,,,„<»»'*•*'"'*"'*.,%, '^ PRINCETON, N. J- Shelf.. BS 2601 .N6A Nicoll, W. Robertson 1851 1923. The Lamb of God ^ii^f^ yrk tS?^" ;;^i*Sptb?^" Y^i^^ y-X'^^'-va^-'y --•v-^^;svi^ ^be 1bou6ebolb Xtbrar^ of lEypoettion, THE LAMB OF GOD. By the Same Author. THE INCARNATE SAVIOUR A LIFE OF JESUS CHRIST. Large Crown Svo. 6s. Canon Liddon. " It commands my warm sympathy and admiration." British Quarterly Review. " Full of literary charm and scriptural interest." Baptist Magazine. " The style is so clear and limpid, and moves with such grace and ease, as to suggest a close kinship with the best French writers." Dr John Ker in Catholic Presbyterian. "Contains much fresh thinking in apt and beautiful expression." London Quarterly Review. "One of the best books on the subject we have ever read. It is invaluable to the thoughtful student, and should be mastered and absorbed by all young ministers of all churches." Scotsman. " Mr Nicoll has honestly sought, by clear expression and the results of reading, to add intelligent freshness to his subject." Baptist. "A book of studies charged with fresh thought, and yet beautifully simple." Edinburgh : T. &. T. Clark. THE LAMB OF GOD, Bjpositions in tbe Mritings of St 5obn. BY W. ROBERTSON "NICOLL, M.A., AUTHOR OF "THE INCARNATE SAVIOUR," ETC. NEW YORK: MACMILLAN & CO. 1883. -> ^^^ PREFACE. Although critical discussion would obviously be out of place in a volume like the present, it is perhaps permissible to indicate the important bearings the subject has on the Johannine con- troversy. The figure of the Lamb holds so prominent a place in the fourth gospel that it is regarded by Baur as one of the great dog- matic points in the interest of which that gospel was penned, and for the sake of which the writer deliberately changed the day already known in the church as that of the Lord's Death. This fundamental and peculiar con- ception of the fourth gospel also rules the Apocalypse ; is perhaps the main figure ; is associated Avith what at first seem startling incongruities ; and is met with no fewer than twenty-seven times. Besides, the Saviour is not only the Lamb but the slain Lamb, the word used signifying sacrifice — a conception VI PREFACE. naturally allying itself with that contained in the nineteenth chapter of the fourth gospel, where stress is laid on the fact that blood flowed from Jesus at His death. The whole subject is dis- cussed by Dr Milligan in his thoughtful paper, " St John's Gospel and the Apocalypse" {Con- tempoj'aiy Revieiv, Aug. 1871), as well as in a series of papers in the Expositor, 1882. The various English and foreign commen- taries have been used in the preparation of this little book, and I have endeavoured to own my main obligations. I am anxious to acknow- ledge my great indebtedness throughout the whole volume to the writings of Dr Maclaren and Dean Church, more especially the former. So far as I am aware there is no separate work on the subject. Kelso, /an. 1883. CONTENTS. CHAPTER PAGE I, Holy, Harmless, and Undefiled . i II. The Sin-Bearing Lamb .... 19 III. The Lamb in the midst of the Throne 37 IV. The Lamb opening the Sealed Book 53 V. The Warrior Lamb . . . . 71 VI. The Marriage of the Lamb . . 89 VII. The Wrath of the Lamb . . . 107 I. HOLY, HARMLESS, AND UNDEFILED. Wrath by His meekness, And by His health sickness, Are driven away from our immortal day. I. HOLY, HARMLESS, AND UNDEFILED. The first words that pointed John to Christ were those of the Baptist — " Behold the Lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world." The profound implications that lay in these words were probably little perceived at first, but they became clearer with growing years and ripening experience. And long after he who had delivered the message was lying in his bloody grave, after the death on the cross, when the Evangelist was in the isle that is called Patmos for the word of God and the testimony of Jesus Christ, he lifted up his eyes from the rocks around him and the tossing sea that girdled them, and saw in the depth of the sanctities of heaven the Lamb as it had been slain. He found no greater word to describe the glory of the noon than that through which he had seen the dawn. It was the same light in 4 HOLY, HARMLESS, AND UNDEFILED. its zenith as when it first greeted him through the mist. Surely it is worth while to investi- gate a revelation like this, which was as much to the aged seer as it was to the young fisher- man. How beautiful is a life of which the early days, the middle, and the latest hold the same convictions, only growing with the man's growth, and widening] with his experience. How beautiful when the life is based on truths which no experience can overthow, which ex- perience only renders more precious ; and how different from the lives of men who flit restlessly from one faith to another and find no abiding home. It is beautiful when we see the father and the young man and the child bound to- gether by the faith which goes through all the stages of life, the end circling round the beginning, only with a deeper conviction and a stronger love at last. To understand the meaning of this profound phrase we must go back to the Old Testament, in which the mind of him who first uttered it was steeped. Perhaps the passage which was most clearly before him as he spoke was that in the climax of evangelical prophecy where Jesus is described as a Lamb led to the slaughter, "^ HOLY, HARMLESS, AND UNDEFILED. 5 and where it is said that as a sheep before his shearers is dumb so he opened not his mouth. Forty days before Christ had been baptised, and in the interval John had no doubt been meditating deeply on the prophecies that an- nounced the Messiah ; and this would stand more clearly before his mind than any. Be- sides, through those days and before them, he had been hearing countless stories of grief and sin from those who came to be baptised of him ; and would he not think of one into whose ear sorrow would never be sobbed in vain — one who was to deal with sin adequately and finally by taking it away .'' " He was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities, the chastisement of our peace was upon him, and with his stripes we are healed," But along with this we must include a refer- ence to the Paschal Lamb. Few thoughts in John's Gospel are more distinct than that of the relation of Jesus Christ to the Paschal Sacrifice and Feast. The Passover, which was the most conspicuous symbol of the Messianic deliverance, was not far off; flocks of lambs were passing by to Jerusalem to be offered at the coming feast, and the sight may have 6 HOLY, HARMLESS, AND UNDEFILED. brought home the thought. Further, there is no difficulty in believing that the forerunner, who had deeply meditated the Messianic pro- phecies and the meaning of the sacrifices, saw, with prophetic insight, that Christ was to suffer, thus standing for a time on a higher level than any of the disciples,* We find in the expression the idea of sacri- fice central to the Bible — the fundamental thought of the Christian life — the Alpha and Omega of John's experience and faith. " With- out expiation, and the ideas connected with it, what," says Vinet, " is Christianity .