5. The death of Christ was necessary upon the account of the
the restoration of original righteousness), justice must be satisfied, and God reconciled, before mercy could restore it. Justice must be appeased, before it would consent to the return of that favour which had devolved into its hands by forfeiture; so great a gift as the Spirit, the author of renewing grace, was not like to be bestowed upon us by God, while he remained an enemy. The gift of the Spirit is therefore ascribed to the purchase of Christ's death.
(3.) There was some necessity of it for his prophetical office. His death was the highest confirmation of his doctrine. This was not indeed the only cause, nor the principal cause, of his death; if it were, his death would differ little in the end of it from the death of martyrs.
Besides, if he had suffered death chiefly for this, what need was there of his undergoing the curse, and groaning under the desertion of his
Father? There was no absolute necessity of his death for the confirmation of his doctrine, since the miracles he performed were a divine seal to assure us of its heavenly original; therefore he directs the Jews to his works, as a means of believing him to be from heaven,
John 10:38. Yet in his death he set forth a perpetual pattern of that obedience, meekness, love to God and man, and trust in his Father, above what any creature had ever been able to propose to us. He taught us in his life by the words of his mouth, and in his death instructed us by the exemplary exercise of his graces, and the voice of his blood, 1 Peter 2:21. He taught us the highest part of obedience to the utmost, by performing the exactest and sublimest part of obedience to his Father; and, therefore, after he had discoursed to his disciples of his death and departure, he adds the reason of it,
'That the world may know that I love the Father; and as the Father gave me commandment, even so I do,' John 14:31; that the world might know that he loved the glory of the Father, who was so merciful as to be willing to remit sin, yet so just, as not to remit it without a sacrifice.
5. The death of Christ was necessary upon the account of the predictions and types of it in the Scripture. Had not Christ suffered, all the predictions had been false, and the types to no purpose. In
this the veracity of God was engaged, not only in making good the threatening of death discovered to the first man, in inflicting what was threatened, but in the way of redemption by his Son. This was not only truth to his own resolve, as he had determined it, but truth to his word, as he had published it. God having decreed and declared the redemption of mankind, and the death of the Messiah as the medium, could not appoint then another way, because his counsel had not only pitched upon redemption as the end, but the death of Christ as the means; and there could be no change in God. Had there been a change in the end, and had God altered his purpose for man's redemption, he had obscured and lost the glory of all those attributes which sparkled in it. There could be none in the means; if so, it must have been for the better or worse. The better it could not be; for no way of so great a sufficiency could be found out as this, nor could any sacrifice of a higher value be thought of. Nor could it be worse; for he could not have pitched upon any deficient way but he would have testified himself weary of, and changed in, his end for which he appointed those means. This necessity of his death, Christ, in his discourse with his staggering disciples, confirms by the exposition of all the Scriptures, which contained the things concerning himself, beginning at Moses, i.e. at the books of Moses, and all the prophets,
Luke 24:27; which he testifies again, ver. 43, naming the Psalms also as particularly containing things that concerned his person and death. Moses discovered it by types, as he was the minister of settling them, and by prophecies, as he was the amanuensis to write some of them. The prophets declared it in express words, they spake it all with one mouth; and their chief prophecies centred in this, that Christ should suffer: Acts 26:22, 23, 'Saying none other things than what Moses and the prophets did say should come; that Christ should suffer.' And the apostle Peter excludes none of the prophets from speaking of those things which were to be done in the latter days, Acts 3:21; and that this was the design of the Spirit in them, to testify of the sufferings of Christ, 1 Peter 1:11.
(1.) Predictions. We shall speak of a few.
