Shedding the Blood of God

When the martyrs and saints offered themselves as a sacrifice, they offered it through the flames of their love and, therefore, embraced the stake.  Love is described as being as strong as death, but Christ did not offer His sacrifice with the flames of His love, though love was in Him, the greatest that ever was but, with the everlasting flames of His Godhead and deity, with that fire from heaven (which is a consuming fire).  He did the deed which will purge our consciences from dead works.  “Take heed unto yourselves and to the flock over which the Holy Ghost hath made you overseers, to feed the church of God which He hath purchased with His precious blood” (Acts 20.28).  God has purchased the church with His own blood.  Whose blood?  God’s blood.  The blood of God must be shed.  “He who thought it not robbery to be equal with God” must shed His own blood.  “Had they known, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory,” that is, they would not have crucified God.

From: “The Satisfaction of Christ,” a sermon on Philippians 2.5-8, in The Puritan Pulpit: The Irish Puritans: James Ussher, D.D., edited by Don Kistler (Orlando: Soli Deo Gloria Publications, 2006), p. 122.

James Ussher (1581-1656) was an Irish Reformed divine and author whose thought influenced the composition of both the Irish Articles and the Westminster Standards.  The sermon quoted from was preached in 1640, when Ussher was 59.

 

On James Ussher

James Usher (or, rather, Ussher) himself was more a writer than a preacher, the most erudite of an erudite time, and one of the most voluminous authors of a time when most authors were voluminous.  But he cannot be omitted here, and he escapes the blame not quite unjustly passed upon Andrewes by never attempting flights of rhetoric at all.  He did not wish his sermons to be published, though they were.  His great chronological and historical works, which gained him a practically enduring fame, are mainly in Latin.  In English, he wrote chiefly on Celtic Antiquities, especially those of an ecclesiastical complexion, as well as on the burning questions of the time – the Protestant/Papist controversy, divine right, and the like.  His style, like that of so many men of his day, is largely conditioned by his method of argument, which consists, though by no means wholly yet very mainly, in appeals to authority and citations from the inexhaustible store of his vast reading.  Only the idiosyncrasy of a Burton can infuse writing of this kind with any particular tincture of style.  But Ussher is always plain and clear.  Neither his temper nor his immediate purpose inclined him to any superfluity of ornament and, when he gets free from citation and has a new paragraph or two to write, as the common phrase is, “out of his own head,” he rather exemplifies the Ascham-Hooker tradition than the more conceited manner of his own day. 

He was born in Dublin in 1581, and was a nephew of Stanyhurst, the eccentric translator of Virgil.  He was one of the first alumni of Trinity College, Dublin, became Fellow, and gave himself up to study, becoming Professor of Divinity in his University in 1607, Bishop of Meath in 1620, and Archbishop of Armagh in 1625.  When Ireland became convulsed by the Rebellion, he went to England and was, for some time, preacher at Lincoln’s Inn.  Though a steady Royalist, he was not molested by the Parliament or by Cromwell, and died quietly at Reigate in 1656.

From: A Short History of English Literature by George Saintsbury (London: Macmillan & Co., Ltd., 1898), p. 384.