Redeemed by the Blood

Who his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree, that we, being dead to sins, should live unto righteousness: by whose stripes ye were healed. 1 PETER 2:24

If the love of God was the first note of Moody’s preaching, the cross was its centre. He did not preach a vague benevolence in the sky. He preached a love that had done something, at a particular place, at a terrible cost. The love of God, he said in The Way to God, is to be learned at Calvary, and nowhere else so clearly.

The old-fashioned gospel

In a sermon on the one word gospel, preached in England and now in the Ochorus library, Moody takes his hearers to the fifteenth chapter of First Corinthians, where Paul sets out what the gospel is.

For I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures. 1 CORINTHIANS 15:3

That, says Moody, is the old-fashioned gospel, and he hoped the church would never get away from it. Some people in his day were urging preachers to say less about Christ’s death and more about His life and example. Moody would have none of it. A beautiful example, however beautiful, cannot take away a single sin. Christ’s life shows us what we ought to have been; His death deals with what we are.

He did not forget the rest of Paul’s summary. The same sermon rejoices that Christ was buried and rose again, that death could not hold Him, and that we do not worship a dead Saviour. But the resurrection matters because of what the death accomplished. It is God’s receipt for a debt paid.

Our Substitute

The word Moody used most for Christ on the cross was substitute. He stood in our place, bore our sins, took the judgement that was ours.

But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed. ISAIAH 53:5

“The moment I believe on the Lord Jesus Christ as my substitute, as my Saviour, that moment I get light and peace.” It is a very simple sentence, and it is meant to be. Moody knew that anxious people do not need a lecture on the theories of the atonement; they need to know that their sins have been dealt with. So he pressed the fact again and again. The sins you have committed, and the ones you have forgotten, are not waiting for you at the judgement if you are in Christ. They were laid on Him.

In The Way to God he reaches for the Passover: when the children of Israel were placed behind the blood in Egypt, he says, that blood was their salvation. The picture repays thought. The destroyer did not ask whether the people in the house were good or bad, clever or simple. He asked only whether the blood was on the door.

And the blood shall be to you for a token upon the houses where ye are: and when I see the blood, I will pass over you. EXODUS 12:13

The burnt ground

Moody’s most memorable picture of the atonement came from the American prairies. In the autumn, he says, the long grass sometimes caught fire, and a strong wind drove the flames faster than a horse could run. Hunters caught in its path had one way of escape. They set fire to the grass around themselves, let it burn, and stepped onto the blackened ground. When the great fire came, it passed them by, because there was nothing left to burn.

Then he applied it. “There is one mountain peak that the wrath of God has swept over—that is, Mount Calvary, and that fire spent its fury upon the bosom of the Son of God.” The believer stands on burnt ground. The judgement has already fallen there.

There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit. ROMANS 8:1

It is worth pausing on how seriously this takes the wrath of God. Moody’s preaching of love is sometimes caricatured as sentimental. But the prairie fire is not sentimental. It assumes that there is a fire, that it is coming, and that no one can outrun it. The love of God in Moody’s gospel is not a love that ignores judgement. It is a love that bears it.

What God cannot see

In the same sermon Moody tells of a child in Ireland who was asked by a teacher whether there was anything God could not do. The child said yes: God could not see his sins through the blood of Christ. Moody’s comment was brief: “The blood covers them.”

The blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin. 1 JOHN 1:7

That is the heart of redemption for Moody. It is not that God pretends our sins were never committed. It is that they have been paid for, and the payment covers them completely. Redemption is a word from the slave market; it means to buy back. We were not bought, Peter says, with silver and gold, which God could have made in any quantity, but with something infinitely more costly.

Forasmuch as ye know that ye were not redeemed with corruptible things, as silver and gold, from your vain conversation received by tradition from your fathers; But with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot. 1 PETER 1:18–19

More than a rescue

Moody knew that the cross was not only a transaction. In The Way to God he says that Christ is not only a Saviour but a Deliverer. He had little sympathy, he says, with the idea that God comes down to save us and then leaves us in prison, slaves to our besetting sins. The blood that frees us from guilt also sets us on the road out of Egypt.

That is an important balance, because Moody’s emphasis on substitution could, in careless hands, turn into something cheap: a transaction completed once, with no claim on the rest of one’s life. Moody did not mean that. The Christ who died for us died that we should live unto righteousness, as Peter says. The fire has passed over; now we are to walk on the burnt ground as those who owe everything.

It is also fair to say that Moody, preaching to crowds, rarely went further than the plain facts of the atonement. He was content to say that Christ died in our place, and to leave the deeper questions of how it was just and why it was necessary to others. The reader who wants to go further will find help in the older divines he loved and quoted. But no reader will find a more direct invitation to stand on the burnt ground than Moody’s.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Is there any sin you still carry as though it were waiting for you at the judgement? Name it, and then read Romans 8:1 over it.

2. Moody insisted on Christ’s death, not only His example. Which has your own faith leaned on more?

3. Take the picture of the burnt ground into a moment of fear this week. Tell yourself where you stand.

4. Read 1 Peter 1:18–19 and consider what it means that you were bought at such a price. What part of your life are you still treating as your own?

5. Read Moody’s sermon One Word — Gospel, in the Ochorus library, in a single sitting.

A PRAYER

Lord Jesus, You bore my sins in Your own body on the tree. I cannot add anything to what You finished there.

I stand on the ground where the fire has already fallen, and I thank You that there is now no condemnation for me.

Let me never make Your blood cheap by living as though I were still my own.

You bought me back; now keep me, deliver me from every besetting sin, and let my life say that I was redeemed at a great price. Amen.