The true God is a God of active love. Scripture allows no such thing as God not caring for what is going on. But you say, Does He not allow evil? Certainly; He let angels and men fall. but this in both was the fault of the creature only.
Have you not all known at some time or other of your life a season when you resolved to repent and to do good? How has it turned out? Did you succeed? or have you not proved that you are bad, and can do no good thing? How comes this? Did God make man so? God made the earth and the race without one evil in either; God pronounced everything to be very good; and evil would have been kept out if man had looked to God. But man fell; and since, "the world by wisdom knew not God."
The wisdom of the world does not want God. Man wants his own way and will, whereas the glory of one that knows God is to do His will.
The Bible read in faith explains not merely how evil spoiled all but how Jesus came as the way, the truth, and the life. and how He justifies God in receiving poor sinners. Grace alone can meet the need; and as He came in love to win us, so He died in the fullness of love to give us a purged conscience that, so reconciled to God, we might worship and serve Him. If He had left man in rebellion, it would have been a strange proof of love. Where would be grace in giving man food and all things necessary for this life and then letting him perish forever at last? No; He gave His Son that the believer should not perish.
The very least thing that God made bears the stamp of His hand; and not only so, but of His mind, of His beneficent goodness. From the first, God looked into man's condition and graciously met it all, unsought and unexpected, in Ws grace. He sent His Son, His well-beloved, His only begotten, the One who thought it not robbery to be equal with God. This is the One God gave for your salvation.
God has done what is far better than slurring over your sins; He spared not His own Son. And mark the manner of it. The Son became man, the obedient One, the only man who never sought to do His own will. Where was there ever such a sight, such a reality, before? He could say, "My meat is to do the will of Him that sent Me." The very idea of such obedience was as far from every heart till Jesus came, as was God's love to lost sinners. Nor this only. Jesus, when asked "Who art Thou?" could answer, "Absolutely what also I say to you" ( John 8:2525Then said they unto him, Who art thou? And Jesus saith unto them, Even the same that I said unto you from the beginning. (John 8:25); W. Kelly Trans.). Who could ever say this but One? Jesus was always just what He also said. Blessed truth, and how suited for God and for man! He Himself was the truth, the perfect truth, sent down to poor sin-blinded man; so that he has the truth, not only detailed in a book, but embodied in a Person, and this a man in the world tried as nobody ever was. It is everywhere the same truth, and all is perfect harmony with the utmost variety. No doubt there are shades of distinction in many different books of the Bible, but it is surely our ignorance when we find them irreconcilable.
The mere handiwork of God is beyond the wisest of men, and the wisest are precisely those who are most ready to acknowledge their ignorance. The more men really know, the more deeply they feel and own how little they know. Just so with the Word of God. What are difficulties to me may not be so to someone more spiritual; and when by faith I see more clearly, the difficulties not only vanish but turn into the strongest confirmation of revealed truth. One Person puts everything into its proper place—Christ. If He were not God, He could not bring into relation with God; if not a man, He could have no point of contact with me. Both are necessary for His work. It is He who says, "I am the way, the truth, and the life." Man feels his weakness, his unworthiness, his unfaithfulness, when he judges himself before God. What life is this that Jesus is? what life did He manifest? Was it the life of Adam? Adam, we read, was made a living soul, but who and what is Christ? A quickening Spirit. "In Him was life; and the life was the light of men." Was it of angels? No; of men. It was not merely for Israel; the pride of the Jew did not like such grace.
Let us go back to a Sabbath day at Nazareth when our Lord went into the synagogue, and the
book of the prophet Isaiah was handed to Him, and He read those blessed words of chapter 61, "The Spirit of the Lord Jehovah is upon Me, because Jehovah hath anointed Me to preach the gospel to the poor," etc. (W. Kelly Trans.). He declared that this prophecy was that day fulfilled in their ears, stopping short in the middle of our verse 2, the point then accomplishing, as distinct from the future "day of vengeance of our God"; for when He had read so far, He closed the book and sat down, with words of grace to all. Did He speak the truth? A great deal turns on this for our souls. Was He really the One foretold by the Spirit of Jehovah, the One that God the Father had sealed? If so, our salvation turns on Him.
