06.10. Appendix 4 -Son Learning Obedience by Suffering
APPENDIX.
SCRIPTURAL EXPOSITIONS AND ILLUSTRATIONS.
IV. The Son learning Obedience by Suffering.
“Though he were a Son, yet learned he obedience by the things which he suffered; and being made perfect, he became the author of eternal salvation unto all them that obey him.”— Hebrews 5:7-9. THE Lord Jesus is here set before us, first, as passing through a painful experience; secondly, as by means of that experience learning a necessary lesson; and thirdly, as becoming in this way qualified to bestow on his obedient people all saving benefits. The experience through which he passes is described not so much in its nature as in its effects. We see the meek and holy sufferer offering up “prayers and supplications.” And these are of no ordinary kind; they are accompanied by “strong crying and tears” (Hebrews 5:7). And if the question is asked,—Why is that sinless one subjected to such an afflictive discipline?—is there anything he needs to acquire at such a cost?—there is a key to the mystery. Son as he is, he has to learn obedience by the things which he suffers; and so to be made perfect. Nor is this all. The gracious end for which he is to learn that lesson and to acquire that perfection is not left to be conjectured. It is that he may become the author of eternal salvation to all them that obey him. The learner, the lesson, the result or issue,—all demand our serious and attentive study. Who and what is the learner? A son; the Son. Can he be a learner simply as the Son? Consider his original nature, dignity, and rank; his co-equality with the Father, as the Eternal Son; of the same substance, equal in power and glory; one with the Father and the Holy Ghost, in the undivided essence of the Godhead, in the mysterious fellowship and mutual relationship of the Trinity, and in all the purpose of the divine mind,—specially with reference to the ordering of the everlasting covenant. Thus essentially one with the Father in nature, and thus intimately related to the Father in person, the Eternal Son can learn no lesson of obedience. But his incarnation renders him capable of doing so;—“Being found in fashion as a man, he became obedient” (Php 2:6-8). In his state of humiliation he learned obedience. And he learned it by becoming obedient even “unto death;” and that death no ordinary one, but “the death of the cross;” death, with the sting of sin, and the curse of the broken law. He learned it, in a word, “by the things which he suffered.”
For, even when incarnate, how could he without suffering have learned it?
Imagine the Eternal Son, taking upon him the form of a servant; uniting in his own person the two distinct natures, the divine and the human; and the two distinct relationships, that of a son, co-equal with the Father, and that of a servant, under authority to the Father. Conceive thus of the Lord from heaven, placed as Adam was in a sinless and sorrowless garden, under no other obligation than that of conformity to the law, which is his own as well as the Father’s. How would he then and in these circumstances have learned obedience at all? He would have been holy, no doubt. Holiness immaculate and inviolable, stainless and serene, would have characterised his whole moral being. But it could scarcely have been holiness having in it anything of the element of obedience. But introduce now the circumstance of suffering, and of such suffering. Bring this holy one into contact with the results of sin realised on earth, and place him under the responsibilities of sin registered in heaven. Let his life be a life of suffering—of suffering, too, judicial and penal— having in it the bitter ingredients of imputed guiltiness and inflicted wrath. Then truly that God-man is in a position to learn obedience. And the more intense his sense of his filial relationship is, and the more inviolable his holiness, so much the more complete must be the lesson; so much the more thoroughly must we regard him as “though he were a son, yet learning obedience by the things which he suffered.” The meaning of this wonderful economy—this “great mystery of godliness”—“God manifest in the flesh,” and in the flesh “learning obedience by suffering,”—will be better understood when we consider the process, as it were, or the manner, of the lesson; the actual learning of obedience in the school of affliction and pain. But at the very outset, let the character which the Son bore and the position in which he stood, when he was learning obedience by the things which he suffered, be carefully noted. He bore a representative character; he stood in the position of the head and surety of redeemed men. He was the second Adam. It was as the second Adam that he learned obedience. That was the lesson which the first Adam ought to have learned, and failed to learn. And it was his failure that rendered it needful that there should be a second Adam raised up to learn it.
There is here, I think, a great truth—a broad general principle—to be announced. The learning of obedience is an indispensable condition of the creature-state itself, or of the creature-relationship to the Supreme. Any one, whoever he may be, whatever his rank and character among the intelligences of the universe—any one placed, whether by his own choice or not, in the state of a creature, or in the relation in which a creature stands to God—must necessarily learn obedience; he has it to learn. And he can learn it only by being tried.
