Calvary to Pentecost

“I have chosen you out of the world,” the Master said. And again, “They are not of the world.” This is the true position of every member of His mystical body — the Church.

In the purpose of God, we have passed out of the world which rejected our Lord, and belong to that in which He is supreme. We are not oblivious to the needs of the world which He so loved and loves. Its sorrows and sins He near our heart; its call for help, like the piteous cry of sailors from a wreck, is ever in our ears; its needs call out our most strenuous energies. But we do not belong to it. We enter it constantly, to be its salt and light; but our true standing is without it, where Jesus is.

We need, then, to understand and embrace the principles of the Risen and Ascended Life, which dates from the cross, as its dawn, and climbs in glorious gradations toward the meridian of a day that can never be shadowed by night. Some of these principles are expounded in the following pages.

CONTENTS.

CHAP. PAGE

I. The Wondrous Cross ii

The passing years enhance the preciousness of the cross. We thought we loved it, and the little hill of Calvary, and the garden with its sweet spring flowers, in those days, now receding far behind us, wdien we first found refuge beneath its outstretched arms. But as the shadows of life besfin to fall, however slightly or evidently from a westering sun, its meaning unfolds itself. There is more than one manner of fruit on the tree of life; more than one point of view from which to behold it; depths as well as heights, lengths as well as breadths.

And yet when we speak thus of the cross, we never forget that its value consists in what He was who hung there in dying agony. Not the cross, but the Crucified. Not the tree, but its precious burden. Not the altar, but the Divine Victim who there surrendered Himself without spot to God, as the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but for the sins of the whole world. We use the cross as a comprehensive word for the work which the Son of God accomplished there.

The river that flowed through Eden parted into four beds, and the doctrine of the cross may be divided into four great lines of truth, respectively presented by the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews, by the Apostle Peter, by the Apostle Paul, and by the disciple whom Jesus loved. We do not for a moment suggest that any of these writers confines himself to one aspect of the death that Jesus died. Each of them touches at will every note in the octave of Calvary. But each gives his own tone and color to the white ray of divine light as it radiates from the cross of the Saviour of the world.

The writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews was evidently educated amid the sacred associations that centered in the Temple at Jerusalem. With throbbing heart he had mingled in the vast festal assemblies. He had loved those days of exuberant joy; had felt the thrill of psalm and hymn, sung of the choirs of Levites; had realized the privileges of the blood of sprinkling, of altar and priest, of near access to the holy Presence that dwelt between the cherubim.

All these had vanished, as light off the clouds of sunset, when with the rest of his Hebrew fellow Christians he went forth to Jesus, outside the camp. At first they had felt dreary and sad, but suddenly had come to see that in the cross of Jesus they had obtained the spiritual realities of which Leviticus could only give the transient symbols (Heb. X. 19; xii. 23, 24).

And perhaps this is the first aspect in which we view the cross. We account it the brazen altar where Jesus put away the sins of the world. We see there the Lamb of God charged with our guilt and penalty, and bearing it away forever. We have our consciences purged from dead works. We have a right to enter the holy place through His blood. We stand in the presence of the burning glory of the Shekinah, unabashed, unashamed, accepted in the Beloved, and entranced in the music of words that float as music around: ‘’ There is no condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus.”

The Apostle Peter is deeply sympathetic with this view. He could not be otherwise, with the Hebrew background of his life. And if we may interpret an expression of his literally, he seems to have been an eye-witness of the sufferings of Christ (i Pet. v. i). As though he was led by a strange fascination to stand afar off, and see the last sufferings of Him whom, for all that he had denied Him, he loved with all his heart. He repeatedly refers to the sufferings of Christ, and holds them up as our example.

But he develops a further view. He speaks emphatically of our redemption ( I Pet. i. 1 8; 2 Pet. ii. i ). In his thought each disk in the blood of Jesus was a coin of priceless value, purchasing us to be His slaves. As though we had stood in the slave- market of the world, “sold under sin,” but He came there with blood as His purchase-money, and bought us to make us bond-slaves to Himself.

This conception of the death of Christ commonly follows upon that already suggested. We first look upon it as a sacrifice, atoning for our guilt, and bringing us near to God; then we find it to be a masterful argument for consecration of all we are and have. We learn that we are not our own, but bought with a price, and we glorify Him in our body and spirit, which are His.

But the Apostle Paul lays stress on yet another aspect of the wondrous cross. We have already found there propitiation and consecration; we now find identification (Gal. ii. 20; Rom. vi. 8). His perpetual thought is, that as we were in the first Adam when he fell, so we were, by some mysterious law, in Christ when He died, and rose and ascended into heaven. In Him, our Ark, we crossed the waters of death, from the old world, where sin and lawlessness were rampant, into the new heavens and earth, in which dwelleth righteousness.

When He htmg in dying anguish on the cross, we were there, though we felt none of the pain; when He descended into the grave, we passed thither also, though we shuddered not with the chill air of the vault; when He arose, we left death behind us forever, and became citizens of a world where the standards of earth are reversed forever, like reflections in standing water.

This thrilled the apostle with ecstatic joy. He was free from tJie coiideinnation of the law. Its pealing thunder rolled beneath his feet, reverberating in the dark valleys far below, but he had passed to the upland lawns, the blue of heaven above him, the sense of freedom, joy, hope, buoyant in his breast.

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