The
Gospel of the Incarnation
Two
Sermons By Benjamin
B. Warfield
Preached to the students of
Princeton Seminary
1. The End of the Incarnation (John
6:38,39)
2. The Example of the Incarnation (Php. 2:5–8)
1. The End of the Incarnation (John 6:38,39)
For I
am come down from heaven, not to do mine own will, but the will of Him
that sent me; and this is the will of Him that sent me, that of all
that He hath given me, I should lose nothing, but should raise it up at
the last day.--John 6:38,39
In the miracle of the feeding of the five thousand our Lord presented
Himself symbolically to man as the food of the soul. For, as Augustine
reminds us, though the miracles wrought by our Lord are divine works,
intended primarily to raise the mind from visible things to their
invisible author, yet their message is not exhausted by this. They are
to be interrogated also as to what they tell us about Christ, and they
will be found to have a tongue of their own if we have skill to
understand it. “For,” he adds, “since Christ is Himself the Word of
God, even a deed of the Word is a word to us.” One of His miracles is
accordingly not to be treated as a mere picture, which we may be
satisfied to look upon and praise; but rather as a writing, which we
are not content to praise though we delight in its beauty, but find no
satisfaction until we have read and understood it. We may possibly
consider somewhat fanciful Augustine’s detailed decipherment of the
signs in which this miracle is written. He discovers in it a complete
parable of the salvation of man and of men. But we can scarcely refuse,
as we read it in the pregnant record of John, to say in Pauline phrase,
“these things contain an allegory.”
As such, indeed, John presents it. This is the meaning of his care to
tell us, as he introduces his recital, that “the passover was at hand”:
not a mere chronological note, we may be sure; nor yet merely an
explanation of the presence of the multitude, gathered for the
pilgrimage to Jerusalem; but a premonition of what is to come,--John’s
account of the occasion and meaning of the miracle, which itself was
the occasion of the great discourse on the bread of life. Christ, the
true passover, chose the passover time, when men’s minds were upon the
type, to present the anti-type to them in symbol and open speech. It
was therefore also that He tested His disciples with searching
questions, designed to bring them to the discovery of whether they yet
knew Him; and that He taxed the people that “signs” were wasted upon
them (verse 26), and that while they were demanding a sign that they
might see and believe (verse 30), the sign had been given them, and
though they had seen, they did not believe (verse 36). It was therefore
above all, that Christ followed up the miracle with the wonderful
discourse in which He explains the sign, and declares Himself openly to
be “the bread of God that cometh down from heaven and giveth life to
the world.” This is the tremendous truth which miracle and discourse
united to proclaim to the multitudes gathered on the shores of
Gennesaret at that passover season; but which, despite type and sign
and teaching--each a manifest word from God,--they could neither
receive nor understand. And this is the blessed truth which our
text,--taken from the center of the discourse and constituting, indeed,
its kernel,--presents to our apprehension and belief anew today. May
the Spirit of truth, who searches all
things, even the deep things of God, illuminate our minds and prepare
our hearts, that we may understand and believe.
I. Let us begin by observing the
testimony borne by our Lord and Master
here to His heavenly original and descent: “I am come down from
heaven,” He says. And the truth here declared is the foundation of the
entire discourse: the whole gist of which is to represent Jesus as the
“bread out of heaven,” “the true bread out of heaven,” “the bread of
God that cometh down out of heaven,” which the Father hath given for
the life of the world. I need not remind you how this representation
pervades John’s Gospel,--from the testimony of the Baptist (3:31), that
He who was to supplant him “cometh from above,” and is therefore “above
all,” to Jesus’ own triumphant declaration at the close of His life,
that, His work being finished, He is ready to return to the Father who
sent Him, and to the glory that He had with Him before the world was
(17:5, 11). Our present asseveration is but a single instance of the
constant self-testimony of the Son of Man to His heavenly original and
descent.
The older Unitarianism was prodigal of miracle. It was not the
supernatural, but the mysteries of the Holy Trinity and the God-man
that were its scandal. When brought face to face with such passages as
these, it was wont, therefore, to explain that Jesus, born miraculously
of His virgin mother, but a mere man, was taken up to heaven by the
divine power to learn the things of God; whence He again descended to
bring divine teaching to men. To the newer Unitarianism, on the other
hand, it is precisely the supernatural which is the offence. Its
philosophical forms might hospitably receive such mysteries as the
Trinity and the God-man, if only they may be permitted to run freely
into their moulds. But divine interventions of any kind, and most of
all the descent of a personal God from heaven to earth, to be incased
in flesh and to herd for a season among men, it cannot allow. It,
therefore, attacks our passages with a theory of ideal, not real,
preexistence, and teaches that Jesus means only that, in the thought
and intention of God, His advent into the world had long been provided
for, and that, in that sense, He was with God and came forth from God.
How weak, how inconceivable, all such expedients are before the majesty
of Christ’s self-witness: “I am come down from heaven.” And when we
turn over the pages of this Gospel,--the leading idea of which it has
been said, inadequately indeed, but so far truly, is the Divine glory
of Christ in the incarnation,--and observe our Lord’s constant witness
in the discourses recorded in it, not merely to His descent from the
Father, but to His essential equality and oneness with God, to His
eternal preexistence with Him, and to His prospective return to His
primal glory with the Father, after His task on earth is
accomplished,--how our spirits bow in worship before that God
only-begotten who is in the bosom of the Father, who became flesh and
tabernacled among us for a season full of grace and truth, and
“declared” to us by His very existence among us that God, not only whom
He came forth from, but whom He is.
II. We should not fail to observe,
however, that the incarnation is not
spoken of in our text, as an end in itself, but rather as a means to an
end. The object of our Lord here is not to present the bare fact
of His having come down
from heaven to the wonder of men, but to expound the purpose of His
coming down from heaven. “I am come down from heaven,” He declares, “in
order that I may do the will of Him that sent me.” You will scarcely
need to be reminded that this, too, is the representation, not of our
text only, but of the whole body of relevant deliverances recorded by
John from the mouth of the Master, and indeed of the entire Gospel
itself. Everywhere and always, it is not the coming down from heaven
itself, but the purpose of the coming, that receives the emphasis. And
this is why it is inadequate to say that the leading idea of John’s
Gospel is the glory of Christ in the incarnation. Its leading idea is,
rather, the sufficient end of the incarnation, or, in other words, its
leading purpose is to present what we may call a satisfactory
philosophy of the incarnation.
And this is the precise amount of truth that lies behind the assertion
so freely made by those who are stumbled by the heights of John’s
theology, that his Gospel is not a simple narrative of fact, but an
ideological treatise,--which, in their view, is equivalent to saying
that it does not give us fact but fancy, and is to be looked upon not
as a sober history but as a metaphysical essay. But does history cease
to be history when it passes beyond the mere tabulation of events, and
essays to marshal them according to their relations and under the
categories of cause and effect?--when it ceases to be a mere chronicle,
in a word, and becomes what we have learned to call philosophical
history? And is it to be made a reproach to a writer of history that he
has sought not merely to collect, but also to understand his facts; and
to record them in such a way as to bring out
their internal nature as well as their external form?
Bishop Alexander, in his delightful little book on The Leading
Ideas of
the Gospels, places the matter relatively to John’s Gospel in a
very
clear light. “A great life,” he reminds us, “cannot be rendered by a
simple agglomeration of facts.” “A great life,--a life whose words and
works influence mankind profoundly,--is not sufficiently told by merely
relating its facts and dates. What an enigma, for instance, is the life
of Napoleon! How many of his biographies are mere masks, concealing
those bronze features! We cannot understand any great and complicated
life, good or evil, by merely recording the isolated events along which
it moved. It is an organic whole, and must be reconstructed as such. .