It would seem, indeed, to be of the essence of that most marvellous and awful gift which God has associated with intelligence,—the gift or endowment of free will,—the power of spontaneous choice and action which makes intelligence to the creature so high and yet so hazardous a boon,—that obedience, even to the most rightful and reasonable authority, needs to be learned as a lesson or acquired as a habit. Hence, whoever is constituted the head or representative of mankind must learn that lesson and acquire that habit of obedience. That, therefore, was the appointed task of the first Adam as well as of the second. And it may help us to a right understanding of this whole matter if we consider the principle which I have indicated as applicable, in the first instance, to the original state of man, or to the first Adam.
I. Thus applied, the principle maybe found to cast some little light on the economy of probation in paradise, on the occasion of man’s temptation and fall.
1. Let us note what man, as originally made, had not to acquire. Personally and perfectly innocent and holy, Adam had nothing to learn in the way of pure tastes or a benign temper. All within being serenity and peace, and all without harmony and repose—had he been left untutored and untaught—his simple, guiltless, guileless, naked character would have expanded—not by any effort, but spontaneously and naturally—into something like that lovely virgin bloom which romantic dreamers have sought to paint as the perfection of uncontaminated humanity. But Adam was not merely an intellectual plant,—or, as it were, mere organised matter, growing or grown into mind. He was a living person, made expressly for personal converse with the living personal God;—made therefore in the image of his Creator;—made after that likeness in respect of high intelligence and holy affections—and above all, in respect of the wondrous faculty of free will.
2. Being so made, what has he to acquire? He has to learn obedience. Many things, I repeat, he has not to learn. All good dispositions are native to him, and not acquired. But obedience is a habit, and he has to learn it. For the learning of it he must be put to school; and to such a school as shall teach obedience alone, and nothing else; not the things he has already by nature, but the thing he needs to learn; not other good qualities or faculties, but obedience merely.
3. In this view, the barer the school the better. The less furniture it has of any sort beyond the mere materials of the single lesson to be learned, the more thoroughly is it fitted to serve the purpose of teaching it The less there is in it of what appeals to anything the scholar already possesses, the more perfectly may it teach the one thing he has to learn,—namely obedience.
4. Now the school to which man was put was the forbidden tree. It was through that tree that he was to learn obedience. All over the garden otherwise, he roamed of his own free will;—giving forth the fragrance and shining forth in the beauty of his own holy innocency of soul;—very much as the plants beneath his feet bloomed into fresh verdure and blossomed into ripe fruit,—or as the animals around; in their harmless gambols, gave ever new exhibitions of beauty, gentleness, and love. But beside the forbidden tree, he was at school; and as a scholar, he had to learn obedience. This indeed was his dignity, as well as his danger. For to be the scholar of God, is more than to be the child of nature. And fascinating as is the charm of virgin innocency—yet, had man used the office of scholar well, he would have purchased for himself a still better degree.
5. And it was the best school he could have had for learning obedience. For it was a school in which he could learn nothing else. It was not a school in which he could learn intelligence;—or exercise and quicken his faculties of thought. That benefit he might have in walking with God, and among the works of God, everywhere, over all the garden. But in the school of the forbidden tree, there was no dealing with his intelligence at all; no appeal to his reason; no attempt to stimulate or satisfy his judgment. Nor was it a school in which he could learn, if he had needed to learn, any good affection of any sort. In God, in one another, in the creatures,—our first parents had ample scope for the indulgence and expansion of all their affections. But in the school of the forbidden tree, the matter upon which the lesson turned had nothing in it with which the affections could deal at all. It was a prohibition and a threat; neither, on the one hand, justified to man’s understanding, as founded on any reason; nor, on the other, coming home in any way to his heart. For it could appeal to no natural sense of propriety, no natural perception of morality, no natural feeling of the sublime, the pathetic, or the honest and good. All the more on that account was it fitted for teaching the single lesson man had to learn, the sole and simple lesson of obedience. The very circumstance, therefore, which some have made an objection to this procedure, is in fact its highest recommendation. That the trial turned on what might seem so insignificant and arbitrary a matter as the mere eating or not eating of the fruit of a particular tree, is the very thing that fits it for being the school in which man is to learn obedience. For, in fact, what else can he learn? He cannot learn, for he is not taught, to understand; he cannot learn, for he is not asked, to approve; he can only learn to obey. And had he learned his lesson right, he would have passed in due time from that school under the discipline of God here below, to some higher home of study in the bosom of God above. He would have been raised from his precarious position of probation, which could not last for ever, to his meet reward in a state of confirmed security and holiness and joy;—having acquired the only thing originally wanting to his perfection; having learned,—not to be good and pure and holy, which he needed not to learn,—but simply to obey.
