Exegetical and Hermeneutical Commentary of 2 Corinthians 5:14

For the love of Christ constraineth us; because we thus judge, that if one died for all, then were all dead:

14. For the love of Christ constraineth us ] i.e. the love which Christ has not only displayed, but imparted (De Wette). He refers to Rom 8:35; Eph 3:19 (which however must be read in the light of 2Co 5:17-18). The word translated constrain signifies to coop up, keep within narrow bounds. Cf. Luk 12:50, where the same word occurs. It is also used by St Luke of diseases, as in Luk 4:38; Act 28:8, and of a multitude crowding, as in Luk 8:45. Here it means ‘prevents us from doing anything but serve you for Christ’s sake.’

because we thus judge ] Not merely equivalent to think, but strictly judge, i.e. form an opinion upon sufficient evidence.

that if one died for all, then were all dead ] Most modern editors omit the ‘if,’ which is not contained in any of the best MSS. nor versions (except the Vulgate), and render thus, ‘That one died for all: therefore all died, not ‘were dead’ as in the A. V. The meaning of the Apostle would seem to be not that all men were dead in trespasses and sins, and therefore needed one to die for them, but that the death of Christ, Who had taken upon Himself to represent mankind before His Father’s throne, was in a sense a death of all mankind ( all collectively. Wordsworth). “What Christ did for Humanity was done by Humanity.” Robertson. Cf. Rom 6:6; Rom 6:10; Rom 7:4; Rom 7:6 (margin); Eph 2:13; Eph 2:16; Col 1:20-22; Heb 9:28; Heb 10:10. Also Gal 2:19-20,‘I through law died to law that I might live to God. I have been crucified with Christ.’

Fuente: The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges

For the love of Christ – In this verse, Paul brings into view the principle which actuated him; the reason of his extraordinary and disinterested zeal. That was, that he was influenced by the love which Christ had shown in dying for all people, and by the argument which was furnished by that death respecting the actual character and condition of man (in this verse); and of the obligation of those who professed to be his true friends 2Co 5:15. The phrase the love of Christ ( agape tou Christou) may denote either the love which Christ bears toward us, and which he has manifested, or our love toward him. In the former sense the phrase the love of God is used in Rom 5:8; 2Co 13:13, and the phrase love of Christ in Eph 3:14. The phrase is used in the latter sense in Joh 15:9-10, and Rom 8:35. It is impossible to determine the sense with certainty, and it is only by the view which shall be taken of the connection and of the argument which will in any way determine the meaning. Expositors differ in regard to it. It seems to me that the phrase here means the love which Christ had toward us. Paul speaks of his dying for all as the reason why he was urged on to the course of self-denial which he evinced. Christ died for all. All were dead. Christ evinced his great love for us, and for all, by giving himself to die; and it was this love which Christ had shown that impelled Paul to his own acts of love and self-denial. He gave himself to his great work impelled by that love which Christ had shown; by the view of the ruined condition of man which that work furnished; and by a desire to emulate the Redeemer, and to possess the same spirit which he evinced.

Constraineth us – ( sunechei). This word ( sunecho) properly means, to hold together, to press together, to shut up; then to press on, urge, impel, or excite. Here it means, that the impelling, or exciting motive in the labors and self-denials of Paul, was the love of Christ – the love which he had showed to the children of men. Christ so loved the world as to give himself for it. His love for the world was a demonstration that people were dead in sins. And we, being urged by the same love, are prompted to like acts of zeal and self-denial to save the world from ruin.

Because we thus judge – Greek We judging this; that is, we thus determine in our own minds, or we thus decide; or this is our firm conviction and belief – we come to this conclusion.

That if one died for all – On the supposition that one died for all; or taking it for granted that one died for all, then it follows that all were dead. The one who died for all here is undoubtedly the Lord Jesus. The word for ( huper) means in the place of, instead of; see Phi 2:13 and 2Co 5:20. It means that Christ took the place of sinners, and died in their stead; that he endured what was an ample equivalent for all the punishment which would be inflicted if they were to suffer the just penalty of the Law; that he endured so much suffering, and that God by his great substituted sorrows made such an expression of his hatred of sin, as to answer the same end in expressing his sense of the evil of sin, and in restraining others from transgression, as if the guilty were personally to suffer the full penalty of the Law. If this was done, of course, the guilty might be par doned and saved, since all the ends which could be accomplished by their destruction have been accomplished by the substituted sufferings of the Lord Jesus; see the notes on Rom 3:25-26, where this subject is considered at length.

The phrase for all, ( huper panton) obviously means for all mankind; for every man. This is an exceedingly important expression in regard to the extent of the atonement which the Lord Jesus made, and while it proves that his death was vicarious, that is, in the place of others, and for their sakes, it demonstrates also that the atonement was general, and had, in itself considered, no limitation, and no particular reference to any class or condition of people; and no particular applicability to one class more than to another. There was nothing in the nature of the atonement that limited it to anyone class or condition; there was nothing in the design that made it, in itself, anymore applicable to one portion of mankind than to another. And whatever may be true in regard to the fact as to its actual applicability, or in regard to the purpose of God to apply it, it is demonstrated by this passage that his death had an original applicability to all, and that the merits of that death were sufficient to save all. The argument in favor of the general atonement, from this passage, consists in the following points:

(1) That Paul assumes this as a matter that was well known, indisputable, and universally admitted, that Christ died for all. He did not deem it necessary to enter into the argument to prove it, nor even to state it formally. It was so well known, and so universally admitted, that he made it a first principle – an elementary position – a maxim on which to base another important doctrine – to wit, that all were dead. It was a point which he assumed that no one would call in question; a doctrine which might be laid down as the basis of an argument, like one of the first principles or maxims in science.

(2) It is the plain and obvious meaning of the expression – the sense which strikes all people, unless they have some theory to support to the contrary; and it requires all the ingenuity which people can ever command to make it appear even plausible, that this is consistent with the doctrine of a limited atonement; much more to make it out that it does not mean all. If a man is told that all the human family must die, the obvious interpretation is, that it applies to every individual. If told that all the passengers on board a steamboat were drowned, the obvious interpretation is, that every individual was meant. If told that a ship was wrecked, and that all the crew perished, the obvious interpretation would be that none escaped. If told that all the inmates of an hospital were sick, it would be understood that there was not an individual that was not sick. Such is the view which would be taken by 999 persons out of 1,000, if told that Christ died for all; nor could they conceive how this could be consistent with the statement that he died only for the elect, and that the elect was only a small part of the human family.

(3) This interpretation is in accordance with all the explicit declarations on the design of the death of the Redeemer. Heb 2:9, that he, by the grace of God, should taste death for every man; compare Joh 3:16, God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth on him should not perish, but have everlasting life. 1Ti 2:6, who gave himself a ransom for all. See Mat 20:28, The Son of man came to give his life a ransom for many. 1Jo 2:2, and he is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world.

(4) The fact also that on the ground of the atonement made by the Redeemer, salvation is offered to all people by God, is a proof that he died for all. The apostles were directed to go into all the world and to preach the gospel to every creature, with the assurance that he that believeth and is baptized shall he saved; Mar 16:15-16; and everywhere in the Bible the most full and free offers of salvation are made to all mankind; compare Isa 55:1; Joh 7:37; Rev 22:17. These offers are made on the ground that the Lord Jesus died for people; Joh 3:16. They are offers of salvation through the gospel, of the pardon of sin, and of eternal life to be made to every creature. But if Christ died only for a part, if there is a large portion of the human family for whom he died in no sense whatever; if there is no provision of any kind made for them, then God must know this, and then the offers cannot be made with sincerity, and God is tantalizing them with the offers of that which does not exist, and which he knows does not exist. It is of no use here to say that the preacher does not know who the elect are, and that he is obliged to make the offer to all in order that the elect may be reached. For it is not the preacher only who offers the gospel. It is God who does it, and he knows who the elect are, and yet he offers salvation to all. And if there is no salvation provided for all, and no possibility that all to whom the offer comes should be saved, then God is insincere; and there is no way possible of vindicating his character.

(5) If this interpretation is not correct, and if Christ did not die for all, then the argument of Paul here is a non sequitur, and is worthless. The demonstration that all are dead, according to him is, that Christ died for all. But suppose that he meant, or that he knew, that Christ died only for a part, for the elect, then how would the argument stand, and what would be its force? Christ died only for a portion of the human race, therefore all are sinners. Medicine is provided only for a part of mankind, therefore all are sick. Pardon is offered to part only, therefore all are guilty. But Paul never reasoned in this way. He believed that Christ died for all mankind, and on the ground of that he inferred at once that all needed such an atonement; that all were sinners, and that all were exposed to the wrath of God. And the argument is in this way, and in this way only, sound. But still it may be asked, What is the force of this argument? How does the fact that Christ died for all, prove that all were sinners, or dead in sin? I answer:

(a) In the same way that to provide medicine for all, proves that all are sick, or liable to be sick; and to offer pardon to all who are in a prison, proves that all there are guilty. What insult is it to offer medicine to a man in health; or pardon to a man who has violated no law! And there would be the same insult in offering salvation to a man who was not a sinner, and who did not need forgiveness.

(b) The dignity of the sufferer, and the extent of his sufferings, prove that all were under a deep and dreadful load of guilt. Such a being would not have come to die unless the race had been apostate; nor would he have endured so great sorrows unless a deep and dreadful malady had spread over the world. The deep anxiety; the tears; the toils; the sufferings, and the groans of the Redeemer, show what was his sense of the condition of man, and prove that he regarded them as degraded, fallen, and lost. And if the Son of God, who knows all hearts, regarded them as lost, they are lost. He was not mistaken in regard to the character of man, and he did not lay down his life under the influence of delusion and error. If to the view which has been taken of this important passage it be objected that the work of the atonement must have been to a large extent in vain; that it has actually been applied to but comparatively a small portion of the human family, and that it is unreasonable to suppose that God would suffer so great sorrows to be endured for nothing, we may reply:

(1) That it may not have been in vain, though it may have been rejected by a large portion of mankind. There may have been other purposes accomplished by it besides the direct salvation of people. It was doing much when it rendered it consistent for God to offer salvation to all; it is much that God could be seen to be just and yet pardoning the sinner; it was much when his determined hatred of sin, and His purpose to honor His Law, was evinced; and in regard to the benevolence and justice of God to other beings and to other worlds, much, very much was gained, though all the human race had rejected the plan and been lost, and in regard to all these objects, the plan was not in vain, and the sufferings of the Redeemer were not for nothing. But,

(2) It is in accordance with what we see everywhere, when much that God does seems to our eyes, though not to his, to be in vain. How much rain falls on ever sterile sands or on barren rocks, to our eyes in vain! What floods of light are poured each day on barren wastes, or untraversed oceans, to our eyes in vain! How many flowers shed forth their fragrance in the wilderness, and waste their sweetness on the desert air, to us apparently for nothing! How many pearls lie useless in the ocean; how much gold and silver in the earth; how many diamonds amidst rocks to us unknown, and apparently in vain! How many lofty trees rear their heads in the untraversed wilderness, and after standing for centuries fall on the earth and decay, to our eyes in vain! And how much medicinal virtue is created by God each year in the vegetable world that is unknown to man, and that decays and is lost without removing any disease, and that seems to be created in vain! And how long has it been before the most valuable medicines have been found out, and applied to alleviating pain, or removing disease! Year after year, and age after age, they existed in a suffering world, and people died perhaps within a few yards of the medicine which would have relieved or saved them, but it was unknown, or if known disregarded. But times were coming when their value would he appreciated, and when they would be applied to benefit the sufferer. So with the plan of salvation. It may be rejected, and the sufferings of the Redeemer may seem to have been for nothing. But they will yet be of value to mankind; and when the time shall come for the whole world to embrace the Saviour, there will be found no lack of sufficiency in the plan of redemption, and in the merits of the Redeemer to save all the race.

(A measure of truth is, doubtless, involved in this controversy concerning the universality of atonement; and the discussion of the subject in America, and more recently in this country, cannot fail ultimately to produce the most beneficial results. Yet we must express our conviction, that the seeming difference of opinion among evangelical people, has arisen from mutual misunderstanding, and that misunderstanding from the use of ambiguous phraseology. One says, Christ died for all people. No, says another, for the elect only. The dispute goes on and on, until at last the discovery is made, that while the same words were used by the disputants, each attached his own meaning to them. This ambiguity is painfully felt in the treatise of a distinguished writer, who has recently appeared on the limited side of the question. He does not explain, until he has advanced very far in the discussion, what sense be attaches to the common phraseology of Christ dying for all men.

He tells us afterward, however, that he understands it in the highest sense of securing salvation for them; when we are convinced, that much of the argument might have been spared, or at all events better directed, than against a position which few or none maintain. The author is himself sensible of this. The question, says he, might, perhaps, have been settled at the outset by a careful definition of terms; but I have purposely deferred doing so, judging, that it might be done with better effect as the discussion proceeded. In speaking of the Saviours dying for people, or dying for sinners, I have used the expression in what I conceive to be the strict and proper meaning, namely, as signifying his dying with an intention to save them. This, however, is not the only meaning the expression will bear, For all people, for sinners in general, the Saviour died. He died in their nature, he died in their stead, he died doing honor to the Law which they had violated; in other words, he died removing every legal obstruction that lay in the way of their obtaining life.

The Death of Christ the Redemption of his People, p. 70. Now, it is only in this last sense, that any rational advocate of general aspect in the atonement will maintain that Christ died for all people. Nor could he desire better language in which to express his views, than that which is furnished in the above quotation. That the atonement has certain general aspects is now nearly admitted on all hands. General it must be in some sense, says the author already quoted, if in some sense it be applicable to all, and that this is the case the foregoing statement undeniably proves, p. 68. The general aspect of the atonement is argued, from those well-known passages in which it is declared to have a reference to people, all people, the world, and the whole world. The reader will find some of these passages quoted above in the commentary. Of this universal phraseology various explanations have been given.

Some have supplied the qualifying adjective elect in these places, where the design of atonement is said to embrace the world. Modern writers of the highest name, however, and on both sides of the question, have vied with each other in their indignant repudiation of any such expletive. I have felt myself, says Dr. Wardlaw, far from satisfied with a common way of interpreting some of those texts which express the extent of the atonement in universal terms by means of a convenient supplement. According to this method of explanation, the world is, in such occurrences of it, made to signify the elect world, the word elect being inserted as a supplement, conceived to be necessary for the consistency of scripture. An elect world indeed, has become a phrase in common use with a particular class of commentators and divines; being employed with as much matter of course freedom, as if it had actually had the sanction of ordinary usage in the sacred volume; but it is not to be found there.

And subjoins Dr. Marshall, writing on the limited side of the question, It certainly is not to be found there, and with every word of this well-deserved censure I cordially agree. Here then is one principle of interpretation fairly exploded, and few nowadays will have the hardihood to espouse it. Again, the phraseology has been explained of the world of Jews and Gentiles indiscriminately, Gentiles as well as Jews; and those who adopt this view tell us, that the Jewish system was narrow and exclusive, embracing only one people, the progeny of Abraham; that it was the design of God, in the fullness of time, to enlarge his church and to receive within her ample arms people of all nations, Jew and Gentile, Barbarian and Scythian, bond and free; that the death of Christ was at once the fulfillment and abrogation of the typical system with all its special and exclusive rites; that by it the middle wall of partition between the Jew and the rest of the world was thrown down; that, therefore, it was natural to represent it as having a reference to all people and to the world, even when absolute universality was not and could not be intended. Such a vast enlargement of the scale on which spiritual blessings were now to be conferred, in consequence of the death of Christ, could not well have been expressed, it is alleged, in any other or in less universal terms. See this view of the subject well exhibited in Hills System, vol. ii., 2 Cor. 5.

To this principle of interpretation we have no great objection. There is doubtless much truth in it. It lends valuable assistance in the investigation of many passages. But is there not some sense in which that atonement has an aspect absolutely to all, and every man? As much we have seen admitted above. Now, if the Saviour died in the nature and stead of all, removing every legal obstruction that lay in the way of their obtaining life, how comes it to pass, that this universal aspect cannot be found in any of those confessedly the most universal passages in the Bible? If it be true, it must be found somewhere in the scriptures, and nowhere so likely, as in this class of texts; and the language, moreover, is just such as is naturally suited to express this sense. While then we allow, that the phraseology in question may be in part explained by the admission of Gentiles as well as Jews into the kingdom of God; we maintain at the same time, that there is nothing in it which prevents us from including all in each of those divisions of mankind. Nay, if the apostles had wished to express this idea, how otherwise could they have done it? Say if you will, says Dr. Wardlaw, commenting on Joh 3:16-17, that the world means Jews and Gentiles, still if it is not any definite number of Jews and Gentiles, it is Jews and Gentiles as together composing the world of mankind.

That the atonement, indeed, has a certain benign aspect toward all people, appears from its very nature. The exact equivalent view, as it has been not inappropriately termed, is now nearly abandoned. Rarely do we find any one affirming, that Christ endured exactly what the elect would have suffered and deserved, and that, therefore, there can be sufficiency in his death for that favored number and for none besides. What then is the light in which the atonement of Christ ought to be viewed? We think the only rational and scriptural account of it, is that which regards it as a great remedial scheme, which rendered it consistent with the divine honor and all the interests of the divine administration, to extend mercy to guilty people at large, and which would have been equally requisite, had there been an intention to save one only, or a million; numbers indeed not forming any part of the question. Here then is something done, which removes legal obstructions and thereby opens the way to heaven for all. And if any do not enter in, their inability is moral, and lies not in any insufficiency of the divine provision. This view, however, seems to furnish a just foundation for the universality of gospel invitations, while it fastens the guilt of rejecting gospel provision on the sinner himself.

Thus far we feel disposed to agree with our author in his commentary, or rather dissertation on the verse and the subject it involves. We maintain, however, that the atonement has a special as well as a general aspect; that while it is gloriously true that it looks to all people, it has at the same time a special regard to some. We object, therefore, to the statement, that the atonement in itself considered had no limitation and no particular reference to any class or condition of people, and no particular applicability to one class more than to another. This is similar to certain rash assertions that have recently been current in our own country; as that while the atonement opens the door of mercy to all, it secures salvation to none; that Christ died as much for those who perish, as for those who are saved. We cannot envy that reputation for acuteness which may be gained by the free use of such language.

Is it not Gods design to save his people? Is not the atonement the means by which he does so, the means by which the purpose of electing love is fulfilled? And yet has that atonement no special reference to the elect? Further, if it be the means of saving them, does it not secure their salvation? Certainly, among people, if any effectual means were devised to accomplish a particular end, that end would be said to be secured by such means. The writer is aware of the ingenious evasion, that it is Gods gracious purpose to apply the atonement, and not the atonement itself, that connects it with the elect, and secures their salvation. We are told, moreover, that we should look on the atonement by itself, and consider it in a philosophical way. The purpose to apply is an after arrangement. But first, a purpose to apply the atonement to a special class, differs in nothing from an original design to save such class by it, for that purpose must have been present to the mind of God in determining on atonement. To say that God saves a certain number by the atonement, and that yet in making it he had no special design in their favor, however it may recommend itself to philosophical refinement, will always be rejected by the common sense of mankind. Second. If we must consider the atonement apart from any special purpose connected with it, why not divest it also of any general purpose, that we may look on it steadily per se, and in this way reduce it to a mere abstraction, about which nothing could be either affirmed or denied?

The advocates of universal atonement, or some of the more forward among them, have recently carried out their views so far, as to deny that God in providing the atonement, or Christ in making it, had any special love to the elect. An eminent writer on that side, however, to whom reference has already been made, while he goes the length of denying special design, maintains the existence of special love, and administers a reproof to those of his own party, who go to this extreme. This is indeed an important concession, for special love is not very different from special design, nor is it easy to see how, in the mind of God, the one could subsist with out the other. The love of the Father is the same thing as election. Election is nothing but the love of the Father formed into a purpose – Marshall. Or the point may be put in this way. Had God in providing the atonement special love to the elect? Where is the proof of it? Doubtless in that very provision. But if God in making it had no design to save them by it, the proof is not only weakened but destroyed. Special love, therefore, necessarily involves special design.

To do away with anything like speciality of design, much has been said on the order of the divine decrees, especially as to whether the decree of atonement, or that of election, be first in order of nature. If that of atonement be first, it is asserted speciality is out of the question, as that is secured only by election, which is a posterior arrangement. On this subject it is more easy to darken counsel by words without knowledge, than to speak intelligibly. It may be fairly questioned, if those who have written most on it, fully understand themselves. Nor can we help lamenting, that so great a part of the controversy should have been made to turn on this point, which has hitherto eluded the grasp of the most profound, and drawn the controvertists into regions of thought, too high for the boldest flights of human intellect. After all that can be said on the subject, it must be allowed that the whole arrangement connected with the salvation of man, existed simultaneously in the mind of God, nor will anyone rise much wiser from inquiries into which was first and which last.

The truth on the whole subject, then, seems to be, that while the atonement has a general reference toward all, it has at the same time a special reference to the elect of God, or as it is well expressed in a recent synodical decision, The Saviour in making the atonement bore special covenant relation to the elect; had a special love to them, and infallibly secured their everlasting salvation, while his obedience unto death, afforded such a satisfaction to the justice of God, as that on the ground of it, in consistency with his character and law, the door of mercy is open to all people, and a full and free salvation is presented for their acceptance. The special aspect, indeed, ought no more to be denied than the general. It rests on a large number of what may be called special texts; as, Christ also loved the Church and gave himself for it, that he might sanctify and cleanse it, etc. For the transgression of my people was he stricken. I lay down my life for the sheep, Eph 5:25; Isa 53:8; Joh 10:15.

Nor will it do to say of this numerous class of passages, that they find a sufficient explanation in the purpose of application, which is connected with the remedy for sin, since most of them are of a kind that connect the salvation of the elect directly with the atonement itself, and not with any after design of applying it. This idea seems but an ingenious shift to sustain a favorite theory. How direct, for example, is this connection in the following passage: who loved me and gave himself for me. No one who had not a theory to support, would ever think of introducing an after design of application to explain this. Indeed, as an able reviewer in one of our periodicals observes of the scheme that excludes a special design, it separates too much the atonement from the salvation of man. It does not connect those that are saved, those that are regenerated by divine grace, at all specially with the sacrifice of Christ. Another important branch of evidence on this point, lies in the special relation which Christ in dying sustained toward his people, as that of shepherd, husband, surety, etc., and which cannot be explained on any other principle than that of special design.

If the question were put, how we preserve our consistency, in thus maintaining both the general and special view, we reply, first, that if both views are found in scripture, it matters not whether we can explain the consistency between them or no. But second, it is not so difficult as some would imagine, to conceive of God appointing a remedy with a general aspect toward the race, but specially intended to secure the salvation of his chosen people.)

Then were all dead – All dead in sin; that is, all were sinners. The fact that he died for all proves that all were transgressors. The word dead is not unfrequently used in the scriptures to denote the condition of sinners; see Eph 2:1. It means not that sinners are in all senses, and in all respects like a lifeless corpse, for they are not. They are still moral agents, and have a conscience. and are capable of thinking, and speaking, and acting. It does not mean that they have no more power than one in the grave, for they have more power. But it means that there is a striking similarity, in some respects, between one who is dead and a sinner. That similarity does not extend to everything, but in many respects it is very striking.

(1) The sinner is as insensible to the glories of the heavenly world, and the appeals of the gospel, as a corpse is to what is going on around or above it. The body that lies in the grave is insensible to the voice of friendship, and the charms of music, and the hum of business, and the plans of gain and ambition; and so the sinner is insensible to all the glories of the heavenly world, and to all the appeals that are made to him, and to all the warnings of God. He lives as though there were no heaven and no hell; no God and no Saviour.

(2) There is need of the same divine power to convert a sinner which is needful to raise up the dead. The same cause does not exist, making the existence of that power necessary, but it is a fact that a sinner will no more be converted by his own power than a dead man will rise from the grave by his own power. No man ever yet was converted without direct divine agency, anymore than Lazarus was raised without divine agency. And there is no more just or melancholy description which can be given of man, than to say that he is dead in sins. He is insensible to all the appeals that God makes to him; he is insensible to all the sufferings of the Saviour, and to all the glories of heaven; he lives as though these did not exist, or as though he had no concern in them; his eyes see no more beauty in them than the sightless eyeballs of the dead do in the material world; his ear is as inattentive to the calls of God and the gospel as the ear of the dead is to the voice of friendship or the charms of melody; and in a world that is full of God, and that might be full of hope, he is living without God and without hope.