. . This, then, is the great Leading Idea of St. John’s Gospel. Given
the facts of Christ’s life, how shall we bind them into unity, and read
them as a whole? What theory of His Person and Nature will give us a
logical and consistent view? . . . What Christ did and said becomes
explicable only by knowing what Christ is. . . . Some who have not lost
all reverence for Christianity speak as if St. John’s prologue added a
difficulty for faith; as if St. Matthew or St. Luke on the incarnation
were comparatively easy to receive. Is it so for those who think? Place
side by side these statements. On the one side--‘when as His Mother
Mary was espoused to Joseph, before they came together she was found
with child of the Holy Ghost.’ On the other side, the four oracular
propositions--‘in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with
God, and the Word was God. And the Word was made flesh.’ Which is
easier to receive? . . . In St. John the
fact of the Incarnation is lifted up and flooded with the light of a
divine idea. If in the Unity of the Divine existence there be a Trinity
of Persons; if the Second Person of that Trinity is to assume the
reality of flesh, and the likeness of sinful flesh, we can in some
measure see why He needed the tabernacle of a body, framed and moulded
by the Eternal Spirit, to be His fitting habitation. The mystery of a
Virgin Mother is the correlative of the mystery of the Word made
flesh.”
Surely this is most admirably said. To be made quite perfect, it needs
only the removal of the emphasis from the nature of Christ to the work
of Christ. “If the Second Person of that Trinity is to assume the
reality of flesh, and the likeness of sinful flesh.” . . . Aye, if. . .
. Dr. Alexander leaves this “if” hanging in the air. But not so John.
To give an adequate account of it is just the object and chief end of
his Gospel. We need to amend the postulation of the problem, therefore,
so far as not only to insert, but to emphasize this element. “Given the
facts of Christ’s life, how shall we bind them together into unity, and
read them as a whole? What theory of His Person and Nature, and Purpose
and Work, will give us a logical and consistent view?” This is the
problem that John’s Gospel answers. And in answering it, it gives us a
philosophy of the incarnation, and thus renders not only the
incarnation itself, but all that Incarnated Life, not only credible but
natural, and not only natural, may we not even say? but almost
inevitable--impossible to be otherwise. And thus John fulfills the end
of his
writing: “These are written, that ye may believe that Jesus is the
Christ, the Son of God; and that believing ye may have life in His
name.”
III. What, then, is the account of the
incarnation which this Gospel
thus commends to us as its philosophy? We note at once that in
our text
our Lord states it, in the first instance, relatively not to man, but
to God. The reason of the incarnation, rendering it credible, natural,
inevitable, is traced back into the councils of the Godhead. “I am come
down from heaven, not to do my own will, but the will of Him that sent
me.”
The purpose of the incarnation is therefore primarily to please God the
Father, and to perform His will. We cannot avoid the implication that
the incarnated one comes, therefore, in a subordinate capacity. He came
down from heaven not to do His own will, but the will of Him that sent
Him. He was sent. He was given a commission, a work, to do. How this
conception is repeated over and over again in the discourses recorded
by John! Even to John the Baptist He is the “sent of God” (John 3:34).
When Nicodemus approached Him as a teacher come from God, He explained
that He was not come primarily as a teacher, but as one sent by God
(3:17) to do a work. And this is the burden of the great discourses at
the pool of Bethesda (5:23, 36), at the feast of Tabernacles (7:16, 18,
28, 29), on the Light of the World (8:16, 18, 29, 42), and as well of
the closing discourses at the last passover (16:5, 17:3, 8, 18, 23). In
all alike Jesus is the sent of God, come not of Himself (7:28, 8:42) to
seek His own will, but to do the will of Him that sent Him (5:30); and
only when He had “accomplished the work given
Him to do” (17:4) to return to the Father who sent Him (17:5).
Now this subordinate relation in which Jesus thus pervasively
represents Himself to have stood to the Father, so as to have been sent
by Him, must be a matter either of nature or of arrangement. It must be
either essential or economic. It must find its account and origin
either in the necessity of nature or else in the provisions of a plan.
But side by side with this perfectly pervasive proclamation of His
subordination to the Father, in the whole matter of the incarnation
itself, and the purpose or “will” that lies behind that incarnation and
gives it its justification and its philosophical account, there runs an
equally pervasive assertion by Jesus Himself and by His historian as
well, of His essential equality and oneness with God. He was not only
in the beginning with God: He was God. He is the only-begotten God, who
is in the bosom of the Father. To have seen Him is to have seen the
Father also. He draws and receives from Thomas, the worshipping cry,
“My Lord and my God.” He declares to the Jews, “I and the Father are
One.” It seems to be clear, therefore, that the subordination in which
the Father is recognized as greater than He, prescribing a “will” for
Him to come into the world to perform, is economic, not essential; a
matter of arrangement, not of necessity of nature.
By such a representation we are, of course, carried at once back into
the darkness, or, what is equally blinding, into the blaze of mystery.
It may be thought that it is enough to be asked to believe in the
mysteries of the God-man and of the Trinity,--that within the unity of
the Godhead there exists such a distinction of persons that of each we
may assert in turn that from the beginning he has
been with God, and has been God. Are we to add this additional mystery
of fancying the persons of the Godhead, though numerically one in
essence and sharers in all the divine attributes, “acting,” as Dr.
Martineau puts it, “each on the other as outside beings and conducting
a divine drama among themselves,”--imposing tasks on one another,
requiring conditions of one another, and earning favors from one
another? No doubt it is past our comprehension. But do we gain or lose
by denying its possibility, its reality? What does the Trinity mean, if
it does not mean such a distinction of persons that each may say
relatively to the other, “I,” and “Thou,” and “He”? What can the
incarnation of the Second Person mean, if the persons may not stand
over against one another in a measure far transcending our power to
comprehend? And let us remember that John presents this conception to
us, not as an added difficulty to faith, but as the philosophy, the
explanation of the incarnation. It may well happen here, too, that two
mysteries support and render credible each the other,--as two beams of
wood, neither of which could easily stand alone, when bowed together
not only support each other but provide a firm foundation upon which
you may safely pile the weight of a slated roof. To adopt Bishop
Alexander’s mode of statement,--“If in the Unity of the Divine
Existence there be a Trinity of Persons, and if the Second Person of
that Trinity is to assume the reality of flesh and the likeness of
sinful flesh,”--is it an additional difficulty or an aid to faith in
this supernal mystery to be further told that this colossal humiliation
of the Son of God was not an objectless display of arbitrary power, nor
yet a tentative and unconsidered effort of divine compassion to do
somewhat,
as yet undetermined in kind or amount, for sinful mankind, but the
execution in time of an eternal plan,--a plan born of, and redolent in
its every part with the infinite compassion of God, shaped in all its
details from all eternity by brooding love, and now remaining only to
be executed by each person involved taking and completing his appointed
part in its tremendous work? The mystery of the covenant is the
correlative of the mystery of the incarnation. Without its postulation
the incarnation would present increased difficulties of belief. Without
the added words, “In order to do the will of Him that sent me,” the
declaration, “I am come down from heaven,” would remain a simple marvel
and prove a strain on faith.
