The word here rendered “without blemish” is found seven or eight times in the New Testament. Twice it is used of our blessed Lord and Saviour—in the scripture given above, and in Hebrews 9: 14, where it is translated “without spot.” As the Lamb of God, He was without blemish, the Lamb by whose precious blood we have been redeemed; and “through the eternal Spirit” “offered Himself without spot to God.” In every other place of its occurrence it is applied to believers. Thus we read, in Ephesians 1:4, that God chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world, “that we should be holy and without blame before Him. in love;” in Philippians 2:15, of “the children of God, without rebuke, in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation,” &c.; in Colossians 1:22, that God hath reconciled His people, to present them “holy and unblameable and unreproveable in His sight;.” in Jude 24, that we shall be presented “faultless before the presence of His glory,” &c.; and lastly, in Revelation 14:5, it is said of the 144,000 who will stand on Mount Sion with the Lamb, that “ they are without fault before the throne of God.” Leaving the reader to follow out the teaching of the several scriptures, we may call attention to two or three things First, that our present standing before God is “without spot”—that God sees us, in a word, on the ground of the work of Christ, as spotless as He who accomplished it; secondly, that it is our present responsibility to be “without spot” (“without rebuke,” Philippians 2:15) in our walk through this world; and lastly, that we shall be finally presented before God actually “without spot,” entirely and perfectly conformed to Christ. What unspeakable and infinite grace!
E. D.