All nations gathered about my Lord, both great and mean men clustered around his person. There are more unlikely things than that you will be dead before next Sunday. IV. "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" good God! In the former cry, as he opened Paradise, you saw the Son of God; now you see him who was verily and truly born of a women, made under the law; and under the law you see him still, for he honours his mother and cares for her in the last article of death. The spear broke up the very fountains of life; no human body could survive such a wound. "Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani," what an awful shriek! Cheerfully accept this burden, ye servants of the Lord. But power is wanted to dash down those idols, to overcome the hosts of error; where is it to be found? crucify him!" Whether a disciple then or not, we have every reason to believe that he became so afterwards; he was the father, we read, of Alexander and Rufus, two persons who appear to have been well known in the early Church; let us hope that salvation came to his house when he was compelled to bear the Savior's cross. Oh! Will your Prince be sumptuously arrayed? If we be true to our Master we shall soon lose the friendship of the world. Will your Prince be decorated with honors? First, we shall look upon them as THE ENSIGN OF HIS TRUE HUMANITY. That is very possible; Christ may have carried the heavier end, against the transverse beam, and Simon may have borne the lighter end. Bearing upon his back the sin of all his people, the offering goes without the camp. The whole universe shall hiss you; angels shall be ashamed of you; your own friends, yes, your sainted mother, shall say "Amen" to your condemnation; and those who loved you best shall sit as assessors with Christ to judge you and condemn you! To-day I invite your attention to another Prince, marching in another fashion through his metropolis. Today! He saw its streets flowing like bloody rivers; he saw the temple naming up to heaven; he marked the walls loaded with Jewish captives crucified by command of Titus; he saw the city razed to the ground and sown with salt, and he said, "Weep not for me, but for yourselves and for your children, for the day shall come when ye shall say to the rocks, Hide us, and to the mountains, Fall upon us." Alas, man is the slave and the dupe of Satan, and a black-hearted traitor to his God. Fathers and confessors, preachers and divines have delighted to dwell upon every syllable of these matchless cries. Even if I may not come at him, yet shall I be full of consolation, for it is heaven to thirst after him, and surely he will never deny a poor soul liberty to admire him, and adore him, and thirst after him." No, no; we must not make a cross of our own. If you will look, there is the mark of his blood-red shoulder upon that heavy cross. The most Scriptural way to describe the sufferings of Christ is not by laboring to excite sympathy through highly-coloured descriptions of his blood and wounds. V. I close with THE SAVIOR'S WARNING QUESTION "If they do these things in the green tree, what will they do in the dry?". Thou wast still straightened till the last pang was felt and the last word spoken to complete to full redemption, and hence thy cry, "I thirst." He would have sacrificed himself to save his countrymen, so heartily did he desire their eternal welfare. You see there the multitude are leading him forth from the temple. Our Lord says, "If any man thirst, let him come unto me and drink," that thirst being the result of sin in every ungodly man at this moment. I show unto you a more excellent way. We thought sometimes that we loved him as we heard the story of his death, but we did not change our lives for his sake, nor put our trust in him, and so we gave him vinegar to drink. Nor is this all. Nay more; he is banished from their society, as if he were a leper whose breath would be infectious whose presence would scatter plague. May the Holy Ghost help us to hear a fourth tuning of the dolorous music, "I thirst." wherein we see the Son of man in the gentleness of a son caring for his bereaved mother. You carry the cross after him. In the same song he speaks of his church, and says, "The roof of thy mouth is as the best wine for my beloved, that goeth down sweetly, causing the lips of those that are asleep to speak." Mark you, the ransom of men was all paid by Christ; that was redemption by price. NOTICE the connection, or you will miss the meaning of the words; for at first sight it looks as if our Saviour taught us that it John:6:29 The Marvellous Magnet Usually the crier went before with an announcement such as this, "This is Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews, who for making himself a King, and stirring up the people, has been condemned to die." Some of you will not be baptized because you think people will say, "He is a professor; how holy he ought to be." Such a greeting had the Lord of glory, but alas, it was not the shout of welcome, but the yell of "Away with him! His great love makes him thirst to have us much nearer than we are; he will never be satisfied till all his redeemed are beyond gunshot of thee enemy. Angels cannot suffer thirst. Great and worshipful being that he is, truth is to be altered for him, the gospel is to be modulated to suit the tone of his various generations, and all the arrangements of the universe are to be rendered subservient to his interests. Hast thou laid thy hand upon his head, confessed thy sin, and trusted in him? A new edition of Spurgeon's classic devotional using the ESV. The more manifestly there shall be a great gulf between the Church and the world, the better shall it be for both; the better for the world, for it shall be thereby warned; the better for the Church, for it shall be thereby preserved. Have you repented of sin? Come, bring him your warm heart, and let him drink