2 Corinthians 5:14

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.)

The Biblical Illustrator, edited by Joseph S. Exell (c. 1880s–1900s) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

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.

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.

Daniel D. Whedon (gen. ed.), Commentary on the Old and New Testaments (1874–1909) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

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.

Alexander MacLaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture (1904–1910) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

5:14-17 Paul’s doctrine of reconciliation arises from his conviction that (1) Christ died for all believers; (2) in Christ, believers also die to sin and self; and (3) now all believers should live for Christ. The new life in Christ thus leads to a fresh evaluation of other people and of Christ.

5:14 Christ’s love controls us: This could refer either to believers’ love for Christ or (more likely) to Christ’s love for us, which urges believers on in making Christ known through their service (see 1 Cor 9:16).

Tyndale Open Study Notes — © Tyndale Open Resources, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Text via the HelloAO Bible API.

2Co 5:14. Γὰρ, 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.—ἀγάπη) 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.]—συνέχει, constrains [‘distinet’ keeps us employed]) that we may endeavour to approve ourselves both to God and you.

Bengel's Gnomon of the New Testament — English translation (T&T Clark, Edinburgh, 1860) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

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. μηκέτι ἑαυτοῖς, 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 Rückert, Paul wishes to give a reason for the εἰ ἐξέστημεν θεῷ. But he thus arbitrarily overleaps the second half of 2Co_5:13, though this expresses the same thing as the first hal.

ἡ ἀγάπη τοῦ Χριστοῦ] 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 apostles 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 ἀγάπη 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; Php_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 εἰς (Col_1:4; 1Th_3:12), and denotes by the genitive only an abstract as object (2Th_2:10); in Rom_15:30, τοῦ πνεύμ. is the genitivus originis.

συνέχει ἡμᾶς] cohibet nos, holds us in bounds, so as not to go beyond the limits marked by θεῷ and ὑμῖν, 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, Rückert, Olshausen, Osiander, Neander, and others; also Chrysostom (ΟὐΚ ἈΦΊΗΣΙ ἩΣΥΧΆΖΕΙΝ ΜΕ) and Theodoret (ΠΥΡΠΟΛΟΎΜΕΘΑ). But contrary to the usage of the word, for ΣΥΝΈΧΕΙΝ 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.; Php_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 συνέχει would revert to the notion of pressing hard, which may be a harassing (Luk_12:50; Wis_17:11, and Grimms 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.

κρίναντας τοῦτο] 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 placethe subjective condition of this influenc.

ὅτι εἷς ὑπὲρ πάντων κ.τ.λ.] that one for all, etc. Who is meant by εἷς, is clear from ἡ ἀγάπη τ. Χριστοῦ, and was known to all the hearts of the readers; hence there is the less ground for breaking up the simple sentence, and taking εἷς ὑπὲρ πάντων as in apposition: because He, one for all, died (Hofmann). As for ὅτι, it is simplest, although εἰ after ὅτι 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 τοῦτο (Rom_2:3; Rom_6:6; 2Co_10:7; 2Co_10:11; Eph_5:5, al.); in such a way, however, that ἄρα κ.τ.λ. is likewise included in the dependence on ὅτι, and does not form an independent clause (in opposition to Rückert). For the contents of the judgment as such must lie in ἄρα οἱ πάντες ἀπέθανον, of which the historical fact, εἱς ὑπὲρ πάντ. ἀπέθ., is only the actual presupposition serving as its ground. The way in which the two clauses are marshalled side by side (without εἰ 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 (Χριστῷ συνεσταύρωμαι, Gal_2:19; ἀπεθάνετε, 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 συνταφέντες αὐτῷ (Col_2:12). Comp. Rom_6:4. Here[231] also, as in all passages where ὙΠΈΡ is used of the atoning death (see on Rom_5:6; Gal_3:13), it is not equivalent to ἈΝΤΊ (comp. on 2Co_5:21), for which it is taken by most commentators, including Flatt, Emmerling, Rückert, 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 ἱλαστήριον has come to benefit all, all are dead, because otherwise the εἷς ὑπὲρ πάντων 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 ὑπέρ here cannot be equivalent to ἀντί is shown particularly by 2Co_5:15 : Τῷ ὙΠῈΡ ΑὐΤῶΝ ἈΠΟΘΑΝΌΝΤΙ ΚΑῚ ἘΓΕΡΘΈΝΤΙ; for according to this the resurrection of Jesus also (since it would be quite arbitrary to refer ὙΠῈΡ ΑὐΤῶΝ merely to ἈΠΟΘΑΝΌΝΤΙ) 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.).

