This answer of Paul's is not simply his own. It is the answer of God to every man who wants to know how he can be saved. It is the answer of the whole Bible. It is the pre-eminently, distinctively Christian answer. All revelation has one great object--Jesus Christ, promised, announced, expected, seen by faith beforehand; then Jesus Christ actually come, His life told, His mission developed, Himself presented to the world as the one and only Name whereby men can be saved;--always Jesus Christ. Patriarchs and prophets, Moses and David, Christ Himself, His apostles and disciples after Him, the whole Church--all unite to say to the awakened soul: "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved."
But this answer, though not Paul's alone, is nevertheless his in such a sense that an immense weight belongs to it. What does Paul himself understand by it? We know something of his experience, and that will tell us the meaning of these words as spoken by him. He spake that which he knew, and testified that which he had seen. He felt that he could offer to the spiritual need of every man that which had so fully met his own.
Read Paul's life. Read his epistles. You see at a glance what Christ was to _him_--a Redeemer. And what to him was the very centre of Christian truth? "Christ crucified." He had been so roused as to see clearly the relation between himself and God. The true sense of sin had been awakened within him. No man had made more strenuous efforts to obtain justification by the works of the law than he had; and no man had more deeply realised his helplessness. How does he describe the struggle? "I had not known sin, but by the law.... When the commandment came, sin revived, and I died.... Sin, taking occasion by the commandment, deceived me, and by it slew me.... That which I do I allow not: for what I would, that do I not; but what I hate, that do I.... I know that in me (that is, in my flesh) there dwelleth no good thing: for to will is present with me; but how to perform that which is good I find not. For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do.... O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?"