Fuente: Albert Barnes’ Notes on the Bible

2Co 5:14

For the love of Christ constraineth us.

The love of Christ

I. The Christians ruling motive–The love of Christ. We love Him because He first loved us. This love leads to service. This principle is–

1. Reasonable.

2. Soul-satisfying.

3. Soul-ennobling.

All true love is such in degree, but this supremely.

II. The restraining power of the love of Christ–That we should no more live unto ourselves. Paul delighted to call himself the servant of Jesus Christ.

III. The constraining power of the love of Christ. (J. Rhodes.)

The matchless beauty of Jesus

I. The constraining motive–The love of Christ. Consider it–

1. In its objects.

(1) Our love is awakened by some excellency or worthiness which the object beloved has in our eyes. But wherein is this to be accounted of, that the Son of God should set His heart upon man? He is likened to a worm, to grass. His foundation is in the dust. How inconsiderable a being is man in comparison with these hosts of heaven.

(2) Our love is called out by congeniality–where there is a oneness of mind, a similarity of feeling, a harmony of taste. But how opposite is the mind of Christ and of the sinner!

(3) Love is attracted by beauty. But mans original beauty, as created in the image and reflecting the glory of God in righteousness, is wholly departed. And in place thereof, deformity only appears in him.

(4) Love is drawn forth by love. Regard in one will produce it in another. But Christs love found no originating cause in our love (Joh 15:16; 1Jn 4:10).

2. In its properties.

(1) It is a self-denying love.

(2) It is a beneficial love. It enriches with righteousness, and peace, and grace, and liberty, and: service.

(3) His is a cheering, gladdening love. Therefore the church says (Son 1:4).

(4) His is an intense, inextinguishable love (Son 8:6-7).

(5) It is a boundless, incomprehensible love (Eph 3:18-19).

3. In its effects.

II. The special manifestation of this love. We thus judge, that if one died for all, then were all dead. This is the great instance wherein the Lord Jesus demonstrates His love.

III. Whereto this love constrains. He died for all, that they which live should not henceforth live unto themselves, but unto Him which died for, them, and rose again. To live to ourselves, to seek our own, is the natural character of all. Self in some form is the predominant and guiding principle.

1. Let the subject humble us. The love of Christ is a powerful thing, being discerned, applied, and realised.

2. Let the subject also instruct us. Our obedience is not to be the result of feeling, but of judgment.

3. Let the subject stimulate us.

4. Let the subject comfort us.

5. Finally, let the subject admonish and persuade those who are yet enemies to God, strangers to Christ and holiness. (J. T. Parker, M. A.)

Christs love constraining

I. To say something about the dying love of Christ. Here I mean to consider the love of Christ in the four following forms.

1. Pure benevolence.

2. Strong affection.

3. Unsolicited mercy.

4. Marvellous liberality.

II. Some of the duties which this dying love excites to perform.

1. To receive Christs ordinances.

2. To obey Christs commands.

3. To submit to Christs cross.

4. To promote His interest.

III. Illustrate the manner in which the dying love of Christ constraineth us.

1. That the dying love of Christ applied and believed, powerfully impresses the human heart.

2. The dying love of Christ singularly guards against practical errors.

3. The dying love of Jesus constraineth us, as it constantly urgeth to holiness.

4. The dying love of Jesus speedily carrieth us on to perfection. Here I mean to convey three distinct ideas, all implied in the word constraineth.

(1) The love of Christ moves forward our whole person.

(2) The love of Jesus bears us up under our burdens.

(3) The love of Christ constraineth us to make swift progress towards perfect holiness. Let us believe the love of God towards us. (E. Brown.)

The constraining love of Christ

We instantly feel that these words express the secret power by which the great deeds of Pauls life were done. But if We connect them with 2Co 5:13 we see that his common acts and judgments were moulded by the same power. Note–

I. The power of the love of Christ.

1. Paul meant Christs love to him, not his love to Christ. Many Christian men endeavour to work from their own feelings of consecration to the Lord; hence their energy is fitful, and depends upon excitements. The word constrain expresses the contrary of this. It suggests not an emotion in a man, but a power, not his, acting on him–an atmosphere surrounding his spirit, and pressing on it on every side. A feeling we possess is ever feeble and liable to change; a feeling possessing us is strong and enduring. This love, surrounding and resting on a man, takes him out of himself, and becomes a permanent influence.

2. It was the love of the living Christ in the present. Who died and rose again–not knowing Christ after the flesh. The love shown on the Cross was not a transient manifestation, but an eternal revelation of the Christ as He is.

3. How this Jove constrains. Compare with our text Gal 2:20. Here are two elements–

(1) Personal sympathy–who loved me. This is one of the mightiest forces in the world. Through all laws a man may break, but let a criminal once realise that there is some one who feels for him, and you gain a power over him which he cannot resist. Rise now one step–to the consciousness of having the sympathy of a greater soul than ours. Rise yet one step higher–a mighty step–to the love of Christ. The first beam of that love reveals the deadness and coldness of the past; and when the thought enters the mans heart, that amid all his coldness Christ cared for him, then the constraining power begins.

(2) The infinite sacrifice: He died for all. Under the power of this belief, all that tempts us to live for ourselves is instantly swept away. We may hear voices telling us of glory, of gain, and power; but we know that for us He left His throne, and then we are content, for Him, to live unnoticed and unknown. We are allured by the fascinations of pleasure–but we remember that for us He bore pain, and those fascinations fall shattered to the ground. We shrink back instinctively from hardships–but we measure our sacrifice with His, and then we accept it with calm and holy joy.

II. How this constraining power manifests itself in earnestness of life. There are three sources of the power that chains us in coldness and cramps our energy:–the monotony of our earthly labour; the depth of our spiritual infirmity; the feebleness of our vision into the everlasting. Now, this constraining love would remove them all.

1. It would consecrate our earthly work. No man can always be acting consciously under the power of Christs love; but a memory of the Cross may unconsciously hallow our life. Is it not possible to accept lifes daily tasks as Gods discipline, and accept them patiently, because Christ loves us? Is it not possible to fulfil lifes common duties right earnestly because Christ died for us?

2. It would strengthen our spiritual infirmity. Trifles exhaust our energy; great forces seem to deaden it; great fears perplex our trust. But if we heard the voice I loved thee, would not that be like a clarion-call to summon us to heroic effort? Would it not clothe us in celestial power?

3. It would link us with the everlasting world. That love breaks down the barrier between the visible and the invisible worlds. Heaven is no idle dream of happiness, but a present fact; for the Christians heaven is to be with and to be like the Saviour.

III. The way in which the constraining power of this love may be realised.

1. Prayerful meditation. In lonely hours, when the voice of the world is still, that love comes near. Pray on until it flashes across the horizon of your soul, and baptizes you in its glory.

2. Carry into action its first impulses. Avoid all that opposes them It is dangerous to enter any path of action on which the Cross-light does not gleam. (E. L. Hull, B. A.)

The constraining influence of the love of Christ

This text is a summary of Christian faith and practice.

I. The condition to which sin has reduced man.

1. Its peculiar wretchedness–then were all dead. Our souls have lost their spiritual life, and are become incapable of spiritual employments and delights.

2. Its hopelessness. We are not like a tree which, though withered, may be brought into a situation where the sun may shine and the rain descend on it and revive it.

II. The interposition of Christ on the behalf of man. Observe–

1. Who it is that is here said to have had compassion on man: the eternal Son of God.

2. How this Being interposed for man: He died.

3. For whom this death was endured: all men. But the interposition of Christ on behalf of man was not confined to dying for him. He rose again to complete the work which He had begun.

III. The principle or motive from which the interposition of Christ on our behalf proceeded. It was not an act of justice: we had no claim on the compassion of Christ. Nor did it proceed from a regard to His own honour only. He was glorious in holiness and fearful in praises long before we were created. It was free and unmerited love alone. To this Divine attribute all the blessings of redemption must be traced. This is the attribute which shines with the brightest lustre in the gospel of Christ. Matchless wisdom devised the stupendous plan, and infinite power executed it; but it was love which called this wisdom and this power into exercise.

IV. The end which Christ had in view in dying and rising again for man (verse 15). This implies that by nature we are all living to ourselves. The selfish and independent principle within us, is one of the sad fruits of our depravity. It is directly opposed to our happiness, and is in the highest degree hateful to God. It is an act of rebellion. Now the design of Christ was to root out this selfish principle. He has bought us with a price; He therefore deems us His own, and calls upon us to glorify Him in our body and in our spirits which are His. Shall we, then, rob the blessed Jesus of the purchase of His blood?

V. The influence which this interposition of Christ has on His people. It constraineth them. This signifies to bear away, to carry on with the force and rapidity with which a torrent hurries along whatever it meets with in its course. Christs love–

1. Lays hold of the affections.

2. Influences the conduct. It changes the life as well as affects the heart.

Conclusion: These truths suggest various inferences.

1. The conduct of a Christian is closely connected with his principles.

2. They are not Christians whom the love of Christ does not influence. They may call themselves after the name of the Saviour, but they are not living unto Him which died for them. This devotedness to Christ is essential to the Christian character. Nothing can supply the place of it; no correct system of opinions, no zeal for doctrines, no lively feelings, no tears or prayers.

3. The superior excellence of the religion of Christ, not only as it saves the soul, but as it affords to man a new, a nobler, and a more powerful motive of obedience. This motive is love to a dying Lord; a motive unheard of in the world before the publication of the gospel, but one which appeals to the finest feelings of the soul, and whose efficacy is stronger than that of all other motives combined. (C. Bradley, M. A.)

A perception of Christs love the effectual source of obedience

I. The love of Christ to be the effectual source of Christian obedience. Let us contrast this motive to moral virtue, with many others by which the majority of mankind are influenced.

1. Perhaps the most general inducement to religious and moral duty is habit. Religion is found to have a kindly influence upon human society. There is therefore in the world habit of religion. The son follows the steps of the father. The first, for instance, goes to church, because the latter has set him the example. He sometimes offers up a prayer, because the practice commenced in infancy. There is little of serious reflection in his conduct. He falls easily into the track or mould of custom. It induces a religion of form rather than of influence, a religion of the body rather than of the soul.

2. Scarcely superior to this principle is the desire of reputation. A certain kind of religion is favourable to reputation. To pass through life with honour is certainly the supreme object with many. Now this principle is not merely defective but hostile to religion. Its very aim is the gratification of self-esteem. It tends to exalt man, not God. It forgets the very first feeling of all religion, God be merciful to me a sinner.

3. Let us examine the next motive to religion, the fear of punishment. There is a natural alarm respecting eternity in the human mind. But this fear of the future is a very inadequate motive to religion. Suppose it to exist to a high degree, and it degenerates into views entirely subversive of all the gracious invitations of the gospel. Suppose it to be weak and momentary, and it can effect little that is medicinal to the heart. In melancholy moments, in hours of sickness, it will produce remorse and misery, but with the departure of these moments, it will lose all its influence.

4. Similar to this principle as to its efficiency is the mere and indistinct desire for future happiness. It will cease to influence whenever self-interest or appetite shall solicit in any violent degree. The pleasure of the life that is, will ever be far more attractive than the dim visions of a joy yet to be.

5. It remains to refer to one other motive to religion, a partial reverence for the Creator. Let experience testify its feebleness and inconsistency as a principle of moral action. How frequently do the same lips which appeared to adore the name of God in the public sanctuary, wantonly desecrate it in private life!

6. Let us now contrast with these low and inadequate motives to religion, the motive contained in the text. For the love of Christ constraineth us, etc. Is filial affection; is gratitude to a generous benefactor; is the tenderness of fondest friendship; are all these motives powerful to constrain to duty, and to urge to service? See all these motives more than united here!

II. The actual extent to which the perception of the love of Christ to the soul will operate. The devotion which arises from every other principle is occasional and limited. It is insufficient to bring us through temptation, to animate the affections and sympathies of our nature. It is insufficient to produce any cordial and active disposition to piety. Such a devotion is not, in fact, of Divine origin; it is not the effect of Divine grace in the heart. It is rather the formal and stinted calculation of a worldly policy. On the contrary, love to Christ is the result of a holy and Divine influence upon the soul. Like the beams of day, it pervades, and warms, and fructifies every inner region, every nobler faculty of the mind. It excites to a religious practice, unlimited and progressive. It renovates the whole character. (G. T. Noel, M. A.)

The constraining power of the loving principle

It was once a problem in mechanics to find a pendulum which should be equally long in all weathers; which should make the same number of vibrations in the summers ticket and in the winters cold. They have now found it out. By a process of compensation they make the rod lengthened one way as much as it contracts the other, so that the centre of motion is always the same; the pendulum swings the same number of beats in a day of January as in a day of June, and the index travels over the dial-plate with the same uniformity, whether the heat try to lengthen or the cold to shorten the regulating power. Now the moving power in some mens minds is easily susceptible of surrounding influences. It is not principle but feeling which forms their pendulum rod; and according as this very variable material is affected their index creeps or gallops, they are swift or slow in the work given them to do. But principle is like the compensation rod, which neither lengthens in the languid heat nor shortens in the brisker cold, but does the same work day by day, whether the ice-winds whistle or the simoom glow; and of all principles a high-principled affection to the Saviour is the strongest and most secure. (J. Hamilton, D. D.)

Sacred enthusiasm, the rationality of Christian zeal

I. We shall first attend to the apostles description of the moral world, He says of man that he is dead. This strong figure of language expresses the inertness as to spiritual duties–the inutility–the offensiveness of a soul alienated from the life of God. He intimates, by this allusion, that the nature of man is in that state which no more answers the designs of his creation than the tenant of a grave can promote the purposes and discharge the offices of social existence.

II. The assurance that the aspect of the atonement is universal as the dominion of human guilt and wretchedness. This forms the second motive of the apostles zeal. This sentiment is not more animating as a doctrine of faith than it has been found efficient as a principle of Christian activity. Its influence on the generous spirit of the apostle elicited an active benevolence so warm that it could not be agreeably employed in an enterprise less sublime than that of applying, in the widest possible sense, the remedy of the gospel to the universal infection.

III. Some reflections on the nature of this love seem necessary before we can fix upon the line of argument which it will be most proper and interesting to follow.

1. The love of Christ may constrain as an example.

2. The love of Christ constrains likewise by the force of gratitude. What bonds of obligations are implied in these expressions, We live! He died for us, and rose again!

Guided by this definition of the subject, we proceed now to illustrate it by the following observations:–

1. This love is a principle of self-consecration to the interests of Jesus Christ.

2. The love of Christ is accompanied by a principle of strong anticipation of His mediatorial glory in the world. The Church of Jesus Christ, breathing His Spirit, is naturally concerned in all that relates to His glory. The Sun of Righteousness is not for ever to be clouded: and it does gratify the love we cherish toward our glorious Saviour to be assured that a day is coming in which the whole world shall be the scene of His triumphant influence.

3. The love of Christ implies an habitual reliance on the agency of the Holy Spirit. (S. Curwen.)

Constraining love

Note–

I. Where lies the power of Christ upon men. There is nothing parallel with the permanent influence which Christ exercises all through the centuries. Contrast it with the influence of all other great names. But here is a man, dead for nearly nineteen centuries, to whom millions of hearts still turn, owning His mystic influence and smile as more than sufficient guerdon for the miseries of life and the agonies of death. The phenomenon is so strange that one is led to ask where lies the secret of the power. Paul tells us The love constrains, and it does so because He died.

1. If we are to feel His constraining love, we must first of all believe that Christ loved us and loves us still. If He knew no more of the future generations, and had no more reference to the units that make up their crowds, than some benefactor or teacher of old may have had, who flung out his words or deeds as archers draw their bows, not knowing where the arrow would light, then the love He deserves from me is even more tepid than the love which, on the supposition, He gave to me. But if I can believe, as Paul believed, that he was in the mind and the heart of the Man of Nazareth when He died upon the Cross; and if we believe, as Paul believed, that, though that Lord had gone up on high, there were in His human-divine heart a love to His poor servant, struggling down here for His sake; then, and only then, can we say reasonably the love that Christ bore, and bears to me, constraineth me.

2. If there is to be this warmth of love, there must be the recognition of His death as the great sacrifice and sign of His love to us. Rule thou over us, said the ancient people to their king, for thou hast delivered us out of the hand of our enemies. The centre of Christs power over mens hearts is to be found in the fact that He died on the Cross for each of us. That teaching which denies the sacrifical death of Christ and has brought Him down to the level of a man, has failed to kindle any warmth of affection for Him. A Christ that did not die for me on the Cross is not a Christ who has either the right or the power to rule my life. The Cross, interpreted as Paul interpreted it, is the secret of all His power, and if once Christian teachers and churches fail to grasp it as Paul did, their strength is departed.

II. What sort of life will this constraining love of Christ produce?

1. A life in which self is deposed and Christ is King. The natural life of man has self for its centre. That is the definition of sin, and it is the condition of us all; and nothing but Christ can radically eject it from the heart, and throne the unselfishly Beloved in the vacant place. Nature abhors a vacuum, and the only way to keep the devil out is to get Christ in. There is but one power which is strong enough to lift our lives from the pivot on which they turn, and to set them vibrating in a new direction, and that is the recognition of the infinite and so tender love of Jesus Christ for each of us. That love may constrain us, shutting out much that one used to like to expatiate in; but within these limits there is perfect freedom. There is no life so blessed and heroic, none in which suffering is so light, pain so easy, duty so delightful as the life that we live when, by Christs grace, we have thrown off the dominion of self and held out willing wrists to be enfranchised by being fettered by the bands of love. A comet–these vagrants of the skies–has liberty to roam, and what does it make of it? It plunges away out into depths of darkness and infernos of ice and told. But if it came within the attraction of some great blazing sun, and subsided into a planet, it would have lost nothing of its true liberty, and would move in music and light around the source of blessedness and life. And so we, as long as we make ourselves the sinful centres of our rebel powers, so long do we subject ourselves to alterations of temperature almost too great to bear. Let us come back to the light, and mow round the Christ; satellites of that Sun, and therefore illumined by His light and warmed by His life-producing heat.

2. One that will often look like madness, Paul was evidently quoting some of the stinging-nettles of speech which had been cast at him by his antagonists. He is mad, they said of him, as they said of his Master. But such enthusiasts are the salt of the earth; and the mad-men of to-day are the Solomons of to-morrow. Oh! would that there would come similar fanatics once more! They would lift all the level of this hollow Christianity in which so many of us are living. If we once had amongst us men after Pauls pattern–some of us who think ourselves very consistent Christians would begin to feel the red coming into our cheeks. The man who professes to live for Christ and never gets anybody to laugh at him as enthusiastic, and impracticable, and Quixotic, has much need to ask himself whether he is as near the Master as he conceits himself to be.

3. One which, in all its enthusiasm, is ruled by the highest sobriety and clearest sanity, Whether we be sober it is for your cause. There is more sober sense in being what the world calls fanatical, if the truths upon the pages of Scripture are truths, than in being cold and composed in their presence. The enthusiasts, who see visions and dream dreams about God and Christ and heaven and hell, and the duties that are consequent–these are the sober-minded men. There were many learned rabbis in Jerusalem, and many intimate friends in Tarsus, who, when the news came that Gamaliels promising pupil had gone over to the enemy, and flung up the splendid prospects opening before him, said to themselves, What a fool the young man is! They kept their belief and he kept his. All the lives are over now. Which of them was the wise life?

III. What is your attitude to that constraining love? The outward manner of the apostles life is not for us, but the principle which underlies is as absolutely and as imperatively and as all-comprehensively applicable in our case as it was in his. There was absolutely no reason for Pauls devotion which does not continue in full force for yours and mine.

1. Christian men and women, do you believe in that dying and living love for you? Do you repay it with devotion in any measure adequate to what you have received?

2. And for some of us who make no profession, and have no reality of Christian feeling, the question is, Do ye thus requite the Lord, O foolish people and unwise? Jesus has loved, and does love, thee; died for thee. He stretches out that grasping hand, with a nail-hole in it, to lay hold upon you, and you slip from His clasp, and oppose to His love a negligent and unaffected heart. Is there any madness in this mad world like that? Is there any sin like the sin of ingratitude to Jesus? (A. Maclaren, D. D.)

The properties and influence of the love of Christ

I. How a sinner may come to know that Christ loved him, for a very obvious reason–that no truth nor fact can have any influence upon our conduct, unless we know it and have some interest in it. We come to a knowledge of the love of God and of Christ by faith. And this is the record, that God hath given to us eternal life; and this life is in His Son.

II. Consider some of the qualities of the love of Christ.

1. It is eternal love. The Lord hath appeared of old unto me, saying, Yea, I have loved thee with an everlasting love; therefore with loving-kindness have I drawn thee.

2. The love of Christ is free love. For it is offered without conditions or qualifications. We are to buy Him without money and without price.

3. The love of Christ to sinners is sovereign love.

4. His love is constant and everlasting love. Like the sun, it may sometimes be obscured to the believers view by unbelief, ingratitude, and remaining lusts and idols; but the obscurity is in the believers darkened eye, not in God.

III. The constraining effects of the love of Christ.

1. The love of Christ, when truly believed by the renewed soul, carries away the soul by its moral power both to will and to perform our duty earnestly and constantly. The soul when under the influence of this love, may be compared to a bark set down on the cataracts of the Nile: whether the seamen will or not, they are carried down the stream.

2. The love of Christ constrains us to give all diligence to make our calling and our election sure.

3. If we believe that God and Christ love us, it will constrain us sweetly and powerfully to love Him again, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

4. But the love of Christ received into the heart by faith in the record constrains, not only to holiness in general, but to every particular duty required in the holy law. (F. Frew.)

Constraining love

1. The love of Christ–His to man, not mans to Him–yet His in its quickening activity, creating its own image in the breast. To constrain is so to shut in as to compel to a given end. Unconstrained, the river would spread out into a marsh, a dismal waste, fruitful only of pestilence and death. Shut in by its constraining banks, it flows a thing of life and beauty, watering garden and field, purifying and gladdening cities, and broadening into the bay on whose fair bosom ships float as they come and go on their beneficent mission of exchange and distribution. So man, constrained by the love of Christ, is so shut in as to be forbidden to wander and spread into a dismal and pestilent waste; is forced rather to move to a divine end, like a river of life flowing from God, hastening to God, in a channel made and moulded by His hand.

2. Now I wish to take Christian missions–the most manifest example of the constraining love of Christ–as a type of this great truth, that the service of God and of man are made one in the service of Christ. Note–

I. The relation between the character of a man and his service of his kind. A bad man can never be a minister of good. Eminent intellect without character is mischievous. A statesman with genius but without character is a calamity to the State. The creative genius may leave behind imperishable works in literature and art, but if he be mean and unclean he will leave a heritage of evil. It is inevitable that the service of man be the peculiar prerogative of the good. The man, therefore, that would serve men in the way of Christ must have the spirit of Christ. Mere decent, responsible, respectable, conventional formalism will not do. It is not enough to stand aloof from the man that does evil. It is necessary that we take the mans soul into our own and save him, if need be, by our very death.

II. By what means, conditions, motives may a man be made–as to character, the best possible that he may be–as to service, the most fit and efficient. Take–

1. The love of wealth, not of money–the greedy passion of the miser, but love of wealth which treats money as a means of distribution. Look at the immense factory with its thousands of operatives, filling so many homes with comfort, so many mouths with bread. Look at the great ships as they bear from distant lands to this, or from this to distant lands, commodities enriching, gladdening life. There is wonderful power in wealth used as a means; but mark, to be good, it is necessary–

(1) That it be in the hands of a good man. A bad man behind wealth uses it only to the deterioration of the world.

(2) That it be distributed. Accumulated wealth is not accumulated weal. A few rich men do not make a rich or a contented people.

