The Incarnation

The Cross: The Glory Of The Incarnation

The tragedy of the crucifixion is one thing, the glory of the cross is quite another. In its tragedy, it is repulsive. In its deeper meaning, it is most attractive. There is a big monument on Bunker Hill that was built—not to the tragedy, but to a deeper feeling that we call patriotism. There were men there who were willing to die for what they believed to be right, and this monument was erected to their memory, and so the crucifixion of our Lord was one of the most repulsive things this world ever saw. I would cross a continent to keep from seeing an execution, a hanging or electrocution; and yet underneath the surface of this revulsion, there is an attraction which is simply irresistible. Some of the most repulsive scenes in history have been sung in song, painted on canvas and chiseled in marble, just because of the deeper meaning of them.

Now we will stand out underneath the cross and look and listen that we may learn to love. Shall we listen? I think as we catch the words which fall from the lips of our dying Lord, we will have defined for us, in a large measure, the deeper meaning of the cross. “Father forgive them for they know not what they do,” and that cry is an appeal to heaven by way of the cross for forgiveness, and it is a plea made by the Lord at the moment when He was making it possible for God to forgive. Mercy is not a species of justice. The very moment a judge begins to be merciful, he ceases to be just, and when he ceases to be just, he begins to be merciful. No man can be absolutely just and absolutely merciful at the same time; yet God is infinitely just, and how can He be infinitely merciful? It is only by the satisfaction of justice that God can be merciful at all, and there is only one place in this universe of which I know, where God shows mercy. He shows His loving kindness, His goodness, His favor in a thousand ways; but not His mercy, His favor for the guilty, His love for sinners, criminals before God. Crimes is an offense before the law, and sin is a crime before God.

Mercy In The Cross

Now in Jesus Christ on the cross there is mercy. God is dealing with the guilty, and His love is expressing itself in satisfying justice. Can you tell me a place in nature where God shows mercy? You keep natural law and you are rewarded; you break natural law and you are punished. You are rewarded in proportion as you keep it, and you are punished just as you break it. There is no mercy in natural law; it has no heart; it never weeps; there is no sympathy. Jesus Christ on the cross is making it possible for God to be just and the justifier of him that believeth; so that now as He satisfies the demands of righteousness and justice, He can pray, “Father, forgive them; it is now possible to be merciful as thou hast been just,” and so that cry on the cross is an appeal to heaven for mercy, because justice has been satisfied.

Peace

And then as we listen, we hear the voice of prophecy. “Today shalt thou be with me in Paradise,” and there is no entrance to Paradise except through Christ on the cross; that is the door here and hereafter. I have met some who believe in Christ as a historical character. They magnify His human attributes, they praise His qualities; but they don’t believe in salvation through the atoning blood. They will take everything except the cross of Christ. I have never yet found a so-called Christian of that kind with any joy, with any peace of soul. There is no entering into the Paradise of joy in the Lord except by the way of the cross. You may magnify the human attributes of Jesus as much as you will, as our Unitarian friends do, but not one of them can you find with rest of soul. The sin question has not been settled; it has been waived aside, it is a sort of imperfect righteousness; but there is no confession of the guilt of sin and meeting of justice that gives real peace of conscience and rest of soul. But in Christ on the cross, there is such a satisfaction of God, and there comes such a peace of heart into the soul as to bring one right into a spiritual Paradise.

Physical Need

Then we hear the voice of physical need. “I thirst.” Jesus Christ on the cross is the cry to heaven for the needs of the body, and through Christ on the cross, that cry is satisfied. The needs of the heart are satisfied. That expression, “the restoration of all things,” we hear quoted frequently now; and in Jesus Christ, there is to be a restoration of the whole body. Whatever the body has lost through sin will be regained in Christ—only in Christ. This world [outside] of Christ can have no hope that the body will be restored. So far as I know, a man dying out of Christ will be raised from the dead just as he died. I am certain he will be raised, for Jesus Christ said so; but the appeal to heaven for the needs of the body is very suggestive indeed, and I believe that all that the body needs for complete restoration will come to us through the cross and the resurrection of our Lord.

