April 26

Lord, shall u:e smite with the sword?... Jesus anszvei’ed, Suffer ye thus far. And He touched his ear and healed him. — Luke xxii. 49, 51.

A “126 “What hast thou done? The voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto Me from the ground” say the grand words of Genesis. There it lies — the earth will not drink it in; there it lies, pleading, appealing to Divine justice to sniite the evildoer. A vehement figure, representing a solemn truth, that every evil has a tongue which calls to I leaven against the iniquity of the evildoer; or, to put it into plainer words, all sin necessarily appeals to God for punishment of the sinner. It does so from the very nature of things and the constitution of the universe, is contrary to the Divine will calls upon God to smite, and smiting to avenge. And that is true, and will be true through all eternity. And there is no Gospel that does not base and found itself upon that. And the first sin of man against man, this first murder and first martyrdom, proclaims to earth, as it appeals to Heaven, the solemn fact that the law of the Divine nature and the necessity of the universe is that evil shall be punished, and that retribution shall follow upon wrong-doing.

Christ’s death comes under that law too. “His blood be on us, and on our children,” shouted the frenzied mob, lightly incurring the awful burden; and His blood was on them and on their children. And the dissolution of their national existence, and the sweeping away of their special privileges, and the destruction of Temple and worship, and their continuance till this day a hissing and a bye-word upon the face of the earth, show us how the blood of Christ spoke what the blood of Abel spoke, and cried to God for vengeance; and the vengeance came, and is here to-day.

And yet the cry for retribution is not the predominant tone. There is a deeper voice than that. Christ’s blood, meaning thereby the fact of Christ’s death, is present in the Divine mind — not only as the consequence of man’s sin, and therefore a crime, but as the consequence of its own infinite love, and therefore an atonement and a propitiation. And whilst in the one aspect it did bring down, as it ought to bring down, judgments upon the wicked hands that crucified and slew, in the other aspect it has brought down upon all the world, and upon us if we will accept it, the blessing of that pardoning grace that sweeps away all sin and makes us pure and holy. The blood of Jesus Christ cries to God for pardon — that is to say, is an element ever present before the Divine mind, conditioning and modifying the incidence of His judgments, and His punishment for sin. Here is the centre of Christianity. The one thing which makes it a power to bless and to help is the Cross, on which the Sacrifice for the sins of the world has died. Is your Christianity a Christianity which founds on the fact of Christ’s death for the sins of the world, and from that draws all your hope, all your knowledge of God and of man, as well as all your power for holiness and obedience? I beseech you, let that voice speak to your hearts and consciences, that they may be sprinkled from dead works by the blood that “speaketh better things than that of Abel.”