IN a public-house in the country town of B — lay the publican, dying. He had lived an ungodly life, and whilst health and strength lasted, God was not in all his thoughts; but at length he was proving that the way of transgressors is hard.”
Like the prodigal in Luke 15, Charley H— had spent all — his whole life — in the far country, far, far away from God; and like him, he at last awoke to the fact that he had needs which the world could not satisfy.
For many a long year he had tried the streams of earthly enjoyment, and perchance he had fancied that they quenched his thirst. But he had discovered the truth of those words of Jesus to one who had also drunk deeply at creature sources, “Whosoever drinketh of this water shall thirst again”; and now he was learning that the world’s resources are but “broken cisterns, which can hold no water.”
He was dying. To what spring of human pleasure or desire will he turn for rest of conscience and of heart? All hopes of this life were ended for him. The reality of eternity stared him in the face. Will he turn to human religion and the traditions of men? They give no peace, for in their very principle they deny the fundamental truth of the Christian faith. They urge men to make peace, when the Scriptures record, as the basis of Christianity, the mighty fact that Christ has “made peace through the blood of His cross.”
To whom then can he turn? God must be met! “It is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment.” But how meet God? What guilty creature can meet Him in his sins, and propitiate a holy, thrice holy God? This was the question of infinite moment to Charley―H. He was a sinner before God: a lost sinner who had no claim upon God. And no lie of Satan — whose ministers preach that the love of God will set aside His holiness, and excuse the sinner apart from the judgment of his sins — will deceive a soul on the verge of eternity, and whose conscience is alive to his sinful condition in God’s sight.
Man needs a mediator who can bring God and the sinner together in absolute consistency with what God is as both light and love. Cain thought, and alas! how many now also think, to be accepted by God through the work of his own hands — the fruit of that which was under the curse. The result proved that God will not have the fact of sin ignored. But the gospel proclaims that He has provided one only place — a mercy-seat — where He can meet the sinner in righteousness and yet in boundless grace. The cross reveals how this is done.
The cross is God’s justification of Himself, if one may say so, before the whole universe. It maintains His absolute holiness, and declares Him to be just in acting as a Saviour-God, whilst at the same time it reveals His sovereign love, and proves it to be perfectly consistent with His ways as “Judge of all the earth.” It shows that God must judge sin, for there He poured out His wrath against sin upon the person of His own beloved Son, when
“He took the guilty culprit’s place,
And suffered in his stead.”
Yet, unsaved friend, if ever God could have overlooked sin it was then, when He “who knew no sin, was made sin”; but it could not be. That cry of unmistakable, though infinitely unfathomable meaning, “My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?” was the expression of that utter abandonment which He underwent, when, taking it from God’s hands, He drank the cup of wrath against sin which was due to the sinner. Can you then, in the face of this awful fact, think that God will excuse sin in you?
But the cross reveals God’s righteousness in saving the sinner as thoroughly as it declares His righteousness in the judgment of sin. And this is the glad tidings. It is no good news to tell the sinner that God must punish sin, though this is surely the truth. But the gospel, clearing away all the fallacies and deceits of men and of Satan, with all the grand simplicity of truth, tells us of “one God, and one Mediator between God and men, the Man Christ Jesus, who gave Himself a ransom for all.”
The publican was to learn what grace is. A servant of Christ who visited him put before him the story of God’s grace in sending “His only begotten Son into the world.” He told out the wondrous tale of divine love unfolded by the Lord in Luke 15 — of the lost sheep, straying away from the only place of safety, and of the One who would “go after that which was lost, until He find it.” He spoke of that Good Shepherd who went on to the cross to lay down His life, in order to bring back in righteousness the lost sinner, wandering far away from God in the distance he loves so well, into God’s presence of present and perfect favor.
What a tale of grace for the heart of a sinner! Proud self-righteousness may murmur against it, refusing to join in the joy of God over returning prodigals; but to remain outside now is to remain outside forever. It is to condemn God’s grace for the wretched satisfaction of justifying self. It is to choose to stand upon the ground of legal self-righteousness, and take the comfort that wrapping one’s self in such garments may give, rather than to own that man has no righteousness, and to receive from God all that He has to give. It is to prefer one’s own “filthy rags,” because they make something of man’s doings, to the Father’s “best robe,” because this makes everything of God’s grace.
The dying man drank in God’s grace. His conscience refused to justify himself: it justified God in condemning him as a sinner. Grace breaks down the hard heart which it enters. What heart would not be melted to find that the One whom we fancied to be a hard master, reaping where He has not sown, and gathering where He has not strawed, is neither gathering nor reaping (unless it be that His love has been requited with hatred), but is giving freely to all who will acknowledge their need by accepting His mercy?
Like another dying man, who discovered this same grace in the One crucified by his side — the coming King of Glory suffering for sins not His own — so this dying publican immediately rejoiced in the grace that could open heaven at once to a dying sinner, without prayers and penances or purgatorial purging’s. Infinite grace! it is divinely suited to man, and it is infinitely worthy of God.
Reader, has grace and truth wrought their double work in you? Conscience is individual in its working. It does not merely own that we all are sinners: it confesses, “I am a sinful man, O LORD.” The heart too is individual in its appropriation. It will not satisfy it that Christ died for every one: it says of Him, “Who loved ME, and gave HIMSELF for ME.”
Thus it was with Charley H —. The message that convicted his conscience also reached his heart, and with divinely given intelligence he confessed both his own condition and the love of Christ. Simply and clearly he responded to the tale of God’s grace in Jesus, as he said, “Charley is the lost sheep, and Jesus is the Shepherd.” He owned himself a sinner: he found God to be a Saviour. Precious faith! “Where sin abounded, grace did much more abound.” “He hath made Him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him.”
Unsaved reader, pause! Hear once more the pleading words of the apostle, “Now then we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God did beseech you by us: we pray you in Christ’s stead, be ye reconciled to God”
W. G. H.