Judge. And I were a betrayer of CHRIST, accountable as I know that I am, and speaking to those who must meet me before his judgment seat, if I proposed them to you with less than their weight, as the words of Him who cannot lie--with less than their authority, as the unchangeable word of the Most High GOD. As such, therefore, I shall proceed, in the fear of GOD, to explain and enforce them.

For if ye believe not that I am He ye shall die in your sins.

The structure of the sentence requires us to consider the words in the same light as those to whom they were spoken.

Prophecy and expectation, grounded on the fulfilment of a remote promise made by the Almighty to a fallen world, of which the Jewish nation were the depositaries, and with which the whole frame and polity of their state was inseparably interwoven, led that people to look forward to the advent of their promised deliverer with the most intense interest. That blessings which language laboured to describe were to accompany his appearance they were fully assured, but of the particular nature and kind they were, with a few exceptions, altogether ignorant. Vainly puffed up by a fleshly mind, corrupt in their morals in proportion to their departure from the spirit of their religion, ambitious of worldly power and grandeur, and pressed under the yoke of foreign and Heathen despotism, they overlooked the spiritual application of their inspired writings, and from the kingly titles and supreme dominion ascribed therein to their Messiah, expected and desired only a temporal deliverance, and the re-establishment of their ancient kingdom in unchangeable supremacy over all the kingdoms of this world. Hence, when JESUS of Nazareth appeared in the lowly condition of a servant, and opened up to them the nature of that kingdom which he came to set up-when he explained the spiritual extent of that holy law which God had given them, and denouncing their sins, called upon them to repent and believe in him for pardon, grace, and everlasting life-when he showed the kind of deliverance he had undertaken to achieve for them, and instead of that worldly power and grandeur which they fondly anticipated, required them to renounce their proud and vain glorious expectations, and to follow him in humility, self-denial, and

holiness, to a kingdom not of this world, they rejected him almost to a man, and with one voice exclaimed, We will not have this man to reign over us. Yea, when his predicted forerunner, whom they all acknowledged to be a prophet, publicly proclaimed him as the promised Messiah, as the Son of GOD, and the Lamb of GOD which taketh away the sin of the worldwhen prophecies fulfilled to the very letter, and miracles wrought before their eyes, confounded every reasonable ground of opposition and refusal, their perverseness was sharpened into malice, and they conspired to take away his life. With this view they watched all his motions, laid snares for him in his speech, and when the innocence and wisdom of his life defeated all their attempts, at last bribed one of his intimate friends to betray him into their hands.

In one of those attempts to ensnare him, the conversation of which my text forms a part occurred, in which, having baffled a deep laid scheme to involve him with the civil or ecclesiastical rulers of the country, he proceeded to set before them the dreadful consequences of continuing to reject his person and doctrine, to warn them that he was not to remain much longer with them, and that if this the day of their visitation was neglected, their ruin was irrevocably decreed. I am the light of the world, I am from above, I am not of this world. Ye are from beneath. If ye were Abraham's children ye would do the works of Abraham. Ye do the works of your father the devil, and because I tell you the truth ye believe me not. I go my way, and whither I go ye cannot come. Ye shall seek me, but ye shall die in your sins. For if ye believe not that I am He ye shall die in your sins.

The words of my text, therefore, are an epitome of the gospel, an abbreviated manner of setting forth that method of salvation which the mercy of GoD has provided for sinners, through JESUS CHRIST. And while they briefly but forcibly declare both the danger and the remedy, and enforce the grand Christian doctrine of salvation by grace through faith, they bind down the attention of every serious mind to the personal interest of the sinner in the atonement of the cross. Ye are sinners, says our LORD to the Jews; and in such sort sinners, that notwithstanding your being God's chosen people-notwithstanding your

dependence upon the promises made to your father Abrahamnotwithstanding your confidence in the sacrifices and expiations of the law given you by Moses-yet as Abraham saw my day, and though afar off, rejoiced and was glad, and by faith in the promise only was justified and accepted, and as Moses himself, and your law with all its provisions, were but types of me, and pointed to me, so must you also, by personally believing in or rejecting me, be partakers of the promise, or be cut off from the hope of Israel. Moses gave you not that bread from heaven, but my Father giveth you the true bread from heaven. I am that bread of life. I am the living bread which came down from heaven, if any man eat of this bread he shall live for ever. Verily, verily I say unto you, he that believeth on me hath everlasting life.

In like manner it is said to each one of us-Ye are sinners, and no otherwise than by faith in the only begotten Son of GOD, can you escape either from your sins or the awful penalty denounced against them by the unchangeable law of GOD.

