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Christ’s Humanity a Golden Chain, February 11
For we have not an high priest which cannot be touched with the
feeling of our infirmities; but was in all points tempted like as we
are, yet without sin.
Hebrews 4:15
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Christ’s overcoming and obedience is that of a true human being. In
our conclusions, we make many mistakes because of our erroneous views
of the human nature of our Lord. When we give to His human nature a
power that it is not possible for man to have in his conflicts with Satan, we
destroy the completeness of His humanity. His imputed grace and power
He gives to all who receive Him by faith.
The obedience of Christ to His Father was the same obedience that
is required of man. Man cannot overcome Satan’s temptations without
divine power to combine with his instrumentality. So with Jesus Christ;
He could lay hold of divine power. He came not to our world to give
the obedience of a lesser God to a greater, but as a man to obey God’s
Holy Law, and in this way He is our example. The Lord Jesus came
to our world, not to reveal what a God could do, but what a man could
do, through faith in God’s power to help in every emergency. Man is,
through faith, to be a partaker in the divine nature, and to overcome every
temptation wherewith he is beset.
The Lord now demands that every son and daughter of Adam, through
faith in Jesus Christ, serve Him in human nature which we now have.
The Lord Jesus has bridged the gulf that sin has made. He has connected
earth with heaven, and finite man with the infinite God. Jesus, the world’s
Redeemer, could only keep the commandments of God in the same way
that humanity can keep them.
We are not to serve God as if we were not human, but we are to serve
Him in the nature we have, that has been redeemed by the Son of God;
through the righteousness of Christ we shall stand before God pardoned,
and as though we had never sinned.
The humanity of the Son of God is everything to us. It is the golden
chain that binds our souls to Christ, and through Christ to God.
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