[1.] The first promise: Gen. 3:15, 'It shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel;' speaking to the serpent of the seed of the woman, which was to defeat all his devices. The Messiah here, as the seed of the woman, was promised to Adam to break the serpent's head, i.e. to take away sin and eternal death from man, which the devil had introduced, by the subtle contrivances of his head, into the world; for he was to take away the strength, power, and wisdom of the devil, signified by the head. The way whereby he was to do it was by having his heel bruised, viz., the heel of his humanity, by suffering. For as he was the seed of the woman, having human nature, he was to be bruised, he was to feel the power of the devil
(now, the power of the devil was the power of death, Heb. 2:14), yet so to feel the power of the devil as not utterly to sink under it; for not his head, but his heel, was to be bruised, i.e. his flesh, not his wisdom and chief design for the redemption of man. He was only to be bruised, not destroyed, or to see corruption; so that his death and resurrection are here predicted. And by suffering his heel to be bruised by the serpent, he was to break the serpent's head, i.e. through death to destroy him that had the power of death, Heb. 2:14.
And we know the death of Christ was the conquest of the devil.
Sufferings are necessary;* for there can be no conquest of the devil but by a satisfaction performed to the righteousness of the law; for his whole empire consisted in the curse of the law; and the law, after sin, required death, called therefore a 'law of sin and death,' Rom.
8:2. The devil was the jailor, having the power of death; the law must be satisfied before the prisoner be freed from the jailor's power. The value of those sufferings is declared, † because his bruise cannot wholly destroy the seed, nor hinder him from bruising the serpent's head. He could not by suffering bruise the serpent's head, unless he had been innocent, and from his innocence derived a dignity and worth to his sufferings; and this no fallen creature could do. Again, he must be innocent; for if he had been under the power of the devil, he could not have bruised his head. And since he was to overcome the devil by having his heel bruised, it signifies his suffering for those sins which were the foundation of the empire and dominion of the devil. Adam might well understand this conquest of the devil to be
the death of the seed, because after this promise he was taught to sacrifice; and the sacrifices, he was presently taught (as may be well conjectured by the skins of beasts, viz., of sacrificed beasts, wherewith God clothed him), as a comment upon this promise, shewed him in their death what he had deserved, and in what manner he was to expect his redemption, so lately promised him.
And surely the wisdom and goodness of God would not teach him the way of sacrificing, without acquainting him with the reason and end of sacrifices, which the Scripture mentions as a means to make man accepted with God, Gen. 4:7; to purge away sin, 1 Sam. 3:14; and to make reconciliation for it, Ezek. 45:17. And Adam, having more natural knowledge after his fall than all his posterity have had since, might easily know by reason that the blood of beasts was too weak and vile to make an atonement for his late offence, which had brought so much misery upon him, and thereby was manifested to be infinitely offensive to God, and therefore more offensive to him than the blood of beasts could be pleasing. This he could not but know, that those sacrifices 'could not make him that did the service perfect as pertaining to the conscience,' as the expression is in Heb. 9:9. And Adam, being the high priest, as head of all, could not but know that those sacrifices were offered for sin; because this was the end of the appointment of a priest, and the chief part of his office, as well as the end of the sacrifice: Heb. 5:1, 'Every high priest is ordained for men in things pertaining to God, that he may offer sacrifices for sin.' Let us further consider. The end of this promise was to defeat the devil, and to comfort Adam after his revolt from God, and thereby his falling under the vindictive justice of God, and to cheer him up before he should hear his own sentence, which was pronounced,
Gen. 3:17–19. So that Adam could not reasonably understand this promise any other way for his comfort, than that this promised seed should take away sin and the death threatened for it; otherwise it had been but little comfort to Adam to see himself ruined beyond any hopes of recovery, and to hear only of the destruction of his enemy.
But in this promise Adam saw the sentence of death respited, because the seed of the woman was promised, which necessarily included the continuance of his life, else there could have been no
seed of the woman. This also signifies to us that the sufferings of Christ were intended for a satisfaction of the violated law and provoked justice; for if sin and death were to be taken away by Adam's imitation of this promised seed when he should appear,
Adam could take no comfort in the promise, unless he had been sure to live to see this promised seed in the flesh. How could he imitate as an example the promised seed whom he was never to see in the world, but was to return to dust long before the appearance of it in the world? And it was necessary Adam should behold this seed in the flesh, if the breaking of the fetters of sin and hell were to be brought about only by his imitation of this seed. Again, to bruise the serpent's head cannot reasonably be understood of a confirmation only of the promised mercy (which some make the end of the death of Christ).
