“CHRIST DIED”
David C Brown
1 Corinthians 15: 1-8
This scripture sets out the terms of the gospel. How wonderful that God has provided glad tidings, and glad tidings depending on ascertained facts. Men may come up with philosophies, their own notions and fantasies. The gospel is entirely a matter of facts. It is founded on that; it can be depended upon because of that. We read through these various things which are determined facts. There is witness to them; they are known matters; the world chooses to disregard them, but they are sound, they are things that can be depended on, and they are facts. Yet they are not mere facts, but they are matters to affect our souls. And as I was considering this scripture, these two words seemed so vital to me, “Christ died”. They are almost the two most amazing words together, that could be put together: “Christ died”. You may look through the story of mankind and ask, ‘What is different? - Abel died, Adam died’. You read in Genesis about persons living to great lengths of time; they died. Methuselah lived nine hundred and sixty nine years “and he died”, chap 5: 27. What is different? Christ died. Well, there are two things.
Firstly, when we think of the glory of the Person, because this is not simply an ordinary, a mere man; this is God Himself. God has come in. We read earlier today about the Babe in the manger; how wonderful. It is not simply something to affect our sentiments: God has come in. He was a Babe; He was a Man. And, of course, we have to be careful: we cannot say that God died. It was a Man that died, but it was a Man who in His Person was God. He was a Man who could go to a grave, and say to the man who was in there, “Lazarus, come forth.” (John 11: 43), and he would come forth. The whole power of death that had gripped every man, from Abel onwards, could not withstand the power of Christ. Yet, Christ died.
A second thing distinguishes this Man from any other; death has a claim upon men because death is the penalty of sin, Rom 6: 23. It is the penalty for your sins. We have no sins recorded of Abel, but he was still of fallen nature, and no doubt he would have accepted he was a sinner; he died. There are others, good men, throughout the Old Testament. How wonderful that there were good men in the Old Testament, God’s work was in them, and faith marked them. Some can be drawn upon as types, but they died, because of the penalty of death upon them; because they were sinners. Remarkably one man did not; Enoch did not, Heb 11: 5. That is a remarkable fact, and it demonstrates too how God was looking forward to the whole idea we speak of as the rapture. He is going to take living persons, I trust us, to be caught up to be with Him, to meet Him in the air. He demonstrated the power to do it already in Enoch. Yet Enoch was still a sinner, one needing a Saviour, and he was unlike Christ, who came here, and in this life had no claim of death upon Him, no claim of Satan upon Him, and no claim of the world upon Him. He was entirely separate from all these things, with no taint of sin upon Him. No sin was in Him, and there was no sin that He committed. How wonderful that there is a Man who is distinguished from all other men, Christ. He has that title; indeed, you could say because of that distinctiveness - Christ - that shows God’s approval of Him. We read of Jesus earlier, but He is Christ, One who has God’s approval because He walked a life of perfection and glory, and secured everything for the divine will.
Despite all that He was, and all His excellence, Christ died. And you can sing, and I can sing:
Christ died! then I’m clean: not a spot within.
God’s mercy and love! not a cloud above.
(Hymn 22)
I trust all of us sang it with faith and reality. You sang it - did you mean it? I always find it a test; we know our hymnbooks, and we can sing with our minds elsewhere. You sang it: did you mean it? In your heart, did it convict you? It is a wonderful, blessed fact, ‘Christ died! then I’m clean’. That involves the fact of His death, and it was such a death as the death of the cross. It involved that His death from men’s point of view was one of shame and degradation. And it also was a death that demonstrated, in its glory and perfection, the love of God towards you. So that we can present the glad tidings, and the only ground we have of presenting the glad tidings is, “Christ died”. Now, there is what is further in this passage which is vital too. But it is foundational that Christ died.
Think of that time; there He was upon the cross. I was reading something before that affected me, Christ was on the cross for the first three hours: and in those three hours what flowed towards Him was man’s utter hatred. ‘You have got want you want’, you could say to the Jews; ‘you have crucified the One you wanted to do away with’. But they had to be there expressing the depth and greatness of human hatred in every kind of aspect. What was flowing down? An infinitude of divine love was flowing towards them, so that the people who were crucifying Him and hating Him, casting everything upon Him, were met by that wonderful word, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”, Luke 23: 34.
