What a contrast! What a broad line of demarcation! What an awful chasm between two men so like in other respects--so near to one another--so near to the divine Saviour! But it is just the same in all cases, everywhere, and at all times. The one simple but solemn question for each and for all is this, "What is my relation to Christ?" All hinges upon this--yes, all for time and eternity. Have I received Christ? or have I not? Am I in Him? or am I not?
The two thieves represent the two great classes into which mankind has been divided, from the days of Cain and Abel down to this very moment. God's Christ is the one great and all-deciding test in every case. All the shades of moral character; all the grades of social life; all the castes, classes, sects and parties into which the human family has been, is, or ever shall be divided--all are absorbed in this one momentous point--"_In or out of Christ._" The difference between the two thieves is just the difference between the saved and the lost; the Church and the world--the children of God and the children of God's great enemy. True it is that, in the case of the two thieves, the matter is brought to a point, so that we can see it at a glance; but it is the same in every case. The person of Christ is the one great boundary line that marks off the new creation from the old--the kingdom of God from the kingdom of Satan--the children of light from the children of darkness; and this boundary line stretches away into eternity.
Reader, what sayest thou to these things? On which side of this line art thou, at this moment, standing? Art thou, like the penitent thief, linked on to Christ by a simple faith? Or dost thou, like his impenitent companion, speak of Christ with an "if"? Say, dear friend, how is it? Do not put this question away from thee. Take it up and look it solemnly in the face. Your eternal weal or woe hangs on your answer to this question. Oh, do we beseech of thee, think of it now! Turn to Jesus now! Come now! God commands thee! Delay not! Reason not! Come just as thou art to Jesus, who hung on that centre cross for us.
P. S.--The two thieves furnish a powerful answer to the ritualist and the rationalist. In one, we see a man going straight to paradise who had never been baptized, and never received what ritualists call "the holy communion." In the other, we see a man who perishes, within arm's length of a Saviour, through a skeptical, rationalistic, infidel "_if_." Let all ritualists and rationalists ponder these _facts_.