CHRSIT CRUCIFIED, THE WISDOM AND POWER of god. VITAL and essential as are the doctrines of Christianity, yet unless digested by the moral faculties, and received into the constitution exercise of the moral man, they are wholly inoperative. They may the intellect and amuse the fancy, but they cannot come at the soul. To receive spiritual food and nourishment from Gospel truths, we must not only " read, mark, and learn," but " inwardly digest them :" and it is only when, as new-born babes, we long after the unadulterated milk of the word, that we can grow thereby. Still, as the doctrines of Christianity are the means through which, in a Gospel land, the Spirit of God invariably operates in the conversion and sanctification of souls; and since that Spirit, powerful and free as the breath of heaven, may impart a quickening principle to the simplest statement of the truth as it is in Jesus, and bless, to the conversion or edification of a soul, whichsoever weapon from the armoury of revelation it seemeth Him good; it may be profitable sometimes to furnish the understanding with the theory of religion, to review the history of man's fall in Adam and his recovery in Christ, and to state those fundamental doctrines which that history involves; whose letter indeed killeth, but whose Spirit giveth life: and which, whenever they touch the heart, purify and convert it and give a new impulse and a new direction to all the energies and tendencies of the moral and intellectual man. "We," says the Apostle Paul to the Corinthians, "preach Christ crucified:" -a subject which affords the amplest scope for appeal, whether to the soundest principles of the cultivated understanding, or the warmest sympathies, the most tender and refined sensibilities, of the heart. My purpose at present is to view the subject doctrinally, or rather historically. And since as the Apostle's declaration implies, "Christ crucified" is the sum of Gospel knowledge and Gospel preaching is the eternal fountain from which all God's dealings with man emanate, and to which again they tend,—I shall take a brief view of the history of the soul, from its creation in the image of God, to its fall in Adam, and its recovery in Christ. I shall trace its 4 N CHRIST. OBSERV. No. 23. course to that period of time when first, "beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord," it is "changed into the same image, from glory to glory, as by the Spirit of the Lord," and onwards, to that morning of eternity, when again it shall be like Christ; for it shall see Him as He is. "In the day that God created man, in the likeness of God made He him," in His perfect moral image, holy, spiritual, and immortal. "Male and female created He them, and blessed them :" and " planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there He put the man whom He had formed. And out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; and formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air, and brought them unto Adam." Such is the lovely picture which revelation draws of man, and of the scene around him, in his created innocence: when the calm stillness of nature, animate and inanimate, was in full harmony with the paradise within his soul: a soul which reflected from its pure and placid mirror the perfect image of God. No storm then desolated the summer landscape, or the clear serene of a sanctified breast. No cloud, moral or material, obscured heaven's rays of glory shut out from the natural eye the beautifying and quickening beams of their meridian day : "the morning spread upon the mountains," the mellowing tints of evening; or darkened, for a single moment, with its passing shade, the light of God's countenance to the soul. In those happy days of innocence and peace, universal nature smiled. In the words of the Psalmist "the trees of the wood rejoiced before the Lord: the floods clapped their hands, the little hills rejoiced on every side: the valleys laughed and sang." God crowned the year with goodness, and His clouds dropped fatness; while man, as the high priest of nature, offered up, with articulate voice, its morning and evening sacrifice of praise and adoration. Then God himself looked down, " and saw every thing that He had made, and beheld it was very good." And man returned the approving smile of his Creator and Benefactor, with the mingled confidence, and joy, and love, of conscious and unsuspicious innocence. Such was the commerce of affections between God and man, when blessings were returned in thanksgivings: and the bounties of nature and of grace touched the chords of gratitude and love in the human soul. Such was the lovely and the peaceful scene upon which the morning of creation dawned. Alas! how dimmed the lustre ! how gloomy the contrast which the world now presents! Desolating tempests and thundering torrents: barren winters and burning summers all nature in rebellion against man, its constituted lord: and man himself at enmity with his brother, and at war with the Omnipotent God: the wrath of God denounced against, impending over, and sometimes flashing upon, a guilty and accursed world, in famine, and pestilence, and the sword; and in all that train of varied miseries and troubles to which man is born "as the sparks fly upward." This seeming moral inconsistency of the government and character of that God, who " is