The Procuring Cause of Forgiveness.

THE obedient life of Christ is not set forth in Scripture as the procuring cause of our forgiveness. It was His death upon the cross that opened those everlasting floodgates of love which else should have remained pent up forever. If He had remained to this very how, going through the cities of Israel “doing good,” the veil of the temple would continue unrent, to bar the worshipper’s approach to God. It was His death that rent that mysterious curtain “from top to bottom.” It is “by his stripes,” not by His obedient life, that “we are healed”; and those “stripes” He endured on the cross, and nowhere else. His own words, during the progress of His blessed life, are quite sufficient to settle this point: “I have a baptism to be baptized with; and how am I straitened till it be accomplished” (Luke 12:5050But I have a baptism to be baptized with; and how am I straitened till it be accomplished! (Luke 12:50)). To what does this refer but to His death upon the cross, which was the accomplishment of His baptism and the opening up of a righteous vent through which His love might freely flow out to the guilty sons of Adam? Again, He says, “Except a corn of wheat into the ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit” (John 12:2424Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit. (John 12:24)). He was that precious “corn of wheat.”
C. H. M.