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Hughes Oliphant Old once wrote (The Reading and Preaching of the Scriptures in the Worship of the Christian Church, Vol. 6, p. 326), “The remarkable thing about the preaching of Benjamin Morgan Palmer is the centrality it gave to the figure of Jesus. It is for this that he was above all remembered. What could commend a preacher more highly!” One of the sermons that Old highlighted to demonstrate this is titled “Love to an Unseen Christ” (note that we do not have this particular sermon available yet on Log College Press).
In this sermon, Palmer connects the Christ of the Bible with the Word of Christ (Logos).
It is this living Christ who gives the freshness and vitality to the Bible, which belongs to no other book. Because He lives in His own essential life, and lives as mediator at the Father’s right hand, there is life in all the words and syllables and lines and letters of the sacred book. As you and I walk up and down through its pages, it is as thought we were walking arm and arm with our living Lord through the walks of a garden; and as our eyes trace the words, they are not to us the cold impressions of a printing press, but they are the articulate utterances of the living Lord, who speaks through this word, as it is interpreted to us through the Holy Spirit, with His own lips from His throne above. Thus it is that the Bible becomes to us a secondary incarnation of our Lord — the secondary rainbow, the outer halo which we behold around His blessed head.
This sermon appears in Vol.. 1 of Sermons by Rev. B.M. Palmer, first published in 1875, and then republished by the late Lloyd Sprinkle of Sprinkle Publications in 2002. This is one of many sermons by a man who truly exalted the Christ of the Bible, and the Bible from which Christ is proclaimed. Though unseen, Christ is most surely the true God incarnate through which alone men may be saved (Acts 4:12), and he is the rewarder of those who diligently seek him in faith (Heb. 11:6). This theme is a constant in Palmer’s preaching, as Old explains. Take time to study the writings, and the sermons, of B.M. Palmer. We hope to add more of his works as we continue to build Log College Press.