6. And this, let it be farther noted, he would have learned in a sense through suffering,—not indeed through the suffering of pain, but through the suffering of patience,—through passive submission, not voluntary action. Nor could he otherwise have learned it. All goodness in him being natural or spontaneous, its exercise, even throughout eternity, never could have taught him this lesson of mere obedience. There must be positive restriction,—the formal and express imposing of constraint,—implying, so far, something of the nature of suffering. But by what he suffers, if he will but suffer it, he may learn obedience, and so through suffering be made perfect. To the tasteful and graceful, yet perhaps the somewhat insipid charm of mere natural innocency, there may be added the sterner and riper virtue of tried and tested discipleship. The whole character thus assumes a firmer texture. The gentle influence of good affections meets and coalesces with the more robust staple of habitual obedience to authority. And he comes out of the school in which mere submission has been the only lesson,—instructed, improved, accomplished, as a finished scholar, and not merely a selfunfolding and growing child,—a man in the full development of proved and perfected manhood.
Such might have been the schooling of man, and such its issue, had he kept his first estate.
II. Returning now to the second Adam, the Lord from heaven, we may be the better able, from the illustrations that have been given, to follow him through some of the actual lessons of that school in which he learned obedience by the things which he suffered. But how shall I venture farther? What instances shall I select of this amazing schooling of such a scholar? I can do nothing more than offer a few general, and generally characteristic, observations.
1. There is this peculiarity running through the whole, that it is still as a Son, or as the Son, that he learneth obedience. There is a vivid apprehension, a blessed realising, of his filial relationship to the Father that never leaves him. The external manifestation of his original and eternal Godhead he laid aside; he made himself of no reputation; he veiled the glory of his divine sonship in a tabernacle of humanity, when he was made flesh and dwelt among us. But his sonship itself he never laid aside. The unspeakable thought, of all that from everlasting to everlasting the Father is to him and he to the Father, was never absent from his mind. “Wist ye not that I must be about my Father’s business,” is his prompt reply when called in question for sitting with the Doctors at the age of twelve. It is “his Father’s business” he must be about. So he begins, and so he goes on. Throughout all his work, and amid all his sufferings, he is about “his Father’s business.” He learneth obedience as the Son. Is he charged as a Sabbath breaker—enduring on that account the contradiction of sinners against himself?— “My Father worketh hitherto and I work” (John 5:17), is the reply with which he sustains himself in his obedience to the spirit of the law, against those who could not look beyond the letter. Is he met, when most graciously proclaiming himself as the good Shepherd, with that discouraging question of unbelief, “How long dost thou make us to doubt? If thou be the Christ, tell us plainly”?—What a sense of his filial oneness with the Father pervades his answer! It is evidently, under that trial, the stay of his own soul;—“I and my Father are one” (John 10:30). Or again, is he forced to upbraid the cities wherein his mighty works were done? See how he learns obedience, even here, as to this most dark and trying sorrow,—the seeming failure of his ministry; and how he learns it still as the Son,—“I thank thee, 0 Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes. Even so, Father; for so it seemed good in thy sight” (Matthew 11:25-26). “I thank thee, 0 Father”—“Even so, Father.” And not to multiply examples, let us come to the crisis of his sufferings. Behold him in the garden. Was it otherwise than as a Son that he learned obedience when, having appealed so affectingly to his Father’s pity, he yet uttered so meekly the words of filial resignation, “Father, thy will be done?” Or finally, as he hangs upon the cross, is it not still as a Son that he learns obedience, when he commends in filial faith, as the Son to his Father, first, the souls of them that slew him, and then his own;—“Father, forgive them for they know not what they do;”—“Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.”
2. But though he was the Son, it was a real obedience that he learned by the things which he suffered. His being the Son did not divest the obedience he had to learn of its true and proper character of obedience. Still less did it exempt him, in the learning of it, from its accompanying pain and grief. The very contrary was the effect of his intimate relation of sonship to the Father, and his intimate sense of that relation. It made such obedience as he had to learn all the more painful, and the learning of it all the more trying. For we must remember that as he never, in all his sufferings, lost his apprehension of his filial oneness with the Father, so he never, in any of them, made a stand upon it, as giving him any privilege of exemption, or any power of endurance or escape.
