AN EXTRACT
The Son of God was dependent, obedient, believing, hopeful, sorrowful, suffering, despised, crucified, buried; everything which the great eternal plan made necessary to Him. He emptied Himself in view of all this, but all that He did was infinitely worthy of His person.
The word at the beginning, “Let there be light: and there was light,” was not more worthy of Him, than were the prayers and supplications “with strong crying and tears,” in the days of His flesh. He could never have been allied with anything unworthy of Godhead, though found, abundantly and at all personal cost, in conditions and circumstances into which our guilt and His grace in putting it away, brought Him.
The person in the manger was the same as on the cross. It was “God manifest in the flesh.” And in the full sense of that glory, we can but speak of His humbling of Himself from the earliest to the latest moment of that wondrous journey.
Self-emptying obedience, subjection of a kind quite its own, is, therefore, to be seen in every stage and action of such a one. And what was that course of service in the esteem of Him to whom it was rendered? As the born one, the circumcised one, the baptized and anointed one, the serving, sorrowing, and crucified one, and then as the risen one, He has passed here on earth under the eye of God.
In the lowliness of the manger, in the solitudes of Nazareth, in the activities and services of all the cities and villages of Israel, in the deep, self-sacrifice of the cross, and then in the new bloom of resurrection, has “this wondrous Man” been seen and delighted in of God—perfect, untainted, recalling the divine delight in man, more than when of old He was made in God’s image, and more than annulling all the divine repentings of old, that man had been made on earth.
His person lent a glory to all His course of service and obedience, which rendered it of unutterable value.
It was His person which gave all its virtues to His death or sacrifice; and it was His person which gave its peculiar glory to all He did, in His course of self-humbling obedience. And the complacency of God in the one was as perfect as His judicial acceptance of the other. Some symbol (like that of a rent veil) is seen by faith uttering that complacency and full delight of God over every passing act in the life of Jesus. Would that we had eyes to see, and ears to hear that, as we pass on through the ways of Jesus from the manger to the tree! But so it was, whether seen or not by us. Complacency of God beyond all thought to conceive, rested on all He did and all He was, throughout His life of obedience.
These are strengthening thoughts about the ways of Jesus. These ways of service and subjection to God are to get their own peculiar character, and in our sight. Obedience has been glorified in His person, and shown in all its ineffable beauty and desirableness; so that we are not merely to say, that the complacency of God in Him was ever maintained in its fullness, but that it passes beyond all created thought.
‘The form of a servant’ was a reality, just as much as “the form of God” in Him; as truly an assumed reality, as the other was an essential, intrinsic reality. And being such, His ways were those of a servant; just as, being the Son, His glories and prerogatives were those of God. He prayed; He continued whole nights in prayer. He lived by faith, the perfect pattern of a believer, as we read of Him: “The Leader and Completer of Faith.” In sorrow He made God His refuge. In the presence of enemies, He committed Himself to Him who judged righteously. He did not His own will, perfect as that will was, but the will of Him who sent Him. In these and in all kindred ways, was “the form of a servant” found and proved and read and known to perfection. It is seen to have been a great and living reality. The life of this Servant was the life of faith from beginning to end.