THESE are the two deepest wants of the sinner. Grace, and grace alone, supplies them both in the Lord Jesus. Nor is there any other name but His, to which God points the needy and guilty soul. To Him the Holy Spirit bears this divine witness. If we receive the witness of men, the witness of God is greater. For men are evil and erring, yet we believe them. How much more should we believe God, Who knows all things and is good, in that which concerns Him and ourselves, both for time and eternity?
They are also the manifestation of God's love, prone as man is to disbelieve it to his own unutterable loss. For who would be so mad as to slight His love, shown in such infinite pity to our evil and lost estate, if he heeded God's plain declaration of it? These are His word's, "In this was manifested the love of God in our case, that God hath sent his only-begotten Son into the world, that we might live through him. In this is the love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son [as] propitiation for our sins."
For if we believe 'the Son of God, He testified that we were dead morally, dead before God; and so said His apostle—dead in sins. How deplorable such a death! How hopeless, save to Him, Who is the true God, and the life eternal! But for this express reason God has sent His only-begotten Son. None less could suffice. It was no assumption on. His part to claim equality with God; but He emptied Himself to become man, a bondman; and He humbled Himself, becoming obedient as far as death, even death of the cross. He thus perfectly met God's glory and man's ruin; He only, and He thus: for a Savior to the uttermost He came to be.
Hence, as He said, His voice sounds (in the glad tidings) to the guilty, and Jews or Gentiles, alike alienated from the life of God. "The hour... now is, when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God; and those that hear shall live.”
How wondrous the boon I How gracious the terms! The quickening power is in Him. He speaks the best news to man. To hear Him is to receive life, and, as He said just before (ver. 24), life eternal. Nor, to avail, could it be otherwise; for they had natural life, and needed nothing less than life eternal. "In this was manifested the love of God in respect of us, that God hath sent his only-begotten Son into the world, that we might live through him." He gives to the believer life eternal; and the believer has it now, as now he needs it; for by this life only can one live to God, as did Christ. So the apostle Paul says, "Christ liveth in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh, I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me." The last Adam is a life-giving Spirit, and gives no life now but His own, as risen from the dead. This may not suit theorists or unbelievers; but it is the truth of God, and the manifestation of His love; and any that obscure, lower, or deny it, must answer for their evil teaching. They fight against God as well as man, and can be set on by none but the enemy of both.
But to have life, even life eternal, with one's sins un-purged, is to ignore the gospel, and the lave that made it good and sent it to us. We ought indeed to have loved God, but nothing was farther from us; we were dead to Him. The law, no doubt, claimed it as the duty of man under His law; but the law never got from him what was due, and could therefore be only a ministration of condemnation. And to that dire need God manifested His love in this deep way. If there was no love to Him, "in this is the love; not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son as propitiation for our sins.”
Yes, there is the necessary complement of His love. It was much that, by the life eternal His Son gave us, we who believe live to God, as that life does and no other life could. But how distressing to find through that life the evil of our nature, the old life at work, the sin that dwells within us, to say nothing of being drawn into acts of sin when truly born of God! His love has provided against this painful anomaly, and gives us to know by faith, that Christ as truly died for sins to blot them out forever, as to give us that life eternal by which we love Him and what He loves, and we abhor our guilty selves and our sins and all evil everywhere else.
How blessed that the love of God was manifested in Christ thus richly! And what a joy that the gospel of God goes forth in this twofold way of mercy to every creature under heaven! Truly grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. It came that we who had no spiritual life might live through Christ, and that He might die for us as propitiation for our sins. His life is essential as a present thing, that we might live to God, not only with all His affections as to God and man, as to good and evil; but also with a purged conscience and a true heart as we are forgiven all trespasses. For this is He that came through water and blood, Jesus the Christ, not by the water only, but by the water and the blood; and it is the Spirit that beareth witness, because the Spirit is the truth. He leads and strengthens the new life.