This, indeed, was the very temptation of the adversary—to lead him into such a use of his sonship. It was thus that he assailed him when,—immediately after the heavens had been opened at his baptism, and the Holy Ghost had descended upon him like a dove, and a voice from heaven had proclaimed, “This is my beloved Son,”—Jesus was “led up of the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil” (Matthew 4:1-10). For what is the devil’s plea? “If thou be the Son of God.” That is his plea, all through the three acts of the temptation.
(1.) Why should the Son of God suffer hunger when by the word of his power, as the Son, he has but to speak, and the very stones will become bread? (2.) Why should the Son of God come in lowly guise, disguised as a poor Nazarene, when, as the Son, he may make the summit of his own temple his glorious throne, and summoning his angels, to whom the Father giveth charge over him, cast himself from its pinnacle, as on the wings of the winds and in the chariot of the clouds, making his approach to Israel? (3.) Why, finally, must the Son of God receive his kingdom only after much tribulation, when he may, at once and immediately, as the Son, recover and reclaim it from the hands of the reigning Prince, on the terms of a single act of courtesy—surely a very simple compromise? And how did the Lord meet this threefold temptation—all throughout based upon an appeal to his sonship? Was it not by declining to take advantage of any privilege or prerogative belonging to him as the Son,—either for lightening the pain,—or for covering the shame,—or for abridging the term, of the obedience he had to learn? He is to live, like any other man, by bread, or in any way that God may be pleased to appoint. He is to depend on his Father’s promised help, only in the lowly path of duty as a servant, and not, presuming on his sonship, to tempt the Lord his God. He is not, as the Son, to act as if he were free to make his own terms with the adversary; he is to worship the Lord alone, and him only is he to serve.
Thus, from the beginning, Son though he was, he yet learned to obey. And so it was to the end. He might have stood, as he tells us, upon his sonship, and claimed deliverance from his final sufferings. What! he says to the over-zealous disciple, who in the garden drew his sword in his defence, “Thinkest thou that I cannot now pray to my Father, and he shall presently give me more than twelve legions of angels? But how then shall the Scriptures be fulfilled that thus it must be? The cup which my Father giveth me, shall I not drink it?” (Matthew 26:53-54; John 18:11). It was the very cup respecting which he had just been praying in an agony that, if it were possible, it might pass from him. As the Son, he might have prevailed to have it pass from him. But still to the last he persevered in learning obedience. “Father, thy will be done!”
3. It was obedience alone that he learned by the things which he suffered. It was all he had to learn; it was all he could learn. No lesson of holiness was to be taught him by suffering save only the lesson of obedience. There was no lust in him for pain or penance to chastise; no imperfect and unstable virtue for discipline to strengthen and mature. Suffering could not add one gracious feature to the consummate moral beauty of his soul; nor could it be meant to eradicate any root of bitterness, or to quench any hidden flame of desire. Obedience alone was “the peaceable fruit of righteousness” it could yield to him.
Hence, through all his sufferings, we find no trace whatever of suffering for mere suffering’s sake; or suffering self-imposed or self-inflicted; or suffering to please men or devils; or suffering, finally, in wanton bravery and defiance of pain. All that he suffered was by the Father’s command, and in execution and accomplishment of the Father’s will. It is undoubtedly true that his sufferings were all, from first to last, voluntary. It was spontaneously, of his own free will, that he gave himself to them all. But still it was in compliance with the Father’s will and for the doing of the Father’s work. It was obedience still, however willing. “No man,” he says, in reference to the crowning instance of his sufferings,—his laying down his life for the sheep,—“No man taketh my life from me, but I lay it down of myself; I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again.” But observe how he instantly and emphatically adds, “This commandment have I received of my Father” (John 10:18).
4. Finally, let it be noted, it was “the obedience” that he thus learned (th.n u[pakoh,n). It was the very obedience needed, not for himself, but for the “many sons” he is to “bring unto glory.” It was the obedience which the first Adam failed to learn that the second Adam learned, by the things which he suffered. The learning of it was not, indeed, by any means so easy, when the second Adam came to repair the damage that the first Adam had done. But the issue is more glorious by far. Let us mark, in this view,—first, the difference between what the first and second representatives of men had to learn;—and secondly, the difference between what might have been the position of all the race, in covenant relation to the first Adam, if he had “learned obedience” through trial—and what actually is the state of believers now, standing in covenant relation to the second Adam, who has, in fact, in a far higher sense, “learned obedience by the things which he suffered.”
