A Sermon

BY THE LATE REV. JOHN KENNEDY, D.D., DINGWALL.
Preached at Dingwall, 1st August, 1875.
“It is finished.”—John xix. 30.

IN Matt. xxvii. 50 we read, “Jesus, when he had cried again with a loud voice, yielded up the ghost.” In Mark xv. 37 we read, “And Jesus cried with a loud voice, and gave up the ghost.” In Luke xxiii. 46 we read, “And when Jesus had cried with a loud voice, he said, Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit; and having said this, he gave up the ghost.” In John xix. 30 we read, “When Jesus therefore had received the vinegar, he said, IT IS FINISHED; and he bowed His head and gave up the ghost.”

Comparing all these accounts of His dying, we find them all telling us that “He gave up the ghost.” The first three tell us that, ere He did so, “He cried with a loud voice.” Luke and John tell us that, as a sign of His resignation in dying, “He bowed His head.” Luke alone gives us His prayer in the act of dying. And John alone tells us what His articulate utterance was when “He cried with a loud voice.” It was evidently when “He cried” that He said, “IT IS FINISHED.” These are the words which He uttered “with a loud voice.” A comparison of the passages quoted will make this abundantly evident. These words are inserted by John in the very place, in the series of events, which is occupied by the “loud voice,” in the accounts given by the others.

In the light of the passages quoted, we see Jesus spending His last hour on the cross to which His blessed body was fastened by the nails which pierced his hands and His feet till the agony of death was passed. We see Him receiving His last drink, and it was “vinegar,” for nothing less bitter can be given to the surety of the unjust, and this fitly closes His experience of human cruelty. We hear His last cry, and listen to the words which He articulated when that cry was uttered. We hear His last prayer, and though it is addressed to His Father, it arises from the midst of both shame and agony. We can observe His last attitude as “He bowed His head,” and appreciate the emblem which it presents of His spirit and of His life. And His last act of obedience followed that token of His meekness, for, having “bowed His head,” “He gave up the ghost.”

But confining attention to the words—”It is finished”—I propose to consider them—I. As an expression of relief. II. As an anticipation of satisfying rest. III. As a shout of triumph. IV. As a “joyful sound” to sinners.

I.—AN EXPRESSION OF RELIEF.—Who can rightly conceive what a relief to Jesus, in His perfect human nature, it was to have passed through all His appointed sufferings? That human nature, perfectly holy, was in a thoroughly abnormal condition, when with all its purity and sensitiveness it experienced what made “the man Christ Jesus” “a man of sorrows.” As the surety of the unjust, He, when “made flesh,” occupied such a relation on the one side to God, and to His people on the other, that sufferings the most intense were utterly unavoidable. He, in His mediatorial position, “must suffer many things.” And in the nature in which He suffered, He was assured of His personal relation, as Jehovah the Son, to the Father who sent Him. His human nature was consciously in union with the divine, as subsisting in the same person with the eternal fulness of the Godhead. And He knew that, though it was in this intimate relation to the Godhead, this, instead of being security for utter relief from suffering, only served to make it possible that suffering, such as none other ever endured, would certainly be His experience in the flesh. His eternal Godhead did not fence His human nature against all suffering—it was rather the altar to sustain and sanctify the sacrifice which, in enduring the full infliction of the curse, He was to offer, in His people’s behalf, to God. He Himself alone could fully know what it was, in the consciousness of His human nature, to have left all suffering behind.

But left behind, with the exception of His actual experience of death, all His sufferings were, and His cry is, “It is finished.” To His human nature, that never had an experience, except that of the consciousness of perfect love, which was not abnormal, what must the relief have been when what interposed between it and the enjoyment of all that was personally due to Him of blessedness was finally removed!

