"That the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed."²⁵ In the light of the Saviour's life, the hearts of all, even from the Creator to the prince of darkness, are revealed. Satan has represented God as selfish and oppressive, as claiming all, and giving nothing, as requiring the service of His creatures for His own glory, and making no sacrifice for their good. But the gift of Christ reveals the Father's heart. It testifies that the thoughts of God toward us are "thoughts of peace, and not of evil." Jer. 29:11. It declares that while God's hatred of sin is as strong as death, His love for the sinner is stronger than death. Having undertaken our redemption, He will spare nothing, however dear, which is necessary to the completion of His work. No truth essential to our salvation is withheld, no miracle of mercy is neglected, no divine agency is left unemployed. Favor is heaped upon favor, gift upon gift. The whole treasury of heaven is open to those He seeks to save. Having collected the riches of the universe, and laid open the resources of infinite power, He gives them all into the hands of Christ, and says, All these are for man. Use these gifts to convince him that there is no love greater than Mine in earth or heaven. His greatest happiness will be found in loving Me.

Finally, Christ is the great Revealer of the thoughts and intents of the heart.²⁵ Are we proud, are we worldly, are we self-willed? Nothing will more bring out the sway and empire of these or any kindred passions over us than the bringing closer home to us the holy character and unmitigable claims of Jesus Christ. Keep them at a distance, and the strong man armed keeps the palace of the soul, and all comparatively is at peace. Bring them near, force them home upon the conscience and the heart; then it is that the inwards struggle begins; and in that struggle the spirit unconsciously revealeth its true condition before God.²⁶

(Yea, a sword shall pierce through thy own soul also,) that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed. (Luke 2:35)

Having thus taught us to refer his death to the divine benignity, having placed his cross in a line with the light of the divine countenance, so that on beholding the one we may be drawn to gaze on the other, he poured out his soul unto death. He showed us that, while the hatred of God against sin is strong as death, his love to sinners is yet stronger than death. He brought to an issue the momentous question, which had been kept open since the fall—whether or not God is light and love. The satanic agitation of this parent truth was the origin of human alienation from God; and having once brought it into question in the human mind, and thereby sown the seeds of enmity against God, it only remained for the father of lies to water those deadly seeds, in order to reap the fruit of a continual triumph against the Supreme. Besides, by widening the breach which existed between earth and Heaven, Satan might calculate on the possibility of at length realizing his own lie, of wearing out the goodness which only encountered abuse, of extinguishing the last spark of love in the breast of God, and of exasperating justice to doom and destroy the whole species. Every moment of four thousand years, therefore, he had turned to account, in fomenting the aversion of man to God. By a vast, evil had been kept in motion, and made to bear upon man, addressing itself to every passion, and intrenching itself in every heart; so that, in a sense more than figurative, the world, the entire mass of humanity, was subjected to a demoniacal possession.