But, secondly, I find in these sayings collectively our Lord's conception of the purposes of His coming.
I gather them together as briefly as may be. The Son of Man is come to seek and to save that which is lost.' The Son of Man is not come to destroy men's lives, but to save them.' I am come, not to judge the world, but to save the world.' Salvation, then, is the purpose. Take another class. I am come that they might have life.' The bread of God is He which cometh down from heaven that He may give life to the world.' Salvation,then, or the communication of life, is the purpose. Yet again, I am come, a Light into the world, that whosoever believeth in Me may not abide in darkness: Salvation, then, or the communication of life, or the flooding of the world with light, such are the purposes, as Jesus saw them, of His coming.
Think of the conception of humanity, that is, of you and me, and of my needs and yours, which underlies these solemn words--dead; in peril; famished; dark and blind--that is humanity, as it presented itself before the meek Sage of Nazareth. And to deal with a humanity so full of desperate needs, and so utterly incapable of any kind of self-help, was the problem which this audacious young Rabbi grappled, and said that He had solved. That is tremendous. And not only is it tremendous, but it may come to us with a suggestion that we had better see whether the terms in which He described the world have any application to us, and, if so, what we mean to do. Christ looked below the surface. He regarded men mainly in their relation to God, and God's laws, and He beheld a universal pall spread over all nations, and every man as having come short of the glory of God.
Think, again, how in this declaration of purpose there lies the clearest consciousness of non participation in that universal condition. He who comes and arrogates to himself the power and the right to deal with these necessities must himself be clear from all implication in them. Think of the consciousness of inexhaustible power, as well as the outgoing motion of a boundless love, which such a notion of His life's work proves Christ to have possessed. What a superb confidence in the healing power of His touch, in the exuberant abundance of vitality, by which He was able to breathe a soul beneath the ribs of all the corpses in the valley of dry bones! What an unfailing fountain of light there must have been in His own consciousness of Himself, that He should venture upon such words as these!
And again, I say, His tremendous claim to be able to save the world in the full sense of delivering from all moral and physical evil, and endowing with all moral and physical good, is verified by facts. He has done it for some of us; He is doing it every day; and if He does not do it to the world, it is not because He has not the power, but because the world will not submit to the power.
Did Peter, or John, or Paul ever say more about His work than He said Himself? Are not their most rapturous sayings only the expansion and the setting forth of the ground and the consequences of His own statements? Back to Christ,' the Saviour, the Life-giver, and the Light-bringer.
