The mission of Jesus Christ.
"Unto you first," etc.. The Bible its own interpreter. All acknowledge the greatness, wonderfulness, perfection of the gospel portrait. Misconstruction of the facts by the Jew, by the unbelieving philosopher, by the mere moralist, by the rationalist. The last verse of the apostle's sermon a summing up Scripture and facts of history. So always revelation and history explain one another. The truly evangelical view of Christ the only one that appeals to the universal human heart.
I. THE INFINITE FOUNDATION ON WHICH THE GOSPEL RESTS. God raised up his Son (Servant); God sent him.
1. The twofold aspect of the Divine character thus presented to us. Love desiring to bless; righteousness requiring the putting away of iniquities. All is from the Father.
2. The person and the work of Christ revealed in their intimate union. "Raised up," comprehending the whole conception of the mediatorial exaltation of Jesus Christ. Difference between his history and that of any mere human agent raised up for action, the necessity for all that we find in the Scripture record. God knows it, though we may not see it.
3. The Scripture is not given to be worked up by men's devices into mere food for human pride; it is a practical Book, the foundation laid, to be built upon. Christ was sent to bless us, and we can find the blessing only as we seek it practically.
II. THE UNIVERSAL MESSAGE TO THE WORLD.
1. The moral state of all men shows the necessity for such a proclamation. "Your iniquities." The history of the gospel reminds us that the most religiously instructed were far from being the most godly. The superstitions and oppositions of the world multiply its iniquities, Man cannot turn himself to God.
2. The whole gospel must be preached, or its true success cannot be realized. The mutilated Christianity of our time is proving itself impotent. We must lead the hearts of men to a person; we must teach them dependence on a power; we must call them to newness of life, a life already made manifest through Christ, both in his history and in the history of his people. Then:
3. The blessing should be put first and foremost. Blessing which the world has been waiting for from the beginning, which it has been prepared for by the dispensations, which it received in germ in Abraham and his seed, but which is for all the families of the earth. Hence it was "to the Jew first," as the consecrated messenger; but as the patriarchs were taken to the larger sphere of Egypt that they might come forth from it prepared to be God's messengers, so Christianity must be taken from its Judaistic standpoint, and put into the central position of the world's life, that it may draw to itself Greece and Rome, the East and the West, the whole nature and existence of humanity. So now the progress of man is from the emancipation of the individual, through that of the nation, to the cosmopolitan blessedness of mankind as a race. The mission of Christ is to each and to all.—R.
HOMILIES BY P.C. BARKER