ὑπὲρ πάντων] for all men in general, so that no one is excluded from the effect of his ἱλαστήριον, 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 οἱ πάντες ἀπέθανον, without meaning by ΠΆΝΤΕς only believers (in opposition to my previous explanation), prove the restraining influence of the love of Christ, which he had himself experience.

οἱ πάντες] with the article; for it applies to all those of whom ὙΠῈΡ Π. ἈΠΈΘ. was just sai.

ἈΠΈΘΑΝΟΝ] not: they are to die (Thomas, Grotius, Estius, Nösselt, 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 Hofmanns misconception of my explanation, as if I took κρίναντας 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 Hilgenfelds Zeitschr. f. wiss. Theol. 1859, p. 241 (comp. his neut. Theol. p. 158 f.), that ὑπέρ 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 ἱλαστήριον, offered for the salvation of all (ὑπὲρ πάντων).

[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.

Meyer — Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament — English translation by Peter Christie, edited by Frederick Crombie (T&T Clark, 1880) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

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.

2Co 5:14 . ἡ γὰρ ἀγάπη τοῦ Χρ . κ . τ . λ .: 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 ἀγάπη is in St. Paul’s Epistles always subjective ( cf. ἡ ἀγάπη τοῦ Θεοῦ , 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 ἡ ἀγ . τοῦ Χρ . reff. above); i.e. , “the Love of God” and “the Love of Christ” signify with him the love which God and Christ bear towards ( εἰς ) man. (St. Paul often uses the verb ἀγαπάω to express man’s love to God, but never the substantive ἀγάπη ), 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 ).

The Expositor's Greek Testament, edited by W. Robertson Nicoll (1897–1910) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

Possesseth us wholly.

He goeth forward in putting away all suspicion of desire of estimation and boasting: for the love of Christ, saith he, compelleth us hereunto, that seeing he died for us all, which 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 of him, to him (to wit) being endued with the holy Ghost to this end and purpose, that we should meditate upon nothing but that which is heavenly.

Geneva Bible (1599) marginal notes — public domain. Text via Bolls.life.

For--Accounting for his being "beside himself" with enthusiasm: the love of Christ towards us (in His death for us, the highest proof of it, Rom 5:6-8), producing in turn love in us to Him, and not mere "terror" (Co2 5:11).

constraineth us--with irresistible power limits us to the one great object to the exclusion of other considerations. The Greek implies to compress forcibly the energies into one channel. Love is jealous of any rival object engrossing the soul (Co2 11:1-3).

because we thus judge--literally, "(as) having judged thus"; implying a judgment formed at conversion, and ever since regarded as a settled truth.

that if--that is, that since. But the oldest manuscripts omit "if." "That one died for all (Greek, 'in behalf of all')." Thus the following clause will be, "Therefore all (literally, 'the all,' namely, for whom He 'died') died." His dying is just the same as if they all died; and in their so dying, they died 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; Pe1 4:1-3).

Jamieson, Fausset & Brown — Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible (1871) — public domain (CC PDM 1.0). Text via the HelloAO Bible API.

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 συνεχειημας, 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.

Adam Clarke's Commentary on the Bible (1810–1826) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.

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: (2 Corinthians 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 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 Romans 14:7-9. 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.

John Calvin's Commentaries (1540-1563) — public domain. Text from the Calvin Translation Society English edition (1840s-50s) via the Christian Classics Ethereal Library (ccel.org). Calvin's coverage is partial (roughly two-thirds of the Bible); uncommented books and verses are honest gaps, never fabricated. The 19th-century editor's footnotes and remarks are omitted so the notes are faithfully Calvin's own voice.