-' " So our object is to show the foundation and meaning of this great idea of sacrifice, and then its large unfoldings as we find them in the Revelation of St John, where we are told of the Lamb en- throned, the Lamb opening the sealed book, the Lamb making war, the Lamb leading, and feeding, and lightening his people, the Lamb overwhelming his enemies with his wrath. The basis of all is found in the words of the Apostle Peter— " A Lamb without blemish and * For a defence of the Isaianic reference see the recent ccm- mentaiy of Keil (Leipzig, iSSo). The other view is defended in the thouglitful commentary of Milligan and Moulton, with which compare Westcott, HOLY, HARMLESS, AND UNDEFILED. 7 without spot ; " or, as it is phrased by the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews, in describing the High priest who became us — " Holy, harm- less, and undefiled." The ideas brought before us by words like these are, first, Christ's inno- cence and gentleness : and, secondly, the bear- ing of these upon His sufferings and death. I. The innocence of Christ signifies that He was absolutely free from every taint of evil. He was not only free from all evil, he was full of all good. When we speak of His holi- ness we point to the positive element — His possession of all good. When we speak of His innocence we lay stress rather on the com- plete absence of evil from His every thought, word, and deed. Even those who make it often fail to understand all that is implied in this immense claim. It means that the boundary lines between right and wrong, often to us more or less obscured, were to Him always as clear as noon. The wonderful skill with which He maps out the frontiers of righteousness, and the nice discrimination with which He goes so far. 8 HOLY, HARMLESS, AND UNDEFILED. and no farther, is the perpetual wonder of moral teachers. It signifies, besides, that He perilled His whole claim upon any, even the minutest fact of His life. All other men, even the best, are only right on the whole, and we are content and thankful if they reach that point of ex- cellence. We should rightly count the critic no less foolish than ungenerous who would reject and condemn a great and noble character be- cause of the flaws and errors that make it human. We are glad to accept our heroes with far greater limitations and blots, and to overlook even much shortcoming, in considera- tion of much attainment. Our temptation is unconsciously to transfer this line of reasoning to Christ, and to look suspiciously upon those who claim His example as a perpetual rule, and who say that to deny His perfection in one, even the least point, is to deny it in all. But, as it has been forcibly said, Christ was either sinless or sinful. Between sinlessness and sinfulness there is no middle term. The quan- tity of sin is not the point in question ; it is its existence. Should the denier be able to make good any charge, even the least, against the moral perfection of Christ, the whole scheme of HOLY, HARMLESS, AND UNDEFILED, 9 salvation vanishes like a dream, and He Him- self needs redemption, instead of being a Re- \-^ deemer : Our faith is vain, and we are yet in our sins.* But great and sweeping as this claim is, the innocence of Christ means something more. It means something positive. When we speak of innocence we think of the bloom and fragrance there is about childhood — that childhood which He Himself was pleased to make a type of man's regained Paradise, when He said — " Except ye be converted and become as little children, ye shall in no wise enter into the kingdom of heaven." Innocence, it has been said, has something strange and wonderful about it. It has a look of exile, as of something heavenly detained in slavery upon earth, a look of peril and of helpless- ness, such as we sometimes see in children.-f" This spotless, childlike innocence Jesus the " Eternal Child " kept to the very last. This innocence was not ignorance. With childhood it is; and men justly count it a high crime to violate the sanctities of childhood. To *See J. B. Mozley, "Of Christ Alone Without Sin," in Co7itemporary Review, March 186S, p. 491. t F. W. Faber. % lO HOLY, HARMLESS, AND UNDEFILED. break in upon that sacred ignorance which makes the sunshine round the head of a young child ripple into a softer gold, to cause one of those little ones to stumble, is to deserve to be thrown with a mill-stone round one's neck into the depths of the sea, and this in the judgment even of the most abandoned. For to lose ignorance is to lose innocence. The evil know- ledge lays hold of something evil within, and though no outward transgression may follow, we know too well that in the soul a battle has been fought and lost. But He knew all things. He speaks with a strange familiarity of vice and crime. He knows what young men do when they leave the father's house, and plunge into transgression in a strange country. He knows how they feel when the wild pleasure thrills them, and how when the reaction comes, when the money is spent and friendly doors are closed, and how when the spirit turns faintly to its father and its home. He knows how sinners entice, and how the son consents. All these things he knows, and has described in imperish- able words ; and yet the bloom of his innocence is unsmirched through all. Neither was his an untried innocence. What ^ HOLY, HARMLESS, AND UNDEFILED. T I wc call a child's innocence is never of course complete, and disappears when temptation comes ; and the prayer for childhood and for age is — " Lead us not into temptation." Christ's sinlessness did not imply a freedom from the burden of maintaining a contest with evil. But it implies that there was no yielding in the contest. He met Satan in conflict face to face and overthrew him. He was tried in the silence of his spirit all through his life with the wiles of the devil, and upon the cross the enemy was there, plying him with the old de- ceits to the very last. And yet, sore as the temptation was, there was not so much as even the least compliance in thought, and all the temptation of the Wicked One no more defiled him than the shadow of a cloud stains the snow. 2. The image of the Lamb