And now let us not fail to observe that it results from what we have
said, that John’s Gospel is the Gospel of the Covenant. If its leading
idea is not merely the glory of the incarnation, but the philosophy of
the incarnation; and if that philosophy runs back into an economic
arrangement or plan between the Persons of the Trinity, by which the
Second Person comes to perform a work committed to Him by the Father,
not to do His own will, but the will of Him that sent Him: this is but
another way of saying that the leading idea of John’s Gospel is the
idea of the Covenant. And is it not so? Search and look, and you will
find not only that this covenant idea recurs again and again throughout
the Gospel, with a frequency and an emphasis which throw it well into
the foreground, but that the book, as a whole, is moulded in its form
and contents upon it. The burden of its first chapters is Christ’s
testimony that He has come because sent by the Father; the burden of
the last chapters is His approaching return to the Father
who sent Him; the accomplished work lies between. And therefore it is
that when Nicodemus came to Him at the opening of His ministry and
asked for teaching, Jesus pointed him rather to His work, and declared
the doctrine of regeneration itself “an earthly thing” compared with
the heavenly mysteries He had to tell,--those mysteries of His descent
from heaven (3:13), sent by the Father (3:17) to save the world (3:16).
And therefore it is that in the midst of His ministry He opens this
great discourse from which our text is taken, by declaring that the Son
of Man has been “sealed,” appointed and set apart, by the Father for
the work of giving eternal life to men; and when His disciples stumbled
at the height of the great truth involved,--that He had come down from
heaven to give His flesh as the food of the soul,--He sorrowfully
added, “What, then, if you should see the Son of Man ascending where He
was before?” And therefore it is that at the end of His life He
compares His finished work with the joy a woman has after travail, when
at length the child is born (16:21); and declares that, having
accomplished the work which the Father gave Him to do (17:4), the
covenant condition is fulfilled, and the covenanted reward is at hand,
and He is about to return to His primal glory. John’s Gospel,--we ought
not to miss it,--is the Gospel of the Covenant.
IV. How our hearts should burn within
us as we approach the last and
most central question of all, and ask what is our Lord’s account of the
nature and terms of this mysterious but most blessed covenant, to
fulfill the conditions of which He came down from heaven. We
observe at
once,--and with what emotions of gladness we ought to observe it,--that
it concerns the salvation of men.
And equally at once we observe, with still swelling emotion, that it is
complete and perfect in its provisions,--that it provides for an entire
and finished, for a sure and unfailing salvation. And we observe that
this involves--as of course it must involve--the consequence that it is
definite and precise in its terms,--that it contemplates a definite and
particularly designated body of men. “And this is the will of Him that
sent me, that of all that He hath given me, I should lose nothing, but
should raise it up at the last day.” The will of the Father which
Christ came down from heaven to do, concerned, then, not all men, but
some men: “All that He hath given me.” And His will with reference to
these, which He sent the Son to perform, was not the making of some
indefinite provision looking toward their rescue from sin and shame,
but the definite, actual, complete, and final saving of them: that “I
should lose nothing of it, but should raise it up at the last day.”
Let our hearts stand still while we read these great provisions. It is
the testimony of the covenanted Son Himself, as to the terms of the
covenant which He came to fulfill, that it had a definite and
well-defined subject,--a restricted subject if you will, a “limited”
subject,--not all mankind, but a given body of men,--a given body of
men who, in the text, are brought into explicit contrast with those
who, though they saw, yet believed not, because they could not come to
Him except the Father drew them, and He draweth none but those whom He
hath given the Son and for the saving of whom the Son came down from
heaven: a precisely determined body, therefore, “particularly and
unchangeably designed, and their number so definite that it cannot be
either
increased or diminished.” But it is as well--and it could not be so at
all, unless it were “as well”--the testimony of the covenanted Son
Himself to the terms of the covenant which He came to fulfill, that it
had a definite and fully-determined end,--not merely the rendering the
salvation of men possible; nor merely the removing of the legal
obstacles in the way of the salvation of men; nor merely the breaking
down of whatever difficulties may stand in the path of the free outflow
of God’s love to men; much less merely the introduction into the world
of a better example of life than had hitherto been before men, or of a
new divine force making for righteousness; or the impressing of men
with a deeper sense of the love of God for them, or of His hatred of
sin; but the actual, complete, and sure salvation of all that the
Father had given the Son: “This is the will of Him that sent me, that
all that He hath given me, I should lose nothing of it, but should
raise it up at the last day.”
In a word, we have presented to us here, in these pregnant words, not
only in outline, but in all its essential details, what has come to be
known among us as the Covenant of Redemption. Men may, no doubt, find
fault with this doctrine. They may say, as they have said, that thus
our Lord, the Saviour of the world, is made not the Saviour of men, but
only of a small, select company of men. It does not appear with what
justification the number of those purchased by His precious blood is
represented as small, when John represents them as an immense multitude
whom no man can number. But when the alternative is--as the logical
alternative assuredly is--limitation of the saving work of Christ,
either in its subjects or in its substance, who, on
either Biblical grounds or on grounds of Christian hope and love, can
hesitate one moment in his decision? If the work of Christ is not
complete, if it did not purchase for us a sure salvation, the charter
of our redemption is gone. It has sometimes been thoughtlessly said
that this doctrine of the Covenant of Redemption is an invention of the
Reformed Theology. A distinguished professor at Andover, Dr. Park, was
accustomed to tell his pupils that the Covenant was made in Holland in
the middle of the seventeenth century. And a distinguished Baptist
teacher, Dr. E. G. Robinson, has lately assured the religious public
that the Covenant theology has been finally entombed in the grave of
Charles Hodge. But not only had the doctrine of the covenants already
come to its rights and been made the architectonic principle of
theology, long before Cocceius published his Sum of the Doctrine of the
Covenants, (1648)--for to him was Dr. Park alluding,--and indeed been
so used, before his supposed discovery of it, in so representative a
symbol as the Westminster Confession:--but from the beginning of that
new discovery of the way of salvation which we call the Reformation, it
had been a prominent feature in the teaching of Reformed theologians in
every land. And we may well believe that it is destined to remain the
central stronghold of faith to the end of time, among all who in
simplicity of heart draw the matter of their teaching out of this
record of our Saviour’s words. For what element of the doctrine is
lacking here? “I am come down from heaven, not to do my own will, but
the will of Him that sent me”: there is the assertion of an economic
arrangement as the pre-condition of the incarnation, and of the
prestipulation of the
incarnated work. “And this is the will of Him that sent me, that of all
that He hath given me I should lose nothing, but should raise it up at
the last day”: there is the revelation of the contents of the
pre-incarnation arrangement, and the provision through the incarnation
for the certain salvation of a chosen body of lost men. “All that the
Father giveth me shall come unto me”; “No man can come unto me except
the Father which sent me, draw Him”: there is the twin definition of
the subjects of the salvation. Or, if we desire further witness than
this one passage, it is spread fully on the pages of this Gospel. Let
us attend only to those calm and final words which, as His work was
accomplishing, our blessed Redeemer addressed, not to us men, but to
His Father, in a divinely assured assertion of His righteous claims
upon the fruit of His work. “Father, the hour is come: glorify thy Son,
that the Son may glorify thee: even as thou gavest Him authority over
all flesh, that to all that thou hast given Him, He should give to them
eternal life. . . . I glorified thee on the earth, having accomplished
the work which thou hast given me to do. And now, O Father, glorify
thou me with thine own self, with the glory which I had with thee
before the world was. I manifested thy name unto the men whom thou
didst give me out of the world: thine they were, and thou didst give
them to me. . . . I pray for them; I pray not for the world, but for
those whom thou hast given me.” All His work is in fulfillment of an
arrangement with the Father; and the whole of it, down to this
High-Priestly prayer itself, making intercession for His own, concerns,
primarily and in its chief import, not the world, but those whom the
Father gave Him out of the world, and secures
beyond failure their complete salvation. This is the whole doctrine of
the Covenant of Redemption: the Reformed theology has grasped it, and
teaches it; but it has not added one single thought to it.
And now let us bask a little, before we close, in the comforting
assurances of this blessed teaching.
