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‘If Thou be the Son of God.’
Mat_4:3
I. Our Lord had enjoyed this sense of Sonship from boyhood. ‘Wist ye not,’ He said to Joseph and His mother when they lost Him from their company, ‘wist ye not that I must be about My Father’s business?’ a saying which He had not learned from them, because they found it strange. From boyhood, then, the characteristic, so far as we can judge, of our Lord’s religious consciousness was this sense of Sonship to God, and He could not have lived long among His fellows without becoming aware that the consciousness was unique; and then as He read and pondered the Scriptures He must have come to realise that, if He were the Son of God, a mission had been laid upon Him by the Father, because the Son of God was spoken of in the Bible, and spoken of especially in the Psalms as One who was to redeem Israel and sit upon the throne of His Father David (Psalms 2, 89).
II. And this was the meaning that the title ‘Son of God’ would therefore convey to any Israelite who knew the prophetic hope and waited for the promised redemption. Nathanael, when he was amazed at our Lord’s insight into His character, acknowledged His claim in the words, ‘Rabbi, Thou art the Son of God; Thou art the King of Israel,’ as though the titles were equivalent. Well, then, if that was the sense in which the title must be interpreted, if God’s Son be God’s elected King, we can see the force of the temptation that came when our Lord, after the solemn announcement of the kingship, retired to meditate in the wilderness.
III. What were the kingly prerogatives which Jesus claimed to exercise as God’s anointed during the opening of His ministry? As St. Luke tells the story in the synagogue of Nazareth, there was delivered to Him the Book of the Prophet Isaiah, and He opened the book and found the place where it was written, ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me.’ We are not surprised, then, to find that God’s kingdom, being a kingdom of love and peace, Jesus would never take to Himself the title of Son of God because of the associations of earthly sovereignty, by which it was coloured in the minds of the people, and only once did He allow it to be applied to Him—namely, when the High Priest adjured Him to confess whether He were the Christ, the Son of the Blessed; and then He accepted the title because to accept it was not to receive an earthly kingdom, but to mount the throne of the Cross from which He knew that He should indeed rule the world. Nevertheless, though, in order to avoid misunderstanding, our Lord did not allow Himself to be called by this name, it was not because He did not regard Himself as King, and as King by right of His Divine Sonship. All through the Gospels, in page after page, you find evidences of a personal claim upon man’s allegiance. He uses ‘For My sake’ and ‘For the kingdom’s sake’ as equivalent terms. He regards service between the citizens of the kingdom as service done to Himself. ‘Then shall the King say, Inasmuch as ye did it unto one of the least of these, ye did it unto Me.’ And this kingship He declared to rest upon the intimate and unique union between the Son and the Father. ‘No man knoweth the Father, but the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son will reveal Him.’ It is only God’s anointed who can be king in God’s kingdom, because no one else can have the Divine wisdom, or the Divine power, or the Divine devotion.
IV. There is no repudiation of the Divine kingship.—In reality it is its most emphatic assertion, because the Divine kingship was to be distinguished from a mere earthly sovereignty by this great fact above all, that it reflected the sovereignty of God which is a sovereignty of love. ‘In all their afflictions He was afflicted,’ said the prophet, speaking of God’s love for Israel. In His love and in His pity He redeemed them, and He bore them and carried them all the days of old. The King, then—and this is a great lesson for us all—the King, then, just because He was Divine could not exempt Himself from any human need.
V. The real sting of the suggestion.—‘If Thou be the Son of God’ is not so much that it attempted to cast doubt into our Lord’s mind as to His relation with the Father, and the reality of His authority and power, as that it would fain have substituted an unworthy idea of God to that vision of mercy and truth which was ever before His mind. The attractiveness of the Gospel of Jesus to the human heart is, that it answers to our longing that the Almighty power behind the world may be known to be a power of righteousness, and wisdom, and love. If Jesus be the Son of God we have that assurance. Before His righteousness, and His wisdom, and His love our hearts bow themselves, and when He says to us, ‘He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father,’ we are ready to believe that it is so, and that it must be so. We echo the testimony of the first disciples: ‘We beheld His glory, the glory of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth.’
Canon Beeching.
Illustration‘In St. Paul’s view the condition of being filled with the fullness of God is that Christ should dwell in the heart through faith, because in Christ, and alone in Christ, all the fullness of the Godhead dwells. If we know anything of ourselves, we know that our nature requires something more than growth to become divine. Is not the great difference between Jesus Christ and other men this—that He was without sin, and we are not? And, if so, is it not a difference which needs explanation? The most striking defect of the “new” theology is, that having no doctrine of Atonement it must either minimise the evil of sin or deny the remedy of forgiveness, and by doing that it takes away that whole side of Christianity which the experience of the world shows to be not its least important side, that whole side of Christianity which is represented by the hymn “Jesus, lover of my soul.” We do, indeed, claim to be the children of God by creation, for it is He Who hath made us, and not we ourselves—made us not like the rest of creation, but in His own image, endowed our nature with reason, and will, and conscience, so that we can feel what goodness is. “Virtue in her shape how lovely!” And we claim to be children of God in the more intimate sense through the Spirit of the Son which God sends into our hearts. “Beloved,” said St. Paul, “now are ye the sons of God.” But it is through the only Son that we are sons: He is, in St. John’s great phrase, “the only Son.” There is none like Him; there is none second. He is the very Word, and expressed Word, of the Father, and we, as matter of simple history, are sons by adoption, accepted in the Beloved. Let us acknowledge this, and then our hope will be, that as we attain more and more to see Him as He is we shall be drawn more and more into His likeness.’