suggests not only the innocence, but also the gentleness of Christ ; " Gentle Jesus, meek and mild." It is in this aspect that he first lays hold of us, and in this aspect he continues most clearly to reveal himself This gentleness is seen both in what he did and in what he endured. We know how gently he used his power ; with what a delicate sympathy he conferred his gifts, how 12 HOLY, HARMLESS, AND UNDEFILED. when he healed the leper he put out his pure hand and came near the need that he might re- lieve the pain, how he touched the little children in their innocence, and the harlots in their filth, how he refused to be the judge of men because he had come to be their Saviour. But that is not the most remarkable aspect of his gentle- ness. In the gentle use of power he was well skilled through his long rule of the kingdom of the eternal patience. What is most striking and impressive is the gentleness with which he en- dured suffering. The great mystery of suffering came up in his history in its sharpest form. His life was confessed by all men pure, sinless, perfect in beauty, and yet he suffered. The contradiction rises to its superlative degree, and we stand amazed. Not only was he man, but he suffered as the uncreated and eternal Son of God. It is as if a star should withdraw its beams and forget to shine that he should pass through an experience strange and awful for a man, so much more strange and mysterious for God incarnate. Besides, suffering was new to him. He learned obedience not as we do in the way of learning to exercise a disposition which otherwise is not ours — not in the sense of having HOLY, HARMLESS, AND UNDEFILED. I 3 his will moulded and tempered through submis- sion. We know that from the beginning, before the shadow had passed over him, the very inmost of his will was in harmony with the will of God. But that inmost will needed to be wrought out in life. He had to make practical acquaintance by experience with the act of sub- mission. He had to learn obedience in actual exercise, and the discipline through which he passed was infinitely more severe than ours. His obedience had to maintain itself in the face of greater and greater demands upon it ; and as he had to meet these demands rising with the rising tide of things which he suffered, he entered ever more deeply into the experience of what obedience was.* And how gently he bore his sufferings ! We remember the impressive silence which he main- tained before the furious and malignant storm of accusation at the bar of Pilate. We remem- ber how, amidst a series of insults and torture which makes us shudder to read of, when the thorns were crushed into his brow, and the faded scarlet thrown round him, and the reed put into his hand and then wrested from him * Cf. Davidson on Hebrews, v. 8. 14 HOLY, HARMLESS, AND UNDEFILED. and used to strike him again and again, not one word of reproach, or protest, or anger escaped his lips. We remember "what a grace he had, even in his dying hour ; " how he prayed when the nails were driven through His hands, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do;" how He opened Paradise to the penitent thief at His side ; how He died with no word of bit- terness upon His lips. And therein, as in all His life, we behold His exceeding gentleness. This gentleness was not weakness, for, as suggestive hints tell us again and again, there dwelt in Him energies which could have routed and destroyed all His enemies. And He was watched by legions of angels, every angel with his hand upon his sword, so that it may not be too much to say that His difficulty was to re- strain and refrain from using these powers. His gentleness in suffering receives a new mean- ing when considered as the gentleness of the strong one who bore not by the constraint of weakness but by the stronger constraint of love. And still further, this gentleness was not soft- ness of temper, not moral indifference or weak- ness. To confound the majestic and solemn tenderness of Christ with weak good nature is HOLY, HARMLESS, AND UNDEFILED. I 5 profoundly to misconceive it. The Lamb of God has seven horns. The heat that destroys and the heat that quickens both come from one source. His grief was sometimes mingled with anger, and, when need was, He could rebuke and silence those who opposed Him. But this power also He rarely used, and the image of the gentle Christ is that left on our minds after a perusal of His whole life. IL The innocence and gentleness of Christ, on account of which He is called the Lamb of God, help us to realise what is very difficult for us ade- quately to conceive, the horror of His sufferings. We do not feel as we should the sufferings of Jesus, partly because into their greatest depths we are not able to see very far, and partly because in this world of sin and pain it is so much a matter of course that a man should suffer, and we our- selves become so familiar with suffering that it is hard to spare thought or sympathy for those who share it with us, however great their share may be. Every one who comes into this world and seeks a career there, must bear his part of the 1 6 HOLY, HARMLESS, AND UNDEFILED. ills of this tried life. He must have his ex- perience of the shocks and overthrows and strange reversals and bitter bereavements of earth ; and, unless his suffering reaches some unparalleled height, we can scarcely spare a thought for it. And so it is that it has been found most difficult to stimulate our dull and selfish imaginations into any adequate feeling about the suffering of Christ. But nothing will help us more to throw away the brazen armour of our selfishness, and to feel how terrible an expression of human sin the Cross was, as to conceive of the sufferer as the Lamb of God. Men must be strangely hardened and deadened before they cease to respond to the suffering of a helpless and innocent being. Suffering wantonly and purposelessly inflicted on dumb and helpless animals moves in minds not altogether devilish an instant horror and sympathy. More especially when those who are so tortured show, as they sometimes do, their love in the very midst of their agony, do we feel the dreadfulness of the deed. Those " who would mangle the living dog that had loved them and fawned at their knee," raise execration in the hearts even of the most HOLY, HARMLESS, AND UNDEFILED. I 7 criminal. That an innocent and unconscious child should be put to torture, is an idea so sickening that we cannot dwell upon it. The legend of one such deed has lingered about an English town for hundreds of years. Now, we are warranted in taking those ideas and trans- ferring them to Christ. He was more innocent than any child, more