As to the argument which demands how Christ could sympathize without personal consciousness of fallen humanity, it is worthless otherwise, besides evincing the judicial falseness and profound iniquity of the system. For if Jesus must have Adam’s fallen nature to sympathize with mine, alas! I have also yielded to evil; am I then, on this view, to have or to lack sympathy therein? Certainly it is not because the poor sinner, however guilty, does not need pity. If the argument prove anything, it goes much too far; logically, it requires actual failure (and to what amount?) in the Mediator in order fully to sympathize with us!
The sympathy of Jesus is in Scripture based on wholly different grounds. I admit that His divine glory alone suffices not, but it does give luster and infinite worth to His most real suffering as Man tried, and in every way conceivable, sin excepted. He must have the nature of those whose cause He undertakes, though not in the same fallen state; He must have proved the anguish and bitterness of temptation here below, and so He did incomparably more than any other. In holy humanity He could thus feel sympathy with our infirmities, having felt the wiles and power and malice of the enemy, and so much more than we do, as His dignity and holiness and love transcended ours. Never having known sin (which, if known, narrows and blunts the heart), but having suffered infinitely, His affections are large and free to go out to us, in our sore distresses as saints, who have not only the same outward enemy to try us, but also a treacherous nature within.
The truth is that the believer, resting by faith on redemption as a work already and perfectly accomplished for him, does not want Christ to sympathize with his indwelling sin, any more than with his sins; he has started with the divine assurance that Christ died for both. And if Christ be risen, so is the believer with Him, and is this nothing, or is it not everything as a groundwork of comfort from above against fallen nature and its bad fruits? Christ bore our sins in His own body on the tree; in Him crucified, sin, the flesh, is already condemned. Am I not to believe it all and accept humbly, thankfully, the peace of a triumphant suffering so wholly and unmistakably of God’s grace to me?
Not that there is not a wise and holy dealing of God with the believer who has been unwatchful and failed. But it is neither the Arminian plan that denies the permanent relationship of the child of God and sets him to begin anew with another and another recourse to the blood of atonement, as if we were Jews and not Christians, nor is it the Calvinist idea, that finds a resource in Christ’s holy eating, drinking, sleeping, praying and worshipping for our respective failures in these things, and so in all else. The principle of both errors seems to lie in Simon Peter’s hasty words in John 13:89, as the truth which corrects them both shines out of our Lord’s reply in verse 10. “He that is washed (leloumevno", bathed) needeth not save to wash (nivyasqai) his feet.” The bustling earnestness of the one scheme fails to give its true value to the bathing of the person; the hard, cold fatalism of the other sees not the need of the continual cleansing of the feet, because the person is once bathed all over. Christianity maintains both, neither weakening the fundamental and eternal character of the new birth nor denying the all-importance of continual self-judgment and confession. The bathing is never repeated; the feet-washing is ever needed here below, if we pretend to communion with Christ. The Holy Spirit carries on the work here in answer to the intercession of Christ above and cleanses with the washing of water by the Word (Eph. 5:2626That he might sanctify and cleanse it with the washing of water by the word, (Ephesians 5:26)) him who is already washed from his sins in the blood of Christ, already born of water and the Spirit.
And such is the doctrine of the typical red heifer in Numbers 19. On the basis of the complete sevenfold sprinkling of her blood before the tabernacle of the congregation, the rest of the sacrifice was duly reduced to ashes as a standing purification for sin. Then, if an Israelite were defiled, the remedy was, not a renewal of the blood-sprinkling, but the sprinkling of the unclean with the water of separation (that is, running water mingled with some of the ashes of the burnt heifer). The defiled soul is made to feel by the Spirit and Word of God what his trifling with sin cost Christ, the Son of God, who bore the unsparing judgment of it all before God when made sin for him. Such is the doctrine of Scripture, old and new; such is the holy way of God in actual experience.
But the sympathy of Christ with sin (or even with sinners as such) would be an opiate for sin, to us most perilous, to Him most dishonoring. Not so: His sympathy is with the regenerate in their great weakness, who hate sin, who have to endure the contradiction of sinners, and who are opposed by Satan acting on the flesh and in the world. This therefore is the needed and the spiritual consolation: “We have not a high priest which cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities; but was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin.” It is not merely that He did not sin when tempted, but that no principle of inbred evil, which we know so distressingly, was in Him. So, at the close of His career, the prince of this world came once more, but it was the same tale of perfectness, early or late: He hath “nothing in Me” (John 14:3030Hereafter I will not talk much with you: for the prince of this world cometh, and hath nothing in me. (John 14:30)).
Hebrews 5 may illustrate a little more fully the readiness with which man falls into the snare of despising Christ: “For every high priest taken from among men is ordained for men in things pertaining to God, that he may offer both gifts and sacrifices for sins: who can have compassion on the ignorant, and on them that are out of the way; for that he himself also is compassed with infirmity” (vss. 12). This is frequently taken as a description of Christ; whereas it is the contrast of an ordinary human high priest with Him. Ignorant and erring men have a priest like themselves — one compassed with infirmity. Such is not Jesus, the Son of God, who has no need on account of this infirmity, “as for the people, so also for himself, to offer for sins.” Doubtless, an analogy with Aaron follows, in that “Christ glorified not Himself to be made a high priest, but was called of God.” In fact, He waited till He ascended and entered on His priesthood on high. For perfection was not by the Levitical priesthood: The law perfected nothing (ch. 7:11,19). Clearly then the passage contrasts Aaron and his sons in this with Christ. They were infirm men. For us Jesus, the Son of God, is the priest in the true tabernacle, which the Lord pitched and not man. This did not hinder His knowing sorrow as none ever knew, but always the sorrow of righteousness and love: “Who in the days of His flesh, when He had offered up prayers and supplications with strong crying and tears unto Him that was able to save Him from death, and was heard in that He feared; though He being Son, [yet] learned He obedience by the things which He suffered” (vss. 78). He had to learn obedience because it was a strange thing to Him who knew only to command. And being perfected (that is, having fully done the work necessary to secure eternal salvation, not for Himself but for others, and being accordingly perfected on high), “He became the author of eternal salvation unto all them that obey Him; called of [or, addressed by] God a high priest after the order of Melchisedec” (vss. 9-10).