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December 1928
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bringing us back to God, be converted into healing chas tisement and gracious penances. But the greater punish ment “is the spiritual punishment which is involved in being morally alienated from God, which may become irreversible and eternal, but which is gone when the moral alienation is gone,” Yes, and from this Christ delivers us in making us at one again with the Father. P reach t h e B lood Pity the poor, polite preachers who are too polite to preach the blood from the pulpit! While they are about it they should be a little more polite and never occupy a Christian pulpit again until they do preach the blood, for only as we are “under the blood” are we saved. “When I see the blood I will pass over you,” said God, of old (Exodus 12:13), and as only the blood saved Israel’s firstborn that solemn night, so only by faith in the blood of the Lamb of God are our souls saved today. The blood of the Lamb is the pride of heaven itself. “These which are arrayed in white robes, who are they, and whence came they?” asks one of the elders, of St. John. “‘And I said unto him, My Lord, thou knowest. And he said to me, These are they which come out of the great tribulation, and they washed their robes, and made them white in the blood o f the Lamb” (Rev. 7, 13, 14). And what is true of the tribulation saints is assuredly true of all saints, for, “Worthy art Thou to take the Book,” the apostle heard about the same time, “and to open the seals thereof : for Thou wast slain and didst purchase unto God with Thv blood men o f every tribe, and tongue, and people, and nation, and modest them to be unto our God a kingdom and priests; and they reign upon the earth. And I saw, and I heard a voice o f many angels round about the throne and the living creatures and the elders; and the number o f them was ten thousand times ten thousand, and thousands o f thousands; saying . with a great voice, Worthy is the Lamb that hath been slain to receive the power, and riches, and wisdom, and might, and honor, and glory, and blessing. And every created thing which is in the heaven, and on the earth, and under the earth, and on the sea, and all things that are in them, heard I say ing, Unto Him that sitteth on the throne, and unto the Lamb, be the blessing, and the honor, and the glory, and the dominion, for ever and ever” (Rev. 5:9 ,13). How Generous Som e Folks A re! “We remember a young man who was with us in col lege whose father was a farmer,” says Frank T. Benson. “The father had brought him a big basket of grapes. One day he came with a bunch and presented it to us with the explanation that he had so many he could not eat them all and they were rotting. If his bread basket had been larger we would have had no grapes. This is the way some people give to God. He gets what they cannot use. Their gifts are the remains of a glutted selfishness.” Cem ented on th e Rock “Living stone . . . . ye also” (1 Pet. 2:4, 5). A well-known servant of Christ once remarked to a godly deacon, “I am not only on the Rock, but I am cemented to the Rock, and the cement is as hard as the Rock itself, so there is no fear of my perishing; unless the Rock falls, I cannot fall; unless the Gospel perishes, I cannot perish.”
Till to Jesus’ work you cling by a simple faith, “Doing” is a deadly thing, ‘‘doing” ends in death. Cast your deadly “doing” down, down at Jesus’ feet; Stand in Him, in Him alone, gloriously complete. Commit every word of it to memory, dear reader, and repeat it slowly to any who really desire to know the way of salvation-—for no words could make it plainer out of Holy Writ. But to grasp the apostolic view of the great atonement we need to believe what the apostles believed, and all the first Christians believed, and all Christians believe to this day and always will believe, namely, that Christ was God. Unless you believe this, Christianity has no Gospel for you, and the print of the nails no pathos. But accept it— take God at His word—and Calvary becomes the greatest spiritual force in your life. S in L aid U pon H im What is represented to us in the New Testament is not that Jesus Christ, an innocent Person, was punished^ without reference to His own will, by a God who thus showed Himself indifferent as to whom He punished so long as some one suffered. But Jesus, being Himself very God, the Son of the Father, Administrator of the moral law and Judge of the world, of His own will became man, and suffered what the sin of the world laid upon Him, in order that He might lift the world out of sin. “Christ also suffered for sins once, the righteous for the unrighteous, that He might bring us to God.” There are, as one has suggested, two distinguishable punishments for sin. From the lesser of these, the tem poral penalty which our sins bring as inevitable conse quences upon ourselves and upon the race, Christians usually suffer. We, too, suffer the death of the body and the chastisement of particular sins. It is good for us that we should do so, in order that, in our case, the punishment of sins which are our own, might, through His
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