He went down into death to bear the judgment of every one that believes on Him. Was not this infinite love? Yes; but it was more -it was righteousness. It was not by power that He met the judgment due to sinners; it was by suffering. He suffered, the just for the unjust, that He might bring us to God. This explains the way, certainty, and fullness of salvation, which would all be a myth if He were not God as well as man. There is nothing that binds all the truth together if He be not Emmanuel, God with us.
"In this was manifested the love of God." Is it because He gave the law? No; for this brought in nothing but condemnation on guilty man. Although the law was in itself righteous, at best it made men feel their state. Love was "because that God sent His only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through Him," and this brings out the glory of His Person. He was the Son of God, above, outside, and beyond all else, both the incerate and the Creator, the eternal Word of God; and the Father would have it known. It was necessary that the testimony should go forth if man was to live Godward and be blessed. And what was the purpose for which this only begotten Son was sent? "That we might live through Him."
Adam only transmitted his own fallen nature, but in Christ we have One who only did His Father's will, and He is a life-giving Spirit—the Head of a new family. Those who look thus to Him, live. God declares that whosoever believes in Him has
everlasting life, and shall be saved. What grace! And this is the sure but the only way. "No man cometh unto the Father, but by Me."
He, the Eternal Life, came to die atoningly; He became a man in order that He might die for our sins. "I am the way, the truth, and the life." He became a man, not only that I might partake of this life, eternal life in Him, but that He might die to take away my sins. It is God's testimony about His Son; it is His declaration of Himself, "He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life." Life is given me now in this world that I may live the life of Christ, and not according to my own old life.
The moment we have life in Christ, we have a divine sense of our sins as hateful and intolerable. You know that all you have been doing has its spring in self, in nature. But if you receive the new life, you have also in Him the efficacy of His death to meet your sins, and this is salvation. It is sad shortcoming to preach only the death and not also the life of Christ, to be satisfied with merely showing how sins may be forgiven by the blood, without a word about life in Him. It looks like man taking only what man wants, the negative relief of what clears conscience, not the positive devotedness to God. But this is not enough for the saint, still less for the glory of God. We cannot have part of the blessing, but a whole Christ. God's will is that every believer should live in and of this new life; that is, the life of every soul who is born again. God is better to him than his own thoughts. The truth is that it is Christ, and not his own notions, or even conscience, that he must rest on by faith. Endued with natural life as a son of Adam, the believer has just as truly a new divine life in Christ. Is it possible to lose this new life? It is eternal life. What does "eternal" mean? But it is possible and easy to lose the joy of this life.
It is of all moment for a believer to distrust himself, but it is wrong to God and His Word, as well as weakness to self, to doubt His faithfulness, or that Christ's life does not stand forever. If the new life in any way depended on himself, he must soon fall away into irreparable ruin. People talk of "the perseverance of the saints" as if it were they who held fast, whereas it is really they who are "kept by the power of God through faith unto salvation." It is not then my perseverance, but divine power, that keeps me through faith.
This is the word that I would leave with you. How plain it is that the whole practical walk of believers flows from life in Christ, and is based for their peace on the blessed fact that they have been brought to God. The death of Christ takes away my guilt and bonds, but what is to be the spring of new life? How am I to mortify my old life? You may tell the old man to die, but it does not wish to die. God declares that He has given me, if a believer, another nature—new life in Christ. Nicodemus had to learn that he needed to be born afresh, not only to hear what Jesus had to teach. You may be sure that when a soul really goes to God for its wants, it always receives through the Lord Jesus; whenever a soul asks in faith, God fails not to give. Grace never sends away empty.
Where is the man who looked to Christ and did not find Him? Does He not say, "I am the way, the truth, and the life"? He is the only way of deliverance from all danger, evil, and sin; His blood, if you believe, brings you now to God without a stain upon you. "The blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanseth us from all sin." If you have Him, you have life in Him. Mere nature is incapable of pleasing God. Faith is the means of life, pardon, peace, strength, everything for the needy; and faith lays hold of what God says and does and gives in Christ, and it is the Spirit of truth which produces faith by our hearing the Word. Thus we see the importance of the Spirit applying the Word to our souls. But all-important as the Word and the Spirit are, neither could avail for the soul without Christ for life, and Christ's death to take away our sins.