n is what God had to do in
order to stop it. Do you think that it would be a small, superficial cut
which could be stanched by nothing else but the pierced hand of Jesus
Christ? Measure the intensity of danger by the cost of deliverance, and
judge how grave are the wounds for the healing of which stripes had to
be laid on Him. Ah! if you and I had not been in danger of death, Jesus
Christ would not have died. And if it be true that the Son of God laid
aside His glory, and came into the world and died on the Cross for men,
out of the very greatness of the gift, and the marvellousness of the
mercy, there comes solemn teaching as to the intensity of the misery and
the reality and awfulness of the retribution from which we were
delivered by such a death. Sin, the universal condition, brings with it
no slight disease and no small danger.

Further, we may gather from this condensed summary where the true heart
and essence of the Christian revelation is. You will never understand it
until you are contented to take the point of view which the New
Testament takes, and give all weight and gravity to the fact of man's
transgression and the consequences thereof. We shall never know what the
power and the glory of the revelation of God in Jesus Christ is until we
recognise that, first and foremost, it is the mighty means by which
man's ruin is repaired, man's downrush is stopped, sin is forgiven and
capable of being cleansed. Only when we think of the Gospel of Jesus
Christ as being, first and foremost, the redemption of the world by the
great act of incarnation and sacrifice, do we come to be in a position
in any measure to estimate its superlative worth.

And, for my part, I believe that almost all the mistakes and errors and
evaporations of Christianity into a mere dead nothing which have
characterised the various ages of the Church come mainly from this, that
men fail to see how deep and how fatal are the wounds of sin, and so
fail to apprehend the Gospel as being mainly and primarily a system of
redemption. There are many other most beautiful aspects about it, much
else in it, that is lovely and of good report, and fitted to draw men's
hearts and admiration; but all is rooted in this, the life and death of
Jesus Christ, the sacrifice by whom we are forgiven, and in whom we are
healed. And if you strike that out, you have a dead nothing left--an
eviscerated Gospel.

I believe that we all need to be reminded of that to-day, as