But as with the Jews so with us, my hearers. Though he tells us the truth, and because it is the truth, and we feel assured that it is the truth by a testimony not to be mistaken, yet too often we believe him not. That is, we do not act upon the conviction thence arising, as we usually do on far inferior interests, from convictions which have less certainty.

For instance were I to ask this congregation, man by man and woman by woman, whether they did not know and feel, in other words, were convinced, that they were sinners, in the Scripture sense of the word, and as such could have no confidence in themselves to meet with safety the righteous judgment of GOD, would there be any found who could honestly say that they even doubted about it? Yet many I fear would have to say, in the same honesty, that this sense of sin had never been so attended to and acted upon as to drive them to JESUS CHRIST, the only physician of souls. But were I to ask the same persons, whether, when labouring under a bodily disease they thus act, or in managing a temporal interest they thus hesitate, and put off what is needful, would they not be obliged to answer differently? Yet surely the danger from a bodily disease, or the loss or gain of a temporal interest is neither so certain or so great

as in the case of the soul. Nor can there reasonably be supposed the same ground of reliance on the judgment of a friend, the skill of a physician, or on the efficacy of the counsel and means which they advise, in the one case as in the other.

By this analogy, then, let us be instructed my friends. For as surely as a curable distemper may prove mortal to the body when the skill of the physician and the means he prescribes are neglected, so will the disease of sin prove fatal to the soul unless arrested in its progress by the grace of the gospel, and deprived of its virulence by the blood of CHRIST.

If

ye believe not that I am He, ye shall die in your sins. This mode of expressing himself, made use of by our LORD, called the Jews at once to consider and compare the circumstances predicted of their Messiah with what was passing before their eyes. And, had prejudice and prepossession allowed them to search those Scriptures to which he so often referred them, they must have seen the fulfilment of prophecy stand out in such bold relief as to draw from their whole nation the acknowledgment of Nathaniel-Rabbi thou art the Son of GOD, thou art the King of Israel.

That this was a mode of speaking familiar to the Jews, when their expected Messiah was the subject, we learn from different instances of its use in the Scriptures. Thus, when Philip, obeying the Saviour's call, communicated the circumstance to Nathaniel, We have found him, says he, of whom Moses in the law and the prophets did write, JESUS of Nazareth the son of Joseph. And when John the Baptist, desirous to satisfy his disciples that JESUS was the Messiah, sent them to him, his message was expressed in the same peculiar mode of speakingArt thou He that should come, or do we look for another? And that it was purposely made use of by our LORD on this occasion we have good reason to infer from his answer to John's message-Go and show John again those things which ye do hear and see; the blind receive their sight, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up and the poor have the gospel preached unto them. Which answer, as it is a literal application of the prophecies to the times and marks of the Messiah, so was it intended to give to them and to

all other inquirers, that substantial and convincing evidence which springs from the coincidence of a deep and wonderful counsel, a declared purpose, and an exact fulfilment; compared with which no other proof possesses so complete a power over the understanding, neither is any other so marked with the impress of heaven, or so well calculated to produce conviction in every fair and unprejudiced mind. Hence it was that our Lord made use of it to confirm to his immediate disciples the other proofs they had of his person and character-Now I tell you before it come, that when it is come to pass ye may believe that I am He. And hence the effect which they have recorded that it produced upon their faith-When, therefore, he was risen from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this unto them, and they believed the Scripture, and the word which JESUS had said. In which, let it be observed and remembered, that it was not simply our LORD's ability to foretel future events which confirmed his disciples, but the plain and evident connexion and agreement of long recorded prophecies with the person and character of JESUS CHRIST, the time of his appearing, and the events of his life and death. The former would have entitled him to the prophetic character only, in which he had many predecessors, but the latter pointed him out as the object and end of all prophetic inspiration, the promised seed of the woman, the angel of the covenant, the Shiloh unto whom the gathering of the people should be, the great prophet whom Moses told the Israelites God would raise up unto them of their brethren, the LORD GOD of the holy prophets, the expected Messiah of the Jews, the appointed and only Saviour of sinners, GOD manifest in the flesh to destroy the works of the devil, GOD over all blessed for ever. And, therefore, they not only believed his word, but they believed in him as he that should come, their LORD and their GOD.

If ye believe not that I am He ye shall die in your sins.

The purchase of mercy for a ruined world, and the proper propitiation for the sin which produced and continued that ruin, can be declared only by Him who is the fountain of mercy, and to whom the atonement was to be made: man has nothing to do with it but to accept or refuse it; and we may assume, with