Hebrews 10:12

Hebrews 10:12

The Lessons of the Cross.

Our Lord's suffering is also

I. Our example. How powerful the force of that teaching has been; how deep it has sunk into human nature's heart. Here is He who was man, and yet was God. As God He could not die, but He stooped to death in the inferior nature. There is no limit to the force of this example. He has burst the gap through the gloomy barrier that fenced in the human life; He has let in light where all was dark before. His footsteps shine before us on the way, and the more rugged and painful the ground, the more firmly are they printed, the more deeply traceable.

II. But, again, the death of Christ witnesses to truth. All prophecy and its fulfilment, all teaching and its verification in the life of man, is less convincing than the tale of the cross. It proves to us the truth in practice, that the will of God is the law and life to man. Life eternal is our object, and therefore suffering is our business.

III. The cross of Christ is our greatest lesson in moral teaching. It teaches us under this head, (1) the immense value of our souls, and (2) the heinousness of sin as the bane and scourge of those souls.

IV. And, lastly, it is our bond of union. He died to gather together in one the Church of God which is scattered abroad, to become the Good Shepherd of those far-off sheep, to bring them home to Him and to each other. The Church of God is the result, imperfect, scantily realised, and in idea so wide and so prominent, so historically grand, so socially vast, that its failure so far as it has failed is forced into prominence which meaner things could not reach. But the Church of God in its imperfections does but sum up and contain the total of the shortcomings of its members. They are Christ's members still; He counts them as such, and we may count them as such.

H. Hayman, Rugby Sermons,p. 214.

Hebrews 10:12

I. There is an exceeding grandeur approaching to awe about everything which can be done only once. This is a great part of the grandeur of death, and of the judgment in their nature, they can be only once. And the atonement is the more grand because it is of the same character. The cross is magnificently fearful in its perfect isolation. Everything in religious truth, which went before it in ages past, looked on to it. Everything in religious truth which has ever followed, and in ages yet to come, looks back to it. It is the bud of all, the beginning of all, the sum of all.

I. We make sacrifices, and what are they? If we think, in any sense whatever, to offer up anything in the slightest degree propitiatory for sin, we plainly violate the whole Bible. We offer three things: our praises, our duties, and ourselves. These are our only sacrifices. And what makes these things sacrifices? The Christ that is in them. So that still, be we of the Jewish or the Christian dispensation, the same thing is true there is "one sacrifice for sins for ever."

II. Remember, that marvellous as is the region of the thought in which we are walking when we treat of the atonement, it is all in accordance with the most perfect sense of our understanding, and all lies within the strictest limit of perfect justice; nay, its foundation is justice, and it commends itself to every man's judgment as soon as he sees it. But such a view as a prospective forgiveness of future sin would violate every principle of common sense. Holiness is the great end of the cross. Pardon, peace, salvation, happiness, are only means means to holiness; holiness, which is the image of God, which is the glory of God. Beware of any approach to any view of Christ which does not directly tend to personal holiness. For He perfects whom? Them that are sanctified.

J. Vaughan, Fifty Sermons,5th series, p. 138.

References: Hebrews 10:12. Clergyman's Magazine,vol. x., p. 230. Hebrews 10:12; Hebrews 10:13. Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. ii., No. 91.