2. Love of power–the desire both to make and to be a law that men shall obey. A statesman, patriotic, makes laws that he may secure the greatest blessing to the individual and to the collective people. The statesman, ambitious, makes laws to serve his own ends, sacrifices what was meant for mankind to his own personal good. The merely ambitious soldier looks at the army he commands as an immense machine, only to be used that it may be hurled against a similar machine, so as to break it without itself being broken. The soldier patriotic thinks that every man in that vast army is a conscious spirit, a centre of influence, needing, if possible, to be saved. The one says with Napoleon, Russian Campaign! what of it? It cost me only three thousand men, careless of the men, careful of himself. The other, like the hero of Sempach, will gather a sheaf of Austrian spears into his breast that the rank of the enemy may be broken and the land saved. Love of power blesses man only when in the presence of a great love it is glorified into patriotism, philanthropy.

3. The love of culture. Its great apostle tells us that its function is criticism of life. What that means we know. A man trained to enjoy the art and literature of past and present, made toward his meaner fellows finical, hypercritical, helping them only by sardonic sarcasm. In culture there may be the training of a character to a nobler, while self-conscious, enjoyment, but not to the large, devoted service that seeks the saving of men.

4. But may you not drill a man into service of his kind by terror? What makes a coward unmakes a man of him; what compels a man to a service which he does not love, makes him impotent for good. In fear there is no power to create the man that can regenerate the world.

III. Let us go on now to some typical cases that illustrate the action of those principles and motives implied in the love of Christ.

1. Here are three men. Look at them before the love finds them. Peter is a bronzed, hard-handed, brawny fisherman. He knows Jerusalem, has heard of Rome and, perhaps, of Athens; but cannot tell what they mean. He is a man who owns, perhaps, his boat and his nets, and thinks himself happy indeed if he lands a draught of fishes. There he is–familiar figure. Here now is John–more favoured by nature, radiant of face, clear of brow. Still, he is but the fishermans son, destined fisherman to be–to be a husband, a father; known to his sons and grandsons, then forgotten. And here is Paul, tent-maker, skilled in the law and history of his people. He, left as he is, would become a name with Gamaliel or Hillel.

2. Mark how the love of Christ comes to and acts on these men. It lays hold on that Peter. Suddenly he becomes a leader of men, who stands undismayed before the priests and rulers. And this John becomes a great interpreter, historian, thinker, and ages sit at his feet and dwell on his words. And Paul, converted, made missionary, in prisons oft, stripes many, stoned, afflicted, etc., still snatches moments amid his career to speak over the ages words that live as veritable spirit and power.

3. This love acts in each of the men in its own particular fashion. Peter it makes a legislator and leader of men, and people say, How great is Peter! But how different John! The Saviour says, Son, behold Thy mother. While Peter had charge of the sheep and of the lambs, John had charge of the mother, and that seemed all. But this educated John till, through the mothers love for him and his love to the mother, he came to understand as no other man did the Saviours love to the world, the Fathers love to the Son. Then look at Paul. He, a trained Pharisee, comes and sees all history, all men, all time, in the light of Christ. Law and gospel, first and second man, grace and sin, faith and works, all, as it were, came through him into articulate expression; and he shows the love making the preacher, the missionary, the thinker, all in one.

4. Now these three men are typical men. The love that worked that change in them is a love working still. Other loves lose their presence and potency over men. This love, never. This age has seen no more wonderful discovery than that of the conservation and correlation of the physical forces, no atom ever destroyed, every atom ever in process of change. But think of this grand moral dynamic, one in essence, indestructible in being, infinite in the variety of its forms, which we call the love of Christ. It took shape in the apostles. Since then it has created saints and heroes, who have stood like Athanasius against the world, or like Knox, who never feared the face of men, and thinkers like Augustine, Aquinas, and Calvin. It has entered into the spirit of reformers, and it has made men like Luther and Zwingle stand up to change the destiny of people and introduce a newer and grander day. It has created great preachers, like Howe and Bunyan and Wesley.

IV. How is it that this love has accomplished so much?

1. Mark. Love is an old thing. Christ did not make it, but found it the most universal and most potent force in the world. But ere He had come one thing love had never done. Lover to lover had been dear. But man as man had not been served through love. And yet without love men cannot be served. It needs not that we hate–it needs only that we be void of affection, to be unable to serve.

2. But look how hard it is to love. See nations, kin, speaking the same speech, under the same institutions, divided by a strip of silver sea, face to face, but disaffected towards each other. Why come wars and fightings? Nations do not love each other. Classes are divided. Here stands culture contemptuous to ignorance, and vice versa. Here is capital looking askance at labour. There is labour making wealth, jealous of the accumulated wealth it has seen made. And see how men, for moral reasons, are unable to love each other.

3. Now mark how Christ accomplished this grand impossibility of love. He came, and He made love to Him become love to all men. Love to persons means the desire to possess the person loved. Love to Christ means a passion to make men possess Him. There is no nation or class in Him. There is humanity. In loving Him you love the very worst as well as the best.

4. But so far we have been only stating fact. We have not yet got the why. Mark, the love that is in Christ is

(1) Gods love, made real, living love on earth for men. Some men think that they could learn Gods love apart from Christ Could they? Did they ere He came? Can they now He has come? This world is very lovely. O my God, I thank Thee that I live. And tis so lovely to stand on mountain peak at break of day, and see from out the east the glorious sunrise bringing light and health and beauty in his beams. But carry to the mountain summit a man who has just left the bed of death, where the dearest of earth to him doth lie. What would the man say? But place him in sight of the love of Christ and you place him in the very heart of God. The Man of Sorrows makes to the man in sorrow God come divinely near.

(2) The very love that made and the very end that was purposed for the world. The love that made the world gave the Son. Is not the giver ever greater than the thing given? The love of God gave its dignity to the gift of God. Without the love how ever was the gift possible?

(3) Love to God as a person. To Gods Son as a person. There cannot be love to aught but persons. Devotion to a cause is not love to Christ, not even if the cause be named a church. The cause must be impersonated.

(4) Gods love sacrificial, painful, pitiful, redemptive. It lifts us into the nature of God and makes us see God, how He feels pity, suffers sacrifice. (A. M. Fairbairn, D. D.)

Under constraint

I. Under constraint. Here is a man who beyond all others enjoyed the greatest spiritual liberty, glorying that he is under constraint.

1. A great force held him under its power. Constraineth.

(1) Consider the various meanings of the word constrain. Restrain.

(a) The love of God restrains from self-seeking, and forbids the pursuit of any object but the highest.

(b) The believer is coerced or pressed, and so impelled forward as one carried along by pressure.

(c) Christs love keeps us employed; for we are carried forward to diligence by it.

(d) The Lords servants are kept together and held as a band under a standard. His banner over me was love.

(e) All their energies are pressed into one channel, and made to move by the love of Christ.

(2) All great lives have been under the constraint of some mastering principle. A man who is everything by turns and nothing long is a nobody: but a man, even for mischief, becomes great when he becomes concentrated. What made Alexander but the absorption of his whole mind in the desire for conquest? Hence come your Caesars and your Napoleons–they are whole men in their ambition. When you carry this thought into a holier sphere the same fact is clear. Howard could never have been the great philanthropist if he had not been strangely under the witchery of love to prisoners. Whitfield and Wesley had but one thought, and that was to win souls for Christ.

(3) Now, this kind of constraint implies no compulsion, and involves no bondage. It is the highest order of freedom; for when a man does exactly what he likes he expresses his delight generally in language similar to that of my text. Though he is perfectly free to leave it, he will commonly declare that he cannot leave it. When the love of Christ constrains us we have not ceased to be voluntary agents; we are never so free as when we are under bonds to Christ.

2. The constraining force was the love of Christ. That love, according to our text, is strongest when seen in His dying for men. Think of this love till you feel its constraining influence. It was love

(1) Eternal;

(2) Unselfish;

(3) Most free and spontaneous;

(4) Most persevering;

(5) Infinite, inconceivable!

It passeth the love of women and the love of martyrs. All other lights of love pale their ineffectual brightness before this blazing sun of love, whose warmth a man may feel, but upon whose utmost light no eye can gaze.

3. The love of Christ operates upon us by begetting in us love to Him. We love Him because He first loved us.

(1) His person is very dear to us: from His head to His feet He is altogether lovely. We are glad to be in the place of assembly when Jesus is within; for whether on Tabor with two or three, or in the congregation of the faithful, when Jesus is present it is good to be there.

(2) Your endeavours to spread the gospel show that you love His cause.

(3) As to His truth, a very great part of our love to Christ will show itself by attachment to the pure gospel, especially to that doctrine which is the corner-stone of all, namely, that Christ died in the stead of men.

4. This force acts proportionately in believers. We are all of us alive, but the vigour of life differs greatly in the consumptive and the athletic. You will feel the power of the love of Christ in your soul in proportion–

(1) As you know it. Study, then, the love of Christ.

(2) To your sense of it. Knowing is well, but enjoyment as the result of believing is better.

(3) To the grace which dwells within you. You may measure your grace by the power which the love of Christ has over you.

(4) To your Christ-likeness.

5. It will operate after its kind. Forces work according to their nature. He who feels Christs love acts as Christ acted.

(1) If thou dost really feel the love of Christ in making a sacrifice of Himself thou Wilt make a sacrifice of thyself.

(2) If the love of Christ constrain you it will make you love others, specially those who have no apparent claim upon you, but who, on the contrary, deserve your censure. I do not know how else we could care for some, if it were not that Jesus teaches us to despise and despair of none.

(3) The love of Jesus Christ was a practical love.

II. This constraint was justified by the apostles understanding. The love of Christ constraineth, because we thus judge. When understanding is the basis of affection, then a mans heart is fixed and his conduct exemplary. Pauls judgment was as the brazen altar, cold and hard, but on it he)aid the coals of burning affection, vehement enough in their flame to consume everything. So it ought to be with us. Paul recognised–

1. Substitution. One died for all. This is the very sinew of Christian effort. Did He die for me? Then His love hath mastered me, and henceforth it holds me as its willing captive.

2. Union to Christ. If one died for all, then they all died.

Conclusions:

1. How different is the inference of the apostle from that of many professors! They say, If Christ died once for all, then I am saved, and may sit down in comfort and enjoy myself, for there is no need for effort or thought.

2. How much more ennobling is the apostles than that of those who do give to the cause of God and serve Him after a fashion, but still the main thought of their life is not Christ nor His service, but the gaining of wealth or success in their profession! The chief aim of all of us should be nothing of self, but serving Christ.

3. Such a pursuit as this is much more peace-giving to the spirit. If you live for Christ, and for Christ alone, all the carpings of men or devils will never cast you down.

4. A life spent for Jesus only is far more worth looking back upon at the last than any other. If you call yourselves Christians how will you judge a life spent in money-making? (C. H. Spurgeon.)

Love and obedience to Christ

Consider:–

I. Take some account of Christs love to us, which is the foundation and cause of our love to Him. Notice the instances of His love hinted at.

1. That Christ died for us (Joh 15:13; Rom 5:6).

2. That He rose again. This was designed for our advantage (Rom 4:25). As His suffering and death were for the payment of our debt, so His resurrection was in order to our discharge. He arose and went to heaven, there to appear in the presence of God for us, and to prepare a place there for His followers.

3. That He died and rose again that we might live; that is, that we might be acquitted from our guilt, delivered from, condemnation, be renewed to a spiritual life of holiness, and be raised at last to heaven.

II. Our love to Christ which is the fruit of His love to us. Christ will own none for His friends who love Him not (1Co 16:22; Luk 14:26; Mat 10:37).

III. The genuine and powerful effect of this love. It will constrain us to live unto Him, which implies–

1. Obedience to His will (Joh 14:15; Joh 14:21; Joh 14:23). This obedience must be–

(1) Willing and hearty obedience. Not like that of slaves to a tyrant, where the only motive to obey is fear of punishment. Of this sort is all the obedience which wicked men pay to Christ.

(2) Sincere and universal to all Christs commandments, without any exception. I do not mean that it will be perfect; but yet true love will not knowingly allow of any defect in obedience.

(3) Like its principle, constant and persevering. We shall not obey Him by fits and starts. Obedience may possibly admit of some interruptions, but it will never be laid aside.

2. Zealous for His interest and honour. Here it will be proper to consider–

(1) The nature of zeal for Christ. Zeal is the natural fervour of the mind when it is very earnest in any pursuit. Sometimes it is a very bad thing; but when it is under the influence of Divine grace, and directed to a right object, it is then exceeding good (Gal 4:18). Christ Himself was a pattern to us of holy zeal (Joh 2:17). Let the same mind be in Us which was also in Jesus Christ–particularly

(a) Grief and resentment at any injuries which are done to His honour. A warm love to Christ will make His honour and interest as dear to us as our own.

(b) Courage in Christs cause, as Christs zeal for His Fathers honour inspired Him with courage to drive out the profaners of the Temple. Such was the zeal of the apostles (Act 4:19-20; Act 21:13).

(c) Diligence in using all proper means to gain over subjects to Christs kingdom and converts to His gospel.

(d) Joy in the advancement of His kingdom and interest.

(2) Motives and reasons for this zeal. Consider–

(a) How zealous Christ has been and is for you and your interest. He died for you.

(b) How little all you can do for Christ will amount unto, and what a mean and poor requital it will be for His love.

(c) How zealous the devil and his agents are against Christ, and to hinder the advancement of His kingdom, and should not we be at least as zealous to promote it?

(d) How Christ will nobly requite your zeal for Him another day (Mat 10:32; Luk 12:8). (D. Jennings.)

The Christians secret

When we see a successful life we are always curious to know what is the secret of it. You see a man who is successful in business, and you wonder what are the qualities in him which make him the successful man he is. The motive power of life is love.

1. Some Christians make the secret of their life fear. What a horrible thing to live with nothing but that fear of death to keep a man away from the slough of animalism!

2. And the motive power of a Christian life is not conscience. A few years ago a young man who was going to enter the ministry as an apostle of ethical culture came to see me, and we talked his ministry over. He told me he was going down into one of the wards of New York City to work for the regeneration of men. He said: I do not want merely to make them happier; I want to make them really better. I asked him: What is the power on which you rely to make them better? I shall appeal to their sense of right; I shall not appeal to anything else, but I shall try to show them that they ought to be righteous because it is righteous, they ought to do right because it is right, He was going to build his religion on what? Love? No! On conscience. Judaism, Puritanism, and Ethical Culture are incarnate conscience. Christianity is incarnate love. A man may conform to law because it is righteous law; but he cannot love the law. You cannot love an abstraction.

3. Thus over against the life that is keyed to fear and the life that is keyed to conscience Paul puts the life that is keyed to love. The love of Christ constraineth us. I want to trace the way in which that love grows up in a human soul. The child begins by loving her father or her mother. The child sees righteousness, truth, purity, patience, fidelity, love, in that father, that mother. And this child who sees in the father the Christly quality, but does not know it is Christly, and begins to love, is already loving Christ, though it is the Christ in fragment, the Christ in a hint. This child goes out into life, little by little, and learns that love is larger than she thought. She learns that father and mother do not incarnate all the phases of love. Love is not confined to the few. There are other husbands that love, other fathers that love, other mothers that love, other phases of love. No one soul can teach all the lessons of love. The length and breadth and height of love–how large it is, how multiplex it is t Learning this, she learns to love also, bears burdens and learns the patience of love, finds the opportunity to do good and learns the service of love. For we learn love only by loving. Many stop there. They have learned the love which we call philanthropy. But they do not know that which lies beyond and is greater than all, because it is in all the love of God, the love of Christ. And so they walk always, it seems to me, in a certain sadness or possibility of sadness, I took my Greek Concordance the other day to see what this word constrains means; and, instead of looking up the classical Greek, I looked to see how it was used elsewhere in the New Testament. And at first I said, I am not getting much light from this investigation. I turned to one incident where it is said the crowd thronged Jesus Christ, and I found the word thronged was the same as the word constrained. And I turned to another passage where it was said that the soldiers came and took Jesus Christ, and I found the word took was the same as the word in our text constrained. And I came to another passage where it is said that a woman was sick with a great fever, and I found the word sick was the same as the word here constrained. This seemed at first strange. But pondering made it clear. Our text is an illustration of St. Pauls genius of talking in metaphor, for Paul was a poet and broke through the rules of rhetoric because his spirit was too strong to be caged by language. Paul is the poet, and it is the poet that speaks here of love. Love is a crowd. Love from father, from mother, from brother, from sister, from brethren, throngs all about Paul, and carries him, as it were, off his feet, as a man is taken by a great crowd and forced along the highway. Love is a soldier; it has come and laid violent hands upon Paul; and he is no longer his own master. Love is his master. Love has captured him, taken him prisoner; Love does with him what he will. Do not be troubled if you do not have the full experience of Paul at the beginning of your life. Have you money, and do you wonder what you shall do with it? Let love tell you. Have you a little time this week, and do you wish to know what you shall do with it? Let love tell you. Have you a friend who has done wrong to you, and you wonder what you ought to do? Let love tell you. Are you questioning what course in life you shall take? Let love tell you. (Lyman Abbott, D. D.)

Christian enthusiasm

1. If enthusiasm be right in any case, it is more than justifiable in the Christian. In such a career as his, it is impious to be calm, if calmness be coldness.

2. Now Paul was an enthusiast. Young Saul, the pupil of Gamaliel, the Pharisee, the persecutor, was an enthusiast. And Paul, the convert, preacher, missionary, is an enthusiast still. With this difference, that the fire now burning on the altar of his heart is heaven-kindled, sustained, and attracted.

3. There were two classes who did not appreciate Pauls enthusiasm; men of no religion at all, like Festus, and false brethren. While Festus said, Paul, thou art beside thyself, persons connected with the Church at Corinth said the same. Pauls defence was that whether sober or mad the love of Christ constrained him. Consider–

I. The love of Christ, i.e., the love in Christ which begets love for Christ.

1. The love which is in Christ is the love of God united with the love of man. Like a stream which starts from inaccessible mountains, and on some distant plain joins itself to some small rivulet, in the love of Christ there is everlasting, self-existent, Almighty love; yet mingling with it is a love begotten and limited by the constitution of human nature. The love of Christ, as Divine, is like the sun, distant, vast, and commanding; yet like the fires that blaze on our hearths in winter, cheerful, accessible, and inviting, It is like a great mountain almost defying us to climb; and yet like green pastures at our feet, tempting us to lie down.

2. Oh, that we could comprehend this love of Christ which passeth knowledge! In one sense we do know it. We know what Christ did: went about doing good. We know why Christ suffered: to bring us to God. But how much is there, even connected with these things, which surpasseth knowledge; and what less can he who hears of Christs love say, than, Lord, Thou knowest all things, Thou knowest that I love Thee? As fire spreads fire, if it come in contact with any inflammable material, so love begets love in the hearts which are susceptible of love.

3. Now love to Christ is awakened by the love of Christ. In the first instance our love is simple gratitude; but very soon it becomes delight, loyalty, friendship, complacency. And then it increases with our faith, and with its own manifestations.

II. The effect it produces. What does Paul mean by constraineth? That it held him to one object of life, that one object being Christ, and it shut him up to one course of conduct. The love of Christ laid hold of the mans mind and kept his thinking faculty moving. It supplied him with motives. It quickened his conscience, commanded his will, lifted up and cast down emotions, formed his character, directed his conduct, and moulded his entire life.

1. Now no man need aspire to the apostleship in order to be a constant and devoted servant of Jesus. Martha and Mary were as much constrained by the love of our Saviour as was Paul. What we need is not a change of sphere, but a change of influence upon us. And the great influence to move you in your sphere, is the love of Christ.

2. How does the love of Christ constrain you? And are you sometimes misunderstood because of this? Do you please the men who are trying to make a compromise between ungodly and Christian principle? Are you at rest in their society, and are they at ease in yours? If this be the case you are not what Paul was when he penned these words. Your career is not like that of a planet commanded and controlled by the sun; but that of the iceberg–always ice–only sometimes ice thawing and melting upon the surface. And shall this sort of being put himself forward as a Christian? Shall this man ever be misinterpreted? What is there to perplex one? A man with no religious excitement cannot be a Christian. What is this gospel but feeling, passion, from beginning to end? It comes gushing out of the very heart of God. God is love, and God so loved the world, etc. Can I believe this without feeling? I may make it part of my creed without feeling. But can I live upon it without feeling? The coldest piece of humanity must be warmed by the gospel if it be believed. Conclusion:–Use this subject for personal examination. Do ask, what have I in this heart of mine? Have I fire, or have I ice? Apply the remedy. Believe the good news now. (S. Martin.)

One died for all—

The ethical value of the atonement

I. But first of all I would have you consider the ethical value of the fact of the atonement. What I mean by that is, the ethical significance of the atonement itself considered apart from our apprehension of it and belief in it. What was there of ethical life and force essentially involved in the atonement? Is it a merely legal and technical fact, external to all life–something that men can brush aside and say, We can do without it? Or is it a manifestation of the ethical life of God, creations fundamental ethical fact, replete with ethical forces?

1. Observe, first, that the act of atonement is deep-set in the ethical life of God. It is the expression, and of course the natural expression, of infinite love. It is simply the ethical life of the Infinite acting out its own inner fulness under the special conditions of a fallen world. The self-sacrificing love of Christ is actually the self-sacrificing love of God. God proves that He can really love by revealing the power of self-sacrifice. The underlying source of all ethical life is the rich self-sacrificing life of God as revealed in Christ. To deny that God is capable of sacrifice is to deny that He is an ethical Being. If God is love, then it must be possible for Him to resort to sacrifice, if necessary, to save the world.

2. The atonement was accomplished through the medium of ethical forces. I want you to notice these fourteenth and fifteenth verses very carefully, in order that you may bear in mind what I mean. So you perceive that the atonement was not merely a legal act; it was Gods life coming into our life. Not God sending His Son to stand outside of our life, and then pouring wrath down upon Him straight from heaven. There is no life, no power in that conception. That is not true atonement. There is yet another step along the path of ethical force. According to the Scriptures there have come into the human race new and infinite ethical forces through the Atonement. After sin had come into the world, man was rendered incapable in himself of ethical life. Sin brought in death and complete moral impotency. Then Christ name and linked Himself to the universal life of humanity. When He came He stood against the surging tide of human sin, He bore the terrible onset of it in His own life, standing as the Son of Man in the centre of the terrible tumult. Then with infinite power He sent the tide back, and brought humanity into the possibility of life again. Herein lies the ethical reality of the atonement–of the great sacrifice in which the Son of God suffered for the sins of the world. Through that expiation, and only through that, has spiritual life and power become possible for man.

II. So much for the fact of the atonement, the ethical significance that appertains to it, and the ethical force that pervades the whole of it. If this is true, if the fact of the Atonement is in very deed the basis of all ethical possibility, then it is natural to expect that belief in the atonement will be a powerful inspiration and incentive to ethical life. And we shall find that it is so.

1. First of all, the consciousness of sin produced by the idea of the atonement is a mighty impulse and incentive to ethical life. Which do you think of two men is likely to struggle with intensity of purpose against temptations to sin–the man that thinks sin means death, the man that believes it was arrested on its path, that it is pardoned, only through the sacrifice of the Son of God, or the man that thinks it is only a little imperfection or immaturity that will gradually whittle itself away? Which do you think of the two is likely to be the stronger morally and spiritually?

2. Then, again, the idea of forgiveness through expiation is a mighty inspiration to ethical and spiritual life. God forgives me at great cost to Himself–that is love indeed! There are people who talk of the love of God that do not know what they mean by it. A love that costs nothing! A love that is utterly incapable of proving its own existence! For these people tell us that the Infinite is incapable of the sacrifices of love. He can be complacent, kind, benevolent; He can let your sin pass away, just because He can do it without trouble or cost to Himself. Is that the inspiration that will send the warm life-throb of gratitude and love to God leaping in our life, that will fire us with enthusiasm to follow after holiness?

3. Then, again, the idea of the proprietary right of Jesus Christ over us is one of the grandest incentives to ethical life and service. Paul has presented it to us very fully here–If one died, then all died, and He died for all, that they which live shall not henceforth live unto themselves, but unto Him which died for them and rose again. If Christs death was an atonement, an expiation, then you and I died in that death. We have no life to call our own any more; we died on His Cross. What, then, is our present condition? Why, we are Christs own. The only life we have is the life He has given us. What right have you to serve yourself? Some one may say that we have the conception of Gods proprietorship over us apart from the atonement. But we know from experience that in a fallen world like this the conception of God as Creator is of little ethical value until it is set in that of God, the atoning Saviour. There are those that even make their creation into such a world as this a ground of complaint against God. But, taken apart, there is no comparison between their several ethical values. Our obligation to the God that created us is vague and unimportant compared with our obligation to the God that redeemed us through sacrifice. The life we received from the hands of the Creator cost Him but little compared with that we have received from the sacrifice of the atoning God, so the constraining love is vastly greater in the latter case than in the former.