1. How the love of God is magnified to
us by this teaching. It is not
from a yesterday only that He has busied Himself with our salvation. In
the depths of eternity our foreseen miseries were a cause of care to
Him. In that mysterious intercourse between Father and Son, which is as
eternal as the essence of Godhead itself, we--our state, our sin, our
helplessness, and the dreadfulness of our condition and end,--were a
subject of consideration and solicitude. What a God this is that is
unveiled before us here. A God of holiness: a God so holy that even in
the abyss of eternity-past He could not rest indifferent to the sin
which was only after the lapse of innumerable ages, to dawn in this
corner of the as yet unexistent universe. A God of justice: a God so
just that already His indignation burned against the as yet uncommitted
sin of such petty creatures of His will as man. But a God of love: a
love so inconceivably vast as already in the profundity of the
unlimited past to brood over unimaginable plans of mercy toward these
few guilty wretches among the numberless multitudes of His contemplated
creatures. When the Psalmist raised his eyes to the heavens above, the
work of the fingers of the Almighty, and considered the moon and stars
which He had ordained, he was lost in a natural wonder that so great a
Creator should concern Himself with so puny a creature: “What is man
that Thou art
mindful of him? And the son of man that Thou shouldst visit him?” But
how much greater a marvel is before us now. It is not man as man,--a
weak and puny creature--that we have to consider; but man as
sinner,--this weak and puny creature become vile and filthy, offensive
and hateful to a holy and just God. It is not in contrast even with the
grandeur of the worlds circling about worlds which crowd the depths of
the heavens and dwarf the consequence of this speck of earth on the
skirts of the universe which is our home, that we are to consider him;
but in contrast with the majesty of the increate Triune maker of all
that is. It is not simply that God has taken notice of this sinful,
puny creature, that we have to consider; but that the All-Holy and
All-Blessed God has felt care and solicitude for his fate and looked
not at His own things in comparison with his. What indeed is sinful man
that God should love him; and before the foundations of the world
should prepare to save him by so inconceivable a plan as to give His
only-begotten Son as a ransom for his life! My brethren, this is not to
the glory of man, but to the glory of God; it is not the expression of
our dignity and worth, but raises our wondering hearts to the
contemplation of the breadth and length, and height and depth of the
love of God that passeth knowledge.
2. And how our appreciation of the
perfection of the work of our
Saviour is enhanced by this teaching. As it was upon no sudden
caprice
that He came into the world, but in execution of a long-cherished and
thoroughly laid plan, so it was no partial work which He performed, but
the whole work of salvation. “This is a faithful saying, and worthy of
all acceptation, That Christ Jesus
came into the world to save sinners.” And this He has accomplished,
even to the uttermost. When He cried upon the cross, as His agony went
out in the darkness of death,--a death for us--in those words of
deepest import and of mighty power, “It is finished!”--when in His
great sacerdotal prayer, he proleptically declared that He had
“accomplished the work” which the Father “had given Him to do,” and was
now ready to lay aside His humiliation and reenter His glory: the
precise thing which He published as “finished” and “accomplished,” was
salvation. All has been done by Him. His saving work neither needs nor
admits of supplementary addition by any needy child of man,--even to
the extent of an iota. When we look to Him we are raising grateful
eyes, not to one who invites us to save ourselves; nor merely to one
who has broken out a path, in which walking, we may attain to
salvation; nor yet merely to one who offers us a salvation wrought out
by Him, on a condition; but to one who has saved us,--who is at once
the beginning and the middle and the end of our salvation, the author
and the finisher of our faith.
What can we possibly need that we do not find provided in Him? Do we
hopelessly groan under the curse of the broken law, hanging menacingly
over us? Christ has “redeemed us from the curse of the law, having been
made a curse for us” (Gal. 3:13). Do we know that only he that worketh
righteousness is acceptable to God, and despair of attaining life on so
unachievable a condition? Christ Jesus “hath of God been made unto us
righteousness” (1 Cor. 1:30). Do we loathe ourselves in the pollution
of our sins, and know that God is greater than we, and that we must be
an offence in His holy
sight? The blood of Christ cleanseth us from all sin (1 John 1:7). But
do we not need faith, that we may be made one with Him and so secure
these benefits? Faith, too, is the gift of God: and that we believe on
Him is granted by God in the behalf of Christ (Phil. 1:29). Nothing has
been forgotten, nothing neglected, nothing left unprovided. In the
person of Jesus Christ, the great God, in His perfect wisdom and
unfailing power, has taken our place before the outraged justice of God
and under His perfect law, and has wrought out a complete salvation.
3. What an indefectible certitude of
salvation is given by this great
teaching. If Christ Jesus came to save and has saved, how can
salvation
fail? If the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord
(Rom. 6:23), how can this eternal life thus freely given go out in
time, and fail to accord with its very designation as eternal? If
Christ has undertaken not merely to open a way of salvation to us, but
to save us; if He came into the world for the precise purpose of
performing this will of God, “that of all that He hath given Him, He
should lose nothing, but should raise it up at the last day,”--what
possibility lies open of the failure of this great design, framed in
eternity by Triune Godhead, and executed in time by none other than the
strong Son of God? Therefore our gracious Lord assures us: “All that
the Father giveth me shall come unto me, and him that cometh unto me I
will in no wise cast out.” And, therefore, His servant, condescending
to the weakness of our fears, argues with us: “God commendeth His love
towards us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.
Much more, then, being justified by His blood, shall we be saved from
wrath by Him.” Oh,
the certitude in that “much more.” “If God be for us,” he argues again,
“who can be against us? He that spared not His own Son, but delivered
Him up for us all, how shall He not also with Him, freely give us all
things? . . . Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?” O weak
and trembling soul, can you not find, not courage merely, but certitude
in this? What matters your weakness? Your salvation rests not on it,
but on God’s strength. He loves you; He determined to save you; He sent
His Son to save you; He has come to do it: He has done it. You are
saved: it cannot fail, unless God’s set purpose can fail; unless
Christ’s power to save can fail; unless His promises of love can fail.
4. What a clear ground of assurance of
salvation is furnished by this
great teaching. Does some wayward spirit say: “All this is true
only of
the elect, those whom the Father gave to Christ. And I, alas! how may I
know that I am of the elect?” Ah, self-tormenting soul, why expend
strength in prying into God’s secrets, instead of taking Him at His
word? It is true indeed that it is only those whom He has given to
Christ that Christ has saved; and the comfort, as the salvation, is for
them alone. But it is not true that God requires of you election for
salvation, or offers you predestination as the way of life. He offers
you not predestination, but Christ; and He requires of you not
election, but faith. Do you make election itself a ground of doubt and
despair? This, says an old Puritan, is indeed to gather poison out of
the sweetest of herbs. “God,” says he, “layeth it as a duty upon every
one to repent and believe, to come to Him and he shall have rest to his
soul. . . . If, then, thou believest, thou repentest, this may be a
sure testimony unto thee of thy everlasting glory.” So, then, “it’s no
wonder,” he continues, “that Paul doth often run out in large
expressions concerning God’s love, his predestination from all
eternity”--note how he identifies the two--“when he hath occasion to
praise God for the calling and conversion of any in time; for this is
to trace the stream till we find its well-head.” “Madmen” is what John
Calvin calls those “who seek their salvation in the whirlpool of
predestination; not keeping the way of salvation which is exhibited to
them.” “To every man,” he explains, “his faith is the sufficient proof
of the eternal election of God; and it would be a shocking sacrilege to
carry the inquiry behind it: for an aggravated insult is offered the
Holy Spirit if we refuse to assent to His simple testimony.”
