CHAPTER XII: Mary my love!! I started Here, I think you can still proof it, thanks
Mary my love!! I started Here, I think you can still proof it, thanks alot!
Death of Eternal Son continued--Acts, 3iii. 15: Ye "killed the Prince of life." I Corinthians, 2ii. 8: They "crucified the Lord of glory." John, 10x. 14, 15: "I am the good shepherd." "I lay down my life for the sheep"--The Lamb of the fifth chapter of Revelation--John, 3iii. 16, 17; i " "For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son." "For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world." Romans, 8viii. 32: "He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all"--Father's"s love in death of Christ--Son's"s love--Self-denial of eternal Son.
THERE -is a passage in Acts, and another in Corinthians, which are kindred passages with those upon which we have been commenting in the preceding chapters. The passage in Acts stands thus: ","But ye denied the Holy One, and the Just, and desired a murderer to be granted unto you; and killed the Prince of life."---Acts, 3iii. 14, 15. The passage in Corinthians stands thus: "Which none of the princes of this world knew; for had they known it, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory."---l Corinthians, 2ii. 8.
Who was the "Prince of life," the "Lord of glory," of these, passages? Doubtless it was -not the mere humanity of. him of Nazareth. Beyond peradventure, he whom these passages denominated the "Prince of life," the " Lord of glory," was the second person of the Trinity, arrayed in his vestment of flesh. We have, then, these additional declarations of the Holy Ghost, that the second person of the Trinity, thus arrayed, was crucified and killed. These declarations must have been accomplished in all the plenitude of their awful truth. Would they have been accomplished by the crucifixion and death of the mere humanity of the Virgin's"s child? A man is not perforated by the perforation of his vestment. That the ethereal essence of the second person of the Trinity was distorted by the wood, and lacerated by the irons of the cross, no one will be wild enough to intimate; but that his ethereal essence endured viewless sufferings denominated in Scripture death, inflicted by the invisible sword of the Lord of Hosts, of which the visible dissolution of his terrestrial being on Calvary was but the representative, we cannot doubt, with the declarations of the Holy Ghost to that effect sounding in our ears.
The Sacred Three have, "at sundry times and in divers manners," declared, without restriction or limitation, that their second glorious person, clothed in flesh, suffered and died for the salvation of the world. Man, for whose sake this miracle of grace was wrought, yields not his credence to these stupendous declarations but with qualifications and exceptions, the creatures of his own reasoning pride, lowering their sublime truths, as it were, from heaven down to earth. What is the cause of this strange phenomenon ? It is caused by the sin of unbelief, that great moral ailment of our natures. This ailment lost us paradise. It withstood the personal miracles of the Son of God. That celestial Physician could cure, by the word of his power or the touch of his hand, the physical maladies of man; but to mitigate this moral malady, he was obliged to lay down his most precious life. And even in the soul renovated by his blood, the final victory of faith over the remnant of unbelief is its last triumph. The sin of skepticism is not peculiar to the scoffing infidel; it is the evil spirit which haunts the path even of the pious Christian. It often obtrudes its "miscreated front" into the closet, whither he has retired to commune with his Redeemer; it sometimes pursues him to the very altar of his God. Regenerated man, while in this wilderness of temptation, is, alas! but a believer in part. The time, however, is at hand when his feeble, trembling, hesitating faith will be swallowed up in glorious certainty.
The following passage is specially relevant to the point in issue: "I am the good shepherd, and know my sheep, and am known of mine."-- John, 10x. 14, "As the Father knoweth me, even so know I the Father: and I lay down my life for the sheep."--" John, 10x. 15. The last verse will be considered first. The speaker, in this pPassage, was Christ. When he said, "As the Father knoweth me, even so know I the Father," he must, beyond doubt, have spoken of himself in, his united natures, and with special reference to his Godhead. It was only the omniscient Son who could know the Father, even as the Father knew him. "Canst thou by searching find out God? Canst thou find out the Almighty unto perfection? It is as high as heaven; what canst thou do? deeper than hell; what canst thou know?"--Job, 11xi. 7, 8. These sublime interrogatories were propounded to demonstrate to feeble man his utter incapacity to explore and comprehend the mysterious and awful elements of the unsearchable God. The manhood of Christ had no greater capacity, physical or intellectual, than an ordinary man ; it had no infinitude of comprehension; it admitted its want of prescience. The mighty speaker, then, who thus claimed community of omniscience with the Father, must have been the fellow of the Father's"s everlasting reign.