And how much was finished when His course of suffering came to an end!

i. There was all the pain which His holy soul endured from the nearness of the world’s corruption, and from the virulence of the world’s hatred. In the measure of His holiness was the amount of His pain because of the pollution with which He was surrounded. Just think of Him who was “the High and Lofty One, who inhabiteth eternity, and whose name is holy,” whose place was on the throne of God for ever, in human nature, in the midst of sinful men on the earth, His eyes, His ears, His memory avenues through which there came wave after wave from the ruffled sea of this world’s sinfulness and misery to give agony to His soul, perfect in its love because perfect in its holiness. How could he, but as “a man of sorrows,” move amidst the corruption and misery of “a present evil world?” Even if the world were not disposed to persecute Him, even if men did no more than sin in His presence, and by doing so dishonour Him who sent Him, and destroy themselves, He could not, with His perfect love to God and to His neighbour, move in the midst of them without being a sufferer. It was the very love which disposed Him to suffer which made His suffering so intense. He would have suffered less if He had loved less, and yet, if He had loved less, He would not have submitted to suffer at all.

But you will say, “Was it not love that disposed Him to suffer, and in the measure of His love therefore He would make light of His suffering?” True, He “endured the cross, despising the shame,” but this contempt, while indicating the triumph of His love over all that would intercept Him from finishing His work, was no evidence of suffering being light in His experience. And besides all He had to observe in the conduct of the world around Him, He contemplated the sins which He bore, and though associating these with His loved ones, accounts for His having meekly borne the burden of them, when the Lord laid them upon Him, that very association occasioned unspeakable anguish to His soul. “This is the sin of my beloved ones, which I can bear only at the cost of being made a curse for them,” we might suppose Him to say. “This is all I have from them. They, my beloved ones, bring on me all this shame and agony.” O what pain it must have given to Him, to have before His pure mind the dishonour to God, involved in their iniquities, and the madness by which, moved by hatred to Him, they had brought upon themselves the fearful curse of which He had so awful an experience.

And He experienced the malignant hostility of the world in direct assaults upon Himself. His having human nature was taken by men as an opportunity of expressing their enmity in oppressing and afflicting Him. Their persecution of Him early began, and during all His public ministry, in the face of all His manifestations of His glory in His miracles, and of all His unwearied course of “doing good,” it continued to increase, till at last, when the assaults of the powers of darkness were fiercest, and the outpoured wrath of God was most overwhelming, their enmity knew no restraint, and burst out in cries for His being crucified. They denied His right to be regarded as the Son of God; they disallowed His Messiahship, and charged Him with being an impostor; His miracles they ascribed to aid from hell; in order to His betrayal into the hands of the Romans, they watched all His actions and all His utterances, and when they could “find no fault in Him at all,” they invented charges against Him—they blasphemed and lied in order that they might murder Him. There is human nature at its highest in the person of the Son of God, and here it is in its low condition, as fallen, in the persons of his crucifiers. Why will men, for there are many such, stand up for the dignity of human nature, as represented by the crucifiers of the Lord of glory, while not caring to discern its dignity as it is represented in the person of Emmanuel? There are who will apologise for His crucifiers, and who care not to be transformed into the likeness of “the man Christ Jesus.”

But all this is now passed. Never again can He in human nature be treated as before. Never shall that flesh in which the Son of God was manifested be nearer to the hands of sinners than a place in the midst of the throne of God; and, expressing His sense of relief, Jesus cries, “It is finished.”

1. It expresses His sense of relief from the assaults of the powers of darkness. How hidden is the presence, and how mysterious are the operations, on the earth, of the army of spirits from hell! But their presence and activity are realities in the consciousness of all Christ’s followers, as surely as they were in His own. Who can conceive what to Him, with His perfect sensitiveness to all that was spiritual, and with His perfect abhorrence of all that was unholy, it was to have hosts of spirits actually assailing Him, to distract Him with all the perturbation which it was in their power to cause? Their very nearness when made felt was agony, and, in the felt weakness of human nature, to be in actual conflict with them was an experience of affliction unspeakably sore. And from the time of the great conflict in the wilderness on to that of the hour of which He said, “This is your hour, and the power of darkness,” though we know not what were the instances and the forms of His experiences of temptation by emissaries from hell, we know that at the close, as at the beginning of His public ministry, He knew what it was to bear the assaults of “the power of darkness.” But the last battle of the war is over, and He expresses His feeling of relief when He cries “It is finished.”