(14) For the love of Christ constraineth us.—The Greek, like the English, admits of two interpretations—Christ’s love for us, or our love for Christ. St. Paul’s 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 Apostle’s 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. Paul’s most unqualified assertions of the universality of the atonement effected by Christ’s death. The Greek preposition does not in itself imply more than the fact that the death was on behalf of all; but this runs up—as we see by comparing Mat_20:28, Mar_10:45, with Mar_14:24, Joh_15:13—into 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. Paul’s 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 all”—this is the Apostle’s thought—“as 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.

A Bible Commentary for English Readers, edited by Charles John Ellicott (1878–1897) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

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 (οἱ πάντες—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.’

The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges (gen. ed. J. J. S. Perowne; Cambridge University Press, 1878–1918) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

And that he died for all, that they which live,.... The end of Christ's dying for men was that they might live; live, in a legal sense, live a life of justification; and that they which live in such a sense,

should not henceforth live unto themselves: to their own lusts, and after their own wills, to either sinful self, or righteous self:

but unto him which died for them, and rose again; that is, for them, for their justification; for all those for whom Christ died, for them he rose again; and who were justified, acquitted, and discharged when he was; which cannot be said of all mankind; and which is an obligation on such persons to live to Christ, to ascribe the whole of their salvation to him, and to make his glory the end of all their actions. Some copies read, "which died for them all".

John Gill's Exposition of the Whole Bible (1746–1763) — public domain (CC PDM 1.0). Text via the HelloAO Bible API.

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 συνεχει 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.

John Trapp, A Commentary or Exposition upon All the Books of the Old and New Testament (1647–1656) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

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” (ἀγάπη τοῦ Χριστοῦ agapē 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 - (συνέχει sunechei). This word (συνέχω sunechō) 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” (ὑπὲρ 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,” (ὑπὲρ πάντων huper pantōn) 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 Saviour’s 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 Hill’s 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 God’s 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 God’s 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.

Albert Barnes' Notes on the Bible (1834–1885) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.

For the charity of Christ, the love of God, the love that Christ has shewn to me and all mankind, and a return of love due to him, presseth me on, is the motive of all that I do; because I consider that if one, our Redeemer Christ Jesus, died for all, then all were dead, and had been lost in their sins, had not Christ come to redeem us. Thus St. Augustine in many places, proving original sin against the Pelagians. Divers interpreters add this exposition, therefore all are dead; that is, ought to die, and by a new life look upon themselves as dead to sin, which is connected with what follows in the next verse. (Witham)

George Leo Haydock (1774–1849), Haydock's Catholic Family Bible and Commentary, 1859 edition — public domain. Excludes Psalms (Douay-Rheims chapter numbering differs from Protestant) and Deuterocanonical books (Catholic canon only).

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 believer’s 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 apostle’s 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.

Matthew Poole's English Annotations on the Holy Bible (1683–1685) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.

The love of Christ. It matters little whether this be interpreted as a subjective genitive, "Christ"s love to man," or as an objective genitive, our love to Christ;" for the two suppose and interfuse each other. St. Paul"s usage, however, favours the former interpretation (2Co_13:14; 1Co_16:24) Constraineth. The word means that it compresses us, and therefore keeps us irresistibly to one object. (Luk_12:50) That if one died for all, then were all dead. This is an unfortunate mistranslation and wrong reading for that one died for all, therefore all died. What compels Paul to sacrifice himself to the work of God for his converts is the conviction, which he formed once for all at his conversion, that One, even Christ, died on behalf of all men (Rom_5:15-19) a redeeming death (ver. 21); and that, consequently, in that death, all potentially died with him died to their life of sin, and rose to the life of righteousness. The best comments on this bold and concentrated phrase are died to the Law that I might live to Christ;" "I have been crucified with Christ"; (Gal_2:19, Gal_2:20) and, "Ye died, and your life has been hidden with Christ in God". (Col_3:3) When Christ died, all humanity, of which he was the federal Head, died potentially with him to sin and selfishness, as he further shows in the next verse.

The love of Christ.

Every quality met in the Lord Jesus which could adapt him to accomplish the work which he undertook on behalf of our human race. But if one attribute must be selected as peculiarly and pre-eminently characteristic of him, if one word rather than another rises to our lips when we speak of him, that attribute, that word, is love.

I THE OBJECTS OF CHRIST"S LOVE. Look at his earthly life and ministry, and the comprehensive range within which the love of Jesus operates becomes at once and gloriously obvious.

