What is the cause of Christ?

Here is the way in which the whole question may be divinely set. Sin entails suffering, the world is full of it because sin dominates the earth. Suffering beyond the grave is entailed for those who die unconverted. Why? Because sin entails suffering. Why did Christ suffer? He suffered for sin. It is true in a certain sense that He suffered for righteousness because He was in an unrighteous world, there was a perfect man in the midst of sinful men, and they hated Him and His Father and they put Him out by way of the malefactors gibbet, the cross. But when He was thus put out by the action of sinful men something else happened, He offered Himself as the great atoning sacrifice, what Scripture calls the propitiation, that is to say, He said, in effect, ‘Let me be the One who bears the judgment and the wrath.’ How could He do it? He could do it on this universal scale because of who He really was. Had He not been the mighty Son of God, had He not been God manifest in the flesh, He could not have done it. What a wonderful thing! The God who acts in righteousness and who has to bring in judgment upon sin came in the Person of His Son into manhood to bear the judgment!

His was no ordinary death, but the death of the curse, the bearing of guilt and suffering on behalf of ruined sinners, agony unparalleled in all history. Well knowing previously, too, the horror all this would entail, yet His willing self-humiliation did not end until He had come to the lowest place, in which He could reach and save the lowest sinner. Indeed, it was only this that could save any sinner: He must come to the lowest place possible, and this He did in willing sacrifice. Blessed be His Name forever!

Christ has done the work that saves. Behold Him on the cross between two mocking thieves, though His rightful place is on the throne of God, the centre of adoring hosts of angels. Though "King of kings," He wears a crown of thorns. The Creator of heaven and earth, He hangs in shame between the two, as if unfit for either place. He cries, "I thirst," though He made the gushing springs and cooling brooks and all the mighty rivers. The cup of the wrath of God is pressed to His stainless lips, and He drains it. The sword of divine justice is uplifted, and He bares His spotless bosom to receive the stroke. The storm of God's anger against sin is bursting upon Him, and He bows His blessed, sinless head beneath the blast. Hear that cry that comes from the very depths of His suffering spirit: "My God! My God! why hast Thou forsaken Me?" God makes Him sin for us — He who knew no sin. He is made a curse for us, that He may become the eternal source and fountain of all blessing. The heavens become black and the earth is quaking. The very rocks are rent as Jesus, the Saviour, makes atonement. Three awful hours have passed, and in triumph He exclaims: "It is finished!" Then He bows His head, yields up the spirit, and the mighty work is done. All praise be His! The anthem of the redeemed is this: "Unto Him that loved us and washed us from our sins in His own blood, … to Him be glory and dominion forever and ever" (Rev. 1:5-6). To the Son of God belongs all glory and all blessing. And to the sons of men is offered free salvation.

But is this nothing to you, who are perishing in sins and unbelief? The Creator of all things did not become a man save to glorify God and to bless man, as blessing could only be thus; and by nothing short of death, the death of the cross. His incarnation was not only to manifest Him in life, solely doing God's will, as it never had been on earth before, but to suffer for sins in the body God prepared for Him, that sins might be taken away by the all-sufficient sacrifice, and that believers might be sanctified, yea, perfected for ever. For this Heb. 10 declares to be the fruit of the Saviour's work.

The will of God, which He came to do, carried Him into the sufferings of Calvary. He suffered at the hands of men, but the sufferings that this passage speaks of were not from men. "He suffered for man's sin." Men could not inflict these sufferings; it was the Lord Jehovah that bruised Him when He was wounded for our transgressions and bruised for our iniquities. A darkness that no eye of man could pierce enshrouded the cross, for the woe of the Sin-bearer no heart of man could fathom, when from that impenetrable pall came the cry, "ELI, ELI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!" From the depths out of which the forsaken One cried, we learn the righteously opened way for us to pass out of death into life. There, upon the cross, where His soul was made an offering for sin, God's love to man was proclaimed in the gift of His Son, that justice and truth might be upheld and that the purpose of God in this to us might come into full effect, in absolute consistency with His holiness. Having suffered for sins, the Just for the unjust, His death opened the way out of the circle of death into the circle of life — a way by which men may pass out of the bondage of lust into the liberty of grace to do the will of God. Again I use the circles as setting before our eyes the way out of the one into the other.

