The happiness of Christ antecedent to His incarnation
The delights between the Father and the Son, before His assumption of our nature, were twofold.
1. They delighted in one another without communicating their joys to any other; for no creature did then exist save in the mind of God.
2. They delighted in the salvation of men; in the prospect of that work, though not yet extant. The condition and state of Jesus Christ before His incarnation was a state of the most unspeakable delight in the enjoyment of His Father. Consider this--
I. Negatively.
1. He was not abased to the low estate of a creature.
2. He was not under the law in this estate.
3. He was not liable to any of those sorrowful consequents and attendants of that frail state of humanity which afterwards He assumed with that nature. Unacquainted with griefs. Never pinched with poverty and want. Never underwent reproach and shame. Was never offended with any impure suggestions. Never sensible of tortures and pains. There were no hidings or withdrawings of His Father. No experience of death.
II. Positively.
1. A state of matchless happiness.
2. A state of intimacy, dearness, and oneness with His Father.
3. A state of pure, unmixed, and ravishing delight.
III. Comparitively.
1. Compare it with the delight that some creatures take in each other, and you will soon find that they fall infinitely short of this.
2. Compare it with the delight that God takes in some of His creatures; you will find it to come short of the delight that God takes in Christ.
3. Compare it with the delight that the best of creatures take in God and Christ; how infinitely short it comes of the delight that God takes in Christ!
Conclusion:
1. What an astonishing love was this for the Father to give the darling of His soul for poor sinners!
2. Adore the love of Jesus to sinners, that ever He should consent to leave such a bosom.
3. An interest in Jesus Christ is the true way to all spiritual preferment in heaven.
4. Jesus Christ is worthy of all love and delight.
5. It is a grievous thing to see God’s dear Son despised, slighted, and rejected by sinners.
6. Let us be ready to forsake and leave all for Christ. (John Flavel.)
Christ’s eternal felicity
I.Christ was with the Father at the beginning. This censures the Arians.
II. God the Father, as He delighted in Christ at the beginning, so He doth always.
1. Because He is His Son.
2. Because He never offended Him.
3. Because He is always ready to please His Father.
III. Christ rejoiced in God the Father from the beginning, and does so always. Some read, “I rejoice, or sport, always before Him.” (Francis Taylor, B. D.)
Rejoicing always before Him.
Eternal Wisdom rejoicing in the events to be revealed
If we contemplate the character of Divine Wisdom as directed to earth, dwelling amongst men, anticipating the concerns and circumstances and history of this human world, we shall--
1. Be led to perceive an importance attaching to all the ramifications of that history, to all its epochs and all its events.
2. In addition to this we shall be led to depend, with a degree of delight and joy, on all the arrangements and developments of this Wisdom in relation to our circumstances.
3. And we shall perceive the impropriety of our murmuring; and that there is the greatest measure of folly, as well as of danger, in allowing ourselves to dispute any part of the Divine proceedings.
4. Such a view will induce us to look with intelligent and instructed minds upon all the things around us, and to observe in the various circumstances which transpire before our view the actual working out of a plan arranged before eternity.
5. We shall regard the great Supreme with deep solicitude, in order that we ourselves may bebrought to see the truth and results of all that is around us.
6. We shall anticipate the glory of that scene in its fulness which we now perceive in fragments. Christ looked forward to the production of the world for the sake of the men who would dwell on it. What is more wonderful than the intellectual, physical, moral, and spiritual being, man? Consider the proofs of this anticipation and delight, and the reason whence arises all this delight. (R. S. McAll, LL. D.)
