1 John 3:5

WHY CHRIST CAME

‘Ye know that He was manifested to take away our sins.’

1 John 3:5

Here is a subject on which men have often worried and perplexed themselves; they have asked themselves, from time to time, why should the scheme of our salvation be what it is? Why must Christ come?

I. Why Christ came.—What was the practical side of the coming of our Blessed Lord Jesus Christ, of His manifestation, as St. John calls it? ‘To save sinners,’ says St. Paul; could there be any announcement more brief, more precise, more attractive, than the aims and purposes of the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ? Who is a sinner? Who is meant by this explanation? A sinner, as the original word implies, is a man who has missed the mark; a man who has failed to hit the aim and object of his being; one who, created for a definite purpose, has failed to realise that purpose; one who, designed to do a certain work and to attain a certain thing, has neither attained the one nor reached the other. That is a sinner. Of course we know the work appointed for God’s creatures and the destiny they are made for. Made originally in God’s image, in God’s likeness, endowed with reason, conscience, sense of duty, power of choice and action, capacity for communicating with their fellow-men and even for holding communion with God, having God’s favour over them now as a present blessing, and God’s eternal presence in their future home, how has the privileged race of mankind demeaned itself? How has it sinned? We know it has broken right away from its proper centre, it has been disloyal to its rightful owner, boasting in a freedom which is no honour, saying, ‘My powers are my own law for me.’ Can we in any way so well express the condition of mankind as we know it as by that one word ‘sinners’?

II. Personal recognition.—Such then was the race which our Blessed Lord contemplated having before Him when He came into the world. He came to save sinners, and on His coming He said Himself, ‘I came not to call the righteous but sinners to repentance.” And so we see that, unless we can recognise ourselves under this description, then neither can we count ourselves the objects of recognition. We must know ourselves to have missed the mark if we would count ourselves in the number of those for whom He offered the salvation of Himself. St. Paul could see himself among that number. ‘Sinners,’ he said, ‘of whom I am chief.’ How true it is that each one of us knows more about himself than he can possibly know about anybody else. And so when he takes into account the warnings, the opportunities, the forbearances which have marked his course through life, and then, on the other hand, the follies and the backslidings, the obstinacies and the sins with which he has gone astray and done crookedly, then he feels that however it may be with others, he can without affectation take upon his own lips St. Paul’s words, and say that if Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners He came to save those of whom I—even I myself—am among the chief.

III. ‘Comfortable words.’—‘Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners’; truly the Prayer Book rightly calls them comfortable words. He came to save those who had missed the mark, to knit again into the bonds of affection children who had left their father’s home and were wasting their goods in selfish misery in desert and distant lands. He came to make God once more known and honoured to those whose special misery it was to feel they had lost sight of Him, who had flung away all the assurance they might have had. He came to take away the sting of death and to give life for evermore. In order to do this—for without it we should be missing the surest basis—He came to take our sins upon Him by dying for our sins. Christ, the sacrificed, and now Christ the Risen and Ascended Lord, came out of the boundless compassion of the Father’s love, to die for us—for our sins, and not for our sins only, but for those of all the world. ‘He was manifested to take away our sins.’ Let us then be continually thinking of this purpose, and so we shall find an increasing power to resist and conquer sin.

—Rev. Lewis Gilbertson.

Illustration

‘Christ’s purpose is to take away, not certain sins, but all our sin, to sanctify us wholly, to present us faultless. He is not partial to the sins which we tolerate. Here, then, is a strong motive, the strongest possible, in the purpose of Christ’s manifestation. How can we, for whom He was manifested, live in the sins which He came to take out of us? How hopeful sanctification is if His purpose was such.’