How precious is the little word grace! How often do we meet with it on the page of inspiration. It adorns every book, and wherever it is found, it makes itself known by the luster that surrounds it. The angels in heaven, who are the witnesses of God’s ways, may enter in some measure into the meaning of the word grace, but it remains for the fallen sons of Adam, to prove experimentally the full, blessed, and everlasting import of it. “That as sin hath reigned unto death, even so might grace reign through righteousness unto eternal life by Jesus Christ our Lord,” Romans 5:2121That as sin hath reigned unto death, even so might grace reign through righteousness unto eternal life by Jesus Christ our Lord. (Romans 5:21). This very precious text teaches us that the sphere of the operations of grace is in a world universally blighted by sin. This wondrous grace of God reaps for itself laurels of unfading glory in a scene where sin and death prevail. Its glorious head is seen towering above the most lofty monument that sin ever raised; it sits enthroned there, and acts in its own sovereignty for man.
Let us see how in has reigned unto death.
To be brief, “the wages of sin is death;” sin is universal, and consequently death. Death stamps the first creation. Look at the world before the flood, sin reigned universally unto death then. Judgment sweeps the mass away.
Grace spares a remnant. Again, look at the state of the world at the time of Abraham; sin reigned unto death in the shape of idolatry.
God was forgotten! They desired not the knowledge of His ways. They did not like to retain God in their knowledge. The Scripture says, “They are without excuse,” Romans 1:2020For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse: (Romans 1:20). God, in grace, calls Abraham out, separates him from an idolatrous world, and makes of him a great nation.
Again, look at the world when the Son of God came into it. Man in every position of life joined hand in hand to get rid of Him. Kings and rulers, priests and people, formed, as it were, one common level upon which to stand, to express their wickedness, and to hurl the blessed One from the scene. “Away with him, crucify him, crucify him,” found expression from the lips of the representatives of the human family.
“We will not have this man to reign over us” were words echoed in the heavenly courts above, as they were expressed in the actions of that vast multitude, who exulted in the shame, sorrow, and death of the Lord Jesus Christ. As we look upon the earth at this period cannot we say, sin reigned unto death? Was it not a tremendous step for man to take, to lay hands upon his Creator, and because He resisted not, to crucify Him, and stain the earth with His blood? Oh! can you penetrate the gloom, the moral darkness, that covered the earth then?
Impossible! Heaven blushed at the crime, and the earth to express its emotion, was convulsed to its very center.
Sin had triumphed, even to the death of God’s spotless Son. Here is the only place where you can rightly measure human wickedness and fully see what man’s heart is capable of doing. Oh, that the world, instead of boasting of its attainments and progress, would but own its wickedness as expressed in the death of Christ! Upon that ground. God will judge the world by and bye. Christ said in view of His death, “Now is the judgment of this world.”
Alas! poor world, if thou hast forgotten thy sins in murdering and rejecting the Son of God, God has not. The gleaming sword must be drawn, and He must and will be avenged for the blood of His Son. Oh, awake to this!
Reader, awake to this!
But could death hold the Son of God? He had submitted to death; He, the gentle unresisting Lamb was led to the slaughter. Man’s sin was expressed thereby, but at the same time atonement for sin was made. God’s justice was satisfied in the sacrifice of the Lord Jesus. God was glorified about sin. Yea, the very thing that expressed man’s sin and ruin was the very thing in the hand of God to meet the ruin, and remedy it, and give sinners who are brought through grace to repentance and faith in Christ, a place above it forever.
Christ triumphed over death, and as the Prince of life rose from the dead, and there He now sits at God’s right hand in glory.
Grace now takes its stand on the ground of accomplished redemption, of God being glorified about sin, lifts high its head and reigns through righteousness unto eternal life by Jesus Christ our Lord: Did sin reign unto death? Now grace reigns through righteousness. Did men congregate together to take counsel against God’s blessed Son? Did they put Him to death—stain their hands and the earth with His blood? God has raised Him up, and now grace, on the ground of that death, brings salvation to a guilty world. “The grace of God that bringeth salvation hath appeared to all men,” Titus 2:1111For the grace of God that bringeth salvation hath appeared to all men, (Titus 2:11). To every land, to every town, to every house, yea, to every individual sinner, does this wondrous grace of God come, with a free and full salvation in its hand.
Grace takes its stand upon the efficacy of the death of Christ and saves the vilest sinner beneath the sun. It triumphs over the foulest sin, and in the persons of such whom it saves, it raises up a monument for itself, the glory of which is never to fade! And, blessed thought! righteousness marks all its ways. It reigns through righteousness. The death of Christ has so settled the question of sin with God, that grace steps forth on the ground of absolute righteousness and dispenses its blessing of salvation far and near. Blessed and happy reality!
Beloved reader of these lines, do you know anything of this blessed grace of God? Is your soul saved by it? If not, you are living in death.
Death surrounds you, death fills your soul, you are away from God, in your sin, hastening to your doom! O awake! O awake to this awful reality! But grace reigns through righteousness, and brings you salvation. Will you not receive it? It points you to the cross of Jesus and tells you that it was obtained there at an infinite price, and presents it to you as a free gift.
Ah, then, my reader, accept at the hands of God’s grace, salvation for your soul. Linger no longer. “Remember Lot’s wife!” Remember how it is written, “How shall we escape if we neglect so great salvation?” Hebrews 2:33How shall we escape, if we neglect so great salvation; which at the first began to be spoken by the Lord, and was confirmed unto us by them that heard him; (Hebrews 2:3).
E. A.