There, in that rock, lies He that made the world. There are sealed up the lips which said, “Come unto me all ye that labour and are heavy laden and I will give you rest.” There are closed the eyes which always beamed compassion, and wept for human woe. There, cold, are the hands which were laid on little children to bless them, and opened the eyes of the blind, and delivered the widow’s son alive to his mother. There reposes that gentle head, that knew no resting place till He could say “I have finished the work that my father gave me to do.” There lies the Life of the world and the Hope of Israel!—The Wonderful, the Counsellor, the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace! He was fairer than the children of men! He was the image of the invisible God! He went about doing good; He was rich, and for our sakes He become poor! Were we seated beside the two Marys, with bleeding hearts we might think what epitaph would best become Immanuel’s tomb; and had we been like them at that moment, ignorant of the purpose of His death, this would express both our faith and our fears— “We trusted that it had been He Who should have redeemed Israel.” But had their conceptions of the great scheme of the atonement been correct, had they understood the nature of Christ’s satisfaction for sin, had they comprehended how before one sinner could be saved the law must be made honourable in all its penalties and all its requirements, they would have been disposed to rejoice rather than mourn when Jesus came to the grave, and they would have written “Lift up your heads, O ye gates, that the King of Glory may come in, to spoil you of your strength and prostrate all your pride. He comes, the Lord of hosts, like a second Samson, to lay His hands on your most colossal pillars, and complete by His own death the overthrow begun in the days of His life.” On the tombs of mortals, however illustrious, we write these humbling words, “Here he _lies_,” but I hear the angel saying at the tomb of Christ, “Come, see the place where the Lord _lay_.” Brethren, “companions in tribulation, and in the patience and kingdom of Christ”—it is well for us to stand by His grave and compare His deep humiliation with His essential glory. Let us behold in His death the infliction pronounced against sin; let us learn the odiousness of it in the sight of God, the vastness of the evil displayed in the magnitude of the remedy, the boundlessness of God’s grace in “sparing not His own Son but giving him up” to the death “for us all.”