4. Further, the conception of the ever-present living Christ is full of inspiration. But, says some one, even apart from the atonement and apart from the God manifest in Christ, we may feel that we have the presence of God with us. What do you know about the ethical relations of the Almighty except what you know in Jesus Christ? Suppose God had not revealed Himself in His Son, then the vague conception of a Divine presence which would have been left to us would have afforded little inspiration and stimulus to live a holy life.

III. Now, in order to make our examination quite complete, it is only fair to see what inspiration we can count upon–what ethical forces remain to us were we to leave out of account the incarnation of God and the expiatory atonement of Christ. There are left to us the following conceptions–

1. We have remaining, first of all, the belief in sin as an imperfection or immaturity–the belief that this sin is not even in itself an unmitigated evil if an evil at all–is only the reverse side of good that it is as necessary in the economy of Gods world as goodness–and we have only to wait a little while and it will pass away. How much inspiration for effort is there in that conception–how much inspiration to struggle against sin?

2. Further, if we leave the atonement of Jesus Christ out of account, we have Jesus Christ left as a pattern for us. I do not undervalue the fact that the life of Christ is an ideal copy, But compare that with the belief that that ideal life is also a living, infinite force within you.

3. Further, we have remaining the belief in God as the Father of spirits. I really cannot say how much that would mean if we knew nothing about Jesus Christ as God incarnate. It meant very little to the highest thought of man in the Greek world before Christ came. People who reject the atonement of Christ have no right to call God Father. It is only in Christ that we know Him to be Father. Now, you can compare the two sets of ideas as an incentive to ethical life–the atonement of Christ and the ideas that circle around it, and the ideas that are left after we have excluded the atonement. I am sure that you will all agree that there is no comparison whatever between the two. It is the atonement of Christ and faith in that atonement that is alone capable of building up the noblest ethical life of man. It is not for me to determine how far ethical life may co-exist with mutilated notions of sin and atonement, with a superficial and inadequate faith in God. It is not for me to make delicate estimates of all the springs and currents of human life. But it is for me to proclaim this, that no life can ever be ethically perfected and glorified except through the power of the atonement. (J. Thomas, M. A.)

Then were all dead.—

The fruit of Christs death

When Christ died all believers were dead in Him to sin and to the world.

I. This truth is asserted in scripture (Rom 6:6; 1Pe 4:1; Gal 2:20; Col 3:3-5).

II. How can all be said to be dead when Christ died, since most were not born?

1. Christ sustained the relation of our Head. It was not in His own name that He appeared before Gods tribunal, but in ours, not as a private, but as a public person, so that when He was crucified all believers were crucified in Him, for the act of a common person is the act of every particular person represented by him, as a member of parliament serveth for his whole borough or county. Now that Christ was such a common person appeareth plainly by this, that Christ was to us in grace what Adam was to us in nature or sin (Rom 5:14; 1Co 15:21; 1Co 15:45).

2. Christ was on the Cross not only as a common person, but as a surety. In His death there was not only a satisfaction for sin, but an obligation to destroy it (Rom 6:6).

(1) On Gods part Christ undertook to destroy the body of sin by the power of His Spirit (Tit 3:5; Rom 8:13).

(2) On our part He undertook that we should no longer serve sin, but use all godly endeavours for the subduing it. Christs act being the act of a surety, He did oblige all the parties interested.

3. Our consent to this engagement is–

(1) Actually given when we are converted (Rom 6:13). Till the merit of Christs death be applied by faith to the hearts of sinners, they are alive to sin, but dead to righteousness; but then they are dead to sin, and alive to righteousness, and as alive yield up themselves to serve God in all things.

(2) Solemnly implied in baptism (Rom 6:3-5).

III. How can Christians be dead to sin and the world, since after conversion they feel so many carnal motions?

1. By consenting to Christs engagement they have bound themselves to die unto sin (Rom 6:2; Col 3:3-5).

2. When the work is begun, corruption is wounded to the very heart (Rom 6:14).

3. The work is carried on by degrees, and the strength of sin is weakened by the power of grace, though not totally subdued (Gal 5:17).

4. Christ hath undertaken to subdue it wholly, and at length the soul shall be without spot, blemish, or wrinkle (Eph 5:27; Php 1:6; 1Th 5:23-24).

IV. What use the death of Christ hath to make us die unto sin and the world.

1. This was Christs end. He died not only to expiate the guilt of sin, but also to take away its strength and power (1Jn 3:8; Gal 2:17). Now shall we make void the end of Christs death, which was to oppose and resist sin? Shall we cherish that which He came to destroy? God forbid. Paul gloried in the Cross, as by it crucified to the world (Gal 6:14).

2. By way of representation, the death and agonies of Christ do set forth the hatefulness of sin.

3. It worketh on love. It should make sin hateful to consider what it did to Christ, our dearest Lord and Redeemer.

4. By way of merit. Christ shed His blood not only to redeem us from the displeasure of God and the rigour of the law, but from all iniquity (Tit 2:14; 1Pe 1:18; Gal 1:4). Our dying to sin is a part of Christs purchase as well as pardon.

5. By way of pattern. Christ hath taught us how to die to sin by the example of His own death, that is, He denied Himself for us that we might deny ourselves for Him. (T. Manton, D. D.)

Fuente: Biblical Illustrator Edited by Joseph S. Exell

Verse 14. For the love of Christ constraineth us] We have the love of God shed abroad in our hearts, and this causes us to love God intensely, and to love and labour for the salvation of men. And it is the effect produced by this love which , bears us away with itself, which causes us to love after the similitude of that love by which we are influenced; and as God so loved the world as to give his Son for it, and aa Christ so loved the world as to pour out his life for it, so we, influenced by the very same love, desire to spend and be spent for the glory of God, and the salvation of immortal souls. By the fear of God the apostles endeavoured to persuade and convince men, and the love of Christ constrained them so to act.

If one died for all, then were all dead] The first position the apostle takes for granted; viz. that Jesus Christ died for ALL mankind. This no apostolic man nor primitive Christian ever did doubt or could doubt.

The second position he infers from the first, and justly too; for if all had not been guilty, and consigned to eternal death because of their sins there could have been no need of his death. Therefore, as he most certainly died for ALL, then all were dead, and needed his sacrifice, and the quickening power of his Spirit.

Fuente: Adam Clarke’s Commentary and Critical Notes on the Bible

The love of Christ signifieth either that love towards the sons of men which was in Christ before the foundation of the world; for even then (as Solomon telleth us, Pro 8:31) he was rejoicing in the habitable part of the earth, and his delight was with the sons of men: which love showed itself in time, in his coming and assuming our natures, and dying upon the cross for us; Joh 15:13; Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. Or else it signifieth that habit of love to Christ, which is in every believer; for it is true of either of these, that they constrain a believers soul.

Because (saith the apostle) we thus account, or reason, that if one died for all. All here is interpreted according to the various notions of men, about the extent of the death of Christ. Some by the term understanding all individuals; some, all the elect, or all those that should believe in Christ; others, some of all nations, Jews or Gentiles. Be it as it will, that point is not to be determined by this universal particle, which is as often in Scripture used in a restrained sense, as in a more general sense. The apostle here concludeth,

that if one died for all, then were all dead; which is to be understood of a spiritual death, as Eph 2:1. And the apostles argument dependeth upon this, that if all, for whom Christ died, had not been dead in sin, there then had been no need of his dying for to expiate their sin, and to redeem them from the guilt and power of it; but be they what they would, for whom Christ died, whether all individuals, or all the elect only, his dying for them was a manifest evidence that they were dead.

Fuente: English Annotations on the Holy Bible by Matthew Poole

14. ForAccounting for hisbeing “beside himself” with enthusiasm: the love of Christtowards us (in His death for us, the highest proof of it, Ro5:6-8), producing in turn love in us to Him, and not mere”terror” (2Co 5:11).

constraineth uswithirresistible power limits us to the one great object to theexclusion of other considerations. The Greek implies tocompress forcibly the energies into one channel. Love is jealousof any rival object engrossing the soul (2Co11:1-3).

because we thusjudgeliterally, “(as) having judged thus”; implyinga judgment formed at conversion, and ever since regarded as a settledtruth.

that ifthat is, thatsince. But the oldest manuscripts omit “if.” “Thatone died for all (Greek, ‘in behalf of all’).” Thus thefollowing clause will be, “Therefore all (literally, ‘theall,’ namely, for whom He ‘died’) died.” His dying isjust the same as if they all died; and in their so dying, theydied to sin and self, that they might live to God their Redeemer,whose henceforth they are (Rom 6:2-11;Gal 2:20; Col 3:3;1Pe 4:1-3).

Fuente: Jamieson, Fausset and Brown’s Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible

For the love of Christ constraineth us,…. Or “containeth us”; holds and keeps us in our station and duty, as soldiers are held and kept together under a banner, or ensign displayed; to which the church refers, when she says, “his banner over me was love”, So 2:4. Nothing more effectually keeps ministers, or other believers, in the work and service of their Lord, or more strongly obliges and constrains them to a cheerful discharge of their duty to him, and one another, than his love displayed in his covenant engagements, in his assumption of human nature, and particularly in his dying for them, which is the instance given in the text:

because we thus judge; having well weighed, and maturely considered the affair,

that if one died for all, then were all dead; or “seeing one died for all”; for it is rather an assertion than a supposition, upon which the apostle reasons. The person designed, who died for all, is Jesus Christ, though not mentioned, and is to be supplied from the former clause. The doctrine of Christ’s dying for men was well known, so that there was no need to mention his name; he is called “one”, in distinction to the “all” he died for, and as exclusive of all others, he being sufficient of himself to answer the ends of his death; and therefore is to be looked unto, and believed on, alone for salvation, and to have all the glory of it. The manner of his dying is for, or in the room and stead of all; so that he died not merely as a martyr, or by way of example, or only for their good, but as their substitute, in their room and stead, having all the sins of his people upon him, for which he made satisfaction; and this the nature of his death shows, which was a sacrifice, a ransom, a propitiation and atonement. The persons for whom Christ died are all; not every individual of mankind, but all his people, all his sheep, all the members of his church, or all the sons he, as the great Captain of salvation, brings to glory. Wherefore this text does not make for the doctrine of general redemption; for it should be observed, that it does not say that Christ died for “all men”, but for “all”; and so, agreeably to the Scriptures, may be understood of all the persons mentioned. Moreover, in the latter part of the text it is said, that those for whom Christ died, for them he rose again; he died for no more, nor for others, than those for whom he rose again: now those for whom he rose again, he rose for their justification; wherefore, if Christ rose for the justification of all men, all would be justified, or the end of Christ’s resurrection would not be answered; but all men are not, nor will they be justified, some will be condemned; hence it follows, that Christ did not rise from the dead for all men, and consequently did not die for all men: besides, the “all” for whom Christ died, died with him, and through his death are dead both to the law and sin; and he died for them, that they might live, not to themselves, but to him; neither of which are true of all the individuals of mankind: to which may be added, that the context explains the all of such who are in Christ, are new creatures, are reconciled to God, whose trespasses are not imputed to them, for whom Christ was made sin, and who are made the righteousness of God in him; which cannot be said of all men. The conclusion from hence is,

then were all dead; meaning, either that those for whom Christ died, were dead in Adam, dead in law, dead in trespasses and sins, which made it necessary for him to die for them; otherwise, there would have been no occasion for his death; yet it does not follow from hence, that Christ died for all that are in such a condition; only that those for whom Christ died were dead in this sense, admitting this to be the sense of the passage; though death in sin seems not to be intended, since that all men are dead in sin, would have been a truth, if Christ had died for none; and much less is this an effect, or what follows upon the death of Christ; nor does it capacitate, but renders men incapable of living to Christ: wherefore a mystical death in, and with Christ, seems rather to he meant; and so the Ethiopic version reads it, “in whom everyone is dead”. Christ died as the head and representative of his people, and they all died in him, were crucified with him, and through his death became dead to the law, as to its curse and condemnation; and to sin, as to its damning power, being acquitted, discharged, and justified from it; the consequence of which is a deliverance from the dominion of it, whereby they become capable of living to the glory of Christ. The sense of the passage is not, that Christ died for all that were dead, but that all were dead for whom he died; which is true of them, whether in the former, or in the latter sense: the article , is anaphorical or relative, as Beza and Piscator observe; and the meaning is, that if Christ died for all, then all “those” were dead for whom he died.

Fuente: John Gill’s Exposition of the Entire Bible

The love of Christ ( ). Subjective genitive, Christ’s love for Paul as shown by verse 15.

Constraineth us ( ). Old and common verb, to hold together, to press the ears together (Ac 7:57), to press on every side (Lu 8:45), to hold fast (Lu 22:63), to hold oneself to (Ac 18:5), to be pressed (passive, Luke 12:50; Phil 1:23). So here Paul’s conception of Christ’s love for him holds him together to his task whatever men think or say.

Judging this ( ). Having reached this conclusion, ever since his conversion (Ga 1:17f.).

One died for all ( ). This is the central tenet in Paul’s theology and Christology. H (over) here is used in the sense of substitution as in John 11:50; Gal 3:13, death in behalf so that the rest will not have to die. This use of is common in the papyri (Robertson, Grammar, p. 631). In fact, in this sense is more usual in Greek than , or any other preposition.

Therefore all died ( ). Logical conclusion (, corresponding), the one died for the all and so the all died when he did, all the spiritual death possible for those for whom Christ died. This is Paul’s gospel, clear-cut, our hope today.

Fuente: Robertson’s Word Pictures in the New Testament

The love of Christ. Christ ‘s love to men. See on 1Jo 2:5.

Constraineth [] . See on taken, Luk 4:38; Act 18:5. It is the word rendered I am in a strait, Phi 1:23. Compare Luk 12:50. The idea is not urging or driving, but shutting up to one line and purpose, as in a narrow, walled road.

Fuente: Vincent’s Word Studies in the New Testament

RIGHT MOTIVE AND OBJECT OF THE MINISTRY

1) “For the love of Christ constraineth us;” (he gar agape tou Christou sunechei hemas) “For the love of Christ constrains us,” keeps on impelling us, Eph 3:19; 1Jn 3:1-2; Joh 3:16; 1Jn 3:16; Rom 5:6-8. He died for us, even while we were yet sinners. This love constantly impels, influences us for good, to or toward obedient service.

2) “Because we thus judge,” (krinatas touto) “judging in this manner,” as follows, we concluded, Act 4:20; Jer 20:9. We speak out our concluding conviction.

3) “That if one died for all,” (hoti eis huper panton apethanen) “that (since) one on behalf of all men died,” and Jesus did die for all men and every man, Heb 2:9; 1Ti 2:4-6; Rom 1:16.

4) “Then were all dead; “ (ara hoi pantes apethanon) “Then they all died,” or were dead; Eph 2:1-2; Eph 2:5; Rom 5:6. All were empty or void of spiritual life, unproductive and incapable of producing righteousness, Mat 7:18.

Fuente: Garner-Howes Baptist Commentary

14. For the love of Christ. The term love may be taken either in a passive signification, or in an active. I prefer the latter. For if we be not harder than iron, we cannot refrain from devoting ourselves entirely to Christ, when we consider what great love he exercised towards us, when he endured death in our stead. Paul, too, explains himself when he adds, that it is reasonable that we should live to him, being dead to ourselves. Hence, as he had previously stated: (2Co 5:11,) that he was stirred up to duty by fear, inasmuch as an account was one day to be rendered by him, so he now brings forward another motive — that measureless love of Christ towards us, of which he had furnished us with an evidence in his death. “The knowledge,” I say, “of this love, ought to constrain our affections, that they may go in no other direction than that of loving him in return.

There is a metaphor (544) implied in the word constrain, denoting that it is impossible but that every one that truly considers and ponders that wonderful love, which Christ has manifested towards us by his death, becomes, as it were, bound to him, and constrained by the closest tie, and devotes himself wholly to his service.

If one died for all. This design is to be carefully kept in view — that Christ died for us, that we might die to ourselves. The exposition is also to be carefully noticed — that to die to ourselves is to live to Christ; or if you would have it at greater length, it is to renounce ourselves, that we may live to Christ; for Christ. redeemed us with this view — that he might have us under his authority, as his peculiar possession. Hence it follows that we are no longer our own masters. There is a similar passage in Rom 14:7. At the same time, there are two things that are here brought forward separately — that we are dead in Christ, in order that all ambition and eagerness for distinction may be laid aside, and that it may be felt by us no hardship to be made as nothing; and farther, that we owe to Christ our life and death, because he has wholly bound us to himself. (545)

(544) “ Il y a vne metaphore et similitude;” — “There is a metaphor and similitude.”

(545) “ Pource qu’il a tant fait pour nous, que nous sommes du tout… luy;” — “Because he has done so much for us, that we are wholly his.”

Fuente: Calvin’s Complete Commentary

CHRISTIAN LOVETHE SUPREME CONSTRAINT

2Co 5:14

IT is doubtful if there is a single phrase in the entire New Testament that comes so nearly summing up the spirit of Christianity as does this sentence. It was written to the Corinthians Greek converts to the Churchand its important word love needed, therefore, a new definition.

Paul has already given that in the thirteenth of I Corinthians. The reason why he took such pains in that definition, and gave such space to it, was the new significance attaching to the word.

By the heathen of the Apostles day love had been degraded, and the very term was synonymous with sentimentality or even sensuality; and the Apostle must needs redeem it for Christs sake and give to it a new spiritual and social significance, all of which was matchlessly done in the great chapter to which we have referred.

The contrast, therefore, here is a most extensive one, and in order to understand this one sentence, one must have read at least the two Epistles to the Corinthians. But when he has done that carefully, thoughtfully, considerately, he will see at least three suggestions which it is our purpose to study.

THE SUPERIOR LOVE!

The love of Christ!

The world never saw its like; in truth, had never known anything of close kinship with it. Up to that time the greatest love the world knew anything about was the love that led a father or a friend to lay down his life for his child or his boon companion. In other words, love had lived in a reciprocal realm; it gave expecting to receive again. But God commendeth His love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, (aliens, enemies, rebels) Christ died for us. This, then, is the superior lovesuch love as the world had never seen till Calvarys hour.

The very phrase, thenthe love of Christ kept in mind, privileges us to make certain statements. It is superior to sensuality. Dr. W. J. Dawson says, At the time Christ came, love had a physical significance, but no moral or spiritual one. It was a synonym of physical sensation. It was the basis of the most abominable acts, because the word had become saturated with abominable meanings, by pagan poets, by vile Emperors, and by the filthy corruptions of a vile people.

Even today this good word has not entirely been delivered from such unholy uses. Not long since Jacob Beelhartdevotee of free lovewas telling the people of the land, Love is the guiding spirit of a universal system, and is harmony. The intellect is subjective because it is unworthy, and the bubblings of the heart are only free to direct the conduct of the spirit.

And yet, every one knows how short-lived are the sickly sentences and sentiments growing out of such definition of this good term. History has not a few illustrations akin to that to which our city has been treated this past week, in which it has been seen again that no endearing terms, in which truth is plighted, even when it is cemented by millions of cash, can hold together people who know nothing of the new meaning of this word.

Thomas Dixon tells how Lord Bulwer gushed in his love letters, beginning them, My dearest and kindest and most bootiful poodle, and ending them, my angel, my love, my light; but after a few brief years was upon this same woman with a carving knife. As he sprang at her, she cried, For Gods sake, take care Edward! at which he dropped the knife and with the ferocity of a tiger, sprang at her and bit a hole in her cheek.

The lower animal life knows all about love-making, but it is on a sensual basis; there are in it no spiritual elements. There are men so animalized that they cannot understand the phrase even, the love of Christ; and such salacious writers insist that Jesus was in love with the Magdalenes and might have married Mary of Bethany had not His enemies hunted Him to His death.

It is also superior to sentiment. When I use the word sentiment, I mean to use it properly, and to employ it significantly. I have never been able to join with those people who objected to sentimentality. Love without sentiment is a rose without aroma. The woman whose husband is without sentiment will never be happy; and the husband whose wife is without sentiment and the willingness to express it, will never know the meaning of domestic sweetness.

And yet, sentiment, in itself, is not sufficient. It can love those who are attractive and responsive so long as they do not cross its will or betray its trust. But a clash of wills can speedily kill sentimental love; and the betrayal of trust will bury it in the deepest of graves. Recently a man in a hotel introduced himself to me. He was personally attractive, clean in speech, wholesome in thought, a good conversationalist, and in a few days we felt that we were mutual friends. I invited him to my room and showed him the pictures of my wife and children, and then he opened his heart and told me his life experience and incidentally explained that of his bachelorhood. He said: I grew up on the farm. My ideals of women were of the most exalted. As a young man of twenty-seven, I found one I supposed to be my ideal and was paying her ardent court when an intimate friend of mine asked me to give him an hour in counsel. Before he had finished the days conversation he had charged her with loss of character, with living an immoral life! It stunned me, and produced skepticism. I wanted to be manly, and I went to her and told her exactly what had been told me. She denied it absolutely, notwithstanding evidence that made an implicit faith impossible. Our relations were renewed and went on for nearly two years, and were rapidly approaching the climax of marriage, when I faced her with one question, Tell me now, as one who must answer before God for the words that pass your lips, were the reports that reached me regarding your conduct truthful or false? I want no equivocation; I want an answer in one word, Yes or No! Upon her knees, with face mantled in blushes, and stained with tears, she said, I cannot, I will not lie longer, every word was true! I did miss the way! I did forget the instruction of my youth. The blandishments of one who professed to love me, seduced and led me astray.

And he said, Mr. Riley, what else could I do except to say, That is the end for us, and take my way in the world alone? His was not the highest love. The love that died that day was not the love of Christ; it was the death of a human sentiment wholesome, sweet, beautiful, maybe, but inferior to the love which I am telling this morningthat love that forgives, the love that can forget, the love that is so great that it has power in itself to cleanse every spot and stainthe love of Christ!

It is superior to sanguinity or the loss of blood relative. We count it a beautiful thing for a man to love his wife, for a woman to ardently love her husband, for parents to love their children, and children their parents, for brother to love brother or sister, for friend to love friend. And yet, even that love is a far-cry from the love of our text. Christ said of it, If ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? do not even the publicans the same?

A man has never particularly exalted himself in my judgment when he has said, I do not see the need of being a Christian! I love my wife and treat her decently; I love my children and keep them comfortably; I live at peace with my neighbors; I care for my creditors and pay my debts; what more can be demanded?

That puts love upon almost a commercial basis. That is the arrangement of tit for tat; that is the philosophy of quid pro quo; that was the sentiment that moved the man to pray for Me and my wife, my son John and his wife; us four and no more.

Dr. Dawson was correct when he said, There can be no more absolutely selfish force in the world than that kind of love which limits itself to its own kith and kin. Feudalism is sufficient to teach you that. The vital principle of feudalism was loyalty among families, tribes and clans. And what was the result? In the Old World one is shown from castle to castle, and when he comes to Edinburgh he hardly needs to have the guide explain, You will notice that there is only one side of this castle which is approachable. There was only one way in which the attacking force could reach this castle, that was from the East. At Warwick the moat is still in existencedried up, but it used to be filled with water, making it not only necessary for the enemy to scale the walls, or force the gates, but also to build an approach across this great circle of water before he could get at his enemy, spill his blood and take his house. On the North Rim of Antrim County in Ireland, you see a grand view of the castle constructed in two sectionsand a drawbridge between. If the enemy attacked from the sea, they retreated landward and pulled up the bridge; if from land, seaward and pulled up the bridge. The dwellers of that castle, the family and servants of that petty king were to be protected, such was the life-interest! But such was a self-love! No, family ties are not sufficient; the feudal plan was a poor expression of love as Christ and His Apostles employed it; and that modern feudalism, which now expresses itself in the commercial mart more strongly than elsewhere, is ten thousand times removed from the teaching of our text. It is not The simple plan that they should take who have the power And they should keep who can!

That may create and preserve fortunes and families, and keep alive the spirit of feudalism; but it also incites riot and battle and bloodshed, and the love of Christ would perish between such conflicting forces.

