Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 3252
“This is He that came by water and blood, even Jesus Christ—not by water only, but by water and blood.” 1 John 5:6.
BY the terms “water” and “blood” we understand the purifying and the pardoning effects of Christ’s work for His people. He came to purify them from the power of sin, that they might no longer live in it. This is indicated by the declaration that He “came by water.” He also came to put away the guilt of their sin, that they might not be condemned for it. This is set forth by the intimation that He also came “by blood.” We might say that all the Lord’s Prophets who came before Christ, in a certain sense, “came by water.” That is to say, they all sought the purification of the Lord’s people. Whether it was Isaiah, whose lips had been touched with the live coal from the altar, or Jeremiah, whose eyes were fountains of tears as he wept over sinners, or Amos, who spoke as a herdsman, or Ezekiel, whose message was one of grandeur and sublimity, the objective of every one of them was to purge the people from their sins. It was against sin that they all lifted up their voices, yet none of them could pardon sin and no one of them ever professed to be able to do so! Of the whole of them it must to said that they came by water only, and not by blood.
But Jesus Christ does what the Prophets could not do. It is true that He does seek to make His people holy, but it is by His blood that all their sins are forever put away. John the Baptist was the last and the greatest of all the Prophets who came before Christ yet he had to say, “He that comes after me is mightier than I, whose shoes I am not worthy to bear.” John never spoke of his own blood having any power to take away sin, but he pointed to Christ and said, “Behold the Lamb of God, which takes away the sin of the world.” So far as our Lord’s first disciples were concerned, He certainly “came by water,” for contact with His unique Personality must have tended to purify their lives. Yet He also came “by blood” as well as by water, for it was by virtue of His atoning Sacrifice that their sins were blotted out and that they became “accepted in the Beloved.”
The two ordinances of our holy religion were intended, I take it, to sum up the teaching of Christ. The one is Baptism, which represents the cleansing of the conscience as the body is washed with water, the death of the soul to the old carnal life, its burial with Christ and its resurrection to a life of holiness. Then comes the ordinance of the Lord’s Supper which sets forth, in the broken bread and the poured-out wine, the great Truth of Christ’s Atonement—the fact that He has, by His death, perfected forever all those who have been set apart unto Him.
It is very important that we should always carry in our minds the remembrance of these two Truths of God—first, that Jesus Christ “came by water, “that is, it was His Divine purpose to purify His people and make them holy. And, secondly, that Jesus Christ “came by blood,” that is, it was His grand aim and objective to deliver His people from the guilt of sin. These are the two topics upon which I am going to speak to you as the Holy Spirit shall graciously guide me.
I. So, first, JESUS CHRIST “CAME BY WATER”—it was His Divine purpose to purify His people.
It is manifest that there was an urgent necessity for this purification, for all of us had become as an unclean thing in the sight of God. Even our righteousnesses were as filthy rags. We could not cleanse ourselves, neither could we obtain cleansing through the works of the Law. Yet it was imperatively necessary that we should be made holy—otherwise, where God is and where His holy angels dwell, we could never be—and, therefore, what we ourselves could not do, and what the Law could not do, “God sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh” has perfectly accomplished!
If any of you ask me how Christ makes His people holy, I would remind you that when the Spirit of God reveals Jesus Christ to our heart, we then begin to perceive the exceeding sinfulness of sin. What? Did sin stab my Savior to the heart?
Did sin nail my Best-Beloved to the Cross? Then I hate sin with a perfect hatred and will be revenged upon it! The Atonement of Christ gives such an exhibition of the guilt of sin as is not to be seen anywhere else—no, not even in the flames of Hell! And when a soul sees Christ despised, rejected, wounded, bleeding and dying because of sin, it realizes how foul and vile a thing sin is and so is moved to hate it, not only because of its foulness and blackness, but also out of gratitude to Christ who has put it away. Did my Savior love me so much as to bear the dread penalty of my sin? Then I will give sin no quarter, but seek to utterly destroy it—
“The dearest idol I have known,
Whate’er that idol is”—
shall be cast down from the throne which it has usurped that I may worship my gracious God, and Him alone!