The Father has given us the very object He delights in for the object of our affection. The Father could not be silent, when Christ was here, — “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” The perfection of the object is the reason of the imperfectness of our apprehension of it; but that is the way God brings our affections into tune with himself. He could say at the beginning, because of His intrinsic perfectness, and at the end because of His developed and displayed perfectness, “This is my beloved Son.” Then what do we say? In weakness and poverty, yet surely each can say with unhesitating heart, I know He is perfect. We cannot reach his perfectness, but we do feel our hearts, poor and feeble as they are, responding. The Father has shown us something of his perfectness. The Father is communicating of His delight. “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased,” not in whom you ought to be well pleased (which is true too); but His way is to communicate to them of His own love to Christ. It is a wonderful thing that the Father should tell of His affection for Christ, and that when He was here amongst us, the Son of man on earth amongst sinful men.
A person need not know that he is righteous in Christ, before he can be attracted by this communication with Him. With the woman in the Pharisee’s house, it was what was revealed in Christ to her made her love much, not what she got from Him. The blessedness of what was in Christ had so attracted her and absorbed her mind that she found her way into the house, thought not of the dinner, &c. She was taken up with Him; she wept, but had nothing to say. Jesus was there. He commanded all her thoughts, her tears, her silence, her anointing of His feet—all noticed by Him, and all before she knew what He had done for her. Attracted there by what she saw in Him, she got the answer as regards peace of conscience from Himself.