It is very wonderful to contemplate the way of the grace of God to a poor sinner; the depths from which it rescues him, and the heights in which it sets him. If we look only at ourselves, even after the knowledge of this grace has filled our hearts with peace and joy, we can never understand why a holy God should take up such as we are; we can do nothing but wonder, while we praise. But the moment the eye is fixed on Christ we cease to wonder. For there in God's presence, is a Man ("the man Christ Jesus "), the object of His infinite delight, the joy of His heart. In the face of that Man the glory of God, the token of His perfect satisfaction, unceasingly shines. And that Man was my substitute upon the cross, the place of judgment and death. Well may I cease to wonder when I see Him where He is.
There are two extremes, if I may so say, to the gospel, and they are, Christ, the beloved Son, forsaken on the cross, and poor sinners accepted "in the Beloved." Extremes indeed, unknown and unintelligible to the natural man, but very wonderful and very precious to those who have, through grace, been enabled to look away from the things that are seen, to those unseen and eternal things of which that glorified Christ is now the center. And there it is that these extremes meet, in the Person of the One once forsaken as the sin-bearer, because that was the only way in which a holy God could be perfectly glorified about sin; now glorified by the very God who then hid His face from Him, and the radiancy of that glory shining in the face of the One who once cried out in the agony of being forsaken by the God whose heart He knew, and whose glory He vindicated, as none other did or could,—"obedient unto death, even the death of the cross."
As I look back for a moment at that cross of shame, with its unfathomable depths of light and love, and then look up by faith and see Him, who was on it for me, the perfect delight of the God who, for the moment, had in righteousness to forsake Him; now, too, the Head of that new creation which shall never be stained with sin, or saddened with death; I may well lose sight of myself, and cease to wonder that I am "accepted in the Beloved."
P. G.