(Good Friday.)
TEXT: HEB. x. 8-12.
DEEPLY as our feelings may be moved on a day such as this, deeply as our hearts may be affected with a sense of sin, and at the same time filled with thankfulness for the mercy from on high, that planned to save us by God not sparing His own Son, we can only be sure of having found the right and true use of the day, when we bring our thoughts and feelings to the test of Scripture.
We find there a twofold treatment of the supremely important event which we commemorate to-day. The gospel narratives unfold to us the facts of Christ’s life and death, setting them before us, each with its own accompanying circumstances; and in every line of their history we see, closely side by side, the clearest light of heavenly love and purity, and the darkest shadow of sin and perversity. Which of us would not gladly linger over this history during this time set apart specially for meditation on the sufferings of Christ? Who would not expect once more to experience the purifying and elevating power of those sacred narratives? And the more we kept in view, in such meditations, the spiritual aspect of the facts, not allowing it to be pushed aside by what is only external, the purer would be the blessing that we derived from such a contemplation of the life of Christ. But the apostles, in their letters to individual brethren as well as to Christian congregations, take this acquaintance with outward facts as a thing for granted; while they seize every opportunity of directing the attention of Christians to the deep, mysterious significance of the death of Christ for our salvation, and to its connection with the great end and purpose of redemption, with the whole of our hopes and our faith. And the more suitable such meditations on the historical facts are for the days preceding this great day, during which no doubt all the pious members of our congregations have been constantly so engaged, not only during our meetings, but in the quiet of private devotion; the more natural it seems to me to turn in this sacred hour to one of those apostolic utterances, and to devote our attention to the deep significance of Christ’s death for the salvation of men.
It is very clear, from the whole context of these words, that the sacred writer regards the Saviour’s death as the real transition point at which the old covenant terminated and the new covenant of God with man began. While he represents the death of the Saviour as an offering for sin, he at the same time sets it forth, in the words, “through one offering are perfected,” as the end of all offerings and all sacrificial services, which, in the times before Christ, formed the essential element both in the worship of the Jewish people, and in the sacred rites, mixed with much delusion and error, of other nations. And we have here set in the sharpest contrast the inadequacy of all former offerings, and that eternal, divine power through which the offering of the Saviour transcends them all, and in so doing has made an end of all offerings. Let us then consider the death of the Saviour in contrast with all other offerings, and as the end of them.
In the earlier part of this chapter the writer had said that the offerings would have ceased if those who offered them had had no more conscience of sin, but had been cleansed once for all; but through the offerings there was only a remembrance made of sins year by year; the sins themselves, he says in our text, can never, by the repetition of the offerings, be taken away. We shall, therefore, not only get hold of the real meaning of his discourse, but exhaust it as to its essential bearing, if we regard the death of Christ as the termination of all offerings in these two respects: first, because there is no longer need of any other remembrance of sin, to be renewed from day to day and from year to year; secondly, because, sin being really taken away, there is no longer need of any such insufficient offerings.
I. Offerings, then, served at first as a remembrance of sin; but now, since Christ became a sacrifice for sin, there is no longer need for any other remembrance of it.
How was it, then, that all the offerings under the old covenant were a remembrance of sin? In this way—that while the offering was supposed to make satisfaction for individual acts that transgressed the law of the Highest, so that there was no longer cause to fear being reproached or punished for them; at the same time the presenting of the offering was a confession of the guilty act; and by this public presentation each offerer made a remembrance of his sins, of everything in which he had come short of the law. We may only notice here, in passing, what an imperfect system this was. For what, after all, are the single out ward acts, in which sin manifests itself, in comparison with sin itself? Nothing but occasional outbreakings of the inward corruption, dependent, in a thousand ways, on external circumstances. If we compare two persons, of whom, on the same day, one has a multitude of such outward offences to repent of and to expiate, while the other can boast of not having committed one, is the latter, on that account, better than the former? By no means! Only he has fallen on a favouring hour, the other on an evil one; and corruption may have just as deep and firm a hold in the soul of the one as in that of the other. For just look at it in this way! How do we suppose a man can single out particular acts that he commits as those which are to be attributed to himself alone? That man may indeed be always right who in his inmost heart ascribes to himself, without reflecting on any one else, a culpable and criminal deed committed by him; but it would be unjust in others to let him settle his account in this manner, and think themselves cleared from all blame of his act, because he imputes it to himself alone; and therefore that man will never be quite wrong who includes others as connected more or less remotely, and often at who can tell what distance of time, with his fault. No, my friends, if we are only in any measure seeking the truth, if we look intelligently into the manifold ways in which the concerns of society are woven into each other, and become aware of all the open and hidden influences that people exercise on each other, we shall be ready to admit that each of us has his share, directly or indirectly, in the sins that appear in others; and that we can by no means consider that our reckoning ends with those which we personally commit. Oh, in