Conviction of Sin by the Cross
It is a fixed expectation of Christ Himself, that His mission to the world will have a considerable part of its value in raising a higher moral sense in mankind, and producing a more appalling conviction of their guilt or guiltiness before God.
I. Conviction of sin is a profoundly intelligent matter, and worthy in that view to engage the counsel of God in the gift of His Son. The sense of guilt is itself a pain of the mind, just as light is pain to a diseased eye; but light is none the less truly light, and guilt is none the less truly intelligent, on that account. The returning of guilty conviction is, in fact, the dawning, or may be, of an everlasting and complete intelligence, in just the highest, moral side of the nature, that was going down out of intelligence into stupor and blindness. Is it, then, a severity in Christ that He is counting on a result of His ministry and death so essentially great and beneficent?
II. It is quite evident that such a Being as Christ could not come into the world, and pass through it and out of it in such a manner, without stirring the profoundest possible convictions of character. If the Divine glory and spotless love of God are by Him incarnated into the world, the revelation must be one that raises a great inward commotion. Every guilty mind will feel itself arraigned and brought to know itself, that beholds or looks into the perfect glass of history that describes this life. And, above all, when it is ended by such a death, inflicted by a world in wrong, who that knows himself to be a man will not be visited by silent pangs, not easy to be stifled.
III. Christ was a Being who perfectly knew the pure standards of character and duty, knowing as well what sin is in the breach of them, and what man is in the sin. He knew exactly what to do on all occasions, and with all classes of men, to put the sense of guilt upon them; and we can see ourselves that He has it for one of the great objects of His ministry, even as it was a great expectation, in the matter of His death, that all enemies and rejectors would discover, in bitter pangs of conviction, that, in what they have done upon Him, they have only let their sin reveal its own madness.
IV. In the Scriptures we find many tokens that Christ, before His coming, was expected to come in this character; and also many declarations by Himself and His followers afterward, that He had, especially in His death, accomplished such a result.
V. A very bad act often brings out the show of a bad spirit within, and becomes, in that manner, a most appalling argument of conviction. Hence the immense convincing power to be exerted on mankind through the crucifixion of Christ by His enemies. It rolls back on our thought in a kind of silent horror, that will not always be repelled, that the manifested love of God, impartial and broad as the world, a grace for every human creature, is yet gnashed upon by the world and crucified.
VI. I think I may assert with confidence, that there is no man living who is not made conscious at times of sin, by the simple fact of his own rejection of Christ. No matter what may be reasoned by infidels and Christian speculatists about, against, or for the historic person of Christ; if He is a fiction only, or a myth, a romance of character, got up by three or four of the most unromantic writers in the world, still He is the greatest, solidest, most real truth, ever known to man. The Christ of the New Testament is the want, consciously or unconsciously, of every human heart; and that, aching secretly for Him, it aches the more that it has Him not, and still the more that it will not have Him. "He shall convince of sin, because they believe not on Me."
H. Bushnell, Christ and His Salvation,p. 98.
References: John 16:10. J. Vaughan, Sermons,11th series, p. 229.