The ways in which the Lord is presented to us in Scripture show how near to dual personality we have to come in any simple apprehension of its statements. Their very boldness (when we realize who it is that is spoken of) exhibits a characteristic feature of inspiration, which does not concern itself with mere mental perplexities, in matters that are so evidently beyond us. We cannot fathom the Christ of God. We can realize how perfectly — divinely — on both sides He suits us; though we may be quite unable to put the two sides together. Dual personality would not suit us; but we want One who is both perfectly human and truly Divine — One who can sleep in the storm on the sea, and then rise and still it. Such a Saviour we have — how good to know it! — if we can see nothing beside His heart of love that unites the two together.
The Lord in His Childhood
Think of His waxing strong in spirit, growing in wisdom as in stature, in favor with God and man (Luke 2:40, 52). How perfectly is He man; how really within human limits; a marvelous Child, yet a Child, as He is plainly called. Who shall adjust the divine to the human here, omniscience to growing knowledge? Shall we attempt it? What would it be but to exercise ourselves in things too high for us, and prove but the pride of our hearts? Would heart or conscience find deeper rest or satisfaction in Him if we were able to comprehend what, for all these centuries, has been inquired into and speculated upon, with no more knowledge achieved at the end than at the beginning?
But assuredly it is the Son of Man I find here — the Divine Person in all the truth of humanity; and who shall deny me the happiness of drinking in the grace that has here stooped down to the condition of a child, so that a child may realize His sympathy and adore Him for His love? Thank God that none can deny me: it is as open to one as to another; and the love is as unfathomable in it as is the Person.
The Voice of the Lord to Israel
In the Old Testament, there is a passage to which we naturally turn in such a connection as this, to admire afresh its sublimity and beauty. It brings together in sharpest contrast such oppositions as these. It is the voice of the Lord to Israel that we hear in it, but we soon recognize it as familiar to us. It asks: “Where is the bill of your mother’s divorcement, whom I have put away? or which of my creditors is it to whom I have sold you?” (Isa. 50:1). Nay, the Lord is not so poor: “Behold, for your iniquities have ye sold yourselves; and for your transgressions is your mother put away” (Isa. 50:1).
And now comes out the controversy that He has with them: “Wherefore, when I came, was there no man? When I called, was there none to answer? Is My hand shortened at all, that it cannot redeem? Or have I no power to deliver?” (Isa. 50:2). Here is Jehovah Himself come as a Saviour to them, but there is no response; He is not recognized, or credited with power to redeem. And we know well when this was: when One came to His own, and His own received Him not; and though the power of God was in His hand, and He used it for them without stint, yet they would not believe in His gracious visitation.
Now He openly declares Himself: “Behold, at My rebuke I dry up the sea, and make the rivers a wilderness: their fish stinketh because there is no water, and dieth for thirst. I clothe the heavens with blackness, and make sackcloth their covering” (Isa. 50:2-3).
But it was not in this guise He had come; and the voice becomes strangely altered. It drops into a softer key, and is now appealingly human: “The Lord God hath given me the tongue of the learned, that I should know how to speak a word in season to him that is weary: He wakeneth morning by morning, He wakeneth mine ear to hear as the learned” (Isa. 50:4).
Christ in His Suffering and Rejection
We need not, for our purpose, go further. The prophet does, and shows us plainly enough. Here, however, we have already the contrast we are seeking. It is the Almighty who is come in servant’s form: it is He who is strangely taking the place of obedience and acquiring the tongue of the learned for the ministry of grace to individual need, if the nation at large rejects Him. For this He becomes Himself a learner, and is wakened morning by morning to “hear” as that. Yet it is the One who dries up the sea and makes the rivers a wilderness. Who shall put these things together? For satisfaction to the intellect, no one can. Yet even the intellect may be satisfied another way: namely, in the assured conviction of its inability to understand one’s own being — to know how “spirit and soul and body” (1 Thess. 5:23) make up one man. Is it so wonderful, then, that there should be modes of the Infinite that baffle us altogether? Or that “no man knoweth the Son, but the Father”? (Matt. 11:27).
Let us turn reverently to another scene in which we find Him whose Name is “Wonderful” — to the awful scene of Gethsemane. Here the “cup,” which He took upon the Cross, is causing Him agony in the anticipation of it. Three times He prays that, if it were possible, it might pass from Him; and to this He adds the words so familiar to us, “Not My will, but Thine be done” (Luke 22:42).
The cup could not pass. He must drink it. But when we realize it as that which, expressed outwardly by the three hours of darkness, has its inner meaning in the agonizing cry, “My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?” (Matt. 27:46), we can understand that it was the very necessity of His holy nature that He shrank from it and could not take it as of His own will, but only as the Divine will for Him. Here, surely, we have a perfect and therefore a real, human will. He is as true man as any man can be; and personally man, as such a will must prove Him. We are again beyond the limit of comprehension here, if we say, as we must say, “Yes, but He is nonetheless Divine”; but we are not beyond the limit of enjoyment or of faith.
At the Cross we find the cup itself — the awful abandonment; but who shall explain it? Or who shall tell us how He is, all through, the Man of faith, yea, the Pattern of faith? Shall we not rather drop all such questioning, and believe, where alone belief finds its opportunity, where we cannot see?