Why Christ came.
I. We are carried here into the very heart of the Gospel; we are told why Christ came, why there is a gospel. Some one may say that the object of the Gospel is to destroy the works of the devil, which is, I suppose, a Hebrew form of words for sin, and thus the amount of it all is that the one aim of the Gospel is to teach men to lead moral lives. In this tone you hear men speak of the Christian morals as higher and purer than those of other religions or other philosophies. They are Christians, according to their idea of that phrase, because they admire the Sermon on the Mount and the general tone of Scripture. The text does bear on its surface an enforcement of morality. It does imply that Christ's real battle is with sin. It does bid us, if we are Christians, to fight it out with our sins. But the thing wanted was conscience knows it a specific medicine for a specific disease, a Divine intervention to repair a breach and a ruin, a supernatural remedy for an unnatural condition. To teach morality to a being whose very will is in bondage is no satisfaction to the demands, to the expectations, of the heart and soul of mankind.
II. "That He might destroy the works of the devil." What have we here? Not, surely, a mere Orientalism for moral evil; not, surely, a chance or a cant phrase for which a mere abstraction might be substituted at pleasure; rather a glimpse faint yet true of a wreck and a chaos utterly unnatural; of a power alien and hostile which has entered, and defiled, and desolated a portion of God's handiwork; something which is not a mere spot, or stain, or disfigurement, but has an influence and an action real and definite, a power which works in the hearts, and lives, and souls of men, and which can only cease to work by being destroyed.
III. And for this purpose the Son of God was manifested. The revelation of the supernatural was the death-blow of the unnatural as such. Conscience accepts, conscience welcomes, conscience springs to grasp, it. We find conscience satisfied, tranquillised, comforted, by the discovery of a love and a power mightier than all the hate and might of evil. We find an argument here, such as there is nowhere else, for renouncing and casting out sin. We do find an echo in all but hardened hearts of that brief, thrilling expostulation of St. John, "And every man that hath this hope in him purifieth himself, even as He is pure."
IV. "If the Fall," one has written, "is a fearful tragedy, reparation must be more than an idyll." The man who makes light of Calvary, the man who rests in Deism, the man who thinks ethics enough, and rather compliments the Gospel upon its morality than views that morality as a revelation such a man, depend upon it, is a man of either darkened or else unawakened conscience. When he learns the plague of his own heart, then there will be a revelation within of the necessity, of the beauty, of the adaptation and congruity, of a gospel of grace. Then will the words flash upon him with a dazzling lustre, "He manifested forth His glory, and His disciples believed on Him."
C. J. Vaughan, Words of Hope,p. 15.
The First Sinner.
Nothing in the whole of Scripture is plainer than its teaching respecting the evil spirit. If he be not a personal reality, the word of God is good for nothing. His agency is closely interwoven with the first man's original sin, as closely interwoven with the second Man's established righteousness; in fact, it forms an integral part of the great whole, which if we attempt to tear away, difficulties beset us far more appalling than anything involved in the doctrine itself thus called in question.
I. Gathering up then the testimony of Scripture respecting Satan, we learn from our Lord's own lips that he abode not in the truth. He was one of those spiritual beings created, like ourselves, in love and living in the love of God. In this love, the spring of all spiritual conscious being, he did not abide. All evil is personal, is resident in a person and springing from the will of a person. And in every such person sin, evil, is a fall, a perversion of previous order and beauty, not in any way an arrangement of original creation.
II. Sin was in this spirit no result of weakness, no distortion of a limited being, endeavouring to escape into freedom. He was mighty, and noble, and free. Out of his very loftiness, out of his spiritual eminence, were those elements constituted which, when once the perversion took place, became the powers and materials of his evil agency. Sin springs not from the body, nor from any of the subordinate portions of our own nature, but is the work of the spirit itself, our highest and our distinguishing part, arises in the very root and core of our immortal and responsible being.
III. All sin is in its nature one and the same thing, whether in purely spiritual beings or in us men, who are both spiritual and corporeal; it is a falling from the love of God and of others into the love of self. And for this reason the fallen spirits are everlastingly tormented; they believe that there is one God, and tremble at Him as their Enemy, perversely mistrusting His love and hopelessly opposing His will.
H. Alford, Quebec Chapel Sermons,vol. iv., p. 68.
References: 1 John 3:8. Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. xxix., No. 1728; W. Landels, Christian World Pulpit,vol. vii., p. 376. 1 John 3:9. J. B. Heard, Ibid.,vol. ix., p. 158. 1 John 3:10. F. E. Paget, Sermons for Special Occasions,p. 89. 1 John 3:13. J. Keble, Sermons for Sundays after Trinity,Part I., p. 42. 1 John 3:13; 1 John 3:14. H. C. Leonard, Christian World Pulpit,vol. i., p. 160.