TEHILLIM 91

14 Because he hath set his love upon me, therefore will I deliver him: I will set him on high, because he hath known my name.

The Obedience of Christ in Relation to the Manifestation of God in Him

Another error is advocated among some professing the truth, and, as usual, it is the result of one part of the truth being unskilfully used to the destruction of another part. Jesus was the manifestation of the Father in human nature. Therefore, argue the new errorists, he was not the subject of probation, but simply the passive medium for the exhibition of the moral attributes of God, possessing no independent will of his own, and no power of choice between good and evil, but simply yielding to the uncontrollable impulse which used him for manifestation.

The seriousness of this error lies in its practical denial of the obedience of Christ, and therefore of the glory appertaining to him as the Son, of whom it is testified that he was

"tempted in all points like unto his brethren" (Heb. 4:15),

but "overcame" (Rev. 3:21). and was consequently approved of the Father (Is. 53:12; Ps. 91:14; Matt. 3:17), and rewarded by elevation to the position of universal lordship (Phil. 2:9, 10.) It destroys for us our great High Priest, who can be touched with the feeling of our infirmities.

The error springs from the application of human reasoning to the testified ways of God. If, say the errorists, Jesus was God manifest in the flesh, he could not be otherwise than righteous. In a sense this is true; but it is using this truth with an unscriptural result when it is made to exclude the fact that the individual Jesus had a separate volition and character of his own, which was put to the proof under trial, and who "doing no sin," became to his brethren a captain and example, who learnt obedience by the things that he suffered.

The two facts (that Jesus was God manifest and that he learnt obedience in suffering, are consistent one with another, as is evident from the fact that they are both testified; and they are in their nature consistent. God manifestation resulted in a new person—the Son: and this Son was made "perfect through suffering." It is only a narrow and unenlightened mode of reasoning that extracts from the one truth the negation of the other.

In two senses, the mistake is not a new one. It belongs, in the first place, to the entire religion of the Roman Mother. It is a peculiarity of the reasonings of the apostacy on the subject of God and His Christ, to destroy the probationary character of Christ's life in the flesh, and his relation to his brethren as the Elder Brother and firstborn in the house of God.

And it is not the first time the notion has been ventilated by modern professors of the truth. Ten years ago it found advocates in America, and elicited the pamphlet by Dr. Thomas's daughter, entitled The Origin and Nature of the Lord Jesus, which first appeared as an article in the Ambassador, vol. IV., p. 85.

This article was published with the consent and under the supervision of Dr. Thomas, and in it occur the words: "We do not say that Christ could not sin," which constitutes an express indication of the Dr.'s mind (though dead) on the subject now raised anew to the distress of some in the truth.

When we are told that this idea of Christ's probation "hung as a cloud" over the Dr.'s writings on the subject, we can only wonder at the presumption which affects a superior discernment to Dr. Thomas on a subject pre-eminently requiring the power of balancing various parts of truth; and marvel also at the facility possessed by some of blinding themselves to the explicit testimony of the Word.

Scripturally enlightened minds can only dissent emphatically (if with sorrow) from those who would take from us so precious a part of the truth as Christ's brotherhood to us.

The Christadelphian, Mar 1876

15 He shall call upon me, and I will answer him: I will be with him in trouble; I will deliver him, and honour him.

He hath set his love upon Me v14

God made Jesus what he was by the Spirit in his begettal. On the seed of the woman was engraved the Father's moral likeness, but this was latent in the babe of Bethlehem, and had to be developed in the man by those circumstances of suffering and trial to which he was subjected. Hence the statement of Paul, that in bringing many sons to glory,

"it became him to make the Captain of their salvation perfect through suffering."

You say this was physical perfection. At this I am astounded. Does suffering engender physical perfection? Rather the contrary: suffering deteriorates physical nature. Adam was more perfect physically before he suffered than after. Not suffering, but the healing influence of the Spirit of God in the change to immortality makes the physical man perfect.

But the moral man, the character, can only be perfected through suffering. Called upon to perform painful acts of obedience, our character of submission to God is more perfected, strengthened, settled, than it could ever be if the path of obedience was a path of pleasure.

The character latent in the man Christ Jesus when a babe, and gradually ripened as he advanced in years and stature, was perfected by the sufferings he was called on to go through in the end of his career.

The Christadelphian, Mar 1876