Online Resource Library
Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.com | DownloadWilliam Burkitt Notes and Observations - Hebrews 4:15 - 4:15
(Show All Books | Show All Chapters)
This Chapter Verse Commentaries:
These words contain a farther description of Christ our great High Priest, by his merciful disposition towards his people; he is said to be touched; that is, sensibly affected with the infirmities, that is, the miseries, sufferings, and calamities, which the human nature is exercised with, and exposed to.
Our Lord Jesus Christ, now in heaven, doth exercise a tender and compassionate spirit towards his suffering children and servants here on earth: he has an experimental knowledge of what his people suffer, either from God, or from man, for God's sake, as one that is interested in them, as one concerned for them, as one related to them, yea, as being one with them.
This sympathy of Christ with, and towards his suffering people, is a tender sympathy, an extensive sympathy, it reaches all our infirmities, a proportionable sympathy, answerable to every occasion, a perpetual sumpathy; as long as he continues High Priest, and we remain subject to infirmities, so long will he be touched with the feeling of them.
Observe farther, The assigned reason why our great High Priest is so sensibly affected with our suffering condition: namely, because he was in all points tempted like as we are, sin excepted. Christ, by assuming our nature, became humbly affectionate, and by suffering our infirmities, became experimentally compassionate.
Here note, That tempatations may be without sin; it is not our sin to be tempted, but to comply with the temptation.
2. That Christ was tempted, yea, in all points tempted like unto us: His temptations were in all points like ours; he was tempted to sin, yet without sin.
There is a two-fold temptation to sin, inward and outward;
inwardly Christ was not tempted to sin,
outwardly he was, and with greatest vehemency assaulted both by men and devils to the worst of sins that ever man was; but he always resisted, and always overcame.
Oh, what a consolation is this unto us under all our temptations, that Christ was in all things tempted like unto us, but without sin!