Revelation 21:23

Revelation 21:23

Christ the Light of all Scripture.

I. Consider how far the Christian conception of Christ accounts for the structure of Scripture prophecy. Deliverance from all evil, by means of the Son of man, who yet should suffer in delivering men this was the idea of the first prophecy and the substance of the first hope. Already, then, we see faintly sketched the outline which all subsequent prophecy only filled up more clearly; already the Spirit of God was testifying to holy men of the sufferings of Christ and the glory that should follow. But along with this promise of a Deliverer, and necessarily springing out of it, another idea must have arisen in the minds of those who heard it: the idea of a Judge and an Avenger. The promise of Him who was to crush the serpent's head implied ere long a warning prophecy of Him who should crush the serpent's brood; and thus the very idea of salvation and deliverance gave rise in a world of impenitent and hardened sinners to that of judgment and retribution. And in this idea of the Christ that was to be, we have the keynote of all the prophecy that foretold Him.

II. But Scripture is history as well as prophecy. Is the Lamb the Light of this also? Does the idea of Christ account for the structure of the historical parts of Scripture? Now, in the first place, it is clear that from the moment that first prophecy to which we have referred was uttered it must have made for itself a history, the history of those that believed it as distinguished from the history of those that believed it not. All righteous men in God's kingdom of old, so far as they were righteous, were truly types of the Son of man yet to be revealed. As we peruse the history of God's kingdom among men, we see throughout it all, side by side with the idea of humanity ever tending, struggling upward towards God, the idea of Deity ever condescending to, ever allying itself with, man. Thus already does the great mystery of godliness, the union of the two natures, God manifest in the flesh, take almost visible shape and form before us, and thus the lines of mystery, like the lines of prophecy, are seen all to lead up to, and converge in, the God-Man, the incarnate Christ.

III. The Lamb is the Light of the law of Scripture. Either the ritual of the Jews was a Divine prophecy of the Atonement, or it was not Divine at all. For view the Jewish ritual apart from any thought of a future atonement to be represented in it, look on it only as a system of worship appointed for men by God, and is it conceivable that the God we worship could have ever given it? We do not hesitate to say that, thus viewed, the ceremonial law of the Jews, with its blood-stained altars, its ruthless waste of innocent life, its burdensome ritual of minute and useless ceremonies, its vexatious and wanton restrictions, its severe and awful penalties for the slightest infraction of its many rules, is one of the most unmeaning, the most repulsive, the most childish of all human superstitions. But view it as a revelation in type and symbol of the atonement hereafter to be effected by the sacrifice of Christ, and it becomes a picture so minutely accurate, a prophecy so extensively and yet so entirely true of all those good things to come, "a pattern of heavenly things" so exquisitely perfect, that it cannot have been given by any save by Him who from everlasting had designed alike the true and heavenly tabernacle and this its earthly and prophetic shadow.

W. C. Magee, Christ the Light of all Scripture,p. 1.

References: Revelation 21:23. Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. x., No. 583; Homiletic Quarterly,vol. i., p. 355.Revelation 21:27. Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. xxvii., No. 1590; J. Aldis, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xxiv., p. 257. Revelation 22:2. Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. xxi., No. 1233; W. C. E. Newbolt, Counsels of Faith and Practice,p. 46; G. W. McCree, Christian World Pulpit,vol. ix., p. 410.