“Oh what joy to know oneself united to Christ! It adds a joy untold to every sweetness. It is the source of it, too, surely. He is all to me, and for me. I work on till He call me; and though it would seem strange to me without you, yet I go on my way, serve others, say little, and pass on; not that I truly do not love others, all that will come out deeply in heaven. I have committed all my ways unto Him till that day.
“Peace be with you. May you find the Blessed One ever near you—that is everything. Faithful is He withal, and true. In His eternal presence how shall we feel that all our little sorrows and separations were but drops by the way, to make us feel that we are not with Himself, and when with Him what it is to be there.
“I never longed more to be with Him in heaven before the Father, though I desire to finish whatever He has for me to do; and if a while ‘He keeps me out, He keeps me out for Him, and then it is worth the while.
“ I reproach myself with want of love to souls, and grace, and courage; but love would give that—it always does. I leave all at the cross. He does, after all, what He pleases with us; and if He is glorified, I am heartily contented with everything, save not to lose Him.”
“I hope I feel ready to take dear’s hint that a letter would be acceptable to you and a few others.
And surely we ought to help each other’s joys and furtherance of faith, if we can, in these days, when many deceits and dangers are abroad. And there are few lessons, dear brother, more precious or more needful than this, that it is the purpose of our God to bring us to Himself, out of all other conditions and confidences. The doctrine of faith is the religion of immediate personal confidence in God. It is grounded on promise in contrast with law, or on what God has done for us, and not on what we may do or can do for Him. In the Epistle to the Galatians the Apostle sought to bring the disciples back to this doctrine of faith, or to this religion of confidence in God. They had been beguiled from it, and were following again, as so many are doing now-a-days, the religion of ordinances. In the Epistle to the Hebrews he warns them against the same dangers, though they had not been so far betrayed into it as the Galatians. And in John’s Gospel you will find that all those who are brought to Christ-Andrew and Nathanael in 1St chapter, the Samaritan in the 4th, the woman in the 8th, and the beggar in the 9th—experience this, that having got Him and reached Him, they need look no further and want nothing besides.
“How blessed this is, dear brother, in a day of revived ordinances like the present, and in a time of great confusion like the present! How we learn, in the mouth of these witnesses, that, as we sing—
‘Possessing Christ, I all possess.’
The day was when the moral power of the religion of faith, or of immediate personal confidence in God, was blessedly felt in Galatia. They would have plucked out their eyes for the apostle then. But, now that they had departed from it, they were in danger of being ‘consumed one of another.’ This was a great moral change accompanying their giving up of the truth. (See chap. 4:15, and chap. 5:15.)
“But if this be so, if, as a poor sinner, I may put my full confidence in Him alone, I ask myself, ought I not to walk before Him alone as my Lord and Master? Surely. And this would purify service, as confidence purifies the conscience. When I trust the Lord Jesus for salvation, without any help from others, or from ordinances, I indeed trust Him. When I serve the Lord Jesus without looking for the eye or the countenance of others, I indeed serve Him. And so, dear brother, as to enjoyment. Our delight in Him should be personal and immediate, as well as our confidence in Him. We should be able to say to Him, ‘All my fresh springs are in Thee.’ But if one may speak for others, it is but poorly so with our hearts. The day of perfection, however, is at hand. The Lord be with your spirit, and keep the few sheep in the pastures or mountains of—safe to the end. Assure yourselves of His love. Know the liberty of His grace; wait in hope of His appearing; say to temptation, How can I do this wickedness and sin against such an One.”
“There cannot be a more important subject in every aspect than that you refer to. The simpler we put Christ’s dying for our sins the better. All these great truths are facts, in which I admire the wisdom of God, as the simplest can thus understand them (through grace), and the strongest intellects must bow and take them as such. When we inquire (and people inquire about everything now), there are depths in it which none of us can fathom.
“The full claim of God against sinners is that they should serve Him according to the relationship they stand in towards Him of creatures, with the knowledge of good and evil. The man is become as one of us, knowing good and evil. He was bound to own God and his neighbor in everything due to them, and that as far as covetous lusts in his heart. Of this (even when men were not under it) the law was the perfect measure.
“But then, in fact, things went a great deal further, because there were dealings of men, and dealings of God, both of which brought out what man was, and imposed new obligations. Man did not like to retain God in his knowledge, and does not; when he knew Him as God as he did in Noah, he set up devils to worship, and degraded himself below the nature of man. Now judgment is according. to works, God taking account of the degree of light in pronouncing the judgment. (See Luke 12) But judgment is according to works, and that is eternal exclusion from God’s presence, whatever degree there may be in actual infliction of punishment.
