The Passion and Death of Christ by Charles Haddon Spurgeon

Author:Charles Haddon Spurgeon
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780802811875
Publisher: William B. Eerdmans
Published: 1973-02-15T06:00:00+00:00

dying for their friends—this is superlative, but Christ’s dying for us is as much above man’s superlative as that could be above mere commonplace. Let me show you this in seven

The first is this—Jesus was immortal, hence the special character of His death. When a man lays down his life for his friend, he does not lay down what he could keep altogether; he could only have kept it for a while, even if he had lived as long as mortals can, till grey hairs are on their head he must at last have yielded to the arrows of death. A substitutionary death for love's sake in ordinary cases would be but a slightly premature payment of that debt of nature which must be paid by all.

But such is not the case with Jesus. Jesus needed not die at all; there was no ground or reason why He should die apart from His laying down His life in the room and place and stead of His friends. Up there in the glory was the Christ of God for ever with the Father, eternal and everlasting; no age passed over His brow; we may say of Him. “Thy locks are bushy and black as the raven, thou hast the dew of thy youth.” He came to earth and assumed our nature that He might be capable of death, yet remember, though capable of death, His body need not have died; as it was it never saw corruption, because there was not in it the element of sin which necessitated death and decay. Our Lord Jesus, and none but He, could stand at the brink of the grave and say, “No man taketh my life from me, but I lay it down of myself. I have power to lay it down and I have power to take it again.” We poor mortal men have only power to die, but Christ had power to live. Crown Him, then! Set a new crown upon His beloved head! Let other lovers who have died for their friends be crowned with silver, but for Jesus bring forth the golden diadem, and set it upon the head of the Immortal who never needed to have died, and yet became a mortal, yielding Himself to death’s pangs without necessity, except the necessity of His mighty love.

Note, next, that in the cases of persons who have yielded up their lives for others they may have entertained, and probably did entertain the prospect that the supreme penalty would not have been extracted from them. They hoped that they might yet escape. There is an old story of a pious miner, who was in the pit with an ungodly man at work. They had lighted the fuse, and were about to blast a piece of rock with the powder, and it was necessary that they should both leave the mine before the powder exploded: they both got into the bucket, but the hand above which was to wind them up was

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