2. These words express His sense of relief from all He suffered in His experience of the wrath of God. Who can enter into the meaning of His own description of His suffering when, speaking to His Father, He says, “I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint; my heart is like wax; it is melted in the midst of my bowels. My strength is dried up like a potsherd; and my tongue cleaveth to my jaws; and Thou hast brought me into the dust of death?” Of course, He knew why it was that He bore the wrath of God—that it was because to Him were imputed the iniquities of the people for whom He was surety. O think of Him between His Father and His beloved people having to bear the wrath of Him, as “the Judge of all,” of whom He said “I and the Father are one,” and tracing all the suffering which the expression of that wrath occasioned to the sins of a people whom He loved from everlasting! But “God over all, and blessed for ever,” though He was, there was nothing in all that He was, and enjoyed, that could interpose between Him, as the surety of the unjust, and the full endurance of the penalty due to the iniquities which He bore; and though He was the Only Begotten and Eternal Son of God, the love of that relationship never for one moment mitigated the expression of judicial wrath bearing on Him as “the just for the unjust.” Neither His own divine supremacy, nor the infinite love of the Father to Him, as His Son, placed any fence between His consciousness, as “the man Christ Jesus,” and the full flood of divine anger. Never more certainly was He Jehovah than when enduring the shame and agony of the cross, never more surely the beloved Son than when the Father’s face was hidden from Him, and when from His desolate soul came the wail—the saddest ever uttered on the earth—”My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” But, instead of imagining that what He was personally mitigated what He endured officially, look, in the light of His unchanging glory and blessedness, on His awful suffering, as stripped naked He hung upon the tree, His blessed body enduring excruciating pain, and His soul submerged in the fiery flood of divine wrath. while the hiding of His Father’s face made all thick darkness over Him, and pitiless crucifiers compassed Him, and scoffing crowds passed Him by in contempt, staying only to wag their heads and rail on Him as they hastened to their marketing in the city.

How much in Jesus’ experience of divine wrath must be utterly unknown to us! But of three things implied in it we may be quite assured. He had a perfect appreciation of the awfulness of divine anger; He was perfectly assured that it bore on Him as the surety of the unjust; and He actually came in contact, with the flaming fire of the expression of that wrath, in all the sensitiveness of His perfect holiness. O how terrible to Him it must have been to be without the light of His Father’s face—to Him who was so dependent on fellowship with His Father for His joy! But all this is now past, and who can conceive what His sense of relief was when He cried with a loud voice, “It is finished?”

II.—THESE WORDS EXPRESS AN ANTICIPATION OF SATISFYING REST.—Between Him and the actual enjoyment in human nature of the rest awaiting Him in the Father’s house, there was yet the act of dying. But His eye looked, as to something very near, to “the joy set before Him.” On that very day His soul was to be in paradise, and in continuation of this, there stretched eternally before His view what awaited Him as “the Lamb who was slain,” in the rest, and blessedness, and glory of a place “in the midst of the throne of God.” In an anticipation of this as so near, there was present rest to His human soul; and how could he, in all His love, as God, to the nature which He assumed, but be glad that His soul and body were so soon to be raised to a place amidst the glory, and to fellowship in the blessedness, of being for ever “on the right hand of the Majesty on high?” Only there could holy human nature, subsisting in the person of the Son of God, find its normal condition and its satisfying rest, and only there could “the Word made flesh” be content to have for ever the nature which made Him a kinsman to His people, and in which for them He glorified the Father on the earth.

But there was rest to Him, in His zeal for the Father’s glory, in the results of the work which He finished on the cross. “I have glorified thee on the earth,” He says to the Father. O, what rest it was to Him to have this to declare! The glory of Him who sent Him was the great end at which, in all His work as surety, He unerringly aimed. He desired, at whatever cost to Himself, to satisfy the justice of Jehovah, as Judge, by rendering a full atonement for sin, to magnify the law of God, as Sovereign, and to make it honourable, and to show forth the glory of the name of Jehovah, as this had never been exhibited before; and in order to this, He yielded Himself up to be so dealt with by God, that there might come forth through Him, by the rending of His flesh and the shedding of His blood, an infinite manifestation of all divine glory. That this grand result was secured, He perfectly knew, and looking on this, in its vastness and brightness, how satisfying was His rest, as, “with a loud voice,” He exclaimed, “It is finished.”

