Daily Devotionals

Music For the Soul

Devotional: December 25th

CHRIST’S INCARNATION IN ORDER TO HIS VICARIOUS AND REDEEMING DEATH

I lay down My life for the sheep. . . . have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again. - John 10:15-18

We can imitate Christ in His service, but not in His sacrifice; we can tread in His footsteps to the gate of Gethsemane, but He has to wrestle in His agony alone; alone has to stand before His judges, and to die alone. He gives His life. As at its beginning He willed to be born, so at the end He wills to die. He is the Lord of Life and the Lord of Death; and never did He witness the completeness of His authority over that awful form, which yet is His servant, more marvelously and entirely than when He seemed to submit to its blow.

Like the King of Israel who bade his armor-bearer fall upon him and slay him, so Christ commanded and Death obeyed. If you will read with an eye to this thought the stories of the Crucifixion, you will see that all the evangelists, as of set purpose, choose expressions which are at least consistent with, and I think were selected on purpose to express, the thought of the voluntariness of our Lord’s death. " He yielded up the ghost," "He gave up the spirit," with a mighty cry which indicated unexhausted strength, " Father! into Thy hands I commend My Spirit!"

The same witness is borne, as I believe, by the remarkable language employed in the account of the Transfiguration, when these three, each of whom stood in a peculiar relation to death, Moses, Elias, and Christ, conversed in solemn words, "concerning the departure which He should accomplish at Jerusalem " - by Himself willing to go, and therefore going. You will not understand either birth or death unless you interpret them both according to His own profound saying: "I came forth from the Father, and am come into the world." Again, "I leave the world and go unto the Father."

And, still further, we have here set forth our Lord’s voluntary death as a ransom. A ransom is a price paid for the deliverance of a slave from captivity. And Christ distinctly, beyond all cavil on the part of honest interpretation, as it seems to me, sets forth His death here as the crown of His service and the climax of His work, because in it there is the power by which the bonds of sin and condemnation are broken, and liberty is proclaimed to the captive, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound. He dies, not as the hero dies who closes his heroism by a brave death. He dies, not as the martyr dies who seals his witness with his blood. He dies, not as the saint dies, leaving behind him sweet and pathetic memories that draw us onward upon a course like his own. Other men’s deaths are but the closing of their activity; Christ’s death is the climax of His. It is not enough that He should serve in our stead; He must die our death if we are to be set free. It is not enough that He should witness of God by the wisdom of His Word, the purity of His life, the graciousness of His deeds, the tenderness of His compassion, the pathos of His tears. A nobler revelation of the love of God triumphing over man’s sin; of the consistency of that life with perfect righteousness - a revelation, too, of the darkness and the foulness of man’s evil which nothing else could have given, is given to us when, and only when, we recognise the voluntary death of Jesus Christ as the ransom and propitiation for the sins of the world.