p. 139 | Salvation by Christ

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Oct 14, 1873

Salvation by Christ.

ALL through the Old Testament there was not a solitary prophet that undertook to lift the vail that separated between the present and the future, and peer out into the distance, but the cross of Christ loomed up before him; not a solitary sweet singer in Israel undertook to tune his harp, but its sweetest note told of Calvary. All the way from beginning to end, the idea of an atonement for your sins and mine is seen in almost every sentence in the blessed Bible.

Suppose I examine the Scriptures, where do I find the glory of Jesus? In his teachings, grand and beautiful! I do not wonder that Renan and others of that class have written, in these last days, that such a teacher never lived on the face of the earth as Jesus Christ. In his example, how beautiful and grand! A converted Jew to whom I once listened was trying in broken language to speak of Jesus, and being at a loss for a word, at last lifted up his eyes to heaven, and exclaimed, “How beautiful a character!”

But it is in the sufferings, in the blood, and in the death, of Jesus on the cross that we find the beauty of his character. It was there that the apostle fixed his heart and his eye when he said, “God forbid that I should glory save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.” I can glory in his teachings, they so infinitely excel the teachings of all the philosophers of earth. I can glory in his example, because it so infinitely excels the most beautiful examples earth has ever seen; but when I glory in Jesus most of all, I get down at the foot of the cross; it is at Calvary, in thought and in heart, at least, I kneel at the feet of my Master, and give him all the glory for the salvation wrought out by his cross. This fact runs through the Old and New Testament Scriptures, that the faith of the church and of the individual believer is directed, not to the Father up yonder upon the throne, not so much to the teachings and example of our blessed Saviour, as it is to the sufferings, the death, and the blood, of Jesus. If this be so, how am I to accept the theory of some who, in these modern days, teach that the death of Jesus was nothing more than the death of a patriot, a philosopher, or a good man?—The Methodist.