1. His friends. Of this fact Christ"s love to his friends we haveabundant proof: "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.

2. His enemies. This is more wonderful, yet the truth of what the apostlesays is undeniable: "While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us." And we cannot forget his prayer offered for his enemies as they nailed him to the cross: "Father, forgive them.

3. All mankind. During his ministry the Lord Jesus was gracious to all withwhom he came into contact. His aim was by the bands of love to draw all men unto himself, that they might rest and live in his Divine and mighty heart.

II THE PROOFS OF CHRIST"S LOVE. The great facts of his ministry and mediation are evidences of his benevolence.

1. His advent. "Nothing brought him from above Nothing butredeeming love.

2. His ministry. He went about doing good, animated by the mightyprinciple of love to man. Eyed sickness he healed, every demon he expelled, every sinner he pardoned, was a witness to the love of Christ.

3. His death. His was the love "stronger than death:" for not only could notdeath destroy it, death gave it a new life and power in the world and over men.

4. His prevailing intercession and brotherly care.

III THE CHARACTERISTICS OF CHRIST"S LOVE.

1. It is sympathizing and. tender, "passing the love of women.

2. It is thoughtful and wise, ever providing for the true welfare of those towhom it is revealed.

3. It is forbearing and patient, otherwise it might often have been checkedand repressed.

4. It is self-sacrificing, counting nothing too great to be given up in orderto secure its ends.

5. It is faithful "Having loved his own, he loveth them even unto the end.

6. It is unquenchable and everlasting: "Who can separate us from the loveof Christ? T.

The constraint of Christ"s love.

The apostle represents the Savior"s love, not merely as something to be admired and enjoyed, but as something which is to act as a spiritual force. He experienced it as the supreme power over his own life, and he had confidence in it as the principle which should renew and bless the world.

I THE NATURE OF THIS CONSTRAINT. Men are influenced by many and various motives, some lower and some higher. Their natural instincts and impulses, their interests, their regard for public opinion and their ambition, the laws of the land, these are among the admitted and powerful inducements to human conduct. But these are not the highest motives, and are unworthy of the nature and possibilities of man, unless in conjunction with something better. Even the sacred obligation of duty is insufficient. But Christ"s love in his redemptive work, revealed to us in the gospel, is a moral and spiritual force of vast power? It awakens gratitude, love, devotion, obedience. It is the universal Christian motive. He who does not feel it, however correct his creed and conduct, is not in the proper sense of the term a Christian. Happy they who live under its sweet and constant constraint!

II THE DIRECTION OF THIS CONSTRAINT. Physical power is of two kinds it is either energy or resistance; e.g. the ocean and the dyke, the powder and the cannon, the steam and the boiler. As with physical, so with moral power.

1. Christ"s love acts by way of restraint. It withholds those who experience it from self-indulgence, from worldliness, and from other sins to which men are naturally prone, and from which only a Divine power can deliver.

2. It acts by way of impulse, inducing to the imitation of Jesus in character and conduct; to obedience such as he enjoins when he says, "If ye love me, keep my commandments;" to consecration such as Paul exemplified when he said, "We live unto the Lord.

III THE EFFICACY OF THIS CONSTRAINT. This depends upon a just interpretation of the passage. Were it our love to Christ which is imputed, this would be a feeble and vacillating motive; but it is something far greater and better, viz. Christ"s love to us. The power of this motive may be seen in the life of every faithful friend of Jesus; e.g. in the apostles, as Paul, Peter, John; in the confessors and martyrs and reformers; in the missionaries and philanthropists, etc. It may be seen in the dangers braved, the opposition encountered, the persecutions suffered, the efforts undertaken and persevered in. What of noble and beautiful and beneficent conduct has not this Divine motive proved able to inspire! Greater deeds and more heroic sufferings than the love of Christ has accounted for, the annals of mankind do not record. It is to this motive that we must look for all that in the future shall bless our common humanity. What nothing inferior can effect the love of Christ will certainly prove powerful to accomplish. T.

The constraining influence of the love of Christ.

I CONSIDER THE LOVE OF CHRIST. Shown in:

1. Advent. Relinquishment of heavenly glory. The highest place above exchanged for one of the lowest on earth.

2. Assumption of human nature. A vast condescension. A most striking proof of love.

3. Life. Miracles, acts of kindness, words, spirit.

4. Death. A transcendent proof.

(1) Death for enemies.