Soul’s Need

Then the voice of the soul’s deep need. “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” The need of the soul. A theologian said it was the humanity of Christ calling out for His deity. Mr. Spurgeon contended, for the deity of Christ, “How can perfection suffer?” Perfection can suffer only when it chooses to suffer for the sake of another, and if perfection chooses to suffer, that is a proof of its perfection. We hear the echo of the fact that the soul needs God. “Why hast thou forsaken me?” What is death? Separation from God. “Depart from me ye cursed.” “He tasted death for every man.” Just now He is tasting separation from God, whatever that means; He is tasting the powers of hell. It is hard for us to realize; but it is true. In that moment of separation, He tasted separation from God.

Human Love

Then we hear the voice of human love. “Woman, behold thy son. Son, behold thy mother.” Christ on the cross has given us one of the sweetest and finest expressions of human love in all this world. He sanctifies motherhood, fatherhood, wifehood, childhood, brotherhood, sisterhood. Someone called attention to the fact that in all the classic literature which had not been touched by the religion of Jesus, there is not a reference to the pleasures of childhood. In Greek or Latin or any other classic books, you find no reference to the pleasures of childhood, just because there were no pleasures of childhood. Children were so useless, hardly worth mentioning; and where the blood of Jesus Christ has not touched, where the cross and its power has not been felt, you find nothing that resembles a Christian home, Christian wifehood, fatherhood and motherhood. Women are chattels and slaves and things, in some places regarded as without souls; but through Jesus Christ on the cross, womanhood and childhood and home have come to their own; and one who enjoys the pleasures of a home, and yet is not grateful to Christ, is an ingrate indeed.

Victory

Then as we listen to the last, we hear the voice of victory. “It is finished.” The work is complete. The suffering is over. Atonement has been made. And the last words, “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.” That is not death. Death has taken place in time of separation from God, and the Christian, when he goes through what we call death, begins right there the new life. “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.” Jesus Christ has died for us, really died; and death to us is “to depart and be with Christ, which is far better.” There is a glimpse of glory in that word, “The time of my departure is at hand.” In its context, it really means, “Lift the anchor and spread sails.” When I was a lad, I sang in Sunday school a hymn that represented death as coming into the harbor and casting anchor and furling sail; but death to the Christian is a going out of the harbor into the ocean of eternity, into larger opportunities and all that; and it is because Jesus Christ died, and in the act of death, we enter upon what He has given us through His dying voice. We just really begin to live in the highest sense; and yet I am not hungering after death. There is only one thing better than dying, to be here when the Lord comes, and it is not our mission to look for death, but to look for the coming of the Lord. Looking for death is not much inspiration. I wouldn’t want to live with anyone looking forward to death all the time; but the people who are looking for the coming of the Lord are good folks to live with. They are optimists all the time. But when death does come, it is the enlargement rather than the contraction of our experience; and it comes to us in that way through the death of our Lord Jesus.

The Spectators

Now if we had time, we could look beyond this scene and get some views that might be helpful to us. We would look at that Roman centurion, typical, strong; he has a duty to perform. He has the papers authorizing him to go through with the execution, and he does it with loyalty. He is intellectually convinced. “Truly this is the Son of God.” He also said, “This is a righteous man;” but he kept right on with his duty; never stopped for mercy. If he ever accepted Christ as his Saviour and Lord, we don’t know. And there are men like him in every congregation, I am certain; sturdy, strong, intellectual men who have an intellectual conviction that Jesus Christ is what He claimed to be, Son of Man and Son of God; but they just keep on with the crucifixion. They go along crucifying the Son of God afresh and putting Him to an open shame.

There is a group of weeping women that attracts our attention. They have enough faith to bring them into the shadow of the cross; but they haven’t any joy, they are broken-hearted. It is better to have enough faith to make you miserable, than not to have any. I would rather be the women weeping with a broken heart than to have no heart at all towards Jesus Christ our Lord; and the joy was coming. But there are a lot of folks that are in the shadow of the cross without the joy, and we are glad to have them there, because they will get the news of the resurrection by and by.

