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‘In this was manifested the love of God toward us, because that God sent His only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through Him.’
1Jn_4:9
I. The manifestation of God’s love.—God’s love is manifested in creation, in preservation, and in all the blessings of this life, but above all in redemption.
(a) God sent His Son.—He did not merely allow or consent to His coming. He Himself sent His Son, gave Him His commission and authority.
(b) God sent His only begotten Son. He Who was sent by God as a gift of love was no less than His only begotten Son. Then God’s love is as great as the Divine glory of His Son. God sends no servant, no archangel, but His equal and co-eternal Son, Who, as His only begotten, and sharing that nature which is love, could best manifest God’s love.
(c) God sent His Son into the world. The destination of the Son, His being sent into a fallen and sinful world, a world disordered and corrupt, a world which during thousands of years had not grown better but worse, manifested God’s love. Christ’s personal history and experience in the world manifested how great was the love of God that sent Him to such a world and to such treatment in it.
(d) God sent His Son … that we might live through Him. The purpose of Christ’s mission, involving His death as a sacrifice for sin, His giving His life to redeem ours, manifested God’s love. They for whom He sent His Son were sinners, guilty, helpless, unloving.
II. Some thoughts which emerge.
(a) Here is the spring and motive of love to God, and the love to man which is its evidence.
(b) If God has given His only begotten Son for our life, with Him also He shall freely give us all things.
(c) How precious is the soul of man! It is the subject of God’s love, and Christ was sent to give it true life.
(d) We must become sons of God, born sons, if we are to manifest His love.
(e) To reject God’s love thus manifested must be the greatest sin and misery, and it is self-inflicted misery as it is wilful sin.
THE INCARNATION
I. The facts of the Incarnation are these.—God the Son was from all eternity, is now, and will be for ever, ‘equal to the Father as touching His Godhead.’ In all the ages of time that preceded the days of the Cross the Son of God existed, even, according to His own words, ‘Before Abraham was, I AM’; and in all the ages of eternity—if we may speak of ‘ages’ in a period of unmeasurable duration—He also had existed; according to the words of the Holy Ghost, ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.’ The unmeasurable eternity passed on, and there came a ‘beginning’ which marked the first boundary of time; and in that ‘beginning God created the heaven and the earth,’ and in that creation God the Son, the Eternal Word, took part, for ‘all things were made by Him, and without Him was not anything made that was made.’ He, then, Who was sent into the word by the Eternal Father and Creator, was the Eternal Son and Creator. It is He of Whom St. John writes, ‘And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us’; of Whom the Angel Gabriel said to Joseph respecting Mary, ‘That which is conceived in her is of the Holy Ghost. And she shall bring forth a Son, and thou shalt call His name Jesus; for He shall save His people from their sins’; of whom St. Luke writes, ‘And she brought forth her firstborn Son, and wrapped Him in swaddling clothes, and laid Him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn’; Who, at the end of His humiliation and sufferings, ‘cried with a loud voice’ and said, ‘Father, into Thy hands I commend My Spirit; and having said this, gave up the ghost’; and Who, having ‘shewed Himself alive after His Passion by many infallible proofs,’ was ‘carried up into “that” heaven’ in human nature where He had been in Divine nature from all eternity.
Most wonderful facts, and yet attested beyond all rational contradiction in the Gospels, that ‘perfect God,’ the Son of God in all the qualities of Divine nature, thus became ‘perfect man,’ the Son of Man in all the qualities of human nature; and that, after thirty-three years of life on earth as a babe, a holy child, a working, teaching, suffering man, He ascended to heaven to reign there with His Divine and human nature inseparably united for ever.
II. The results of this Incarnation.—‘In this was manifested the love of God towards us, because that God sent His only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through Him.’ The summing up of the results of the fall is contained in the words ‘death through sin,’ and the summing up of the results of the Incarnation is contained in the words ‘life through holiness.’
(a) It was said of Jesus before He came into the world, ‘That Holy Thing Which shall be born of Thee shall be called the Son of God.’ It was the holiness of His origin which made Christ a New Man and a Second Adam. In Him our human nature was re-created in purity and sinlessness, as it had been originally created in the First Adam, but as it was never inherited from him by his descendants. The Creator did not again build up a human body out of the dust of the ground and inspire it with the breath of life, but He provided a pure Virgin, that she might, by a miracle, become a Holy Virgin Mother; and that thus the human nature of God Incarnate might be inherited from a human parent and formed of her human substance, and yet so inherited that it should be uncontaminated by that which all other human beings inherit—the taint of original sin. Thus the Holy Child Jesus came into the world with the nature of man unfallen, and His soul and body were both untouched by original sin from His cradle to His Cross.
(b) But as Jesus was entirely free from original sin, so also He passed through the probation of His earthly life without ever falling into actual sin. No assaults of the Tempter could make Him disobey His Father as they had made the first Adam do. In the wilderness He withstood all the array of temptations to which human nature is liable through the infirmities of the flesh, the seductions of the world, and the wiles of the devil; in the garden of Gethsemane He resisted the temptation to separate His Will from the Will of His Father by choosing some other way than that of the Cross; at the Cross itself He bore trials of His body and soul such as had never fallen to the lot of man before, yet none of these things could move Him from the pathway of perfect holiness.
(c) By that perfect holiness, therefore, which could thus withstand all assaults of the enemy of God and man, Jesus was qualified to become an offering for the sin of the world, living over again under its greatest trials and difficulties the probational life of human nature, and living it until He had carrried that human nature in His own person beyond the range of the Tempter’s power. Free from the sin of nature and free from the sin of act, He could be the Representative of all sinners and stay the penalty of sin, as Adam had represented all sinners incurring that penalty; and thus in the words of St. Paul, ‘As in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.’ It was a result of the Incarnation of the Son of God that His death should vanquish the power of death, and that though men must still die before they can live, yet shall the purpose of God in sending His Son into the world be fulfilled, ‘that we might live through Him.’