(2) Death at the hands of those he came to save.

(3) Most painful death,

(a) physically,

(b) mentally, and

(c) spiritually.

"My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?

(4) A death the object of which was the redemption, purification, exaltation, and eternal happiness of men.

5. Intercession. "He ever liveth to make intercession". (Heb_7:25)

II CONSIDER THE EFFECT OF THE LOVE OF CHRIST. It constrained the apostle with irresistible power all his energies into one channel." "Constraineth its influence was continuous. Its power was not soon spent; rather that power increased as the love of Christ was increasingly realized.

1. Negatively. Not to live to himself (ver. 15). There was now a greater power operating upon him than the mighty power of self.

2. Positively. To live to Christ (ver. 15). The love of Christ overmastered him. He felt that through it he had been purchased with a great price, and therefore sought to glorify Christ in his body and spirit which were peculiarly his.

1. By a blameless life.

2. By seeking to show forth Christ in his character, spirit, acts, etc.

3. By submitting his will to Christ"s in all things.

4. By cherishing a deep love for Christ.

5. By seeking to extend the kingdom and to increase the glory of Christ.

6. By being wholly devoted to Christ. He was wont to speak of himself as the "slave of Christ. H.

Vers. 14, 15.

The secret of devotedness, life one now flings a charge of madness at the sublime enthusiasm of St. Paul. He is looked on as a paragon of Christians. But, while he lived, he had no such general appreciation to encourage and sustain him. What he had above other men were not praises, but labours and reproaches. He endured all because he had in himself the mainspring of faith and the holy energy of love. Throughout this Epistle he shows his feelings and motives with the utmost candour, and in this passage tells how he came to be so enthusiastic toward God and so thoughtful and self-controlled toward his fellow Christians.

I THE MOVING PRINCIPLE OF CHRISTIAN DEVOTEDNESS. It is the strong unchanging love of Christ to his people, assured to them by his Spirit and his Word. Paul had a fear of God, a reverence for the Law, and walked in all good conscience; but when the love of Christ was revealed to him and suffused his spirit it made a new man of him thrilled, stirred, animated, constrained him to love and serve Christ and the Church. And as the apostle grew old and experienced, this motive lost nothing of its power. The love of Christ became to him, as it does to all experienced Christians, more and more wonderful a Shepherd"s love, that led him to die for us, and that now secures that we "shall not want;" a Brother"s love, and "love beyond a brother"s;" a Bridegroom"s love, who gave himself for the Church and will present the Church to himself.

II THE WAY IN WHICH THE MOTIVE ACTS. It is through no mere gush of feeling, but through consideration of the purpose and efficacy of Christ"s death and resurrection.

1. He died for all to this intent and with this result, that all of them died.Virtually and in the estimate of God this crucifixion of the whole Church took place when Christ was crucified. In the actual realization of it it becomes true to each man as and when he looks to Christ crucified and is united to him by faith. And with effects both legal and moral. He who was married to the Law dies to the Law, and is freed from its claims, so as to be married to the risen Christ. He who lived in sin dies to sin, and may not any longer live therein. He who loved the world is crucified to it, that he may love and live to God.

2. He rose again; and all the crucified ones live by him. So they havejustification, as represented by the accepted One, who has gone to the Father; and sanctification too, as separated to God in holy living and guided by the indwelling Spirit The former manner of life is marked by self regard. The new manner of life exchanges this for the habit of regarding Christ. So his constraining love induces his followers "to live unto him.

III USES OF THIS DOCTRINE.

1. Let it instruct us. Many are very ill informed on the relation of our Lord"s death and resurrection to the Divine will and to human salvation; and for this reason they are much less constrained by his love than they ought to be. Study these things. Bring thought and consideration as well as emotion to the theme. The love constrains "because we judge.

2. Let it humble us. Has the Son of the living God so loved us, and where is our love to him?

Lord, it is my chief complaint That my love is cold and faint.

1. Let it impel us. What we need to overcome our moral indolence and habits of self-pleasing is the pressure of strong convictions and motives; and we can best get these in contemplating the love, the death, and the resurrection of Christ. This, too, is a great security against departure from the Lord. When we know and feel little of Christ"s love we are easily tempted; but when this is in our thoughts and affections we abhor and repel whatever might separate us from him.