Then as we look at that inscription above the cross, we are instructed in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. It is in the wrong place. Learning ought to be at the feet of Jesus and not at His head; but it is suggestive of the fact that this cross of Christ, and the fact that Christ died, is going to be preached in all the languages of Earth; and it is just what the Latin with his love of conquest needs; just what the Greek with his fine culture and civilization needs; just what the Hebrew with his religion needs; and the people on Earth today that are strong like the Romans, and cultured like the Greeks, and religious like the Hebrews need Jesus Christ upon the cross. That is the only need of their hearts, and religion does not satisfy them.

We can find a group of Pharisees and priests wagging their heads around the cross and mocking the Lord. He is dying. Religion does not save people. I have said it several times and been misunderstood; but I think I will say it again. Next to sin, religion has done more to damn this world than everything else put together. Now that will shock you. The matter with the cannibal is religion; the matter with the Chinaman is religion. It is the religious nature of the man that has been distorted and polluted and needs to be saved by the power of the cross, and sometimes you will find under the name of Christianity, religiosity—religion that expresses itself in architecture and stone, glass windows, temples, music and oratory, and religion without Christ, and religion that shows itself in gorgeous colors, that will not accept the Christ who died. It wags its head, of course. Oh, the religion of Earth needs salvation through the cross of Christ.

The Glory Of The Cross

Now we will consider for a few minutes the peculiar glory of the cross. We can just touch the brim of this. I said the other night when some of you were present, that I preached twenty-one sermons in the Tabernacle in London last October on one text, “God forbid that I should glory save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.” A London publishing firm has brought them out in book form. I wish I could afford to give each one of you a volume, because that is the sermon I would like to preach this morning. How the glory of the cross shows itself in so many ways.

The Glory Of Love

It is the glory (we will have time to say) first of all, of sacrificial love. Love has a tendency to enjoy itself. When it becomes sacrificial, seeking the enjoyment of another, then it is akin to the love that Jesus Christ had on the cross. The secret of unhappiness in married life and almost everywhere else, is that we get married to be happy ourselves, and we do other things to be happy ourselves. If we should get married just simply to make someone else happy, we would have a happier time ourselves. It is the sacrificial love of Christ that gives true joy on Earth and in heaven.

Some time ago, I was treated with an experience in my Bible study. I decided that I would preach a series of sermons on the text, “God is Love.” Well, the easiest way to do it is to just take the book of Genesis and go through it and show the love of God as it appears in the book of Genesis, I thought. And I sat down and read Genesis through and did not find a mention of God’s love. If you can find it, drop me a postal and I will stand corrected. The word “love” occurs thirteen times; but if you were left to Genesis to be told that God loves anybody, you would never find it. You can read it between the lines; it is there and you know it; but it is the justice and the retribution that is revealed first of all, that which we leave out so frequently now. Then I said, “I will have to preach my first sermon on Exodus,” and I read it through and it isn’t there. Well, I looked in Leviticus and it isn’t in there. “Surely it is in Numbers,” I thought, but no, it isn’t. There is no reference to the love of God in the first four books of the Bible, that I could find. But when you get into Deuteronomy, you have reached the John of the Pentateuch. God gave me at least three sermons on the love of God out of the book of Deuteronomy.

As you go through the Old Testament, you will be surprised to find that several of the larger books have no reference to the love of God. It isn’t in the book of Job, and only twelve or fourteen times in the minor prophets. God just takes it for granted that we ought to know He loves us. That is a matter of course He doesn’t take time to tell us in the book of Genesis, it is just taken for granted. I said to myself, “I will have to make up for lost time when I get to the New Testament. I will preach a series of sermons on love as revealed in the book of Matthew,” and it isn’t in that. It took my breath. I read through the Gospel of Matthew and did not find a declaration of God’s love. Oh, it is there, because Jesus is there, and the parables are there, and the miracles are there, and you can feel the throbbing of God’s loving heart all through the book in almost every verse; but there is no declaration of it. “Well,” I said, “I will have to take my first sermon out of Mark,” and it isn’t there—not a declaration. “Well then, in Luke,” and there is only one in Luke—the judgment and the love of God—just incidentally. In the first three Gospels not two declarations of God’s love. The manifestation of it is there; but not the declaration of it.

