‘Died for us.’  Now that expression plainly implies two things:  first, that Christ died of His own accord, and being impelled by a great motive, beneficence; and, second, that that voluntary death, somehow or other, is for our behoof and advantage.  The word in the original, ‘for,’ does not define in what way that death ministers to our advantage, but it does assert that for those Roman Christians who had never seen Jesus Christ, and by consequence for you and me nineteen centuries off the Cross, there is benefit in the fact of that death.  Now, suppose we quote an incident in the story of missionary martyrdom.  There was a young lady, whom some of us knew and loved, in a Chinese mission station, who, with the rest of the missionary band, was flying.  Her life was safe.  She looked back, and saw a Chinese boy that her heart twined round, in danger.  She returned to save him; they laid hold of her and flung her into the burning house, and her charred remains have never been found.  That was a death for another, but ‘Jesus died for us’ in a deeper sense than that.  Take another case.  A man sets himself to some great cause, not his own, and he sees that in order to bless humanity, either by the proclamation of some truth, or by the origination of some great movement, or in some other way, if he is to carry out his purpose, he must give his life.  He does so, and dies a martyr.  What he aimed at could only be done by the sacrifice of his life.  The death was a means to his end, and he died for his fellows.  That is not the depth of the sense in which Paul meant that Jesus Christ died for us.  It was not that He was true to His message, and, like many another martyr, died.  There is only one way, as it seems to me, in which any beneficial relation can be established between the Death of Christ and us, and it is that when He died He died for us, because ’He bare our sins in His own body on the tree.’

Dear brethren, I dare say some of you do not take that view, but I know not how justice can be done to the plain words of Scripture unless this is the point of view from which we look at the Cross of Calvary—­that there the Lamb of Sacrifice was bearing, and bearing away, the sins of the whole world.  I know that Christian men who unite in the belief that Christ’s death was a sacrifice and an atonement diverge from one another in their interpretations of the way in which that came to be a fact, and I believe, for my part, that the divergent interpretations are like the divergent beams of light that fall upon men who stand round the same great luminary, and that all of them take their origin in, and are part of the manifestation of, the one transcendent fact, which passes all understanding, and gathers into itself all the diverse conceptions of it which are formed by limited minds.  He died for us because, in His death, our sins are taken away and we are restored to the divine favour.