We should behold our adorable Savior with the deepest humiliation, for having occasioned Him such anguish!
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Had we never sinned, our adorable Savior would never have assumed our nature, nor suffered the unfathomable agonies of His Father’s wrath, in our place. In Christ’s sin-atoning sufferings, we should measure our guilt and misery.
Was He under the hidings of His Father’s face?
We deserve to be banished from the gracious presence of our God to all eternity!
Did He suffer inconceivable agonies both of body and soul, under the wrath of Almighty God?
We merited the utmost extremity of that wrath forever and ever!
Did He suffer even unto death?
We were liable to everlasting death, even that “second death in the lake that burns with fire and brimstone,” “where the worm never dies, and the fire is never quenched!”
Draw near then with me, brethren, to Gethsemane and to Golgotha, and contemplate with me the scenes which were there exhibited.
Behold that Sufferer in the garden, whose agonies of soul are so intense, that the blood issues from every pore of His body!
Behold Him on Mount Calvary, stretched upon the cross, and hear His heart-rending cry, “My God! My God! Why have You forsaken Me!”
Say then within yourselves, ‘Now I behold what my sins have merited! Or, rather, what my sins merit at this hour. There is not a moment of my life, wherein I might not justly be called upon to drink that bitter cup, without the smallest hope for even the slightest mitigation of my woe through eternal ages.’
Dear brethren, this is the looking-glass in which I wish you to behold your own deservings before God. I would not have your eyes turned away from it for one instant, to the last hour of your lives.
In viewing particular sins, you may perhaps be led to self-satisfaction, from the thought that they have not been so enormous as what are habitually committed by others. But in viewing your iniquities as expiated by our blessed Lord, you will see that nothing can exceed your vileness; and you will be ready to take the lowest place as the very “chief of sinners!”
The best of you, no less than the most abandoned, have merited, and do yet daily merit, at God’s hand–all that the Savior endured for you–and never look at yourselves in any other looking-glass than this!
Oh! brethren, if our minds were more occupied in exploring the height and depth and length and breadth of redeeming love–we would not be so easily turned away from it, to the trifling vanities of this poor world. Let Christ’s unfathomable love be duly and abidingly impressed upon your minds, and this subject will elevate and enlarge the soul, and have a transforming efficacy in proportion as we delight to dwell upon it!