love," Scripture alone solves and reconciles. It declares to us that this wonderful change found its originating cause in Adam's sin: that "God cursed the earth for man's sake:" that "by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin." Forbidden to eat of the fruit "of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil," and threatened" in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die," Adam eat; and in acquiring the expected but deceptive knowledge to which he proudly aspired, was deprived of the principle, and cut off from the Fountain, of spiritual life; and thus spiritually died. The command was imposed as the one test of, or rather opportunity for exercising, his gratitude and obedience that he might be elevated in the scale of creation by the privilege of moral liberty; and by the using of this privilege in the free choice of holiness. Positive, absolute good he already knew by a blissful experience. Of good, in its relation to and contrast with evil, he was indeed happily ignorant, because in the world around him, or within him, he saw and knew no sin or misery with which to contrast that happiness which pervaded the scene around him, and that holy joy, that peace of God which presided in his own bosom. The only knowledge, therefore, which he could acquire by eating of the forbidden fruit, and which knowledge the violation of God's command necessarily conferred upon him, was the knowledge of evil,-of moral and consequently of physical evil. And in this relative sense alone was it, that man acquired, or that God withheld from him, "the knowledge of good and evil." But it is more material to our purpose to reflect, that, by his disobedience, Adam, the father of the human family, wholly lost that moral image of God in which he was created. He lost the image of God's holiness; for he had once sinned. He lost the image of God's spirituality; for he "became flesh." He lost the image of God's immortality, by the immediate fulfilment of that threatening, "In the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die." Thus unholy, carnal, mortal, Adam "begat a son in his own likeness, after his image." Such then was the nature which Adam propagated, and with which the earth was overspread; until, at length, God again looked down, and, as Moses was commissioned to tell, saw that " all flesh had corrupted his way upon the earth," "and that every imagination of the thoughts of man's heart was only evil continually." In righteous vengeance, He summoned this guilty world to a typical judgment; swept, by the deluge, its offending myriads into a typical hell; and preserved in the ark, by a typical salvation, the solitary few, who, strangers and pilgrims in an alien world, feared God, and wrought righteousness, and walked by faith the narrow way which leadeth unto life. Again: when the effects of the flood had passed away, in the renewed world God, as the Psalmist relates, again "looked down from heaven upon the children of men, to see if there were any that would understand, and seek after God." And again: He finds that "they are all gone out of the way, that they are altogether become abominable, that there is none that doeth good; no, not one." Such are the testimonies which God himself bears to man, under the antediluvian, the patriarchal, and the Mosaic dispensations. To prove then the assertion of the Apostle, given under the Christian dispensation, that "all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God" and that the whole race of man lies under the condemning sentence of the law,--that law which denounces a curse against "every one who continueth not in all things that are written in the book of the law to do them," we need not appeal to the convulsions of a labouring and decaying world; or to the fair face of nature, moved as it is, and stript of its created beauty, on account of the sin of man; but we may safely appeal to the "more sure word of prophecy; and say, in the language of an Infallible Guide, "Search the Scriptures.” There, the corruption of man's nature, originally perfect, is the fundamental truth that every page to which we turn either asserts or assumes. This truth alone can rationally explain its ceremonial ablutions and typical sacrifices: give object and meaning to its commands and prohibitions, punishments and rewards. There we distinctly learn that "all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God:" that man's fallen nature subjects him to the guilt and punishment, to the corruption and bondage of sin; and that he is a debtor in ten thousand talents, and with nothing to pay. But "the God with whom we have to do" is a sin-abhorring and holy God: a God of justice and truth: a God who, prospectively, denounced, against the whole race of man, the sentence of spiritual and eternal death, when, amid the countless favours and blessings of paradise, He issued that one warning prohibition, "In the day that thou eatest thereof, thou shalt surely die." He repeats, daily, the same sentence to each individual, in the standing record of His will, "The soul that sinneth, it shall die." And remember, that of His words, though heaven and earth shall pass away, not one jot or one title can fail. : It is then to sinners, as under the guilt and sentence of the Divine law-the truth, and justice, and holiness of God pledged to their eternal ruin in