2. Let it comfort us. We are delivered from the wrath to come. Christ loves us. Then the Father also loves us. Duties are pleasant, afflictions are light; to live is Christ, to die is gain. F.

Vers. 14, 15.

The power of the Christian motive.

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 men"s lives give us very sad thoughts of our humanity. They range all the distance between the animal and the Divine, but they belong for the most part to the lower levels. The entire aspect and character of a man"s 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. St. Paul was in every way a remarkable man, full of energy, consecration, self-denial, and the "enthusiasm of humanity;" and in the passage now before us he tells us what was the supporting motive, the secret strength, of it all. "The love of Christ constraineth us.

I THE SOURCE OF THE CHRISTIAN MOTIVE. "Because we thus judge, that if one died for all, then all died in him." Apparently that life of the apostle was the life of an enthusiast. But if you used that word in any bad sense he would indignantly deny such an accusation. It was indeed a life to which he was constrained, held fast, impelled, coerced, and that by the intense love of his soul for another a love passing the love of women. But St. Paul would most earnestly urge that this love of his was no mere passion, no mere impulse, no blind force taking sudden mastery of his heart, and crushing down and silencing thought and judgment and will. He declares it to be a love based on judgment, and strengthened by maturer judgment. If that love was first won by the gracious vision granted to him when be was nearing Damascus, it was more truly a love confirmed and established by the serious meditations and calm decisions of his time of blindness, and by the Scripture studies of his lonely days in the desert. That sober consideration took up:

1. The sadness of man"s condition. "Then were all dead;" or, as otherwiseread, "then all died.

2. St. Paul"s judgment decided that it was quite true about Jesus Christ he had intervened to save men by his own sufferings and death. "He died for all." Paul or Saul, as he was then called was nearing the fulness of manhood when he heard of the appearance of a new prophet teacher in the land of his fathers. But all his prejudices arrayed themselves against the acceptance of him and against belief in his special commission and authority. It appeared from the reports that he was a poor man; that he came from the despised Galilean Nazareth, about which Old Testament Scriptures prophesied no such great thing; that he made himself the "friend of publicans and sinners;" that he was an unsparing foe of Paul"s own sect, the Pharisees; but that at last he had been stopped in his mischievous career, and made a public example of by an ignominious and shameful death. And then one day prejudice was overthrown. Prejudice was made to see the living glory of him whom it had tried to believe was disgraced and dead. Prejudice heard the authoritative voice of the supposed impostor speaking out of the heavenly places. Prejudice was conquered; the reason, the judgment, and the heart were enthroned, and set to form a judgment concerning Christ. And what a different thing the career of the Lord Jesus became when it was soberly, thoughtfully judged! Poor was he? It was the worthy outer garb of the unspeakable humiliation of the Divine Lord to the weakness of men. It was the fit outward seeming for "Immanuel," God with us. Out of Nazareth did he come? That was only one of the thousandfold proofs that he was indeed the Messiah promised to the fathers, now in dimmer and now in clearer outlines. Friend of publicans and sinners was he? No wonder; for he well knew that the real want of men is, not the removal of diseases, or the extensions of ceremonial worship, or even the unfolding of new truths, but the pardon of sin, the cleansing away of iniquity, and the assurance, carried home to the very soul, that God loves and would save the sinner. Despised and rejected of men was he? Yes; and it must have been so. Sinful humanity could not bear the reproach of the presence of perfect virtue. The forces of evil would be sure to wrestle hard against him who came that he might cast them out and destroy them. Die, did he, a mournful, shameful death? Judgment says There, amid the very shame of the cross, thrown up by the very darkness that lies behind it, shine forth rays of transcendent glory. There, in those hours of agony, may be seen sublime self-sacrifice, mystery of spiritual suffering, Divine sin bearing, and the most persuasive manifestation of God"s love to men. There is God "not sparing his own Son, but delivering him up for us all;" and there is God"s Son "bearing our sins in his own body on the tree." On that sober judgment the apostle based his new life motive. He set the love of that dying Saviour so high in his soul that it became from henceforth the master motive of all that he did.