It is the same love towards you now, the same love. We sing that too:
Lord, on the throne Thy love’s the same
As once upon Thy cross of shame;
(Hymn 15).
The love is not reduced. If you ever wondered, or if you ever doubt, how much God loves you, or how much Jesus loves you, just remember: Christ died for our sins. Christ died. He took up our liabilities at the cross; He took up the charges against us at the cross; He took up what was God’s just judgment upon our sins at the cross. Do you know that for yourself? “Christ died for our sins”; Christ died for my sins? Do you say that? Because you have got to take this up and grasp it. These are facts; it is the truth. There are witnesses that Christ died. But that might be to someone here, as it is to many people, merely a historical fact. They look up the history books, and they can estimate the time and so on; and there is no affect upon them morally. Does the fact that Christ died have an effect on you morally? Christ died for our sins. We have to lay hold of it in faith. And He died having completed everything that was required that you should come into blessing. He died having completed the most terrible three hours in history of this universe. How terrible they were to Him.
We were speaking yesterday about holiness, and that is one feature of the Lord Jesus. It has been said that there was nothing out of keeping with the holiness of God in the whole of His pathway. And there He was at the cross, and His Person filled with that holiness, divine holiness; He is the Holy One of God. Holiness includes at least an utter revulsion for sin; and that One was made sin on the cross so that you and I could be in liberty without any charge against us:
Christ died! then I’m clean: not a spot within.
God’s mercy and love! - not a cloud above.
The work so full, so complete, so blessed that you can come into that blessing. You can come into it in its fulness and know what it is in the sight of God and in your conscience. I think these two thoughts are there, ‘not a spot within’, that you realise within yourself, as having trusted Jesus, that you are clean. All the work has been done; what was morally out of accord with God has been removed. Along with that, ‘not a cloud above’, nothing to dim your communion with God because of the work of the Lord Jesus Christ. Wonderful. That is the prospect to you in the gospel; that is what is being laid before you.
But again, we have to emphasise it has got to be taken up in faith. Do you have faith? Have you trusted this One? Have you accepted Him as your own Saviour? When it says, “Christ died for our sins”: have you accepted, 'It was for my sins’, and how blessed it is when you know that, when you think of it that He died; that is the penalty. Everything is finished as far as sins are concerned. When He went into death, the final matter was the penalty, and the penalty was borne by the Lord Jesus. Christ died.
But then He was buried; He went out of sight. Then the world could not see Him any longer, and they have never seen Him since. Others have seen Him. God’s eye was in that tomb, and His spirit was with the Father. It is wonderful to think of God’s care, to think of the care that God had of the body when it was buried. The reality of death, death was so real, that despite the glory of the Person, He could not care for Himself. So God provided something. What would men have done? They would have taken the body down from the cross and put it into a criminal grave. God provided for that: ‘So far you have gone, so far you have gone in disparaging and doing everything wicked you can towards my Son’. God ensured that He was with the rich in His death. But then He did not remain there: how wonderful! We have been speaking of that already, and that only confirms to speak of it again and again; what does it say? “He was raised the third day according to the scriptures”. That was God’s act, or on the other side of that you could say it was His own act because of who He is. The glory and the might! Here it is presented as God’s act, He was raised.
Think of God being first at the tomb; before Mary who rose early because she had lost her Lord and she wanted to be as near as possible. Do you feel like that? Christ was raised from among the dead by the glory of the Father. Raised, how wonderful: what an answer to man, an answer to sin, an answer to what there is in this world. It was an answer to the righteousness of the Lord Jesus too, an answer to the perfection of His work, an answer to all He deserved. It was an answer for mankind.
