MANY witnesses we have to the delight which God takes in the exercise of grace, in the work of Christ for sinners, in the provision He Himself has made for the bringing home of His banished ones. The whole of Luke 15 declares this; and this delight of God in the saving of poor sinners gets another fine reflection in the experience of Christ in John 4:31, 3231In the mean while his disciples prayed him, saying, Master, eat. 32But he said unto them, I have meat to eat that ye know not of. (John 4:31‑32).
A sinner had just been converted, and her spirit filled with liberty and joy.
The disciples, who had left their Master to buy some food, rejoin Him just at the moment, and spread the table for Him. But He tells them that He needs it not. He has been already at a feast; though wearied, hungry, and athirst, He has been rested and refreshed.
But how? Since they had left Him He had been toiling diligently, and had only seen water without tasting it. All this might well have made Him more weary and more athirst. But still He was refreshed, and needed not the table which they had spread for Him. A sinner had been saved and made happy: this had given Him a feast in a desert. The very style in which He answers the disciples, its fervor and energy, bespeak the joy of that moment to Him, and what His soul had known.
What an expression of the divine delight in the grace that saves a sinner is this! The sinner had known her joy―but it was not to be compared with the joy the Saviour had known. To speak in Levitical language, the fat was still the food of the altar. In her new-found joy the woman forgets her waterpot; in His, Jesus forgets His thirst. Sacred, happy witness of a precious secret of the divine bosom.
And joy, let me add, begets generosity and largeness of heart. When we are happy we are open-handed. Joy is the parent of great and noble sentiments of soul. And thus is it also with Christ here; not that, but at all times, as I need not say, every sentiment of His soul was infinitely perfect. But these verses give us an expression of what I observed, that joy begets generosity. The mind of Christ, having conceived this joy which we have noticed, is borne onward in a strain of beautiful generosity, “One soweth and another reapeth,” He says to the wondering disciples. It was the mind of David after the capture of Ziklag. David was then so full of joy that he decreed, “As his part is that goeth down to the battle, so shall his be that tarrieth by the stuff.” The joy of the spoil of the Amalekites so enlarged the heart of David, that there came forth this great ordinance, and he made it a statute in Israel (1 Sam. 30). And so, to speak as a man, the mind of the Son of God in this passage.
What, I ask, does all this tell us poor sinners, but the deep interest which our salvation has in the bosom of God? The Son came forth from that bosom to reveal it to us; and, in the words of a hymn, we say,
“Tis His great delight to bless us.
That song we may sing, tuning our instruments for such music, at this fine and fervent scripture.