There was no need of bruising the heel barely for a confirmation of this mercy; for that was confirmed by the unalterable promise and will of God. And no question but Adam thought it sufficiently valid, since he received it from the mouth of God himself, and had so late an experience how true God was to the word of threatening. There is no other thing left, then, as the end of this bruising the heel, but to render mercy triumphant without any wrong to justice, and to vindicate the honour of the law, and, in a way of righteousness, not only of sovereign dominion, to defeat the serpent and restore the fallen creature.
[2.] Another prediction is Psalm 22. All the circumstances of his passion are here enumerated: sufferings, revilings, contempt by men, the desertion of God, his agonies, the parting his garments; and, at last, the propagation of the gospel and the calling of the gentiles are here predicted. The Jews understood it of the body of the Jewish nation;* but the design of the psalmist is to set forth a particular person, who is distinguished from the wicked crew that oppressed him, and from those that favoured him, whom he calls his brethren, and distinguisheth himself from the congregation wherein he would praise God, ver. 23; and upon the death of this person the world was to be gathered in to God: ver. 27, 'All the ends of the world shall remember, and turn unto the Lord;' agreeable to the prediction of
our Saviour, that when he should be lifted up, he would draw all men after him. Here is the prediction of the very words he spake upon the cross, when he lay under the imputation of our sins, and cried out, under the sense of his Father's wrath, ver. 1, 'My God, my God,' &c.
The miserable condition he was brought to, ver. 6, as a worm and no man, exposed to such a state of misery, and to be of no more account than the most contemptible animal, a worm. The word worm† comes of תולע, which signifies the grain which gave a scarlet dye, because the colour proceeded from a worm enclosed in that grain. Our
Saviour was as a worm crushed to tincture others with his blood. The very gesture of the people when they reviled him, wagging their heads, ver. 7, and Mat. 27:29; the reproaches they belched out against him, ver. 8, Mat. 27:43, 'He trusted in God, let him deliver him;' the sharpness of his death, ver. 14, 'I am poured out like water, all my bones are out of joint;' a distortion and racking of all his bones, effusion of his blood, dissolution of his vital vigour (like wax melted) under the sense of God's wrath, an expression used, Ps. 68:2, to shew the greatness of God's wrath against sin and sinners; his extreme thirst, ver. 15, 'My tongue cleaveth to my jaws;' the manner of his death by crucifixion, ver. 16, by piercing his hands and his feet, shewing it to be a lingering and painful death, which manner of death is also prophesied, Zech. 12:10, 'They shall look upon me whom they have pierced,' which the ancient Jews understood of the Messiah, and is a proof that the Messiah was to be pierced or digged into. And this place is cited as a prediction of the death of Christ,
John 19:37, Rev. 1:7; and as the manner of his death, so the excellency of his person is described there. The same person is a God to pour out the Spirit, and a man to be pierced; he works wonders as God, and suffers wonders as man.
[3.] The whole 53d of Isaiah is a prediction of this. He was to be rejected of men, wounded for our transgressions, to have our sins laid upon him by God, to bear iniquity, to be led as a sheep to the slaughter, to make his soul an offering for sin. This is so plain that the Jews anciently understood it of the Messiah;* but the latter Jews, to evade it, have fancied a double Messiah, one a sufferer, another a
triumpher, the sufferer of the tribe of Ephraim, the triumpher of the tribe of Judah; but where doth the Scripture mention a Messiah of the tribe of Ephraim? It always fixeth his descent from the house of David, of the tribe of Judah.