First, Let us compare, or contrast, the second Adam with the first in the tasks assigned to them respectively.
Here the difference is vast. In the first instance, if it could be said that obedience was to be learned through suffering at all, it was through suffering without either sin or the sense of sin—through suffering in no way partaking of a judicial character. It was suffering, in short, allowing it to be properly suffering, neither retributive in its purpose, nor severe in its nature. For, on the one hand, as to its design, it was not punitive or penal, but preventive and probative merely,—intended not to punish but to try. And on the other hand, as to its amount, it implied no actual ordination of evil, but the mere withholding of what might seem to be good—restraint, therefore, merely, and not positive pain. Adam in Paradise would have “learned obedience,” had he simply suffered the abridgment of his absolute discretion, to the extent of abstaining from the forbidden tree.
Very different is the task of the second Adam. The scene of his discipline and trial is not the school of an unforfeited and unpolluted paradise, but the school of a condemned cell—the residence of prisoners, guilty, and awaiting execution. The obedience he has to learn, when he takes the place of such criminals, is not mere abstinence from what may condemn them;—it reaches the endurance of that actual condemnation which they have all already incurred. In the capacity in which he has to “learn obedience,” he stands as the representative, not of a race that may fall, but of a people already fallen. And he has to “learn obedience,” to the full extent of undertaking all their liabilities, and answering for all their sins.
Ah! what a burden is it that is thus laid on this Divine learner in the school of suffering!
It is not the burden merely of keeping his eye from beholding—his heart from coveting—and his hand from touching—a certain forbidden thing. It is the far, far heavier burden of bearing for us the guilt of that first sin which our natural covenant-head, the first Adam, committed,—and of all our sins that have flowed from that dismal source. What did he suffer? And how, by all that he suffered, did he learn obedience? He “bore our sins in his own body on the cross.” He was “made sin” and “made a curse” for us. He bared his bosom to the bolt of wrath that should have scathed and destroyed us for ever. And when the Father said, “Awake 0 sword against my Shepherd, against the man that is my fellow!” the answer of the Son was still the same, “Lo I come, I delight to do thy will 0 God.”
Secondly, We may now see how much more precious to us, as well as how much more costly to himself, the attainment of the second Adam is, as compared with what that of the first would have been, even if he had stood. For what comparison can there be between the position we might have occupied, as represented by a mere innocent creature, trained and tried in obedience by a slight and arbitrary test, and the position which we may now occupy, as represented by the very Son of the Highest himself;—and by him as “though he were a Son, yet having learned obedience by the things which he suffered”? In the former case, our position at the best would have been that of a servant reconciled to service; in the latter, it is that of a son taught, 0 how willingly, to obey. For let us remember, the Lord associates and identifies us with himself, in respect of what he personally is to the Father, as well as in respect of what he has learned by the things which he suffered. He makes us one with himself in his sonship, as well as in the obedience which, as the Son, he learned through suffering. In fact, it is the sonship of the second Adam, that makes his “learning of obedience through suffering” so much more precious and profitable, than the first Adam’s success, had he succeeded, would have been. Or rather, it is the combination of these two—the depth to which he descends as suffering for us in obedience to the Father, and the height to which he raises us as one with him in his sonship—that completes his fitness for being our Saviour. It is thus that “being made perfect, he is the author of eternal Salvation unto all them that obey him.” For that is the practical issue of the wondrous education of the Son of God in the school of suffering.