Election does indeed lie at the root of our salvation: but faith is the
proof of election. Are we saved? The question is resolved in this: Do
we believe in Jesus Christ? Christ indeed says, “This is the will of
Him who sent me, that of all that He hath given me, I should lose
nothing, but should raise it up at the last day.” Here is election the
root of the saving work of Christ. But have you failed to note or to
remember that he immediately adds: “For, this is the will of my Father,
that every one that beholdeth the Son and believeth on Him should have
eternal life, and that I should raise him up at the last day.” Here is
the work of Christ received in faith the ground of salvation: and here
is faith, laying
hold of Christ, the evidence of salvation. And, therefore, it is not
only said, “All that the Father giveth me shall come unto me,” but it
is immediately added: “And him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast
out.” These words are gracious enough in their broadest sense to send a
thrill of joy through the heart. But there lies hid within them a
further delicate grace which is lost in the English translation. The
word for “come” is so varied in the two clauses as to lay the stress in
the first instance “upon the successful issue of the coming, the
arrival,” and in the second “on the process of the coming and the
welcome.” “All that the Father giveth me shall come unto me”--shall
certainly and unfailingly reach me. “And him that cometh unto me I will
in no wise cast out”--“him that is in the process of coming,”--yea,
even though he is but just begun, with weak and faltering steps, even
such an one as this who is but beginning to come--“I will in no wise
cast out.”
What a blessed assurance, when faith is made thus not the ground of
salvation, not the condition of salvation, but its evidence! It is here
that the sweet herb of election begins to pour forth its refreshing
cordial. Men may tell us, indeed, “Believe and you shall be saved,”
while still making faith the ground or the condition of salvation. And,
then, with what dreadful solicitude will we pluck up our faith over and
over again by the roots, to examine it with anxious fear: Is it the
right faith? Is it a strong enough faith? Do I believe aright? Do I
believe enough? Shall I abide in my belief until the
end? Dreadful uncertainty! Inexpressible misery of ineradicable doubt!
It is only when we have learned from such words of our Master as those
before us today, that we dare say to our souls not only Believe and ye
shall be saved! but those other words of deeper meaning and fuller
comfort, caught from the Master’s own blessed lips: Believe and ye are
saved! “Verily, verily, I say unto you,” says our Saviour in words
which sum up previous teachings (John 3:18, 36): “He that heareth my
words and believeth Him that sent me, hath eternal life, and cometh not
into judgment but hath passed out of death into life.” Blessed John,
who so caught his Master’s words and recorded them for us. When faith
is thus made not the ground or the condition, but the evidence of
salvation, our eternal bliss is no longer suspended in any sense on
aught that we are or do, but hangs solely on the work of Christ, doing
His Father’s will. Faith, even faith, as the ground or condition of
salvation, may be also the ground of despair: but faith as the proof of
salvation is the charter of assured though humble hope. It takes hold
of the “strong Son of God, immortal love,” and of the indefectible
purpose of Almighty grace which cannot fail or know any shadow of
turning. This we owe to that doctrine of the eternal covenant which our
blessed Saviour reveals to us in the words on which we have meditated
today. Because of its blessed provisions we can cry joy to our souls,
though they tremble with natural fear and can scarce believe that
Christ will save such faithless souls as they. Though they have faith
but as a grain of mustard-seed, they are saved already. For, this is
the will of Him who sent our Redeemer, that of
all that He gave Him, He should lose nothing, but should raise it up at
the last day: for this is the will of the Father that every one that
beholdeth the Son and believeth on Him should have eternal life and He
should raise him up at the last day.
2. The Example of the Incarnation (Php.
2:5–8)
Let
this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus; who, being in the
form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: but made
himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and
was made in the likeness of men: and being found in fashion as a man,
he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of
the cross.--Php. 2:5–8
“Christ our Example”; after “Christ our Redeemer,” no words can more
deeply stir the Christian heart than these. Every Christian joyfully
recognizes the example of Christ, as, in the admirable words of a great
Scotch commentator, a body “of living legislation,” as “law, embodied
and pictured in a perfect humanity.” In Him, in a word, we find the
moral ideal historically realized, and we bow before it as sublime and
yearn after it with all the assembled desires of our renewed souls.
How lovingly we follow in thought every footstep of the Son of Man, on
the rim of hills that shut in the emerald cup of Nazareth, on the blue
marge of Gennesaret, over the mountains of Judea, and long to walk in
spirit by His side. He came to save every age, says Irenaeus, and
therefore He came as an infant, a child, a boy, a youth, and a man. And
there is no age that cannot find its example in Him. We see Him, the
properest child that ever was given to a mother’s arms, through all the
years of childhood at Nazareth “subjecting Himself to His parents.” We
see Him a youth, laboring day by day contentedly at His father’s bench,
in this lower sphere,
too, with no other thought than to be “about His father’s business.” We
see Him in His holy manhood, going, “as His custom was,” Sabbath by
Sabbath, to the synagogue,--God as He was, not too good to worship with
His weaker brethren. And then the horizon broadens. We see Him at the
banks of Jordan, because it became Him to fulfill every righteousness,
meekly receiving the baptism of repentance for us. We see Him in the
wilderness, calmly rejecting the subtlest trials of the evil one:
refusing to supply His needs by a misuse of His divine power, repelling
the confusion of tempting God with trusting God, declining to seek His
Father’s ends by any other than His Father’s means. We see Him among
the thousands of Galilee, anointed of God with the Holy Ghost and
power, going about doing good: with no pride of birth, though He was a
king; with no pride of intellect, though omniscience dwelt within Him;
with no pride of power, though all power in Heaven and earth was in His
hands; or of station, though the fulness of the Godhead dwelt in Him
bodily; or of superior goodness or holiness: but in lowliness of mind
esteeming every one better than Himself, healing the sick, casting out
devils, feeding the hungry, and everywhere breaking to men the bread of
life. We see Him everywhere offering to men His life for the salvation
of their souls: and when, at last, the forces of evil gathered thick
around Him, walking, alike without display and dismay, the path of
suffering appointed for Him, and giving His life at Calvary that
through His death the world might live.
“Which of you convinceth me of sin?” is too low a question. Who can
find in all His life a single lack, a single failure to set us a
perfect example? In what difficulty of life,
in what trial, in what danger or uncertainty, when we turn our eyes to
Him, do we fail to find just the example that we need? And if perchance
we are, by the grace of God, enabled to walk with Him but a step in the
way, how our hearts burn within us with longing to be always with
Him,--to be strengthened by the almighty power of God in the inner man,
to make every footprint which He has left in the world a stepping-stone
to climb upward over His divine path. Do we not rightly say that next
to our longing to be in Christ is our corresponding longing to be like
Christ; that only second in our hearts to His great act of obedience
unto death by which He became our Saviour, stands His holy life in our
world of sin, by which He becomes our example?
Of course our text is not singular in calling upon us to make Christ
our example. “Be ye imitators of me, even as I also am of Christ
Jesus,” is rather the whole burden of the ethical side of Paul’s
teaching. And in this, too, he was but the imitator of his Lord, who
pleads with us to “learn of Him because He is meek and lowly in heart.”
The peculiarity of our present passage is that it takes us back of
Christ’s earthly life and bids us imitate Him in the great act of His
incarnation itself. Not, of course, as if the implication were that we
were equal with Christ and needed to stoop to such service as He
performed. “Why art thou proud, O man?” Augustine asks pointedly. “God
for thee became low. Thou wouldst perhaps be ashamed to imitate a lowly
man; then at least imitate the lowly God. The Son of God came in the
character of man and was made low. . . . He, since He was God, became
man: do thou, O man, recognize that thou art man. Thy entire humility
is to
know thyself.” The very force of the appeal lies, in a word, in the
infinite exaltation of Christ above us: and the mention of the
incarnation is the Apostle’s reminder to us of the ineffable majesty
which was by nature His to whom he would raise our admiring eyes. Paul
pries at our hearts here with the great lever of the deity of our
exemplar. He calls upon us to do nothing less than to be imitators of
God. “What encouragement is greater than this?” cries Chrysostom, with
his instinctive perception of the motive-springs of the human heart.