And there was satisfying rest to Him in the result of His work as bearing on the people whom He loved. For them His surety work was undertaken, for them it was begun; with His eye on each one of them, and His heart as well, He went on suffering while He obeyed, and obeying while He suffered, till the work was finished. He knew that He had endured, till He exhausted, the curse due to them, that He had done all that was required to secure to them a right to everlasting life, and that nothing was left undone in His fulfilment of the conditions on which He received from the Father the promise that all Israel should be saved in Him with an everlasting salvation. All this secured, He was at rest. O, think at what a cost He earned His Sabbath! And think of the love that never looks back regretfully on all the toil through which this rest was reached. O, who but an enemy would grudge to the Son of Man a Sabbath on the earth, of which He would be Lord, that it might to the end of time be a symbol and memorial of the rest on which He entered when, raised from the dead, He received a demonstration from heaven of the acceptance of His work?

III.—THESE WORDS ARE A SHOUT OF TRIUMPH.—The very finishing of the work of Christ, viewed apart from its design and results, was a victory. How much and how many interposed between Him and finishing the work which the Father gave Him to do! He could not therefore say “It is finished” without that utterance being the cry of a victor—a shout of triumph. Though Church and State were both against Him, though all classes in the world and all the legions of hell were active in opposing and harassing Him, never for one moment did He falter or stumble in the work. His love triumphed over every affliction. His faith did not for one moment fail; His meekness remained in perfect calmness, unruffled by any of all the storms of persecution which swept over his consciousness; and perfect in every motive, thought, feeling, word, and action, He went on step by step through all His course of suffering, till He finished the work which the Father gave Him to do. Who could thus have triumphed but Himself?

But to some eyes the aspect presented by Jesus, as nailed to the tree, is very unlike that of a conqueror. Have not His enemies succeeded in His betrayal and in His condemnation? Has He not, by His Jewish enemies, been delivered to the Gentiles? Have they not ordered His crucifixion? Has He not been actually led forth to “the place of a skull,” bearing the Cross that was soon to bear Him? Has He not actually been nailed to it? Hours have passed and none has come to save Him, and do not His enemies twit Him with being powerless to save Himself? And is He not just about actually to die? He is alone in the conflict, and the whole result depends on Him. “Of the people there is none with him,” and if He dies, then surely it would seem as if His cause was defeated and not victorious. Does it become Him, just before bowing His head and giving up the ghost, to utter a shout of triumph? Yes, verily, nothing ever became Him better than, between His last sip and His last breath, to announce His victory.

Ah! but look at Him hanging on the tree, showing every sign of being already dead, His last breath having departed just after He had, with a loud voice, declared that He had won the victory. Yes, I can bear to look on all that proves Him dead, and to think of strong-limbed and stout-hearted Roman soldiers keeping watch around the Cross unheeding and unmoved, and of mocking crowds who pass by the Crucified, regarding Him as a malefactor who had received “the due reward of his deeds.” But I must think of some things else. I am not to forget the darkened sun, the awful shadow cast over the face of the heavens, the quaking earth, the rending of the veil, the open graves, the risen dead; a still more marked display of the power of God on conscience, in causing even a Roman centurion to “glorify God, saying, Certainly this was a righteous man”; the trophy of victory taken from beside His Cross when, amidst His weakness, shame, and agony in the flesh, His power to save prepared a blaspheming thief in a few minutes for “paradise,” and that He could keep, even then, in His grasp the cords of love by which He drew out the hearts of a few trembling, mourning women after Him. All these things I remember, and they are no signs of His being defeated. Yea, it is when I place what I have produced out of the record as a counterpoise beside all that unbelief would regard as signs of His defeat, I have both before me, so that I can use them all as proofs that the Beloved has conquered.

