EV 23: 9-22: 44{)I HAVE already shown the character of the Sabbath, and how God introduced it in a manner altogether peculiar. He presented it at the very beginning of the feasts, though in fact its accomplishment, viewed now as a type, will be at the end. It is the great purpose to which all lead. As a present witness to this God attached such importance to the Sabbath, that, differing from all the other feasts, it was to be repeated at the end of every week.
Further, it is a mistake to suppose the Sabbath is done with, for it is to be in force throughout the millennium. I am not speaking of the Lord's day, when we very properly meet together as Christians; and I believe, so far from its being a mere question of man or churches appointing that day, that it has the very highest divine sanction. So true is this, that a Christian losing sight of the import, object, and character of the Lord's day would be more guilty than a Jew that dishonored the Sabbath day. But as the Lord's day came in by the resurrection of Christ for the Christian and the church meanwhile, it will be the Sabbath and not the Lord's day when the Lord God establishes the kingdom and our Lord Jesus Christ reigns manifestly; when idolatry shall be abolished, superstition swept away, and every kind of iniquity that now raises its head will have met its end; when every creature in this world will be restored. For I pity the man who thinks the world was only made to be spoiled: certainly he who does not believe it is spoiled must be more lamentably wrong; but it is a gloomy and false thought that God made creation only to be ruined. As surely as the first Adam was the means of universal ruin for the creature, so the Second Adam will be the great Deliverer not only of us but of it. He will reconcile to God all that He made, that is, all things: I say not all persons, for this is fatal error. In Scripture you never read of all persons being reconciled.
One little word makes all the difference between blessed truth and hateful error. What can be more false than the infidel dream of universal restoration? God will judge all whose sins have not been borne away by faith in Christ and His cross.
There is a day coming when all creation will rejoice, when the heavens and the earth and all in them will sing together. God has taken particular pains to express the earth's joy also, and it is a singular proof of the infatuation of man that he can-not see it though clearly revealed. This will be the rest of God; and, when it comes, the Sabbath and not the Lord's day will again be the distinctive sign of God, which He will have observed and honored through the whole earth. You will judge then from this that I am anything but an anti-Sabbatarian. Yet it is an indisputable fact now that all is changed. We do not keep the last but the first day of the week. And what principle lies at the bottom of the change? That the Lord is risen indeed, and not only so, but is gone to heaven, and the first day of the week shines from the person of the risen Lord Jesus in the heavens, now opened, on a heavenly people who are as yet here, but going to be with the Lord Jesus there. Hence it will always follow that, when men confound the Sabbath and the Lord's day, they are earthly-minded. As the Sabbath is bound up exclusively with the earth and an earthly people, so is the Lord's day with those who are heavenly.
The next feast, indeed the first of the feasts proper as here begun, is the passover. " In the fourteenth day of the first month at even is Jehovah's passover." The foundation of all the ways of God for a fallen people is laid not in grace only but righteousness; it is the death, the efficacy of the blood, of the Lamb. Theology would have ordered otherwise, and made it the law or Christ's obedience of it. But mark it well: the first feast is not even a witness of the incarnation, nor of the Lord's path on earth; but His blood staying divine judgment. God begins with Christ's death: and no wonder; He could not overlook our sins; and there they were for the first time righteously met, and one may add, as far as the type goes, for the last time as well as first. They were perfectly met for us by Him. It made no difference to the revealing Spirit whether the facts were present or future, so far as the communication of God's mind was concerned. All was before His eyes, though in Christ and after redemption the truth comes out with deeper and infinite fullness. But every scripture is divinely inspired, and it was just as impossible that God could lie before His atoning work was accomplished as when it was; and that is in part my reason for taking this chapter to speak on. It is high time for every Christian to stand for the word of God, and for every written word of His. The difficult times of the last days are come. Those that hesitate their dislike, or openly declare it, against what they call verbal inspiration, are apt to lose all right sense of God's word. It might be profitable, for such as shrink from the inspiration of the word, to say what remains for themselves to depend on. If you give up to the infidel the words of Scripture, he will not leave you the thoughts of God. You may try to separate the truth from the words of God; but truth is communicated by words; and the apostle claims to speak " in words which the Holy Ghost teacheth." The Bible is the only book which possesses such a character; and the Christian who is led by the Spirit in searching the word of God will learn how worthy of all confidence is the only and absolutely perfect communication of the mind of God.
On the paschal night God acted as Judge. This was necessary and righteous. And let me remark here how dangerous it is when people talk about His love, where they ought to think and bow before His solemn judgment of sin.
I do not deny love for an instant; but even the boundless love of God cannot treat with sin, except by His own judgment of it. If sin were to be judged in our persons, we must be lost forever. But then grace provided an offering, the only adequate one, in Christ on the cross; and, accordingly, all the holy unsparing force of God's judgment fell on the head of the Lord Jesus there and then. It is not merely that He died in love in order to meet our. need-this He did most surely, but far more and of deeper import, for He met the judgment of God. He suffered what sin deserved at the hand of God. And this is so essential to truth that one could not call a true believer in the atonement the man who only sees Christ dying in love to man, and so only takes in the outward fact and human side of the cross.
It is plain fact that those who that day only saw Christ crucified were none the better, but rather worse. They were hardened at the sight, and afterward more careless than ever. Those whom grace gave to believe what God wrought therein were saved from wrath. It was shadowed in the blood of the slain lamb.
Thereon immediately (and there is nothing morally more remarkable in these feasts) follows the feast of unleavened bread. Indeed, as may be seen elsewhere, the two are so bound up together that they are both sometimes called the Passover. Not one day is allowed to separate them; and this because God will not allow that the remission of our sins brought in by the blood of the Lamb shall be forever so little separated from our responsibility to holiness. The moment the Israelite was under the shelter of the blood of the lamb, he was forbidden to eat leavened bread, or have leaven in any shape within his house.