1. He is thus “made perfect.” The expression is remarkable. He himself uses it in anticipation of his sufferings and their glorious issue (Luke 13:31-32). The Pharisees said “Depart hence, for Herod will kill thee.” No! he replies, I am not to be thus hurried. For all Herod’s bloody purpose, I have some days yet for doing good on the earth before I “shall be perfected.” When the time comes, and not before, I shall be perfected: perfected by the very measure Herod proposes when he fain would kill me. To the same effect, using the same word, the Apostle speaks, “It became him, for whom are all things, and by whom are all things, in bringing many sons unto glory, to make the Captain of their salvation perfect through sufferings” (Hebrews 2:10). In several different ways, the sufferings of the Lord may be regarded as constituting, or contributing to constitute, his perfection or completeness. For one thing, they fit him for having compassion on his people and sympathising with them. They have the same conflict which he had; the same temptations; the same solicitations and assaults of the adversary. And in all of these they have this double consolation and encouragement. On the one hand, they may remember that Jesus was really tempted like as they are,—that he did not insist or presume upon his power and prerogative as the Son, but was simply like them a servant and a sufferer in the hands of his Father. On the other hand, they may be assured that whatever support the unbroken sense of his Sonship afforded to him, is afforded also to them; inasmuch as they also, in and with him, are sons. For, as he makes himself one with them in their sufferings, so he makes them one with himself in his sonship. But the perfection reached through suffering has reference chiefly, beyond all doubt, to the Lord’s official character and ministry as the great “high-priest of our profession,”—the representative of his people. In that character, he occupies the place of the first Adam in Paradise. And on behalf of those for whom he stands, he has to reach that platform of confirmed acceptance to which Adam would have been raised, when his temporary probation was over, had he “learned obedience” by the thing wherein he was tried. Our great high-priest, standing in this representative position, must be proved as Adam was proved, and perfected as Adam would have been perfected; perfected by passing from a condition of trial to one of finished and complete victory. This was in large measure “the joy that was set before him,” for which “he endured the cross, despising the shame” (Hebrews 12:2). And this joy was perfected, when “God exalted him to be a Prince and a Saviour, for to give repentance to Israel, and forgiveness of sins” (Acts 5:31).
2. Being thus “made perfect, he became the author of eternal salvation.” For now, on the footing of his obedience, “learned by the things which he suffered,”—and rewarded as well as attested by his resurrection to glory,—he is in a condition to bestow, not a contingent or conditional, but a complete salvation; not the temporary enjoyment of an opportunity of salvation, but eternal salvation itself.
How grievously do they dishonour him,—how sadly do they detract from the perfection of his priestly character and work,—who conceive of him as merely giving men another chance, as it were, for trying, upon easier terms than before, to win for themselves eternal life. Is this all the effect of his interposition on our behalf?—to put us again upon probation?—that we may try to succeed where our first father failed? No. Let us be sure that the Son, in virtue of that obedience which he “learned through suffering,” and the “perfection” to which he thus attained, is in a position to be to us at once and immediately “the author of eternal salvation.” He is complete for us, and we are complete in him. We are “of God in him,” and he “is of God made unto us wisdom, and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption” (1 Corinthians 1:30).
3. For fully finishing in us what he has fully obtained for us, he requires nothing more than what is reasonable, when he requires the same mind that was in himself. He is the author of eternal salvation to “all them that obey him.” For this obedience on our part is really nothing else than sympathy with Jesus in his obedience.
Thus viewed, it is of a twofold kind. We are to obey him by submitting to him in the things which he suffered for us. And we are to obey him by submitting to him in the things which he would have us to suffer with him. In the first place, we obey him when we submit ourselves to his righteousness, or to himself as “the righteousness of God;” when, born of his Spirit and believing his gospel, we enter into his perfection as our great representative, High Priest and surety, and into the completeness of that salvation of which he is become the author. Our first obedience to the Son is to receive the fruit of his obedience. We first honour him by believing in him; renouncing for ever the vain conceit of our being saved by any present or prospective or possible obedience of our own; not seeking to perfect our own peace with God, but yielding ourselves up to him who is our peace, already perfected. Let us receive him, as the author to us personally of “eternal salvation.” Let us be sure that the obedience he learned as the Son is infinitely perfect,—as the sufferings by which as the Son he learned it are infinitely precious. There is a perfection of merit in the obedience to justify us wholly,—as there is a perfection of efficacy in the sufferings to atone for all our sins. Let us not be disobedient to him when he asks us to submit to him, in his thus doing all and bearing all that, in the view of his Father’s righteous government and law, was needful for our eternal salvation.
Then, let us submit to him,—as in what he obediently suffered for us,—so in what he calls us obediently to suffer with him. Let us bear this reproach; take his yoke upon us; take up his cross; fill up the measure of his sufferings. And let us do all this in the spirit of simple obedience: not as being profitable to him, or rendering any favour or service that can avail him, or doing any great thing, or exercising any great virtue; but simply as, in and with him, “learning obedience through endurance and suffering.” For indeed it is a great thing to be thus going about every duty, enduring every sorrow, submitting to every privation, simply as like-minded with him,—obedient to him as he was to the Father. Truly, thus suffering with him, we may expect to be glorified together; glorified in the full joy and liberty of the day of the manifestation of the sons of God. THE END.
Printed by R. CLARK, Edinburgh.