“Nothing arouses a great soul to the performance of good works, so much
as learning that in this it is likened to God.” And here, too, Paul is
but the follower of his Lord: “Be ye merciful, as your Father which is
in heaven is merciful,” are words which fell from His divine lips,
altogether similar in their implication to Paul’s words in the text:
“Let it be this mind that is in you, which also was in Christ Jesus.”
It is the Spirit which animated our Lord in the act of His incarnation
which His apostle would see us imitate. He would have us in all our
acts to be like Christ, as He showed Himself to be in the innermost
core of His being, when He became poor. He that was rich, that we by
His poverty might be made rich.
We perceive, then, that the exhortation of the Apostle gathers force
for itself from the deity of Christ, and from the nature of the
transaction by which He, being God, was brought into this sphere of
dependent, earthly life in which we live by nature. It is altogether
natural, then, that he sharpens his appeal by reminding his readers
somewhat fully who Christ was and what He did for our salvation, in
order that, having the facts more vividly before their minds, they may
more acutely feel the spirit by
which He was animated. Thus, in a perfectly natural way, Paul is led,
not to inform his readers but to remind them, in a few quick and lively
phrases which do not interrupt the main lines of discourse but rather
etch them in with a deeper color, of what we may call the whole
doctrine of the Person of Christ. With such a masterly hand, or let us
rather say with such an eager spirit and such a loving clearness and
firmness of touch, has he done this, that these few purely incidental
words constitute one of the most complete statements of an essential
doctrine to be found within the whole compass of the Scriptures. Though
compressed within the limits of three short verses, it ranks in fulness
of exposition with the already marvelously concise outline of the same
doctrine given in the opening verses of the Gospel of John. Whenever
the subtleties of heresy confuse our minds as we face the problems
which have been raised about the Person of our Lord, it is preeminently
to these verses that we flee to have our apprehension purified, and our
thinking corrected. The sharp phrases cut their way through every
error: or, as we may better say, they are like a flight of swift
arrows, each winged to the joints of the harness.
The golden-mouthed preacher of the ancient church, impressed with this
fulness of teaching and inspired himself to one of his loftiest flights
by the verve of the Apostle’s crisp language, pictures the passage
itself as an arena, and the Truth, as it runs burning through the
clauses, as the victorious chariot dashing against and overthrowing its
contestants one after the other, until at last, amid the clamor of
applause which rises from every side to heaven, it springs alone
towards the goal, with coursers winged with joy sweeping like a single
flash over the
ground. One by one he points out the heresies concerning the Person of
Christ which had sprung up in the ancient church, as clause by clause
the text smites and destroys them; and is not content until he shows
how the knees of all half-truths and whole falsehoods alike concerning
this great matter are made by these searching words to bow before our
Saviour’s perfect deity, His complete humanity, and the unity of His
person. The magic of the passage has lost none of its virtue with the
millennium and a half which has fled by since John electrified
Constantinople with his golden words: this sword of the Spirit is as
keen today as it was then, and happy is the man who knows its temper
and has the arm to wield it. But we must not lose ourselves in a purely
theological interest with such a passage before us. Rather let us keep
our eyes, for this hour, on Paul’s main purpose, and seek to feel the
force of the example of Christ as he here advances it, for the
government of our lives. But to do this, as he points it with so full a
reference to the Person of Christ, following him we must begin by
striving to realize who and what our Lord was, who set us this example.
I. Let us observe, then, first, that
the actor to whose example Paul
would direct our eyes, is declared by him to have been no other than
God Himself. “Who was before in the form of God,” are his words:
and
they are words than which no others could be chosen which would more
explicitly or with more directness assert the deity of the person who
is here designated by the name of Christ Jesus. After the wear and tear
of two thousand years on the phrases, it would not be surprising if we
should fail to feel this as strongly as we ought. Let us
remember that the phraseology which Paul here employs was the popular
usage of his day, though first given general vogue by the Aristotelian
philosophy: and that it was accordingly the most natural language for
strongly asserting the deity of Christ which could suggest itself to
him. As you know, this mode of speech resolved everything into its
matter and its form,--into the bare material out of which it is made,
and that body of characterizing qualities which constitute it what it
is. “Form,” in a word, is equivalent to our phrase, “specific
character.” If we may illustrate great things by small, we may say, in
this manner of speech, that the “matter” of a sword, for instance, is
steel, while its “form” is that whole body of characterizing qualities
which distinguish a sword from all other pieces of steel, and which,
therefore, make this particular piece of steel distinctively a sword.
In this case, these are, of course, largely matters of shape and
contour. But now the steel itself, which constitutes the matter of the
sword, has also its “matter” and its “form”: its “matter” being metal,
and its “form” being the whole body of qualities that distinguish steel
from other metals, and make this metal steel. Going back still a step,
metal itself has its “matter” and “form”; its “matter” being material
substance and its “form” that body of qualities which distinguish
metallic from other kinds of substance. And last of all, matter itself
has its “matter,” namely, substance, and its “form,” namely, the
qualities which distinguish material from spiritual substance, and make
this substance what we call matter. The same mode of speech is, of
course, equally applicable to the spiritual sphere. The “matter” of the
human spirit is bare spiritual substance, while its “form” is that body
of qualities
which constitute this spirit a human spirit, and in the absence of
which, or by the change of which, this spirit would cease to be human
and become some other kind of spirit. The “matter” of an angel, again,
is bare spiritual substance, while the “form” is the body of qualities
which make this spirit specifically an angel. So, too, with God: the
“matter” of God is bare spiritual substance, and the “form” is that
body of qualities which distinguish Him from all other spiritual
beings, which constitute Him God, and without which He would not be
God. What Paul asserts then, when he says that Christ Jesus existed in
the “form of God,” is that He had all those characterizing qualities
which make God God, the presence of which constitutes God, and in the
absence of which God does not exist. He who is “in the form of God,” is
God.
Nor is it without significance that, out of the possible modes of
expression open to him, Paul was led to choose just this mode of
asserting the deity of our Lord. His mind in this passage was not on
the bare divine essence; it was upon the divine qualities and
prerogatives of Christ. It is not the abstract conception that Christ
is God that moves us to our deepest admiration for His sublime act of
self-sacrifice: but rather our concrete realization that He was all
that God is, and had all that God has,--that God’s omnipotence was His,
His infinite exaltation. His unapproachable blessedness. Therefore Paul
is instinctively led to choose an expression which tells us not the
bare fact that Christ was God, but that He was “in the form of
God,”--that He had in full possession all those characterizing
qualities which, taken together, make God that all-holy, perfect,
all-blessed being which we call God. Thus the Apostle prepares his
readers for the
great example by quickening their apprehension not only of who, but of
what Christ was.
II. Let us note, then, secondly, that
the Apostle outlines for us very
fully the action which this divine being performed. “He took the
form
of a servant by coming into the likeness of men; and being found in
fashion as a man, He humbled Himself by becoming subject even unto
death, and that the death of the cross.” There is no metamorphosis of
substance asserted here: the “form of God” is not said to have been
transmuted into the “form of a servant”; but He who was “in the form of
God” is declared to have taken also to Himself “the form of a servant.”
Nor is there, on the other hand, any deceptive show of an unreal
humiliation brought before us here: He took, not the appearance, mere
state and circumstances, or mere work and performance, but veritably
“the form of a servant,”--all those essential qualities and attributes
which belong to, and constitute a being “a servant.” The assumption
involved the taking of an actually servile nature, as well as of a
subordinate station and a servant’s work. And therefore it is at once
further explained in both its mode and its effects. He took the form of
a servant “by coming into the likeness of men”: He did not become
merely a man, but by taking the form of a servant He came into a state
in which He appeared as man. His humanity was real and complete: but it
was not all,--He remained God in assuming humanity, and therefore only
appeared as man, not became only man. And by taking the form of a
servant and thus being found in fashion as a man, He became subject to
obedience,--an obedience pressed so far in its humiliation that it
extended even unto death, and that the shameful death of the cross.