II THE WAY IN WHICH THE CHRISTIAN MOTIVE WORKS. "They which live should not henceforth live unto themselves, but unto him which died for them, and rose again." The motive works by establishing a new law for the ruling of our life and conduct. It is the not-unto-self law. We do not know ourselves as we really are in our carnal state if we think that is not a new law. Gratification of self is the great unnatural human law. The not-unto-self law is the chosen life principle of all the good. It is the law of God, the life rule of Jesus the Christ; and, learnt of him, it has made many a human story since then beautiful and gracious. Could it be established in all hearts, the golden age would have come, in which the unselfish King can reign forever and ever. The only possible deliverance from the sway of the old self law is found in the elevating of some new and inspiring love to the throne of the heart. And Jesus makes himself the Object of just such love. The new motive also works in another way. It gives an inner spiritual force to sustain us in the endeavour to obey the law. Love becomes to us what it is to the child. The love of the parent becomes the law of the child"s life; but the love, as it dwells in the heart of the child, makes obedience easy. So our love to Christ can become the inner force by which our obedience is sustained day by day. R.T.

The Pulpit Commentary (1880–1919), ed. H.D.M. Spence-Jones & Joseph S. Exell — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

For the love of Christ - To us, and our love to him. Constraineth us - Both to the one and the other; beareth us on with such a strong, steady, prevailing influence, as winds and tides exert when they waft the vessel to its destined harbour. While we thus judge, that if Christ died for all, then are all, even the best of men, naturally dead - In a state of spiritual death, and liable to death eternal. For had any man been otherwise, Christ had not needed to have died for him.

John Wesley, Explanatory Notes Upon the Whole Bible (1754–1765) — public domain. Text via the GEBible commentary corpus.

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.

William Burkitt's Expository Notes on the New Testament (1700–1703) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

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

J. W. McGarvey (with Philip Y. Pendleton), Commentaries on the New Testament (The Fourfold Gospel, 1914; Acts; and the epistles) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.

14–16. For the love of Christ constraineth us. It was the power that moved him in all his conduct. That one died for all, therefore all died (Revision). I thus judge that if Christ died for all, all in Christ have died with him to a life of sin. Baptized into his death we must be dead to sin. The next verse shows that this is the meaning. Compare Rom. 6:3, 4, 6, 11 and Gal. 5:4.

B. W. Johnson's The People's New Testament with Notes (1889–1891) — public domain. Electronic text from the Christian Classics Ethereal Library (CCEL) ThML edition.

14. ὅτι εἶς (אBC2DFGKLP, Syrr. Aeth.) rather than ὅτι εἰ εἶς (א3C, Vulg. Copt. Arm.).

14. ἡ γὰρ ἀγάπη τοῦ χριστοῦ συνέχει ἡμᾶς. This is not parallel to τὸν φόβον τοῦ κυρίου (2Co 5:11): it means the love which Christ has towards us (Eph 3:19; Rom 5:5; Rom 5:8). See Cremer, Lex. p. 594. Because He loves us so much, we have to restrict our energies to the service of God and of our fellow-men, to the exclusion of self. By συνέχει is meant ‘keeps within bounds,’ prevents from wandering to other objects than the service of God and of man. The word implies pressure (Luk 8:45; Luk 19:43), but the pressure which restrains (Luk 12:50), rather than that which pushes forward. See Lightfoot on συνέχομαι ἐκ τῶν δύο (Php 1:23), the only other Pauline use of the verb; ‘I am hemmed in on both sides, I am prevented from inclining one way or the other.’ ‘Urges us on’ is not quite the meaning, although Chrysostom so paraphrases it; οὐκ ἀφίησιν ἡμᾶς ῥαθυμῆσαι οὐδὲ ὑπνῶσαι, ἀλλὰ διανίστησι πρὸς τοὺς ὑπὲρ ὑμῶν πόνους, καὶ ὠθεῖ. He twice quotes, ἡ ἀγάπη τοῦ θεοῦ, a reading for which there seems to be no authority. But restrains us from commending ourselves may be right. The idea of motive, though not in the word, can perhaps be deduced from it; ‘possesses us, absorbs us’; comp. Act 18:5, ‘he was wholly absorbed in preaching.’

