New Tabernacle SermonsTalmage, T. De Witt (Thomas De Witt)
Religion
New Tabernacle Sermons
Talmage, T. De Witt (Thomas De Witt)
Presbyterian Church -- Sermons; Sermons, American
But I have some good news to tell you. I want to engage in a
litigation for the recovery of that soul of yours. I want to show that
you have been cheated out of it. I want to prove, as I will, that you
were crazy on that subject, and that the world, under such
circumstances, has no right to take the title-deed from you; and if
you will join me I shall get a decree from the High Chancery Court of
Heaven reinstating you into the possession of your soul. "Oh," you
say, "I am afraid of lawsuits; they are so expensive, and I can not
pay the cost." Then have you forgotten the last half of my text? "Ye
have sold yourselves for nought; and ye shall be redeemed without
money."
Money is good for a great many things, but it can not do anything in
this matter of the soul. You can not buy your way through. Dollars and
pounds sterling mean nothing at the gate of mercy. If you could buy
your salvation, heaven would be a great speculation, an extension of
Wall Street. Bad men would go up and buy out the place, and leave us
to shift for ourselves. But as money is not a lawful tender, what is?
I will answer: Blood! Whose? Are we to go through the slaughter? Oh,
no; it wants richer blood than ours. It wants a king's blood. It must
be poured from royal arteries. It must be a sinless torrent. But where
is the king? I see a great many thrones and a great many occupants,
yet none seem to be coming down to the rescue. But after awhile the
clock of night in Bethlehem strikes twelve, and the silver pendulum of
a star swings across the sky, and I see the King of Heaven rising up,
and He descends, and steps down from star to star, and from cloud to
cloud, lower and lower, until He touches the sheep-covered hills, and
then on to another hill, this last skull-covered, and there, at the
sharp stroke of persecution, a rill incarnadine trickles down, and we
who could not be redeemed by money are redeemed by precious and
imperial blood.
We have in this day professed Christians who are so rarefied and
etherealized that they do not want a religion of blood. What do you
want? You seem to want a religion of brains. The Bible says: "In the
blood is the life." No atonement without blood. Ought not the apostle
to know? What did he say? "Ye are redeemed not with corruptible
things, such as silver and gold, but by the precious blood of Christ."
You put your lancet into the arm of our holy religion and withdraw the
blood, and you leave it a mere corpse, fit only for the grave. Why did
God command the priests of old to strike the knife into the kid, and
the goat, and the pigeon, and the bullock, and the lamb? It was so
that when the blood rushed out from these animals on the floor of the
ancient tabernacle the people should be compelled to think of the
coming carnage of the Son of God. No blood, no atonement.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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