AS IT WAS FORETOLD.

Auckland Star, Volume LXI, Issue 97, 26 April 1930, Page 2 (Supplement)

AS IT WAS FORETOLD.

LIFE AND DEATH OF JESUS. The following is from the sermon delivered by the Rev. W. D. Morrison Sutherland at a united meeting in the Baptist Church, Mount Albert, on Good Friday: — "Medical men who have studied the matter have given it as their opinion that it was heart rupture that was the cause of Christ's death. That is to say, if they were asked to give a certificate of His death, they would give as its actual cause a broken heart. Their opinion is worth pondering, in view of the statement in one of the Messianic psalms: 'Reproach hath broken My heart.' For what does it mean? It means that it was not the pain and the exhaustion caused by the crucifixion that killed our Lord. It did not kill the two men at His side —their legs had to be broken. It means that what killed Him was the sin and wickedness of sinful and wicked men. "And yet, when all this is said, only half the truth has been stated, for wo must remember that His deatli was voluntary on His part., Behind the iniquity and the wickedness and the savageness of it, there was His Own will. He willed it, otherwise it would have been a purely human death and a martyrdom, and, therefore, without virtue. It was no merely human death. It was the death of the Son of God. He died on a cross on a Friday afternoon outside the city gate because He willed it. 'No man,' He had said some time before, 'taketh My life from Me. I lay it doWn of Myself. I have power to lay it down and I have power to take it up again.' So His death was a doing, as well as a suffering. Wicked men nailed Him to the Cross because He allowed them. The sin and wickedness of men broke His heart, because He took the sin and wickedness of men upon Himself. He died because He gave His human spirit up to His Father. In death and in life He was the Son of God. "One is amazed that anybody can read the Gospels, especially in the light of the Old Testament, without this conviction. There is nothing in history more wonderful than the literal manner in which His whole career was the fulfilment of the Old Testament Scriptures. He was of the seed of Abraham, of the House of David, and the Son of a virgin. He suffered the reproach of His mother's children. He was a man of sorrows. He was betrayed by a friend and follower. He was crucified. Soldiers gambled for His clothes. He was buried in a rich man's tomb. "All that was predicted- long years before He was born. Even the man who, when he heard the pitifully human cry break from Him, 'I thirst/ placed a sponge with sour wine to His lips, was unconsciously fulfilling Scripture. You can, without the slightest difficulty, piece together the Gospels out of Pentateuch and Psalter and Prophets. You can, without the slightest difficulty, show that Jesus died as He had lived, according to the Scriptures. You can prove, as the Apostles did, and as every preacher of, the Gospel does, to minds open to conviction, that He was the One for Whose coming all the past was preparing, and from Whom all the futurewas to spring. That it needs more unreasoning faith to be a sceptic than a Christian believer is the tritest' of truths. The credulous man is not the man who repeats the. Apostles' creed. The credulous man is he who . believes that Jesus' life and death fitted in,by chance with the predictions of the Old Testament."