had to send
away evil. Throughout his life on earth, he resisted every impulse to
work more rapidly for a lower good,--strong perhaps when he saw old age
and innocence and righteousness trodden under foot. What but this gives
any worth of reality to the temptation in the wilderness, to the
devil's departing from him for a season, to his coming again to
experience a like failure? Ever and ever, in the whole attitude of his
being, in his heart always lifted up, in his unfailing readiness to pull
with the Father's yoke, he was repelling, driving away sin--away from
himself, and, as Lord of men, and their saviour, away from others also,
bringing them to abjure it like himself. No man, least of all any lord
of men, can be good without willing to be good, without setting himself
against evil, without sending away sin. Other men have to send it away
out of them; the Lord had to send it away from before him, that it
should not enter into him. Therefore is the stand against sin common to
the captain of salvation and the soldiers under him.

What did Jesus come into the world to do? The will of God in saving his
people from their sins--not from the punishment of their sins, that
blessed aid to repentance, but from their sins themselves, the paltry as
well as the heinous, the venial as well as the loathsome. His whole work
was and is to send away sin--to banish it from the earth, yea, to cast
it into the abyss of non-existence behind the back of God. His was the
holy war; he came carrying it into our world; he resisted unto blood;
the soldiers that followed him he taught and trained to resist also unto
blood, striving against sin; so he became the captain of their
salvation, and they, freed themselves, fought and suffered for others.
This was the task to which he was baptized; this is yet his enduring
labour. 'This is my blood of the new covenant which is shed for many
unto the sending away of sins.' What was the new covenant? 'I will make
a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah; not
according to the covenant which they brake, but this: I will put my law
in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts, and will be their
God, and they shall be my people.'

John baptized unto repentance because those to whom he was sent had to
repent. They must bethink themselves, and send away the sin that was in
them. But had there been a man, aware of no sin in him, but aware that
life would be no life were not s