Have enemies seemed to make “a show” of Him “openly” on the Cross? Does His actual death seem to complete their victory? So let it seem to be to every eye on earth but that of faith. All that seeming of victory on their side was required in order to the reality of victory on His. The seeming and the real never more widely differed than here. For it was He, and by means of being “crucified in weakness”—by shame, agony, and death on the Cross—who made a show of them. His victory over His enemies in being “obedient unto death, even the death of the Cross,” secured a resulting victory—a victory which could only be won by dying. His finishing of His work in death was a victory, and secured a victory. For—

1. “Through death he destroyed him that had the power of death, that is, the devil.”
   Satan has the power of death only as the executioner of the sentence of death. This “power of death” only death can destroy. The executioner has the power till his work is done. The death which he executes brings his power to an end. He by thoroughly doing his work utterly destroys his power to do it. Here, in the case of Christ, was One to whom were imputed the iniquities of a people whom only God can number. On Him the devil brought his “power of death” to bear, and the more certain I am that his work was thoroughly done, the more persuaded I am that his power has been destroyed, and that the countless multitude have been redeemed. To assure me of this I need every indication of weakness, every element of shame, every pang of suffering, every token of death, that are associated with Christ crucified in the story of the gospel.

2. He in His death triumphed over sin.
   He made a full end of the guilt, exposing to punishment, of the sins of all the people for whom He died. He made a full and final end of all this. His love could not be satisfied without all this for them. And I require, in order to be sure of this, everything I can find in the gospels which proved that He died in weakness, shame, and agony—all that is evidence of His having been “made a curse.” If sin has brought death on Him, it cannot bring death on His people. The more it seemed to triumph in His death, the less possible does it seem to be that it can triumph in theirs. And by enduring an experience of the condemning power of sin, He secured the condemnation to extinction of sin itself in the souls of all for whom He died. “He condemned sin in the flesh” by enduring the death to which sinners are condemned. By dying for sin once, He secured the utter and eternal death of sin. There is no longer aught to interpose between divine omnipotence, acting in the interest both of grace and holiness, and that abominable thing which God hateth, and which made loathsome the objects of His love; and its destruction is therefore certain, and is a triumph won by Christ through His being “made sin” and “made a curse.”

3. And He won a triumph over the world.
   But for His death all the objects of His love would have been left in slavery, under the despotism of “a present evil world.” He would fain have them free, and He well proved how intently His love was set on their emancipation. But having rendered His due to God, in dying for His people, He can now look forward, through death, to the power to save to the uttermost, which shall be His when He is at the right hand of the Father; and in full view of the triumph of His power in delivering His people from a present evil world by drawing them to Himself, and by preserving them till they pass out of it at last, His shout is in joyful anticipation of triumph when He cries with a loud voice, “It is finished.”

4. And He knows that in the moment when His spirit is gone out of His body, to it death shall be for ever past, and that His death shall be the death of the death of all His people.
   He anticipates, therefore, a deliverance from death both for Himself and for all the objects of His love. Death, by its seeming triumph over Him, was death to itself. When He lay under its power He was preparing for a triumph over it. He triumphed over its terrors in yielding Himself to its stroke, and if He lay dead for a season it was that His might be an eternal life of triumph over it. The glory of this life, as it shone on His view through the rending of His flesh, evoked a shout of triumph as He exclaimed with a loud voice, “It is finished.”

5. He could bear to think of His body being laid in the grave after His soul had passed into paradise, for such was His view of His victory over the grave that He could not, in the near prospect of it, but raise a shout of triumph.
   How much there is in the burial of Christ, as it lies in between His death and His resurrection! It is the demonstration of His death and it is the occasion of His resurrection. It proves that “he loved unto the end,” and it furnished an opportunity of proving that He is Almighty. For the sealed stone is removed, the grave clothes are laid aside, the bands of death are broken, the tomb of Joseph is empty again, for “the Lord is risen indeed.” And as surely as He rose, so shall all His ransomed ones. His eye passed on from His own resurrection to its fruit in that of all the bodies of His people, and rested on the glorious prospect of their being—both in soul and body—perfectly like Him and for ever with Him. Can we wonder, then, that love such as His should break forth in a shout of triumph in view of such a consummation?

IV.—THESE WORDS ARE A “JOYFUL SOUND.”—The loud voice of the High Priest on Calvary reminds one of the sound of old over the burnt-offerings, when the trumpets were blown by the priests in the tabernacle and afterwards in the temple. And what good news—what “glad tidings of great joy”—do the words, “It is finished,” convey!