Words cannot
adequately paint the depth of this humiliation. But this it was,--the
taking of the form of a servant with its resultant necessity of
obedience to such a bitter end,--this it was that He who was by nature
in the form of God,--in the full possession and use of all the Divine
attributes and qualities, powers, and prerogatives,--was willing to do
for us.
III. Let us observe, then, thirdly,
that the Apostle clearly announces
to us the spirit in which our Lord performed this great act.
“Although
He was in the form of God, He yet did not consider His being on an
equality with God a precious prize to be eagerly retained, but made no
account of Himself, taking the form of a servant.” It was then in a
spirit of pure unselfishness and self-sacrifice, that looked not on its
own things but on the things of others, that under the force of love
esteemed others more than Himself,--it was in this mind: or, in the
Apostle’s own words, it was as not considering His essential equality
with God as a precious possession, but making no account of
Himself,--it was in this mind, that Christ Jesus who was before in the
form of God took the form of a servant. This was the state of mind that
led Him to so marvelous an act,--no compulsion from His Father, no
desires for Himself, no hope of gain or fear of loss, but simple,
unselfish, self-sacrificing love.
Now it is not to be overlooked that some of the clauses the meaning of
which we have sought to fathom, are differently explained among
expositors. Nevertheless, although I have sought to adduce them so as
to bring out the Apostle’s exact meaning, and although I believe that
his appeal acquires an additional point and a stronger leverage when
they are thus understood, it remains true that
the main drift of the passage is unaffected by any of the special
interpretations which reasonable expositors have put upon the several
clauses. These divergent expositions do seriously affect our doctrine
of the Person of Christ. In particular, all the forms of the popular
modern doctrine of Kenosis or Exinanition, which teaches that the
divine Logos in becoming man “emptied Himself,” and thus, that the very
God in a more or less literal sense contracted Himself to the limits of
humanity, find their chief, almost their sole Biblical basis in what
appears to me a gratuitously erroneous interpretation of one of these
clauses,--that one which the Authorized Version renders, “He made
Himself of no reputation,” and which I have ventured to render, “He
made no account of Himself,” that is, in comparison with the needs of
others; but which the theologians in question followed, unfortunately
as I think, by the Revised Version, render with an excessive
literality, “He emptied Himself,” thereby resurrecting the literal
physical sense of the word in an unnatural context. We have many
reasons to give why this is an illegitimate rendering; chief among
which are, that the word is commonly employed in its figurative sense
and that the intrusion of the literal sense here is forbidden by the
context. But it is unnecessary to pause to argue the point. Whatever
the conclusion might be, the main drift of the passage remains the
same. No interpretation of this phrase can destroy the outstanding fact
that the passage at large places before our wondering eyes the two
termini of “the form of God” and “the form of a servant,” involving
obedience even unto a shameful death; and “measures the extent of our
Lord’s self-denying grace by the distance between equality with God and
a public execution on a gibbet.” In any case the emphasis of the
passage is thrown upon the spirit of self-sacrificing unselfishness as
the impelling cause of Christ’s humiliation, which the Apostle adduces
here in order that the sight of it may impel us also to take no account
of ourselves, but to estimate lightly all that we are or have in
comparison with the claims of others on our love and devotion. The one
subject of the whole passage is Christ’s marvelous self-sacrifice. Its
one exhortation is, “Let it be this mind that is also in you.” As we
read through the passage we may, by contact with the full mind and
heart of the Apostle, learn much more than this. But let us not fail to
grasp this, his chief message to us here,--that Christ Jesus, though He
was God, yet cared less for His equality with God, cared less for
Himself and His own things, than He did for us, and therefore gave
Himself for us.
Firmly grasping this, then, as the essential content and special
message of the passage, there are some inferences that flow from it
which we cannot afford not to remind ourselves of.
1. And first of these is a very great and marvelous one,--that we have
a God who is capable of self-sacrifice for us. It was although He was
in the form of God, that Christ Jesus did not consider His being on an
equality with God so precious a possession that He could not lay it
aside, but rather made no account of Himself. It was our God who so
loved us that He gave Himself for us. Now, herein is a wonderful thing.
Men tell us that God is, by the very necessity of His nature, incapable
of passion, incapable of being moved by inducements
from without; that He dwells in holy calm and unchangeable blessedness,
untouched by human sufferings or human sorrows forever,--haunting
“The lucid interspace of world and
world,
Where never creeps a cloud, nor moves a wind,
Nor ever falls the least white star of snow,
Nor ever lowest roll of thunder moans,
Nor sound of human sorrow mounts to mar
His sacred, everlasting calm.”
Let us bless our God that it is not true. God can feel; God does love.
We have Scriptural warrant for believing, as it has been well phrased,
that moral heroism has a place within the sphere of the Divine nature:
we have Scriptural warrant for believing that, like the old hero of
Zurich, God has reached out loving arms and gathered into His own bosom
that forest of darts which otherwise had pierced ours.
But is not this gross anthropomorphism? We are careless of names: it is
the truth of God. And we decline to yield up the God of the Bible and
the God of our hearts to any philosophical abstraction. We have and we
must have an ethical God; a God whom we can love, and in whom we can
trust. We may feel awe in the presence of the Absolute, as we feel awe
in the presence of the storm or of the earthquake: we may feel our
dependence in its presence, as we feel our helplessness before the
tornado or the flood. But we cannot love it; we cannot trust it; and
our hearts, which are just as trustworthy a guide as our dialectics,
cry out for a God whom we may love and trust. We decline once for all
to subject our whole conception of God to the category of the Absolute,
which, as has been truly said, “like Pharaoh’s lean kine, devours all
other attributes.” Neither
is this an unphilosophical procedure. As has recently been set forth
renewedly by Andrew Seth, “we should be unfaithful to the fundamental
principle of the theory of knowledge” “if we did not interpret by means
of the highest category within our reach.” “We should be false to
ourselves, if we denied in God what we recognize as the source of
dignity and worth in ourselves.” In order to escape an anthropomorphic
God, we must not throw ourselves at the feet of a zoomorphic or an
amorphic one.
Nevertheless, let us rejoice that our God has not left us by searching
to find Him out. Let us rejoice that He has plainly revealed Himself to
us in His Word as a God who loves us, and who, because He loves us, has
sacrificed Himself for us. Let us remember that the fundamental
conception in the Christian idea of God is that God is love; and the
fundamental dogma of the Christian religion is that God so loved us
that He gave Himself for us. Accordingly, the primary presupposition of
our present passage is that our God was capable of, and did actually
perform, this amazing act of unselfish self-sacrifice for the good of
man.
2. The second inference that we should draw from our passage consists
simply in following the Apostle in his application of this divine
example to our human life: a life of self-sacrificing unselfishness is
the most divinely beautiful life that man can lead. He whom as our
Master we have engaged to obey, whom as our Example we are pledged to
imitate, is presented to us here as the great model of self-sacrificing
unselfishness. “Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ
Jesus,” is the
Apostle’s pleading. We need to note carefully, however, that it is not
self-depreciation, but self-abnegation, that is thus commended to us.
If we would follow Christ, we must, every one of us, not in pride but
in humility, yet not in lowness but in lowliness, not degrade ourselves
but forget ourselves, and seek every man not his own things but those
of others.