loving, more gentle, and by the constraint of His love, more helpless than any other could be. And it was He whom men chose and did to death in agony and in shame. This aspect of Christ's suffering, if we dwell upon it, may make us feel as those did who, when they saw it, smote their breasts and returned. This is the end of human nature apart from God — to nail upon the cross the Son of God Himself; and in this crime we all of us had a share. In the cross, looked at from this point of view, we have the culmination and the condemnation of human guilt ; and were this the only point of view from which we could regard it, it would fill us with horror and despair. But a profounder thought leads us to see in the death of the Lamb of God not merely the condemnation, but also the atonement for human B l8 HOLY, HARMLESS, AND UNDEFILED. guilt. He died in the fulness of power, of con- sciousness, and of love. Viewed from the human side His death was a murder, but deeper know- ledge reveals it as the determinate counsel of God, and the expression of His own loving will. There is more in the Cross than at first we dreamt of If it opens the great depths of man's sin, it opens also the greater depths of God's mercy. As we gaze heart-stricken on the Sufferer the calm lips will say to us the old, old words, " Thy sins, which are many, are forgiven thee : go in peace." II. THE SIN-BEARING LAMB. Not all the blood of beasts, On Jewish altars slain, Could give the guilty conscience peace, Or wash away the stain. But Christ, the Heavenly Lamb, Takes all our sins away ; A sacrifice of nobler name. And richer blood than they. My faith would lay her hand. On that dear head of thine ; While like a penitent I stand. And there confess my sin. My soul looks back to see. The burden thou didst bear, When hanging on the cursed tree, And knows her guilt was there. 11. THE SIN-BEARING LAMB. The great difference between Christianity and other religions is that in Christianity the work of salvation is accomplished by God. In other religions and systems of moral reformation the work of emancipation is one that man himself must accomplish. They begin by telling him what he has to do to avert the wrath and to win the favour of Deity. They differ, indeed, in their requirements, but this fundamental idea is common to every one of them, which shows that it is a natural and congenial thought of the human mind. The true religion, on the other hand, commences by contradicting and over- turning this thought. It tells us that salvation, so far from being a work of man, is the result of a long and arduous work of sacrifice accom- plished by God Himself. It tells us not what man has to do to win God, but what God has done to win man. It comes to him not as an 22 THE SIN-BEARING LAMB. elaborate code of rules which he must obey, but as a free gift which he is to receive ; and the reason why so many fail to gain salvation is because they make the fatal mistake of sup- posing that it is something that they must work out, instead of something that they must receive from the God who Himself has wrought it out. When John says, " Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world," he is manifestly pointing back to the sacrificial system which pervades the Bible from the beginning to the end. He is thinking of the great process which led up to Christ. He remembers how from the beginning lambs were slain continually — how they were offered up by Abel, Noah, and Abraham — how the altar of God was ever red with blood ; and he sees Jesus Christ as coming to complete these sacrifices and terminate them by the offering of Himself So to understand the force of the passage we must look to these sacrifices, and no sufficient explanation of them can be given which does not admit that they implied the substitution of the victim in place of the offerer, and the acceptance of a satisfac- tion for the offence • in other words, that they were both vicarious and expiatory. , And so THE SIN-BEARING LAMB. 23 Jesus Christ, as a sacrifice, is to be viewed as satisfying Divine justice, and reconciling men to God. We must indeed exclude the idea^ that He produced a new disposition in God toward us. But what He did was to reconcile the Godhead within itself, and so to alter the judicial relations of God toward us as that He can deal with us upon a new footing. So much^ as this may be defined as the teaching of Scrip- ture, from which we learn all that we know on the subject, in contradistinction to what we may guess or suppose. But this explanation leaves great mysteries, which we could explain only if it were possible for us to climb the heights and fathom the depths of the Divine nature. A consideration of Jesus Christ as the sacrificial Lamb may show us both what we can under- stand, and why it is impossible for us to under- stand more. I. Jesus Christ died, but, as we have seen, not for His own sins. He was the Lamb of God. He passed pure as a sunbeam through all the defilement of the world. His life was 24 THE SIN-BEARING LAMB, like a spring of water in the salt sea, throwing its sweetness over the surrounding bitterness. He appeared, indeed, in the likeness of sinful flesh, even as the brazen serpent was made in the likeness of the serpents that slew the Israehtes. "Man," says Gregory, "is freed from sin by Him who assumed the form of sin, and was made after our fashion, who were changed into the form of the serpent." But, as there was no venom in the life-giving image to which the people looked, so Jesus Christ had in Himself no taint of sin. He was holy, harm- less, and undefiled ; and His death cannot be understood except as a death for the sin of others. Had He not been sinless His life would have been forfeited, and it would not have been in His power to offer it up in atonement. ■^ 2. Jesus Christ died according to the appoint- ment of His Father, They do fatally miscon- ceive the whole evangelical system who repre- sent the heart of the Father toward man as different from the heart of Christ. "God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten son." \1 pleased the Father that in Him should all fulness dwell, and that that fulness should y be opened up in His death. It pleased the THE SIN-BEARING LAMB. 25 Lord to bruise Him. Christ is the Lamb which God Himself furnishes for sacrifice. The idea that God needed to be mollified or appeased by the sacrifice of His Son is a heathenish mis- conception. Whatever love dwelt in the heart of Christ was the love of the Father. What- ever fulness dwells in Him to forgive and to save is the fulness of the Father. He appeared to do the will of God when He came into the world to die. 3. Not only was He the Lamb appointed by God — He was also God Himself. He took upon Him our humanity, but He took it into union with His divine nature. It was through His eternal divine nature* that He offered Himself to be a sacrifice to God, and because it was so the sacrifice was efficacious. He took human nature at His incarnation into eternal union with the Divine. The blood which He shed on the tree was the blood not merely of the Son of Mary, but of the Infinite Being thus united to a created form. Hence came its^ efficacy. The blood of bulls and goats secured the outward religious position of the offerer, but could not put away sin, could not operate in the sphere * Hebrews ix. 13, 14. 