"And I lay down my life for the sheep." The speaker had two lives, the human and the divine ; the drop and the ocean of vitality; distinct, yet united. If his meaning was that he would lay down the human drop, leaving the divine ocean untouched, then must he have made a sudden, abrupt, and strange transition, in one brief sentence, from the altitude of his united natures, where the sentence began, down to his mere exclusive humanity. There is nothing on the face of the passage to intimate that such sudden descent was intended. Such abrupt transition is not required or indicated by anything in the context. In a verse shortly succeeding, in the same chapter, are found the memorable words, "I and my Father are one." ---John, 10x. 30. The terms used by Christ, in the passage under review, were unlimited and illimitable. They import the laying down of both his lives. They are not satisfied with anything of the totality. To compress them within a small fractional part of that stupendous whole, is to straiten, and distort, and maim the terms. Why will reasoning man gratuitously crucify the living, palpable, speaking words of the crucified God? Because, as the needle is true to the pole, so does unbending man implicitly follow the guidance of that hypothesis which he has adopted for his polar star, "God is impassible." Yet has it been shown that this assumed polar star, though it has hung for centuries on the skirts of the horizon, is but an exhalation of the earth.
He who laid down his "life for the sheep" designated himself by the name of the good shepherd. "I am the good shepherd." To whom was this endearing name applied? Not to the human son of Mary, but to the "Lord of glory." The human son of the Virgin was but the mansion of the good shepherd--the temple consecrated by the indwelling God. As, then, a man dieth not because his mansion is consumed ; as the God is not destroyed. by the destruction of the temple, so the life of the good shepherd would not have been laid down by the dissolution of his tabernacle of clay, according to the mighty meaning of the august speaker. His declarations, which so astonished the heavens, could have been satisfied only by laying down the divine life of the second person of the Trinity, in the scriptural import of the stupendous terms, as well as the life of the associated man.
Christ did not leave the meaning of the term "life" as applicable to himself, to be inferred by reasoning process. Five chapters before that upon which we are commenting, he explicitly fixed its signification by his own paramount authority. "For as the Father hath life in himself, so hath he given to the Son to have life in himself."-- John, 5v. 26. The Father's"s own vitality was imparted to the Son. His was the life which came down from heaven. It was the life that had breathed vitality into created intelligences. When Christ, therefore, announced the laying down his life, he meant not merely the human drop. He included the divine ocean of being.
According to Christ's"s own explication of the term life, when applied to himself, the life of the incarnate Son was as the life of the Father. This authoritative explication of the term, when so applied, became a governing precedent for all future cases. Christ, then, in using the same term, with the same application to himself, five chapters afterward, intended, doubtless, to abide by his own explication and precedent. Hence we justly infer, that when he declared, "and I lay down my life for the sheep," he meant that the life which he was about to lay down was as the life of the infinite Father. It was the life, the whole united life of the incarnate God. The advocates of the prevalent theory cannot escape this conclusion, unless they are prepared to allege that the Son of God applied the term life to himself in one sense in the fifth chapter of John, and in a totally different sense in the tenth chapter of the same evangelist. But such discrepancy of meaning, in the use of a term solemnly defined by himself, and declarative of his own vitality, could scarcely have proceeded from the lips of the incarnate Word; at least, such discrepancy is not to be inferred without some scriptural intimation of its existence. No such intimation is to be found in the Volume of Inspiration.
The incarnate God laid down his ethereal life, not, indeed, by its cessation even for a moment, but by sustaining, in his divine essence, the expiatory agonies substituted for the spiritual or second death that awaited the redeemed. Thile expiatory agonies assumed, therefore, the awful name of the penalty for which they were substituted. Inspiration aptly termed those sufferings death. The appellation commends itself to the children of men by its manifest appropriateness.
In the passage cconcerning the coming immolation of the Shepherd God, the pronouns "I" and "my" hold conspicuous places. The personal pronoun, "I" is thrice repeated to denote the second person of the Trinity, clothed in flesh. "I am the good shepherd." "As the Father knoweth me, even so know I the Father, and I lay down My life for the sheep." Mark well the mighty terms, "my life." Thus applied, the little pronoun "my" acquired a meaning high as heaven and vast as the universe. It gave such exaltation to its adjunct noun as to grasp the life which "inhabiteth eternity." " No person is wont to employ the name of a whole to denote one of its minute parts. Should historian or geographer apply the peculiar name of a continent to designate its smallest kingdom, he would speak in language unintelligible and misleading. The terms "my life," according to their obvious and plain import, intended the whole united life of the divine speaker. If he meant merely the little spark of his mortal vitality, he must, in this case, have departed from that simplicity and perspicuity which formed so distinguishing a characteristic of him who spake as never man spake. To narrow down the terms to the mere mortal life of Mary's"s son would be imparting to this stupendous passage--we speak it witlh reverence--an illusory meaning. It would make the passage, though infinite in seeming and profession, finite only in its real purpose; finite only in its fulfilment.
The Lamb of the fifth chapter of Revelation was certainly Christ. That Lamb had been slain. That glorious Lamb of God had two natures, the human and the divine. And had he, indeed, been slain but in one of them, and that, too, his inferior nature? The scene of this sublime