he result of the Father's purpose, and we
read that in that wondrous surrender there were two givings up The
Father 'freely gave Him up to the death for us all.' That divine
surrender, the Apostle ventures, in another passage, to find dimly
suggested from afar, in the silent but submissive and unreluctant
surrender with which Abraham yielded his only begotten son on the
mountain top. But besides that ineffable giving up by the Father of the
Son, Jesus Christ Himself, moved only by His love, willingly yields
Himself. The whole doctrine of the sacrifice of Jesus Christ has been
marred by one-sided insisting on the truth that God sent the Son, to the
forgetting of the fact that the Son 'came'; and that He was bound to the
Cross neither by cords of man's weaving nor by the will of the Father,
but that He Himself bound Himself to that Cross with the 'cords of love
and the bands of a man,' and died from no natural necessity nor from any
imposition of the divine will upon Him unwilling, but because He would,
and that He would because He loved. 'He loved me, and gave Himself for
me.'

Then note, further, that here, most distinctly, that great act of
self-surrendering love which culminates on the Cross is regarded as
being for man in a special and peculiar sense. I know, of course, that
from the mere wording of my text we cannot argue the atoning and
substitutionary character of the death of Christ, for the preposition
here does not necessarily mean 'instead of,' but 'for the behoof of.'
But admitting that, I have another question. If Christ's death is for
'the behoof of' men, in what conceivable sense does it benefit them,
unless it is in the place of men? The death 'for me' is only for me when
I understand that it is 'instead of' me. And practically you will find
that wherever the full-orbed faith in Christ Jesus as the death for all
the sins of the whole world, bearing the penalty and bearing it away,
has begun to falter and grow pale, men do not know what to do with
Christ's death at all, and stop talking about it to a very large extent.

Unless He died as a sacrifice, I, for one, fail to see in what other
than a mere sentimental sense the death of Christ is a death for men.

And lastly, about this matter, observe how here we have brought into
vivid prominence the great thought that Jesus Christ in His death has
regard to single souls. We preach that He died for all. If we believe in
that august title which is laid here as