Many other prophecies there are of this: Zech. 13:7, 'I will smite the shepherd,' and Dan. 9:24, the 'Messiah shall be cut off, but not for himself;' he shall be counted the wickedest man, and put to death as the greatest malefactor, who hath no crime of his own to merit death, but his death shall be for the good of mankind. And the ends of it are expressed, ver. 24, to finish transgression, and make an end of sin, and to make reconciliation for iniquity, and to bring in everlasting righteousness, and to seal up the vision and prophecy; to finish transgression, or restrain it; to abolish sin in regard of the guilt of it, and restrain it from accusing us before God, and procuring the condemnation of us; to make an end of sin, or seal up sin, covering it, that it shall no more appear against us, as the writings of the Jews were rolled up, and sealed on the back side, that the writing could no more be seen; to make reconciliation for iniquity, to expiate iniquity
(a word belonging to sacrifices), to take away the obligation of sin (and it is observable, that all the words used in Scripture to signify sin, are here put in, חטאה ,עון ,פשע, to shew the universal removal of them, as to any guilt, by the death of Christ), and to bring in everlasting righteousness. As righteousness was lost by the first
Adam, so it was to be restored by the second, to make us for ever accepted before God. And to seal up the vision and prophecy, to accomplish all the visions and prophecies in the appearance of his person, and performance of his work. All prophecies pointed to him, and centered in him; and the end of his coming and excision was to deliver us from sin, and introduce such a righteousness as might be valuable for us before God And then he was to be a prince, when he had been a sacrifice, and cut off for the sins of the people. As the time approached for the coming of this promised seed, God made clearer revelations of the death of the Messiah, and his chief design in it.
And this is such a testimony of a dying Messiah, by the hands of violence, and for those great ends which the Christian religion
affirms, that the Jews, with all their evasions and obstinacy, know not how to get over it.
(2.) The second thing is the types. There were several types of Christ in the Old Testament, both in the persons of men and the ceremonies of the law. No one type no, nor all together, could fully signify this great sacrifice. The figure hath not what the truth hath.† The image of a king represents not all that the king hath or is. Moses was a type of the Messiah, who was to be raised up like to Moses, Deut. 18:15.
Moses, put into an ark, was exposed to the mercy of the Egyptians on the land, and the crocodiles in the river, and after that advanced to be chief governor of Israel; Jonah, buried three days in the belly of the whale; Noah, penned up in an ark, to become the father of a second generation; Joseph, cruelly put into a pit, and sold by his brethren, and afterwards lifted up to a throne, to be the preserver of his spiteful brethren,—these, it is likely, had all some relation, as types, to Christ. It would be endless to mention all; let us consider in general.
[1.] Sacrifices. These were practised by all nations, as well Gentiles as Jews, and from a notion that they did pacify their offended deities.
Heathen authors give us a full account of their sentiments in this case; and the Philistines, neighbours to the Jews, declare this as their sense in their trespass offering, they would return to God after they had felt his hand, 1 Sam. 6:3–5. The common notion of all heathens was, that they were offered to God for a propitiation for sin, and either for preventing the judgments they feared, or removing the judgments they felt.
(1.) These sacrifices could not arise from the light of nature. Being universally practised, they must arise from the light of nature, common to all men, or from some particular institution derived to all men by tradition. The light of nature could not be any ground for the framing such an imagination in men's minds, that God should be appeased by the blood of irrational creatures. The disproportion of them both to the offence, the offender, and the offended person, hath
been seen and spoken of by the wiser sort of the heathens themselves. Natural light would rather have dictated to them that their devout prayers, deep repentance, and hearty reformation would have been more efficacious to avert the anger of God than the cutting the throat of a bullock or lamb, and pouring out the blood at the foot of their altars. They could no more suppose that such offerings should appease an offended God, than the cutting off a dog's neck, or the crushing a fly before the statue of a prince would have appeased the anger of their injured sovereign. And none could think but the killing a worm, and offering it to the prince, had been as well or more sufficient to have mitigated his wrath, than the killing a thousand cattle had been to allay the wrath of God, in regard of the proportionableness of a worm to the one, greater than that of all the beasts in the world to the other. The light of nature would not instruct the heathens barbarously to take away the lives of men, and offer them for the expiation of their sins. For that teacheth us to love one another, as being descended from one root, and being of the same stamp. Besides, had any law of nature obliged men at any time to bloody sacrifices in such a nature, it would have obliged them still.
No law of nature is razed out by the gospel, but more cleared; and whatsoever is due to God by the law of nature is more improved by the Christian religion. Natural light would be able to make more objections for the forbearance of such a practice, than arguments for the preserving it in the world.