κρίναντας τοῦτο. Because we formed this judgment (1Co 10:15; 1Co 11:13), came to this opinion. Some refer this to his conversion. But at the moment when Christ captured him and changed him from a persecutor into a convert he could hardly be said to have formed any such conviction. The time of reflexion after his conversion may be meant. In that case translate, because we have formed this judgment, or because we thus judge (A.V., R.V.). The τοῦτο anticipates ὅτι and ἄρα, especially the latter: it is οἱ πάντες ἀπέθανον that is the main element in the judgment. For this use of τοῦτο comp. 2Co 8:20, 2Co 10:7; 2Co 10:11.

ὅτι εἶς ὑπὲρ πάντων ἀπέθανεν· ἅρα οἱ πάντες ἀπέθανον. See critical note. That one died for all, therefore they all died; the ὅτι is practically the sign of quotation, giving the words of his judgment. In one sense, all died in Adam (1Co 15:22); in quite another, all died in Christ (Gal 2:19; Col 3:3). This is the interpretation of οἱ πάντες ἀπέθανον adopted by Athanasius, Cyril of Alexandria, and many moderns; and it is preferable to the explanation that the death of one for all showed that all men were previously dead in sin, which Chrysostom seems to mean.

Cambridge Greek Testament for Schools and Colleges (Cambridge University Press, 1896; 21 vols, various authors incl. Carr, Maclear, Plummer, Farrar, Lumby, Moule, M. R. James, Simcox) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

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.

14.] For (reason of his devotion under all reports and circumstances, θεῷ and ὑμῖν, as in last verse) Christ’s love (not, love to Christ, as Œ, 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 ἀγάπη is with Paul always subjective,—Rom 5:5, Rom 5:8; Rom 8:35, Rom 8:39; ch. 8:24; 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 εἰς, Col 1:4; 1Th 3:12) constraineth us (a better word could not be found: the idea of συνέχω 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 angustiæ 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, οὐκ ἀφίησιν ἡμᾶς ἡσυχάζειν, all in fact amount to one—that of the forcible compression of his energies to one line of action),

Henry Alford, The Greek Testament (1849–1861) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

14. ἡ γὰρ ἀγάπη τοῦ Χριστοῦ συνέχει ἡμᾶς. ‘We are influenced, not only by future rewards and punishments, whether in this world or the next; there is something in the present which affects us, for Christ’s love controls us: The love which Christ has for us (Gal 2:20) keeps us back from all self-seeking, and confines our aims to the service of God and of our fellow-men.’ In the Pauline Epp., the genitive of the person after ἀγάπν seems always to mean that the person exhibits, not receives, the love (13:13; 2Th 3:5; Eph 2:4; etc.), and in them ἀγάπη seems never to be used of man’s love to Christ or to God. In any case it is love and not fear (v. 12) which operates. As regards the meaning of συνέχει, comp. συνέχομαι ἐκ τῶν δύο, ‘I am hemmed in on both sides, restrained from inclining either way’ (Php 1:23; see Lightfoot). ‘The love of Christ constraineth us’ (AV, RV) is doubly ambiguous; it may mean ‘our love for Christ urges us on.’ ‘Our love for Christ’ is certainly wrong, as v. 15 shows; and ‘urges us on’ is probably wrong, although Chrys. takes it so, as does Vulg., urget nos. The verb implies the pressure which confines and restricts (Luk 8:45, Luk 8:12:50, Luk 8:19:43; Act 18:5). It is true that restriction may lead to concentration, which may produce an increase of activity. Nevertheless, restricting men is opposed to pushing them on, and here ‘restrains us from self-seeking’ rather than ‘urges us on to service’ seems to be the meaning. “Urges us on to avoid self-seeking’ is a curious way of adopting one translation and keeping the meaning of the other. Bousset makes συνέχει refer to ἐξέοτημεν, ‘restrains us from madness and extravagance,’ ‘keeps us sane and sober’; hält uns bei Sinnen. It is more probable that it refers to ἑαυτοὺς συνιστάνομεν, ‘restrains us from self-praise.’ Papyri give no help; they merely repeat the usages found in N.T.

International Critical Commentary — older volumes (1896–1929), various authors — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

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

Constraineth [συνεχει] . 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.

Marvin R. Vincent, Word Studies in the New Testament (1887–1900) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.