One Way to God
Jesus could not make it clearer; ‘I am the door,’ he said. He could not make it more lucid, ‘I am the way . . . no man comes to the Father but by me.’ One day in this world there was darkness at noon and there at the epicentre of that cosmic gloom was God’s only begotten Son, Jesus Christ. He had come forward under the constraint of his love for us and in his office as our Redeemer and Saviour. The green hill far away was a place of execution, and there the flaming sword was destroying him. He was there receiving our sin and guilt and blame. There on the cross of Golgotha while made sin for us he found this principle still applied, that without the shedding of blood there was no remission. It was not enough that he had become incarnate; it was not enough that he had preached the Sermon on the Mount; it was not enough that he had pleaded for men to repent of their sins and come to him. No, there must be the shedding of blood. If Christ was to purchase our pardon then there was only one place he could do that, on Calvary’s tree. It was by the shedding of his own most precious blood. It was only by his dying under the condemnation of God that Jesus Christ could redeem us.
You take that great figure of the sword. It became a commanded sword, one that must do the work its Creator gave it to do, and so we hear, ‘Awake, O sword, against my shepherd, against the man who is close to me! declares the Lord Almighty. Strike the shepherd’ (Zechariah 13:7). That great flaming sword of God’s judgement against sin, turning every way against every form of iniquity, buries itself at last deep in the person of the Son of God.
‘Jehovah bade his sword awake:
O Christ, it woke ‘gainst thee;
Thy blood the flaming blade must slake,
Thy heart its sheath must be.
All for my sake, my peace to make;
Now sleeps that sword for me’
(Anne R Cousin, 1824-1906)
Only thus does Christ become a Saviour. Only thus is he perfected, as he sheds his blood and the waters go over his soul, as the sword of retributive righteousness turns this way and that upon the head of the church and he receives double from God for all their sins. It is a marvellous principle, the great God who condones nothing, and his great Son in whose heart the sword of God is buried. That is the way to God. That is why Christ was able to promise the dying thief, ‘Today you will be with me in paradise.’ What the first Adam lost the last Adam has regained.
I tell you when men approach God and come to his throne they still find the flaming sword. He is a righteous God and never anything else, but you will find something else, that if we go to him by Jesus Christ alone then we are sprinkled with his blood and there is immunity from the guillotine. We are inviolable if Christ has gone there first in our place, with our sin and taken responsibility for our guilt and the sword has fallen on him, then it cannot fall again on us. Punishment God cannot twice demand for the same sin. Where do we stand today in regard to this? As we approach the great white throne where do we find a covering for our sins? Here is the great inviolable principle, ‘Without the shedding of blood there is no remission of sins.’ Where do we stand in the light of that? Do we cry, ‘I am saved from the sword of wrath! The door to heaven is opened wide, the blood of Christ has been shed for me, the sentries have become welcoming angels, there is remission and so I can come boldly’? This is the way of peace with God!
Is there one single person reading these words who is reconciled to going to hell? And if I assume that not one of you wants to end in the place of woe then let me ask you upon what is your hope and confidence that it will not be so with you? On what are you basing your hopes of heaven? On what? Have you taken into your reckoning the flaming sword? Have you realised that the means of pardon and redemption have been determined by the nature of the God who is light and a consuming fire? The greatest impediment to your reconciliation is God himself. There is the integrity of God and I am saying that all the greatest difficulties are on his side. It is the glory of the gospel that it tells us that he has also dealt with the difficulties. He has appeased his own wrath against our sin while remaining a God of utter blamelessness. He has imputed my sin to his own dear Son and willingly and lovingly Christ has borne it and dealt with all its eternal consequences. He has been condemned and I am pardoned. He has been judged and I am forgiven. The sword fell on him and the kiss comes to me.
Have you fled to the Christ your substitute? Are you hiding in his wounded side? This is the only way to God. This is the only way there will be a new heavens and a new earth. Paradise will be restored one day by this great work of the Son of God. You must do what this man did as he sat in a car and heard the gospel. There was no priest and no church; no baptismal font and no episcopal hands placed on his head. There was just the word of the gospel of forgiveness of sins through Jesus Christ. He trusted the word; he trusted the one who had come and spoken the word, the Saviour who had bowed his head under the blow of the flaming sword that we might bow our heads in submission and acknowledge him to be our eternal Lord.