An Ethiopian, of great worldly authority, was driving through the desert; he had been to worship in the city of God. If anything could have been done, in any city, to improve his spiritual condition, Jerusalem was the place. As yet, he knew not his dead condition. Reading the Word of God, where the prophet Isaiah describes the adorable Substitute, he read these words: “He was led as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before its shearers is silent, so He opened not His mouth. He was taken from prison and from judgment … for He was cut off from the land of the living” (Isa. 53:7–8). At this moment, the Spirit of God sent His servant Philip to give joy to his anxious and troubled soul.

Philip opened his mouth, and from Isaiah 53, preached unto him Jesus. Men of God in those days were known to show plainly that, if Christ died for all, then all were dead. The Ethiopian might well be no better for going to Jerusalem—how could he be? What could the doctors of religion do for a dead man? Or what even could the law do for a dead man? The death of Christ had shown that man’s case was beyond the reach of anything, except boundless grace. And what had God done in boundless grace for dead, lost man? He had given His Son to die for him—to take his place in death—that He might be the Firstborn from the dead. That He might rise from the dead and be the beginning of a new creation, in which death and sin should be no more.

Yes, men of God in those days did not preach the death of Christ for the improvement of man, but as the death of man before God; and the resurrection of Christ as the life, and the only life of every believer in Christ.