26 THE SIN-BEARING LAMB. of the spiritual. The blood of the eternal Christ must have a transcendent power. How great we cannot tell. The thought distances and rebukes reason. But it has power to put away sin. And this helps us to see why the doc- trine of the atonement must be in a measure mysterious. Much of the misconception which has attended the orthodox theory of the atonement has arisen from the fact that it has been unconsciously discussed on a Unitarian theory of the person Christ. The transcendent mystery which we cannot remove lies in the fact that we have in the atonement the love of the Three-one God working for man ; or, as it has been ex- pressed, the self-reconciling of the Godhead with itself, or an action of the Godhead within, and at unity with itself for our salvation. 4. The Lamb of God was also true man. He became man and entered into true sym- pathy with all our sufferings. He was bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh, and He enters into vital union with those whom He came to save. And here we have another fruitful source of error arising from the question of the atone- ment being disposed of as if Christ and man THE SIN-BEARING LAMB. 27 N were entirely distinct, whereas there is be- tween the Redeemer and the redeemed an essential and vital unity. The Christ on the cross is not some miserable man suffering for his own sins, but a representative of mankind. He is the Flower and Head of the race, the Representative of humanity, the second Adam. He becomes one with those who have seen Him as identified with them in a manner which finds its parallel only in the unity of the Triune God. Those who believe in Him live and move and have their spiritual being in Him. • 5. He died of his own free will. From the very beginning His obedience was voluntary. His incarnation loses its whole meaning and value, unless we understand it as the willing entrance into our condition for our sakes of the Son of God. For our sakes He deigned and consented to be born, even as for our sakes He deigned and consei ited to die. He had before Him all the way wfea*- He was to pass. through w* In the very beginning of His ministry, the same thought came over His spirit that crossed it at the end ; and He said that He had to be lifted up even as the serpent was lifted up in the wil- * Cf. Delitzsch, "Jesus and Hillel," p. 184. 28 THE SIN-BEARING LAMB. derness. This gives their whole meaning to His sufferings. The very essence of sacrifice hes in the spirit, and if the spirit of Jesus Christ had rebelled, or if He had been but the feeble victim of an enormous wrong, His sacrifice would have been of no value. So if the shocks and storms of life had taken Him unawares, as they take us, the meaning of that life would not have been what it is. But we know that He counted the cost — that ^every step of his restless wandering life brought him nearer Jerusalem, where the prophets were slain, and that He freely willed to die for us. " If I had known," we often say, "what I had to pass through, I never could have lived." He knew it all, and loaded with the weight of this foreknowledge. He went through it for our sakes. 6. His sufferings were in a peculiar sense the bearing of our sins. Looked at externally, we could not assign to the life of Jesus Christ the pre-eminence in suffering. Life has been less sweet and death more bitter from that point of view to others than to Him. Others have endured greater privations, greater physical tortures, and have had far less to up-bear and console them than He had ; but, when we look THE SIN-BEARING LAMB. 29 at the matter more closely, we perceive that His sufferings were in a mysterious sense the endurance of sin. Especially we see this in connection with His death. The shuddering with which He looked forward to it is not explained by the natural shrinking and reluct- ance of the physical frame. " We know," it has been said, "with what a piercing strength the first glimpses of a coming sorrow shoot in upon us — how they checker our whole life and over- shadow all things, how sad thoughts glance off from all we say and do and listen to, how the mind converts everything into its own feeling and master thought. It is not only on the greater and sad occasions that our afflictions overwhelm us ; perhaps our keenest sufferings are in sudden recollections, remote associations, words, tones, little acts of unconscious friends. And so it was with Jesus. The very spike- nard had in it the savour of death." " She hath done it against my burial."* " I have a baptism to be baptised with, and how am I straitened till it be accomplished." The shrinking is most manifest at Gethsemane. There, we are told, He began to be appalled, stunned, smitten out * H. E. Manning. 30 THE SIN-BEARING LAMB. of Himself. His soul was sorrowful all round. His straining eyes stretched the whole horizon, and found it one unbroken pall. He was sorrow- ful even unto death, as if one more weight laid upon the quivering breast would have been too much. Great drops of blood fell from Him in His agony. How shall we explain that thunder- cloud of darkness, and storm, and passion, with its flashing lightnings, in which His soul was wrapped ? Is there any torch which throws a ray into deep gloom save that which was put in our hands by the prophet when he says, " He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities .^" The heroic calmness and courage which marks the life of Christ makes it impossible for us to explain His fear of death in any other way. He if any had lived A life which dares send A challenge to its end, And when it comes say, " Welcome, friend." He who the noble army of martyrs praise is not less brave than the bravest of that company ; and yet he shrank and shuddered as none of them ever did^ because in His sufierings He • was to enter a deeper depth than any of them could ever know. THE SIN-BEARING LAMB. II. The result of all this is, that the suffering is efficacious — " He taketh away the sin of the world." The blood of bulls and of goats could never take away sin, but this man has offered up one sacrifice for sins for ever, " He taketh away ; " it is not merely " He bears the sin of the world." He takes it away by taking it upon Him. Many an unconscious victim had shed its blood for the sin of the world, and yet the sin remained. Many a great heart had borne the sin of the World, and had broken under the weight, and still the sin remained. There had been many that palliated the sin of the world, and yet it remained. It is possible to disguise the sin of the world, to drive it under the surface, to cover it with a fair exterior, to make excuse for it, but that is not to take it away. It is possible to fight with separate sins of the world, and in some measure to master them, but as long as any sin remains the sin of the world has not been taken away. But Jesus came not to deal with the sins of the world but with the sin of the world. In human nature strictness in one direc- tion often compensates itself by laxity in an- 2,2 THE SIN-BEARING LAMB. other, and men dream that they have overcome sin when they have gained a victory in some isolated fragment of the world of moral duty. But to exchange one sin for another, as Samson the Nazarite did, is not redemption. Nor is the mere escaping from the penalty of sin redemp- tion. Redemption means the removal of sin, not merely of the punishment of sin ; and He who dealt with sin effectually by taking it away was Jesus Christ, and Jesus Christ alone. The szn of the world, not the sins. The vic- tory of Christ was over sin as a unity, the whole corruption of human nature which finds expres- sion in separate sins. The sin of the world is regarded as heaped up in one tremendous pile, and that pile laid upon the head of Christ. That was the load which He staggered under. Think of the sin of one life, the sin with which it is born, the sins of childhood, youth, manhood, age ; the sins of broken vows, broken oaths, un- fulfilled duties ; and then multiply that one life by the numbers of all the world, and consider what a foe it was Christ came to reckon with, what a foe it was that He overcame in the body of His flesh through death. The sin of tJie world. When John spoke of THE SIN-BEARING LAMB. 33 the world he manifestly did not think of the extent of redemption. He did not mean to say that the work of Christ was effectual for all humanity, and that all sinners, no matter how they regarded Christ and His atonement, had their sins removed. He was thinking of the world, not in its extent but in its nature. He thought of the world as it is apart from and hos- tile to God, and the sin which belongs to the world as such. The world has ceased to be the expression of God's mind and has become his rival.* On the one side He sees the world with its sin, on the other side he sees God with His Lamb, and God with His Lamb is able to meet the world with its sin. The remedy is sufficient ; the obstacle henceforth lies on the side of man and not upon the side of God. We believe that our Jesus is the Saviour of the whole world. Although only one-third of the human race is Christian even in name, we know that He is the new head of humanity, not of England or of present Christendom only, but of the whole world — that all the aimless self-denial of the Buddhist, all the Pantheistic yearnings of the Brahmin, all the loveless theism of the Moham- * Cf.Westcott's elaborate note, "Commentary on St John," p. 31. C 34 THE SIN-BEARING LAME. medan, all the blind gropings of the rude and unlettered savage will find their real rest and satisfaction in Him. III. The condition of salvation is to behold ; and if we consider the nature of salvation we see that the condition is not arbitrary but lies in the very nature of the case. If the Gospel had been an elaborate code of laws it would not have required trust. If it had been possible through rites and ceremonies to save the soul, then the performance of these, apart from the feeling of the worshipper, would have been suffi- cient. But since salvation is vitally and essen- tially a gift that God is willing to give to man, it is clear that if man be free everything must depend upon man's willingness to receive the gift — that is, upon his faith ; and so the connec- tion between faith and salvation is simply in- evitable. The look is the look of longing, of desire, of trust ; such a look as the dying Israelite in the desert, where the very sand round him seemed to be hatching serpents, gave to the brazen serpent lifted on high. Then new life stole into the languid frame. It is the look that THE SIN-BEARING LAMB. 35 takes hold of Christ. Appropriation, said Isaac Taylor, is the secret of dying. And it is the secret of living too. We take hold of Him, He takes hold of us, and the great old word is ful- filled — He sent down from above ; He drew me; He took me out of many waters. Round this doctrine of the Atonement man's trust and hope have ever gathered. It is the resting-place of the soul. Denounced as im- moral by those who do not understand it, not thoroughly apprehended, and often much mis- apprehended, even by those who love it, it has vindicated itself triumphantly in its influ- ence on faith and life through all the ages. It will increasingly vindicate itself in the ex- perience of those who lovingly embrace it. ''While there is life in thee," says a great teacher of the Church, "in this death alone place thy trust, confide in nothing else besides ; to this death commit thyself altogether ; with this shelter thy whole self ; with this death array thyself from head to foot. And if the Lord thy God will judge thee, say, Lord, be- tween Thy judgment and me I cast the death of our Lord Jesus Christ ; no otherwise can I contend with Thee. And if He say to thee, 36 THE SIN-BEARING LAMB. Thou art a sinner, say, Lord, I stretch forth the death of our Lord Jesus Christ between my sins and Thee. If he say, Thou art worthy of condemnation, say, Lord, I set the death of our Lord Jesus Christ between my evil deserts and Thee, and His merits I offer for those merits which I ouglit to have, but have not of my own. If He say that He is wroth with thee, say. Lord, I lift up the death of our Lord Jesus Christ between Thy wrath and me."