of reality to the temptation in the wilderness, to the devil’s departing from him for a season, to his coming again to experience a like failure?  Ever and ever, in the whole attitude of his being, in his heart always lifted up, in his unfailing readiness to pull with the Father’s yoke, he was repelling, driving away sin—­away from himself, and, as Lord of men, and their saviour, away from others also, bringing them to abjure it like himself.  No man, least of all any lord of men, can be good without willing to be good, without setting himself against evil, without sending away sin.  Other men have to send it away out of them; the Lord had to send it away from before him, that it should not enter into him.  Therefore is the stand against sin common to the captain of salvation and the soldiers under him.

What did Jesus come into the world to do?  The will of God in saving his people from their sins—­not from the punishment of their sins, that blessed aid to repentance, but from their sins themselves, the paltry as well as the heinous, the venial as well as the loathsome.  His whole work was and is to send away sin—­to banish it from the earth, yea, to cast it into the abyss of non-existence behind the back of God.  His was the holy war; he came carrying it into our world; he resisted unto blood; the soldiers that followed him he taught and trained to resist also unto blood, striving against sin; so he became the captain of their salvation, and they, freed themselves, fought and suffered for others.  This was the task to which he was baptized; this is yet his enduring labour.  ’This is my blood of the new covenant which is shed for many unto the sending away of sins.’  What was the new covenant?  ’I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah; not according to the covenant which they brake, but this:  I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts, and will be their God, and they shall be my people.’

John baptized unto repentance because those to whom he was sent had to repent.  They must bethink themselves, and send away the sin that was in them.  But had there been a man, aware of no sin in him, but aware that life would be no life were not sin kept out of him, that man would have been right in receiving the baptism of John unto the continuous dismission of the sin ever wanting to enter in at his door.  The object of the baptism was the sending away of sin; its object was repentance only where necessary to, only as introducing, as resulting in that.  He to whom John was not sent, He whom he did not call, He who needed no repentance, was baptized for the same object, to the same conflict for the same end—­the banishment of sin from the dominions of his father—­and that first by his own sternest repudiation of it in himself.  Thence came his victory in the wilderness:  he would have his fathers way, not his own.  Could he be less fitted to receive the baptism of John, that the object of it was no new thing with him, who had been about it from the beginning, yea, from all eternity?  We shall be about it, I presume, to all eternity.