He who came to save men is no other than God. Therefore He is capable of viewing sin from God’s standpoint and of understanding what was due to God because of man’s sin. By uniting His Godhead to His manhood, He was capable, in His twofold nature, of sustaining pangs which humanity could not have endured apart from Godhead, and of receiving into His infinite mind a sight of sin and a horror concerning it, such as no finite mind could ever have endured.
You think perhaps that you comprehend sin, but you cannot do anything of the kind. It is an evil too monstrous for the human mind fully to know its heights and depths, its lengths and breadths; but Christ, who is God incarnate, fully knew what sin meant. He had plumbed it to the very bottom and knew how deep it was. He had gazed upon it and felt the horror of its unrighteousness, ingratitude and depravity. Its sinfulness struck His sinless mind with all its awful force and overwhelmed His holy soul with a horror which no one but He could bear.
He was, in all respects, perfect and therefore had no need to die on His own account. It behoved Him to suffer, not because He was the Son of God or the Son of man, but because He was the Redeemer, the Surety, the Substitute of men.
When I have felt the burden of my sin, I confess that I have at times felt as if it was too great to be taken away by any conceivable power. But, on the other hand, when I have seen the excellence of my Master’s Person, the perfection of His manhood, the glory of His Godhead, the wonderful intensity of His anguish, the solid value of His obedience, I have felt like John Hyatt,2 who said, when dying, that he could not only trust Christ with his one soul, but that he could trust Him with a million souls if he had them. If my sins were greater than they are, and God forbid that they should be – if my sense of them were ten thousand times more vivid than it is, and I could wish I had a more clear and humbling consciousness of my own iniquity – yet I know, even then, that my Lord and Master is a greater Saviour than I am a sinner.
From the constitution of His Person as God and man, I am certain that, if I had heaped up my iniquities till they reached the skies – if I had piled mountain of sin upon mountain of rebellion and had thought to scale the very throne of God in my impious rebellion – yet even then the precious blood of Jesus Christ, God’s Son, could cleanse me from all sin.
Writing to the Hebrews concerning Christ’s incarnation, the Apostle Paul says, “Once in the end of the world hath He appeared to put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself”. It was He, against whom this sin had been committed – it was He who will be the Judge of the living and the dead and who “appeared to put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself”. Is there not great comfort in this fact? It is the Son of God who has undertaken this great labour. He appeared, sinner, to save the guilty; God appeared “to put away sin”. Lost one, the great Shepherd has appeared. Your case is not hopeless, for He has appeared. If anybody, other than God, had undertaken the task of putting away sin, it could never have been accomplished; but it can be accomplished now, for He who appeared is the One with whom nothing is impossible.
Christ came as the chosen Mediator, ordained by God for this tremendous task. He is no unauthorised individual who, of his own accord alone, stepped into the gap without a command from heaven. No, but He appeared whom the Father had, from eternity, chosen for the great task and whom He had commissioned and sent to perform it. His very name, Christ, tells of His anointing for this service.
He could not sit in heaven and accomplish this great work of salvation; so He appeared on earth in human form. He “made Himself of no reputation, and took upon Him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men: and being found in fashion as a man, He humbled Himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross”.
1Taken from Spurgeon’s “Good Tidings of Great Joy”: Christ’s Incarnation the Foundation of Christianity.
2Probably an English nonconformist minister who lived from 1767 to 1826.