Mr Darby said (Collected Writings vol 1 p215) that the resurrection was ‘the great miracle of divine interference in human misery’. Think of the misery of mankind; what is death but the greatest source of that misery? Well, it is part of the human condition, but in that misery there is God’s interference; God is assured that there is going to be not just one resurrection, but many. This chapter goes on to refer to “the first-fruits, Christ”, v 23. There He is: nobody can share that with Him; He has to be the first. He is pre-eminent in resurrection: the first-fruits Christ. “Then those that are the Christ’s at his coming”. Think of that wonderful company, the dead in Christ; they are going to rise. There is not anyone here who has not had the sorrow of losing someone to death. Is it not wonderful, that we can have that confidence that, if they believed, that person who is gone into the grave will rise again, “each in his own rank”. The first rank is in glory; every other one is going to be in glory too. Nothing can stop it, as the hymn says:
Despite aught Satan could contrive,
In Christ shall all be made alive.
(Hymn 179)
That resurrection power is available to everyone, it is towards you now. The gospel goes out; what power there is, the power of resurrection. That resurrection power can be known in your life, because you have not only been a sinner, but you have a sinful nature. And how is that dealt with? It is dealt with by the fact that the Lord Jesus has gone into death, and the believer can say I have died with Christ, and I am buried with Him, and can live again. The power of resurrection means there is resurrection power for you to walk, and to “walk in newness of life”, Rom 6: 4. How wonderful for you to enjoy what it is to serve Him. I think it is wonderful that the apostle Paul, as he is coming to the end of his life, desired “to know him”, Phil 3: 10. How well he knew the Lord Jesus, and he wanted to know Him better.
How well do you know Him? Do you want to know Him better? The more you know Him, the more you will desire Him. “The power of His resurrection”: the better you know it as the apostle Paul did, the more you will desire it: “to know him, and the power of His resurrection”, the enjoyment and the fulness and the blessedness of what is the divine mind that you should enjoy. That being worked out in practice depends on the Holy Spirit. This passage in Corinthians does not go on to everything that is in the glad tidings because we have said of "the first-fruits, Christ”, that He is raised, ascended and glorified, but now think of the wonderful fact that the first thing in His mind as glorified was to send the Holy Spirit. There was a period when the Lord was raised and the Spirit had not yet come, and there was that wonderful communication in heaven between divine Persons.
I trust that you not only know the Lord Jesus as your Saviour, but you know the Holy Spirit as your Comforter and Friend, the power for life. No doubt again you will desire to know more in the degree that you know it. The more you know the Spirit’s power, the more you will desire the Spirit’s power, and know that you have got to leave every other power behind. Nothing else is going to be of value in the testimony, in the assembly, in the response to God, but the Spirit’s power, under the Lord’s direction, and as given by the Father. How wonderful to be brought into this.
And then you have the fact, lest there should be any doubt, that the Lord Jesus appeared; He appeared to companies, appeared to individuals, appeared to five hundred at a time. He was not limited then and He is not limited now. This was actual; this was literal; the Lord Jesus actually came to persons in a room without opening the door. He came and stood in the midst. That was real. The apostles saw it with wonder, and did homage to such a One. You think of Him coming in and saying, “Peace be to you”, John 20: 19. There were individuals - Cephas, that is Peter, Christ came to him, and I think you could say simply He resolved matters with him. He will come to you; if there is a matter between you and the Lord - sometimes there is even for the believer - He is ready to come to you.
All the issues have been dealt with in perfection at the cross. You can say, ‘Christ died! then I’m clean’; you can be in His presence in that way. After that we have mention of another of the great witnesses - out from His side flowed blood and water; there is everything needed to cleanse you, everything needed to make you suitable for the divine presence; everything from Him. Again it is a matter of faith; it is a matter of receiving Him; it is a matter of accepting Him. It is a matter of knowing such a One as your Saviour and your Lord. How wonderful that we have such a Saviour to speak of.
And then we gather on a Lord’s day morning, and we have these emblems before us, and we are reminded of that love that has been shown so perfectly. “Christ died”; there is the bread; there is the cup. Christ died; He is not in death now: He is in glory now, but the love is still the same. We sometimes sing that too:
The love that gave Thyself for us
Forgotten cannot be;
Its fresh appeal …
(Hymn 326)
I trust there is a fresh appeal for everyone in the preaching of the glad tidings tonight, and may we be blessed as letting that flow over us, and being in the fulness of the blessedness of such a glorious Saviour.
For His Name’s sake.
Loanhead
19th February 2023