(2.) They must be therefore from institution. And since the practice hath been so universal, and the head of it can less be traced than the head of the river Nilus, it must be supposed to descend from the first man by tradition, and carried by his posterity to all the places which they first peopled, and so continued by their descendants. Bloody sacrifices seem to be instituted just after the fall. How should Adam be clothed with the skins of beasts? Gen. 3:21. If it be meant that God only taught him to clothe himself with the skins of beasts, it implies a giving him order to slay beasts, and most probably first in sacrifice, and ordering him to take the skins for clothing, which in the Levitical service were appropriated to the priests. For food it is probable they
were not killed; the food then appointed was the herb of the field, even after the fall, Gen. 3:18. And the objection against this, that there were but two of a kind, male and female, created, and therefore if two beasts of the same kind had been slain, a species had been destroyed, is of no validity. For the story of the creation mentions not such a parsimonious creation, nay, it is more probable there were more than two of a sort created. However, sacrifices began early.
Abel is the first we plainly read of, Gen. 4:4. He brought of the firstlings of his flock, and Cain brought of the fruit of the ground, an offering to the Lord. They may not be out of the way who think that there was a crime in the matter of Cain's sacrifice, it not being a bloody one. No doubt but he had seen his father offer to God the fruits of the earth, as well as the bodies of beasts, and might think that the offering those fruits of the ground (the tilling whereof was his proper employment) was sufficient, that there was no need of blood for the expiation of his sin. He seems to stand upon his own righteousness, and offer only what was an acknowledgment of God's dominion and lordship over the whole world, as if he had only been his creature, and not an offending creature. It was not inconsistent with a state of innocence for a man to make such acknowledgments to God, as the Lord of creation and the Benefactor of man. But after the fall there was not only the dominion of God, but his justice, to be acknowledged, which was best signified in a way that might represent to man the demerit of his offence and the justice due to him, which could not be by the offering of fruits, but by the shedding of blood, without which there is no remission.
(3.) If then they were from the special institution of God, they must be figures of something else intended. For since we find an universal sentiment in the practisers of them among the Gentiles, that they were for expiation, and that common reason could not find ground enough to fortify such an opinion in them; and that the Scripture, the ancientest book in the world, gives us an account of their ancient practice and divine institution; they could not be instituted by God, as the prime means of appeasing him, for that could not be congruous to the nature of God. There was no proportion between
the justice of God and them, nor between them and the sin of man.
But the most reasonable conclusion would be, that they were ordained to signify some other thing or sacrifice intended for the expiation of sin; that they were typical of the death of some one able to bear the punishment and purge the transgression. Since they could not purge the conscience, they must be concluded to be types of something that should have a sufficiency and an actual efficacy to this end. And this the heathens might have guessed from reason and the universal practice, that they were shadows of something else, though they could not have imagined the true person they were shadows of.
To sum up, therefore, the account the Scripture gives us of them, we must consider* that after Adam's revolt, and contracting death and the curses of the law by that apostasy, there was a necessity of maintaining the honour of the law, and God's own veracity in the commination, and satisfying his provoked justice, which must be done by that nature which had offended. Upon this account, and for this end, the second person, the Son of God, voluntarily exposed himself, and stood as a screen between the consuming fire and the combustible creature. Hereupon the sufferings of the Son of God were mutually agreed upon, the particular sufferings appointed and determined, and the time when he should be incarnate, and expose himself to that which the criminal should have endured, was settled, and the redemption, the design of those sufferings, declared by promise; and because the time would be long before his coming to suffer, and the faith of men might languish, God kept it up by lively representations of those sufferings, and the end of them, in the death of sacrificed beasts. Not that they should rest upon them, but use those shadows as props to their faith in the promised seed, till the fulness of time should come. All those sacrifices were a rude draught, or initial elements or rudiments, to teach the world what was to be done with a full efficacy by the person appointed to it. Whence the apostle calls them 'the rudiments of the world,' Col. 2:20. And so they were a copy of what was resolved in heaven from eternity, to be fulfilled in time, for the expiation of sin. They all had relation to
Christ. They were to be without blemish, and dedicated wholly to God, as things that were to perish for his glory; and being burnt, and the smoke ascending to heaven, God might, as it were, partake of the oblation, as the Scripture testifies: Gen. 8:21, 'And God smelled a sweet savour,' viz., from Noah's sacrifice. So Christ offered himself as a holocaust to the Father, as the antitype of those victims that were wholly to be consumed by fire. And this blood speaks better things than the blood of Abel's sacrifice, or the blood of all the sacrifices shed from the very first; for this pacifies an angry God, purges a guilty conscience, and breaks the chains of hell and damnation.
