7. The blood of Christ
7
The blood of Christ
The blood of Christ: the sin-atoning and peace-speaking blood of Christ. I do not know, my brethren, how it may be with you in this awful matter of the blood of Christ. There may be some of you who are not without some difficulty in receiving and in holding by the fact and the doctrine of the atonement. But for my part, my insurmountable difficulty would be if there were no absolute fact, and no sure and certain doctrine, of the atonement. Whether or no God could at once and forever forgive my sin without the atonement I cannot tell. I am not one of his counselors. But one thing I do know and can tell. When I take counsel with my own soul about my sin, I both see and know that, to all eternity, I never could forgive myself, or endure myself, but for the all-satisfying and all-obliterating atonement for all my sin that has been made by the Son of God. Neither lapse of time, nor attempts at redress and reparation, nor penances, nor self-denials, nor floods of tears, nor sweats of blood, nor solemnly sworn covenants, no, nor all these things taken together, could ever take away the awful load of my sin. But when Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is “made sin” by my sin,1 when both the fault and the stain and the guilt of my sin are all taken away from me by his blood, then a peace that simply passes all my understanding,2 as a matter of fact and of sure experience, takes possession of my heart and my conscience. And when I again fall into fresh sin and fresh guilt, and that is with every breath I draw, and when I again receive the atonement, that great peace again returns to me.
For the absolutely greatest sinner hiding in this house of God tonight there is this tremendous but most glorious lesson. It is not only the blood of Christ, and the blood of the Lamb, it is this: “The Church of God, which he hath purchased with his own blood.”3 The blood of God: the tremendous bareness, so to speak, and the tremendous boldness of the words, the astounding and overwhelming grace of the words, will surely bring them home to every specially guilty conscience and to every specially corrupt heart. Times and occasions without number, when every other Scripture has threatened to fail myself, this supreme Scripture has been a house of refuge and a high and heavenly tower to me. The blood of God has a specially inward and a specially personal and a specially experimental evidence to me, and I recommend that most wonderful of all the Scriptures to them that need it; I recommend it to them with all my heart.
His blood can make the foulest clean,
His blood avails for me
so sings Charles Wesley.4
*From Bunyan Characters, Fourth Series (Edinburgh & London: Oliphant Anderson and Ferrier, [1908]), 127-28, 133. See also a similar reflection entitled “The Blood of God” in Ralph G. Turnbull, ed., The Treasury of Alexander Whyte (Westwood, New Jersey: Fleming H. Revell Co., 1953), 58-63.
1. See 2 Corinthians 5:21.
2. See Philippians 4:7.
3. See Acts 20:28.
4. Charles Wesley (1707-1788) is one of the foremost Evangelical hymnwriters of the eighteenth century, whose hymns are still widely in use. The lines quoted are from the well-known hymn of Wesley that for many years after his death was normally the first hymn in a Methodist hymnal, “O for a thousand tongues to sing.”