very manifold ways,—not only by misleading example and inconsiderate speech, but by easy, lenient judgments, by neglecting to express disapproval, and in many ways besides, we all help to cause sin in others; and we can hardly say that any sin is the sin of one alone. For this reason, then, all remembrance of sin made by the offerings was imperfect and unsatisfactory, because it depended on this division of human responsibility, because it only dealt with sin when it became outwardly manifest, so that there was no true remembrance of inward sin impressed on the mind of the worshipper. And when the apostle says elsewhere that “by the law is the knowledge of sin,” he is perfectly right; for this is, in fact, the highest merit that can be ascribed to an external law, although it possesses no power for real amendment; but he could certainly never have meant that the remembrance of sin, provided for by the offerings prescribed in the law, could ever have produced a complete consciousness of sin or a true knowledge of it. No, this is only effected fully by the contemplation of the suffering and dying Saviour. There we have presented to us in one view, in the authors of this death, the full depth of human depravity, and in Him who suffered it, the full glory of the only-begotten Son of the Father; so that we may say with perfect truth that there is no real remembrance of sin but the death of the Lord. In this, sin has accomplished its greatest work; here it shows itself in its full strength and completeness. The apostle John must also have taken this view when he summed up all sin in “the lust of the eyes, and the lust of the flesh, and the pride of life.” It was the lust of the eyes, the mistaken tendency of man to be captivated by outward appearance, and by that to estimate character, which caused so many of our Lord’s contemporaries to perplex themselves by superficial judgments. What good can come out of Nazareth? Of what consequence can this man be who has not learned the Scriptures in our way? The lust of the flesh, the delight that men take in the transitory blessings of the present life, the striving after distinction and honour in the world, after the securing and increasing of every outward possession, the joy of seeing others dependent on them and of being looked up to by them,—this was what caused the high priest and the elders of his people to agree in the decision. It is better that one man should perish than that the whole constitution, under which we can direct and restrain the people, should come to ruin. And the pride of life,—what is it? It is the pride built on man’s presumptuous self-confidence when he imagines that, in his sagacity and experience of life, he has already possessed himself of what is best and most perfect, and therefore holds the powers unsurpassed to which he owes those possessions. Thus nothing better can gain entrance to his mind, and in the pleasant twilight of self-complacency all pure light is scorned and rejected. It was through this pride of life that the wise and powerful of those times did not believe John’s announcement of the kingdom of God; and it was because of it that afterwards the secret of the divine counsels remained hidden from them, and could be revealed only to babes. But from this very cause, that the light was hidden from the wise and mighty because of their pride, they were able so to sin against Him who was the centre of all the promises, that they crucified Him. Hence we may truly say that we find, in that which was the cause of the Saviour’s death, the most notable example of all that darkens the human soul and keeps men far from the way of truth and salvation: and a remembrance of sin, ineffaceable to all eternity, was recorded in the fact that in the one nation in which the knowledge of the only true God had been preserved, those very persons who should, above all others, have possessed and kept up this knowledge, were sinful and corrupt enough to slay on the cross the Prince of Life and the Lord of Glory. What more can we need as a remembrance of sin? There it stands, once for all, just as much for every individual, as for all times and for the whole human race. For whatever stirrings of sin we still have, whatever in us resists the will of God, of which He was the eternal embodiment, may always be traced to something of that which was the cause of the Lord’s death; and thus we must regard all sins as having a share in crucifying Him. And hence every succeeding generation needed, just as little as we, any other remembrance of sin than that which was created by the death of the Lord: and He is thus the end of all offerings; because the sorrowful confession of single sins by means of such sacred observances, and the sorrow and repentance for separate outbreaks of sin, of whatever kind they may be, cannot by any means be compared with the sorrow with which we all, without distinction of better or worse, must be bowed down by this thought, that it was our kindred, men like ourselves, who, through the same corruption that we find in ourselves, crucified the Lord of Glory. A remembrance which thus bears upon everything evil in the human soul, makes every other for ever superfluous. And again, if in connection with distinct sinful acts that we have committed, we prescribe to ourselves, or have prescribed to us by others, certain performances, whether works of love or exercises of devotion; these can never make what is done as if it had not been, nor dry up the fountain of such acts, and therefore can be nothing but a remembrance of sin; so what would this be but to turn back to that imperfect system which has only the shadow instead of the reality? and what would be proved by our doing so, but that we fail to ascribe the due value to the remembrance of sin made by the death of Christ? Let us then use this day’s solemn commemoration of that death, to establish ourselves anew on this article of our Church’s faith; that even in this respect we have regard to nothing but the perfect sacrifice once finished by Christ on the cross. And let each one whose heart admonishes him to think of the corruption in his own breast, and every one who is still conscious of occasional symptoms of his old sin. cast himself down before the cross of Christ, and there, in the name of Him who was made the offering for sin, beseech the Father to preserve him from ever again, by his lust of the eyes and lust of the flesh and pride of life, crucifying afresh the Prince of Life and Lord of Glory.