There is no question to be made, but the believers among the Jews did apprehend the heel of the promised seed bruised in every sacrifice; they could not else offer them in faith. As mathematicians measure the greatness of the stars, which are above their reach, by the shadows of the earth, which are within their compass, so did they, upon the view of those sacrifice-shadows, apprehend the virtue and efficacy of the grand oblation.* As those that did understand
Christ in the manna did also eat Christ in the manna, 1 Cor. 10:3, 4, so those that did apprehend Christ in the legal sacrifices, were also sprinkled with the blood of Christ. Thus was Christ a lamb slain from the foundation of the world, not only by purpose and decree, but significatively and typically in all the ancient sacrifices. I might here instance in the two anniversary goats, Levit. 16, one offered, the other devoted to the wilderness; in the red heifer, Num. 19, burnt upon the day of expiations, both eminent types of the death of Christ; as also in the passover or paschal lamb, the blood whereof sprinkled upon the posts was of no necessity in itself for the Israelites' preservation from the destroying angel, nor had any intrinsic virtue in it to procure their security. The angel, no doubt, had acuteness of sight enough to discern the houses and persons of the Israelites from those of the Egyptians.† We cannot justify the wisdom of God in this conduct, if we refer it not to Christ, as a representation of that great miracle of redemption to be wrought by him for the true Israelites, when he should come to free man from a bondage worse than
Egyptian. This is the true Lamb of God, that hath the virtue and vigour of all that whereof the paschal lambs had but the image and
shadow. Let me add the observation of one,‡ the command of God, that the bones of the paschal lamb should not be broken, signified that the redeemer of the world should die such a death wherein the breaking of bones was usual. Yet that that circumstance should not be used in his death, and therefore that that order of not breaking the bones of the paschal lamb, is cited by John, as if it had been literally meant of him and not of the lamb: John 19:36, 'That the Scripture should be fulfilled, a bone of him shall not be broken.' I might also instance in that eminent type of the blood of Christ, the blood of the sacrifice sprinkled upon the altar, book of the law, vessels of the sanctuary; after which the elders of Israel ate and drunk in the presence of God, no longer exposed unto his anger, Exod. 24; commented upon by the apostle, Heb. 9:19, 20.
[2.] Isaac's death was a type of the death of Christ. Of his death; for he was, in the purpose of his Father, upon the command of God, cut off. And Isaac, bearing the wood, did prefigure the manner of the death of Christ, viz., such a death wherein the bearing the wood was customary.* As in crucifying, the offenders bore the cross to the place of execution, and Christ did his. And a type also of the resurrection of Christ; for it was the third day from the command of offering him that Abraham received him to life as new born, and raised from the dead, Gen. 22:4, and that in a figure of some nobler sacrifice and resurrection, Heb. 11:19. Moriah was the place appointed by God where Abraham was to offer his son, Gen. 22:2, in one part whereof was the temple and the tower of David; another part of the mount was without Jerusalem, and was called Calvary, upon which Isaac was to be sacrificed, as Jerome tells us from the Jewish tradition.
Now, upon Abraham's readiness to offer his son Isaac, God binds himself by an oath, that in his seed all the nations of the earth shall be blessed, Gen. 22:16–18. In his seed, as dying, and to be offered up, and rising again, as Isaac did in figure. God now binds himself by an oath to do that to Abraham which he had before promised to Adam; the intent of which oath the apostle, Heb. 6:13, 19, 20, refers to the settling of Christ as redeemer, and more positively affirms this seed to be Christ, Gal. 3:10. This oath to Abraham was pursuant to that