But when I came to John, John 3:16 flashed upon me. That is the first declaration of God’s love in the New Testament Scripture—the revelation of it all together, “God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” Why, it has been growing through the Old Testament Scriptures all through the ages, and we by inference have just taken it for granted; but here in one great sunburst of revelation, we have the whole of God’s love revealed—the height and the depth and the length and the breadth. But in Jesus Christ on the cross, there is the glory of the sacrificial love of John 3:16. The Holy Spirit seems to have so written the book and so arranged it that this should just flash out in one great sunburst of God’s love, the infinite, everlasting, unsearchable.

“The Glory Of Light”

Then there is the glory of sacrificial light. “I am the light of the world.” Light is sacrificial. It is the nature of light to give itself. This earth this morning is the altar on which the sun is sacrificed, and it is light. It is taken by leaf and bud and grass and flower; nature receives light from the sun, and if the sun should decide not to give itself, not to be sacrificial, it would cease to be the sun. There would not be any more light in the heavens. “If the light that is in you be darkness how great is that darkness.” If you begin to live for self and try to turn back the light on yourself and just keep it for yourself there will be no light at all. There will be simply darkness.

What is light? During one era, geologists tell us there were great forests and these forests, through convulsions of nature, were buried, and as the result of heat and pressure we have the coal beds of Pennsylvania and Wales. What are they? Imprisoned light. Light that was taken in from the sun when the forests were here, conserved in leaf and fibre, buried out of sight during the centuries, just imprisoned light; and we dig out this imprisoned light and put it through a process we call combustion, and the light that was taken in from the sun is let loose and we use it in various ways. Jesus said, “I am the light of the world.” How did He become light? By the Sermon on the Mount? Not a whit. By His parables? Oh, there is much of light in the Sermon and in the parables; but He became light not by what He spoke, but through the process of combustion, of consummation; it was on Calvary that Jesus Christ became light. And then He turns to us and says, “Ye are the light of the world.”

How do Christians become light? I made a sermon once on that very text, the subject being, “Christians good reflectors of light,” and I thought it was a nice little sermon. I can get some good points. The reflector must be at the right angle, and keep the dust rubbed off, and keep it in the light; but the trouble about it was it didn’t come out of the text, and there is no text I can find that it does come out of. It doesn’t say, “You are reflectors of light;” but “You arelight,” and there is a difference between reflectors and light. Reflection is a cold process. You cannot raise a crop by moonlight. You must have the light straight from the sun, and this way of reflecting light will be a cold process. You are the light. How am I to become the light of the world like my Lord? Listen, “I beseech you, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies, a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service.” “If anyone would be my disciple let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me,” and it is by the process of combustion, of sacrifice, that the Christian becomes light unto those about him; and there is a glory in sacrificial light. All the glories of nature, the bloom of the flower, and the beauty of the landscape come from the sacrificial light of the sun giving up itself for the beautifying of nature; and the glory of Christianity is not so much the light it gives; but in the sacrificial spirit of the followers of our Lord.

Glory Of Truth

Then the glory of sacrificial truth. Truth is not always sacrificial. It is the nature of truth to fight, and Jesus said, “I bring a sword.” “Contend (you remember) for the faith once delivered to the saints,” and Paul delighted in that metaphor, “Fight the good fight of faith.” “Take unto you the whole armour of God.” There is a peace that you can get only by fighting for it. There is a peace by surrender that the world recommends; but Jesus said, “My peace I give unto you, not as the world gives.” The world gives peace by compromise, by surrender. If a man wants a drink of whiskey, the world says, “Get peace by going into the saloon and getting it.” The Lord Jesus says, “Get peace by conquering.” Robert E. Lee got peace at Appomattox, and Grant did; but I think the average man would prefer the peace of Grant to Lee, Napoleon and Wellington got peace at the battle of Waterloo; but the average Frenchman and Englishman would prefer the peace of Wellington to Napoleon. One got peace by surrender, the other by victory. “Not as the world giveth give I unto you.” “I want you to have the peace of victory, and truth will gain the victory.”

