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Music For the Soul
Devotional: April 27th

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THE TWO VOICES

The voice of thy brothers blood crieth unto Me from the ground. - Genesis 4:10

Speaketh better things than that of Abel. - Hebrews 11:24

We have the blood that speaks of man’s hate, and the other blood that speaks of God’s love. The former was shed simply because the milk of brotherly affection was all curdled into hate through the working of jealousy and of envy. So that first dismal story rises up on the very threshold of history as a solemn revelation of the possibilities of diabolical and murderous hatred that lie in all human relationships and in all men’s hearts; and speaks to every one of us the warning that we shall not cherish the tiny seeds of jealousy and envy of a brother’s good, which may ripen and fructify into the devilish fruit of murder, as it did there.

Christ’s death was also caused by man’s sins, by the antagonism which was raised in man by His very beauty and purity. Eternal goodness came into the world, and the world hated the light, because its deeds were evil.

But we have to go deeper than that. The blood of Abel proclaimed man’s hate, the blood of Christ proclaims God’s infinite love. For He died, not because men hated Him, but because He loved men. He did not die because Pharisees and Scribes, with all the others who were roused in antagonism against Him, carried out their schemes, but He died because He would. It was not their hostility that nailed Him to the Cross, it was His purpose to save. It was not because men willed it that He perished from the life of earth, but because He would give Himself for us. And so, whilst from that old dim incident far away there, low down on the horizon of history, there streams out, as it were, a baleful light that speaks of man’s sin and hatred, from this other there rays out a celestial brightness, which proclaims the infinite love of the Father who gave His Son, and the infinite love of the Son who gave Himself. The one is reeking with hatred, the other is fragrant with love. The one shows the depths of possible evil in men’s hearts, and how all human affection may be embittered and turned to its opposite; the other shows how the infinite lovingkindness of God lives on and on, like the patient sunshine upon the glaciers, notwithstanding all the coldness and the alienation of man’s nature, and how that infinite and wondrous love shrinks not from even the death which the hate it would win to love can inflict. "The blood of sprinkling speaketh better things than that of Abel," in that against the blackness of man’s hate it lifts the sevenfold lustre of the infinite love of God.

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