“But there is a great deal more behind. The mind of the flesh is enmity against God, wholly and always, besides breaking through obligations, and leads to our doing this. Man was driven out of God’s presence at the beginning, and besides future judgment for works, finds, when his eye is open, that he is lost now, though this be concealed from those walking by sight. When the veil of sense and the show of this world is gone, he finds it is forever.
“Now, though the law proved this to the divinely-taught mind, its grand proof was in the rejection of Christ. He shall convince the world of sin, (not of sins —also true,) because they believe not on me. Tip to the flood, the first world it was—but with testimony from God—man left to himself, and God was obliged to bring in the flood. Then after it government came in, in Noah; promise to Abraham; law by Moses, then prophets, then Christ. That is, dealings of God with men, a complete system of probation, which ended in the proof that he not only would not obey, but had no cloak for his sin, and had seen and hated God in grace. ‘Have seen and hated both me and my Father.’ Hence it is said, Now once in the end of the world,’ and the Lord, ‘Now is the judgment of this world,’ and Stephen, after reciting the call of promise in Abraham, declares, You have not kept the law, have repelled and persecuted the prophets, killed the Just One, do always resist the Holy Ghost. Then man’s history ended; he was not only guilty and subject to judgment, but his mind was proved to be enmity with God. This is not sins, but sin—man not judged, but lost already, while judgment, which is not yet come, is according to works.
“Now Christ was just personally exactly the opposite of this. He loved the Father, and was obedient, but this was Himself and always. But He had a work to do according to the ever-abounding love of God. He died for our sins according to the Scriptures; and if a man believe in Him, his sins are forgiven and blotted out, the guilt and responsibility met. But when we look into the work of the cross, we see more than this. He glorified God there, and when made sin. This was a wonderful mystery, a perfect victim spotless before God, perfect in obedience, perfect in absolute self-surrender, perfect in love to His Father, perfect in His love to us, able as a divine person to sustain the weight of God’s glory in the place of sin i.e., as made sin for us, not only in the likeness of sinful flesh, but for sin. Now is the Son of Man glorified, and God is glorified in him. If God be glorified in him, God shall glorify him in himself, and shall straightway glorify him, and Christ, as Man, is in the glory at the right hand of God.
“As the meat-offering, He was fully tested by the fire of God’s judgment in death, and was only a sweet savor. In the burnt-offering He was a sweet savor to God, but it was positive propitiation or atonement, as glorifying God in righteousness, love, majesty, and everything. He was, in the place of sin, as for sin. As the sin-offering, he bore our sins, but that was not a sweet savor, though the fat was burned on the altar. Christ was thus the Lord’s lot as well as the people’s lot. The bearing of our sins cleared the responsibility incurred-the guilt. This is true of His people, and the blood upon the mercy-seat has perfectly glorified God in all that He is, and laid the foundation for accomplishing the counsels of God, which were before the responsibility ever existed. God’s love provided the Lamb; but God’s righteousness required the propitiation, and by the cross alone the righteousness, and love, and majesty of God are secured, and what He is, is made known. The Son of Man must be lifted up, and the Son of God is given.
“As regards the epoch of completing the work, it is clear that, as the wages of sin is death, He must die to complete that; but there was a far deeper truth in what that involved, and it was equally important that the drinking of the cup of God’s forsaking should be over, because He was to give up His own spirit in peacefulness to God, as He did, laying it down of Himself when all was finished. The forsaking of God was of its own, and the deepest character of the sufferings of the blessed Lord. This He felt anticipatively in Gethsemane when He was not actually suffering, but it cannot be separated from death, because death bore the character of divine judgment against sin, and not an accident, so to speak, of mortality.
“But it is not in itself judgment, i.e., the judgment to come. It is appointed unto men once to die, and after this the judgment;’ but all possible suffering combined against Christ; betrayal, abandonment, and denial. The bulls of Bashan and dogs came against Him, and the power of Satan in death, the poker of darkness, and His beloved people assisting. This led up on the appeal in it to God (Psa. 22) to the sense of being in it forsaken of God. He was heard from the horn of the unicorns, when all was finished. He gave up His own spirit, commending it to His Father, crying with a loud voice, and actually died.
“I could only rapidly trace, in a few words, what presents itself to my mind in this. There is nothing like it in the history of heaven and earth, that in which Christ could present a motive to His Father to love Him. ‘Therefore doth my Father love me.’ All is looked at as a whole, for the blood and water came from a Christ already dead, and must have been so to be of avail to us.” (Compare 1 John 5)
“But I repeat the more simply, in our work with souls we put the blessed Lord’s dying for our sins the better. But to have a solid and deep work we must know ourselves, and sin, as well as sins,—what we are in the flesh, as well as what we have done. (See Romans from ch. 5:12.) But this goes on to our being crucified with Him, which is another truth.”