Who does not see that in this organism which we call human society,
such a mode of life is the condition of all real help and health? There
is, no doubt, another ideal of life far more grateful to our fallen
human nature, an ideal based on arrogance, assumption, self-assertion,
working through strife, and issuing in conquest,--conquest of a place
for ourselves, a position, the admiration of man, power over men. We
see its working on every side of us: in the competition of business
life,--in the struggle for wealth on the one side, forcing a struggle
for bare bread on the other; in social life,--in the fierce battle of
men and women for leading parts in the farce of social display; even in
the church itself, and among the churches, where, too, unhappily,
arrogant pretension and unchristian self-assertion do not fail to find
their temporal reward. But it is clear that this is not Christ’s ideal,
nor is it to this that He has set us His perfect example. “He made no
account of Himself”: though He was in the form of God, He yet looked
not upon His equality with God as a possession to be prized when He
could by forgetting self rescue those whom He was not ashamed, amid all
His glory, to call His brethren.
Are there any whom you and I are ashamed to call our brethren? O that
the divine ideal of life as service could take possession of our souls!
O that we could remember at
all times and in all relations that the Son of Man came into the world
to minister, and by His ministry has glorified all ministering for
ever. O that we could once for all grasp the meaning of the great fact
that self-forgetfulness and self-sacrifice express the divine ideals of
life.
3. And thus we are led to a third inference, which comes to us from the
text: that it is difficult to set a limit to the self-sacrifice which
the example of Christ calls upon us to be ready to undergo for the good
of our brethren. It is comparatively easy to recognize that the ideal
of the Christian life is self-sacrificing unselfishness, and to allow
that it is required of those who seek to enter into it, to subordinate
self and to seek first the kingdom of God. But is it so easy to
acknowledge, even to ourselves, that this is to be read not generally
merely but in detail, and is to be applied not only to some eminent
saints but to all who would be Christ’s servants?--that it is required
of us, and that what is required of us is not some self-denial but all
self-sacrifice? Yet is it not to this that the example of Christ would
lead us?--not, of course, to self-degradation, not to self-effacement
exactly, but to complete self-abnegation, entire and ungrudging
self-sacrifice? Is it to be unto death itself? Christ died. Are we to
endure wrongs? What wrongs did He not meekly bear? Are we to surrender
our clear and recognized rights? Did Christ stand upon His unquestioned
right of retaining His equality with God? Are we to endure unnatural
evils, permit ourselves to be driven into inappropriate situations,
unresistingly sustain injurious and unjust imputations and attacks?
What more unnatural than that the God of the universe should become a
servant in the world,
ministering not to His Father only, but also to His creatures,--our
Lord and Master washing our very feet? What more abhorrent than that
God should die? There is no length to which Christ”s self-sacrifice did
not lead Him. These words are dull and inexpressive; we cannot enter
into thoughts so high. He who was in the form of God took such thought
for us, that He made no account of Himself. Into the immeasurable calm
of the divine blessedness He permitted this thought to enter, “I will
die for men!” And so mighty was His love, so colossal the divine
purpose to save, that He thought nothing of His divine majesty, nothing
of His unsullied blessedness, nothing of His equality with God, but,
absorbed in us,--our needs, our misery, our helplessness--He made no
account of Himself. If this is to be our example, what limit can we set
to our self-sacrifice? Let us remember that we are no longer our own
but Christ’s, bought with the price of His precious blood, and are
henceforth to live, not for ourselves but for Him,--for Him in His
creatures, serving Him in serving them. Let all thought of our dignity,
our possessions, our rights, perish out of sight, when Christ’s service
calls to us. Let the mind be in us that was also in Him, when He took
no account of Himself, but, God as He was, took the form of a servant
and humbled Himself,--He who was Lord,--to lowly obedience even unto
death, and that the death of the cross. In such a mind as this, where
is the end of unselfishness?
4. Let us not, however, do the Apostle the injustice of fancying that
this is a morbid life to which he summons us. The self-sacrifice to
which he exhorts us, unlimited as it is, going all lengths and starting
back blanched at nothing, is
nevertheless not an unnatural life. After all, it issues not in the
destruction of self, but only in the destruction of selfishness; it
leads us not to a Buddha-like unselfing, but to a Christ-like
self-development. It would not make us into
“deedless
dreamers lazying out a life
Of self-suppression, not of selfless love”
but would light the flames of a love within us by which we would
literally “ache for souls.” The example of Christ and the exhortation
of Paul found themselves upon a sense of the unspeakable value of
souls. Our Lord took no account of Himself, only because the value of
the souls of men pressed upon His heart. And following Him, we are not
to consider our own things, but those of others, just because
everything earthly that concerns us is as nothing compared with their
eternal welfare.
Our self-abnegation is thus not for our own sake, but for the sake of
others. And thus it is not to mere self-denial that Christ calls us,
but specifically to self-sacrifice: not to unselfing ourselves, but to
unselfishing ourselves. Self-denial for its own sake is in its very
nature ascetic, monkish. It concentrates our whole attention on
self--self-knowledge, self-control--and can, therefore, eventuate in
nothing other than the very apotheosis of selfishness. At best it
succeeds only in subjecting the outer self to the inner self, or the
lower self to the higher self; and only the more surely falls into the
slough of self-seeking, that it partially conceals the selfishness of
its goal by refining its ideal of self and excluding its grosser and
more outward elements. Self-denial, then, drives to the cloister;
narrows and contracts the soul;
murders within us all innocent desires, dries up all the springs of
sympathy, and nurses and coddles our self-importance until we grow so
great in our own esteem as to be careless of the trials and sufferings,
the joys and aspirations, the strivings and failures and successes of
our fellow-men. Self-denial, thus understood, will make us cold, hard,
unsympathetic,--proud, arrogant, self-esteeming,--fanatical,
overbearing, cruel. It may make monks and Stoics,--it cannot make
Christians.
It is not to this that Christ’s example calls us. He did not cultivate
self, even His divine self: He took no account of self. He was not led
by His divine impulse out of the world, driven back into the recesses
of His own soul to brood morbidly over His own needs, until to gain His
own seemed worth all sacrifice to Him. He was led by His love for
others into the world, to forget Himself in the needs of others, to
sacrifice self once for all upon the altar of sympathy. Self-sacrifice
brought Christ into the world. And self-sacrifice will lead us, His
followers, not away from but into the midst of men. Wherever men
suffer, there will we be to comfort. Wherever men strive, there we will
be to help. Wherever men fail, there will we be to uplift. Wherever men
succeed, there will we be to rejoice. Self-sacrifice means not
indifference to our times and our fellows: it means absorption in them.
It means forgetfulness of self in others. It means entering into every
man’s hopes and fears, longings and despairs: it means manysidedness of
spirit, multiform activity, multiplicity of sympathies. It means
richness of development. It means not that we should live one life, but
a thousand lives,--binding ourselves to a thousand souls by the
filaments
of so loving a sympathy that their lives become ours. It means that all
the experiences of men shall smite our souls and shall beat and batter
these stubborn hearts of ours into fitness for their heavenly home. It
is, after all, then, the path to the highest possible development, by
which alone we can be made truly men.
Not that we shall undertake it with this end in view. This were to dry
up its springs at their source. We cannot be self-consciously
self-forgetful, selfishly unselfish. Only, when we humbly walk this
path, seeking truly in it not our own things but those of others, we
shall find the promise true, that he who loses his life shall find it.
Only, when, like Christ, and in loving obedience to His call and
example, we take no account of ourselves, but freely give ourselves to
others, we shall find, each in his measure, the saying true of himself
also: “Wherefore also God hath highly exalted him.” The path of
self-sacrifice is the path to glory.
* Benjamin Warfield, The Gospel
of the Incarnation, (New York: Anson D.
F. Randolph and Company, 1893).