life from him; but no man had power to take away Christ's life
from Him: "I lay it down of Myself," He said. The Son of Man _gave_ His
life. He was not dragged as an unwilling victim to the sacrifice and
bound upon the altar. He was both Priest and Victim; as the apostle puts
it, "He gave Himself up." True, the element of necessity was there--"the
Son of Man _must_ be lifted up"; but it was the "must" of His own love,
not of another's constraint. Not Roman nails or Roman thongs held Him to
the Cross, but His own loving will. It is important to emphasize this
fact of the _voluntariness_ of our Lord's death, because at once it sets
the Cross in a clearer light. It changes martyrdom into sacrifice; and
Christ's death, instead of being merely a fate which He suffered,
becomes now, as Principal Fairbairn says, a work which He
achieved--_the_ work which He came into the world to do: "The Son of Man
came ... to give His life."[20]

III

Again, Christ taught us that His death was _the crowning revelation of
the love of God for man._ And it is well to remind ourselves of our need
of such a revelation. We speak sometimes as though the love of God was a
self-evident truth altogether independent of the facts of New Testament
history. "God is love"--of course, we say; this at least we are sure of,
whatever becomes of the history. But this jaunty assurance will not bear
looking into. The truth is that, apart from Christ, we have no certainty
of the love of God. A man may cry aloud in our ears, "God is love, God
is love"; but if he have no more to say than that, the most emphatic
reiteration will avail us nothing. But if he can say, "God is love, and
He so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son"; if, that is
to say, he can point us to the Divine love made manifest in life, then
he is proclaiming a gospel indeed. But let us not deceive ourselves and
imagine that we can have Christ's gospel apart from Christ.

Now, according to the teaching of the Gospels, all Christ's life--all He
was and said and did--is a revelation of the love of God. But the crown
of the revelation was given in His death. It is the Cross which was, in
a special and peculiar sense, as Christ Himself declared,[21] the glory
both of the Father and the Son. And the apostles, with a unanimity which
can only be explained as the result of His own teaching, always
associate God's love with Christ's death in a way in which they never
associate God's love w