CAN anything be more wonderful? especially when we bear in mind WHO He is, and what we were and are. Yet He, the Eternal Word, was made flesh, He, the Lord of glory and the Holy One of God, was crucified like the vilest slave or the most dangerous of malefactors, and this by no compulsion from superior power, but gave Himself, as God gave Him the Only-begotten Son, “for our sins.” We had no good thing in us for God or for heaven, nothing that could suit divine light and love; we had sins, we had a nature only evil continually, because it is impregnated with self-will and resents Him who alone is absolutely and perfectly good, because He is God, and cannot but judge the rebellious creature, unless He would consent to His own dishonor and wink at evil. This He will not do; and that He might deliver the wretched slaves of sin and Satan, He sent His Son that we might live through Him, and that He might die for us.
This is the gospel. Do you believe it? Are you looking only to Christ and His cross for your soul that you may be saved? There is none other way. But this way is as open as it is sure, as truly for God’s honor as it suits you, without money and without price, that you may be saved forever. It is of faith that it might be by grace.
Yet I would not withhold from you that it is to “deliver us,” not only from coming wrath, but from this present evil world, from the age we live in, so vain and proud, so man-exalting and science-idolizing and Christ-despising and God-defying. “Ye cannot serve God and Mammon.” If you are cleansed by Christ’s blood, you are bought with a price; you are Christ’s freedmen to be His bondmen, “according to the will of our God and Father, to whom be the glory unto the ages of the ages. Amen.” W. K.