1. These words convey the joyful news that the great work of redemption is completed.
   This work was entrusted to and undertaken by Christ alone. There was, “of the people,” “none with him.” And as He alone began it, so from His hand alone it received its finish. Emmanuel did it all. Any other hand would mar it. But His hand alone touched it, and He leaves the mark of perfectness on every part of it. All the obedience, though rendered in human nature, was the obedience of Emmanuel; all the suffering, though endured in the flesh, was the suffering of the person who is Jehovah the Son. Infinitely meritorious, therefore, is the surety righteousness of Christ. The justice of God is infinitely well pleased with His blood as an atonement for the sins of His people, and a sweet-smelling savour shall His sacrifice ever yield unto God. The law has been magnified by the obedience of Him who is its Lord, who for a season obeyed it as a servant. Christ was persuaded of the acceptance of His atoning work by God. In this assurance He exclaimed, “It is finished.” And gloriously God hath declared His acceptance of the work. Each attribute, glorified on the Cross, was, in the lustre of its manifestation, there at the grave to sanction, and to shine benignly on, resurrection work. Jesus died to the glory of the Father, and “by the glory of the Father” was He raised from the dead. And the High Priest has gone into the holiest with the accepted sacrifice, and the “joyful sound” of “the golden bells”—the good news of the Gospel—tells us that He lives and hath power with God. And God calls you to His mercy-seat, through the rent veil of Emmanuel’s flesh, to present yourself as a sinner on the blood that made atonement, as a suppliant for a free and full and final forgiveness of all your sins. Only Christ, only His blood, only His word—only He as the way to God, only His blood as the ground of your pardon and acceptance, only His word as your warrant for coming as you are, and for expecting that redemption in Christ shall be yours. Such is the glad peal that reaches you in the loud cry from the Cross.

2. These words tell you that the everlasting covenant is sealed, and that if you come to Christ you will obtain, on the ground of His finished work, a right to all its blessings.
   The New Testament is in His blood, and it, with all it contains, shall be yours if by faith you receive Christ and His blood as freely offered in the Gospel; and God Himself, as “the God of all grace,” shall be yours, to dispense to you the provision of the covenant graciously, wisely, and effectively.

3. These words tell you that you can find in Christ a right to victory over every enemy.
   His shout of triumph is an everlasting sound, passing through the Gospel trumpet, telling you that His victory shall be yours in Him if you flee to Him for refuge. O, what gladness this should bring to the heart of the oppressed, who can bring nothing but unworthiness before God, and who cannot, but as feeble cowards, face the enemy in the day of battle. Christ tells you that the victory has been won by the great battle in which He, as “the captain of salvation,” stood all alone against sin, Satan, the world, death, and the grave. These all are already conquered. You will be a victor at the outset if you come to Jesus, and though there may be a conflict after this, it is with enemies who cannot take away your life, though they may harass and scare you, while He shall secure to you benefit even from your wounds, and crown all your experience of His grace with the calm of eternal rest and with the glory and the gladness of eternal triumph.

APPLICATION.—I. How few there are who will stop to listen to this cry from the Cross!
It continues still to be uttered “with a loud voice” through the trumpet of the Gospel. You cannot contrive how to escape from hearing it. You have already heard it, and your memory preserves it, and you cannot therefore escape from it by refusing your earnest attention, or by ceasing to read your Bible, or by absenting yourself from the house of God. Christ crucified is near, and His cry is kept up. Memory long ago anticipated the discovery of how to preserve sounds, and give them forth again after long intervals, and you cannot at any time escape from yourself. You will carry much of the Gospel in your memory even to hell, if you enter it at last, and I know nothing that can more augment your misery there than remembered Gospel truths. What, then, are you to make of this text? Some of you are so occupied with the things of the world that you grudge a moment of your life to the doctrine of the Cross. You go through the wearying, wasting toil of your wonted round of business or toil or pleasure till your head is dizzied and your heart is stone. You have neither eye nor ear for Christ because you have no heart for Him, and you pass Him by unheeded, afraid that He may take something from you of what you are so eager to give wholly to the world. Others are averse to look towards the Cross, or listen to the voice that tells, from out of its shame and agony, that the work of redemption is finished, because they think they have a righteousness of their own which makes them independent of that which was wrought out by Jesus. Among those who passed by the Cross when Jesus was hanging on it, and acted the part of mockers towards Him, there may have been some hurrying to prepare for temple service, as surely as there were some who were hastening to market. These were equally disposed to pass the glorious sufferer by, and not to see or hear what might wean them from their idol. And besides these there may have been some, not intent either on marketing or worship, who were so far away from all that was divine and scriptural, through the power of unbelief, that in the scene on Calvary there was nothing that would for a moment arrest them in their pursuit of pleasure, and nothing even to cause a conscious feeling of any kind towards Him who was lifted up on the tree. And there are these classes still among the despisers of Christ crucified—the jaded worldlings, the religious toilers, and the frivolous pleasure-seekers. In one thing, at least, all these agree—they care not to see the beauty or to reach the righteousness or to taste the love of Christ crucified, by the word of His mouth being applied to them with power. Such are some of you, in whichever of the classes of despisers you may be found. But thus saith the Lord, “Behold, ye despisers, and wonder and perish.” And this also He saith, “How long, ye simple ones, will ye love simplicity, and the scorners delight in their scorning, and fools hate knowledge? Turn you at my reproof; behold, I will pour out my Spirit unto you; I will make known my words unto you.”