* * Anselm Admoni/io Morienti. III. THE LAMB IN THE MIDST OF THE THRONE. Thou whose ways we praise, Clear alike and dark, Keep our works and ways This and all Thy days Safe inside Thine ark. Thou whose face gives grace As the sun's doth heat. Let Thy sun-bright face Lighten time and space Here beneath Thy feet. Bid our peace increase, Thou that madest mom ; Bid oppressions cease ; Bid the night be peace ; Bid the day be born. III. THE LAMB IN THE MIDST OF THE THRONE. One of the ground thoughts in the Book of Revelation is that Jesus Christ, who died upon the tree, sits upon the throne of the universe. We find the thought expressed in varying forms. For example, we are told that Jesus is the First and the Last, the origin and the goal of all things. We are told that He has the key of David, an expression signifying absolute power and irresistible will. We read that His feet are as fine brass, describing His sovereign march over the fields of life. But the clearest expression of the thought is the phrase which we have chosen as the heading for this chapter, in which Jesus Christ the Lamb as it had been slain, is represented as seated on the central throne of the universe, and receiving the praises of the various orders of creation. This great thought may be viewed 40 THE LAMB IN THE MIDST under varying aspects, Jesus Christ rules the universe as Creator, Lord, and Reconciler. 1. He rules it as the Creator. All things, according to the uniform doctrine of Scripture, were made by Christ. Whether there be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers ; what- ever orders of being may exist, these and the worlds they people came from His creative mind and His plastic hand. He Himself was the anticipation of creation. In the remarkable prefiguration of Christ in the Book of Proverbs, Wisdom is made to say, " I was set up from everlasting, from the be- ginning, or ever the earth was. When there were no depths I was brought forth, when there were no fountains abounding with water. Before the mountains were settled, before the hills was I brought forth." Jesus Christ is the image of the invisible God in a sense which does not depend upon the Incarnation, and which does not vanish with earth or time, but which remains when the veils of flesh and sense are lifted, and we see face to face. The ab- OF THE THRONE. 4 1 solute invisible God no man can see, save as He is revealed in Jesus Christ. This Christ was the prophecy of creation, and He Himself fulfilled the prophecy. The creating power passes through Christ as its medium — "With- out Him was not anything made that was made." All the products of nature are from His hand ; from Him all the terms of crea- turely existence take their rise, and of all life in its lowest as well as in its highest forms. He is the Distributor and Giver ; so that in a manner, for all creatures, to live is Christ, whether they acknowledge it or not. How much needed is this great and half- forgotten truth in days when men soar and roam through the universe, and find it empty of God, when everything spiritual and divine is said to be vanishing from the world before the march of Science. Nothing can be sadder than to wander through Nature and find it tenantless. But how different when we render to Christ the things that are Christ's in it all. There is nothing created, said Goethe, j- so mean and trifling that it is not a thought of God. But the more beautiful and tender truth is that everything created is a thought 42 THE LAMB IN THE MIDST of Christ, meant to lead us straight to him. We are, in spite of ourselves, swayed by the influences of our time. Nature often seems, even to the Christian, very stern and pitiless. It is blessed to be able to see' in it all proofs of the thought and expressions of the mind of him who is not only Creator but Redeemer. II. Not only is Jesus Christ the creator of nature, but He holds it together. By Him all things consist, and so of all the unconscious forces in the world. He is Lord ; and those who wrote over the grave of one killed on the Rififel- horn the words, " It is I, be not afraid," under- stood in whose hands are all the powers of the Universe that seem so blind and unreined. But, putting it more generally, Jesus Christ is the Lord of providence — the true King with plenary power. It is He who rules over the evolution of events and the disclosing of the epochs in the world's history. There is much to confirm the thought which has visited all in hours of gloom, that history is nothing more than a shifting phantasmagoria OF THE THRONE. 43 of passions and desires. Sometimes men seem to be flung together, a rude and chaotic mass of creatures, who fight and crawl over each other, and die, and are laid in the hopelessness of a beast's grave. Sometimes history seems no more than a series of petty stage-plays, without connection, and leading to no issue. But even sceptical thinkers admit the organic unity of all history. Only to many each event is but a link in the long chain of the harmony of the universe ; to such " the organic development of history will mean the unbroken sweep of natural law, without one breath of the creative spirit from on high, while to a higher school of thought the one purpose of history is the pur- pose of everlasting love worked out in and through human personality by a personal re- deeming God."* We see above it all the throne where the King sits, who holds all things in His hand and guides them according to the purposes of changeless love. The true exposition and idea of history are to be found in the kingdom of redemption. * Dr Robertson Smith in " British Quarterly Review,'' April 1870, p. 314. 44 THE LAMB IN THE MIDST III. Jesus Christ reigns as the Reconciler.* Old divines were wont to distinguish between two kingdoms of Christ — the one inalienable, which He possessed as the eternal Son of the Father, and the other given to Him as Mediator by the Father, and delivered over to the Father in the end.-f- The distinction is a real one, and is kept in view in what we say. Jesus Christ rules not only as Creator and Lord, but as the Reconciler of the universe to God. I. In the full and deep sense, reconciliation * In the recent life of Sir William Rowan Hamilton, the illustrious mathematician, p. 465, the following remarkable statement occurs : — Others , . . have been compelled' to acknowledge mysteries of reason which prepare for and har- monize with the mysteries ascribed to religion by the Christian Church ; they have felt that the Incarnation and Passion are not incredible, to those who believe and meditate on the earlier mystery of creation, that the difficulties which beset the one are the same in kind as the mysteries which beset the other ; that in the region of philosophical thought an acting is a suffering God, and that whatever inclines a commencing inquirer to reject as absurb a belief in a " Lamb slain before the foundation of the world, the same principle if pursued into its philo- sophical consequences would lead to rejecting the belief of any personal God at all.'' + Compare the singularly clear and instructive discussion in George Gillespie's "Aaron's Rod Blossoming," p. 203, &c. OF THE THRONE. 