The Free Gift of God by C. M. S.

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · May 18, 1911

The Free Gift of God

By C. M. S.

BECAUSE of the promise made to the Eden household by Satan, and man’s acceptance of it, the days of human life were numbered, and that life was made dependent upon human effort for its sustenance. Obedience was the key to everlasting life; disobedience would open the gate of the tomb, and flood the world with misery, greed, and crime.

But human effort can not bring everlasting life; it can not guarantee the prolongation even of this temporal life. Since the decree went forth in Eden, “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread,” man has waged a continuous warfare with the thistle and the thorn for the wherewithal to live. But this bread secured by human effort was not

to be the Bread of Life. Men ate of it, and died. Men toiled for it for themselves and their families, till, bent and beaten in the struggle, they were laid away, and left the same heritage to their children. So mortal man has passed his little day, and fought his losing fight, in the battle for bread — and life.

Into this whirlpool of stress and struggle and strife, of blasted hopes and blighted ambitions, there came one day the good news of deliverance — the Bread of Life had come. Moving among men as one of them was One to whom the Father had given “to have life in himself” sufficient for the needs of all the world. Man had been struggling to force the unwilling earth to yield him sustenance for his temporal life; but even this must come through the power and the merciful forbearance of God. But the life which Jesus Christ has come to give was the life of which sin had robbed the race, and that was life eternal. The bread that man had eaten in the sweat of his face was the bread that he had earned. It could sustain only for a time the life that God had put in man; so that man never could, through his own labors, “eat, and live forever”—never could win eternal life by works that he might do. That must be “the gift of God.” And so the record reads: “The wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.” Rom. 6:23. That “gift” came in Christ, the Son of God, the Son of man, binding in one the attributes of both humanity and divinity, and so reconciling man to God. “This is the record, that God hath given to us eternal life, and this life is in his Son. He that hath the Son hath life; and he that hath not the Son of God hath not life.” 1 John 5:11, 12.

Blessed be that Bread of Life that satisfies the hunger of the soul! Mankind has eaten to the full of the “bread of affliction,” and struggled from the cradle to the grave for the bread of temporal sustenance; but now, out of the largeness of the abundance of the mercy of God comes the free gift of the Bread of Eternal Life, which, if any man eat, “he shall live forever.” We were shackled to sin; Christ has burst the shackles for us, and set us free. We were bound by transgression to the prison-house of the dead; but Christ is risen, and holds the keys of the grave, and will set at liberty every soul that has put his trust in him. We have eaten of the fruit of our labor that could not give us life; he has given us in its place the life of God, that makes eternity ours, and will permit our feet to tread this earth when sin has been consumed. All this has come — has come to us — through him who is the Bread of Life, the free gift of God. C. M. S.