Answer: All that God is. It is not “filled with,” otherwise we could hold it, that is, the finite could hold the infinite! But “filled unto” or “into,” just as an empty vessel without a bottom might float about in the ocean and be filled into all its fullness, any amount of water passing through it as long as it remained in the ocean, but incapable of holding a drop if taken out. Such is the believer.
Answer: The passage all through is addressed to those who “are in Christ Jesus,” and does not therefore raise the question as to the scope of Christ’s death. That is answered elsewhere.
Question: Why is blood named first in John 19:3434But one of the soldiers with a spear pierced his side, and forthwith came there out blood and water. (John 19:34), and water first in 1 John 5:6-86This is he that came by water and blood, even Jesus Christ; not by water only, but by water and blood. And it is the Spirit that beareth witness, because the Spirit is truth. 7For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one. 8And there are three that bear witness in earth, the Spirit, and the water, and the blood: and these three agree in one. (1 John 5:6‑8)? Does water here refer to cleansing by the Word?
Answer: In the gospel “the blood” is mentioned first by the Apostle, because it is God’s side of the atonement, and answers His claims on man as a sinner. In the epistle, water is uniformly named first because it is a question of our walk as Christians, and water is the symbol of the cleansing action of the Word and the Spirit, by which we are born again (John 3).
Question: Is there any one fact that, beyond all others, proves man’s guiltiness before God?
Answer: The grand question for the whole world, and for each human heart, is this: “How has Christ been treated?”
A murderer was preferred to the holy, spotless, loving Jesus. The world, the heart, got its choice. Jesus and Barabbas were set before it; and the question was put, “Which will you have?” What was the answer, the deliberate, determined, answer? “Not this man, but Barabbas. Now Barabbas was a robber.”
Tremendous fact! A fact little weighed, little understood, little entered into; a fact which stamps the character of this present world, and tests and makes manifest the state of every unrepentant, unconverted heart beneath the canopy of heaven.
If I want a true view of the world, of nature, of the human heart, of myself, whither shall I turn? To police reports? To the calendars of our Grand Juries? To the various statistics of the social and moral condition of our cities and towns? Nay, all these, it is true, may set before us facts which fill the soul with horror, and make the blood run cold.
Let it be distinctly seen, and deeply felt, that all the facts that were ever recorded of crime, in, its blackest and most fearful forms, are not to be compared with that one fact, the rejection and crucifixion of the Lord of glory. This crime stands out in bold and black relief from the background of man’s entire history, and fixes the true condition of the world, of man, of nature, of self.