themselves, and in all creation, without remedy, and without hope, it is to sinners so circumstanced, that "we preach Christ crucified, the wisdom of God unto salvation:" that is, the grand scheme of Omniscence for reconciling the jarring attributes of Deity; that mercy and truth might meet together, righteousness and peace embrace each other. Christ crucified is "a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction, for the sins of the whole world," guilty and perishing as it is making full atonement for iniquity, transgression, and sin; and bringing in a perfect and “everlasting righteousness." He paid, with His own blood, the price of man's redemption. He fully satisfied, by His obedience, even unto death, the infinite demands of holiness, and truth, and justice; so that God might be just, and yet the Justifier of him that believeth in Jesus. But man is not only guilty, but depraved. His very inmost nature, his "carnal mind, is enmity against God," and loves the practice and the present wages of sin. He instinctively lives by sight, and not by faith; and sails, with rapid and fearless course, upon the smooth expanse of a deceitful world, amid hidden rocks, and shoals, and quicksands. Pardon, therefore, of the guilt of sin, though free as the boundless mercy of God can bestow, and the utter helplessness of man require, does not meet his utmost necessities. The voice of the sinner is—or ought to be-" Create in me a clean heart, O God; and renew a right spirit within me." To such " we preach Christ crucified, the power of God unto salvation." We propose to the affections, led captive by Satan at his will, a new and adequate object, "Christ crucified." We appeal to every slumbering principle, every generous feeling, every tender sympathy and we call upon the sinner to abandon for ever, at the foot of the cross, the sins which there cru : cified the Lord of Glory: there, to mortify, in the heart, the love of this present evil world: and there to crucify "the flesh, with its affections and lusts." Nor are the blessings of the Gospel merely negative; healing indeed the diseases of the soul, but not ministering to its wants and innocent desires. No: we offer a congenial food for the unsatisfied cravings of the immortal soul in "the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Ghost." We offer rest to the troubled spirit, in its pilgrimage through a world of cares, in that "peace of God which passeth all understanding." In fact we offer respectively, in "Christ crucified," to the ignorant, and the guilty, and the unholy, and the lost, "wisdom, and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption." And still we preach Christ crucified,-to the Jews a stumbling block, and to the Greeks foolishness:"-to the superstitious, or legal formalist, trusting in his ceremonial privileges, or self-justifying performances to the carnal and worldly professor, counting gain godliness; seeking to make religion pander to his temporal interests, and unmortified lusts: to this Jew in spirit, whatever may be his nation or creed, the cross of Christ is "a stumbling block," in its levelling and abasing doctrines, its unworldly and self-denying precepts. To the literary attainments, and speculative theories, of the philosopher, to the self-sufficiency of reason, to the pride of the natural heart, to this spirit which characterizes the Greek, the preaching of the cross is "foolishness," in its simple and spiritual, and as he deems them unphilosophical causes and inadequate means: and in its want of all scholastic system; its rejection of all merely human eloquence and worldly wisdom. And yet, thus rejected as He is, it is "Christ crucified" alone, with His efficacious atonement, His spiritual precepts. His new commandment, His elevating and eternal sanctions, His quickening and immortalizing Spirit, who can give to the cold and inanimate body of a temporal and ceremonial dispensation-which, separate from Christ, Judaism is-or to the marble statue of a mere earthly philosophy, the completeness, and the finish, of moral perfection, and moral beauty, the last touch of the artist's hand. He alone can impart to it the enlivening spirit; and "breathe into its nostrils the breath of life." It is "Christ crucified" alone who can create sound and vigorous principles; warm and energetic affections: who can bestow spirit, and life, and heart: who can, at once, redeem and cleanse; justify and sanctify: who can first awaken the slumbering conscience, stupified by sin, and steeped in the utter forgetfulness of a spiritual death, to the danger and ingratitude of wilful and unresisted sin: thus " purge the awakened conscience from dead works to serve the living God:" and with that magnet of Omnipotent attraction, His dying love- that mysterious influence with which He declares, when "lifted up," He would draw all men unto Him-can assimilate the soul to His own likeness; leading it on from grace to grace, from holiness to glory. But, however various our courses through life, one end is common to all: "It is appointed unto all men once to die, and after that the judgment." We must all meet the king of terrors, on the borders of the grave and the King of Glory at the bar of judgment. And who, I put it to your own reason and conscience-who, at that solemn hour, can extract the sting of death? speak peace to the troubled |