Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 3311
“But one of the soldiers with a spear pierced His side, and forthwith came there out blood and water.” John 19:34.
IT is with much fear and trembling that I usually stand upon this platform—not that I shrink before the face of the multitude however large, but the weight of the subject which I have continually to bring before your minds fills my own soul with awe. And yet it is with more than usual anxiety I approach my subject this evening, because although it is full of tender interest and touching pathos, I feel that without the unction of the Holy Spirit, it would be insipid and unprofitable. And yet, on the other hand, with that Divine anointing, it is one of the richest topics that can possibly engage our meditation!
Readers of old theology will have remarked how constantly the fathers were accustomed to dwell upon the wounds of Jesus slain. And this fifth wound which penetrated His heart was peculiarly attractive to them. They said a great many things about it. Some, indeed that were fanciful, but other remarks that were truly excellent and well deserve to be treasured up. I would it were more the practice of Believers nowadays than it is to study the very Person of Christ, as well as the Doctrines of the Gospel, and to learn the Divine lessons which are discoverable in the wounds of Jesus as well as the sacred admonitions bequeathed to us by the words of His mouth.
One of these old Divines says that Jesus Christ was typified by our first father, Adam. As Adam fell asleep, and out of his side Eve was taken, so Jesus slept upon the Cross, the sleep of death, and from His side, where the spear was thrust, His Church was taken. He who redeemed us unto God by His blood, formed us as a peculiar people for Himself. The Church is one with Him—she came out of His side, and as He looks upon her, He can say—“You are bone of My bone, and flesh of My flesh. With My blood have I redeemed you.” Others have been pleased to compare Christ to the Rock in the wilderness, which was smitten, and this spear-thrust is the great cleft in the Rock. You may remember how Toplady puts it—
“Rock of Ages, cleft for me! Let me hide myself in Thee.”
And he clearly has this in view, for the next lines are—
“Let the water and the blood
From Your riven side which flowed,
Be of sin the double cure,
Cleanse me from its guilt andpower ” I do not consider this allusion fanciful, nor can I think it distorts the type. Moses hidden in the cleft of the rock, that he might see God’s Glory, had not a standing place one-half so glorious as you and I have when, sheltered in the wounds of the Savior slain, we see the glorious Justice and the Infinite Love of God reconciled in the Person of the dying Lamb.
In the course of reading, I have met with some remarkable expressions in regard to this great wound of Christ. Some have called it, “a gate of Heaven.” Why should I object to the title? Do we not enter into Heaven through the wounds of Jesus? It is, of course, a metaphorical expression, yet quite allowable. If the teaching is that there is no other way of access to God except through the torn veil of Christ’s body—and that veil was torn in two, indeed, when the soldier with the spear pierced His side—we may, without straining the thought, call that wound one of the gates of Heaven. Another calls it “a celestial window, a window of Paradise,” and we have versified that idea in one of our own familiar sonnets—
“Look through Jesus’ wounds on me;
Him, and then the sinner see.”
Another writer, carried away by the consideration of this spear-thrust, calls it “a palace of refuge.” A palace! Surely, never kings had such an one! Solomon’s palace of ivory was nothing like it! And what a refuge it is! When the poor heart, like the dove hunted by the hawk, needs a shelter, if it can fly to Jesus’ wounds, it is sheltered from all its sins. Well does our song put it—
“Come, guilty souls, and flee away Like doves to Jesus’ wounds! This is the welcome Gospel Day, Wherein free Grace abounds.”
1 forget the name of the writer, who, in speaking upon his Master’s wounds, seems to get so exalted and carried away by the subject that He calls this wound “the sacred wellhead of the rivers of golden sand which cover all the earth”—two rivers, one of water and the other of blood. Two quickening rivers that carry life through the realms of death. Two purifying rivers cleansing the Augean stable of this filthy world. Two mighty rivers which bear the elect vessels onwards towards the sea of everlasting bliss, not one of them suffering shipwreck on the voyage, for this mighty river is too deep to have quicksands, too broad for the mariner to be cast away upon a rock-bound shore! I like the thought, and so let it be—the sacred wellhead of that river of more than golden sand—the streams whereof make glad the multitudes of God’s chosen throughout the earth!