‘He died for our sins.’  Now, if the Apostle had only said ’He died for us,’ that might conceivably have meant that, in a multitude of different ways of example, appeal to our pity and compassion and the like, His death was of use to mankind.  But when he says ’He died for our sins,’ I take leave to think that that expression has no meaning, unless it means that He died as the expiation and sacrifice for men’s sins.  I ask you, in what intelligible sense could Christ ‘die for our sins’ unless He died as bearing their punishment and as bearing it for us?  And then, finally, ’He died and rose ... according to the Scriptures,’ and so fulfilled the divine purposes revealed from of old.

To the fact that a man was crucified outside the gates of Jerusalem, ‘and rose again the third day,’ which is the narrative, there are added these three things—­the dignity of the Person, the purpose of His death, the fulfilment of the divine intention manifested from of old.  And these three things, as I said, turn the narrative into a Gospel.

So, brethren, let us remember that, without all three of them, the death of Jesus Christ is nothing to us, any more than the death of thousands of sweet and saintly men in the past has been, who may have seen a little more of the supreme goodness and greatness than their fellows, and tried in vain to make purblind eyes participate in their vision.  Do you think that these twelve fishermen would ever have shaken the world if they had gone out with the story of the Cross, unless they had carried along with it the commentary which is included in the words which I have emphasised?  And do you suppose that the type of Christianity which slurs over the explanation, and so does not know what to do with the facts, will ever do much in the world, or will ever touch men?  Let us liberalise our Christianity by all means, but do not let us evaporate it; and evaporate it we surely shall if we falter in saying with Paul, ’I declare, first of all, that which received,’ how that the death and resurrection were the death and resurrection of the Christ, ’for our sins, according to the Scriptures.’  These are the facts which make Paul’s gospel.

II.  Now I ask you to look, in the second place, at what establishes the facts.

We have here, in this chapter, a statement very much older than our existing written gospels.  This epistle is one of the four letters of Paul which nobody that I know of—­with some quite insignificant exceptions in modern times—­has ever ventured to dispute.  It is admittedly the writing of the Apostle, written before the gospels, and in all probability within five-and-twenty years of the date of the Crucifixion.  And what do we find alleged by it as the state of things at its date?  That the belief in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ was the subject of universal Christian teaching, and was accepted by all the Christian communities.  Its evidence to that fact is undeniable; because there