The Testimony of the Blood # 5

There is something almighty in the death of Jesus Christ. Many of God's people have failed to recognize the important distinction between His crucifixion and His death. The crucifixion is man's side. The death is His own. All the crosses ever made, and all the men who ever conceived them, could never have brought about the death of the Lord Jesus, apart from His own voluntary act of laying down His life. "I lay down My life ... No man taketh it from Me... I lay it down of Myself. I have power (jurisdiction) to lay it down, and I have power (jurisdication) to take it again. This commandment have I received of My Father's" (John 10:17, 18).

The preaching of Christ crucified i not the preaching merely of what men did to Him, but of what He allowed men to do, and, in and through what they did, what He did. The death of Christ, in its real meaning, is not man's act, nor is it the devil's act. satan and men had made many unsuccessful attempts to kill Him, but His hour had not come. He fixes the time for what He will do. The rulers said, "Not during the feast" (Mark 14:2), but the Lord Jesus took it out of their hands, and out of the hands of Judas, and precipitated it on that day in the Upper Room; so deftly heading it up that Judas was as one under authority: "That thou doest, do quickly" (John 13:27).

When He 'lays down' His life that He may 'take it again', there is infinitude in the deliberate act, and it relates to universal sovereignty. Sin, as the principle; the old creation, as the sphere; satan, as the ruler in that realm; death, as the consequence; and judgment, as the inevitable prospect and reality: all are involved in the death of Christ. That entire ground was dealt with, and that regime brought to an end, in that death. The whole thing centers in the Person of the Lord Jesus. The same Person must be able both to act as representative of man rejected of God because of sin, and, as representative, receive all the judgment of God upon man and sin, and yet at the same time,because sin is not inherent in Him, but in Himself He is utterly sinless, render death and hell incapable of holding Him. There never was such an One, other than Jesus Christ: Son of Man - Son of God.

The pouring out of His Blood was, on the one side, His voluntary yielding to wrath and destruction from the face of God, as Man for man; and, on the other side, a saying in effect to death, the devil and the grave, 'I concede you all your claims unto the last atom, and exhaust all your demands, in being made sin and a curse. But you have another in Me also, over Whom you have no power or rights, because you have no ground in Him. You cannot hold Me - I defy you; and, what is more, I now take you as My prisoners. Henceforth I am your Lord, and I will plunder your domain and rob you of your spoil.'

Thus the testimony of the Blood is basic to victory, ascendency, and spiritual prosperity, and is the most deadly force against all the works of the adversary.

So He, because of His sinless perfection, can stand in complete acceptance with God, suitable to God, and this representatively as man (though more than man). His Blood, therefore, representing His sinless and victorious life, is given to us, and in virtue of it there is constituted that princely seed in all the good of His triumph. This does not make us sinlessly perfect, but He Who is in us is so.

~T. Austin-Sparks~

(the end)