In preaching the gospel we must bring out the value of that blood. Although the life of the Lord Jesus was throughout so God-glorifying — a life of faith and perfect obedience from beginning to end, without a failure, the Man of prayer, — yet that glorifying life could not of itself, prospectively and retrospectively, effect the salvation of one single soul — he must die if any are to be saved. "He suffered for sins." There are sufferings that are non-atoning, and sufferings that are atoning. Peter speaks of witnessing the sufferings and partaking of the glory; Paul reverses it. Jesus suffered at the hands of man for His faithfulness to God: He suffered at the hands of God for His faithfulness to us — sufferings we shall never know. That which is deepest in the cross is known only to God and to Christ. He endured more (and only a divine person could have endured it) than all the lost will endure eternally. The centre of two eternities, and the greatest wonder of all eternity, the greatest glory brought to God, in all His nature and every attribute, and a salvation glorifying to God and in every particular suitable to us, was brought about by the cross. The heavens declare the glory of God, but that is not where God's highest wisdom is seen; the angels learn it through the church.

None but the Son of God and Son of Man can save sinners; and even He only by dying for their sins and bearing their judgment at the hand of God. But this He suffered once, once for all: the infinite fruit of God's love to the sinner, and His hatred of their sins. But the heart must give Him credit for such love, and rest upon His redemption by faith: else there is no purification of heart or conscience; and this must be now and here below, that as believers, as His saints, we may serve and worship Him henceforth by the Spirit of God.

Thus, before the day of judgment, sin has been thoroughly dealt with by God in the cross of Christ. There will be a day of judgment, and those who believe not will find everlasting condemnation there. But for those who believe, there has been already judgment in Christ. God must judge sinners; but were this all, where would be His love? If He overlooked sin, where His holiness? That would not be love but indifference to evil. When I see the cross, I see the perfect desert of sin, and that not in the destruction of the sinner, but in the Person of the Lord Jesus Christ, suffering once the just for the unjust that He might bring us to the God who was glorified in the sins being thus completely blotted out. Christ took sin in His own body on the tree, laid down the life in which He bore it, and rose absolutely without it. Now then the question of righteousness is not raised only, but settled. Neither is it any longer a promise, but a work done. There are promises for the believer to enjoy in their season; but the suffering on the cross is ended and past. Redemption is neither creation, nor law, nor promises, but a divine work wrought about sin and already accomplished in Christ through His blood - in Christ now accepted of God and glorified at His right hand.

Such was the marvellous life of this blessed One. But this was not all. He died! Yes, He died under the weight of the first man's guilt, He died to take away the sin of the world, and alter completely the ground of God's relationship with the world, so that God might deal with man and with the world on the new ground of redemption, instead of the old ground of sin. He died for the nation of Israel. He tasted death for every man. He died the just for the unjust. He suffered for sins. He died and was buried, according to the Scriptures. He went through all — met all — paid all — finished all. He went down into the dust of death, and lay in the dark and silent tomb. He descended into the lower parts of the earth. He went down to the very bottom of everything. He endured the sentence passed on man. He paid the penalty, bore the judgment, drained the cup of wrath, went through every form of human suffering and trial, was tempted in all points, sin excepted. He made an end of everything that stood in the way, and, having finished all, He gave up His spirit into the hand of His Father, and His precious body was laid in a tomb on which the smell of death had never passed.

And observe, that Christ came to redeem us and bring us to God, to destroy Satan's power, and to glorify God; and further, He came to be able to sympathise with the trials, and the difficulties, and the sorrows that our hearts meet with while trying to walk rightly here below.