Thank God there is a love which expresses itself beyond that of the feudalistic spirit, beyond that which holds to the family and joins kith and kin. Let me give you an illustration: A pastor of the Highbury Quadrant Church, London, once said, Recently there stood up in the lecture hall of my own church a woman who for the first time opened her lips in public. She got up to tell us how, by the grace of God, she had been recovered from a condition of what seemed hopeless drunkenness. She was a woman born into good society, accomplished, speaking four languages, a fine musician, widely travelled, and yet she had sunk into the lowest gutter of inebriety, thrust out by her friends, left to perish, and discovered by a Salvation Army lass who took her, with all her repulsiveness, straight away to the Salvation Army Home for Inebriates; and so little did the family of that woman love her, although they are wealthy people, moving in good society, that they have never paid that Salvation Army captain for the cab fare.

This woman comes once more before the world, after eighteen months of suffering and struggle, reclaimed. You would say, now domestic love will surely come in; now the sense of kith and kin will be revived; now her friends will open their arms to receive her!

No! No! Her children are told she is dead! Her husband wishes to see no more of her. Her own mother consents to meet her only at a public restaurant; and the woman told me how she went, with what a turbulent heart within her, and with what a yearning love for her mother. But the reception she got was so freezing cold, she could not endure it, and she said, I began to ask myself whether it paid to be good, and I turned from my own mother and came back to the Salvation Army woman, the mother of my soul, for I knew that, in her, I had a love which no one else could give me.

Ah! was not Christ right when He said, If ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? Some of us have friends who have cost us grief and shame and misery, and we know how we feel about them. We dont wish to see them again. We prefer to forget them, andGod forgive us we almost wish they were dead. That is the natural feeling of grieved and wronged and betrayed human love. We are no worse than our fellows, it may be, when we acknowledge such feelings. But Christ demands that, if we are Christians, we should be much better than our fellows, and much better than the best of our fellows according to the flesh.

And, what force is there that can make us feel kind even to our own kith and kin who have bruised and hurt and put us to shame by their conduct? What, but the love of Him who, being sinless, bore the sins of others; who, being just, died for the unjust that He might bring us to God, and never complained of the injustice of it?

Human love failed that poor woman in her worst need. Where human love fails, Christs love comes to the rescue, and by this we know that we have passed from death unto life, because we love the brethren.

But I pass on to the second phrase concerning us:

THE SUFFICIENT CONSTRAINT

Sufficient for what? One might answer, for any thing; for everything! Has not Paul said of this love that it Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things. Charity never faileth.

It is sufficient, then, to overcome apathy. The need of the world is redemption from indifference. East India, with its Christian Science philosophy, is not alone in this need. Its greater indifference is participated in, to a greater or less extent, by all men and women of the world, and Frederick W. Robertson never said a truer thing than when he said, There are fewer signs in a souls state more alarming than that of religious indifference. He might have added by way of definition, social and spiritual indifference.

Charles Cuthbert Hall, the famous preacher, speaking in Chicago some years since, said, We all rejoice in the remarkable growth and the excellent features of American civilization, and we are pleased at the relatively good state of the common morality of the people. We are proud of our country and we like to speak of it in praiseworthy terms to our brothers across the water; but a deeper examination of the social side of our American life reveals a situation that causes anything but satisfaction. It is a matter of consternation and deep concern to us that the moral standard of American life is deteriorating. In the hustle and bustle of every-day activity we have astonished the world; but, morally, we are rapidly going asternso rapidly that one is dumfounded at the contrast after a visit to some of the countries of the old world. I am an optimist through and through, but I am not a stone-blind optimist. I feel and know from observation that religion has little if any part in our American civilization today. This is a lamentable state of affairs, and it behooves each and all of us to do all we can to help to stem this tide of indifference. Our home life is not what it should be, and it is not to be wondered at when we realize the general apathy of the people as regards their spiritual welfare.

But why this indifference even in the realm where men and women are supposed to be the most interestedthe realm of the home? Simply because the love of Christ is not there. It has been crowded out; oftentimes unconsciously crowded out. The father is not fully aware how effectually it has been killed; the mother is not cognizant of it; the children are not. Little by little they have let the world in and the love of the world has been death to the love of Christ, for it is not only written in Johns Epistle, but it is written into the experience of every man and every woman, as the eternal, unchangeable truth, that if you love the world, and the things that are in the world, the love of the Father cannot abide, for all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world.

When that gets possession spiritual apathy is inevitable. There is but one way to conquer it Christ in the heart; Christ in the Life; Christ in the home! You can hang your motto on the wall: Christ is the unseen Guest in this home but that will not help a particle unless Christ be enthroned in the heart; be made indeed the Guest of the home, the central figure in morning prayer, the Counsellor of the days purchases, the Director in the days duties, in fact, the Lord of life.

The love of Christ is the only adequate constraining force.

That love can conquer prejudice. It did in His case; it will in ours! The Samaritan, hated by His Jewish friends, He named a good neighbor; the Gentile, denominated a dog, He called a Brother. The Publican and sinner, social outcasts from the Jewish standpoint, He sat with them, ate with them, and loved them even unto His death. Truly it is when we think on Christ as the express image of the Father that we can sing the words of that old hymn:

The love of God is wider,Than the measure of mans mind;And the heart of the EternalIs most wonderfully kind.

His love can rise above repulsion. There are so many people, some of them even in the Church of Christ, that cannot enter a sanctuary unless its every appointment is satisfactory, and its every attendant attractive.

Any man who is in health, and who lays any claim to decency, when he enters the sanctuary should come in as clean in person and clothes as possible to his purse and powers; but, on the other hand, the love of Christ never disfellowships even the repulsive man. In His day the blind and the halt, the lame, were not cared for as now. The majority of the people simply put them away as domestic nuisances, social inconveniences. But to Christ they were men and women, to be loved, pitied and aided. He never passed them by without a look, a word, a touch. The leper was not only a social outcast, but regarded, by his own family and friends, as one dead; and was actually driven into the fields lest people be compelled to look at his open sores. He must, at their nigh-approach, cry, Unclean! Unclean! and hide himself. Christ called the lepers into His presence, and laid His hands upon them, and with every evidence of tenderness and love, healed them.

In the Life of Livingstone we read a story which has its duplicates in that of every true missionary, of a poor African woman lying by the roadside afflicted by the most repulsive disease; and yet, Livingstone stayed his feet, stretched out his hand, and contributed in every possible way to her comfort. A great preacher says, This was because he saw in her a creature for whom Christ died, and recognized that in that souldumb, confused and ignorantthere was still an immortal soul compared with which, in value, all the gold of Ophir and all the diamond fields of Africa, were but as the dust in the balance. I think he went a little deeper still; he saw in her his own sister. And repulsion does not exist where love is truly regnant.

I was in a city once where Quo Vadis was presented in moving pictures, and I dropped in for twenty minutes and the scenes I looked upon were those that the frightful edict of Nero affected when he caused the Christians to be drawn to the middle of the arena and driven by their brutal keepers into a little circle, and then fifty hungry, starving, lions loosed upon them. In a few minutes all that was left was the repulsive bones and torn and soiled garments. Yet, as I sat there looking upon a scene that passed nineteen centuries ago, and upon nothing better than an imaginary representation of that, those bones were not repulsive to me, and those bloody garments held for my vision no revolt! I yearned to go into the arena and gather up the bits of torn garments and gnawed bones and bear them away at least to a quiet beautiful burial, because the stretch of nineteen centuries could not destroy from my thought the fact, These are my brethren, my sisters in Christ. And where the love of Christ is repulsion is unknown. You can tell when you walk the streets tomorrow and look upon the poor cripple at the side of the walk, and the blind man groping his way about the street, whether the love of Christ is in your heart or not. Do you want to help him, or do you wish you had taken the other side of the street? That will well-nigh settle it.

But I conclude with

THE SWEEPING PRONOUN

The love of Christ constraineth us.

Who are the us? I think you will consent with me

It should include all professors. There was a time, doubtless, when it did; but the day was not long prolonged. Ananias and Sapphira joined the early church, and Simon Magus sought membership in it. When the people were called Christians first in Antioch, the term meant a company who were followers of Christdead to sin, buried with (Christ) by baptism, raised * * (to) walk in newness of life. They were a company wholly devoted each to all and all to each. Of them the world was compelled to remark, both upon their affection and upon their faithfulness. When they themselves employed the term us it swept a definite circle, the men and women who lived the new life, spake with new tongues, and enjoined love in a new meaning.

But, alas, for a possibility of decline! The principle, Many are the elect, but few are the select, was even then receiving its proof; and more and more, as the days have come and gone, has the opposite waxed, until now, as we employ the term, we must seek a new meaning. What do you mean by us?

It does include all possessorsall those who have Christ in their hearts; all those who are living the new life in Him; all those who know the new motive of His love in them. Some of them very humble folk, some of them specially notable ones, belong to a common household of faith, to a common household of fellowship. Christ is the object of that faith and the center of that fellowship. Some of them may be as great as Paul; some of them as notable as Peter; some were destined to names as immortal as that of John; others of them either not known, or soon to be forgotten as were certain others of the Apostles. But in the last Great Day, how this circle will shine! In the twenty-first chapter of the Book of the Revelation, the time comes when the Holy City is let down out of Heaven. What a thing of beauty! The glory of God was in it! Its light was like unto a stone most precious; its gates, pearls; and the wall of the city, we are told, had twelve foundations, and in them the names of the twelve Apostles of the Lamb.

That day Philip, Thomas, and Bartholomew, and Andrew, and Nathaniel, and others, little known to church history, will appear as pillars in the Church triumphant!

My brother layman, occupying perhaps an inconspicuous place in the public thought, listen to this story and be encouraged. He was a middle-aged clerk in a large wholesale house; he had been in that office for twenty-five years, and for ten years had occupied the first chair in the head office. He had no chums, we are told, and no amusements; only a cozy, comfortable room in the boarding house. He was known as a contented, happy man, giving himself assiduously to his work in the store on the week days, and in the church on the Sundays. But every heart knoweth its own bitterness, and down beneath his serene countenance there was a spirit of restlessness. He was beginning to ask himself whether he had not missed the mark and made a failure of his life. This night he remained in the office alone, his head upon his arm. No one would have dreamed it, but there by himself he was sobbing and saying, Oh, God, how little my life means in the world! Suddenly the last delivery of the day was at hand. The postman opened the door without ceremony, flung down the letters and went his way. He gathered himself together and mechanically opened the two addressed to him. The first was from British Columbia, and from a young man who had been under him for five years, and who two years before, had gone West. It ran as follows, Dear Mr. G: I am writing to thank you for all your goodness to me while in your office. I am succeeding beyond my expectations in business, and yesterday became a member of the church, having decided for Christ two months ago. For these two blessings of God I owe all to you, for in both business and religion you have been my example. I hope in this new land to help others as you helped me.

His tears were dried; there was a something of satisfaction settling into his face when he opened the second letter, which read,

Dear Sir: I have taken your advice and once more feel like a free man. With the money you loaned me I have paid my debts, and with Gods help and yours, I will redeem the past. I cannot thank you as I ought but I do trust I will be worthy of your confidence.

A new light came into his face. The old restlessness passed forever. He walked with the step of his youth. God had held the goblet of life to his lips and he had drunk deep of the love of Christ.

It is also a pronoun of appeal. The love of Christ constraineth us. It amounts to an invitation. Come with us into a new experience and into a glorious service. It also amounts to an appeal to us to God; for, as Dr. Dixon once said, The two great words of the New Testament are Come and Go! Come to Christ. Go into all the world and preach His Gospel. Our fathers used to sing,

Fly, Christians, to their rescue fly,Preach Jesus to them eer they die.

And there is just as much need of it today, New Theology notwithstanding. The Word of the Lord still is, Whom shall I send, and who will go for Us? I do believe that when once it is understood what martial demands our Master makes upon His converts; what sacrifices He requests, and what compensations He proposes, the spirit of true Christianity, wherever it exists, will respond in the language of the hymn that we sometimes sing, if with full meaning I do not know:

It may not be on the mountains height Or over the stormy sea;It may not be at the battles frontMy Lord will have need of me;But if by a still small voice He callsTo paths that I do not know,Ill answer, dear Lord, with my hand in Thine,Ill go where You want me to go.

Ill go where You want me to go, dear Lord,Over mountain, or plain, or sea;Ill say what You want me to say, dear Lord,Ill be what You want me to be.

Perhaps, to-day there are loving words Which Jesus would have me speak;There may be now in the paths of sinSome wandrer whom I should seek.O Saviour, if Thou wilt be my Guide,Tho dark and rugged the way,My voice shall echo Thy message sweet,Ill say what you want me to say.

Theres surely somewhere a lowly placeIn earths harvest field so wide;Where I may labor thro lifes short day,For Jesus the Crucified.So trusting my all to Thy tender care,And knowing Thou lovest me,Ill do Thy will with a heart sincere,Ill be what You want me to be.

Fuente: The Bible of the Expositor and the Evangelist by Riley

(14) For the love of Christ constraineth us.The Greek, like the English, admits of two interpretationsChrists love for us, or our love for Christ. St. Pauls uniform use of this and like phrases, however, elsewhere (Rom. 5:5; Rom. 8:35; 1Co. 16:24; 2Co. 13:14), is decisive in favour of the former. It was the Apostles sense of the love that Christ had shown to him and to all men that was acting as a constraining power, directing every act of every spiritual state to the good of others, restraining him from every self-seeking purpose.

Because we thus judge, that if one died for all.Better, as expressing the force of the Greek tense, Because we formed this judgment. The form of expression implies that the conviction dated from a given time, i.e., probably, from the hour when, in the new birth of his conversion, he first learnt to know the universality of the love of Christ manifested in His death. Many MSS. omit the if, but without any real change of meaning. It is obvious that St. Paul assumes the fact, even if it be stated hypothetically. The thought is the same as in the nearly contemporary passage of Rom. 5:15-19, and takes its place among St. Pauls most unqualified assertions of the universality of the atonement effected by Christs death. The Greek preposition does not in itself imply more than the fact that the death was on behalf of all; but this runs upas we see by comparing Mat. 20:28, Mar. 10:45, with Mar. 14:24, Joh. 15:13into the thought that the death was, in some very real sense, vicarious: in the place of the death of all men. The sequence of thought involves that meaning here.

Then were all dead.These strange, mysterious words have received very different interpretations. They cannot be rightly understood without bearing in view what we may call the mystic aspect of one phase of St. Pauls teaching. We may, perhaps, clear the way by setting aside untenable expositions. (1) They cannot mean, however true the fact may be in itself, that the death of Christ for all showed that all were previously under a sentence of condemnation and of death, for the verb is in the tense which indicates the momentary act of dying, not the state of death. (2) They cannot mean, for the same reason, that all were, before that sacrifice, dead in trespasses and sins. (3) They can hardly mean that all men, in and through that death, paid vicariously the penalty of death for their past sins, for the context implies that stress is laid not on the satisfaction of the claims of justice, but on personal union with Christ. The real solution of the problem is found in the line of thought of Rom. 5:17-19, 1Co. 11:3; 1Co. 15:22, as to the relation of Christ to every member of the human family, in the teaching of Rom. 6:10, as to the meaning of His death(He died unto sin once). Christ died for allthis is the Apostles thoughtas the head and representative of the race. But if so, the race, in its collective unity, died, as He died, to sin, and should live, as He lives, to God. Each member of the race is then only in a true and normal state when he ceases to live for himself and actually lives for Christ. That is the mystic ideal which St. Paul placed before himself and others, and every advance in holiness is, in its measure, an approximation to it.

Fuente: Ellicott’s Commentary for English Readers (Old and New Testaments)

4. Apostolic scheme of Christ’s death, and of our renewal and reconciliation, 14-19.

Paul now, in the following section, explains the ground of his fervent which they styled craziness. The impulse of Christ’s love compels him to make the expiation, renovation, and reconciliation his overwhelming theme.

Fuente: Whedon’s Commentary on the Old and New Testaments

14. Love of Christ Christ’s love to us, not ours to him; his love sublimely displayed in his death for us. Eph 3:19; Rom 8:35; Rom 8:37.

Constraineth us Compels me by compression, as if it were the powerful pressure of a physical force. The madness which these Jew-Christians charge upon me is the powerful pressure of the love of Christ impelling me, by the power of his death, to a complete devotion to your salvation. And this charge of madness is the keynote to the entire passage, (2Co 5:13 to 2Co 6:11,) showing the intense power of the theme that made Paul’s life one long impulse of grand excitement.

Thus judge The judgment comprehends 2Co 5:14-15. If Omitted by the best authorities. Read, we thus judge that one died for all, therefore all died. How it is here that all died commentators differ. We think the correct reference is to that death which all died in Adam, (Rom 5:15,) for which Christ’s death is a divine substitute. St. Paul assumes Christ’s death as proof that all died, by sin, from the life of God; a death beginning in spiritual death, and reaching to bodily death and second death. That, literally and historically, this complete death has not yet been completed of our whole race, nor, in fact, of any of our race, and will not be completed till the second death is inflicted, is true. But then conceptually St. Paul views that great death, being in process of accomplishment through ages, as one great accomplished fact. Yet is it not so accomplished but that the death of Christ may take its place, and so forestall and supersede its literal accomplishment. Paul’s reasoning is, that nothing less than our death could require Christ’s death. If he died, it was because we all died. The rendering, were all dead, is justified by Col 3:3, where the same tense is used.

Another interpretation, adopted by Alford, is, Christ died for all, therefore all died, too, to sin; and thence is deduced that all must live the new life. But died and live are here used so repeatedly of literal death and life that it appears arbitrary not so to interpret this clause. That the all here for whom Christ died means the entire race is plain, unless we deny that the whole human race died in Adam.

Fuente: Whedon’s Commentary on the Old and New Testaments

For the love of Christ constrains us (‘grips us tightly’), because we thus judge, that one died for all, therefore all died, and he died for all, that they who live should no longer live to themselves, but to him who for their sakes died and rose again.

For what they do, they do because they are constrained by the love of Christ, the love that Christ has for them (it could mean the love that we have for Christ, but the immediate reference to the cross points to His love for us). They are gripped by His love. His love for them, revealed through the cross, moves them to reveal a similar love for others. Was He willing to die for them? So were they willing to die for others. Did He show His love for them? So will they show their love for others.

Indeed the death of Christ was such that they ‘all’ partake in it. He died ‘for all’ (that is for all who believe, whether Jew or Gentile), and 1Co 15:3 tells us it was ‘for our sins’. And in that fact that He died for all, all died. His death for sins was counted on their behalf. The fact that the latter ‘all’ must refer only to Christians suggests that the first does also.

So the dying figure on the cross suffered for the sins of all who would be His. And as He died, we died in Him. His death comprised in itself a multiplicity of deaths, the deaths of all who would be ‘in Him’. The sentence of death on sin was being paid in Him for that innumerable multitude. That this has substitutionary force cannot be reasonably denied, although we can also include representation. He died in their place and as their representative, and thus they consider themselves as having died with Him (Gal 2:20). His death is put to their account so that the law cannot condemn them. It has been satisfied by their having died in Him (Gal 3:10-13) and it can no longer point the accusing finger (Rom 7:6). For if it did we would boldly reply, ‘I have already died in Christ. The price I owe has been paid.’

And the final purpose in His dying for all was so that those who did die with Him may no longer live to themselves, but to Him Who for their sakes died for them and rose again. They are to consider themselves, as they once were, as ‘the old man’, as having died so that their lives no longer belong to them. They must reckon themselves as dead to sin and alive to God (Rom 6:11). And they must reckon themselves, as they are as the new man, as having risen with Christ, and therefore as being under obligation to God to live as He lives. For they have been raised in Him into heavenly places (Eph 2:6) and must live heavenly lives as citizens of heaven (Php 3:20).

The further significance of the cross is that those who come to receive the benefit of it in forgiveness of sin and in salvation (‘for our sins’), then recognise that as He died on the cross so did they, and they therefore recognise that being dead to sin they must live as dead to sin. They must die to all that put Christ on the cross. They must crucify the flesh with its affections and desires (Gal 5:24). And they must see themselves as having risen in Him to a new life, so as to please the One Who Himself also died and rose again for their sakes. They must let Him live through them. In the words of Paul elsewhere, “I have been crucified with Christ. Nevertheless I live. Yet it is not I who live, but Christ Who lives in me. And the life that I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God Who loved me and gave Himself up for me’ (Gal 2:20). He recognised that Christ was now living in him, and desired to live through him. Thus his life from that time was a life offered to the One Who loved Him. This is why the Corinthians can recognise the genuineness of his message and of his concerns.

Fuente: Commentary Series on the Bible by Peter Pett

2Co 5:14. Constraineth us; “Bears us away, like a strong and resistless torrent.” Thus much is implied by the original word . See Php 1:23.

Fuente: Commentary on the Holy Bible by Thomas Coke

2Co 5:14 f. Paul now proves what was implied in 2Co 5:13 , that his whole working was done not in his own interest (comp. , 2Co 5:15 ), but for God and the brethren; the love of Christ holds him in bounds, so that he cannot proceed or do otherwise. According to Rckert, Paul wishes to give a reason for the . But he thus arbitrarily overleaps the second half of 2Co 5:13 , though this expresses the same thing as the first hal.

] not: the love to Christ (Oecumenius, Beza, Grotius, Mosheim, Heumann, Hofmann, Maier), but: the love of Christ to men (so Chrysostom and most others); for the death of Christ floating before the apostle’s mind is to him the highest act of love (Rom 5:6-7 ; Gal 2:20 ; Eph 3:19 ; Rom 8:35 ; Rom 8:37 ); and with Paul generally (not so with John) the genitive of a person with is always the genitivus subjecti (Rom 5:5 ; Rom 5:8 ; Rom 8:35 ; Rom 8:39 ; 2Co 8:24 ; 2Co 13:13 ; Eph 2:4 ; Phi 1:9 ; also 2Th 3:5 ; 1Th 1:3 is not here relevant), while, when the person is the object of love, he expresses this by (Col 1:4 ; 1Th 3:12 ), and denotes by the genitive only an abstract as object (2Th 2:10 ); in Rom 15:30 , . is the genitivus originis .

] cohibet nos, holds us in bounds , so as not to go beyond the limits marked by and , and to follow, possibly, affections and interests of our own. Comp. Calvin ( constringere affectus nostros ), Loesner, Billroth, Hofmann, Castalio: “tenet nos.” Most, however, follow the Vulgate ( urget nos ): it urges and drives us . [229] So Emmerling, Vater, Flatt, Schrader, Rckert, Olshausen, Osiander, Neander, and others; also Chrysostom ( ) and Theodoret ( ). But contrary to the usage of the word, for always expresses that which holds together, confines , and the like, and so may mean press hard , but not urge and drive (Luk 19:43 ; Luk 8:37 , al. ; Phi 1:23 ; also Act 18:5 ). Comp. Plato, Polit. p. 311 C; Pind. Pyth. i. 37, al. ; Philo, Leg. ad Caj . p. 1016 E; also LXX. in Biel and Schleusner, Thes . Ewald: it harasses us , “so that we have no rest except we do everything in it.” Thus would revert to the notion of pressing hard , which may be a harassing (Luk 12:50 ; Wis 17:11 , and Grimm’s Handb. in loc .). But this is not given here by the context, as, indeed, that further development of the meaning does not flow from the connectio.

] after we have come to be of the judgment , namely, after our conversion, [230] Gal 1:16 . This judgment contains that, in consequence of which that restraining influence of the love of Christ takes place the subjective condition of this influenc.

