end, but chiefly for a very different purpose, namely, to suffer and to die; that being a saving work, and of the utmost necessity. He declared that he came to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many. More than once he informed his disciples, that by a bitter and a most humbling kind of suffering, which hung over his head, that which was written concerning him, behoved to be accomplished.
His circumstances and manner of acting were wholly directed to that end. The joyful solemnizing of his birth, by a retinue of spirits immortal and enthroned, was heard by good witnesses indeed, but of low degree, and few in number; and with some express testimonies on earth, during his quiet education in a remote and contemptible town, they were almost gone out of mind. His heavenly consecration was shown to John only; his glorification on the mount, only to three of his followers, of which he forbade them to speak till after his resurrection, or to make him known every where as Christ. Several times he commanded not to propagate the cures he had wrought. Often his preaching was involved and figurative, more adapted to inflame the great against him, than to unite the many in his favours. Yet his greatness could not be wholly unknown, and when men would have exalted him, he shunned it. By all these things, the judgment and the confidence of the people concerning him, was much more vague and unstable, than even concerning his austere forerunner.—In one word, his ministry was so conducted as might best serve, not to prevent, but to pave the way for his farther suffering and death, while the clearer and more extensive spread of his doctrine, and thereby at the same time, the publication of his death and his glory, behoved to be the work of the apostles in his name.
That Christ suffered and died for the good of his church, is without controversy; so also did the apostles. But was any of them crucified for us, as was Christ? To say this, would in Paul’s judgment be the utmost absurdity. What then hath the Saviour done, which no other did?—‘He was delivered for our offences.’ ‘He suffered for our sin, the just for the unjust; that he might bring us to God.’ He ‘died for our sins.’ ‘The blood of Jesus Christ cleanseth us from all sin.’—And so indeed, that he delivered us from sin, by taking it upon himself. For he who neither had nor knew sin, was of God made to be sin for us, that we might he the righteousness of God in him. He ‘bare our sins in his own body upon the tree.’ ‘Behold, said John, the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world.’ And how does he take it away? By his death. For to say a lamb takes away sin, is not sense, if there be not an allusion to the Paschal Lamb, or to other sacrificed lambs, which were to be slain according to the law. ‘Christ our passover is sacrificed for us.’ ‘Ye are redeemed by the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish, and without spot.’—He put himself in our place, fulfilled for us the demands of God’s holy law, and for us satisfied his inflexible justice. Why, pray, of all men, of all the saints, of all the most excellent teachers, was Christ only free from all moral impurity? As a Prophet, this was not absolutely necessary for him; but necessary it was that he, being to fulfil the law for others, should have no need to satisfy for his own sin. ‘God sending his Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and that for sin, condemned sin in the flesh; that the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us.’ ‘God sent forth his Son made under the law, to redeem them who were under the law.’—The apostle confirms this in the clearest manner, giving us at the same time, a notable sign of the remarkable curse in the death of Christ. It is written, ‘Cursed is every one, who continueth not in all things which are written in the book of the law to do them. Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us: for it is written, Cursed is every one who hangeth on a tree.’
This important doctrine is inculcated on us in many places, under the notions of a purchase, a ransom, a propitiation, and a testament; by which the virtue and the efficacy, of Christ’s death are elucidated. Let it not be objected, that these phrases are borrowed from other things, and therefore to be understood in an improper and figurative sense. A figurative sense is not however, no sense at all, or without sense; but serves to make profound subjects more comprehensible to a common understanding.
1. A Purchase. Believers in their soul and their body are God’s, ‘because they are bought with a price;’ they are the church of the Lord God, which he hath purchased with his own blood. The song unto the Lamb runs, ‘Thou wast slain, and hast redeemed us to God by thy blood;’ which strongly indicates, that their salvation is to be ascribed to the merits of his bloody death.
2. A Ransom. In the New Testament, the word deliverance is often used in translating one, which properly signifies a redemption, or ransom. Thus it is written, ‘ye were redeemed from your vain conversation, not by corruptible things, as silver or gold, but by the precious blood of Christ.’ This redemption is explained by the forgiveness of sins. It is, therefore, his blood and death, wherewith he made payment, in order to procure our discharge from the debt of sin. He came ‘to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many.’—λυτρον. Matt. xx. 28. and αντιλυτρον. 1 Tim. ii. 6.
