“The Death of Christ” by J. D. Jones

Notes taken from Paul’s Certainties by J. D. Jones. Chapter 4 contains a sermon called “The Death of Christ” that examines Paul’s statement in 1 Corinthians 15:3 that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures.

“The Cross was never meant to be a puzzle, a baffling, hopeless mystery.”

“And in so far as in our preaching and teaching we shift the centre of gravity from the Cross to something else, to that extent we depart from New Testament and Apostolic precedent and practice.”

“Pilate wrote a superscription over the Cross to this effect : ’Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.’ But the Apostles wrote another superscription over the Cross of Christ. It is written in a thousand tongues, and this is how it reads: ’God is love.’”

“God was in Christ on the Cross. The Cross is proof, not of Christ’s love only, but of the Father’s love too. There is no divorce.”

“But it was not the physical suffering that constituted the awfulness of the Cross. Probably in the matter of physical torment the two thieves suffered more than Jesus. It was the spiritual anguish our Lord passed through that made His death so awful.”

“One of the most deplorable characteristics of our day and time is the decay of the sense of sin. We have treated ’ sin ’ as if it were a light thing. ’Sin !’ said a French critic ; ’I have abolished sin.’ There are verses in the Bible, those solemn verses which speak of ’the wrath of God,’ which are rarely, if ever, referred to now ; while ’hell ’ is by multitudes regarded as an exploded superstition. But ignore those solemn and austere verses as we may, sin is not a light thing. It is a terrible, an awful thing. Its enormity and horror it is impossible to exaggerate. And there is nothing we want more than to see sin as God sees it.”

“But the Cross itself is God’s judgment upon sin; it represents God’s estimate of sin; it is God’s everlasting testimony against sin.”

“Do you want to realize what sin is, my brother? Come and stand before the Cross. What brought the Death of Christ Jesus there? Sin. Sin a light thing? It laid the Cross on Christ! Sin a trivial thing? Christ
had to die to deliver us from it!”

“Yes, brethren, on the Cross Christ died for us—died that death of ours which is the wages of sin.”

“When we want to win men, what do we do ? We get back to the old story.”

“The saintliest of men have at the last come to rest absolutely on Christ’s finished work. ’ I am a great sinner,’ said Dr. Lindsay Alexander, ’but Christ is a great Saviour.’”