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WHAT ARE THESE MARKS?
from Spurgeon's "The Enchanted Ground"
I wish I could raise him before you tonight--
even the Christ of God, and bid him stand here,
and you should see his hands and his feet, and you
should ask, "What are these marks we see
there?"
He would reply-
"These are the wounds that I received when I suffered for the
sons of men," and he bares his side and says- "See here,
here went the spear when I died that sinners might live."
In glory now, "yet once", says he, "this face was defiled with
spittle, and this body mangled with Pilate's scourge and
Herod's rod, and I, whom angels worshipped, was treated as
a menial, aye, worse- God himself forsook me, Jehovah hid
his face from me, that I, bearing the punishment of sin- might
really bear it, not in fiction, but in fact, and might suffer the
equivalent for all the miseries that souls redeemed by me
ought to have suffered had they been cast into hell."
Will you look at his wounds, and yet refuse him?
Will you hear the story of his love, and yet reject him?
Must he go away and say in his heart--
"They have refused me; they have refused me; I told them of
salvation; I showed them how I bought salvation; they have
refused me; I will go my way, and they shall never see my
face again till that day when they shall say-- "Mountains fall
upon us; hide us from the face of him that sits upon the
throne!"
If you will not have him in mercy, you must have him in
judgment, and if the silver scepter of God will not touch you,
the Christ of God, the man of Nazareth, will come a second
time on the clouds of heaven, and woe unto you in that
tremendous day!
Then shall the nations of the earth weep and wail because of
him. They would not have him as their Savior; they must have
him as their Judge, and out of his mouth shall the sentence
come, "Depart! Depart!"
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