15
15
Well, there was only one way. God, in the greatness of His
heart of love, would not allow His blessing to be for ever pent
up. He was concerned that His blessing could flow out to men.
You get the secret in the first few chapters of Genesis, and the
secret is that a Man, the same One who is now at the Father’s
right hand distributing blessing, had personally to become a
curse. He was One who was distinct, who was apart from all
these features that required the curse; the features of sin that
you know in your heart, the features of lawlessness that
have marked you since the time of your childhood, these
features Jesus was apart from, distinct from. Every way He
was afflicted; everything that has come upon anyone has in
some way come upon the Lord Jesus, every sorrow. We think
of the sorrows that there are in bereavement; the Lord Jesus
has felt that kind of sorrow; He has felt everything of that kind,
felt it so that He wept, but always distinct from any other
person in that He is sin apart, no sin, not a taint of sin; in fact
there was a man at the cross who had to give testimony—“this
man has done nothing amiss”, Luke 23: 41. Now you know
how often you do things amiss.
You may not be trying to sin; you could almost say it is not sin,
but it is amiss. You are trying to do your best and you cannot
do it. Here was One, the Lord Jesus, not only without sin but
without doing anything amiss; no word out of turn, no action
out of turn, everything perfect according to God’s view.
What did God do to that One? He caused that blessed, holy,
blameless One to bear the penalty. The Lord Jesus was
hanged, hanged upon the cross to bear sin, to bear the
penalty and to remove the curse, to allow God’s heart of
blessing for you to be opened up, to allow the blessing that
had been in the heart of God towards all men to flow out
freely. That is the way that Jesus has been, to bear the curse,
to go to the cross; ‘through toil, and grief and loss, the Man of
sorrows wends His way’, the hymn says, until that time when