seem to against him. Here the witnesses come into court. The devil says, “Soul, God has forgotten you, I will bring in my witness.” First he summons your debts — a long bill of losses. “There,” he says, “would God allow you to fall like this, if he loved you?” Then he brings in your children — either their death, or their disobedience, or something worse, and says, “Would the Lord allow these things to come upon you, if he loved you?” At last he brings in your poor tottering body, and all your doubts and fears, and the hidings of Jehovah’s face. “Ah,” says the devil, “do you believe that God loves you now?” Oh, it is noble, if you are able to stand up and say to all these witnesses, “I hear what you have to say, let God be true, and every man and everything be a liar; I do not believe any of you.” You all say, God does not love me; but he does, and if the witnesses against his love were multiplied a hundredfold; yet still I would say, “I know whom I have believed.”
I know that safe with him remains,
Protected by his power,
What I’ve committed to his hands,
Until the decisive hour;
He will bring me safely to heaven at last, unharmed in the way.
26. I have only one other application to make from my text. In this large assembly, composed of so great a multitude of men, there are doubtless some who are saying, “I cannot think that God would have mercy on such a sinner as I am.” “I cannot conceive,” says another one, “though I know my guilt, I cannot conceive that the love of God can blot out such iniquity as mine.” Permit me to take your hand, and if mine is not enough I could take you around these galleries, and down here, and I could give you hundreds of hands, and hundreds of lips should speak and say, “Sinner, never think that the love of God can be exceeded, or destroyed, by your sin, for I obtained mercy,” and around the gallery the sound would go if this would be a gospel chorus — “and I,” “and I,” “and I,” and you might go up to the brother, and say, “What were you?” “I was a drunkard”; one says. “I was a swearer, I cursed God”; says another, “I loved the boxing ring, and the bowling alley”; says another; “I was a fornicator, an adulterer, and yet God has forgiven me,” and oh how sweetly would we all sing in chorus, concerning the power of Christ to save, for we have all in our measure felt its might.
27. Now, my, dear friend I take your hand, and I say, “We have known and have believed the love that God has for us,” and we are the very chief of sinners ourselves. Will you honour God by believing that he is able to save you through the blood of Christ, for if the Lord now enables you to honour him in believing, depend upon it, he has begun a good work in you and has set his heart upon you. Sinners, believe that God is love. Oh trust him who gave his Son to die. He will deny you nothing. If you ask with humble faith, you shall assuredly receive, our witness is given; do not reject it, “We have known, we have believed the love that God has for us.”
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The Wounds Of Jesus
No. 254-5:233. A Sermon Delivered On Sunday Evening, January 30, 1859, By C. H. Spurgeon, At The New Park Street Chapel, Southwark.
He showed them his hands and his feet. {Luke 24:40}
1. I have selected this sentence as the text, although I shall not strictly adhere to it. What was to be seen on Christ’s hands and feet? We are taught that the prints of the nails were visible, and that in his side there was still the gash of the spear. For did he not say to Thomas? “Reach your finger here and behold my hands, and reach your hand here and thrust it into my side, and do not be faithless, but believing.” I wish to draw your attention to the simple fact, that our Lord Jesus Christ, when he rose again from the dead had the marks of his passion in his body. If he had pleased he could readily have removed them. He rose again from the dead, and he might have erased from his body everything which could be an indication of what he had suffered and endured before he descended into the tomb. But, no! Instead of that, there were the pierced hands and feet, and there was the open side. What was the reason for this? There was no absolute necessity for it: it could easily have been dispensed with. What, then, were the reasons? I shall endeavour to enter into this subject, and I hope we may draw some profitable instructions from it.
2. First, what influence did the exhibition of the hands and feet have upon the disciples? Secondly, why is it that Jesus Christ, now in heaven, bears with him the scars in his flesh? And, then, thirdly, is there any lesson to us in the fact that Jesus Christ still wears his wounds? I think there is.
3. I. First, then, OF WHAT USE WAS THE EXHIBITION OF THOSE WOUNDS TO THE DESCIPLES? I reply at once that they were infallible proofs that he was the same person. He said, “Behold my hands and feet, that it is, I, myself.” It was to establish his identity, that he was the very same Jesus whom they had followed, whom at last they had deserted, whom they had beheld afar off crucified and slain, and whom they had carried to the tomb in the gloom of the evening; it was the very same Christ who was now before them, and they might know it, for there was the seal of his sufferings upon him. He was the same person; the hands and feet could testify to that. You know, beloved, had not some such evidence been visible upon our Saviour, it is probable that his disciples would have been sceptical enough to doubt his identity. Have you never seen men changed, extremely changed in their external appearance. I have known a man, perhaps, five or six years ago; he has passed through a world of suffering and pain, and when I have seen him again, I have declared, “I should not have known you if I had met you in the street.” Now, when the disciples parted with Jesus it was at the Lord’s Supper. They then walked with him into the garden. There the Saviour sweat, “as it were great drops of blood.” Do you not imagine that such a wrestling, such a bloody sweat as that, must have had some effect upon his visage. It had surely had enough to mar it before. But now the ploughshares of grief were sharpened, and anguish made deep furrows upon him. There must have been lines of grief upon his brow, deeper than they had ever seen before. This would have produced a change great enough to make them forget his countenance. Nor was this all. You know he had to undergo the flagellation at the pillar of the Praetorium, and then to die. Can you imagine that a man could pass through the process of death, through such astonishing agony as what the Saviour endured, and yet that there should be no change in his visible appearance? I can conceive that in passing through such a furnace as this, the very lineaments of Christ’s face would seem to have been melted, and would have needed to be restored before the disciples could discern that he was the same man.
4. Besides that? you know that when Jesus arose, he rose with the same appearance as he now has when seated in heaven. His body was flesh and bone, but, nevertheless, it had miraculous powers; it was capable of entering into a room without the ordinary modes of access. We find our Saviour standing in the midst of his disciples, the doors being shut. I believe that Jesus had a body such as we are to have in the next world. Jesus Christ was not a phantom or spectre. His body was not a spirit; it was a real body. And so in heaven do not imagine that we are to be spirits. We are to be spirits until the great resurrection day; but, then, our spirit is afterwards to receive a spiritual body; it is to be clothed; it is not to be for ever a naked, bodiless spirit. That body will be to all intents and purposes the same body which shall be laid in the tomb. It is sown in dishonour, and the same, it is raised in glory: it is sown in weakness, and the same, it is raised in power. Note, Jesus was still flesh! All flesh is not the same flesh: all bodies have not the same qualities. So our Saviour’s
