Abbildungen der Seite
PDF
EPUB

CHAP. X.

Observations on the Testimony which Jehovah has given to the divine and human natures of Jesus Christ, contained in a few of the very many parts in the Sacred Writings.

As this small work is now drawing to the conclusion of its first part, it will not, I hope, be deemed out of place to indulge some reflections on the testimonies which Jehovah himself has interspersed, where most requisite, through different and very numerous portions of his own written and most sacred Word, respecting the twofold natures of Christ, concentrated in that one and eternally-designed person of the Immanuel. But in a small manuel of this kind, those parts only of a most striking and directly prominent description can be collated from the whole for insertion, in order to bring the Mediator before us as "Perfect God, and perfect Man; of a reasonable soul, and human flesh subsisting." Now, this reasonable soul or spirit is that of which Moses spake, saying, "Let us make man, after

our Likeness," referring to that co-equal and co-eternal spiritual Essence or Divinity ever constituting the Godhead of Jehovah, and which is invisible and indestructible, and coequally infinite. It is, and must evidently be so in all the Divine Persons, because Jehovah as a Spirit cannot be more or less than infinite in himself, and in all that relates or appertains to that one and the same spirituality of the Trinity in common. Now the endowment of Adam with life, by the Creator, when God breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul; and the incarnation of God, the Divine Word made flesh, were both effected by the divine agency of the power of the highest, or of the Holy Ghost; and the advent or birth of the seed of the woman, was according to the course of nature in her productions of man at large. Therefore in the child Immanuel we behold the same feeble and helpless immaturity of strength, common to our infantine state of childhood, he being "God of the substance of the Father, begotten before the worlds, and man of the substance of his mother, born into the world. Who although he be God and man, yet is he not two, but

one Christ. One altogether, not by confusion (that, is blending) of substance, but by unity of person." For we must be exceedingly watchful to respect the human and divine natures of Christ in an entirely separate and distinct state, perpetually bearing in mind what the Saviour put into the mouth of Moses, in the wilderness, for the instruction of the Hebrew Church, and that same record which he bare to the same spiritual likeness of the divine persons of the Godhead; when being asked which was the first commandment, his answer was, "Hear, O Israel; the Lord our God is one Lord." But farther, in the natural growth of Christ's person or manhood, we are told that he increased in wisdom and in stature, and grew in favour with God and man, so that the natural image of man in the seed of the woman, was progressive after the customary increase of human nature in our race; but when he had attained to the full maturity of manhood, we see that in him the fulness of the Godhead dwelt bodily, for then he was as assuredly and as essentially God, co-equally infinite with the Father, as he perpetually had been in his eternal goings-forth in his character of the

Word, from the bosom of his Father of old, and from everlasting. If we connect and compare with these remarks the entire and amazing amount of the sacred history, beginning with the record of the eternal and Triune Godhead, and are scrupulously exact in discriminating between the evident and intentional transition of Jehovah, from that trinity by this personally significant form of words, applicable alone to Christ; "So God created man in his own image," &c., we see in the announced purpose of Christ's individual assumption of our flesh, the infinite wisdom and mercy of the Deity-who, prescient of the breach of the covenant of works, and the fall of man by our first parents in the garden of Eden, had eternally in view the salvation of his church, by Immanuel, the seed of the virgin, and that the indivinity of creature bloodshed, as a figurative substitution for the blood of Christ, could only be made available by faith, until the advent and death of the Son of God, the particulars of whose human sufferings are asserted with such reiterated solicitude and earnestness, in all the infallible truth of inspiration at different periods of time, and by different prophets, from

the days of Moses, to the closing of the sacred canon of the Old Testament by Malachi. All scripture on this head indicates and declares the divine and human natures of the Word made flesh, and points to him as the only expiation of sin, by the completion of the whole amount of prophecy, resulting in the redemption of the children of Adam, eternally purchased by the sacrifice of his body on the cross, and by the shedding of that sinless blood which bare witness to the human nature, or natural image of the man Christ, when yielding up the ghost on Mount Calvary. Plainly pointing to that covenant of redemption, in and through which Isaiah (lv. 3.) assures Israel of the mercies of Jehovah, saying, " Incline your ear, and come unto me; hear, and your soul shall live: and I will make an everlasting covenant with you, even the sure mercies of David." The mercies here alluded to, are again thus plainly mentioned in a part of the Acts of the Apostles (ch. ii.) where, among other things, David, a type of the Redeemer, and Christ himself, are thus spoken of.

"Men and brethren, let me freely speak unto you of the patriarch David, that he is

« ZurückWeiter »