Christ, Victory of – Charles Spurgeon

HERCULES cleansed the Augean stable, says the fable, but what an Augean stable was this world! Yet Christ will purge it; he is purging it, did purge it by his death. This Aceldama shall yet become an Elysium; the field of blood shall be transformed into a garden of delights. Christ came to bear a load upon his shoulder, compared with which the burden of Atlas is as nothing. Atlas, according to the heathen mythology, bore the world between his shoulders, but Jesus bears the world’s sin, and that is more. Can you see him there in the garden? Great drops of sweat prove what a tremendous toil he has undertaken. Do you see him on the cross? Not a bone is broken, but every bone is dislocated, to prove how great the labor, but how greater still the strength which achieved the whole. O Lord Jesus! when we see that you have burst the gates of death, that you have trodden on the neck of sin, that you have broken the head of Satan, that you have led captivity captive, and opened the gates of Heaven to all your people, we may indeed sing, “You have a mighty arm.