1. Each one of you all must either receive the words of Christ in the text as true and act accordingly, or reject them, as if they were untrue, and act accordingly.
   From this alternative there is no escape. You must first regard what He speaks about as important ere you will care to believe that what He says regarding it is true. He must be to you the only resort left to you as a sinner. His name must be to you the only one “under heaven” whereby you can be saved. Persuaded that you have been a transgressor from the womb, that the curse of the broken law rests on you, and that power to treasure up “wrath against the day of wrath” is the only power that is at work within you, how could you fail to be shut out from all hope apart from Christ and His redeeming work, and to you what, in importance, could compare with your being assured that His work was finished, and because finished by Him, was sufficient as a ground of acceptance with God for the very chief of sinners? If assured of this, then you would seek to lay all your own righteousness aside, that you might come naked, in excuseless guilt, to be clothed with “the righteousness which is of God by faith.”

But if you do not thus receive, you must reject the words of Christ. If you do not believe what He saith then you make Him a liar. And you do so whatever form your rejection may assume. You do so who say that you require no righteousness either to be wrought by yourself or as wrought by another. O, think of the earnestness of Christ about that as to which you are so indifferent. You reproach Him for regarding a justifying righteousness as something to finish which He would bear shame and agony and death. You mock His suffering, and you dispense with His work, and you treat His words with the contempt which is due to a lie. And you reject His words as if they were untrue, who are still trying to “establish” your own tottering righteousness. You refuse to listen to Him when He tells you that the work in which you are foolishly engaged has already been finished by Him, and so well finished that nothing besides is required as a foundation of peace with God. You, too, reject His words who are persuaded that, apart from Christ crucified, there is no hope for you, but refuse to cast yourselves in faith as sinners on Him and on His finished work. You cannot refuse to trust on that righteousness, which He finished, all your eternal interests, without saying that He has left His work, which is your only resource, unfinished. O, friend, have done with casting dishonour on Him, and doing harm to yourself, by refusing to yield to His call when He says, “Come unto me, all ye who labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.”

1. Let all whose eye is on Christ crucified, as the one object of their faith, more habitually remember, more heartily cherish, and seek more powerfully to be affected by the words of Christ in the text.
   Friends, you need to be more under the power of these words, that there may be more mortifying of your pride of heart. It is this cry of Christ’s from the Cross that, applied by the Spirit, who can renew as well as impress, will prove to be the death yet of your legal spirit. If you are friends of the Crucified One you will be enemies to all that would spoil Him of His glory. And you need to remember these words when you find no other resource, apart from His finished work, to which you can repair. Friends, if these words are true, why should you be afraid? Stand on the work which Emmanuel finished. What besides can you desire as a ground on which to ask the blessing of acceptance with God, on which to claim an interest in all the fulness of the covenant of grace, and from which to rise, on the wings of desire and hope, towards the brightness of an eternal triumph over every enemy, and of the full enjoyment of God Himself for ever? And you need to be more habitually under the power of these words in order to a deeper sense of what you owe to Him who uttered them on the Cross, that your love may become more fervent, your heart more contrite, your prayers more trustful, your songs more hearty, your service more self-denying, and yourselves more Christ-like.