. . .] that one for all , etc. Who is meant by , is clear from . , and was known to all the hearts of the readers; hence there is the less ground for breaking up the simple sentence, and taking as in apposition: “ because He, one for all, died ” (Hofmann). As for , it is simplest, although after is not genuine (see the critical remarks), to take it, not as because , but as that , corresponding, according to the usage elsewhere, to the preparatory (Rom 2:3 ; Rom 6:6 ; 2Co 10:7 ; 2Co 10:11 ; Eph 5:5 , al. ); in such a way, however, that . . . is likewise included in the dependence on , and does not form an independent clause (in opposition to Rckert). For the contents of the judgment as such must lie in , of which the historical fact, . ., is only the actual presupposition serving as its ground. The way in which the two clauses are marshalled side by side (without or because ) makes the expression more lively, comp. 1Co 10:17 . Hence it is to be translated: that one died for all, consequently they all died, i.e . consequently in this death of the one the death of all was accomplished, the ethical death, namely, in so far as in the case of all the ceasing of the fleshly life, of the life in sin (which ethical dying sets in subjectively through fellowship of faith with the death of Christ), is objectively, as a matter of fact, contained in the death of the Lord. When Christ died the redeeming death for all (comp. 2Co 5:21 ), all died, in respect of their fleshly life, with Him ( , Gal 2:19 ; , Col 3:3 ); this objective matter of fact which Paul here affirms has its subjective realization in the faith of the individuals, through which they have entered into that death-fellowship with Christ given through His death for all, so that they have now, by means of baptism, become (Col 2:12 ). Comp. Rom 6:4 . Here [231] also, as in all passages where is used of the atoning death (see on Rom 5:6 ; Gal 3:13 ), it is not equivalent to (comp. on 2Co 5:21 ), for which it is taken by most commentators, including Flatt, Emmerling, Rckert, Olshausen, de Wette, Usteri, Osiander, Gess, Baur, Maier, but: for the sake of all, for their benefit, to expiate their sins (2Co 5:19 ; Rom 3:25 ). Since One has died the redeeming death for the good of all, so that the death of this. One as has come to benefit all, all are dead, because otherwise the would not be correctly put. The dying of Christ for the reconciliation of all necessarily presupposes that death-fellowship of all, for Christ could not have died effectively for one who would not have died with Christ; unbelieving, such a one, in spite of the sacrificial death made for all, would still be in his sins. [232] That here cannot be equivalent to is shown particularly by 2Co 5:15 : ; for according to this the resurrection of Jesus also (since it would be quite arbitrary to refer merely to ) must have been substitutionary, which is nowhere taught, since it is rather the actual proof and confirmation of the atonement (see 1Co 15:17 ; Rom 4:25 ; Rom 9:33 ; Act 13:37 f.; 1Pe 1:3 f.).

] for all men in general , so that no one is excluded from the effect of his , and every one, so soon as he becomes a believer, attains subjectively to the enjoyment of this effect. This subjective realization, although in the case of those who refuse belief it is frustrated by their guilt, is, in the divine plan of salvation, destined for all , and has already taken place in the case of believers; hence Paul, who himself belonged to the latter, might justly from this his own standpoint in the , without meaning by only believers (in opposition to my previous explanation), prove the restraining influence of the love of Christ, which he had himself experience.

] with the article; for it applies to all those of whom . . was just sai.

] not: they are to die (Thomas, Grotius, Estius, Nsselt, and others); not: they were subjected to death (Chrysostom, Theodoret, Erasmus, Beza, and others; Vatablus: “morte digni”); nor: they must have died (Ewald); nor: “it is just as good as if they had died” (Calovius, Flatt, and others); but: “ mors facta in morte Christi ” (Bengel), they died , which is to be considered as a real fact, objectively contained in the fact of the death of Jesus, and subjectively accomplished in the consciousness of individuals through faith.

[229] Beza: “totos possidet ac regit, ut ejus afflatu quasi correpti agamus omnia.”

[230] Not at , but after conversion. His conversion took place through Christ seizing on him and overmastering him, and not by way of argument; but subsequently in him who had become a believer there necessarily set in the discursive exercise of reflection, guiding the further judgment regarding the new life which he had acquired. This in opposition to Hofmann’s misconception of my explanation, as if I took as identical with the conversion of the apostle.

[231] Comp. Schweizer in the Stud. u. Krit . 1858, p. 462 f.; Hofmann, Schriftbew . II. 1, p. 324 f. What Baur remarks, on the other hand, in Hilgenfeld’s Zeitschr. f. wiss. Theol . 1859, p. 241 (comp. his neut. Theol . p. 158 f.), that denotes the ideal substitution, i.e. the most intimate, immediate entering into the other and putting oneself in his place, is not the contents of the idea of the preposition , but that of the idea of sacrifice , under which the death of Jesus is ranked, in the consciousness of the apostle and his readers, as an , offered for the salvation of all ( ).

[232] Certainly the dying of Christ was the “close of the previous sin-tainted life of mankind” (Hofmann, comp. Rich. Schmidt, Paul. Christol . p. 55 f.), but in so far as this dying blotted out the guilt of mankind. This expiation becomes appropriated by individuals through faith, and out of faith there grows the new life of sanctification, in which he who has died ethically with Christ in faith is ethically risen with Him and lives to God.

Fuente: Heinrich August Wilhelm Meyer’s New Testament Commentary

DISCOURSE: 2020
THE CONSTRAINING POWER OF CHRISTS LOVE

2Co 5:14-15. The love of Christ conslraineth us; because we thus judge, that if one died for all, then were all dead: and that he died for all, that they which live should not henceforth live unto themselves, but unto him which died for them, and rose again.

ST. PAUL was more abundant both in labours and in sufferings than any other of the Apostles: but his zeal was by many considered as no better than madness. To the lukewarm, as well as to those who were altogether careless, he appeared to be transported far beyond the bounds of reason and propriety; and they therefore did not hesitate to say that he was beside himself. But whilst he was thus condemned as a wild enthusiast, he cultivated in reality the strictest sobriety; as is evident throughout his whole history, and in all his epistles. But, it was with him a small matter to be judged of mans judgment: he cared not what opinion his adversaries formed of him, whilst he had the consciousness that he was actuated by zeal for God, and by love to man. Nevertheless he was not backward to declare whence his zeal arose; nor was he afraid to let his enemies themselves judge whether it was rational or not. He tells them, that, if he was beside himself, it was to God, that he might be glorified; or, if he was sober, it was for their cause, that they might be benefited: but that, whatever judgment might be passed upon him, the love of Christ constrained him, and under the influence of that he thought it right to live entirely to his God.
In vindication of the Apostle, and for the regulating of our own minds, we shall inquire,

I.

What it was which stimulated him to such unparalleled exertions

It was the love of Christ which constrained him. By this I understand, not his love to Christ, but Christs love to him; which is here mentioned in its two great leading features;

1.

His dying for us

[Wonderful indeed was this love! that when he was incapable of any increase of honour or happiness himself, he left the bosom of his Father, and took our nature upon him with all its sinless infirmities, on purpose that he might expiate our guilt by his own blood, and work out a righteousness for our acceptance before God That he should do this so readily, undertaking every thing as soon as it was proposed to him by the Father [Note: Psa 40:6-8.], and adhering to his engagement till it was perfectly fulfilled, not dissuaded by any [Note: Mat 16:23.], nor deterred by the dreadful prospect of all his sufferings [Note: Luk 12:50.], but drinking to the very dregs the bitter cup, and completing every thing till he could say It is finished: well may it be said, What manner of love was this!]

2.

His employing for us the life that was restored to him at his resurrection

[As he died for our offences, so he rose again for our justification. He is as much occupied about the work of our salvation now, as he was when living on earth, or dying on the cross: He ever liveth to make intercession for us. Every thing is put into his hands, in order that he may manage it for our good. All the works of Providence are directed and overruled by him for the furtherance of our welfare: and he, as the living Head of his people, imparts to them such measures of grace as he sees needful for them. In a word, he lives in them as in his temple, and carries on the whole work of grace in them, and never suffers so much as one of them to perish Can we wonder that such love as this constrained the Apostle, and carried him forward, like a resistless torrent, in the service of his God? ]
The Apostle, in further vindication of himself, proceeds to state,

II.

Why he suffered it to have such an ascendant over him

He acted not from feeling only, though doubtless the flame of love that was thus kindled in his soul burned with inextinguishable ardour [Note: Son 8:7-8.]; but from judgment also: he judged,

1.

That our obligations to the Lord Jesus Christ are infinite

[It is plain, that if one died for all, then were all dead. And was this our state? Were we dead in trespasses and sins, and under a sentence of eternal condemnation? O! what do we owe to that Saviour who emptied himself of all his glory for us, who died for us when enemies, and actually became a curse for us, bearing in his own person all that was due to the iniquities of a guilty world! The apostate angels had no such mercy shewn to them: they fell, and had none to help them; and are therefore reserved in chains of darkness unto the judgment of the great day. And had not the Lord Jesus Christ died for us, we had been dead still, and should have been to all eternity companions with the fallen angels in misery, as we have been in transgression. Moreover, his life is as necessary for us as his death: for if he did not keep us every moment, even as the apple of his eye, no one of us could endure unto the end: the great adversary of mankind, who tempted our first parents to sin, would beguile and ruin us for ever, if Jesus did not carry us in his bosom, and give us grace sufficient for our returning necessities.

Judge then whether this be not a reason for loving him, and for devoting ourselves unreservedly to his service? Can too much be done for him, who has done, and is doing, so much for us? Or should we think much of any sufferings that we may be called to endure for him? Should we not even rejoice if we are counted worthy to suffer for him, and welcome even death itself, if only his name may be magnified? If to entertain such sentiments, and to pursue such conduct, be madness, I would to God that we all were as obnoxious to the charge as Paul himself! But let the world say or think as they will, such a devotedness to God is a reasonable service [Note: Rom 12:1.].]

2.

That the very end for which the Lord Jesus Christ has conferred those obligations upon us, is, that he may bind us to himself in a state of holy obedience

[It is not to rescue us from death and hell only, that Jesus has died for us, but to deliver us also from sin and Satan, and to bring us back to the state from which we are fallen. Were we created holy and happy, even like the angels themselves? to that state would the Lord Jesus elevate us again, that both in this world and to all eternity we may delight ourselves in God. This is declared to be the express purpose of his death [Note: Tit 2:14.]. Did he then die to redeem us from all iniquity, and shall we still live in sin of any kind? Did he die to purify unto himself a peculiar people zealous of good works; and shall we not labour to attain this blessed character? Shall there be any bounds to our zeal; or shall we restrain it because a blind and ungodly world agree to call it madness? What if Mary was censured by the proud Pharisee for her over-righteous zeal; did Christ condemn it? Did he not even compel the Pharisee unwittingly to condemn himself [Note: Luk 7:37-47.]? We mean not by this to justify any departure from real sobriety of mind; for religion is a sober thing, being not like the transient glare of a meteor, but like the steady course of the sun: but this we would do; we would dissuade all from living in any measure to themselves, and bring them to live wholly and entirely to their God; and, if the world deride this as enthusiasm, and prescribe to us a lower standard of duty, we would say with Peter, Whether it be right to hearken unto you more than unto God, judge ye; for we cannot but consult his will, and approve ourselves to him [Note: Act 4:19-20.].]

Application
1.

Let us all seek an interest in Christ

[Has he died for us; and shall we die too? God forbid. It is a blessed truth, that he has died for all, and given himself a ransom for all, and tasted death for every man, and made himself a propitiation for the sins of the whole world. How awful then the thought that any should perish, for whom Christ died! What a bitter reflection will it be to such persons in the eternal world, that Christ died for them, and yet they would not seek for salvation from him! O that this may not be our unhappy state! Let us look to him, and believe in him, and live by faith upon him now, that we may live with him for evermore.]

2.

Let us meditate much upon his love

[Were we but duly sensible of his love to us, we could not refrain from loving and serving him. O think what a subject for contemplation this is! It has been the one theme of praise and adoration in heaven for thousands of years, and will be to all eternity; and shall we not delight in the contemplation of it? It has a height and depth, and length and breadth, that is utterly unsearchable. Beloved brethren, meditate upon it, till the fire kindle in your hearts, and you be constrained to glorify him with your bodies and your spirits which are his.]

3.

Let us endeavour to answer the true end of all his love

[You have heard what this was, even that you should not henceforth live unto yourselves, but unto him. Now, then, set about the blessed work. Let the pleasures, the riches, the honours of the world be to you as the dirt under your feet: be crucified to the world, and let the world be crucified unto you. And begin to walk as Christ walked, and to follow the example which St. Paul has set you. Let the world despise you, if they please; seek ye the approbation of your God: and when they, like Michal, deride your piety, say ye with holy David, If this is to be vile, I will be yet more vile than thus [Note: 2Sa 6:22.].]

Fuente: Charles Simeon’s Horae Homileticae (Old and New Testaments)

14 For the love of Christ constraineth us; because we thus judge, that if one died for all, then were all dead:

Ver. 14. The love of Christ, &c. ] As reward hath an attractive, and punishment an impulsive, so love hath a compulsive faculty. This love of Christ had so closed in St Paul, so hemmed him in, and begirt him round, that his adversaries reported him a mad man, as 2Co 5:13 ; he erred in love toward his sweet Saviour, and even exhaled has blessed soul in continual sallies, as it were, and expressions of his dear affection to the Lord Jesus. The word he here useth, imports that he was even shut up by his love to his dear Lord, as in a pound or pinfold, so that he could not get out. He had meditated so much upon Christ’s love, donec totus fixus in corde, qui totus fixus in cruce, that his heart was turned into a lump of love.

Then were all dead ] All the body suffered in and with Christ the head, and so are freed by his death, Heb 2:9 , as if themselves in person had died.

Fuente: John Trapp’s Complete Commentary (Old and New Testaments)

14 19. ] And his constraining motive is the love of Christ; who died for all, that all should live to Him; and accordingly the Apostle has no longer any mere knowledge or regards according to the flesh, seeing that all things are become new in Christ by means of the reconciliation effected by God in Him, of which reconciliation Paul is the minister .

Fuente: Henry Alford’s Greek Testament

14. ] For (reason of his devotion under all reports and circumstances, and , as in last verse) Christ’s love (not, love to Christ , as c [6] , Beza, al., but Christ’s love to men , subjective, as most Commentators; as shewn in His Death , which is the greatest proof of love, see Rom 5:6-8 . Meyer remarks that the gen. of the person after is with Paul always subjective, Rom 5:5 ; Rom 5:8 ; Rom 8:35 ; Rom 8:39 ; ch. 2Co 8:24 ; 2Co 13:13 ; Eph 2:4 ; Php 1:9 al. (but see his own note on 2Th 3:5 , where he maintains the objective sense), whereas with John it is not always so, 1Jn 5:3 . Paul usually expresses love of , i.e. towards , by , Col 1:4 ; 1Th 3:12 ) constraineth us (a better word could not be found: the idea of is that of forcible limitation , either in a good or a bad sense, of confining to one object , or within certain bounds , be that one object a painful or glorious one, those bounds the angusti of distress, or the course of apostolic energy, as here. ‘ Constraineth us ,’ generally: limits us to one great end, and prohibits our taking into consideration any others. ‘Metaphora est in verbo constringendi : qua notatur, fieri non posse, quin, quisquis mirificum illum amorem quem testatus est nobis Christus morte sua, vere expendit et reputat, quasi ei alligatus, et arctissimo vinculo constrictus, se in illius obsequium addicat.’ Calv. The varieties of interpretation, some as Meyer, urging more the sense cohibendi , others as Chrys., that excitandi , , all in fact amount to one that of the forcible compression of his energies to one line of action),

[6] cumenius of Tricca in Thrace, Cent y . XI.?

Fuente: Henry Alford’s Greek Testament

2Co 5:14-16 . IT IS NOT THE KNOWLEDGE OF CHRIST IN HIS EARTHLY LIFE, BUT THE LOVE WHICH CHRIST HAS FOR MAN THAT IS THE CONSTRAINING POWER OF PAUL’S PREACHING.

Fuente: The Expositors Greek Testament by Robertson

2Co 5:14 . . . . .: for the Love of Christ constraineth us, sc. , within the limits laid down in 2Co 5:13 . The words are often quoted as meaning that the love which Christians bear to Christ is the supreme motive of the Christian life; but however true this is in itself, it is not the meaning of the Apostle here. The genitive of the person after is in St. Paul’s Epistles always subjective ( cf. , Rom 5:5 ; Rom 8:39 , chap. 2Co 13:13 , 2Th 3:5 , and cf. also Rom 15:30 , Eph 2:4 , Col 1:13 , and for . . reff. above); i.e. , “the Love of God” and “the Love of Christ” signify with him the love which God and Christ bear towards ( ) man. (St. Paul often uses the verb to express man’s love to God, but never the substantive ), St. John’s usage varies, the genitive sometimes being objective and sometimes subjective ( cf. Joh 5:42 and 1Jn 2:5 ; 1Jn 2:15 ; 1Jn 3:17 ; 1Jn 4:9 ; 1Jn 5:3 ; see also Luk 11:42 ), but St. Paul’s is not doubtful. The “Love of Christ” here, then, is the love which Christ has for us, not the love which we bear to Him; the constraining power of Christian ministration and service is more effective and stable than it would be if it sprang from the fickle and variable affections of men ( cf. Joh 15:16 ).

Fuente: The Expositors Greek Testament by Robertson

2 Corinthians

THE LOVE THAT CONSTRAINS

2Co 5:14 .

It is a dangerous thing to be unlike other people. It is still more dangerous to be better than other people. The world has a little heap of depreciatory terms which it flings, age after age, at all men who have a higher standard and nobler aims than their fellows. A favourite term is ‘mad.’ So, long ago they said, ‘The prophet is a fool; the spiritual man is mad,’ and, in His turn, Jesus was said to be ‘beside Himself,’ and Festus shouted from the judgment-seat to Paul that he was mad. A great many people had said the same thing about him before, as the context shows. For the verse before my text is: ‘Whether we be beside ourselves, it is to God: or whether we be sober, it is for your cause.’ Now the former clause can only refer to other people’s estimate of the Apostle. No doubt there were many things about him that gave colour to it. He said that a dead Man had appeared to him and spoken with him. He said that he had been carried up into the third heaven. He had a very strange creed in the judgment of the times. He had abandoned a brilliant career for a very poor one. He was obviously utterly indifferent to the ordinary aims of men. He had a consuming enthusiasm. And so the world explained him satisfactorily to itself by the short and easy method of saying, ‘Insane.’ And Paul explained himself by the great word of my text, ‘The love of Christ constraineth us.’ Wherever there is a life adequately under the influence of Christ’s love the results will be such as an unsympathising world may call madness, but which are the perfection of sober-mindedness. Would there were more such madmen! I wish to try to make one or two of them now, by getting some of you to take for your motto, ‘The love of Christ constraineth us.’

I. Now the first thing to notice is this constraining love.

I need not spend time in showing that when Paul says here ‘The love of Christ,’ he means Christ’s love to him, not his to Christ. That is in accordance with his continual usage of the expression; and it is in accordance with facts. For it is not my love to Jesus, but His love to me, that brings the real moulding power into my life, and my love to Him is only the condition on which the true power acts upon me. To get the fulcrum and the lever which will heave a life up to the heights you have to get out of yourselves.

Now Paul never saw Jesus Christ in this earthly life. Timothy, who is associated with him in this letter, and perhaps is one of the ‘us,’ never saw Him either. The Corinthian believers whom he is addressing had, of course, never seen Him. And yet the Apostle has not the slightest hesitation in taking that great benediction of Christ’s love and spreading it over them all. That love is independent of time and of space; it includes humanity, and is co-extensive with it. Unturned away by unworthiness, unrepelled by non-responsiveness, undisgusted by any sin, unwearied by any, however numerous, foiling of its attempts, the love of Christ, like the great heavens that bend above us, wraps us all in its sweetness, and showers upon us all its light and its dew.

And yet, brethren, I would have you remember that whilst we thus try to paint, in poor, poor words, the universality of that love, we have to remember that it does not partake of the weakness that infects all human affections, which are only strong when they are narrow, and as the river expands it becomes shallow, and loses the force in its flow which it had when it was gathered between straiter banks, so as that a universal charity is almost akin to a universal indifference. But this love that grasps us all, this river that ‘proceedeth from the Throne of God and of the Lamb,’ flows in its widest reaches as deep and as impetuous in its career as if it were held within the narrowest of gorges. For Christ’s universal love is universal only because it is individualising and particular. We love our nation by generalising and losing sight of the individuals. Christ loves the world because He loves every man and woman in it, and His grace enwraps all because His grace hovers over each.

‘The sun whose beams most glorious are

Despiseth no beholder,’

but the rays come straight to each eyeball. Be sure of this: that He who, when the multitude thronged Him and pressed Him, felt the tremulous, timid, scarcely perceptible touch of one woman’s wasted finger on the hem of His garment, holds each of us in the grasp of His love, which is universal, because it applies to each. You and I have each the whole radiance of it pouring down on our heads, and none intercepts the beams from any other. So, brethren, let us each feel not only the love that grasps the world, but the love that empties itself on me.

But there is one more remark that I wish to make in reference to this constraining love of Jesus Christ, and that is, that in order to see and feel it we must take the point of view that this Apostle takes in my text. For hearken how he goes on. ‘The love of Christ constraineth us, because we thus judge, that if one died for all, then all died, and that He died for all,’ etc. That is to say, the death of Christ for all, which is equivalent to the death of Christ for each, is the great solvent by which the love of God melts men’s hearts, and is the great proof that Jesus Christ loves me, and thee, and all of us. If you strike out that conception you have struck out from your Christianity the vindication of the belief that Christ loves the world. What possible meaning is there in the expression, ‘He died for all?’ How can the fact of His death on a ‘green hill’ outside the gates of a little city in Syria have world-wide issues, unless in that death He bore, and bore away, the sins of the whole world? I know that there have been many-and there are many to-day-who not accepting what seems to me to be the very vital heart of Christianity-viz. the death of Christ for the world’s sin, do yet cherish-as I think illogically-yet do cherish a regard for Him, which puts some of us who call ourselves ‘orthodox,’ and are tepid, to the blush. Thank God! men are often better than their creeds, as well as worse than them. But that fact does not affect what I am saying now, and what I beg you to take for what you find it to be worth, that unless we believe that Jesus Christ died for all, I do not know what claim He has on the love of the world. We shall admire Him, we shall bow before Him, as the very realised ideal of humanity, though how this one Man has managed to escape the taint of the all-pervading evil remains, upon that hypothesis, very obscure. But love Him? No! Why should I? But if I feel that His death had world-wide issues, and that He went down into the darkness in order that He might bring the world into the light, then-and I am sure, on the wide scale and in the long-run only then-will men turn to Him and say, ‘Thou hast died for me, help me to live for Thee.’ Brethren, I beseech you, take care of emptying the death of Christ of its deepest meaning, lest you should thereby rob His character of its chiefest charm, and His name of its mightiest soul-melting power. The love that constraineth is the love that died, and died for all, because it died for each.

II. Now let me ask you to consider the echo of this constraining love.

I said a moment or two ago that Christ’s love to us is the constraining power, and that ours to Him is but the condition on which that power works. But between the two there comes something which brings that constraining love to bear upon our hearts. And so notice what my text goes on to adduce as needful for Christ’s love to have its effect-namely, ‘because we thus judge,’ etc. Then my estimate, my apprehension of the love of Christ must come in between its manifestation and its power to grip, to restrain, to impel me. If I may use such a figure, He stands, as it were, bugle in hand, and blows the sweet strains that are meant to set the echoes flying. But the rock must receive the impact of the vibrations ere it can throw back the thinned echo of the music. Love must be believed and known ere it can be responded to.

Now the only answer and echo that hearts desire is the love of the beloved heart. We all know that in our earthly life. Love is as much a hunger to be loved as the outgoing of my own affection. The two things are inseparable, and there is nothing that repays love but love. Jesus Christ wishes each of us to love Him. If it is true that He loves me, then, intertwisted with the outgoing of His heart towards me is the yearning that my heart may go out towards Him. Dear brethren, this is no pulpit rhetoric, it is a plain, simple fact, inseparable from the belief in Christ’s love-that He wishes you and every soul of man to love Him, and that, whatever else you bring, lip reverence, orthodox belief, apparent surrender, in the assay shop of His great mint all these are rejected, and the only metal that passes the fire is the pure gold of an answering love. Brethren! is that what you bring to Jesus Christ?

Love seeks for love, and our love can only be an echo of His. He takes the beginning in everything. If I am to love Him back again, I must have faith in His love to me. And if that be so, then the true way by which you, imperfect Christian people, can deepen and strengthen your love to Jesus Christ is not so much by efforts to work up a certain warmth of sentiment and glow of affection, as by gazing, with believing eyes of the heart, upon that which kindles your love to Him. If you want ice to melt, put it out into the sunshine, If you want the mirror to gleam, do not spend all your time in polishing it. Carry it where it can catch the ray, and it will flash it back in glory. ‘We love Him because He first loved us.’ Our love is an echo; be sure that you listen for the parent note, and link yourselves by faith with that great love which has come down from Heaven for us all.

