dominating purpose. We are told sometimes that Jesus was a great
teacher, and so He was, but the apostles never gloried in that fact.
We are constantly reminded that He was a great reformer, and so He
was, but Peter and John and Paul seemed to be altogether unconscious
of that fact. It is asserted that He was a great philanthropist, a man
intensely interested in the bodies and the homes of men, and so of
course He was, but the New Testament does not seem to care for that.
It has often been declared that He was a great martyr, a man who laid
down His life in devotion to the truth, and so He was and so He did,
but the Bible never looks at Him from that standpoint or regards
Him in that light. It refuses to enroll Him among the teachers or
reformers or philanthropists or the martyrs of our race. According
to the apostolic writers, Jesus is the world's Redeemer, He was
manifested to take away sin. He is the Lamb of God that taketh away
the sin of the world. The vast and awful fact that broke the apostles'
hearts and sent them out into the world to baptize the nations into
His name, was the fact which Paul was all the time asserting, "He died
for our sins."

No one can read the New Testament without seeing that its central and
most conspicuous fact is the death of Jesus. Take, for instance, the
gospels, and you will find that over one-quarter of their pages are
devoted to the story of His death. Very strange is this indeed, if
Jesus was nothing but an illustrious teacher. A thousand interesting
events of His career are passed over, a thousand discourses are never
mentioned, in order that there may be abundant room for the telling of
His death. Or take the letters which make up the last half of the New
Testament; in these letters there is scarcely a quotation from the
lips of Jesus. Strange indeed is this if Jesus is only the world's
greatest teacher. The letters seem to ignore that He was a teacher or