The Spurgeon Series 1857 & 1858. Charles H. Spurgeon

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СКАЧАТЬ wounded, almost to death; the surgeon is by his side, and the soldier asks him a question. Listen, and judge his folly. What question does he ask? Does he raise his eyes with eager anxiety and enquire if the wound is mortal, if the practitioner’s skill can suggest the means of healing, or if the remedies are within reach and the medicine at hand? No, nothing of the sort; strange to tell, he asks, “Can you inform me with what sword I was wounded, and by what Russian I have been thus grievously mauled? I want,” he adds, “to learn every minute particular respecting the origin of my wound.” The man is delirious or his head is affected. Surely such questions at such a time are proof enough that he is bereft of his senses.

      2. There is another fool. The storm is raging, the ship is flying impetuously before the gale, the dark cloud moves swiftly over head, the masts are creaking, the sails are ripped to rags, and still the gathering tempest grows more fierce. Where is the captain? Is he busily engaged on the deck, is he manfully facing the danger, and skilfully suggesting means to avert it? No sir, he has retired to his cabin, and there with studious thoughts and crazy fancies he is speculating on the place where this storm took its rise. “It is mysterious, this wind; no one ever yet” he says, “has been able to discover its origin.” And, so reckless of the vessel, the lives of the passengers, and his own life, he is careful only to solve his curious questions. The man is mad, sir; take the rudder from his hand; he is completely gone mad! If he should ever get to shore, shut him up as a hopeless lunatic.

      3. The third fool I shall doubtless find among yourselves. You are sick and wounded with sin, you are in the storm and hurricane of Almighty vengeance, and yet the question which you would ask of me, this morning, would be, “Sir, what is the origin of evil?” You are mad, Sir, spiritually mad; that is not the question you would ask if you were in a sane and healthy state of mind; your question would be: “How can I get rid of the evil?” Not, “How did it come into the world?” but “How am I to escape from it?” Not, “How is it that hail descends from heaven upon Sodom?” but “How may I, like Lot, escape out of the city to a Zoar.” Not, “How is it that I am sick?” but “Are there medicines that will heal me? Is there a physician to be found that can restore my soul to health?” Ah! you trifle with subtleties while you neglect certainties. More questions have been asked concerning the origin of evil than upon anything else. Men have puzzled their heads, and twisted their brains into knots, in order to understand what men can never know — how evil came into this world, and how its entrance is consistent with divine goodness? The broad fact is this, there is evil; and your question should be, “How can I escape from the wrath to come, which is engendered of this evil?” In answering that question this verse stands right in the middle of the way (like the angel with the sword, who once stopped Balaam on his road to Barak,) “Without shedding of blood is no remission.” Your true need is to know how you can be saved; if you are aware that your sin must be pardoned or punished, your question will be, “How can it be pardoned?” and then point blank in the very teeth of your enquiry, there stands out this fact: “Without shedding of blood there is no remission.” Notice this is not merely a Jewish maxim; it is a worldwide and eternal truth. It does not pertain to the Hebrews only, but to the Gentiles likewise. Never in any time, never in any place, never in any person, can there be remission apart from shedding of blood. This great fact, I say, is stamped on nature; it is an essential law of God’s moral government, it is one of the fundamental principles which can neither be shaken nor denied. Never can there be any exception to it; it stands the same in every place throughout all ages — “Without shedding of blood there is no remission.” It was so with the Jews; they had no remission without the shedding of blood. Some things under the Jewish law might be cleansed by water or by fire, but in no case where absolute sin was concerned was there ever purification without blood — teaching this doctrine, that blood, and blood alone, must be applied for the remission of sin. Indeed the very heathen seem to have an inkling of this fact. Do not I see their knives gory with the blood of victims? Have I not heard horrible tales of human offerings, of holocausts, of sacrifices; and what do these mean, except that there lies deep in the human heart, deep as the very existence of man, this truth, — “that without shedding of blood there is no remission.” And I assert once more, that even in the hearts and consciences of my hearers there is something which will never let them believe in remission apart from a shedding of blood. This is the grand truth of Christianity, and it is a truth which I will endeavour now to burn into your memory; and may God by his grace bless it to your souls. “Without shedding of blood is no remission.”

      4. First, let me show you the blood shedding, before I begin to dwell upon the text. Is there not a special blood shedding meant? Yes, there was a shedding of most precious blood, to which I must now refer you. I shall not tell you now of massacres and murders, nor of rivers of blood of goats and rams. There was a blood shedding once, which did all other shedding of blood by far outdo; it was a man — a God — that shed his blood at that memorable season. Come and see it. Here is a garden dark and gloomy; the ground is crisp with the cold frost of midnight; between those gloomy olive trees I see a man, I hear him groan out his life in prayer; listen, angels, listen men, and wonder; it is the Saviour groaning out his soul! Come and see him. Behold his brow! Oh heavens! drops of blood are streaming down his face, and from his body; every pore is open, and it sweats! but not the sweat of men that toil for bread; it is the sweat of one that toils for heaven — he “sweats great drops of blood!” That is the blood shedding, without which there is no remission. Follow that man further; they have dragged him with sacrilegious hands from the place of his prayer and his agony, and they have taken him to the hall of Pilate; they seat him in a chair and mock him; a robe of purple is put on his shoulders in mockery; and see his brow — they have put on it a crown of thorns, and the crimson drops of gore are rushing down his cheeks! You angels! the drops of blood are running down his cheeks! But turn aside that purple robe for a moment. His back is bleeding. Tell me, demons who did this. They lift up the thongs, still dripping clots of gore; they scourge and tear his flesh, and make a river of blood to run down his shoulders! That is the shedding of blood without which there is no remission. I am not finished yet — they hurry him through the streets; they fling him on the ground; they nail his hands and feet to the transverse wood, they hoist it in the air, they dash it into its socket, it is fixed, and there he hangs the Christ of God. Blood from his head, blood from his hands, blood from his feet! In agony unknown he bleeds away his life; in terrible throes he exhausts his soul. “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani.” And then see! they pierce his side, and now runs out blood and water. This is the shedding of blood, sinners and saints; this is the awful shedding of blood, the terrible pouring out of blood, without which for you, and for the whole human race, there is no remission.

      5. I have then, I hope, expounded my text accurately; without this shedding of blood there is no remission. Now I shall come to dwell upon it in more detail.

      6. Why is it that this story does not make men weep? I told it poorly, you say. Indeed, so I did; I will take all the blame. But, sirs, if it were told as poorly as men could speak, if our hearts were what they should be, we would bleed away our lives in sorrow. Oh! that was a horrid murder! It was not an act of regicide; it was not the deed of a fratricide, or of a parricide; it was — what shall I say? — I must make a word — a deicide; the killing of a God; the slaying of him who became incarnate for our sins. Oh! if our hearts were only soft as iron, we must weep, if they were only as tender as the marble of the mountains, we would shed great drops of grief; but they are harder than the nether millstone; we forget the griefs of him who died this ignominious death, we do not pity his sorrows, nor do we value the interest we have in him as though he suffered and accomplished all for us. Nevertheless, here stands the principle — “Without shedding of blood is no remission.”

      7. Now, I take it, there are two things here. First, there is a negative expressed: “No remission without shedding of blood.” And then there is a positive implied, truly, with shedding of blood there is remission.

      8. I. First, I say, here is A NEGATIVE EXPRESSED: there is no remission without blood — without the blood of Jesus Christ. This is of divine authority; when I utter СКАЧАТЬ