But how can I speak about echoes and responses when I know that there are scores of men and women whom a preacher’s words reach who would be ashamed of themselves, and rightly, if they exhibited the same callousness of heart and selfishness of ingratitude to some human, partial benefactor as they are not ashamed to have exhibited all their lives to Jesus Christ. Echo? Yes! your heartstrings are set vibrating fast enough whenever, in the adjoining apartment, an instrument is touched which is tuned to the same key as your heart. Pleasures, earthly aims, worldly gifts, the sweetnesses of human life, all these things set them thrilling, and you can hear the music, but your hearts are not tuned to answer to the note that is struck in ‘He loved me and gave Himself for me.’ The bugle is blown, and there is silence, and no echo, faint and far, comes whispering back. Brethren, we use no one else, in whose love we have any belief, a thousandth part so ill as we use Jesus Christ.

III. Now, lastly, let me say a word about the constraining influence of this echoed love.

Its first effect, if it has any real power in our hearts and lives, will be to change their centre, to decentralise. Look what the Apostle goes on to say: ‘We thus judge that He . . . died for all, that they which live should not live henceforth unto themselves.’ That is the great transformation. Secure that, and all nobleness will follow, and ‘whatsoever things are lovely and of good report’ will come, like doves to their windows, flocking into the soul that has ceased to find its centre in its poor rebellious self. All love derives its power to elevate, refine, beautify, ennoble, conquer, from the fact that, in lower degree, all love makes the beloved the centre, and not the self. Hence the mother’s self-sacrifice, hence the sweet reciprocity of wedded life, hence everything in humanity that is noble and good. Love is the antagonist of selfishness, and the highest type of love should be, and in the measure in which we are under the influence of Christ’s love will be, the self-surrendering life of a Christian man. I know that in saying so I am condemning myself and my brethren. All the same, it is true. The one power that rescues a man from the tyranny of living for self, which is the mother of all sin and ignobleness, is when a man can say ‘Christ is my aim,’ ‘Christ is my object.’ ‘The life that I live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me.’ There is no secret of self-annihilation, which is self-transfiguration, and, I was going to say, deification, like that of loving Christ with all my heart because He has loved me so.

Again, let me remind you that, on its lower reaches and levels, we find that all true affection has in it a strange power of assimilating its objects to one another. Just as a man and woman who have lived together for half a century in wedded life come to have the same notions, the same prejudices, the same tastes, and sometimes you can see their very faces being moulded into likeness, so, if I love Jesus Christ, I shall by degrees grow liker and liker to Him, and be ‘changed into the same image, from glory to glory.’

Again, the love constrains, and not only constrains but impels, because it becomes a joy to divine and to do the will of the beloved Christ. ‘My yoke is easy.’ Is it? It is very hard to be a Christian. His requirements are a great deal sterner than others. His yoke is easy, not because it is a lighter yoke, but because it is padded with love. And that makes all service a sacrament, and the surrender of my own will, which is the essence of obedience, a joy.

So, dear friends, we come here in sight of the unique and blessed characteristic of all Christian morality, and of all its practical exhortations, and the Gospel stands alone as the mightiest moulding power in the world, just because its word is ‘love, and do as thou wilt.’ For in the measure of thy love will thy will coincide with the will of Christ. There is nothing else that has anything like that power. We do not want to be told what is right. We know it a great deal better than we practise it. A revelation from heaven that simply told me my duty would be surplusage. ‘If there had been a law that could have given life, righteousness had been by the law.’ We want a life, not a law, and the love of Christ brings the life to us.

And so, dear friends, that life, restrained and impelled by the love to which it is being assimilated, is a life of liberty and a life of blessedness. In the measure in which the love of Christ constrains any man, it makes for him difficulties easy, the impossible possible, the crooked things straight, and the rough places plain. The duty becomes a delight, and self ceases to disturb. If the love of God is shed abroad in a heart, and in the measure in which it is, that heart will be at rest, and a great peace will brood over it. Then the will bows in glad submission, and all the powers arise to joyous service. We are lords of the world and ourselves when we are Christ’s servants for love’s sake; and earth and its good are never so good as when the power of His echoed love rules our lives. Do you know and believe that Christ loves you? Do you know and believe that you had a place in His heart when He hung on the Cross for the salvation of the world? Have you answered that love with yours, kindled by your faith in, and experience of, His? Is His love the overmastering impulse which urges you to all good, the mighty constraint that keeps you back from all evil, the magnet that draws, the anchor that steadies, the fortress that defends, the light that illumines, the treasure that enriches? Is it the law that commands, and the power that enables? Then you are blessed, though people will perhaps say that you are mad, whilst here; and you will be blessed for ever and ever.

Fuente: Expositions Of Holy Scripture by Alexander MacLaren

love. App-135. Compare Rom 8:35.

constraineth. Greek. sunecho. See Luk 4:38; Luk 8:45 (throng).

because, &c. = judging (App-122.) this.

if. Texts omit.

for. App-104.

were, &c. all died.

Fuente: Companion Bible Notes, Appendices and Graphics

14-19.] And his constraining motive is the love of Christ; who died for all, that all should live to Him; and accordingly the Apostle has no longer any mere knowledge or regards according to the flesh, seeing that all things are become new in Christ by means of the reconciliation effected by God in Him, of which reconciliation Paul is the minister.

Fuente: The Greek Testament

2Co 5:14. , for) The same sentiment is found at 2Co 11:1-2; but greatly augmented in force of expression; for he says here, we have acted without moderation [whether we be beside ourselves] and the love of Christ, etc., there, in my folly and I am jealous.-) love, mutual: not only fear: 2Co 5:11, the love of Christ, viz., toward us, in the highest degree, and consequently also our love towards Him [That, which the apostle in this passage calls love, which may perhaps seem to go beyond bounds, he afterwards calls jealousy, which may be roused by fear even to folly, 2Co 11:1-3.-V. g.]-, constrains [distinet keeps us employed]) that we may endeavour to approve ourselves both to God and you.

Fuente: Gnomon of the New Testament

2Co 5:14

2Co 5:14

For the love of Christ constraineth us;-As Christs servant he partook of the love which Christ has for men. It constrained him to give up all, that he might persuade some to believe in and obey Christ. He was willing to be contrasted with those who gloried in appearance, and not in heart, to be accused by false teachers of being beside himself, because he was constrained by the love of Christ to do so. [The constraining power of Christian ministration and service is more effective and stable than it would be if it sprang from the fickle and varied affections of men. Jesus said to his disciples: Ye did not choose me, but I chose you, and appointed you, that ye should go and bear fruit, and that your fruit should abide: that whatsoever ye shall ask of the Father in my name, he may give it you. (Joh 15:16).]

because we thus judge, that one died for all, therefore all died;-All are dead in trespasses and sins, and need saving, so Christ died for all. We behold him who hath been made a little lower than the angels, even Jesus, because of the suffering of death crowned with glory and honor, that by the grace of God he should taste of death for every man. (Heb 2:9). But not only the fact that Christ died for all, making it possible for God to be just, and the justifier of him that hath faith in Jesus (Rom 3:26), must be considered, but also the effect this love should have upon men.

Fuente: Old and New Testaments Restoration Commentary

The Constraint of Love

For the love of Christ constraineth us; because we thus judge, that one died for all, therefore all died; and he died for all, that they which live should no longer live unto themselves, but unto him who for their sakes died and rose again.2Co 5:14-15.

This is the great Apostles triumphant answer to his accusers. The First Epistle to the Corinthians had only fomented the Judaistic elements in the already faction-torn church at Corinth, until, at the date of this Epistle, they were clamorously challenging the authority of St. Paul and the truth of the doctrines he was preaching. More persons than St. Paul have found that it is not easy to maintain ones equanimity under unjust criticism, especially when the aspersions relate to the fondest attachment and the supreme ambition of life. Such an ordeal reveals the man, and in its fierce light graces or defects stand forth in sharpest outline. If St. Paul never appeared more human, neither was he ever more manifestly great, than when pouring out his mighty heart in these rushing sentences, often made obscure by their very intensity. Is St. Paul ambitious? Does he desire by talking about bonds and imprisonments, or dream and revelations, to exalt himself above his brethren? Does he wish by his unsparing anti-Judaism, by ideal demands on the Christian life, to make himself the judge of conscience and the infallible interpretation of the Divine mind? Or has he gone quite beyond himself and is he mad? All thisand much morehis enemies openly charge. To one and all his answer is: The love of Christ constraineth us.

If we connect this assertion with the words which immediately precede itWhether we be beside ourselves, it is to God; or whether we be sober, it is for your causewe shall see that not only his great heroic deeds, but his common acts and judgments, were moulded by the same power. He had defended himself so vehemently against the great public charges which had been brought against his character that to the refined and self-contained Corinthians he appeared beside himself; but he affirms that burning torrent of defence was not for self-interest, but for God; because the love of Christ constrained him. There had been charges too subtle and shadowy for public defences to remove, and these this man of vehemence had calmly lived down; but he declares that this meek endurance sprang not from his self-control, but from the love of Christ which constrained him. If, then, not only his grander deeds but his daily acts and judgments were thus inspired, these words express a power which was acting intensely on Pauls whole nature, and which made his silence and vehemence, his love and suffering, one living language, by which the constraining love of Christ strove to utter its burning energy.

I

The Test of Life is found in its Motive

1. The life of an intelligent being must be under the sway of some chosen and cherished motive. High degrees of intelligence find their expression in the careful selection of the motive. Where the intelligence is low and untrained, we find men blindly obeying motives which the accident of the hour may have raised up, or to which the bodily passions may excite. We can look into the face of no fellow-man and say, That man is living without a motive. The consideration of the motives that actually rule mens lives gives us very sad thoughts of our humanity. They range between the animal and the Divine, but they belong for the most part to the lower levels. The entire aspect and character of a mans life may be changed by a change of his motives. A new and nobler motive will soon make a man a better man. No man ever did rise to do noble things while his motive concerned only self and self-interests. All noble lives have been spent in service to others. All the best lives in private spheres have been self-denying lives. All the heroic lives in public spheres have been the lives of patriots, the lives of the generous, the pitying, and the helpful.

Humanity does not need morals, it needs motives; it is sick of speculation, it longs for action. Men see their duty in every land and age with exasperating clearness. We know not how to do it. The religion which inspires men with a genuine passion for holiness and a constraining motive of service will last. It has solved the problem of spiritual motion.1 [Note: John Watson, The Mind of the Master, 180.]

(1) Many people have no higher motive than the hope of reward and the fear of punishment.Hope and fear are among the most powerful feelings of our nature; and, acting in opposite directions as they generally do, they lead to a behaviour in which the influence of both is to be seen, like those compound motions, the result of equal and opposing mechanical forces. How much do we do from the hope of reward! How much do we not do from the dread of punishment! How steadily are we thus preserved in the straight path of duty from the pressure on the one side and the other of these two powers!

The statute-book does not simply say, like the Decalogue, Thou shalt not steal; it says, If you do steal, the detective will deliver you to the judge, and the judge to the jailer, and he will cast you into prison, and you shall not get out thence till you have paid the forfeit of your crime. We know that if we rob our neighbours house, or assault our neighbours person, or slander our neighbours good name, or in any other way disturb the peace of society and violate the letter of the law, we must pay the penalty. The fear thus inspired operates like a charm. It pervades the whole mass of society: though unseen it is felt; and even when scarcely consciously felt, its influence is active, like some of those subtle agencies in the atmosphere that surrounds us, which tell upon our happiness, our health, and our life, though we are altogether unaware of their existence. It makes the thief honest, the slanderer silent, the turbulent peaceful. We are virtuous by compulsion. We do good because we dare not do evil.

But even in this motive there lies an element of truth. There is at least the recognition of righteousness in the earth. And when we have done evil we recognize the justice of the punishment which overtakes us.

Mourner that dost deserve thy mournfulness,

Call thyself punished, call the earth thy hell;

Say, God is angry, and I earned it well

I would not have Him smile on wickedness:

Say this, and straightway all thy grief grows less:

God rules at least, I find as prophets tell,

And proves it in this prison!then thy cell

Smiles with an unsuspected loveliness.

A prisonand yet from door and window-bar

I catch a thousand breaths of His sweet air!

Even to me His days and nights are fair!

He shows me many a flower and many a star!

And though I mourn and He is very far,

He does not kill the hope that reaches there!1 [Note: George MacDonald, Poetical Works, ii. 248.]

(2) A higher motive is found in the sense of duty.There is something in us which recognizes moral obligation, and impels us to take a line of conduct which, perhaps, we have no natural inclination to follow. Now, we can all of us see that, when we come to speak of duty, we have risen into a higher region of thought. And yet the purest motive of life is not conscience. That is what the Puritans built on. There was very little love in the Puritan theology, very little exposition of the love of God, very little manifestation of love in the household (there was love, but it was concealed, not manifested), very little preaching of love in the pulpit. The great power that bound Puritanism together was the power of conscience. That was the power of Judaism. There was love in Judaism, but not much. The real power of Judaism was an awakened conscience. The school of Ethical Culture is a survival of Puritanism, as Puritanism was a survival of Judaism. In them conscience is the key-note. Judaism, Puritanism, and Ethical Culture are incarnate conscience. Christianity is incarnate love. A man may conform to law because it is righteous law; but he cannot love the law. We cannot love an abstraction. We cannot love a thing. There must be some heart, some power to love in return, in that which we love. We can love only a person. Christianity comes, and it shows in the heart of history this Divine Person, and says to us, Love for Himthat is to be the constraining power, the motive power, the secret of your life.

There is no disguising it that law, fate, destiny, or commandment may produce an exceedingly noble form of religion; that it may make a nation strong in law, and powerful in all things; but it tends always to produce a character that is hard and cold; noble, but ungenial, ungracious. Yet the result of a clear understanding of law, and a very clear obedience to it, is never in any way to be accounted cheap. For it is better to be ungracious and obedient than to be gracious without obedience. It is better to be moral and undevout than to be devout and immoral. It is better to have your strength, even though clothed in raggedness as to beauty, than to have a sensuous beauty upon inward deformity and untruth.1 [Note: George Dawson.]

In actual practice the theory that lays the emphasis upon duty, as opposed to inclination, contains an important element of truth, which naturalistic theories of the end of action have always tended to overlook. For it is undoubtedly true that at a certain stage in moral development, both in the individual and in the race the negative or ascetic element is the prominent one. All moral progress consists in subordination of lower to higher impulses, and at a certain stage it may be more important to conquer the lower than to give effect to the higher. How far it is possible to effect this conquest without appeal to higher and more positive principles of actionhow far, for instance, sensual impulses can be made to yield before the abstract announcements of reason that they are wrong, without assignment of further reason or without appeal to the higher interests and affectionsis a question for the educator. What is certain is that morality begins in self-restraint and self-denial, and that it is impossible to conceive of circumstances in which this negative element will be totally absent from it. Whatever we are to say of the desire to enjoy pleasure, it is certain that readiness to suffer pain is an element in all virtue, and that there is more danger for the individual in indulging the former than in over-cultivating the latter.2 [Note: J. H. Muirhead, The Elements of Ethics, 128.]

II

The Sovereign Motive is Born at the Cross

1. The Apostle does not mean, as at a first glance we might suppose, his own affection for Christ, his own devotion to Christ. This affection, this devotion, was indeed a constraining power. But it was only second in the chain of causes and consequences. It was not the source and origin of his energy. The source must be sought farther back than this. The source must be sought outside himself. The source must be found in God, not in man. Not his love for Christ, but Christs love for him, for others, for all mankind, for a world steeped in ignorance and sin and miserythis was the prime cause of all his moral activity, the paramount motive which started and directed all the energies of this most magnificent of all magnificent lives. His own love for Christ was only the response, only the sequelas he himself would have confessed, the necessary, the inevitable sequelto Christs love for him once impressed upon his being. Christ first loved him, and he (how could he help himself?) was fain to love Christ. It was not he, St. Paul, that lived any longer; it was Christ that lived in him. It was not he, St. Paul, that planned, that felt, that toiled, that suffered for Christ, that traversed the world with his life in his hand for Christ, that was instant in season and out of season for Christ, that died daily for Christ; but it was Christs own love fermenting like leaven in his inmost being, stirring and animating his sluggishness. This unspeakable love rises up before him, as the one great fact which will not be thrust aside, the one clear voice which will not be silenced. It haunts him sleeping and waking. It occupies the whole background of his thoughts. Forget it? How can he forget it? Others may forget, but he can never forget.

Many Christian men endeavour to rouse themselves into energy by the strength of their own devotion. Their glance is perpetually on themselves, and they try to work from their own feelings of consecration to the Lord; hence their energy is fitful, and depends upon excitements. At one time they are filled with ardour, and at another cold in gloom. When their love is deep, then are they strong; when it is feeble, they endeavour to awaken it by spasmodic effort and self-condemnation; and as their vows of devotion fade and fail, they sink either into a morbid gloom that withers their energy, or into a calm self-contentment that lulls them in a spiritual dream. A feeling we possess is ever feeble and liable to change; a feeling possessing us is strong and enduring. This love surrounding and resting on a man, takes him out of himself, and becomes a permanent influence, not diminishing in temptation, or lessening by change of circumstances. It is, then, a love in Christ inspiring manrendering him its instrument, making his life its language, changing not with his changes, but acting with eternal charm on his spiritthis is the power to which our text refers.

2. The supreme proof of Christs love was His death on the cross. He died for all. The death of Christ for allwhich is equivalent to the death of Christ for eachis the great solvent by which the love of God melts mens hearts and is the great proof that Jesus Christ loves each one of us. If we strike out that conception we have struck out from Christianity the vindication of the belief that Christ loves the world. The basis of Christs authority, and the vital centre of all His power over mens hearts by which He transforms lives, and lifts those which are embedded in selfishness up to wondrous heights of self-denial, is to be found in the fact that He died on the cross for each of us. As a matter of fact, those types of Christian teaching which have failed to hold the sacrificial death of Jesus Christ as the centre of His work, and have brought Him down to the level of a man, have failed to kindle any warmth of affection for Him. A Christ who did not love me when He was upon earth, and who does not love me now that He is gone up on high, is not a Christ whom I can be called upon to love. And a Christ that did not die for me on the cross is not a Christ who has either the right or the power to rule my life.

We must accept that full-toned teaching if we are to solve the riddle of the power which the Man of Nazareth has over the world. Unless He was the Son of God, and therefore loving us each, as only a Divine heart can love; unless He was the Sacrifice for sin, and therefore rendering up Himself unto the death for each of us, there is nothing in Him that will absolutely sway hearts and perfectly ennoble lives. The cross, interpreted as St. Paul interpreted it, is the secret of all His power, and if once Christian teachers and Christian churches fail to grasp it as St. Paul did their strength is departed.

Few men in these days, he once said to me, have done so much for the religious life of Scotland as James Morison. The pendulum of human thought is ever swinging to the extreme points: he found it at the extreme point of Gods sovereignty, and brought it to the other extrememans responsibility; but the truth lies where these two meet; and, crossing his arms, he made the sacred sign, as, in a voice of singular depth and persuasiveness, he saidAll truth centres in the Cross of Christ.1 [Note: A. Guthrie, Robertson of Irvinc, 63.]

3. The love of Christ manifested on the cross stirs love in us. The Redeemers love is a fire of live coals, which ever burns on the altar of His own compassionate heart. But the human heart is as an unkindled piece of coal, hard, cold and dark. It never can of itself either kindle itself or catch the fire of Divine love to do so. It can never, therefore, change its coldness and darkness into warmth and brightness; nevertheless, if a live coal from the altar of celestial love touch and catch hold of it, it is speedily transformed, its blackness into brightness, its coldness into radiating heat, and its hardness into yielding softness. It is similar, when the love of Christ catches and kindles with its heavenly flame the human heart. It transforms the soul into which it enters, so that its spiritual darkness is replaced by spiritual brightness, its hardness becomes softness and sensibility, its coldness a fountain of warmth, glowing and scintillating with true Christian feeling. In fact the heart and life is transformed by the entrance of the love of Christ, and becomes instinct with His love. A new energy or force has been created in it which is similar to, but feebler than, the love which kindled it.

It was about three weeks before his end, whilst confined to his room for a few days by an attack of feverish illness, to which, especially when in anxiety, he had always from time to time been liable, that he called Mrs. Arnold to his bed-side, and expressed to her how, within the last few days, he seemed to have felt quite a rush of love in his heart towards God and Christ; and how he hoped that all this might make him more gentle and tender, and that he might not soon lose the impression thus made upon him; adding that, as a help to keeping it alive, he intended to write something in the evenings before he retired to rest.2 [Note: A. P. Stanley, The Life and Correspondence of Thomas Arnold, ii. 321.]

Lord, hast Thou so loved us, and will not we

Love Thee with heart and mind and strength and soul,

Desiring Thee beyond our glorious goal,

Beyond the heaven of heavens desiring Thee?

Each saint, all saints cry out: Yea me, yea me,

Thou hast desired beyond an aureole,

Beyond Thy many Crowns, beyond the whole

Ninety and nine unwandering family.

Souls in green pastures of the watered land,

Faint pilgrim souls wayfaring thro the sand,

Abide with Thee and in Thee are at rest:

Yet evermore, kind Lord, renew Thy quest

After new wanderers; such as once Thy Hand

Gathered, Thy Shoulders bore, Thy Heart caressed.1 [Note: Christina G. Rossetti, Verses, 34.]

4. The impulse that comes from the cross is sustained by the convictions of an enlightened judgment. The love of Christ constraineth us; because we thus judge, that one died for all. The love of Christ is a principle which operates, and can operate, only for reasons shown. It calls into exercise our judging faculty. So far from dealing exclusively with the feelings, it requires us to think. In this manner is its motive power maintained, just as in the case of the engine by whose nice and measured play the huge vessel is propelled against wind and tide. To one who has never witnessed the results of steam-power, such a sight is quite a marvel. How can it be? he asks. How such power? You tell him of the expansive power of steam. But what is steam? he asks; and where is it generated? You take him on board, and descend with him into the vessel. You show him the huge boilers, and the great furnaces beneath, and the heaps of fuel with which the fires are fed. Only then his wonder ceases. And what constitutes the fuel of the fire which underlies, so to speak, the visible play of the Christian propelling power? The Holy Spirit, it must always be allowed, is the source of all spiritual processes. He is the Inspirer of Christian love. He fans the hidden flame, and keeps up the glow. At the same time, He employs means; and the means which the Spirit usually employs for maintaining the influence of the love of Christ up to the constraining point is thisjudging concerning the grand comprehensive fact that Christ died for us. The facts of Calvary constitute, as it were, the fuel which feeds the sacred fire, whereby is maintained the power of spiritual propulsion; and by the earnest, prayerful, and persistent exercise of all our facultiesour thinking, reasoning, judging, determining facultyupon these Calvary-facts, we bring, as it were, fresh supplies of fuel in order that with them we may feed the fire of Christian exercise and action.

My apprehension of the love of Christ must come in between its manifestation and its power to grip, to restrain, to impel me. If I may use such a figure, He stands, as it were, bugle in hand, and blows the sweet strains that are meant to set the echoes flying. But the rock must receive the impact of the vibrations ere it can throw back the thinned echo of the music. Love, in like manner, must be believed and known ere it can be responded to.1 [Note: A. Maclaren.]

In the convent of San Marco in Florence, in cell after cell there are depicted upon the walls the scenes of the crucifixion of Jesus by the brush of that poet-painter-preacher, Fra Angelico. The painter has seemed to feel that the figure of Jesus crucified was more than he could compass; he has left it most conventionally treated. All the depth of his power he has put into the figure of St. Dominic, who stands at the cross representing the Christian soul in all the various phases of feeling which pass over it, as it contemplates the spectacle of Jesus crucified. First, there is the mere bewilderment, as of one who contemplates a sight shocking and horrible, and he hides his face in horror, as from something disgraceful. You pass into another cell, and the scene is changed. Now he is looking up in questioning bewilderment; he has not yet taken in the meaning of the scene, but he is sure that there are hidden there depths of misery and truth. You pass to another cell, and now he has understood what it is. He has seen in Jesus One who is suffering for human sin; he is determined that he will not share those sins, he feels there a penitence which is represented by the scourge at the foot of the cross. You pass into another, and now he has found the joy and repose of that forgiveness which passeth out of the loving heart of Christ. He kneels there, he contemplates in ecstasy Jesus who has forgiven him. Once more. Alone he is standing, with his arms outstretched, as one who simply contemplates in admiration the glory of that great love for all the world which beams from the cross. Once more, he is kneeling there, kneeling on one knee, as one who had prepared to start up; he is there half in homage, half in recognition that this cross lays upon his life the allegiance of a great service; he is grasping it as one who is just leaving for his mission.2 [Note: Bishop Gore.]