3. A Propitiation. Sometimes this in the Greek is called αποκαταλλαγη, (conciliatio) that is, a reconciliation. Accordingly, believers are now reconciled to God by the death of his Son; by his cross; by the blood of his cross, and in the body of his flesh through death. ‘God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself:’ which is farther explained, ‘not imputing their trespasses to them.’—But it is also called a propitiation, in the translation of ἱλασμος, (expiatio) used concerning the victims which were anciently slain, as a typical propitiation in place of the guilty. So now Jesus Christ the righteous is the propitiation for our sins. For God ‘sent his Son to be a propitiation for our sins.’ God hath set him forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood, for a demonstration of his righteousness, by (or rather because of) the forgiveness of sins. Therefore, ‘the Lamb of God hath so taken away the sins of the world,’ that he took them upon himself, that he bare them, that he died in the place of his people.
4. A Testament. According to his last institution, the assignation of the everlasting inheritance, is called ‘the New Testament in his blood, which was shed for many, for the remission of sins.’ This signifies to us, not only that Christ had a perfect right to the honour of settling the inheritance, not only that his death as a testator was necessary to put his people in possession of it; but, that that inheritance had its foundation precisely in the shedding of his blood, in his deepest humiliation, and his violent death; as thereby their sins, which otherwise stood in the way of salvation, could be forgiven. If, instead of the New Testament, we rather choose to translate it the New Covenant; the allusion will be somewhat different, but the matter the same.
This leads us to the epistle to the Hebrews, in which all these doctrines are ascertained to us at great length, and with invincible arguments. That epistle was intended to demonstrate indeed, the authority of Christ’s instruction above all the prophets, and even Moses himself: but also, under propositions borrowed from the ancient religion, and fitted to the Hebrews, to reconcile his priestly office with the intention of the Levitical sacrifices, and to exalt it infinitely above Aaron’s priesthood. Christ being a High Priest of unchangeable power, needed not to offer up sacrifices for his own sins, but having offered himself up once to God, he thereby made reconciliation for sin, made an end of it, opened a sure way to heaven, and ‘can save unto the uttermost all who come unto the Father by him.’ Read the 5th and the 10th chapters. Would you, on account of the doctrine so full of consolation, suspect this epistle, and erase it from the volume of holy scripture? In it, however, no doctrine occurs, which is not also mentioned elsewhere; and this apostolic epistle is surpassed by none of the rest, in sublimity of matter, in weight of evidence, in glorifying the grace of God in Christ, in strong consolation, in encouraging to the spiritual warfare, and in the most animating motives to holiness and perseverance.
Besides, in the Saviour’s satisfaction only lies the reason, why his suffering together with his resurrection, are every where represented to us as the sum and substance of the gospel. No other part of his history and ministration are so fully propounded, and that by all the Evangelists.—We have already seen, that the Apostles preached, not only the doctrine of evangelic morality, but chiefly Christ himself, that is, his person, work, and two-fold state. Paul would know nothing among the Corinthians, ‘but Jesus Christ and him crucified.’ The cross of Christ was that alone in which he gloried. He reduces the knowledge of Christ, for the excellency of which he counted all things but loss and dung, to the knowledge of the power of his resurrection, and of the fellowship of his sufferings.—In that most important conversation on the holy mount, between our Lord, and two of the celestial inhabitants, the two great teachers and reformers under the old dispensation, we find no more mentioned, but that it turned upon that decease which he should accomplish at Jerusalem.—In the cross, and the other humiliations and sufferings of the Saviour comprehended under it, the love of God towards men, in not sparing his own Son, as also his wisdom and power unto salvation are displayed in a peculiar and a most conspicuous manner. In the cross, is the abolishing of the power and the fear of death. Deliverance from the dominion of sin, as also the glory to come, are its pleasant fruits. The plain, but most consolatory symbols of the grace of Jesus, in Baptism, and the Holy Supper, point us in like manner to his atoning death, with a charge to shew it forth in particular.