Sacrifice

But after all, the glory of truth is not so much in fighting and conquest and victory as in sacrifice. Loyalty in every fibre of his being, to the very highest, on the altar of God for humanity, is the glory of our religion. Jesus said, “I am the truth;” but truth on fire, truth ready to give itself in sacrifice, truth dying for those in error—that is the glory. Oh, there is a glory in the conflict, in the battle; but there is a greater glory in the sacrifice that truth makes for those that are bound in shackles of falsehood. The same glory in sacrificial power. It is the nature of power to exert itself, as I said the other night, but the power that withholds itself in order that love may be manifested, is more holy; so in sacrificial holiness, and sacrificial worship and in sacrificial suffering.

If I were a painter, I would put a scene that took place years ago out on the western plains on the wall of my study. Out in a blizzard, two little girls missed their way home from school. They were found the next afternoon at three o’clock, and the elder one had taken off her outer clothes and wrapped them around the little sister, and then had taken off another garment and wrapped that around the little sister, and they had both frozen to death, with the older one trying to keep the little sister warm. There is a revulsion in that , of course, but there is a beauty in it that you don’t see anywhere else. The beauty of sacrificial suffering for others; and you take that out of life and you have robbed life of its beauty and its glory.

At the door of a hospital in Brooklyn, you see a man go in who has left his work for the day; a great, strong, virile, vigorous man physically. You admire his appearance and you admire his strength. After four or five hours, that man comes out on the arm of two nurses. He is pale, emaciated, scarcely able to walk. Why? He went in there to see his little boy, his child, and the doctor said, “There is only one way to save his life. If you will go with me and give the blood out of your healthy body, we can save the boy’s life.” He bared his arm and said, “Take it all if you want it, and send him home well to his mother.” Gave the blood of his body for the life of his boy. There is little glory in this, giving his strength to one he loved; but there is an appeal for us in the tottering form that reflects the glory, the glory of sacrificial suffering. Take that out of life and you have turned this world into a lot of leaches and hyenas.

Now there are three Scriptures that I might have time to discuss, the practical John 12:32, “I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men.” The secret of the magnet—the sacrificial truth, light and love that attracts, the most attractive people on this earth are those that incarnate the sacrificial. In Jesus Christ on the cross, we have the climax of it. “Except a grain of wheat fall to the ground and die it abideth alone.” The Greeks wanted to see Jesus. You remember Philip came to Jesus and said, “These Greeks would like to see you.” What did He reply? “Bring them in”? Oh, no. “Except a grain of wheat fall to the ground and die.” As if to say, “Oh Philip, if your Greek friends would see me, they cannot see me at all.” The only way to see Jesus is in the process of dying. “Except a grain of wheat die, it abideth alone.” When we step inside the gate of heaven and listen a moment for the music and look a moment at its glory, what do we see? John says, “I saw a lamb, as it had been slain, in the midst of the throne.” The sacrificial cross lives in the heavens. This makes heaven, and you don’t have to inquire for golden streets and jasper walls and gates of pearl. Wherever the sacrificial Christ, with the marks of the cross upon Him is enthroned, wherever He is enthroned in palace or in home, that is a bit of heaven.

As we listen—“Worthy is the Lamb that was slain, to receive power.” “Worthy is the Lamb that was slain.” The standard of worth in heaven is the cross, the slain Lamb. The standard of ethics in heaven is the cross. Things are right or wrong there, not as they violate the Ten Commandments; but because they fall short of the sacrificial love of Jesus Christ as manifested on the cross; and when we have woven that into our lives, and given to Christ who died that which is worthy, we don’t have to wait for heaven, heaven is right there.