45 can only be a reconciliation of men and spirits. Only spirits can love and hate, only spirits can be turned from hate to love ; and the great work that Jesus does as Reconciler — that which is most vital to us, and at the same time most intelligible — is the work which He does in bringing back those who were rent and sun- dered from God by wicked works to their soul's true rest and home. The carnal mind is enmity against God ; not indeed that the enmity is always consciously felt, nor that it always ex- presses itself in blasphemy and defiance. Yet einmity it is, as all honest, thoughtful people will admit. At the very best, God is not in all our thoughts ; at the very best there is a deep dissonance between our thoughts and the thoughts of God ; at the very best we do not glorify Him in our bodies and spirits which are His, There is between us and Him a deep gulf — how deep and broad we cannot tell, only it seems deeper and broader the more we look into it ; and to bridge that gulf, and bring us back again to God is the work of Jesus Christ, the Lamb, As we saw, He recon- ciles us in the body of His flesh through death. It was part of the reconciling process that He 46 THE LAMB IN THE MIDST should become man, and share in the experi- ences of humanity. But this alone was not enough. It was through death, through the bowing of His head to the last enemy, through His victory over death and the grave that He made it possible for the old fellowship between man and God to be renewed,* and so in a great and noble sense He is King over the higher universe of redeemed souls — redeemed by His blood, who offer up to him intelligent and conscious allegiance, and who bear testimony that through His work they have been brought back to themselves and their Father. 2. But, as we are taught^ there is a further reconciliation. Jesus Christ reconciles not only men, but all things on earth. The reconciliation is in a sense over and done with. It lies in the past, however it may be appropriated and worked out in the future. The universal re- conciliation of all things in Christ affirmed by Paul,-f- cannot be said to bear upon the question whether or not at some point in the future all intelligent creatures will consciously love and * See I John iii. 5, as showing that the redemptive efficacy of Christ's work is to be found in His whole life crowned by His Death. t See Col. i. 19, 20, &c. OF THE THRONE. 47 serve God. But it cannot mean less than this, that the influence of the cross, in ways we do not understand, is felt all over the creation — that the influence goes into heights and depths beyond our ken. It cannot mean less than this, that nature itself, over which a deep shadow has passed through the sin of man, shall find that shadow vanish to return no more. And here we are on ground where speculation is vain. We deal with matters in which Scripture is our only teacher, and we find in Scripture intimations which strangely recalLthe latest utterances of science about the imperfection and inadequacy of nature. " The creature was subject to vanity, not willingly, but by reason of Him who hath subjected the same in hope; because the creature also shall be delivered from the bondage and brought into the glorious liberty of the children of God." And then the mystery which so shadows all its beauties will end, all things being reconciled. 3. Still more unfamiliar and strange is the thought that Jesus Christ the Lamb is the Reconciler of things in heaven. How can those who have never fallen, who have never left the light, need to be reconciled to a God from whom 48 THE LAMB IN THE MIDST they have never been alienated ? And here again it is obvious that the word reconciliation is not used in its full sense. Still it is clearly- taught that all orders of spiritual being are brought near to God through the work of Christ. The angels in their errands to the world have been perplexed by its misery and sin. The angels ministered to the Son of God in the days of His flesh, and sustained Him in His agonies. In the cross of Christ the very depths of the Divine nature have been unveiled — depths of yearning, self- sacrificing tenderness which never otherwise would have been revealed to angels ; and thus we read that into the mysteries of redemption they desire to look. The word " look " means a penetrating intense gaze. It is the word used to describe the sharpened, eager wistfulness with which the women looked into the empty tomb, and the statuesque unwavering gaze of the cherubim on the mercy-seat. And now the way and the end of the Divine love have been made plain to them, and they stand nearer to God than ever before. So, then, we perceive the cross of Christ is the centre of the universe ; and thus we read that OF THE THRONE. 49 the living creatures, the representatives of crea- tion, the elders who represent the Church and the angels who represent the higher order of spiritual being, burst out together into the great shout of triumphal praise to the Lamb that was slain, who is worthy to receive power, riches, and honour, glory and blessing. And so all His many crowns encircle the wreath that wounded Hjm. The Lamb as it had been slain sits in the midst of the throne. Another aspect of Christ's kingly work, which we propose to treat in another chapter, is His punitive and destructive energy, which will end at last in the disablement and abasement of all hostile powers. They will be put beneath His feet. On the other side of the advent there may be a period of conflict with a succession of evil dominations. How distant the issue may be we cannot tell, but that period too will close in His complete victory ; and then the revolt will be finally quelled, and the reign of Christ as Mediator will come to an end. " The Son Him- self, also, shall be made subject to Him that did put all things under Him that God .may be all in all." * * I Cor. XV. 28. D 50 THE LAMB IN THE MIDST Christ, as it were, had authority given to Him by His Father to go forth and quell the insur- rection. So long as the rebellion lasts the Son of the King stands in the front of the fight. He leads the troops. He commands all operations till the final victory ; but when that comes He takes the kingdom He has won and gives it to His Father, not quitting the throne where God and the Lamb sit in indissoluble unity, but ruling as the Second Person of the Trinity with the Father and the Spirit, God being all in all. We conclude with two practical reflections. We have seen that all the universe and its forces are being administered for purposes of redemp- tion. The Lamb rules and He rules as the -^S' Date Due (^^wa!«lpWfWW m PRINTED IN U. 8. A.