from that purified chalice as much as he wills. The mind of man is like the daughters of the horseleech, which cry for ever, "Give, give." Yes, he loves to be with his people; they are the garden where he walks for refreshment, and their love, their graces, are the milk and wine which he delights to drink. Beloved, let us comfort ourselves with this thought, that in our case, as in Simon's, it is not our cross, but Christ's cross which we carry. We see in Simon's carrying the cross a picture of what the Church is to do throughout all generations. He believed, as a Roman in gods many. I do not think we should seek after needless persecution. I cannot give you more than a mere taste of this rich subject, but I have been most struck with two ways of regarding our Lord's last words. You may sit under a sermon, and feel a great deal, but your feeling is worthless unless it leads you to weep for yourselves and for your children. "When Jesus therefore had received the vinegar, he said, It is finished: and he bowed his head, and gave up the ghost." John 19:30. They prefer a ceremonial pompous and gaudy; the swell of music, the glitter of costly garments, the parade of learning all these must minister grandeur to the world's religion, and thus shut out the simple followers of the Lamb. This is unfortunate, since his works contain priceless gems of information that are found nowhere except in the ancient writings of the Jews. A refined and heavenly appetite, a craving for our Lord. How great the love which led him to such a condescension as this! One would wish to be as a spouse, who, when she had already been feasting in the banqueting-house, and had found his fruit sweet to her taste, so that she was overjoyed, yet cried out, "Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples, for I am sick of love." Let us exult as we see our Substitute going through with his work even to the bitter end, and then with a "Consummatum est" returning to his Father, God. We will now take the text in a third way, and may the Spirit of God instruct us once again. What learn we here as we see Christ led forth? Then they said, "Hail, King of the Jews!" And they struck Him with their hands. Complain not, then. How they led him forth we do not know. I believe there was a tenderness in Christ's heart to the Jew of a special character. Let there be nothing but your religion to object to, and then if that offends them let them be offended, it is a cross which you must carry joyfully. Though bitter to him in the speaking it will be sweet to us in the hearing, so sweet that all the bitterness of our trials shall be forgotten as we remember the vinegar and gall of which he drank. John 19:4-5. He is not allowed to worship with them. My heart shall not be content till he is all in all to me, and I am altogether lost in him. Today! And now, brethren, our blessed Lord has at this time a thirst for communion with each one of you who are his people, not because you can do him good, but because he can do you good. Jesus said, "I thirst," and this is the complaint of a man. Let the sympathy of Christ, then, be fully believed in and deeply appreciated, since he said, "I thirst." The sufferings of Christ should make us weep over those who have brought that blood upon their heads. How has it been with you? My Lord is not altogether without his espoused one. One word: transformation. Oh, wondrous substitution of the just for the unjust, of God for man, of the perfect Christ for us guilty, hell-deserving rebels. This is what the Apostle meant when he said, "I fill up that which is behind of the afflictions of Christ in my flesh for his body's sake, which is the Church." Jesus thirsted, then let us thirst in this dry and thirsty land where no water is. According to the sacred canticle of love, in the fifth chapter of the Song of Songs, we learn that when he drank in those olden times it was in the garden of his church that he was refreshed. They are created in the minds of men. O souls, burdened with sin, rest ye here, and resting live. When our Lord cried, "Eloi, Eloi," and afterwards said, "I thirst," the persons around the cross said, "Let be, let us see whether Elias will come to save him," mocking him; and, according to Mark, he who gave the vinegar uttered much the same words. He is exiled from their friendship, too. We do not read that they removed the crown of thorns, and therefore it is most probable, though not absolutely certain, that our Savior wore it along the Via Dolorosa, and also bore it upon his head when he was fastened to the cross. Dear friends, we must remember that, although no one died on the cross with Christ, for atonement must be executed by a solitary Savior, yet another person did carry the cross for Christ; for this world, while redeemed by price by Christ, and by Christ alone, is to be redeemed by divine power manifested in the sufferings and labors of the saints as well as those of Christ. The Christian faith and motives for Christian worship are based on the certainty of facts. This is a kind of sweet whereof if a man hath much he must have more, and when he hath more he is under a still greater necessity to receive more, and so on, his appetite for ever growing by that which it feeds upon, till he is filled with all the fulness of God. London shall see the glory of the one: Jerusalem beheld the shame of the other. Our Lord is the Maker of the ocean and the waters that are above the firmament: it is his hand that stays or opens the bottles of heaven, and sendeth rain upon the evil and upon the good. Is not this a fertile field of thought? According to modern thought man is a very fine and noble creature, struggling to become better. And yet he placed himself for our sakes into a position of shame and suffering where none would wait upon him, but when he cried, "I thirst," they gave him vinegar to drink. 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