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TOPIC: Gordon, Samuel Dickey - Quiet Talks About Calvary (Other Topics in this Collection)
SUBJECT: 04. Adrip With Blood
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Adrip With Blood
The second run that I wish to take is tracing out in the same brief way the Calvary foreshadowings in a God-appointed ritual. You know the whole story full well. God planned that in the Levitical code, the Mosaic code, there should be plainly foreshadowed the great sacrifice of Calvary. Mark this a moment. A man brought a lamb or some other beast. It must be a firstling, a first-begotten. It must be without blemish, carefully examined, and no blemish appearing. It did not deserve death, yet its blood is shed.
The man puts his hand on the head of the lamb, or other beast, as it is about to be killed, and in effect says,—this is the graphic thing pictured,—he says, “I and this offering I make are as one. In giving it to death I acknowledge my sin, and that my sin is worthy of death. I must die because I have sinned.
I acknowledge that. It dies in my place.” So the man said by his act.
And through its death, through its blood poured out, the man was reckoned cleansed, and walked into the presence of God, and had fellowship with God. And in a limited way, at limited times, he went, representatively, into the very immediate presence of God, as we do through our Lord Jesus Christ. That was the God-appointed ritual.
And for over two thousand years those sacrifices were made. This whole Old Testament is simply adrip with blood, adrip with blood all through, for years, generations, centuries, millenniums, until the fact of substitution, the sacrifice of innocent blood on behalf of the guilty, was woven into the very web and woof of the whole Hebrew nation.
And if you will turn to Ezekiel’s prophecy you will find a further suggestion there; an intimation, or suggestion, that in the coming time there may be a series of blood-offerings, continuing the old Hebrew code, a continual reminder to the world, in that millennium time, of the one way whereby men have been saved, by the giving of innocent blood; and that the ritual here pointed forward, as it so plainly does, to the coming sacrifice of the Lord Jesus. It looks very much in Ezekiel, as though there is to be a long red hand pointing backward, all those millennium years, to the Lamb of God pouring out His blood for the sin of the world.
Then Calvary is foreshadowed in the songs of the Hebrew people. You know how a people’s songs both reveal them and make them. A nation reveals itself most in its song: more than in its law. And a nation is made more by its song than by its laws. If you will go through the Hebrew singing-book you will find suffering all through, suffering undeserved, suffering by reason of the action of somebody else who is guilty of wrong. That tracing runs all through. But there are two Psalms that I must point you to particularly, in this brief way. Psalm Twenty-two and Psalm Sixty-nine stand out peculiarly in the Psalm Book for this Calvary foreshadowing.
The Twenty-second Psalm is a picture in its very structure. It is a Psalm of sobs. If you will take simply your English Bibles, and cross out the italicised words, which are supplied by the translators, you will get something of the structure of the Psalm. It is just like broken sentences, a man sobbing with his heart breaking, and with broken, interjected words breathing out the breakings of his heart.
Without doubt it had a historical setting in David’s own life. There can be no question of that. But without doubt, too, its fullest meaning is found only in our Lord Jesus Christ. And while neither it, nor any page of the Old Testament, touches the mode whereby our Lord suffered His death, the fact of His suffering, in minute detail, is brought out in this Psalm.
It has been thought by some, and I think not at all unlikely, that our Lord Jesus Christ may have used this Psalm in His own inner thought, as He hung upon the Cross. The first sentence of it, and the last, come audibly from His lips:—“My God, My God, why hast Thou,—why didst Thou—forsake Me?”; then quietness, silence for a time, and by and by the great voice rings out in a shout,—“It is done! It is finished!” the last phrase in effect of the Psalm. And in between these two, the suggestion is, He has been breathing out, sobbing out in His inner consciousness, in broken words, this Twenty-second Psalm.
The Sixty-ninth Psalm is the second of these. You know how it goes into detail of the very things our Lord suffered. But I must not stop with that now. If we had an hour for Psalm Sixty-nine, we might watch, away back in the Hebrew Psalm Book, the beating, the throbbing, of our Lord’s heart as He hung on the Cross.