III

The Power of the Cross Constrains to Unselfish Service

The love of Christ, says the Apostle, using a highly forcible expression, constraineth us. The corresponding word in the original primarily signifies to shut up or to compress, as by some coercive power which cannot be withstood; and in its secondary sense it means to impel, to bear away, or to hurry onwards, as if by the force of some rapid and impetuous torrent. As employed in the text, it intimates that the love of Christ exerts somewhat of this mighty and well-nigh irresistible influence on His people as often as it takes full possession of their souls, captivating their every thought, engaging their every affection, shutting them closely up, or hemming them completely in, so that only one line of conduct can be adopted by themurging all their energies into action, bearing them on in the face of every obstacle, and leaving them no alternative but to obey its dictates.

1. The first great effect of Christs love is to change the centre of life.All love derives its power to elevate, refine, beautify, ennoble, conquer, from the fact that, in a lower degree, all love makes the beloved and not the self the centre. Hence the mothers self-sacrifice, hence the sweet reciprocity of wedded life, hence everything in humanity that is noble and good. Love is the antagonist of selfishness and the highest type of love should be, and in the measure in which we are under the influence of Christs love will be, the self-surrendering life of a Christian man. The one power that rescues a man from the tyranny of living for self, which is the mother of all sin and ignobleness, is when a man can say, Christ is my aim, Christ is my object. There is no secret of self-annihilation, which is self-transfiguration and, I was going to say, deification, like that of loving Christ with all my heart because He has loved me so.

Keith Falconer, that noble young man who died in Arabia in starting a mission among the Mahommedans, said, Let people call you eccentric. Eccentric means nothing more than out of centre, and if you have got a new centre in God of course you are out of the old centre of the world. Let the worlds machinery move round the old centre. You have begun to move by that eccentric movement about quite another pivot than that around which the world moves.1 [Note: J. K. Maclean, Dr. Pierson and his Message, 278.]

A cometthese vagrants of the skieshas liberty to roam, and what does it make of it? It plunges away out into depths of darkness and infernos of ice and cold. But if it came within the attraction of some great blazing sun, and subsided into a planet, it would have lost nothing of its true liberty, and would move in music and light around the source of blessedness and life. And so you and I, as long as we make ourselves the sinful centres of our rebel powers, so long do we subject ourselves to alterations of temperature almost too great to bear. Let us come back to the light, and move round the Christ; satellites of that Sun, and therefore illumined by His light and warmed by His life-producing heat.2 [Note: A. Maclaren.]

2. Next, the dynamic of the cross becomes the inspiration of a sacrificial life.One died for all, therefore all died; and he died for all, that they which live should no longer live unto themselves, but unto him who for their sakes died and rose again. The idea here expressed is a favourite one with the Apostle. Often he speaks of Christians as dead with Christ, as made conformable to his death, as planted together in the likeness of his death. And in one very striking passage in particular, which occurs in the second chapter of the Epistle to the Galatians, at the twentieth verse, he thus writes: I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me. In this striking passage the very same idea is expressed in nearly the same language as in the text, namely, that, in the practical judgment of the faithful Christian, his own life, as to all selfish purposes, is held by him to have expired upon his Saviours cross, so that in his prevailing disposition he is now dead to everything that interferes with his devotedness to the Son of God, who gave Himself for him. So closely does his fate unite him to the Saviour that he views himself as having fellowship with that Saviour alike in His crucifixion and in His resurrection, and reckons himself to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ. He lives no more himself, but Christ liveth in him; the whole life which he now leads, as a Christian, being one of conformity to the example, and subserviency to the will of Christ.

He dwelt within the wilderness

Disdaining Mammons lure:

He walked among the thorns of pain,

And yet His step was sure.

He saw the vine-deckt homes of men,

And gazed with quiet eyes;

He turned away: Not here, He said,

Is found My Paradise.

He saw the gilded chariots pass,

The conquerors array:

They held to Him a laurel crown,

And still He turned away.

Back to the wilderness He went

Without a thought of loss:

He hewed out of the wood two beams

And made Himself a Cross.

If I would save them I must die!

(This was the thing He said);

Perchance the hearts that hate Me now

Will learn to love Me dead.

He died upon the Cross He made,

Without a lip to bless:

He rose into a million hearts,

And this was His success.1 [Note: W. J. Dawson, The Book of Courage, 26.]

3. It is a glad ministry.For the yoke of Christ is not a despotic constraint, like the law with its shalt and shalt not, spoken in thunder from Sinai: not an unreasonable constraint, like that of self and Satan, chaining men to compliances which they know to be unlawful and fatal to truth and peace; not an arbitrary constraint, like the shifting fashions of this vain world, which men follow blindly about, not knowing whither they may lead them. It is none of these; its law is generated in the soul itself, and in its best and highest portion. Its cord that binds men is woven out of the noblest of human motivesfaith, gratitude, adoration. The Son of God loved methis is its first principle, graven deeply on the heart. This is no vague admiration of His love; this goes beyond the orator and the poet; this is the guilty sinner grasping his Saviour, the drowning mariner reaching at his plank; a fact not only consented to by the understanding, not only uttered by the lips, not only overflowing at the fountain of tears, but fixed in the central depths of the personal being, resident, and paramount, in the council chamber of the heart. The Son of God loved me. Am I convinced of this? Then He is bound to me, and I to Him; wherever He is, there am I; wherever I am, there is He.

When the long absent sun once more revisits the Polar seas, and the weary adventurer, close captive of the cold, with his bark anchored to an ice-floe, becomes conscious of the universal thaw, and feels himself borne outward by the resistless pressure of the liberated waters; right joyously does he loose his moorings and commit himself to the gladsome flush, and steers full gallantly through the melting masses which are speeding southward with himself. Thus eagerly does the soul, long frozen up in selfishness, obey the mighty influence of the Sun of Righteousness, and surrender itself to the onflow of the love of Christ. For the love of Christ constraineth us.1 [Note: B. Gregory, Sermons, Addresses and Pastoral Letters, 198.]

The Constraint of Love

Literature

Alford (H.), Quebec Chapel Sermons, i. 348.

Arnold (T.), Sermons, iii. 1.

Battle (H. W.), in The Southern Baptist Pulpit, 133.

Bradley (C.), Sermons, i. 293.

Calthrop (G.), The Future Life, 88.

Cunningham (J.), in Scotch Sermons, 50.

Dawson (G.), Three Books of God, 79.

Fraser (J.), Parochial Sermons, 59.

Gregory (B.), Sermons, Addresses and Pastoral Letters, 198.

Hull (E. L.), Sermons, i. 102.

Iverach (J.), The Other Side of Greatness, 237.

Kingsley (C.), National Sermons, 230.

Lightfoot (J. B.), Sermons in St. Pauls Cathedral, 243.

Little (J.), The Day-spring, 63.

Little (J.), Glorying in the Lord, 33.

Manning (H. E.), Sermons on Ecclesiastical Subjects, 345.

Myres (W. M.), Fragments that Remain, 14.

Rendall (G. H.), Charterhouse Sermons, 188.

Robertson (F. W.), Sermons, iii. 90.

Robertson (J.), Sermons and Expositions, 157.

Spurgeon (C. H.), Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, xxiv. (1878), No. 1411.

Westcott (B. F.), Words of Faith and Hope, 201.

Wilson (J. M.), Sermons Preached in Clifton College Chapel, 253.

Christian Age, xlii. 306 (L. Abbott).

Christian World Pulpit, xvii. 372 (W. G. Horder); xxiii. 132 (H. W. Beecher); xxxiii. 300 (S. Newth); xxxiv. 106 (B. F. Westcott); li. 54 (S. G. MacLennan); liv. 392 (Griffith John); lxi. 326 (H. Black); lxxx. 341 (A. C. Hill).

Church of England Pulpit, xliii. 229 (C. Gore).

Clergymans Magazine, 3rd Ser., ix. 233 (H. G. Youard).

Homiletic Review, New Ser., xx. 521 (A. Maclaren); xliii. 525 (W. G. Danley); li. 451 (J. M. Thoburn); liv. 52 (H. G. Weston).

Fuente: The Great Texts of the Bible

the love: 2Co 8:8, 2Co 8:9, Son 1:4, Son 8:6, Son 8:7, Mat 10:37, Mat 10:38, Luk 7:42-47, Joh 14:21-23, Joh 21:15-17, 1Co 16:22, Eph 3:18, Eph 3:19, Eph 6:24, Heb 6:10, 1Pe 1:8

constraineth: Job 32:18, Luk 24:29, Act 4:19, Act 4:20

because: Rom 2:2, 1Co 2:14

one: Isa 53:6, Mat 20:28, Joh 1:29, Joh 11:50-52, 1Ti 2:6, Heb 2:9, 1Jo 2:1, 1Jo 2:2

then: 2Co 3:7, 2Co 3:9, Luk 15:24, Luk 15:32, Joh 5:25, Joh 11:25, Rom 5:15, Rom 14:7-9, Eph 2:1-5, Col 2:13, 1Ti 5:6, Tit 3:3, 1Jo 5:19

Reciprocal: Gen 19:3 – pressed Gen 29:20 – for the love Exo 21:5 – And if Deu 6:5 – God with all Deu 32:6 – requite Jdg 16:15 – when thine 1Sa 12:10 – deliver 1Sa 28:23 – compelled him 2Sa 23:16 – the three 1Ch 11:18 – brake Psa 26:3 – For Psa 116:12 – General Pro 7:21 – forced Pro 23:26 – give Son 5:2 – my head Son 7:12 – there will I give thee Isa 11:6 – General Eze 37:11 – whole house Hos 11:4 – drew Hos 13:1 – died Mat 25:40 – Inasmuch Mar 12:17 – and to Luk 4:39 – and ministered Luk 7:43 – I Luk 7:47 – she Joh 5:23 – all men Joh 13:17 – happy Joh 14:15 – General Joh 16:27 – because Joh 21:7 – when Act 16:15 – And she Act 18:5 – was Act 20:22 – I go Rom 6:2 – live Rom 12:1 – by the Rom 14:9 – Christ Rom 14:13 – but 1Co 1:13 – Paul 2Co 4:5 – and 2Co 8:5 – first Gal 5:6 – faith Gal 6:14 – the world Eph 3:17 – being Eph 4:20 – General Eph 5:2 – as Phi 2:21 – the 1Th 1:3 – and labour 2Ti 1:7 – a sound Tit 2:14 – unto 1Jo 4:19 – General Rev 1:18 – was

Fuente: The Treasury of Scripture Knowledge

CONSTRAINING LOVE

The love of Christ constraineth us.

2Co 5:14

The fascination of the Cross is that there the ineffable love of God is manifested. The spectacle is horrible, piteous, agonising, yet on that scene have been fixed the highest, tenderest, holiest thoughts of men for nineteen centuries. Till Christ came men feared God rather than loved Him. The Cross of Christ proclaimed a fuller revelationGod so loved the world.

I. The Atonement is a great mystery and its method cannot be explained.But from the point of Christian faith and experience see what it has done for humanity. We have not a high priest who cannot be touched, etc. The Cross of Christ has done much to sweeten and sanctify beds of sickness and hours of suffering which before were endured with a kind of stoical apathy. (Contrast patience of Job with patience of St. Paul.) No wonder symbol of Cross meets us everywhere; it is the symbol of love of God to heart of man. It is the heart rather than the intellect which has embraced it. The I know and I am persuaded of St. Paul were conclusions, not of his reason, but of his faith. Love is the passion of the soul, not an inference of the understanding.

II. Does this love draw out any corresponding affection?Christs love to me and my love to Christ act and react. Christ showed love that He might win love. If God so loved us we ought also to love one another. Faith must be energised by love; love the moving and sustaining power of faith.

III. We should be strong if indeed we could lay hold of this Cross with the faith and firmness of St. Paul. God forbid that I should glory, etc. He hath made Him to be sin, etc. This is love of Christ in its fullness and power.

Bishop Fraser.

(SECOND OUTLINE)

MISSIONARY SERVICE

Generosity is not extinct among uswhy is it that the offerings to a cause so grand and noble as that of Christian missions are given not spontaneously, but after long solicitation, and flow with a comparatively scanty and stinted stream? Is it not in truth, let me ask you to consider, because the love of Christ does not constrain us?

Or, again, look at the question of missions from the side of the men who go. Money will not preach the Gospel; that is a work for human souls and human tongues. The riches of all London will not convert a single soul. That is the work of the Holy Spirit of God. He uses the instrumentality of human workers. But what if He finds no co-workers? There are few, sadly too few, just to show that faith has not quite died out among us, and that the love of souls is not utterly extinct. But this, more than the otherthe sparingness in moneyis an ominous sign that not as it should constrain, and as it did constrain the souls of the generations of old, does the love of Christ constrain us.

I make appeal first to the young among you, and second to the mature.

I. To the young.Has missionary enterprise no attraction for you? Does the work of winning souls not beckon you with an irresistible force? Will not some of you turn from working wholly for yourselves and for your own profit and advantage in this world, to give your lives to the noble, the Christ-like task, of striving for the highest good of others in the field of missions? I know how youth has its dreams, its high ideals, of great deeds that you would like to do, of a noble life that you would desire to live. Here may be the realisation of those desires. I do not exaggerate one iota when I declare that the life of the missionary servant of Christ, lived faithfully, is the noblest life in this world of ours, and gives opportunity for the exercise of the highest chivalry and the truest heroism. Beside it pale the commonplace careers of us who do our duty in humbler spheres at home. It does not hold out riches or an easy life, or the avoidance of danger, or a long succession of tranquil days as an inducement. But it is a calling for which, unlike some others, poverty is no disqualification. The poor may offer himself equally with the rich, if he have the indispensable qualifications of piety, ability, and obedience. Who is there among you who will make answer to the Lords call this day, Here am I, send me? Which of you now, in the bloom of your youth, and the freshness of your powers, feels in the depths of his heart The love of Christ constraineth me to do as Christ didgive away my life to bring about the salvation of souls?

II. To those of older and maturer years.Every one of us has his lot in life providentially fixed; and if God does not call upon us to serve Him in one way, He does in another. If the love of Christ constrains you, there will be a work for you to do at home for the good of souls, though it be a different work from those who go out to the forefront of the battle against ignorance and heathen darkness. They also serve who only stand and wait. Without you the strife against sin could not be carried on, for it is your part to provide the necessary funds; it is your part to encourage and strengthen the hands of those who come forward to go; it is your part to share the cares and to rejoice in the successes of those who are labouring in the field by a hearty and unwearied sympathy in the progress of the work.

Illustration

These words express the distinctively Christian temperthe disposition of mind that the knowledge of Jesus and the endeavour to follow and be like Him works in our soulsand which becomes the source of any and all good works which we do, missions to the heathen among the rest. They do not tell us anything expressly about missions. But they hold up for our imitation that which is the motive power of missions as of everything good that the Christian may do. They give us the reason which, in all ages, has inspired the missionary to give himself to the laborious work of preaching the Gospelwhich has been to him a recompense for all that earth held dear, which he gave up; which has spurred him on to the lavish spending of health and strength in the cause of Christ; which has brought him not seldom to the fellowship of Christs Calvary and to the winning of the martyrs crown.

(THIRD OUTLINE)

TRUE RELIGION

The object of true religion is to cast the self out of the human heart and to set God in the vacant place.

I. There are three things that are insufficient to achieve the purpose, although they certainly seem to point in the direction of it. They are

(a) The tendency to worship, which may be said to be innate in all men.

(b) The sense of duty, which is very strong in some.

(c) The inclination to aim at a lofty standard of excellence or of capability, which is characteristic of not a few.

These three things are well, so far as they go. They may lead on to higher results; but at the same time they may not. We may be religiousyou know what I meanand we may be anxious to fulfil our duty, and we may honestly strive to be better than we are; and yet the tendency which makes a mans self the very pivot and centre of his whole existence may remain in us, with all its vitality, as strong and as unimpaired as ever.

II. We need the introduction of another influence, which shall assume the leadership and revolutionise our whole beingand that influence is the influence of love. And here it is that Christianity comes in. Christianity is the only religion on the face of the earth that works by love, that uses as its chief instrumentality the love of God for man.

III. We all know what ruling passions are.One man lives for artit is his thought night and day: the vision of beauty floats continually before him, and everything about him is drawn in that particular direction. Another, with an equally passionate fervour, lives for gold: for gold he rises early, and late takes rest, and eats the bread of carefulness. A third for something else. But the ruling passion of St. Paul is to follow Christ, to imitate Christ, to spend and be spent in the service of Christ; and most willingly and joyfully would the Apostle lay down his life, if only by so doing the cause of his Divine Master should be to any extent advanced in the world. And such, although on a lower level, and at a humble distance, is the feeling of every one who is born again of the Spirit and made a new creature in Jesus Christ. The man is animated by a new nature. He has, as it were, gone out of himself and become the property of another; and he is proud to be able to say, I am a bondservant of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Rev. Prebendary Gordon Calthrop.

Illustration

There are limits to the human affection. The mightiest and most enduring of all human loves is that of a mother for her child; and yet even that may be worn out by a long persistent course of vice and rebellion and ingratitude. It is not so with Christ. His love for us is patient, and never tires. We cannot quench it by our unworthiness. It still rises above our sin. Having loved His own, He loved them to the end. And there are limits to the self-sacrifice involved in the human affection. You may do much for a person you love: you may surrender comfort, property, position, creditalmost everything that belongs to youfor his sake; but you may stop short at the point of the surrender of life. It was not so with Christ. He went the whole length. He did not merely give up what belonged to Him, He gave Himself.

Fuente: Church Pulpit Commentary

2Co 5:14. The motive for the zeal of Paul was the love of Christ, which was so great that He died for all mankind. The death of Christ was needed by all as was proved by the truth that He died for them, since the death would not have taken place had such an event not been necessary.

Fuente: Combined Bible Commentary

2Co 5:14. For the love of Christnot our love to Christ, but (as the following words shew, and other places confirm) Christs love to men (see Rom 8:35; Rom 8:37; Gal 2:20; Eph 3:19),constraineth usso shuts us up that we cannot choose but act as we do,because we have thus judged. The aorist is used to express a fixed principle of action, which was laid down once for all and at the outset of his Christian life:that one died for[1] all, therefore all diedthe all in the One; realized in each on his believing (Rom 6:8-12),and he died for all, that they which live should not henceforth live onto themselves, but unto him who for their sakes died and rose again:Until this new principle of action took possession of us, we all lived to ourselves; some of us for one thing, some for another, but all for self: now, the love of Christ has dissolved every old principle of action, and become the all-absorbing passion of our life: we are crucified with Christ, nevertheless we live; yet not we, but Christ liveth in us; and the life that we now live in the flesh we live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved us, and gave Himself for us.

[1] The preposition for, here used, means in Greek on behalf of; but in what sense, the context and the nature of each case must determine, Here, and in all such case, the sense of substitution is clearly meant

Note.Had the apostle held that Christ was a mere creature, and that the supreme duty of every creature is to live to the glory of God, such a principle of action as that here expressed must have amounted to a deliberate withdrawal of his allegiance from God, and making it over to a creature. But since it is certain that he did not consider that his allegiance to God was thereby in the least compromised, it is for those who deny the supreme divinity of Christ in the one Godhead to solve this difficulty.

Fuente: A Popular Commentary on the New Testament

That is, the infinite love of Christ in dying for us, constraineth us to live unto him, and do the utmost services for him. Some understand it passively, for the love that Christ beareth us; others take it actively, for that love which we bear to him. Now this love is said to constrain. Some think it a metaphor from a woman in travail, that strives to be delivered of her burden; others, that it signifies to have one bound, and so much under power, that he cannot move without leave. The expression denotes the absolute empire which the love of Christ had over him, ruling all the inclinations of the heart, and the actions of his life. It signifies the sweet violence and force of love, by which the soul is overpowered, and cannot say nay; it does wholly possess us, rule and command us, keep us in its power, and makes us do whatever it would have us do.

Learn hence, That the love of Christ has such a constraining power, and obliging force and efficacy upon the soul, that it inclines it to a willing performance of all duties, though attended with the greatest difficulties and dangers. Love is the spring of action, ’tis a forcible and compelling, ’tis an invicible, unconquerable affection: and it has such an influence from the consideration of what Christ is in himself, and of what he has done for us, and designed for us.

Fuente: Expository Notes with Practical Observations on the New Testament

Verse 14 Paul was devoted in his service to Christ who would have him serve man. Though the apostle might be tempted to neglect this service, the love of Christ caused him to continue in it. He especially felt compelled to serve since Christ had representatively died for all. Paul was thus dead to sin and self, and alive in Christ. ( Rom 6:1-11 ; Gal 2:20 ; Col 3:3 )

Fuente: Gary Hampton Commentary on Selected Books

For the love of Christ constraineth us; because we thus judge, that one died for all, therefore all died;

Fuente: McGarvey and Pendleton Commentaries (New Testament)

5:14 {8} For the love of Christ {l} constraineth us; because we thus judge, that if {m} one died for all, then were all dead:

(8) He continues dismissing all suspicion of desire of estimation and boasting. For the love of Christ, he says, compels us to this, that seeing he died for us all, who were dead when as we lived to ourselves (that is, while we were yet given to these earthly affections) we in like sort should consecrate our whole life which we have received from him, to him. That is, being endued with the Holy Spirit to this end and purpose, that we should meditate upon nothing but that which is heavenly.

(l) Wholly possesses us.

(m) He speaks here of sanctification, by which it comes to pass that Christ lives in us.

Fuente: Geneva Bible Notes

The primary reason Paul could not live for himself, however, was God’s love for him. The Greek construction is probably a subjective genitive. [Note: See Martin, p. 128.] God’s love extended to Jesus Christ dying on the cross. Jesus provided the example that all His disciples must follow. He gave His life for others. Yet Jesus’ death was much more than an example. Paul had come to appreciate the widespread effects of that death (as being "for all") and the essence of that death (as a substitute).

"Paul is not suggesting that, irrespective of their response and attitude, all men know forgiveness of sins or experience selfless living. There is universalism in the scope of redemption, since no man is excluded from God’s offer of salvation; but there is a particularity in the application of redemption, since not all men appropriate the benefits afforded by this universally offered salvation." [Note: Harris, p. 352.]

The apostle had also become aware that such love merited complete devotion (i.e., making the fulfillment of God’s desires rather than selfish desires the goal of life). We "all died" (2Co 5:15) in the sense that all believers died in the person of their representative, Jesus Christ. [Note: See Hodge, p. 136; and John V. Dahms, "Dying with Christ," Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 36:1 (March 1993):15-23.]

". . . Christ’s death was the death of all, in the sense that He died the death they should have died; the penalty of their sins was borne by Him; He died in their place . . ." [Note: Tasker, p. 86.]

". . . One died on behalf of all (not only, for the benefit of all . . . but instead of all . . .). . ." [Note: Henry Alford, The Greek Testament, 2:663.]

Moreover as Jesus died to His own desires and rose to continue serving us, so we should die to our own selfish interests and live to serve others. Paul himself modeled what he observed in Jesus’ experience and called on his readers to duplicate His example.

"Thus there emerge from 2Co 5:11 and 2Co 5:14 two motives for apostolic evangelism, the ’fear of the Lord’ and the ’love of Christ.’ . . . The one relates to Jesus’ role as Judge, the other to his role as Savior." [Note: Barnett, p. 288.]

In this section Paul identified two motives for Christian service: an awareness of our accountability to God (2Co 5:11) and the example of Jesus Christ (2Co 5:14). Jesus is both our Judge and our Savior, and His two roles should have an impact on how we live.

Fuente: Expository Notes of Dr. Constable (Old and New Testaments)